Barbara Bleiman, co-director of the English and Media Centre, challenges fears surrounding media reports of rote learning and poetry. There’s been a fair bit of discussion in the press about the teaching of poetry in the new GCSEs with the suggestion that students will now have to learn 15 poems off by heart for GCSE…
English and Media Centre co-director, Andrew McCallum, waxes lyrical about why group work is so important to the successful study of English. We’re huge believers at the English and Media Centre in the value of group work – by which we largely mean group talk – as a crucial part of a balanced teaching…
English and Media Centre co-director, Andrew McCallum, warns against responses to recent curriculum and GCSE changes that potentially risk limiting students’ experience of English at secondary level. The law of unintended consequences finds rich pickings in education, nowhere more so than in teaching English to 11-16 year olds. Policies and initiatives introduced with good intentions…
We invited Dr Emma Smith, Shakespeare scholar at Hertford College, Oxford, to come to talk to a group of teachers in a twilight session at EMC. The idea was to inform ourselves and teachers about current practice in the study of Shakespeare in the academy and to discuss together what the implications of this might…
Barbara Bleiman, Co-Director of The English and Media Centre, clarifies the issues around the de-coupling of AS and AL. The new AS and AL reforms are raising difficult questions about how best they should be implemented. Why? Because not only are different suites of subjects being reformed at different times, resulting in a muddling mix of…
Barbara Bleiman, Co-director at The English and Media Centre, considers interesting areas for debate about English as a subject The blogosphere and twittersphere are both full of impassioned arguments and discussions around education, many of them sustained by English teachers or Headteachers with a background in English teaching. English teachers have always been at the forefront…
The changes in the English curriculum at KS3 and 4 have revived old, one might even say clichéd, debates about teaching the canon. It can seem as if one has to choose between texts that are ‘relevant and accessible’ or those that provide ‘cultural capital and challenge’. In practice of course, most English teachers have…
EMC’s co-director, Andrew McCallum, outlines some welcome challenges ahead for teachers of literature at KS3 and KS4. Here’s something to put cheer into the hearts of all you committed English teachers out there: despite earlier fears to the contrary, the status of literature in schools is rising and set to rise even higher. As an…
EMC has invited some well-known figures in the world of English and Media teaching to give their views on a subject about which they feel strongly by writing us a guest post. These posts will not necessarily represent the views of The English and Media Centre, but promise to be thought-provoking and spark debate. IS…
EMC recently produced an early ‘first impressions’ blog on the new draft GCSE specifications for 2015. In some ways, that was a rather easier task than for the new A Level specifications because the truth is that with GCSE, the specification writers’ hands have been well and truly tied by the rigidity of the requirements…
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