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Remember, we are human!

The 2001 Garth Boomer Memorial Address

"a great Garth Boomer Address"

Dr Jonothan Neelands

Transcript of the Garth Boomer Memorial Address delivered at the Joint National AATE/ALEA Conference on July 14, 2001 in Hobart, Tasmania.

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Introduction
Literacy, culture and power
Literacy as the foundation of a pro-human society
The UK National Literacy Strategy: a narrowing down
A pedagogic context for human learning

Mindfulness and playfulness
Planned and lived
Necessary constraint and necessary freedom
Imagination and knowledge

INTRODUCTION

"We are human because we were once children and our imagination was ours."
- Edward Bond

It is a great honour to be offered this space to address the conference and its themes. I am particularly honoured that this will be the Garth Boomer Memorial Address. Garth was a great inspiration to us all both here in Australia and in the world. I have tried to keep him in mind as I have prepared this presentation and I hope that if he were with us he would smile and nod rather than frown at what I will say.

I also want to celebrate the power of this conference’s theme - Leading Literate Lives - for us as educators. It is a wonderfully processual and alive way of reminding us of our purpose: to help young people to lead literate lives. Now whilst they are in our care but also for the future. So that they may go into the world without the disadvantages of previous generations whose illiteracy made them prey to the powerful and which confined their worlds of work, leisure, study and of personal and social relationships.

It is always difficult in planning a keynote for a conference away from home to strike the right balance between speaking of my own context and the issues that dominate the educational agenda in England and trying to strike more universal chords that will have resonance for colleagues working in very different cultural contexts.

I had expected to follow Michael Barber and that would have been easy. Michael would, I think, have given a very different gloss to his account of the state of English in the State of England. Now I have to follow Allan Luke and that’s much more difficult! He gave us such an inspired and informed account of the many achievements of literacy and English educators both in his own state of Queensland and in Australia more generally and he rightly did this with a sense of pride, whilst also reminding us of the perils and opportunities that lie ahead of us.

In some ways, what I will be doing in this talk is going over some of the same ground that Allan walked us over yesterday — and as I listened I had the choking feeling of "But I was going to say that!" But on reflection that may be no bad thing and what I would like to do is to compliment Allan’s data rich and evidence-based account with perhaps a more philosophical retracing of the mapping that he began for us yesterday.

LITERACY, CULTURE AND POWER

I want to begin by defining what I mean by literacy and offering a local story from home. The definition helps to position me within the debates about literacy and the story also helps to both position me as a human being and also to illustrate themes which I hope will be of interest to us all.

My definition of literacy is derived from Gordon Wells. It is, therefore, a socio-linguistic definition which roots literacy in the world rather than in classrooms and text books. It is also a definition that pre-supposes a multi-literacies context, so in talking about literacy I am not confining myself to any particular medium.

To be fully literate means to be able to choose and use a wide variety of dialects and registers, effectively and appropriately, according to the functions and purposes of the private and public contexts that we find ourselves in.

- adapted from Gordon Wells

In this definition, Following Halliday, I understand dialect to refer to the ‘way that we speak’, which is often determined by our position in the social structure. In other words, we expect dialect to be linked to class, ethnicity or other sub-cultural variables. Register I understand to be determined by function and audience —we say things in different ways according to our purpose and the nature of the social activity we are engaged in. The emphasis on choosing and using is a reminder that the more dialects and registers that we have access to, the more literate and therefore the more powerful we can be in the world. Effectively and appropriately reminds us that our choices are often constrained by cultural rules and codes that determine which registers and dialects are appropriate in different modes of communication and cultural locations. Private and public is an affirmation of the importance of preparing our students to be powerful in public arenas as well as in their intimate moments of loving and sharing within families and local communities. And contexts, of course, reminds us that language is always situational and can in my opinion only be acquired and developed situationally.

And now the story — I have told it before, but it still serves me as a powerful reminder of my own privileged position and of the lived efficacy of my definition of literacy:

I have lived in Leicester, a Midlands town, for over twenty-five years. I was a student here. I married and brought up my child in this town. Like many other professional people, I have moved up the property ladder and now live in a small, terraced house in a ‘desirable’ residential area only a few miles from the student flat, which was my first home. I should also add that Leicester is a very successful multi-racial city and my street is a very mixed street — all kinds of people live there - but by and large, we are all successful, professional people.

At the end of my street there is a large private independent girls’ school. Each morning and afternoon there is chaos as cars descend on the street to drop off students. One day, the school applied for planning permission to expand its numbers. The local councillor sent out letters warning us of the school’s plans and giving us details of the proposal. There was outrage in our street. Within days, a campaign was mounted. The solicitor across the road prepared a draft letter of objection for us to use and the doctor from number 14 organised a fund to pay for a traffic survey to prove that the daily invasion of cars was a danger to residents and students alike.

When the planning committee met to consider the school’s proposals, they were faced with seventy-five letters of objection — each one detailing the council’s legal obligations to provide for the safety of residents and each one making reference to relevant statutes and legal precedence. There was also a persuasive twenty page traffic survey prepared by the same professionals who advise the council. The application was rejected. The school will not expand — because of the objections raised by the people who would have been most affected by the proposed change.

For the last twenty-five years I have been a regular at the Manchester Arms. The pub is set deep in the back streets of Leicester in a pre-dominantly white working class neighbourhood. The Manchester Arms is a large Victorian pub with the best pool room in town. The pool room was upstairs. Downstairs the pub was divided into two quite different spaces. The young people of the neighbourhood used one of these areas — it was loud, busy, smoky. Some of these young people had been in the same nursery/kindergarten class as my own son. In the other space there was quiet and decorum; no swearing or horseplay, just the older residents enjoying dominoes and beer. They were separated from their children and grand children by a thick wall, which blocked out the sights and sounds of the next bar. That was the way it had always been in the Manchester. At some point in your life, you made the journey from one bar to the next and you were replaced by the next generation.

Norman was the landlord. He was an ex-wrestler. At about the same time that we were campaigning against the girls’ school’s plan, he called out to me and told me that the brewery had decided to close the pub and convert in into a Mr. Q Disco Theme Bar. The pool room would go, the wall dividing the two bars would go and twenty-four inch TV monitors would beam MTV into the new open-plan bar. Like everyone else in the pub I was shocked by the injustice of a London based brewery deciding to replace the unique culture of the Manchester with its own homogenised plastic culture — Mr. Q bars can be found in every town - the same furniture, the same fizzy beer, the same TV monitors.

We talked about it all night. We made new friends with other regulars who wanted to share their anger. We became nostalgic and told stories of the past — great nights, eccentric regulars, crazy practical jokes.

I asked Norman when the changes would happen and he told me that there was to be a final meeting on the Thursday and he would let me know the results on the Friday, my regular night for pool. On Friday Norman was excited. He knew the date the pub would close but there had been some excitement at the meeting on Thursday. It had been a planning meeting, Norman explained, and the planning committee delayed its decision for half an hour whilst it considered a letter of objection written by one of the local residents. "Yes," Norman added, "they said if they had had more letters of complaint they would have turned down the brewery’s application. Pity that, isn’t it? If we had known, we could have got people writing letters and then we could have kept the pub."

How is it that the people who live in my street know that if you write legal letters and commission traffic surveys you can determine your destiny and that the people who live around the Manchester Arms don’t? How is that those of us who are already powerful in terms of income, professional status and civic respect already know how to use language to influence events and that those of us who are powerless and poor do not?

Nigel Hilton reflects on the same problem in the opening pages of Buddy:

As if he didn’t look different enough already. Blazer, miles too short at the sleeves. Jeans, instead of grey trousers....And a stinking white plastic bag to carry his books and things....Sometimes he almost wished he’d never been promoted to the E-stream. E for Express. The top stream. He had been so thrilled at the end of the first year when his class teacher had told him he was going up because his tests had been excellent. E for excellent. It had seemed like the best thing that had ever happened to him. It would have been except — E for except — he wasn’t like the others.

It wasn’t just that they all seemed to be able to buy whatever they wanted. It was the way they talked. The things they talked about. The way they casually used names — names of newspapers and books, names of places they’d been to, names of things their parents had bought. They weren’t cleverer than he was — in fact some of them were not as clever — but they were different.

Different. Not inferior/superior, not cleverer/thicker, not better/worse — but different. The difference for Buddy is the difference between himself and those who seem comfortable in the world, knowledgeable about its variety, versed in its customs and rituals, fluent speakers whatever the situation. The difference is not between the quality of Buddy’s own heritage and experience and that of the other E stream kids — the difference is the breadth and diversity of the other kids’ own experience.

In my street we have had many previous experiences of the powerful uses of language, often as powerful users ourselves! When the time came we knew how to use language to shape experience in our favour. Most of the people in the Manchester Arms had never been prepared, by experience or by teaching, to use the forms of powerful language that might have saved their pub. The experience happened to them — their own resources of language were less successful in helping them to determine their own experience.

I belong to a generation of teachers who now understand that they may well have failed those children we were most anxious to help. We know now that we cannot make assumptions about the prior learning experiences of children. We cannot base an education in English on the assumption that all children have access to the same linguistic resources and experiences.

The African-American educator Lisa Delpit describes our task in these words:

"What should teachers do about helping students acquire an additional oral form? First, they should recognise that the linguistic form a students brings to school is intimately connected with loved ones, community and personal identity. To suggest that this form is ‘wrong’ or even worse, ignorant, is to suggest that something is wrong with the student and his or her family. On the other hand it is equally important to understand that students who do not have access to the politically popular dialect form in this country, that is, Standard English, are less likely to succeed economically than their peers who do. How can both realities be embraced?"

And this is, of course, a crucial point. What we say and how we say it depends on the social context we find ourselves in. Different contexts require different ways of talking. The language of the dance floor is not the same as the language of the court room. Language and literacy are therefore embedded in an awareness of how the world works, in issues of power, cultural difference, domination and emancipation.

LITERACY AS THE FOUNDATION OF A PRO-HUMAN SOCIETY

Literacy is the most important weapon in the arsenal that the poor, the dispossessed, the underprivileged can use to transform themselves and the societies that marginalise them.

Witness this boy of 14 who has recently been freed from seven years bonded labour in a carpet factory in Pakistan. He sits alone under a tree with a tattered reader and a scrub of paper copying with a pencil end:

A young boy of fourteen is teaching himself to read and write. He is asked how important it is for him to learn. He replies:

"If you are not literate everybody can cheat you. If you are literate no-one can cheat you"

And this emancipatory theme echoes through the testimonies and struggles of the dispossessed. In African-American literature and in the writings of others who have languished under various forms of oppression there is the same fierce demand for an emancipatory education based on a demand for access to the linguistic and literary tools and weapons of their oppressors.

As the English cultural and literary theorist Terry Eagleton reminds us:

One of the most moving narratives of modern history is the story of how men and women languishing under various forms of oppression came to acquire, often at great personal cost, the sort of technical knowledge necessary for them to understand their own condition more deeply, and so to acquire some of the theoretical armoury essential to change it.

It has been my privilege to spend some time this year in so-called developing societies.

In Pakistan, there is a real awareness that emancipation can only be achieved through universal literacy. But these literacy programmes are not narrowly defined in terms of technical competencies and measurable, but limited, outcomes. No, they are from the outset tied to a vision of a fairer, progressive society. The diagram below was produced by a non Governmental Organisation called INSAN which is particularly involved in 0working both with children in bonded labour and illiterate children in villages.

It clearly places literacy as a first goal for education not as its end result. Literacy is seen as the foundation for building a ‘pro-human’ society in which all citizens can participate, regardless of gender, caste and difference, through virtue of their universal education.

As you can see, it begins with the idea of a thought-provoking curriculum (and I am reminded yesterday of Allan Luke saying that when he did find it in classrooms, how significant and important it was); and through a thought-provoking curriculum the idea that students will inevitably become more critical; and that critical awareness will lead to frustration; and the feelings of frustration will lead to motivation for action, which children now have the tools to do something about; and that in turn will lead to a struggle, which in turn will lead to a pro-human society.

THE UK NATIONAL LITERACY STRATEGY: A NARROWING DOWN

You might think, then, that I would celebrate the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy in schools in England. Potentially, it is the crusade to right the wrongs of the past. To ensure that all children in England have equal access to the power and enfranchisement that literacy provides. But I am not here to celebrate it. Nor is Michael Barber. If Michael Barber were here, it is true that he would be able to produce data to show that ‘standards’ of literacy have improved in our schools as a result of the ‘single method’, death-by-outcomes strategy we have adopted. But as Allan reminded us yesterday, any attempt to bring some order and consistency to literacy education will produce some positive results — in the short term at least. Tony Blair’s government made a promise to the people that 80% of all 11 year olds would be level 4 by 2002, measured by Standard Attainment Tests and, of course, that may happen because what you do is adjust the test and levels until you get 80% in 2002.

This is a deeply conservative Labour government and only 53% of the population could be bothered to turn out to vote for or against it last month. It is said that when the results were announced, Baroness Thatcher’s smile reached from ear to ear! On the other side, we have a rump Tory party advocating the legalisation of cannabis! This is, to use Allan’s phrase, the delinearisation of politics!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the National Literacy Strategy, which I’ll now call NLS, let me explain. The NLS is a non-compulsory (but they’ll bust you if you don’t do it) option in our schools. It sets targets and programmes of literacy study for each term in each year for children from 5 to 14 years of age. At the heart of the NLS is the daily ‘literacy hour’. The literacy hour is divided into timed segments: 15 minutes shared text work (a balance of reading and writing but usually a sharing of a story or extract); 15 minutes of focussed word level and sentence level work; 20 minutes of independent reading and writing for some whilst the teacher works with at least one ability group; 10 minutes reviewing, consolidating teaching points covered in the lesson. Now, if you talk to the system leaders about the literacy strategy, they say, "Oh well, teachers are more flexible than that." When they say teachers are more flexible, what they mean is that teachers are more subversive than that. And whilst I will be making critical comments about what is happening in England, I’m not making them about the teachers. I want that to be absolutely clear. I want you to understand the struggle the teachers are facing and the strength they have in saying, "I’m not doing this minutes thing; it just doesn’t work. What if the kids get interested in the story?"

The focus in the literacy hour is almost entirely on the phonetic and lexico-grammatical systems at work in the chosen text. There is very little consideration or time for the semantics of the text. There is almost no consideration of the broader social and cultural context of the text or on its human significance to the children.

Indeed in the early years, a ‘big book’ often provides the context for the literacy hour. More often than not the language users in these books are animals living in some fantasy world where the intentions and motives of language users are reduced to P.C. Tiddles trying to get the ducks to stop peeing in the village pond! Children are rarely offered the chance to use politically powerful forms of talk and writing in authentic real life contexts.

There are three levels of literacy in this system — word level, sentence level and text level. That’s it. What is missing, of course, is the all important contextual level.

All acts of communication take place within a cultural space — the words and sentences that make up the text can only be meaningfully understood and produced when there is a critical awareness of the cultural contexts and spaces in which texts are produced and received. This awareness necessarily involves a consideration of issues of power, tradition, and cultural difference.

My own interest in drama is, of course, to do with its power to both reveal and comment on the contextual level of text production. In all forms of drama what we try to do is to recreate the context in concrete and visible ways so that the connections between text and context can be seen and actively experienced

Even the most simple act of communication - a message or exchange of an anecdote between two communicating agents - will occur in this cultural space and will be bound by the codes and rules that govern that space, and will be bound by considerations of differences in terms of status, age, gender, cultural difference. And, of course, speakers also come with a past and are motivated towards a future. And part of the complexity of our world is trying to understand the interconnectedness of all of that. This is what I think attracts writers to drama as a form of text making. Drama allows them to concretely describe and use and resonate the elements of the cultural space which impinge on speakers’ agents in acts of communication.

There is considerable discontent in England amongst teachers of English in particular. And I believe that this discontent stems from the mistake of not introducing the NLS as an emancipatory and socially and politically transforming project. Many English teachers in England share the view of the cultural theorist Raymond Williams that our:

"deepest impulse is the desire to make learning part of the process of social change."

Instead the NLS poses as a politically neutral methodology, but as the American radical Henri Giroux reminds us:

"Far from employing neutral educational techniques, schools exercise discipline in both controlling what people know and how they behave."

Within the NLS there are clear political attempts to purge English teaching of some of its traditional obsessions with so-called ‘child-centredness’ - to remove the lived experience of students from the teaching-learning equation and I will return to this point later. The idea of child-centredness is used as a term for abuse. When the NLS was introduced, the Minister for Education David Blunkett said, "We hope that with the introduction of the NLS we will remove the last traces of child-centred education from our schools."

Now benignly you could say that what he was urging us to do was to replace a child-centred philosophy emerging out of the ideas of John Dewey with a curriculum-centred philosophy. But actually what you do when you remove the child from child-centred is to leave a vacuum and something will go into that vacuum. And what goes into that vacuum is ‘the state’. So what you end up with is a state-centred education system in which increasingly the policies, the legislation governing what teachers and kids do in the classroom is determined by the short-term political interest of the party in power.

There are also attempts to purge English of any critical position, which has its origin in the sixties. Of course, what they forget is the real contribution made by feminists, post- colonialists, media and cultural theorists to the English curriculum. It also wants to purge English of its obsession with the socio-cultural context in which language operates. We did have a thing called critical literacy. They don’t want us to look anymore at the relationships between knowledge and power or between sacred and profane cultural objects and texts. We have booklists for kids now that say, "This is what you should read; this is what you must read." It’s this quaint New York idea. New York kids have to read three novels every term and comment on them. What they don’t give them in New York is a list of the books that they are to read. What they don’t do in New York is give them a separate list of multicultural reading material in which the most recent book was written in 1980 and in which 75% of the books in the list are out of print.

Worst of all, what the NLS represents is an attack on your autonomy as a teacher. They are trying to take the ‘you’ out of your teaching in order to produce a conformity of practice, and this comes under the noble name of OFSTED inspections. It works like this: all teachers in England are now required to submit lesson plans in advance for what they do, for every lesson that they teach. In some schools, these lesson plans must be divided into 5 minute segments because the government has decided that you should change tasks every 5 minutes.

I was at a conference about the NLS and somebody asked the woman in charge, "Is the NLS going to take into account the report from the Stephen Lawrence inquiry?" Now you may not know about Stephen Lawrence. He was a young black man who was murdered some seven or eight years ago. As a result of the inquiry, educators in particular were urged to combat racism in schools. See, it’s a very clever question. The answer was, "Well we have included a lot of multicultural literature in the NLS." Now, posing as a classroom teacher I put my hand up and asked, "Well what happens if I’m sharing one of these multicultural stories with the kids and they kind of get interested in it, you know, and they want to discuss it and talk about difference and they want to talk about identity and the 15 minutes is up?" The difficulty is that you may have an OFSTED inspector in your room. He has your lesson plan. And if you were to make your own judgement as a teacher to leave word level study alone today and have that discussion with your kids, he would come up at the end and demand to know why you had varied from your lesson plan.

We had an OFSTED inspection at Warwick University. We run 14 different teacher education courses at Warwick and each one is inspected separately. So we have 14 different inspections every 4 years. They came in to inspect Primary English. Now we have about 150 kids in a year going through the English program, so what often happens is this: they get a lead lecture and then break into 9 or 10 different seminar groups. These seminar groups are led by people like Alison Sealy and Hilary Minns who are internationally acknowledged experts in their fields. OFSTED sat in on these seminars and they came out and told us there was a problem. They had noted that in the seminars some of the handouts were given out in a different order and that in some seminars some of the handouts weren’t even used at all. We asked what the problem was. They replied, "Consistency. How can you guarantee the consistency a student experiences across the seminar groups if seminar leaders are delivering them in different ways?"

Content is another thing we want to get rid of, particularly cultural content. Discontent in England about the arbitrary imposition of the NLS is focussed, I think, on the attacks on English’s traditional claim to be the site of cultural exploration, intervention and discovery. Sometimes this discontent is focussed on the erosion of the centrality of literature to English studies — because literature in all of its forms was an important means of addressing the cultural experiences of others and of communicating our own cultural experiences to others. In this context, literature provided a vital space for articulating the lived and living experiences of cultural, ethnic, gender and class differences. The fascination with literature at the heart of the English curriculum is also a fascination with both the diversity and commonality of human individuality — an individuality that is based in the different ways in which we all intersect with time and space and in how the immediate social and cultural influences that surround us shape and inform our experiences so that we are different, but we are also able to share differences with and through common cultural resources.

The traditional model of English in England is in fact based on a more radical and inclusive definition of learning which necessarily seeks to address the place of language and literature in the world, in the lives of the human ‘becomings’ in our classrooms. The NLS, on the other hand, seeks to disassociate literacy from real world contexts, from issues of power, from transformative teaching practices.

Because the NLS prescribes methodologies as well as outcomes we have actually naturalised the idea that you can only read through phonics. That is not like an option or one of the many strategies you might use. It is Mother Nature! Mother Nature tells us that you can’t learn to read unless you use the phonic method alone. There is, as a result, almost no discussion of pedagogy in England. There is no discussion to be had. The increasingly prescriptive legislation that dominates teaching, learning and testing has removed the need to discuss how best children learn, the atmosphere in which we teach, the choices available to us as educators, the need for us to differentiate teaching and learning in respect of different cultural populations and their needs and aspirations.

For these reasons I want to argue in the time that remains for a new emphasis on the pedagogical context in which literacy programmes are delivered. This emphasis seeks to return some autonomy to teachers and schools. It seeks to celebrate the art and artistry of teachers. It seeks to provide a humanising context for learning, which is broadly cultural rather than narrowly technical.

A pedagogic contract for human learning

The pedagogic contract is expressed as the living dynamic generated by locating teaching & learning practices and the lived experience of schooling within a set of dialectics

Betwixt and between:

The first set of dialectics: between mindfulness and playfulness

We think about what we do. And again Allan’s data on this was clear. There is not enough teaching, which demands of kids that they should be mind — full. Too much Flipper. Not enough critical pedagogy. Not enough opportunity for substantive discussion or even the expectation that there will be substantive discussion. You can tell it if you come as a visitor as I so often do into classrooms. You ask a question and in some classrooms no hand is raised - kids just look around and expect someone else to answer. In other classrooms kids are keen to talk and you can tell there is a teacher who has created that atmosphere where kids are expected to be mindful and to join in discussions about who they are and who they are becoming.

We take the human content and context of our work seriously. And as the data that we were shown yesterday indicates, de-contextualised teaching which does not pay critical attention to the human content will prove disastrous as we move into the 21 century

We consider how what we learn might change us and who we are becoming. Like many of you I came into teaching because I believed that teaching is a personally and socially transforming occupation. But these are dialectics - it’s not like opposites or contradictions - it’s the playfulness in mindfulness, the mindfulness in playfulness. We also need to feel safe to be able to experiment, to risk, to fail, to bend and stretch the rules. I’m not sure that anyone feels safe in this respect anymore, not in my country anyway. The threat of testing and inspection produces a numbing conformity, a standardisation which is inimical to a playful spirit. You can’t play about if you think you are going to get slapped for it.

We play with language and other sign systems to find the new, the unspoken, the fresh voice. It is important that we encourage children to see themselves as producers rather than mere reproducers of language and textual practices. Allan Luke again reminded us of the importance of that - that children in our classrooms are those who will inherit the world. And they are the ones who will need to forge new ways of saying, new ways of seeing, new ways of producing text that will reflect the times that they will grow into. They also need to understand that the rules of language are cultural not natural as the English would have it. The rules can be made and unmade and are always changing as we change. I want them also to understand that they need to be creative in the world, because more and more this is what they will need in the future. As Allan said, employment is changing; we are not going to be diggers of soil or manufacturers in factories. What we are going to need to be able to do is shape imaginative activity into outcomes that will be useful for us. And what we are also going to need to be able to do is find new ways of looking at old problems. The problems in our cities are no longer going to be solved by putting in a new sewer system or new freeways. We need to find more creative ways of dealing with things.

And in this classroom nothing is sacred. There should be no acceptance of a hierarchy of texts in which class-based distinctions are made between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ which marginalise or make invisible the linguistic and literary practices of dominant and marginalised groups. The historical processes of ‘canonisation’ should be made visible to students in our classrooms.

The second set of dialectics: between the planned and the lived.

Our local communities have a clear plan or map of where we are going, what we need to learn, how we will be valued. As the French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggests, children have an entitlement to: a rational and really universal pedagogy, which would take nothing for granted initially, and would not count as acquired what some and only some of the pupils had inherited, would do all things for all and would be organised with the explicit aim of providing all with the means of acquiring that which, although apparently a natural gift, is only given to the children of the educated classes.

Many people in our local communities have reason to mistrust and fear school systems, which failed them in the past. They need the reassurance that there is a logical, comprehensive system in place that will not fail their children in the same way. And this system may well involving testing so that parents know exactly where their children stand and what they will need in order to improve.

We are entitled to the knowledge that will give us power. Again, what Allan confirmed for us yesterday was the gradual ghettoising of cultural capital and powerful knowledge into the private sector so that those who have power can reproduce that power by removing their children from the public sector and, in turn, those in the public sector are doomed to lives that will be less and which will be inherited by their own kids in the future. Fortunately, for the English people, the health service and schools remain in the public sector despite Tony’s best efforts.

The artistry of teachers occurs significantly in the dialectic between the planned and the lived. This is what many people do not understand. That what we do every day is to mediate the plan with the lived experience of kids coming to our classrooms through thousands and thousands of little interactions. We have a responsibility which we take seriously for delivering a curriculum, but we do it in ways which are sensitive to the population of kids who sit in front of us in the classroom. This is what bureaucrats and politicians mistrust, because they can’t monitor every interaction in every classroom in every school and they can’t seemingly trust that we might do a good job with that.

We also need to remember that we are human with human needs, emotions, fears and dreams and this needs taking into account in terms of delivering the planned curriculum. We must remember that communication is often based on the need to share significant experiences of the world — through the shared resources of language we are able to describe our own unique experiences in ways that make it shareable with others.

Listen to the words of a refugee woman writing in a writing workshop in a refugee centre. about her experiences - not actually the experiences of being a refugee in terms of what she has fled from — but as a result of her experiences in coming to England, which she imagined to be a beacon of hope.

I am a refugee

I am a refugee and I am a mother of two children.
I am a human being who has her own thoughts.
I am a person who thinks that everyone should be a good human being.
I am a woman who couldn’t achieve her ambitions.
I am a simple person who wanted a new world full of people laughing, children who eat and mothers who don’t cry.

But of course that’s not the only way that we write out of significant human experiences. Here is an example of a young homeless man trying to share his significant experience, only in this instance his audience is the local council housing department and his purpose is desperate.

You can hear the strangled voice trying to find the appropriate register. He struggles to recall the half-understood lesson on formal letter writing and ‘appropriate’ genre, a man who knows it is not enough to be able to write poetry about your significant experience. You also need to be able to convert it into forms that may give you the chance to improve or give you some power back in your life.

We should also remember that in a state-centred education system, those in temporal power can comfortably imagine that the folders and ring binders that contain The Plan for the curriculum in every school actually represent the curriculum as it is lived by children and teachers. I have this image of people who work in the Department of Education and Skills, as we now call it. Before the election, it was the Department for Education and Employment. Their Head Office is in 88 Piccadilly. It’s about as swish as you can get. So these guys’ experience of the education system in England is getting off the tube, walking down the Piccadilly past the Hard Rock café, Prêt a Porter for their little lunches and into the building. And I have this image that at five o’clock, the guys in their grey suits, before they turn the light off, pat all these ring binders that contain the national curriculum. And they think to themselves that if this is being delivered in every classroom in every school in every town in every county, all is well in the state of England! And of course it doesn’t represent the curriculum at all. The whole point is that the curriculum will be entirely different, not just in each classroom, but in each group of kids that pass through each classroom. That is our skill; that is what it is that we do. The consequences of working in an educational system that is dominated by the imaginary of the curriculum as a Grand Plan are exquisitely described by the Japanese-Canadian educator, Ted Aoki, in these terms:

What we see here is the conventional linear language of 'curriculum and instruction' of 'curriculum implementation' of 'curriculum assessment'. This is the world in which the measures that count are pre-set; therefore ordained to do the same -to dance the same, to paint the same, to sing the same, to act the same….where learning is reduced to 'acquiring' and where 'evaluating' is reduced to measuring the acquired against some pre-set standardised norm. This metron, this measure and rhythm, is one that in an overconcern for sameness fails to heed the feel of the earth that touches the dancing feet differently for each student.

Our experiences shape our worlds, our learning and our ‘becomingness’. Let me tell you another story. I teach a post-graduate certificate course. It’s a one year course for English and Drama graduates to become teachers and of course we spend a lot of time watching these students in school. I went to watch one of our students who had received a ‘first’ in English from Warwick. She’s teaching 15 year olds and she gives me her lesson plan. Five pages long, these lesson plans. She’s required to do one of these for each of the six lessons she will teach that day. Her plan is great, it’s fine, it’s very clear. She’s teaching GCSE English, an examinable subject. She is teaching about other cultures. Imagine how you’d feel sitting in the classroom and the other culture happens to be your culture. It’s this remarkable English stubbornness to recognize that ‘our’ culture is actually made up of lots of cultures. Anyway, she is going to teach an extract from ‘Search For My Tongue’ by Suhata Bhatt. So the lesson starts, she gets up the front and she reads the poem.

from "Search For My Tongue" by Sujata Bhatt

You ask me what I mean
by saying I have lost my tongue.
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue,
and could not really know the other,
the foreign tongue.
You could not use them both together
even if you thought that way.
And if you lived in a place you had to
speak a foreign tongue,
rot and die in your mouth
until you had to spit it out.
I thought I spit it out
but overnight while I dream,


(munay hutoo kay aakhee jeebh aakhee bhasha)


(may thoonky nakhi chay)


(parantoo rattray svupnama mari bhasha pachi aavay chay)


(foolnee jaim mari bhasha nmari jeebh)


(modhama kheelay chay)


(fullnee jaim mari bhasha mari jeebh)


(modhama pakay chay)

it grows back, a stump of a shoot
grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins,
it ties the other tongue in knots,
the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth,
it pushes the other tongue aside.
Everytime I think I've forgotten,
I think I've lost the mother tongue,
it blossoms out of my mouth

Having read the poem, she asked the kids, "What do you notice about this poem?"

I think she was referring to the kind of visual shock or the visual difference on the page. This white boy in the class of predominantly white boys, puts his hand up and he says, "It’s beautiful, Miss."

She asks, "What do you mean, beautiful?"

He says, "Well, it wasn’t so much how you said it. But Gujarati, it’s like a beautiful language, isn’t it, because it is a spoken language and it’s got like its own poetry.

She says, "Well of course you don’t understand what it means."

"No I don’t."

She says, "Let me tell you what it means. Actually, the Gujarati is an exact translation of the English that follows it."

At this point, one of the seven Gujarati speaking girls in the classroom put her hand up and says, "Sorry Miss, I think you’re wrong."

The student goes red and asks, "Oh, what do you mean?"

She says, "Well, it doesn’t translate, Miss. I think that’s the point of the poem. You express your ideas in your language and you can’t translate them into another language. I think that’s probably what she is trying to say."

At which point the white boy who made the first comment — these seven Gujarati speaking girls are sitting in a group together and they are pretty much surrounded by white kids and mainly boys - gets up, turns to the girl and starts clapping. And all the kids in the classroom get up, turn to this girl and start clapping.

It’s those moments of cultural solidarity between kids in the classroom that give you faith. And the young teacher learnt a lesson that day about the planned and the lived. She had a unique opportunity to deliver something that was part of an examination syllabus that was required learning and, at the same time, to bring a text into the classroom that spoke of the immediate lived experience of those girls in that classroom at that time. And she missed it. And it was not her fault. It was my fault because I trained her, and I trained her to deliver the National Curriculum. And I trained her to write those lesson plans and I trained her not to divert from them - and I trained her so well that she forgot to use her eyes.

Our differences are our strength. We urgently need (and I know you have made more progress in many of these areas than we have and I appreciate that) to move away from a deficit model of multi-culturalism. This may already have happened in Australia, but we need a pedagogic context in which the high quality of students’ work is achieved because of, rather than in spite of, their diversity. You hear a very strange kind of deficit talk. "You know, given that it’s a multicultural school these kids do really well." These kids do really well because it is a multicultural school and I‘m sure that those of you who live in cities find it’s increasingly difficult to work in schools that are not. There’s not enough difference to work with and one of the urgent problems that we are also facing is what do we do in mono-cultural classrooms where there is a kind of cosy conformity of ideas. How do we get that substantive discussion going among students when they are not creating it for themselves through a consideration of their difference?

The third set of dialectics: between necessary constraint and necessary freedom.

You know, we work in a classroom within a school community and we live with its traditions, codes and rules and I think that our classrooms should model a kind of democratic society that we're giving the kids the tools to achieve. I don't think we live in democratic societies, but I think we have the potential to do so and part of what we ought to be doing in classrooms is showing kids how they can make that happen. But, kids also come from communities, and some of those communities are more bound to tradition than others and we need to respect that and kids need to understand that that's ok.

We access and work with culturally powerful genres of communication because we are not going to be able to be powerful otherwise and sometimes that constrains our voice.

'"I want to write a poem about this now."

"No, you going to write an engineers report because that way you will stop the school at the end of your street blocking your drive."

We have structure and structures to grow with. We scaffold with care, we build structures for kids, we talk about how we get kids from this place to that place so that it feels like a discovery. But we must also have necessary freedom in our learning. We are individuals. We must have choices in our learning. We must be free to change our worlds and we must understand that knowing the rules, far from constraining us, gives us more choices, greater freedom to be.

The fourth set of dialectics: between imagination and knowledge.

We imagine what we cannot yetknow. The English playwright Edward Bond provides us with this metaphor: "Every child needs a map of the world." The child is born into darkness knowing there is an unmapped world beyond. Experiencing the world brings knowledge and the ‘known’ world provides the basis for imagining the ‘unknown’. As the child develops, so the ‘map’ expands and is filled with the light of knowledge. We see more and more of it. But what we know of course is there is a darkness beyond the light, there is something beyond what we know. And for kids, of course, that pool of light can be quite small and narrow. It grows over a lifetime. In the old days of European voyages, on the maps beyond the edge of the known world, it used to say, "Here there be dragons." Because what we do is we imagine what we cannot yet know. We imagine what is in the darkness. If we tie what we imagine to what we already know then we can begin to stretch out that light so that more and more of the world comes within our knowledge. But imagination is critical to that and in England, as I guess in many other countries, imagination is marginalized and becomes one of those frivolous, trivial things. Whereas, actually, the capacity to imagine as a way of coming to know is core to being human. But what we imagine is anchored to what we know. When kids are in a drama, what they tend to do is tie their imaginings to two different kinds of logic: a narrative logic (What happens in films like this, stories like this?); and a cultural logic (What has my experience of the world so far taught me?). I think imagination becomes powerful when it is tied to knowledge in that way. I've got nothing against fantasy and P C Tiddles has a place, but it is also important for children to tie their imaginings to what is possible and real in the world and this often means having to think harder, to go beyond magic solutions in order to act upon the world in realistic and achievable ways.

We imagine and re-imagine ourselves and others. This is crucial to the process of social change. Through imagining and re-imagining, students can be encouraged to be free of cultural constraints and traditional obstacles to power — they can imagine themselves powerfully and powerful in the world. Through sensitive re-imagining of the ‘other’ students learn to break free from the stereotypes and demonising of ‘others’ both within their own local communities and in the media generally. The self is a cultural concept. The self is actually a space of possibles and for many kids, who they think they are is who they have been told they areand often therefore their space of possibles is very narrow: "I am shy, I am insecure, I am stupid, I am from the wrong end of town, I cannot be." And often, kids' sense of the possibles of the other is also very limited - based on stereotypes that come within the community or from the media - not based on experience at all, but based on what they have been told about the other. And what we need to do in both English and Drama is to help kids to expand that space of possibles. So the space of possibles of self include a confident self, a powerful self, a leader self, an achiever self. But at the same time, the space of possibles of the other begins to expand so that I understand that those kids who look different from me come in as many different shapes and sizes and forms as I do, or we do. In that way I can begin to imagine myself as the other and I can begin to imagine the other in myself. And if we can expand those boundaries out it will be an important way of us feeling comfortable about difference whilst at the same time being able to recognise what is human in each other.

It is important in all classrooms that we are free from ideologies that replace the imagination. There will always be a boundary between what we are able to know and what we are not able to know, what we cannot touch, what we cannot access. And, of course that's the margin where ideologies operate. You know, "We'll tell you what to think of what's in the darkness. We don't want you to imagine it. We will tell you, we will tell you what you should know." It is also important that we realise that what we think we know is often imaginary. This is part of the whole critical literacy approach that you have here as well - that we test the claims for something to be true or the knowledge that people have. We test that against whether other people have other kinds of truths. Or at least we have it in our minds in the classroom that there will always be more than one truth and so we ask for it.

It's amazing how quickly ideas become naturalised. We've just had this experience in England over the release of the killers of Jamie Bolger. We have made it okay for a grieving mother to go on the front page of our newspapers and say, "I want them killed! I want them killed!" We made it alright for a chief of police to say, "I understand that these boys may have been transformed by therapy and counselling and they may now be good and normal citizens, and now they should do their time." This is vengeance. As somebody said, "Why aren't we giving medals to the teachers, the social workers, the counsellors, the therapists that work with these young boys, to make them okay in the world?" We do not believe in rehabilitation. We believe in natural justice and natural vengeance. To a Scandinavian person, that would be culturally abhorrent. The Swedes, the Danes, the Norwegians believe absolutely in the human power to transform, in rehabilitation and yet we naturalise it, as if that's the only way that you can see things. We have that kind of reproducing, that fooling kids into thinking that that which is natural is actually cultural, or at least that is what they need to understand. More often that not, that which is natural is actually cultural and therefore may be seen by others differently.

We create our own map of the world. We must be allowed to do that. We are changeable and so is the world. Otherwise, we are truly lost. And, lastly, imagining reminds us that we are human and in English classrooms, students need the space to imagine. In English students need the space to imagine, what if? In drama, they need the space to behave as if. If we could imagine the ‘other’ would we still drop bombs on babies, suffer the poor, choose carpets stained with the blood of child labour, and wear our Nike hats with pride?

The title: Remember we are human. I was doing a drama in a school in Toronto, based on a very short piece of writing done by a 7 year old called Mila. It goes:

"I ran away but nobody came to find me so I ran back."

A group of kids was looking at what that might mean, a whole drama that ends with Mila packing her bag and leaving her house. As she does, she passes through a tunnel of kids who are offering her advice on what she should do. And I’m the teacher and I move through the class and I listen to their advice and the last kid in the line (who has made sure he is the last kid in the line, he’s kept moving, kept moving, wants to be the last voice, a young kid with Downs Syndrome) looks up at me, points his finger at me and says, "Remember, we are human."

Garth, I hope I have honoured your spirit. Thank you all for listening and good luck in your work.

Remember, we are human!