My starting point is "Staying Power", an exhibition that aimed to increase the number of photographs representing Black British experience in the UK. The exhibition was recommended by a former pre-service/PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) student who had grown curious about the language and culture of her students. One…

Peter Medway was an exceptionally able teacher, researcher and thinker, and his work throws light on governments, inspectors and educators. In the early 1960s, Peter met a theory which "established language as a major means of constructing our realities". Later, after teaching English in secondary schools for two decades, he reflected on…

Evidence from a recent study of English teaching in three London schools in the post-war era suggests that changes to curriculum and pedagogy, commonly attributed by historians to the 1960s, were well underway in the 1950s. Major changes associated with "New English" occurred when teachers began taking the lives and experiences of their…

Herbert Courthope Bowen was a progressive spirit in English teaching during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Ideas about the role of activity in the development of the child--ideas usually associated with progressive teaching in the 1960s and 1970s--may be found in Bowen's published papers. In connection with the time that Bowen was…