Written nearly 40 years ago, Peter Medway's "Finding a Language" continues to be an arresting read, which offers a powerful vision of what might be possible in education. In this brief introduction, I set the work in context, referring to ideas that Pete engaged with and recalling a little of the times.

This article takes a personal view of the contribution made by Pete Medway to King's College London.

In this essay I explore the constraints and opportunities confronting me as a newly qualified teacher and how these affect my pedagogy. I have reflected on my own development from beginning to newly qualified teacher and considered how such forces have shaped my identity as a teacher, my values and my approach to the job. As part of my exploration…

The second part of this account of struggles over literacy begins in the later seventeenth century. From the 1670s, the new dissenting academies, backed by rising business classes, made teaching in English for a wider curriculum their goal. Thus was Defoe's mastery of a new spoken style developed, while in Scotland, the eighteenth century…

The first part of this account of struggles over literacy begins with the later middle ages and follows issues in the construction of a literacy addressed to the lower orders through to the seventeenth century. After the suppression of the Lollard Bible had left the English peasantry without that spur to literacy, the sixteenth-century formation…

The continuing instability of Education as a discipline is examined against renewed arguments for its "disciplinary" status. Teacher education in particular is seen as Marjorie Garber's concept of "discipline envy" to propose a more positive relationship between disciplines that might work for the good of teacher education.