Ian Cushing's 'Standards, Stigma, Surveillance: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and England's Schools' draws on raciolinguistic theory to offer a detailed and compelling critique of language policies and teaching practices in contemporary urban schools in England. It argues that 'minoritised' pupils and teachers are consistently positioned in deficit…

Recent reforms to Initial Teacher Education in England are a continuation of a decades-long political project, aiming to change the whole social complex around teachers' professional education. But the most recent frameworks present some new inflections to the construction of learning, pedagogical relationships and difference. Positivist versions…

By offering a close reading and interpretation of one conversation between four Year 8 pupils about Robert Swindell's "Stone Cold," I aim to address questions of what might count as knowledge in English and to suggest how it might develop not only out of the qualities of a text, but from particular social relations and a set of pedagogic…

I begin with an account of my own observation of an English lesson taught by one of my student teachers using a teaching resource, "The Island," that I used myself as a new teacher more than 20 years ago and of my own responses on finding it transformed by two decades of change in educational policy and practice. It has become almost a…