Teachers Talking Texts

Our first episode on unseen poetry! In this episode Miss Iqbal, Miss Kemp and Miss Neokleous discuss Wendy Cope's poem 'Sonnet'. If you find unseen poetry a challenge, this is the episode for you. You can hear how the three of them discuss a poem that they've never read before, developing and building upon their interpretations together. 

Click here to read the poem with them. Did you come up with the same ideas? Do you have any thoughts they missed? Let us know!

In this episode, English teachers discuss whether they feel sympathy for Macbeth after he has murdered the King of Scotland. Is he an evil, twisted man or a mere human like any one else, who just took it one step too far?

In the return of our Sixth Form electives, Mr Rahman provides an introduction to reform, grassroots change, abolition and revolution. From the purposes of protests, changing the system from within and how to lobby government through to the Black Panthers, the abolition of police, and the Haitian, Cuban and Burkina Faso's revolutions, we look at the past and present to imagine a better world and how to bring it about.

Closing off the Spring Term, Ms Iqbal and Mr Rahman are joined by four of our Year 10s to talk through An Inspector Calls. With topics ranging from  love, responsibility and power to gender, justice and even prison abolition, we put together a ranging approach to this key GCSE text that remains relevant to this day.

Looking at Bangla-language textbooks for the diaspora in the UK, this episode targets applied linguists, mother tongue / heritage language teachers, community psychologists and activists, and anyone interested in identity, nationalism and community schooling. It's a brief look at the contexts of Bengali migration before an interpretation of some relationships with the language and the country at the time. Find all the resources here, including the presentation, a transcript, some reading and an annotated bibliography that explores the theory in some more depth: rb.gy/nge8vh

In this week's elective, Mrs Pillay explores education, language and the alphabet in a study of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll's contributions to nonsense literature. We look at how children learn and understand the Victorian world in a context of rigid structures and rote learning, subverting much of what's expected from language and art.

Mr Brillantes' elective explores what postmodernism is, questioning where we find meaning and how to navigate space after the crises of modernity. From Freud, Picasso and war to The Library of Babel, Twitter and a WhatsApp group chat, this week's session observes how postmodernism has predicted much of the world today.

In our third session of the English Electives, Mr Rahman and the Sixth Form speak about migration, dehumanisation, institutional neglect and neocolonial industry under the title of English & Power: Capitalism, White Supremacy and Decolonisation. From Grenfell and Yarl's Wood to Unilever, Burkina Faso and Rana Plaza, we build an understanding of what we understand White Supremacy to be and how the English Language plays a role in it all. Find the resources here: https://rb.gy/8tdmrk