The Place of English Revisited

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 of my practice and the values I hold, I have revisited ‘The Place of English’, an essay I wrote midway through my Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) year; I have reconsidered how the current climate of educational reform and my subsequent experience have altered or strengthened these initial perceptions. In what follows I have reflected critically on two episodes of teaching and learning with my Year 10 class, my most challenging group, in order to further understand the way in which I have responded to the responsibilities and pressures placed on a classroom teacher. These pressures, I suggest, are intensified by the preconceptions of age and gender within my school and implicit more widely in the traditional values of our culture. The fragments of my practice that I have explored reveal tensions that gesture at a gap between educational theory, first-hand professional experience and governmental policy. They present an argument to resist the temptations of oversimplified, linear conceptions of teaching and learning, and maintain the place of English as a subject of creativity, exploration and expression that, at its heart, values both individual and collective student voices and identities.     

Teaching computer literacy: helping patrons to help themselves.

Teaching computer literacy to library patrons is an entirely appropriate activity for librarians in their role as liaisons between information and those who are seeking it. At the Norris Medical Library of the University of Southern California there are four main computer activities: information management workshops, provision of a microcomputer laboratory and classroom, formation of user groups, and installation of a campus-wide electronic bulletin board. Benefits to the library include: increased computer knowledge for librarians, better understanding of the information needs of the campus community, mutual respect and friendship between librarians and patrons, and introduction to the library of patrons who may otherwise never have come.