In your own write; for English wherever I may find her: De-territorialising writing

This chapter offers an account of an intervention within a university-based ‘Access to Higher Education’ programme. The context is important because transitions always are and as such are also places where pauses may be made for thought. It is in this ‘hiatus’ that the authors find time and space to genuinely negotiate literacy with the University of Opportunity, an institution which was the first and only university to waive requirements for ‘passes’ in GCSE English and maths for applicants. The chapter explores the ongoing writing project which both addresses issues around widening participation and social justice in its desire to find alternative ways to validate students as they arrive. As English teachers, working as academics in an Institute of Education and substantially focused on Teacher Education for the post-compulsory (PCE) sector, the authors found themselves experiencing and negotiating a set of issues around genuine access to university education but also finding simple principled responses within their previous practices as teachers of the subject previously known as English. These issues had nothing to do with course content or indeed curriculum, which can always be more responsive but are never more than, but was rather concerned with the creation of a community of readers and writers, where every writer could be assured of a welcome and readers. Appropriately, this process is also called ‘being included’, the ‘subject’ around which all were invited or indeed allowed to meet.

Citation

Bennett, P. & Scott, H. (2022) In your own write; for English wherever I may find her: de-territorialising writing in Bennett, P., Lambert, L., & Smith, R. (Eds.). (2022). Rethinking and Reviving Subject English: The Murder and the Murmur (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003262718

Type

Chapter in book

Language

en

Description

This is an accepted manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Rethinking and Reviving Subject English: The Murder and the Murmur on 27/09/2022, available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003262718 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

ISBN

9781032202181

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

cbn

Collections

Faculty of Education, Health and Wellbeing