Another wonderful book:

Jonah Lehrer: Proust was a Neuroscientist.

The author considers the work of  five avant garde writers (Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf), an artist (Paul Cezanne), a composer (Igor Stravinsky) and a chef (Auguste Escoffier).

He relates the ground-breaking achievement of each of them to the scientific ideas of the time and shows how, by being true to their experience of life, they anticipated the scientific insights of modern neuroscience. This meant that they found themselves in conflict with the scientific pundits of the time. Continue reading →

Another mind-opening read:

Jenny Cook-Gumperz: Literacy and Schooling: an unchanging equation in ed.  Cook-Gumperz: The Social Construction of Literacy, 1986, CUP

The author questions the assumption in Western societies that there is a necessary connection between literacy and schooling. In other times and places the mass of the people have been literate without going to school. (The Vai people in Liberia were literate in Vai and Arabic before going to school to become literate in English, for example.) Continue reading →

Last week I finished reading Urszula Clark’s book War Words: Language, History and the Discipline of English (Elsevier 2001). For this blog I shall skip chapters 4,5 and 6 and move at once to share my delight at finding her reference to the Wigan Language Project. In half a page she encapsulates the main features of Breakthrough to Learning, laying proper emphasis on the teaching of abstract language. Continue reading →

With two friends I’ve been reading Chapter 3 of Urszula Clark’s book War Words: Language, History and the Discipline of English. All three of us have “English” degrees and we all earned our living teaching “English” in one form or another. (The first effect of Urszula’s book is to problematize as a school subject – hence the inverted commas.) We all had some training in modern Linguistics  and two of us taught English Literature as well. The institutions we taught in ranged from primary through secondary schools and Further Education to University, and the clientele from native speakers to foreigners and immigrants.

Our professional lives covered, between us, the period 1950-2000, the major part of the period covered by Clark’s second chapter. It was fascinating to see how our various experiences exemplified the ideological debates and practices of the second half of the twentieth century. I, at least, participated in those debates, both as an active member of the Labour Party and as a teacher in the system. When I recall what it felt like to be involved in those conflicts, I recall my utter confusion! What the heck was going on? Continue reading →