Putting on those context spectacles

Context is such a tricky aspect of English teaching. Too much emphasis on context causes students to offload spurious facts and details. Too little emphasis on context and students make random statements and lots of misconceptions. How many times have we seen students proclaim that ‘all’ Victorians felt or thought something? The idea that society is just one collective thought and feeling is slightly chilling.   

I don’t deny that contextual knowledge is useful and helps to frame understanding, but its problem in English usually stems from the concrete nature of things. If we are thinking of knowledge in English, then the easiest knowledge students can secure is knowledge around context. The problem for English is that a lot of English is forming inferences. The key inferences we ask of students in English relate to three areas usually: 

• Inferences around the writer’s intent;

• Inferences around the reader’s reaction; 

• Inferences around the characters in the texts. 

Yes, you do need a lot of knowledge to form those inferences, but the thinking isn’t quite ‘concrete’. There’s a lot of supposition, guessing, and relating to past knowledge. A lot of the knowledge surrounding this stems from experience rather than direct teaching. This reminds me of a book I read and in it the character reacted the same way.  Contextual knowledge often sounds good in the students head but doesn’t relate to the inferences needed in most English essays, inferring the writer’s intent, the reader’s reaction or the character’s thoughts and feelings. That’s why we get knowledge dumps in essays. 

The other alternative has been to focus on the text as the source of contextual information. The text is simply a product of its time. This tends to be the way the exam board prefers, but it doesn’t make things so easy. If students are not used to exploring the text as a product of its time, then they don’t see it as that. Put any old show or film before a student and they’ll notice the dated effects, fashion, technology  or language. They don’t really explore the people and how attitudes towards gender or class have changed. Exhibit A: they all remember the word ‘squiffy’ in ‘An Inspector Calls’. Astute students can spot the aspects that reflect the time, but that’s a minority. 

I personally think there is a balance to be had. Students need some knowledge, but not too much and certainly not knowledge that is going to over complicate and problematise understanding. What do I mean by knowledge that problematises understanding? Take, for example, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Often, students are informed about the contextual history surrounding homosexuality in the Victorian age. This then, for some students, warps their understanding of the text. Instead of it being one possible interpretation of the text, it becomes the glue that links all ideas together. We can do more damage with some pieces of knowledge for some students. I think there should be a greater discussion of problematic knowledge in the same way we talk about misconceptions. They have the power to override all thoughts. 

It is the relationship that this contextual knowledge has with the writer and the text that needs to be at the forefront of the teaching. And, we need to work on making the writer a person and a concrete aspect. More concrete than the knowledge related to context. 

So, how, in theory, do I introduce context and make the writer seem concrete when discussing texts? 

Step 1 - The basics 

Firstly, I get students to watch a video as homework. I ask them to watch it before reading the text. I inform the class that I am going to test them on what they learn from the video. 

An Inspector Calls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fXw8lWWtlA

A Christmas Carol 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xRonangfz0&list=PLQTtyDJWDJDZns579hi1OGlYtktiFwstn&index=6

Then, I start the next lesson with a test. The link is below.  https://www.dropbox.com/s/mehkq1sxgncziiq/11%20Homework%20Questions%20to%20Context%20Video.docx?dl=0

This document is used repeatedly over the course of GCSEs. It forms revision and works as a constant reminder of key threads in the story. Initially, we throw the first copy away as students get quite a few wrong on the first go. The next time we do it, about a week later, I get them to make it neat as it will be the one that stays in their books. 

I start with this approach rather than use lots of exploratory texts, because students need a grounding of knowledge in the first instance. Whilst I think it is lovely and nice to show a few texts related to the period, it is rather ‘pin the tail on the donkey’. I could spend a lesson exploring hoping students would pick up attitudes towards class or I could tell them that attitudes towards class was an issue and then get them to explore how that idea is developed, explored in a painting or text. 

Step 2 - building the writer 

Unless you routinely get students to salute and bow to an image of the writer, the writer is a ghostly presence in the room. Some can see him/her. Others cannot. English teachers need to help students form a construction in their heads of the writer. They need a construction of the writer that makes them seem like a real person. Someone with an active presence in the text and the lesson. We are reading that writer’s manifesto. 

To construct that writer, I use the context sheet. If this was the world you were growing up in, what would you think? What would you want? What would you do in your writing to make society change? 

From this, we are able to construct ‘a construct’ of the writer. Of course, we are making inferences. 

Dickens was… 

• Protective of children and saw children as losing their childhood 

• Lost his childhood and so didn’t want others to lose theirs 

• Angry that there were very few options for the poor 

• Felt that the government wasn’t doing enough to help the weakest 

• Conscious of how money affected society 

• Felt that money controlled all aspects of our lives 

• Angry that the rich were profiteering from the poor 

• Interested in politics and read government reports 

• Aware of how easy and quickly someone could become poor 

• Aware of how people are determined to stay rich

From this, we had constructed an idea of this person. Students had an idea of who Dickens was as a person. They had this mantra for the book: 

Dickens thought Britain was broken and saw that his book could be the message to fix it. 

It became the default response when reading the text.  

Why does Dickens make the setting cold and foggy? Because Britain was broken, Dickens wanted to suggest how cold society was. The fog symbolises how they couldn’t see the problem and so there was no sense of things improving.  

By securing an initial understanding of the writer, we have something to frame ideas around. Therefore, their inferences developed and extended throughout the reading of the text. They’d start understanding that Dickens cared for the poor, but notice how he wasn’t really against the rich. But, what they had was a starting point to build inferences around the writer’s intent, which they can use to build and create their own. If students have knowledge of the primary intent, then they can explore secondary intentions. 

We spend so much time on character construction that we fail to address the biggest thing we want students to talk about - the writer. 

Step 3 - exploring the text 

Now that we have some threads to work with, I return back to this sheet and the construct of the writer routinely when looking at the text. They have a compass to guide their thinking and to work with. We put a lot of stock on their memory, but whilst reading a text we need to keep working on building connections. After reading a section, I will get students to link to the context or construct somehow. Or, I will start the reading with the idea from the construct: We know Dickens was political and supportive of the poor so what is he trying to do in this section? Politically? Socially? 

We talk about the writer as a person we are familiar with. As if he has just stepped out of the classroom and we are talking on his behalf. There is a presence in discussion. He isn’t an afterthought, which the teacher has to keep returning to when analysing the text. He is a fully rounded person to them. 

How we use knowledge is important in English. However, I think we need to use it carefully. Knowledge can build more knowledge, but we need to think more about how that knowledge builds. We need to work on demystifying the writer and we need to help students to form and create inferences on their thoughts, feelings, ideas and perspective. The biggest problem students have is talking about the writer’s intent. That’s because they have no concept of writers as real people. Let’s start helping students to see writers as real people, even if they might have been dead for a few years. Inference works on knowledge and we have to work on the two aspects in lessons.

Thanks for reading,  

Xris 

Exploring the Inspector’s smalls - being precise with ideas and quotations

Plays, I think, are quite tricky things at GCSE. The plays available for the exam specs  are either chockablock with interesting language choices or they are so sparse that it takes a heavy duty microscope to find them. ‘An Inspector Calls’ falls into the first camp: a play that’s quite rich for exploring the playwright’s craft. And, this can often be a downfall when studying the text. There’s so much to talk about. 

Shakespeare exam questions tend to be kinder to students because they will provide students with an extract from the play, which they can simply use as a springboard or a fresh pasture to dig for quotations. Exams around plays tend to provide students with just an essay title and that’s just it. So, when students are writing about AIC they are having to mine their memory and their recollections of the text rather than have something concrete and tangible to start with. This leads us to what is fairly rote teaching around plays. Instead of exploratory teaching we rely on teaching around the key characters and the key themes. Therefore, the teaching of ‘An Inspector Calls’ becomes DIY essay kits of each character and each theme. Instead of understanding the play, characters and theme the students are taught what to write on a question on Mr Birling and what to write on the theme of social injustice. Are the exams promoting original thought or are they asking students to recall? 

Don’t get me wrong; I do think students need to be taught quite a bit of knowledge around texts. They need to be taught the writer’s intent, the relationship with the context, the form, interpretations and various other things, but I also think there should be some wiggle room for their own exploration and joining up of aspects, ideas and knowledge. The best students make nuanced and precise links whereas the weakest students tend to repeat what the teacher said. 

Every exam for literature relies on students thinking and forming their own ideas. The problem that English faces is that students see English, at times, like other subjects. That means, when faced with a question, they write everything they can remember about that topic. We see that in English with essays. Students write everything down about Mr Birling and so we tend to get lots of generic comments or soundbites about the character. The reliance is on the knowledge and what they can recall. There is no room for moulding, shaping  and exploring ideas. Good students take the knowledge they have and do something meaningful with it. 

Precision in thought, knowledge, ideas and quotations is what is needed for the higher bands. We can teach students some precise knowledge, but teaching precise thought isn’t so easy. That’s why I changed my approach to ‘An Inspector Calls’ a few years ago. The reliance of generalised thinking / knowledge / quotations was creating generalised essays. Therefore, I asked myself how I could make students more precise with their thinking / knowledge / quotations that didn’t rely on me teaching exam essay after exam essay. 

To start off with, I read the whole play with the class and used Stuart Pryke’s brilliant cold read questions.  That provided students with a good understanding of the plot, ideas and key concepts. Then, instead of slavishly going through the whole text, we looked at some choice quotations in order of their appearance in the text. There were about nine to ten for each act. The quotations weren’t ‘big quotations’ that everybody must know, but quotations that reveal something about the character. They might reveal their attitude towards something or their motivations or even some personality aspects.

Now, instead of presenting the quotations to students and asking them to play ‘hunt-the-thimble’ of language techniques, we highlighted some interesting choices of language used in the quotation. They look a bit like this: 

We often talk about cognitive overload, but looking at dialogue in a script is overwhelming for me so it must be overwhelming for students too. There’s so much to filter out. We tend to use questions to direct students to bits of interest, but even then it is quite hard for a lot of students because they have to filter out quite a bit of stuff. For me, this really helped to channel the thinking. Of course, we did go back to the script, but we had a starting point which was narrow, focused and without distractions. 

We’d then take each line of dialogue at a time, exploring what those choices meant and what they make us understand.  We discussed the use of ‘port’ and how it represented Birlings desire to be seen as ‘old money’. We mentioned how Birling engages with Edna in conversation, which shows how he still lacks the manners and sophistication of the higher classes. We explored why Birling pointedly mentions Gerald’s name and how Birling is so desperate to build a connection that he is forcing the issue. Finallally, we chatted about Birling’s use of name dropping and how that differs from Gerald's lack of name dropping in the story. The great thing about this was that we were able to explore language choices in such a way that it was exploratory and probing rather than interrogative. Students listen and question language choice regularly each day, yet we don’t build that level of linguistic exploration to dialogue in plays. Plays tend to be seen as just a novel without the description in it. They are not seen as real conversations. Conversations where people contradict what they say with the tone or word choice they use. 

For me, the beauty of a more simplified initial exploration of the text meant that students were starting with a probing way of seeing the text. The fact that we could show how an interpretation can be built from simply Sheila describing the ring as being something Gerald ‘wanted’ was so empowering for students. Quotation learning and learning large quotations is problematic with the new GCSEs. Yes, students need quotations and knowledge of the texts, but they don’t need thirty behemoths to learn to succeed. Instead, they need lots of little, powerful quotations that they could string together to form an argument. One student linked Sheila’s use of dashes and Gerald’s ‘wanted’ to explain how Sheila is devoid of freedom and independence. The dashes reflected her inability to form logical thoughts. 

As we continued across the play, we started noticing patterns in the language. Characters would dehumanise or humanise Eva depending on moments. The Inspector dehumanises Eva to shock the characters in relation to their actions, whereas Birling and Gerald dehumanise Eva to distance themselves from the situation. Gerald even plays around with who he dehumanises and when it suits him he dehumanises the prostitutes in his storytelling so that he can humanise Eva and present himself as the lovely ‘knight in shining armour’. We also noticed other linguistic tricks used by the characters, because the language choices were at the forefront of the exploration. 

Then, as we finished each act we worked on recalling the interesting choices we noticed. 

 

Once we had jotted the choices that they could recall, we thought about formulating essays around a character or theme. What choices could we use to frame a discussion on class? From the beginning of reading the text, we were looking at supporting arguments with precise choices. The reading of the play coincided with the building up of their knowledge around choices. Students were able to use precise evidence to formulate opinions about a theme or character from an early stage. We rewarded students for choices outside the ones provided. 

Interestingly, the approach had a snowball effect. It provided them with the confidence to explore the choices thoughtfully in dialogue, but it also allowed them to see connections and patterns. The clarity was there from the start. They built on their existing knowledge and saw repetition later in the text, which allowed them to triangulate their thinking and interpretations

Here are links to the documents we used: 

Act 1 : https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/q0le3okkj56u6iydvokyo/AIC-ACT-1.docx?dl=0&rlkey=aphl1963qxp0lk69350pcm6w9

Act 2: 

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/hwjwtjkwss9ge61a6tmt2/AIC-ACT-2.docx?dl=0&rlkey=q8423wrioifw9mm3qd54e2e0s

Act 3: 

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/90y8r88997gvob6u7g1pr/AIC-ACT-3.docx?dl=0&rlkey=k82ratca7mfg7cctatjshhhba

Quotation learning is problematic in English and I think it needs lots of thought in how we do it. All too often, we rely on the ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ approach. We’ll just learn loads of quotations with the hope that one will hit the donkey’s backside. Thoughtful, intelligent and meaningful quotations are much more beneficial to formulating an essay than a bazillion massive quotations. I fear that we are overloading students with quotations for the sake of learning quotations. Think of Sheila’s discussion of Alderman Meggarty. She talks ‘coolly’. That one word encapsulates how Sheila has accepted male violence on women. Sheila who is usually so emotive is so unemotional at this point in the story. Sadly, she has desensitised herself to it. 

I, personally, have enjoyed teaching ‘An Inspector Calls’ this way, because it has put interrogation at the heart of learning. Yes, we have looked at larger sections, but starting with this probing thinking from the start has really helped us to understand characters, choices, ideas and themes precisely. 

What student doesn’t like probing the language of a teacher? As teachers, we are mindful of how a slip of the tongue can get us into ‘hot water’. We are careful about what we say and how we say it, because we know students might pick up on the choice we made. Naturally, students are attune to this pedantic language analysis. We all are. We just don’t explore it enough in lessons. 

 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris