A shelf of books, many theoretical handbooks related to Literature

Articles

Opinion and Editorials

If you would like to contribute to the website and share your experiences, please get in touch. Our articles focus on the delivery of Disciplinary and conceptual Knowledge.

  • Why the traditional material centric approach to Literature might be failing our students

    Traditional schemes of work intend to ‘foster a love of reading’, and attempt this through prescriptivist reading dogma. This fails to teach the decoding strategies needed to understand literary texts, and you cannot love what you do not understand.

  • From Fixity to Credit

    In my previous post, I attempted to impart some of Adrian Johns’ examination of the durability, permanence or ‘fixity’ inherent in printed literature, to maintain meanings indefinitely. It has been assumed by other academics that the very technology, the print itself and the construction of the book, carries some innate permanence as a priori, but…

  • The Nature Of The Book

    Something that struck me as of paramount importance when designing these lessons was to open with some discussion of ‘what literature is’, The small ‘l’ denoting the common, concrete noun of the object-in-hand, as opposed to capital ‘L’ denoting the proper, abstract noun of the course; Literature. How we define this object as literary, and…

  • Why are the lessons so boring?

    Students become bored during lessons. They become bored of the lesson. They are bored by the lesson. And sometimes, no matter what we try to do as teachers, there seems to be no antidote to their boredom. But in trying to fix boredom we are actually contributing to greater difficulty accessing the lesson. Maybe teachers…

  • Welcome to Discipline of English, a repository for the accumulated knowledge of teaching English Language, English Literature and Media Studies. I have taught at GCSE to OCR, AQA, Pearson, Eduqas, as well as at A Level and even the new T Level. It all started in 2007, and I have worked with students in Wales,…