The English classroom is an indispensable site to critically engage the social complexity of the climate crisis and COVID-19. A question comes up, however, about how to plan for such critical engagement when teaching canonical literature that is seemingly removed from the specific concerns of the current moment. The focus of this article is on…

Every year since 2007, the Globe Theatre has run the "Playing Shakespeare" project, largely funded by Deutsche Bank. This has three main components: school-based workshops, CPD sessions for teachers and free performances for school students. From 2014 to 2016, we were commissioned to evaluate this project. In what follows, we reflect on…

My article argues that the concept of "aesthetic learning" can be helpful for English teachers on two levels. First, it can be a useful identity for English teachers and students to adopt, based upon my own experiences as a secondary English teacher, creative writer and PhD student. Second, I argue that "aesthetic learning" is…

This article examines two comic book adaptations of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" produced for teenage readers and used in school classrooms. It seeks to understand the ways in which particular kinds of literacy are being implied and constructed through the textual practice of multimodal adaptation. It presents a close reading of sections of…

This article reports on the first two phases of a project to promote the classics through English at Key Stage 3, a scion of the Cambridge Schools Classics Project. We discuss the primary importance of speaking and listening in the English classroom both for the individual and the collective, and reflect on the power and importance of using…

This paper takes the grotesque as a model of subjectivity that offers compelling inroads to understanding adolescence. Bakhtin notes that the grotesque "seeks to grasp in its imagery the very act of becoming and growth, the eternal, incomplete, unfinished nature of being". I argue that Carson McCullers' novel, "The Member of the…