Although one in five state-educated children in England speaks a language other than English at home, there is little space in the National Curriculum for the expression of this linguistic heritage. In this article, we make the case for facilitating multilingualism in the primary classroom through translingual creative writing, which involves…

This field report from The Asylum Project, an Olimpias disability culture experiment, centres non-mainstream experiences of space in two Michigan performances, accessing extrasensory experiences as a creative form. How can we witness and amplify histories of intersected violence and emergent forms of healing? How can we invite hauntings? In…

This paper explores the application of texture and textual attractors within a cognitive stylistic pedagogy for English teachers. Texture, defined as the feeling of building and experiencing a fictional world, is here taken up as a facilitative way of thinking about how reading, language, experience and cognition operate in the classroom. On the…

This article presents lessons from touring a show on pain with limited resources and in chronic pain. In 2014, I toured solo deaf-accessible poetry/art show "Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee" in various forms in the UK, Austria, and India. As an Indonesian woman with then-extreme chronic pain and fatigue, herein are lessons learned from…

Research about love in early childhood education and care is rare. Love is difficult topic to research and write about in scholarly contexts. In order to properly explore love in professional contexts, practitioner narratives on the topic were sought through individual, unstructured interviews. A spiral-patterned methodological approach was…

This article offers a case study account of a garden-themed poetry writing project run by a creative writing organisation in partnership with a class of 9-10-year-old children from a London primary school. I explore the concept of creativity which framed the five-week project and analyse the different ways in which the creative practitioner worked…

Jerome Bruner's experiment over 30 years ago suggested that imaginative literature had greater affordances for the "subjunctification" of experience by those who heard it read aloud than did transactional prose such as a news article. By "subjunctification", Bruner meant the capacity to use the resource (the short story, for…

This paper explores what happened in the English classroom when two innovative projects merged and spoken word poetry became part of multilingual digital storytelling. As a Spoken Word Educator and Teacher Educator, we wanted to explore the complexity of bringing together these multimodal art forms. Making a poem come to life though film is hard…

This article examines the relationship between the discipline of 'English Literature' and the contemporary multilingual classroom. It argues that, although our field has often been cast as a kind of corrective to the 'problem' of language diversity by helping to teach language norms, literature can -- and should -- be made a preeminent space for…

This article focuses on a tablet film-making project involving a group of English and Drama student teachers, their university tutors and a class of boys in a South London school. We reflect on the potential for learning about aspects of the curriculum that emerged from the technology we were using and the approach that we took. We explore how the…

This paper explores the impact of a Spoken Word Education Programme (SWEP hereafter) on young people's engagement with poetry in a group of schools in London, UK. It does so with reference to the secondary Discourses of school-based learning and the Spoken Word community, an artistic "community of practice" into which they were being…

This article will discuss my often challenging transition from radical political poet to full time poet teacher in a Roman Catholic secondary school. Can the counter-cultural art form of spoken word education thrive within the institution of school? By looking at classroom and after school experience, student poems and relevant theory, the paper…

This paper describes the impact of an oral retelling of Homer's "Iliad" on pupils' learning in Key Stage 2 classrooms (children aged 9-11) in schools in East London. We argue that the oral nature of the retelling and responses promoted high levels of engagement and inclusion, leading to enhanced understanding by the pupils. The use of a…

This paper describes an approach to preparing student teachers to teach poetry. The emphasis is upon the use of teaching and learning strategies that demonstrate to students the value of poetry. The first term of a three-term course is described. (Author/MT)

The author has worked in education for almost 30 years in the UK and internationally. Since 1987 when she cofounded an international theatre company called CETTIE (Cultural Exchange Through Theatre In Education), the author has worked as an arts practitioner and arts education consultant in parallel with her teaching career. She has consistently…