Interview with John Elliot, 6 December 2002

Abstract

We were all sitting there waiting quietly for the introductory session of a two-year, part-time advanced diploma course at Luton Teachers' Centre. In rushed a guy in baggy corduroys, blue fisherman's smock, long hair streaming behind. He was carrying large brown boxes, full, I discovered later, of weighty volumes we were to grow to love much later: Stenhouse, Humanities Curriculum Project, R.S. Peters, Michael Oakeshott, Beyond the Numbers Game, and so on. One kindly student took pity, and went out to a tatty car to help with bundles of photocopied papers: ‘the ethics of what law?’. These were to become our weekly struggle of bedtime reading, a basis for discussion in future seminars. I can still remember the titles. So this is what they meant by the ‘process model’, ‘teaching for understanding’, ‘philosophical analysis of classroom practice’ in the course brochure. And struggle was the right word. A discontinuity, a challenge to what we thought we knew, there was a stretching of constructs, an expansion of ideas, and application to our classrooms. Investigations illuminated our own theories of learning, and we related apparently jargonistic, irrelevant, academic concepts to urban school life. © 2003, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.