English literature at brondesbury and kilburn high school (UK 1980–1984)

Abstract

This chapter describes a UK school English department’s successful but short-lived attempts in the 1980s to develop more linguistically and culturally inclusive forms of curricula and assessment working in collaboration with like-minded public examination boards. Referencing Basil Bernstein’s distinction between performative approaches to curriculum, assessment and pedagogy, which privilege ‘absences’, and competence approaches, which privilege ‘presences’, the department’s initiative is illustrated via an account of how one student’s non-standard use of English was able to be accommodated within formal examination systems in a way that valued his creativity and critical insights rather than punishing him for his lack of expertise in standard forms of expression. The account is contextualised within education movements and debates of the time, including the development of creative responses to literature study and the challenging of an existing literary ‘canon’, as well as within current central education policy in England which, it is suggested, promotes the return of ‘traditional’, performative, and fundamentally ex-clusive approaches to curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.