Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

produced by plenty of people who have long been preparing us for the moment we find ourselves in. Even better, you almost certainly have an extensive selection of these resources in your store cupboards already, so there needn’t be that much involved in the way of costs. Many of youwill have already been delivering the material for years. It just needs to be fully applied. If, on the one hand, we have ultra-processed, hyper-promoted, addictive algorithmic radicalisation, then its foil is to be found in books – essential vittles for our character! Moreover, books don’t have to be the foundational material of literature courses alone; they need to become a cross-curricular amuse- bouche that can prepare us for the conceptual flavours of everything we study. To help us explore and resist discriminatory extremism, students have, for some time, been tasked with reading To Kill A Mockingbird , OfMice and Men and others, so that through the mediumof literature, we get to see the lived experiences of people of colour, and we could all help to build sympathy and develop a better understanding of the structural barriers they faced. Texts present us with a ‘narrative of representation’, so that we can see how the worldmakes people appear to themselves and others. Most importantly, books challenge misrepresentations – they can immerse us in experiences of ‘otherness’, and how it feels to be excluded, stereotyped, and/or seen as deficient according to some ‘exalted’ standard (usually that of being white andmale). Building a battle-ready curriculum When thinking about the processes set in motion by Charlie Kirk’s death, we should be turning to 1984 , Fahrenheit 451 , An Inspector Calls and The Diary Of A Young Girl by Anne Frank. These texts all utilise a political language that helps us see how fascismworks – how it falsifies truth and undermines reality. They remind us of our responsibilities to wider society and of our interconnectedness, in ways that transcend the oft- derided terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’. What should our response be to the seemingly endless front pages and short-form videos that depict immigrants as a faceless swarm of, counter- intuitively, benefits cheats and job thieves?We should be reading Refugee by Alan Gratz, The Boy At The Back Of The Class by Onjali Q.Rauf, We Are Displaced by Malala Yousafzai, and more. Students should get to imagine life in the clothes of other nationals, so that we can better feel what it’s like to have a home, culture and dreamwrecked by empowered extremism. What would delivering such a reading culture look like in practice? This is something our school is currently attempting – a curriculum of books delivered to all students, once per term, per year group, each with a different curricular link, amounting to 18 books by the end of KS3. A critical curriculum, delivered through literature, that’s readily available to all students, provides a means of understanding reality. During the first 10 minutes of each lesson, the teacher will continue the narrative from the point reached by the previous teacher. It’s important that the teacher reads, and does justice to the sensitivities conveyed by the text. We then discuss these narrative experiences: how they relate to the real world, and how seeing them on the page can impact our own individual conceptions of reality. Throughout the year, teachers and curriculums across the school can reference back to these texts which exemplify the disciplinary critical language. Importantly, we’re recalling the emotional impact of this critical language – not just the cognition. It’s a curriculum delivered by all subjects simultaneously; one formed of 18 books that could conceivably be found on the shelves of any classroom. And all it takes is just 10 minutes at the start of each lesson, for two weeks in each term. That’s two weeks of starter activities, reading about the world as made fictional, and responding to these moderately and safely, when the world outside seems all too real. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Aaron Swan is an English teacher, Language For Learning lead, and has been a head of department 69 teachwire.net/secondary P E D A G O G Y