Selective amnesia and the political act of remembering English teaching

Abstract

In this article the authors explore the phenomenon of 'selective amnesia' as it relates to education. We define this as a politically engineered loss of collective memory, both curricular and pedagogic, which has adversely affected what teachers and teachereducators do. Through an intergenerational dialogue between four secondary English teachers/teacher-educators, we invoke the power of memory to explore alternatives to currently dominant narratives in English teaching. Our starting point is 'what exactly has been forgotten?' 1 From there we move on to consider the underlying principles and values of the different model of English that emerges from our collective memory, and discuss how this might engage with policy in order to identify new forms and ideas. We propose that, for those involved in English teaching and teacher education in the here and now, memory has both a critical and motivational role to play.

Intergenerational Learning Among Teachers’ Professional Development and Lifelong Learning: An Integrative Review of Primary Research

“…In close relation to this, Çelik and Polat (2022) tried to define correlations among knowledge sharing and intergenerational learning. Some other papers studied IL as a key concept to preserve cultural memory concerning education values and practices and roughly argue the benefits of such preservation to new generations of professionals, both as a key strategy to organize curriculum and didactics thought (Diamond & Bulfin, 2021;Pitfield et al, 2023) or to define strategies for linking successive generations of Black educators (Loder-Jackson, 2012). Another paper studies teachers' age-related stereotypes from a generational perspective (Geeraerts et al, 2021).…”