How Big is Your Effect Size: Doing Research in the Classroom

Abstract

It would be impossible to preface what follows with one of those ‘disclaimers’ that insist ‘the views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of…’ This would not only be disingenuous, it would deny the history that I draw on to make an argument about teaching, learning and research. Twenty-five years ago I came to the Institute of Education to do an MA in Language and Literature. My tutors were Jane Miller and Tony Burgess. Since 1989 I have been working at the Institute as a member of what used to be called the English department, largely as a PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) and MA tutor. My ideas about classrooms as places where creativity and cultural making are defining characteristics have grown out of my work here, the time I’ve spent in classrooms and working with trainee teachers and MA students. As important have been the conversations I have had with colleagues in the Institute and the writing I’ve done with them. This history has its roots in the work of James Britton and Harold Rosen and their insistence that we have no choice but to ‘begin from where the children are’ (Britton, J. [1970] 1975. Language and Learning. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 134), to see the linguistic and cultural resources that pupils bring with them to the classroom as the foundation for learning. John Yandell’s work is part of this history, particularly his many studies of the ways in which students illuminate and make sense of the literature they encounter in the classroom. ‘The text, the classroom and the world outside’ is the sub-heading of Chapter 6 of his book The Social Construction of Meaning: Reading Literature in Urban English Classrooms (Yandell, J. 2013. The Social Construction of Meaning: Reading Literature in Urban English Classrooms. Abingdon: Routledge.) and it signals a clear link between John’s work and the Bullock Report of 1975, with its insistence that no child should be expected to ‘cast off the language and culture of the home as he crosses the school threshold, nor to live and act as though school and home represented two totally different cultures which have to be kept firmly apart’ (Bullock, A. (Chairman). 1975. A Language for Life. The Bullock Report. HMSO, 286).