This workshop will focus on European and international dimensions of the ‘New English’ 1945 –65. As part of a major Leverhulme funded project, Social Change and English: A Study of Three English Departments 1945-1965, we are currently investigating the hypothesis that a radically new curriculum and pedagogy for the teaching of English language and literature in British secondary schools, ascribed by historians to the 1960s, was already well developed in the 1950s. We assume that the origins of that ‘New English’ lay in the immediate post-war climate of internationalism, democratic optimism and cultural renewal, together with changes in school provision and a new professional self-confidence at a time when teachers themselves were at the forefront of curriculum change. The New English has been criticised for its perceived narrow focus on local community. Yet evidence in two schools under investigation supports the claim that there was also a broadening international outlook. We will describe how a chief architect of the ‘New English’, Harold Rosen, gave us in interviews a striking account of his Jewish childhood in a cosmopolitan and multilingual community in East London, surrounded by political discussion and debate. We will refer to his account of serving in Allied Army of Occupation in Europe during and straight after the war and show how such experiences both informed his teaching and shaped a distinctive version of the secondary school subject. Strong pre and post-war European links also feature in our second school, where the playwright, Harold Pinter’s English teacher vigorously promoted European languages (German and Russian) and literatures as well as drama in schools. Students like Pinter, who came from working class, East London homes, relished ‘ordinary’ speech. (Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of the ‘New English’ was its hospitality towards vernacular speech.) The same students also discussed world issues such as Marshall Aid and ending colonial government, even forming a school branch of the Council for Education in World Citizenship. We will argue with close reference to interviews and archival evidence that international and European orientations in the ‘New English’ as exemplified in these schools diverged from versions of the subject that were confined to functional literacy skills or the national heritage and its post-war reconstruction. (367 words)

Existing histories of English have drawn their evidence largely from publications and not at all from schools. Taking a radically different approach, we are conducting case studies of three former London schools, using interviews with surviving teachers and pupils together with the study of documents (including student work) in order to establish what went on in English classrooms. Our interest is in how a particularly active group within one specialised branch of the teaching profession, thought and acted in the first twenty years after the Second World War. Our ‘unit of analysis’ is the school English department. The three schools have been selected on the basis of the influence they are widely regarded as having had on the reform of English teaching. We are investigating each school in turn, employing a mixed methodology involving both interview and documentary research (McCulloch & Richardson 2000, Cunningham & Gardner 2004). (147 words)

• To document changes in English teaching in three London schools in the period 1945-65 including teacher’s conceptions of their role • To develop an adequate methodology for investigating what went on in English classrooms involving a combination of written and oral sources and implemented through detailed case studies of school departments. • To identify links between curriculum change, social and cultural change and teachers’ conceptions of their role. • To produce model archives for the study of school-based subject histories, thus encouraging further research (both academic and amateur) and strengthening professional and public memory. • To disseminate our findings and to provoke critical reflection on the present state of English and the profession. (114 words)