Teaching tough kids: Searle and Stepney

Abstract

The template for Chris Searle’s teaching career, his development of a working-class pedagogy and his concept of critical literacy, was set in his very first teaching job, at Sir John Cass School in Stepney, East London. Here he engaged with the lives and imaginations of all the children, encouraging them to write out of their own experience and imaginatively extend it to the lives and struggles of others, whether in their immediate neighbourhood, across the UK, or globally. The writings, published as a series of booklets, Stepney Words, became a national cause célèbre, leading to Searle’s dismissal, a student strike and his reinstatement. Searle’s pedagogy — which he terms critical literacy — goes beyond the concept of child-centred radical progressivism in education, to class-conscious, communitarian education. Critical literacy exposes and deals with the issues that shape the world in which the students have to live, helping them to make sense of it in their own terms. It is a genuine, unforced fusion of the personal and the political.