Race & Class current issue

Englishman

Sivanandan, A. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

An insurrection in words: East End voices in the 1970s

Harcup, T. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

From 1971 to 1976, Chris Searle was at the centre of a number of events in the East End of London that, nearly four decades on, continue to resonate. This article uses a combination of reminiscence, reflection, contemporaneous and retrospective accounts, and engagement with the writings of Searle himself, to explore the meanings of the ‘Stepney Words insurrection’ and the creation of the Basement Writers. The article is informed by ideas of critical literacy, including Paulo Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, and argues that community publishing can be seen as an expression of working-class agency and active citizenship within an alternative or ‘plebeian public sphere’.

Teaching tough kids: Searle and Stepney

Davis, B. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

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.

Chris Searle: Funk Brother number one

Scott, J. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

The working-class pedagogy, or ‘resistance education’ of Chris Searle; his identification of linguistic colonialism; his practice of critical literacy as embracing the lives, experiences and imaginations of his students; and the massive body of work, from Stepney Words onwards, in which he has set this down, comprise an unparalleled resource for radical educationalists seeking to develop the practice — and theory — of critical literacy and working-class pedagogy. Yet, while concepts such as linguistic colonialism have been elaborated to furnish the careers of more high-profile intellectuals and academics on the cultural Left, that same cultural Left, in its concern with a self-limiting identity politics, has sidelined the challenging, revolutionary implications of Searle’s approach and methods. In the process, Searle has been left ‘standing in the shadows’, much like the musicians who originally crafted the Motown sound — the Funk Brothers — and made that phenomenon possible.

The pitch of the world: cricket and Chris Searle

Westall, C., Lazarus, N. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

Part of Chris Searle’s wide-ranging contribution to Race & Class — and the subject of this article — is a body of cricket writing that exposes the crippling imperial legacies of the game but still insists on its potential for the future, particularly in England; a future Searle understands as emerging from the country’s working-class, multi-ethnic, inner-city communities. Searle is indebted to C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963) and, like James, sees cricket as a site for the expression, playing out and (sometimes) the imaginary resolution of social relations. Searle also follows James in arguing that, because of the game’s sociality, the politics of cricketing performance must be assessed in terms of the relationship between players and their communities. In this context, he has analysed the significance of figures like Devon Malcolm, England’s Jamaican-born fast bowler, and Brian Lara, the world-record holding West Indies batsman. Notably, Searle’s academic and personal contribution has been ‘Towards a cricket of the future’, as one of his own pieces is entitled. He has also helped lay the ground for a critique of the globalised televisual spectacle that is, increasingly, the international game of cricket.

More than words: Chris Searle's approach to critical literacy as cultural action

Lankshear, C., Knobel, M. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

This article discusses what seem to us to be some of the key features of Chris Searle’s approach to language and literacy education within school classroom settings in England, as portrayed in his own writings and reflected in work done by his students and published in numerous compilations from Stepney Words (1971) to School of the World (1994). We understand his work as a sustained engagement in critical literacy, underpinned by an unswerving belief that being a literacy educator serving working-class communities is inherently a political, ethical and situated — material and grounded — undertaking. Throughout his school teaching life, Chris Searle took it as axiomatic that working-class children should learn to read, write, spell, punctuate and develop the word as a tool to be used in struggles — their own and those of people like them, wherever they may live — for improvement and liberation. Literacy education for working-class children must proceed from, maintain continuity with and always be accountable to the material life trajectories and prospects of these children. It can only do this by maintaining direct contact with their material lives and their situated being within their material worlds.

Going in by the front door: Searle, Earl Marshal School and Sheffield

Davis, B. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

The pattern of Searle’s later teaching career and continuing development of a child-centred, working-class pedagogy, or critical literacy, proved even more controversial than at Sir John Cass school. He was appointed to the head-ship of the 80 per cent non-white Earl Marshal comprehensive in Sheffield in 1990, a year before the first Gulf war. But his refusal to exclude pupils, his determined attempt to involve the local communities, Yemeni, Pakistani, white working-class, etc., in the life of the school and his encouragement of pupils to confront the issues raised by the war — which affected many of them directly — and his bending of the National Curriculum to these ends earned him the wrath not only of the more conservative elements on the local education authority but of shadow Labour education secretary and Sheffield MP, David Blunkett. Attempts made to close Earl Marshal were successfully resisted; Searle was fired, but not before the publication of a number of collections of pupils’ writings, including Lives of Love and Hope, by female pupils and based on family experiences.

Earl Marshal School: towards an inclusive education

Gurnah, A. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

For five years in the early 1990s, as the Conservative government attempted to drive through the new educational policies heralded by its Education Reform Act of 1988, a comprehensive school in Sheffield was the site of a bold experiment in progressive education. Located in a working-class, inner-city area, Earl Marshal School was ethnically highly diverse, with students from Pakistani, Somali, Yemeni and Caribbean families; white students made up less than 20 per cent of the student roll. With Chris Searle as headteacher from 1990 to 1995, these students, aged 11 to 16, were exposed to a very different kind of schooling from that envisaged by the government — with its newly introduced national curriculum, competitive league tables between schools and authoritarian system of inspections carried out through the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED). Instead, Searle refused to exclude students for misbehaviour; did not sheepishly follow the national curriculum; was not over-impressed by OFSTED; sought student democracy; and involved the local community in the affairs of the school. Inevitably, he drew fire from OFSTED, from other headteachers, from the local education authority (LEA) and even from David Blunkett, the Sheffield MP who from 1994 was Labour’s shadow secretary of state for education. In the end, they were able to unseat him, depriving Sheffield of the benefits of his ideas. The headteacher who opposed the permanent exclusion of students was himself, as he puts it, ‘permanently excluded’ from the job that he loved and lived for.

Mozambique diary

Davidson, B. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

Between 1977 and 1979, Chris Searle taught in the newly liberated Mozambique. His diary of working in a secondary school was published as We’re Building the New School! (London, Zed, 1981) and we reproduce here excerpts from its foreword by Basil Davidson, writing in January 1980.

A British anti-imperialist lion in the Grenada revolution

Jules, D. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

In 1979, the New Jewel Movement (NJM), under the leadership of Maurice Bishop, took power in Grenada in a bloodless coup. With a political vision conjoining socialism and black power, the revolution in Grenada immediately drew the hostility of the US government, which began a programme of destabilisation. The leadership of the revolution sought to develop a highly participatory approach to political and economic decision-making that would enable the country’s workers and peasants to actively shape Grenada’s development. With popular education a priority, Chris Searle came to Grenada to teach. But he soon was invited to contribute to ministerial discussions, devising national education policy and creating a publishing house. He also helped to write Maurice Bishop’s speeches. In 1983, the US government took advantage of division and conflict in the leadership of the NJM to mount an invasion, ‘Operation Urgent Fury’, which restored to Grenada a regime more favourable to US interests.

Review: Forward Groove: jazz and the real world from Louis Armstrong to Gilad Atzmon By CHRIS SEARLE (London, Northway Publications, 2008), 278 pp, {pound}14.99

Ellison, M. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

Tributes

Croft, A., Prescod, C., Bourne, J., Reilly, D., Pulsifer, G. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT

Bibliography of publications

Searle, C., Webber, F. — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:18:33 PDT