‘I don’t doubt Shakespeare or Dickens’ contribution to English literature,but whether we’re going to be teaching dead men, can’t we teach dead women too?’One evening in an empty classroom at our school last June, and the English department got together to go through the courses offered by the modern A-level and GSCE curriculum specifications. There was an uncomfortable moment as we realised that very few of the set texts we’d be teaching our students in the modern school year were written by women,and fewer still by writers from ethnic minority backgrounds. We knew that we’d fill to work very hard to obtain texts like The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (set way, way back in the Victorian past and including just one female character, or a fainting maid) relevant to our students. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com