British Journal of Educational Technology

V O27
~ NO 3 1996

227-229

Colloquium
A window on the future for English
Sally Tweddle. Until April 1996 Sally Tweddle was Senior Programme Officerfor English at the
National Council for Educational Technology; she is now a senior research fellow at the Institute for
Cancer Studies, The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B 1 5 2TT. Email
S.J.Tweddle@ bham.uc.uk

In October 1992 the National Council for Educational Technology (NCET) held
seminars for employers and educationalists across phases and disciplines to examine
the implications for the curriculum of new technologies and the practices they make
possible. The participants conclusions reflected what has since become a consensus
view and are reported in The Future Curriculum with IT (NCET, 1993).They called for
an education system which produces lifelong learners who are flexible, team workers
and who delight in and can handle change; who are literate and numerate, effective
communicators, autonomous, reflective and motivated. They identified implications
for the structure and organisation of education and for curricula and courses and they
warned of a real risk that education is looking backwards and will therefore fail the
young people of today.
Subsequently, groups of curriculum specialists were convened to examine how the
curriculum might need to change. The task for English was to explore how to fit
youngsters for a world in which writers and readers have access to vast quantities of
information, in which communication is global, collaboration is increasingly possible
and the meaning of text is unstable. The issues raised fall into three categories.
Methodology
There are questions around planning, around differentiation in teaching and around
the notion of the teacher as controller of information. For instance, how does an
English teacher introduce Shakespeare if every pupil can choose to watch a different
version of Romeo and Juliet and at different times? How does the teacher work with
a group, some of whom have used the Internet for trans-national discussions about
the play, some of whom are swapping electronic Coles notes and others of whom have
only read the printed text!
Curriculum
There is a n imperative to adapt existing reading and writing curricula in order to
accommodate electronic texts. New concepts and skills are required for the reading of
hypertexts and the writing of texts which combine words, images and sounds. But as
primary teachers in Redbridge, who have been researching into reading with CDROMs, have discovered there is much that is not yet known about these processes.

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Assessment
New technologies make possible a number of different types of collaborative writing
and working practices will increasingly be predicated upon them. For teachers, there
are consequently questions around how achievements in collaborative activity can be
recognised. monitored and assessed.
The NCET Future Curriculum Group has developed a theoretical framework for
teaching English with all types of texts which builds on the best of current reflective
practice (Tweddle, 1995). What, then, are the implications; how different will the
classroom of the future be? The Apple Classroom of Tomorrow in Nashville,
Tennessee, may provide some pointers.
A classroom of tomorrow
In Dodson Elementary School, there is one computer for every four pupils. The I<4
(eight year olds) classroom looks like a good primary classroom anywhere; clusters of
desks where computers sit alongside books, paper and pencils. When I first visited, just
one of the computers was used and when I returned a week later half of the computers
were in use; the technology had become so integrated that teachers and pupils ignored
it when it was not needed.
On my first visit, groups of children were malting research presentations. All were oral
and captured on video but each employed different media. The children in the first
group spoke in turn, illustrating what they said with a video they had made. In the
second group the children each used different resources: a n adult text book, handwritten notes, hand-written and illustrated posters, visual aids. They adopted the
presentational style of television documentary. The third group, much like TV
weathermen, supported their talks with their own multimedia hypertext. There
appeared to be no feeling amongst the children or teacher that any presentational
medium was more prestigious than another but there was a sense of appropriateness
to purpose about the chosen media.
After each presentation teacher and children questioned the speakers. The teacher
introduced new information and encouraged children to clarify points; she helped the
children to make connections between what they already knew and what they had
heard. She made assessments as they talked.
These children were literate communicators, confident with the new literacies as well
as the old, using all technologies, media and cultural forms confidently and appropriately. They had learned to work as individuals within groups and the teacher was
assessing them as individuals and collaborators.
This was not the classroom of sceptic futurologists, where isolated learners work
though computer-constructed courses, with teachers dispossessed and a curriculum
driven by computerised tests. It had little connection either with the kind of English
curriculum which has at its core a literary cannon and is assessed through pencil and
paper tests.

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229

There is much to change and inequities in provision are such that it will be decades
before all schools can provide the kind of environment that I saw in Nashville. But
what classrooms like this can do is offer hope for the future: they signal what can be
achieved when educators are in a position to offer a curriculum which exploits the
opportunities that derive from new technologies.
References
NCET (IY Y 3 ) The Future Curriculum with IT National Council for Educational Technology,
Coventry
Tweddle, S ( 1 Y Y 5 ) A Curriculum for the Future: A Curriculum Built for Change English in
Education 29 2 3-11