Elaine McNally - Head of Department - Hemel Hempstead

The Leading, Language and Literature Podcast

In this episode I’m speaking with Elaine McNally. Elaine is an English Head of Department and enthusiastic presence on Twitter, where she she tweets @mrsmacteach33.

I reached out for a chat with Elaine after seeing her speak at the TeachMeetEnglishIcons event earlier this year. Her presentation - ‘Powerful Voices: A Year 8 Curriculum’, tackled the topic of how she had tried to deliver diversity within her department’s curriculum thinking. Although an important and timely endeavour, what stood out about the way Elaine navigated the discussion was her observation that she had felt out of her depth at times. This was due to ‘the thorny nature of diversity as a term,’ which is me quoting Elaine, who was quoting Bennie Kara. Needless to say, this was a fantastic exploration of the consequences for planning and teaching around the concept of diversity and something that I wanted to be able to talk about in more detail.

We discuss:

• The best text Elaine’s ever read, taught or learnt herself
• What diversity actually means when leading a curriculum rethink
• The canonical or classic texts that have been kept in Elaine’s KS3 curriculum and how she approaches them with diverse interpretations in mind
• The texts her department have introduced or kept that have a more diverse point of view at their core
• And finally, the substantive and disciplinary concepts that Elaine and her team chose to include after their KS3 review

At a time when my own school foundation is considering its output in relation to empire, imperialism and inclusion, this was a conversation I hugely benefitted from thinking forwards into the future so thanks again to Elaine for that.

If you want to be kept up to date on when educational chat like this happens, then be sure to subscribe to the podcast and/or follow me on Twitter @chrisjordanhk

Links:

TeachMeet English Icons Recordings

Slides from Elaine’s presentation

A Little Guide for Teachers: Diversity in Schools by Bennie Kara

The Bone Sparrow by Zana Fraillon

Raymond Antrobus - poet

Christine Sun Kim - poet