Incorrigibly Plural – A L.A.T.E. Conference in celebration of Morlette Lindsay

This Saturday saw a number of teachers, teacher educators, and pupils gather together at the UCL-IOE to celebrate the contribution of Morlette Lindsay to English teaching and to share ways of continuing her work.  Workshop contributors included a number of DARE affiliate members, such as the British Library (Emma Bull and Katie Adams) and Theo Bryer and John Potter. But the event was conceived and led by John Yandell, Anne Turvey, Jane Coles and Theo from the English PGCE/MA team at the UCL-IOE.

The event kicked off with a double act keynote from John and Anne which described key philosophies and approaches from the Walworth curriculum onwards (Harold Rosen and Southwark teachers)  all presented under the heading, Guerilla Teaching, all of them dependent on a value system which was so much a part of Morlette Lindsay’s work and teaching.  The audience took part in a teaching activity on Louis MacNiece’s poem, Snow, which involved active reading, active participation. Workshops followed during the morning, ranging from using London as a resource, through shared, collaborative writing, iPad filmmaking using drama and text as a resource, working with musuems, the British Library’s digital resources, cultural identity as a resource for poetry and dynamic creative writing activities.

The final keynote was a group performance by The Spoken Word lunchtime group from Alexandra Park School, co-ordinated by Lisa Moore and Klara Bernatt and featuring writers and performers from many year groups, in many styles, all of them inspiring and committed performers, highly supportive of each other and with breathtaking abiltity and love for the spoken word form.  Morlette would have loved it, as Anne Turvey commented at the close.  She would have loved the whole occasion, her powerful influence going on and reflected in the way the team transformed room 728 into an exhbition space of memorabilia and important works and images for Morlette.  It was an inspiring occasion. The work goes on…

The next LATE conference is the summer one, on June 17th…