The Art/English course at Exeter College (continued)
And we went from there. After the first year, in which I wasn't involved, Graham and I continued to run the course as a duo from 1974 to 1987. Graham continued to be the Art teacher till early retirement in 1994, after which Carol Kennedy, Anna Murray and Kathy Taylor successively took over; I continued to teach all or some of the English until 2001 (promotion in 1986 started to reduce my teaching commitments, always the way in education; Fran Jenkin and Helen Armstrong were, for some groups, the main English teachers). The course had a short after-life, with a 2002 intake, who left in 2004. Thirty-one years: not too bad a record for a course which was given notice to quit less than eighteen months into its original incarnation.
The character of the course changed in the third year, not least because both Graham and I were now A-level teachers, and split the time exactly. It also changed because the students applying for the course were being chosen because they wanted to do both subjects (the chief criterion for selection in 1973 and 1974 was that the students were considered in some vague sort of way to be ‘creative'). There were lots of advantages. Because they were in the same group for Art as for English, they got to know each other much better; they bonded more easily; although they were predominantly art students at heart, they were able to see another side of themselves in the English lessons; they had two teachers in common – and that meant that Graham and I were able to sort out any misconceptions we had. Parents evenings were a pleasure (and always good fun, because Graham, by common consent, looked like the English teacher, whilst I, being about as unkempt as was permissible even in those permissive times, with a rope of hair down my back, looked like the Art teacher. Caught off-guard, parents never had a chance to take against us. And there were huge benefits for me as an English teacher. I knew all my students were art students. By and large, that meant they were quite happy to experiment; and that suited me. We didn't just read Chaucer: we built room-size three-dimensional versions of it. We didn't just read The Waste Land ; we created it (there is a comic version of this in Gene Kemp's novel No Place Like , which derives from a visit she paid to the course). And for Graham, he had the advantage of knowing that here were students who were ready for conceptual ideas, and who might even be persuaded to write about them.
It was one night at Graham's house in 1974. He asked me what I was obliged to teach. King Lear , I admitted. It would be unfair to call Graham antagonistic to books. He had read his favourite books several times over (Sartre was a speciality). Equally, it would be unfair to call me well-read. I had read a high number of books very quickly. These included King Lear , and at that stage, I hadn't the foggiest idea how to teach it. Graham wanted to know what it was about. I replied with a list of themes – typical, this, of a relatively recent A-level student and undergraduate. I was still learning about the complexity of texts, that they weren't a bag of examinable themes (as I had certainly been led to believe). It's about – ‘about', that dangerous word – power, and loss of power, I said; about the chain of being from the divine to the animal; about sight and insight; about the paradox of madness and insanity; about age and youth; about folly and wisdom. About resignation. And so on.
It was enough. I was talking abstracts. I should have noticed the gleam in Graham's eye. Without realising what I was doing, I had pitched King Lear into art-teacher territory. Without telling me, Graham started enthusing about King Lear 's themes, and started to work on them with our students. In one room, there I was, flogging tediously (and incompetently) through the text. In the next-door art-room, Graham was interrogating them about the play, and getting ready to load them into his car. He drove them to the nearby woods, where he had them compose living triptychs of themselves in amongst the trees. He had them stage photographs of roped-off portions of the wood which represented what they told him were the three stages of the play. He had them making drawings and three-dimensional models of the three stages. He hadn't read the play, but they were having a great time interpreting it – in Art lessons, not in English lessons. It was a huge lesson for me, one I should have learned for myself. They were enjoying themselves in Art. They were learning. They were making sound-tapes. I was flogging through the set book. That year, 1974-75, was when I learned from Graham that teaching had to be active.
But we did have a shared brainwave. What if the play – the whole play – was pasted flat, on a board? What if we tore the book up, and made it ‘a flat book'? The next day we – the students Graham and I – started to rip the text apart. It took up surprisingly little space, and sat on an easel between the two rooms. Gradually it was filled with coloured mapping pins (it was in the days before the database. Every reference to eyesight had a green pin pushed through it. Everyone who passed the play, as a flat book, read it. The caretaker started to quote from it. Graham had an art-speak phrase for it – “the random access board”. He also had an alarming tendency to label the themes with slightly suspect names – “bestiality”, for instance, for the recurrent images of animals. That was the only worrying moment in parents' evenings: when Graham explained that King Lear was about “bestiality”, and that he had the pictures to prove it.
By the second year of teaching, and the third CLP group, I'd cracked it, thanks to Graham. The Art/English course was about learning through doing. CLP always was Graham's genius in action. Working with an art teacher transformed my teaching – they even started to pass their English A-levels, too.
CLP started out life as a concept; it grew into a much simpler, more amenable thing. It was course of students who were like-minded individuals, and whose shared interests allowed the content of the lessons to cross boundaries when and if appropriate. It probably took me a decade to realise that the boundary-crossing was appropriate for anyone I was teaching. In the meantime, the course existed almost as a family affair, with first- and second-year students co-existing, getting to know each other rather better than their friends who took A-levels completely separately. When the move from the decrepit buildings to newer buildings (actually, the re-decorated end of an old building – and ironically, the first buildings are still standing, whilst the newer ones have recently been entirely demolished), it became a little harder to sustain the more obvious links. Nevertheless, and especially at the outset of the course, I could always count on my English A-level students to come up with art-work, and the sense of identity persisted. Three sisters passed successively through the course; so did other pairs of siblings. In the last group I taught, there was the nephew of someone from the sixth group. (That's when it is time to feel ancient; although by that time, another former student was teaching my daughter, which was another clue that it was time to move on).
There's a great deal more to tell, and, when there's time, I'll tell it. In the meantime, here is a chance to leave a message about what happened to you in the years after CLP or the Art/English course – whichever one you called it. And there's space to dig out some of the photographs (there are several of some groups, very few of others. Send them in as .jpg files if you've got them). I hope to post them on the site once I get the time.
There are a couple of tiny signs that the course existed. The painted hands which Lou Mason put up the side of a building are still there. And in 1978, Graham chalked the directions for a parents' evening – an arrow to Y2 and and an arrow to Y3. Ten years later, Y3 was re-named Y2, and Y2 was re-named Y3. But somehow, the chalk-marks have evaded everything. Over twenty-five years later, Graham's (now misleading) chalk-marks are still there.