Workshops for Teachers: Teaching Prose, 1800 - The Present

How do you bring diverse voices into the A level English classroom? How can you work within the requirements of the National Curriculum to decolonise your teaching?

Roehampton’s English and Creative Writing academics have devised a series of 60-minute professional development workshops for teachers of KS4 and KS5 English.

Drawing on our own work ongoing work to expand the diversity of voices represented within our undergraduate curriculum, these interactive sessions will be delivered by a specialist in the field and are a fantastic way to explore ideas for adding variety to your own teaching.

Sessions focus on particular set texts as examples, but provide material suitable for teaching a range of A Level set texts, so there is something for everyone in each session.

This session's topic will be on:

• Language, Race, Identity in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Mary Seacole's Amazing Adventures

Language, Race, Identity in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
In this session, we will explore the ways in which Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea is an important work of postcolonial fiction, writing back against the canonical British novel Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë over 100 years before. We will look at questions of race and racial identity – both in relation to Antoinette’s perceived identity as a “white cockroach” in Jamaica, as well as the ways in which Rhys looks back to Brontë’s character, Bertha Mason, as a classic example of the racialised “made woman in the attic”. Finally, we will explore important thematic elements of Rhys’s novel (such as language and clothing), using the song “Work” by Rihanna ft. Drake to help us understand the novel’s racial and cultural context.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Mary Seacole's Amazing Adventures
In this part of the session we will think about the Gothic and 'the other', and place Shelley's novel in the context of black women writers such as Mary Seacole and Phillis Wheatley. We will also talk about using illustrations and visual sources on the classroom to bring the nineteenth-century to life for your students.