INOTE 2024 — Julian Girdham

On Saturday the annual day-long conference of the Irish National Organisation for Teachers of English was held in Portlaoise. As the pandemic showed us, there is nothing like meeting our colleagues in person and ‘nerding out’. Online support such as the excellent work being done by Education Support Centres in webinars (I delivered one on Wednesday on King Lear) is important too, and often pleasingly accessible. But seeing each other, talking at lunch and making serendipitous connections is a real tonic.

In his opening address, Chair Mikey Meally started with a reading of ‘The Windhover’ (more from me on Hopkins). He then addressed the biggest thing on English teachers’ minds at the moment, Leaving Certificate reform, which concerns all in INOTE since it looks like a ‘rapid acceleration’, and ‘change without thought.’ We need some critical distance, and not to do things too quickly. But out of 4500 English teachers in the country, only 122 responded to a recent feedback survey: on Saturday, all were asked to fill in a paper form to provide evidence for the committee about members’ ideas. It is vital we do not end up having to implement something we do not believe in, as happened with the Junior Cycle (which could be excellent with tweaking). Most serious is the possibility that Paper 1 language material may move back into Fifth Year (as with the dismal withdrawn proposal about the Paper 1 exam), in the form of the Additional Assessment Component, worth at least 40% of the final grade. As Mikey said, English is an iterative subject, and in Fifth Year our pupils need to be able to ‘fail’ in a safe space as they develop their writing and thinking before they end their school careers. Also, I have written about the AACs in the context of generative artificial intelligence and its threat to academic integrity: an article on this topic will appear in the Irish Times later this month.

The keynote speaker this year was Dr Katriona O’Sullivan from Maynooth University, author of the bestselling biography Poor, which coincidentally I recommended a month ago in Fortnightly 172, much of which was about English teachers. She spoke about the teachers who came into her life in both positive and negative ways, but especially Mr Pickering, as I quoted in that Fortnightly:

Mr Pickering was a northern man in his forties. I loved him. I loved his pronunciation of Shakespeare, the way he thoughtfully read through the texts and explained each phrase to us, telling us how we might say it today. I took notes in his class, always wanting to make good on my homework. His praise meant more to me than other teachers’. I wanted to be the best in his class; he was hard on all of us, so you knew when he told you that you’d done well, you really had. In his class I gladly shot my hand up; even wrong answers were engaged with.

As she described in Poor, Mr Pickering once came to her home to see her father after he again failed to turn up to her parent-teacher meeting, and insisted on Katriona’s academic promise: sadly, when she went back as an adult to thank Mr Pickering for all he had done for her, she discovered he had died. She urged all teachers to use their privilege, especially with children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and pointed out how the ‘poor-poor’ are so much worse off than the ‘rich-poor’.

The second speaker was the poet and teacher Victoria Kennefick, whose books Eat or We Both Starve and egg/shell I have previously recommended here. Her poem ‘Guest Room’ was the unseen choice for the 2023 Leaving Certificate Higher Level Paper 2, which had an extraordinary impact. Recently Victoria has found out she has ADHD, which makes sense of her school experience, which she has often found overwhelming both as a child and a teacher. Unseen poetry is her spiritual home, a gateway for those who struggle with longer texts and an equalising space with just one poem on a clean page of paper. She presented a technique in looking at a poem as a house, and used this as a creative prompt to get us writing.

I then went to two workshops with experienced teachers, which provided plenty of practical ideas for our classrooms. Aoife O’Driscoll took us through her recent approach to Paper 1 tasks, especially preparing for the composition. She concentrated on discursive writing, which some candidates can find reassuring. Regularly-appearing topics can be researched in advance. As always, Aoife provided lots of resources and ideas. Mikey Meally did too, with many ways of approaching poetry in an active way (he pointed out that these were to vary our approach, not as the main one): re-forming a poem, crunching poems (I thought of Alphabetical Diaries here), blacking out words to focus on shape/form and more.

There was great interest from all in hearing from Louise O’Reilly of the NCCA on the work of the redevelopment committee for the English Leaving Certificate. She laid out the timeline ahead of us, especially the draft specification becoming available for consultation in February/March 2025, and the publication of the final version in September 2025, to be followed shortly afterwards for the guidelines for the Additional Assessment Component. It is fair to say that we can expect a sceptical reception for these proposals when they come, and next year’s INOTE gathering may have a lot to say about them. It is already clear that the AAC, a possible return to the idea of dividing Language and Literature, alongside the danger of dumbing-down literature papers to align in some way with the Junior Cycle course, may result in a very disaffected teaching community.

The panel at the end, chaired by Róisín Mernagh, was Claire Cotter, Aoife O’Driscoll and Becky Long of Children’s Books Ireland. They discussed the impact of English teachers (prompted by Katriona O’Sullivan’s words earlier), the importance of school libraries and access to books, and information literacy at a time when truth has never been so slippery in public discourse.

Finally, the INOTE magazine has also appeared online (my Personal Anthology piece on short stories for reading out loud in the classroom is included).

Sincere thanks to the committee for organising this excellent and invigorating event.