Harold Rosen Lectures

June, 2012 (DARE)

Michael Rosen – Beyond Recitation: Poetry and the Arts in the Curriculum

The first lecture was given, appropriately enough, by Michael Rosen, Harold’s son, at the launch of the DARE centre at the Institute of Education in June 2012. Michael delivered a passionate and characteristically humorous defence of the place of poetry and the arts more generally in education, interwoven with memories of his father’s life, poetry and educational work.

February 2013 (UKLA)

Shirley Brice Heath – Deciphering Landscapes of Reading

The second Harold Rosen lecture was given at the British Library by Shirley Brice Heath (Stanford University) in February 2013, as part of the UKLA international symposium Ways of Reading. She began with a substantial tribute to Harold Rosen, and an account of his influence on her own work and thinking. Her lecture introduced her new book, Words at Work and Play, thirty years after her influential work Ways With Words.

June, 2013 (DARE)

Jonathan Neelands – Dramatic Futures: why the Arts and Humanities should reclaim the curriculum

The third lecture was given by Professor Jonothan Neelands (University of Warwick) at the DARE Arts day, 21st June, 2013, at the Institute of Education. Jonothan gave an exhilarating defence of the performing arts in education, and a savage critique of the marginalization of the arts in policy domains internationally. He also made recollections of Harold Rosen’s political interventions in education and the arts a powerful theme in his lecture.

June, 2014 (NATE)

Michael Rosen – Looking for Language

The fourth lecture was given by Michael Rosen at the 2014 NATE conference in Bristol on the 27th June 2014. Tom Rank of NATE commented: “Michael Rosen was in top form on the first day of NATE Conference, moving from the personal (a poem about eating hot potatoes round the family table – we all had to join in) to the educational, grammatical and political”.

July, 2014 (UKLA)

Teresa Cremin – Revisiting the Power of Narrative

The fifth lecture was given by Teresa Cremin (Open University), as part of UKLA’s 50th International Conference on July 6th 2014. It begins with an appreciation of Harold Rosen’s contribution to thinking about narrative. It moves on to explore children’s engage with and production of narrative, considered in relation to questions of creativity, performance, play and pedagogy, and anchored in a rich variety of work with teachers, children, and prominent researchers in related fields of study.

November, 2014 (DARE)

Myra Barrs and Sarah Horrocks – All the Children Have A Voice: Educational blogs and their effects on students’ writing

The sixth lecture was given by Myra Barrs (freelance author, consultant and researcher, formerly director of CLPE) and Sarah Horrocks (director of London Connected Learning Centre) on 28th November 2014 at the Institute of Education in London. Myra and Sarah’s research project set out to study practice in blogging, with a particular emphasis on children’s writing, in four primary classes. In most classrooms, for most pupils, blogging resulted in pupils’ increased engagement in writing, greater awareness of audience, greater awareness of their own writing and that of others, and an enhanced sense of belonging to a writing community.

June, 2015 (NATE)

Simon Wrigley – The Occupation of Writing

The seventh lecture was given by Simon Wrigley (director of the National Writing Project UK) at the annual NATE conference, 27th June 2015, in Newcastle. Simon began his talk with a poem of Harold Rosen’s, and acknowledged his work several times during the talk, referring to his insistence on the significance of writing, the power of anecdote, and the politics of writing. His talk considered how teachers can nurture children’s writing, and escape the shackles of writing frames and scaffolding; and also, importantly, how teachers can also be writers, finishing the talk with a reference to his own work on this theme.

July, 2015 (UKLA)

Kathy Hall – Investigating the Language of Learning

The eighth lecture, given by Kathy Hall (University College, Cork), at the UKLA International Conference at NCTL Nottingham on July 11th 2015, considered some important lines of inquiry bearing on talk and learning in classrooms before going on to look at how the language of neuroscience is permeating education and potentially changing our understanding of learning and the learner.

June, 2016 (NATE)

Sue Dymoke – Finding and Keeping Poetry

The ninth lecture was given by Sue Dymoke (University of Leicester) at the NATE Conference In Stratford-upon-Avon on June 26th 2016, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Dartmouth Conference in 1966.. Drawing on her own experiences as a student, teacher and reader of poetry, she reflected on how poetry came to be such an important element of her life, echoing the themes of personal growth which informed the Dartmouth Conference, and argued that we need to continue to find ways to help young people can find and keep poetry for themselves in ways that will continue to enrich them throughout their adult lives.

July, 2016 (UKLA)

Gabrielle Cliff Hodges – Who’ll Tell the Story? Why researching and teaching narratives still matters

The tenth Harold Rosen lecture was given by Gabrielle Cliff Hodges (University of Cambridge) at the UKLA international conference in Bristol on 10th July 2016. This lecture re-visited some of Harold Rosen’s powerful arguments in The Dramatic Mode (1980) and Stories and Meanings (1985) about why it matters that young people both create their own narratives in the classroom and engage with other people’s narratives as well. It suggested arguments for teachers researching their own practice, especially through critically reflecting on and analysing rich data generated by what students draw, say or write about the role of narratives in their lives. Finally, it anticipated reasons why narratives – whether crafted in new or conventional media – might prove to be of ongoing value as the twenty-first century continues, considering in particular their potential contribution to sustainable futures for both young people and the teachers who educate them.

March, 2017 (DARE)

John Richmond – Harold Rosen: Writings on Life, Language and Learning

The eleventh lecture was given on 20th March 2017 at UCL by John Richmond, editor of the newly published collection of Harold Rosen’s writings: Harold Rosen: Writings on life, language and learning, 1958–2008. Harold’s son, Michael Rosen, and Betty Rosen, Harold’s widow, introduced the lecture. It was an inspiring tribute to this towering figure and leader of thought in the world of English teaching, addressing questions of language, politics, culture and narrative, and giving a lavor of the book through discussion of its central themes, and readings from Rosen’s autobiographical writings and poems. The lecture was well-attended, especially by the English in education community, many of whom had known and worked with Harold Rosen.

June, 2017 (NATE)

Simon Gibbons – English: Past, Present and Post-Truth

The twelfth lecture was given by Simon Gibbons (Kings College London) at NATE Conference in Nottingham on 24th June 2017. Simon drew on material from his recently published book English and its Teachers: A history of policy, pedagogy and practise to explore the contested history of subject English and to consider how this history might inform future directions for a subject that should arguably have increased significance for young people as we negotiate turbulent times.

July, 2017 (UKLA)

Sue Ellis – Making a Difference by Making it Different: how researchers and educators can create kinder literacy interventions

The thirteenth lecture was given by Sue Ellis on 2nd July 2017 at the UKLA International Conference at the University of Strathclyde. Sue argued that, despite the fact that we know that social class and gender are strongly associated with how easily and how well children learn to read, many education policies frame literacy as a cognitive endeavour and suggest cognitive, content-based curricular interventions to address the attainment gap. Such approaches often ignore children’s social/cultural capital and identity in ways that risk literacy teaching appearing alien and unkind. This lecture described an intervention that took place in 46 primary schools, designed to help teachers re-balance and expand their professional knowledge to create more inclusive and socially responsive literacy activities, resources and pedagogies. The lecture detailed how specific tools and knowledge helped change teachers’ patterns of professional noticing, re-shaping what the teachers noticed, what they attended to and what they ignored so that they responded differently to their students.

March, 2018 (DARE)

Margaret Mackey – Readers in Training and the Surveilled Imagination

The fourteenth lecture was given by Margaret Mackey (University of Alberta) on 21st March 2018 at UCL Institute of Education. Her lecture focused on the goal of education to equip children to savour the pleasures of “private reading.” However, her lecture revealed that the privacy of digital reading is not secure. She gave examples that demonstrated the breadth of incursion into behaviours that were recently completely internal, even secret: the commercial use of algorithms to observe personal text selection in order to recommend further choices, the option for instructor oversight of student reading activities in university class modules, and outright surveillance of children’s behaviours from within the texts of their classroom reading scheme. Mackey’s lecture teased out the implications of such encroachments for our tacit and explicit understanding of what “private reading” involves, asking in what ways these changes matter. In light of the revelation only days before the lecture of the mining of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica for political ends, Mackey’s was particularly timely in asking the audience to ponder the line between nonchalance and paranoia when it comes to the surveillance of personal reading.

June, 2018 (NATE)

Andy Goodwyn – The Highly Affective Teaching of English: reclaiming our expertise

Not available at present, not recorded, but a written version is planned to be published in Teaching English

The fifteenth lecture was given by Andy Goodwyn (University of Reading) at the NATE/IFTE Conference at Aston University on 24th June 2018 . In this lecture, Goodwyn considered the professional identity of English teachers, their expertise and their love of English, arguing that, at a time when test-driven outcomes are driving much of what is happening in education, we need to reclaim English as the key personal and affective subject in schools. Interspersing a policy history with vignettes from his own family history, he sought to trace the relationship between social and political movements over the last century, and to make some predictions about possible future directions.

July, 2018 (UKLA)

John Potter – Dynamic Literacies, Third Spaces and Everyday Practices: The ‘Other Possibilities’

The sixteenth lecture was given by John Potter (UCL Institute of Education) at the 54th UKLA International Conference in Cardiff on 6th July 2018. His talk drew on the book he published last year with Prof Julian McDougall of Bournemouth University, ‘Digital Media, Culture and Education’ (Palgrave, 2017). John’s talk made connections to the work of Harold Rosen, in particular the Walworth English Syllabus of 1958, showing how a respect for the wider culture around the school could be used as a focus for teaching and learning. This syllabus proposed work in themed ‘magazines’ which was centred on the lived experience of the pupils as a location for writing and, ultimately, ‘other possibilities’ such as filmmaking.

June, 2019 (NATE)

Barbara Bleiman – Big Picture English: Beyond the Brushstrokes

The full lecture has been published in the February edition of Teaching English.

The seventeenth lecture was given by Barbara Bleiman at NATE Conference in Chester on June 22nd 2018. In this lecture, Barbara Bleiman explored what has been happening to English teaching in recent years, suggesting that we need to foster a broader, more expansive view of the subject, more in keeping with the principles and practices of the late 20th century, rooted in the work of educationalists like Harold Rosen. She offered a critique on the emphasis of the word at the expense of the text, detail and form at the expense of significant ideas, and small achievements in assessment at the expense of a rich, holistic education, supported by some examples of what’ Big Picture English’ looks like taken from recent work from EMC’s group work project ‘It’s Good to Talk’.

July, 2019 (UKLA)

Andrew Burn – Play: From the archive to the playground and back again

The eighteenth lecture was given by Andrew Burn (UCL Institute of Education) at UKLA International Conference at Sheffield Hallam University on 14th July 2019.

November, 2020 (NATE)

John Yandell – English in the time of Corona

The nineteenth lecture was given by John Yandell (UCL Institute of Education) at NATE’s online conference on 14th November 2020. You can download the powerpoint here and watch the lecture (right).

February, 2022 (NATE)

Victoria Elliot– Pride, Prejudice and Zombies: English Literature in the Secondary School

The twentieth lecture was given by Victoria Elliot (Oxford University) at NATE’s online conference on 21st February 2022.

March 2022 (ReMAP)

Myra Barrs – Vygotsky the Teacher

The 21st lecture was given by Myra Barrs at UCL Institute of Education on 29th March 2022.

The 22nd Harold Rosen lecture

Dr Ian Cushing

From the white ears of Ofsted to the word gap: language policing as a design feature of English education

The 22nd Harold Rosen Lecture was delivered online at NATE on 27th March 2023.

November 2023 at The Great Hall, King’s College, London

Peter Thomas delivered a rousing Harold Rosen Lecture.

November 2025

NATE was honoured to welcome Carol Atherton to give the Harold Rosen Lecture. Head of English at Spalding Grammar School and author of Defining Literary Criticism (2005) and the acclaimed Reading Lessons (2024), Carol has long been respected for her insights into literary study, curriculum, and the lived experiences of young readers. Her lecture continued Rosen’s tradition of provoking debate and deepening understanding of English as both a discipline and a formative force in young people’s lives.