Opening the book: in memory of Jane Ogborn
Posted on 24/01/2025
Teachers have teachers among the living and the dead. Mentors, models, exemplars, they inhabit our thoughts, memories and even dreams, offering guidance and inspiration or, it may be, a warning. Absent from our classrooms, they yet appear momentarily in them as a catchphrase or a bodily gesture which was theirs and which we discover in ourselves. When we think about what it is we do when we teach, they help put the pedagogic landscape into words and walk through it with us. A handful of our teachers, perhaps the most influential, are the first to reveal how that landscape coheres, and to open its horizons.
Jane Ogborn, who died on 9 January, was one such teacher for me.[1] I took up my first post as an English teacher at Crown Woods School, then part of ILEA, in the early 1980s, where Jane was deputy head of department, a softly-spoken, unassuming, hugely respected and influential colleague. She showed me how to keep thinking about the nature of reading, and how to teach English Literature so that students would keep reading it. Her profoundly-considered understanding of reading as the making of meaning, rather than as meaning’s reception, struck a chord in me that still sounds, resonating with a bedrock belief that to learn is to make sense, and our unavoidable condition as human beings. The teacher’s work is to help us make better sense.
I took this to be a common conviction among comprehensive school teachers. In Jane’s case, and in relation to the teaching of English Literature, it was coupled with her recognition of the reader’s own complex positioning as a meaning-maker, and her awareness of the manifold nature of a text. She wrote:
[Students] need to recognize the importance of considering a text’s means of production, its historical and social context, literature’s place in different cultures, the effects which our gender, race and class have on the meanings we make from a text, and the insights critical theory offers us into the possibilities of plural readings of any text.[2]
These considerations broaden and deepen what the work of reading anything may encompass. They enrich the repertoire, already extensive, of ways English teachers can read and teach a literary work, and so help students become more alert and sensitive in their own reading.
Jane worked to radically renew assessment practice in English Literature. The goal was a form of public assessment which would permit secondary students to respond as themselves, in sincere, informed ways, to texts, and to explore, refine, substantiate, confirm or reconsider these genuine responses in a sustained act of reading. To this end she pioneered, together with Peter Buckroyd, English Literature exams in which the student has a copy of the set text to hand: unannotated in the case of ‘Plain Text’ exams, and annotated for those termed ‘Open Book’. This means that students can rely on their own thinking as they answer the question, and can mount their own arguments supported by textual material found then and there to be significant.
Such an approach values the student’s interpretative freedom as a reader, and the quality of its crystalised articulation under timed conditions. It enables an independent authenticity of response. This is necessarily denied by approaches which enjoin students to repeat in the exam what they have been told by teachers. Plain Text and Open Book exams illuminate and render assessable not so much what a student remembers from their lessons as how a student may read because of them.
The AEB 660 English Literature A Level, which Jane helped develop, was assessed not only through Open Book exams but also by coursework, including a kind of mini-dissertation. Students could choose texts they would study and, with guidance from their teachers, frame a coursework-question about them to answer at length.[3] Broadening the scope for what could be read on the course gave students a broader basis to show how they read. This made less daunting the work of becoming wiser readers: readers more closely attentive to text, more informed about context, more alert to their own reading practices, more attuned to the determining forces at work as they read, more sensitive, critical and, in the proper sense, discriminating.
The experience of reading on the course was explicitly considered within it, so that students might better learn:
… to tolerate uncertainty and confusion when they read, to feel that it’s all right to change their minds about a text on later readings and to understand that any critic is also expressing only a partial and incomplete reading, however authoritative it might seem.[4]
Right wing educationalists, forever pessimistic about human educability and fearful of all democratising impulses in school, vilified this kind of teaching, targeting it as part of their general assault on the comprehensive ideal. But Plain Text, Open Book and coursework-based exams enable teachers and students to exercise control over vital elements of the course. As importantly, they help teachers foster processes which better secure validity and reliability in assessment, a professional task which should not be entirely contracted-out to those beyond the classroom.
Jane’s work outside Crown Woods School, and especially with colleagues at the English and Media Centre, helped sustain belief among practitioners in ways of reading, writing and talking in English lessons which were far more educationally-fruitful than those promulgated and enforced by a succession of Education ministers.[5]
I remember Jane not only for her revolutionary and inspirational work to re-cast the formal public assessment of reading at 16 and 18, establishing a true gold standard, but for her thoroughgoing intellectual rigour, her generous and well-judged guidance and support, and her endorsement of English teaching as a democratic and creative practice, the hallmark of the Department she distinguished.
[1] Jane Ogborn obituary | Teaching | The Guardian
[2] Jane Ogborn, ‘A-Level Pressures for Change’, 1990, cited by Robin Peel in ‘Exploring the Metropolis’, a paper presented at the Biennial Conference of the International Federation for the Teaching of English (New York, NY, July 10-14, 1995), 1995, p15. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED441235.pdf
[3] See John Hodgson, ‘Authenticity, Validity and Reliability in A-level English Literature’, Forum, 59, 2, 183-188, 2017; also Stella Canwell and Jane Ogborn, ‘Balancing the books: modes of assessment in A level English literature’, in Sue Brindley (ed), Teaching English, London, Routledge, 132-136, 1994.
[4] Peel, 1990, op. cit, p15.
[5] In Memory of Jane Ogborn | English & Media Centre