‘To know the world of the school and change it’ An Exploration of Harold Rosen’s Contribution to the Early Work of the London Association for the Teaching of English

Sadly, I cannot claim to have known Harold Rosen personally. I was fortunate enough to hear him speak on a number of occasions, but I can’t even claim, in any meaningful sense, to have met him. Though in many ways I regret this, it has not diminished in any way the extent to which he has influenced my personal and professional development as a teacher of English, nor does it undermine the extent to which I feel his influence has been profound in the development of English pedagogy and practice more widely. As a PGCE student at the Institute, I came to Harold through his contribution to Language, the Learner and the School (Barnes, Britton, and Rosen 1969). This text changed the way I saw myself as a teacher, and changed forever the way I thought about what goes on – or what should go on – in the best English classrooms. It is still the text I recommend above all others to students each year on the PGCE courses on which I have taught. Published under the banner of the London Association of the Teaching of English (LATE), my reading of the text led me directly to active involvement in LATE, an involvement that has had a defining influence on both my professional and personal life. Leaving aside some more personal benefits (I will not be the only person to have met their spouse through the Association’s activities), fifteen years of professional involvement with LATE have culminated in my current PhD research, which aims to recount the history of the Association, evaluate its influence on the development of post-war English teaching and consider the potential contemporary significance of aspects of its work. I have commented elsewhere that the LATE story is an underexplored and at times misrepresented area in the field of subject English history, and I have given there some fuller details of my work (Gibbons 2008); the current reader need only really know that central to the project are interviews with colleagues involved in the Association in its first two decades, and extensive archive materials comprising – amongst many types of document – conference reports, meeting minutes and correspondence. For an English teacher, to explore the archive of documents relating to LATE’s work during the period from its foundation in 1947 to the birth of the National Association (NATE) in 1963 is by turns inspiring, thrilling, sobering, and even – given recent and current contexts – depressing. The capacity shown by members of the Association across school and university sectors to work collaboratively for the betterment of English education is seemingly boundless; the sheer number of voluntary hours given to the development of study groups, the organisation of conferences and the publication of research-based reports is staggering; and the