Diversity in GCSE English Literature

[kikoou]

Hi!

Hope everyone is doing well and thank you for opening this thread!

I'm a mature student who's doing an Access to Higher Education course with the aim of being a teacher. As parents, I would love your input for my Extended Project by completing this google form.

It's really short, about four questions and it's just about what books you might have studied in your English GCSE. I don't need any personal details, literally just your age and the books!

forms.gle/q6ZWTFPfm9M83jni9

Thank you so much in advance!

I answered this, though I did O levels.
Ultimately the books are whatever is on the syllabus, which are written by white dead males on the whole. The poetry is a bit more diverse.

You didn't ask about characters within the books, or books studied in KS3. If you had done you might find more diversity, e.g Of Mice and Men, To kill a mocking bird, Noughts & Crosses.

My daughter's GCSE is still dead white men. When I raised it with the teacher I was told they 'tried' to add diversity in the poetry choices. It is just not good enough.

I think you need to also look at the curriculum for the whole of secondary. We don't just learn in our exam years and there is more time and more flexibility in the pre exam years when the teachers are not constrained by the exam boards.

Plus let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. Classics are classics for a reason and while people will often come to modern novels on their own lots of people won't tackle the classics without some prodding. Diversity is a good thing should add to the overall curriculum not wipe out the previous one.

OP I’m afraid brevity may be the downfall of your survey. It’s too superficial and there’s no room for explanations.

Do you feel your culture was represented by the books you studied?

• can’t be answered (at least for me) with a simple yes or no. I, and my parents were born on three separate continents and the one in which I was brought up - encompassing the UK - was obviously partially represented in the literature I read at school. That was my culture - but only part of it. If in some alternate universe I had been exposed only to the literature of my parents’ heritages at school I would then have been poorly educated in some aspects of British literature. But I’d still have imbibed a good deal of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy (as my parents did in their faraway continents as schoolchildren). And lots of Shakespeare.

Things aren’t quite as cut and dried as your form suggests.

The set texts are here: thenationalcurriculum.com/gcse-english-literature-texts/

The impression I get is many schools stick to a subset of the texts as

• they don't need to keep buying books or making teaching resources
• they can jump exam boards more easily
• shorter books are easier to study / read in class
• there are more resources around to support students
• in the case of plays, some are performed more so making it easier for students to see a live performance