Victoria Bowen, Harriet Hand and Alf Coles
It all started with an idea… a seed of something indistinct… a way of acknowledging the kaleidoscope of research work happening daily within the Teaching Learning and Curriculum (TLC) community at the School of Education, University of Bristol. A group of three formed and we mused …
One of us shared this take on the idea of a pamphlet:
“One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and ‘high-brow’ than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals… Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or in verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of ‘reportage.’ All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.” – George Orwell, in an introduction to the British Pamphleteer
And so, a seed was planted.
An invitation went out to the TLC community to contribute to a pamphlet that would showcase and connect the diversity of research happening in the research centre. This first pamphlet would be aimed at teachers and, in defining a pamphlet, would take inspiration from Orwell giving authors complete freedom of expression. We hoped the pamphlet would help connect some of our research to a those working close to practice.
Two weeks later, following a brief editorial process, the first ‘TLC pamphlet’ was curated with a range of contributions, images, and links to other work. A further two weeks welcomed its publication with the aim of helping the diverse perspectives and research interests and activities of the Centre reach a wider practitioner audience through distribution to the School’s PGCE students. We asked each PGCE student to read the pamphlet and then give it to a teacher in their placement school.
A seed was now a sapling, with hopes of one day becoming a tree, rooted and established in the teaching and learning community. A step towards this will be the publication of issue two in the summer.
Issue one of the ‘TLC pamphlet’ can be found here. There are some spare hard copies at the reception desk of 35 Berkeley Square. If you would like to contribute to future issues, we welcome submissions from postgraduate researchers and academic staff. Or, perhaps, you would like to be part of the editorial team. Contact: victoria.bowen.2018@bristol.ac.uk.