We are a research-informed curriculum workshop.We create innovative designs for learning about English.
As happy with punctuation as we are with poetry, with 18th century grammarians as we are with the TXT generation, we want other people – especially young people in formal education – to have as much fun as we do playing with the crazy dog and being led by the nose up interesting paths.
Julie Blake
Julie Blake has worked as a teacher, teacher educator, writer, researcher and designer of educational materials in the UK. She is currently co-directing the Poetry By Heart national schools recitation competition, editing and innovating Poetry By Heart’s digital poetry anthologies, and revising The Full English: an A-Z handbook of English teaching activities. She is also researching lost, forgotten and neglected books written for or read by black and minority ethnic children in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as part of an AHRC funded research project.
Tim Shortis
Tim Shortis has worked as a teacher, examiner, researcher and designer of secondary level educational materials in the UK. He developed the popular Texts in Context website with the British Library Learning team which includes a sampling of dictionaries over time (Words and Meanings) and, with Julie Blake, developed a number of other acclaimed web-based teaching designs, notably for BL Learning (Language and Literature timeline) and BT (All Talk).
He and Julie have collaborated to develop a number of teaching designs for A Level English Language students and recently developed an interactive poetry timeline which features OED links to particular words. Tim’s doctoral studies are focused on the alterations to orthographic practice occasioned by SMS and related digital media.