Textual space and its importance to school ethos and cultural pedagogy

ABSTRACT This paper theoretically demonstrates the potential of textual space in making an important contribution to school ethos and cultural pedagogy. It demonstrates how culturally-inclusive (representational) textual space can be expanded throughout the school and could contribute to social justice and decolonisation efforts beyond the English Literature classroom. This is increasingly important in an age of culturally and politically securitised schooling, where government control exercised at the macro-level (colonial/neoliberal education policy) and micro-level (teaching and learning; the enactment of the formal curriculum) reproduces cultural inequality. This paper therefore argues for textual space in the English Literature classroom to be appropriated as a representational, dialogical, historical and connected space (in opposition to neoliberalism’s decontextualising and atomising agenda) for real-world political action and the democratisation of cultural production within the wider school environment.