The Cross of St George, the Union Jack and Cultural Diversity

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LESSON(S) 3/4 - Activity (F)

Each school, as an inclusive cross-curricular exercise, could ask all departments to contribute images, pictures, photographs, short pieces of text, artifacts etc. so as to illustrate these themes, or different cultural themes arrived at in lesson 2/activity (E).

These could be used in a categorising card sorting exercise, so as to engage students. Perhaps teachers could send in, electronically, their own ideas and examples to this site? (email feedback@iresepect.org.uk).

To get things rolling we include some literary suggestions - please refer to:
An A-Z of literary Englishness. - Once again, these literary examples could be used for categorisation after discussion. (It might also be fun to choose some pages from selected titles spontaneously and randomly with a class to see if there is anything present that fits with the chosen themed sub-headings).

After the themes are chosen and before the intensive card sorting exercises, we recommend that students listen to 2 poems from the British Library CD compilations: “THE SPOKEN WORD Poets” ISBN 0-7123- 0517-3.

• Alfred Tennyson reads “Charge of the Light Brigade”
• and also Henry Newbolt reads “Vitai Lampada”

They could also read the texts; when they are ready, students could categorise these poems under the relevant cultural themes’ sub-headings, listed earlier.

Students should note that the poems contain attributes that might result in them being placed under more than one category.