Today, Brune Park are hosting students from Bridgemary and Bay House Schools for a morning of ‘Stretch and Challenge’ curated by Brune Park’s English Department and aimed at students who are in touching distance of the Level 7-9 band.
Rather than instruct or advise on the AQA’s assessment objectives, the event will rather take as its starting point one of the level 9 descriptor words for English Literature – ‘conceptualised’ – and combine it with a journey through an era that the students will encounter almost at every turn in both Language and Literature texts and unseen papers – The Victorian Age.
The day has taken as its title ‘Cognitive Dissonance and the Victorians’ and aim to probe and expose the identity crises of an age of great modernisation, but also of intense psychological and existential dysfunctionality.
There has been a keynote lecture introducing high concepts via Art, Social Science, Natural Sciences and Politics and then the group split into three seminars led by Ms Harlan, Mr Paxton and Mr Andrew-Power, looking at the theme through the lenses of Thomas Hardy’s Plena Timoris, Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Students across the three schools will emerge with a sense of how applying a conceptualised understanding of this era will give them intellectual confidence, a deeper responsiveness and clarity in making compelling connections and a set of transferable skills for use across the English examinations.
We are very excited about this historic collaboration between the three schools and are confident that it will set a strong precedent for future projects and mutual support within the family of the GFM.
M Paxton A Harlan T Andrew-Power
