Object Pathos: Writing for Resonance in the English Classroom

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• Ben Rudd, PhD student, Faculty of Education, Darwin College
• Tuesday 25 November 2025, 13:10-14:00
• Richard King room, Darwin College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Janet Gibson.

ABSTRACT : Contemporary education scholarship shows that Secondary English places an excessive emphasis on technical brushstrokes and replication. ‘Object pathos’ is proposed as one approach which contrasts with pedagogies built around assessment criteria. Object pathos is an original pedagogy which focuses on material objects that change or appear in new contexts as sources of narrative meaning. This research uses Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance to investigate how narrative approaches to English might support the study of composition and textual meaning in ways that encourage relationality, personal response and mitigate learner alienation. This theoretical framework also brings together the literary ideas of Virginia Woolf, George Saunders, and Ursula K. Le Guin; the materialities of John Dewey, Bill Brown and Steven Connor; and the narrative theories of Paul Ricœur and Viktor Shklovsky. This presentation will report the findings of the Ideas in Things action research study, which involved trialling a large set of object pathos resources with teachers across three schools in England.

BIOGRAPHY : Benjamin Rudd is a PhD student at the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on how ideas from narrative theory and practising writers can be applied to form classroom experiences that elicit personal response and encourage creative agency. He has taught English, music, and drama at Secondary level in England and the United States. He engages more widely with creative writing through the University of Cambridge’s BBC Partnership Shadowing Scheme.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars series.

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