Professor Burn received the ‘Outstanding Contribution to the Teaching of English’ award, and Dr Yandell was recognised for his ‘Outstanding Contribution to Research’.
Professor Burn and Dr Yandell received their awards in a virtual ceremony following the NATE conference ‘Creative Literacies and the 21st Century Learner: Empowering English teachers to prepare young people for life and learning’.
Each year since 2004, NATE has presented its annual awards to those who have made significant contributions to the teaching of English or to the work of NATE.
Professor Burn received his award for his pioneering teaching and research work on media in English and media arts, especially on games and video games, as well as for his editorship of NATE News for many years.
Dr Yandell was awarded for his wide-ranging and acclaimed work on pedagogy, meaning-making and classroom cultures, as well as his editorship of the research journal ‘Changing English’.
Andrew Burn is Professor of English, Media and Drama, and director of the DARE centre, a research collaboration with the British Film Institute. He has published work on many aspects of the media, including media literacy in schools, the semiotics of the moving image and computer games, and young people's production of digital animation, film and computer games. He has conducted a wide range of research projects over many years, funded by, among others, the AHRC, the European Commission, the ESRC and the EPSRC.
He is interested in the study of popular culture, especially as it relates to play, the arts and education. Methodologically, he has adapted theories of multimodality to describe and analyse media texts, relating them to them to the Cultural Studies research tradition. He has previously taught English, Drama and Media Studies in comprehensive schools for over twenty years. Professor Burn also led the bid for the first Media Arts specialist school, Parkside Community College, in 1997.
John Yandell taught in inner London secondary schools for twenty years before moving to IOE, where he has led the Secondary English and English with Drama PGCE programme since 2004. As a teacher and a teacher educator, he has written extensively on policy and pedagogy, curriculum and assessment. He has a longstanding interest in school students as active and collaborative makers of meaning, and a commitment to investigating and representing classrooms as complex sites of cultural production.
He is the editor of the journal, 'Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education', and the author of 'The Social Construction of Meaning: reading literature in urban English classrooms' (Routledge, 2013). Other publications include ‘Rethinking Education: whose knowledge is it anyway?’ (with Adam Unwin, New Internationalist, 2016), and ‘Critical Practice in Teacher Education: a study of professional learning’, which he co-edited with Ruth Heilbronn.