Dominic Wyse is a Senior Lecturer in Primary and Early Years Education at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Churchill College Cambridge and a member of the Centre for Commonwealth Education. He was a primary teacher for eight years which included posts in London, Bradford and Huddersfield. Following his work as a teacher he lectured in Primary Education at Liverpool John Moores University for eight years, latterly as a Reader. Dominic's research focuses on curriculum, pedagogy and policy. A major strand of this is his work on the teaching of English, language and literacy.

Following his role as a research consultant to the Cambridge Primary Review his paper (with Harry Torrance) on national curriculum and assessment published in the journal Educational Research was described by James Popham, the respondent to the special issue, as "powerful" "insightful" and "a first-rate analysis". Work published in research journals has included analysis of the teaching of grammar in relation to pupils' writing (cited by an EPPI-center systematic review as one of three "extensive reviews" in the context of a 100 year period of debate). The UK government decision to implement synthetic phonics teaching as the main approach to the teaching of reading was the focus of a paper (with Morag Styles) that was one of the most downloaded papers in Literacy in 2007, and was followed by a paper (with Usha Goswami) that extended the systematic synthesis of experimental evidence to show that a range of teaching approaches to the teaching of reading, rather than just synthetic phonics, should be used.

Dominic is editor (with Richard Andrews and Jim Hoffman) of The Routledge International Handbook of English, Language and Literacy Teaching. He is a Deputy Executive Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Education. He is also editor of the upcoming series of books about Primary Education to be published by Routledge. He is a member of the editorial boards of Teaching and Teacher Education: An International Journal of Research and Studies; Writing and Literacy; and The Editorial Commissioning and Advisory Board of the Teacher Training Resource Bank.

I studied for my first degree at the Royal Academy of Music, where my main instrument was the viola. One essential characteristic of a viola player is a thick skin which develops as a result of being the joke instrument of the orchestra. There are even whole web sites devoted to viola jokes:

What's the difference between a viola and a trampoline?
You take your shoes off to jump on a trampoline.

What's the difference between a violin and a viola?

1. The viola burns longer.
2. The viola holds more beer.
3. You can tune the violin.

(http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/jokes/viola.html)

Although I enjoyed work as a viola player education was in my blood. My father worked as a secondary school music and drama teacher in a school on the Orchard Park estate in Hull, and my mother worked as an early years teacher and in teacher education. I decided to undertake a post-graduate teaching course, and it was this course at Goldsmith's College (University of London) that excited my interest in educational theory. The subjects of two essays that I wrote, one on the teaching of music and one on the teaching of writing, were to prove prescient in relation to my future career. As Director of Music-Making at Churchill College I maintain my professional interest in music. As far as the essay on writing was concerned this was the beginning of a long research journey through the teaching of English, language and literacy.

Teaching practices in London Bridge, Rotherhithe, and Kent didn't quite prepare me for the challenges of Somers Town, not far from Euston Station, where I took up my first teaching post for the influential Inner London Education Authority. Half way through this first year of teaching I became dissatisfied with the children's response to writing activities. An ILEA in-service training session alerted me to the ideas of Donald Graves, memorably described by Pam Czerniewska as “one of the most seductive writers in the history of writing pedagogy”. My teaching of writing was transformed, and the children started asking to do writing, rather than trying to avoid it.

The wide range of cultures and languages that was a feature of the families in the school in London contrasted sharply with the predominantly British Asian community I worked with in Bradford. It was as a teacher and language/English coordinator in Bradford that I decided to study for my first Master's degree. The focus of the research was the teaching of writing, published as my first book Primary Writing (Open University Press). This is, to my knowledge, still the only research-informed book-length treatment of the process approach to writing that shows the ways that its conceptualisation in the UK was different to that in Graves' native New Zealand. Of course with the benefit of hindsight about a first book there are some things that I might change, but C'est la vie! A colleague at the Institute for Education in London remarked recently that I was one of the few people researching primary writing in the UK at that time. My interest in writing continued with research on grammar, and more recently has included research on enhancing pupils' writing through partnerships with museums.

As a teacher of a mixed age class of children aged between five and seven years old in Bradford I delivered the first three years of the UK's statutory national curriculum tests (commonly known as SATs). A soul destroying experience. Work as a teacher (then teacher educator and researcher) was bringing me into direct contact with central government policies on the curriculum and pedagogy. And increasingly I didn't like what I was seeing! It was the implementation of England's National Literacy Strategy (NLS) from 1997 onwards that was to spark ten years of critical research work on literacy policy. I hope, along with other colleagues of a similar view, I can take some small recognition for helping its demise. How seemingly innocuous the statement buried in the 103 page government White Paper was that announced the death of the NLS: “As we move to our new model of how improvement support is delivered to schools, we will not renew the current, central contract for the National Strategies when it comes to an end in 2011.” (DfCSF, 2009, p.59)

Music has remained an important part of my professional life but it has not been a direct focus for my research. In part this is because I was attracted to the new challenges that research into curriculum and policy offered. But music has informed my thinking about education. It is perhaps why I can see education as an art, and as a craft, more than a science. It is why I see the composer in the writer and the performer in the reader. Recently these connections have come to the fore as part of my research on creativity, and museums and education.