Rachel Wicaksono – Miss Palmer

Miss Palmer – a secondary school teacher, who taught English and Drama at Northfield Comprehensive, Billingham. She got our class to transcribe TV adverts for ‘domestic’ products then act them out with the gender roles ‘reversed’. That activity gave us enough to talk about for a whole year of classes: written/spoken texts, varieties of English, script writing, ‘domesticity’, gender roles and the spaces in between them, power, the role of the media, advertising, capitalism. She made us feel clever and powerful. She was brilliant.