I sweat with shame when I think back to postgrad pub conversations and the daft one-upmanship that forced me to spend each week beating myself through a pile of books I didn’t fully understand, just to be able to casually flick a reference to Proust across my pint - or to heap praise upon an impenetrable Hungarian novelist to force an admission from my peers that they had no idea who I was talking about.

You have to understand that this all stemmed from the insecurities of someone with barely enough cultural capital to fill a bindle and who suddenly found himself among those born with a silver spoon in their mouth and the complete works of Goethe up their arse.

These days, as a college teacher whose brain has mostly turned to porridge through the hurricane of enrolment and the first, crucial weeks of teaching GCSE resits, I’m ready to admit that the novel I’m struggling with now is the children’s sword-and-sorcery saga The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

I’ve just made it past the half-way point and it appears that the driving force of the narrative -the protagonist’s defining quest in this epic fantasy - is to gain access to the university library. That’s what’s keeping me coming back to the book. It’s not even the university’s teaching he covets most: he wants to see what he can learn for himself. If you’ll excuse the tired parlance, he’s desperate to be an independent learner.

Valuing learning

The key to maximising the success and progress of our young people lies in whether we can help to establish communities where they value learning as highly as Kvothe the Bloodless does. Colleges are best suited to this because they offer a reset button for those learners whose schools failed to tackle anti-intellectualism or that fostered a permissiveness around disengagement. Colleges provide a fresh start where hard work and aspiration, which might have suffered years of embarrassed neglect, can emerge and thrive in a space where they are enthusiastically celebrated.

Colleges do an unrivalled job of embracing diversity, and that should include those out and proud about their engagement with learning. We need to welcome intellectual playfulness into our classrooms, providing a space where showing off what you know is admired. Let’s encourage students to argue ridiculous positions in order to stretch understanding of their subject and of different viewpoints. Or sometimes just for the amusing hell of it.

I’m a great fan of The Metagame, a card game that shares some distant similarities with Cards Against Humanity, but is safe in the classroom. Students draw cards from “culture”, which might be anything from “The Theory of Relativity” to “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony” to “Ikea furniture”. They then draw a question card, like “Which will save the world?” or “Which is most fun at parties?” and must argue the case for their card. You do need to filter out some of the cards to keep the game this side of appropriate, but usually once your students have the hang of it, you’ll gain more by adapting it to your own needs or having them create their own question and culture cards.

Subject knowledge and fun

I’ve had a lot of mileage out of that game in English over the years…Which is Estella Havisham most likely to have in her handbag: Vogue or Prozac? Which is more influential: A statistic or a metaphor? Which feels like first love: Romeo and Juliet or Twilight? I’m sure that all subjects could use this kind of thing once in a while to demonstrate the link between a bit of subject knowledge and a lot of fun.

It takes some courage to persistently challenge disengagement. As a teacher, ensuring your students know they cannot opt out requires steely determination and a confidence that every necessary support is in place to allow everyone to participate. Imagine how much harder it is, as a student, to challenge it. Irony can be our ally here. If you really want to break the restraint students have about celebrating each other’s efforts, be so over the top in leading a whooping cheer that the students can cover their genuine admiration for their friend with the deniability of irony. And the recipient of the air-high-fives and fist pumps can cover her genuine pride and delight. After a while, the irony will fall away.

Friendly competition supports a healthy learning community too. Once your students are trying to outwit each other intellectually, they’ll start looking things up for themselves to gain an edge. Whether it was for the right reasons or not, those pretentious pub chats motivated me to read books that I wouldn’t otherwise have picked up. I don’t regret taking the time to discover the pretty lyricism of Proust or the harrowing visions of László Krasznahorkai. Maybe I should take a walk over to the university library later…once I’ve finished that kids’ book.

Andrew Otty leads 16-19 English in an FE college. He is an ambassador for education charity SHINE