The article examines several books about teaching and learning in Great Britain. Government focus in Great Britain has moved in recent years to embrace pedagogy as well as curriculum, beginning with the commissioned report of 1992. There is a national drive for improved teaching and learning, which has added urgency from the need for national competitiveness and well-being, the need for individuals to have adaptive powers in a rapidly changing world, and vague feelings that things ought to be different in the new millennium. Teaching and learning are manifold and multicontextual activities. Learning communities are mulifaceted institutions. The same kind of complexity applies to particular areas of the curriculum and approaches to their teaching. We can illustrate this by looking at arguably the most important area of the curriculum currently in Great Britain, that of literacy. We currently have a National Literacy Strategy, designed to raise standards of literacy in all primary schools in England. The official definition of literacy emphasize skills, although it is noted that, among other things, literary primary pupils should be interested in books. read with enjoyment, and evaluate and justify their preferences and through reading and writing, develop their powers of imagination, inventiveness and critical awareness.