English in Australia7PMVNF/VNCFSt Time Travel (Knowing our history as English teachers) Brenton Doecke, Deakin University A review essay of Peter Medway, John Hardcastle, Georgina Brewis and David Crook, English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy: Emerging Choice in London Schools, 1945–1965, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
‘Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.’ Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, VI, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. with an intro- duction by Hannah Arendt, trans Harry Zohn, London: Fontana, 1970/1973, p. 257.
We all know how enriching it can be to revisit a novel, reflecting on the ways our interpreta- tion may have changed, leaving us with a completely different impression of the characters and scenes than those we remember when we first read the story. Such moments say just as much about one’s personal growth as they do about any qualities inherent within the novel. Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities was the first ‘adult’ book I read as a child, a reading that was prompted by my viewing of the Ronald Colman film adaptation on day-time TV. The opening Time Travel and closing lines of the novel – ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … It is a far, far better thing that I do…’, etc. – were poetry to me. When I reread the novel a few years later, it was only to find in Sidney Carton a shadowy figure, whose choice to die on the guil- lotine was surely in protest at the dreary bourgeois world that was forming around him. I was left pondering what I had lost and gained over the years between my readings. Since then the novel has accompanied me on a visit to London, when the proximity of the places that form the backdrop of part of the story, though radically transformed over the intervening centuries, somehow framed the novel differently, giving rise to a new reading. But this process of periodically asking who you are (Gramsci, 1971/1986 p. 324) need not only be occasioned by a work of fiction. I also make a habit of revisiting other books that have marked key moments in my intellectual and professional life and engaging with them anew. Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, St Matthew’s Gospel – my capacity to read these texts with fresh eyes is an index of whether I ought to be rereading them at all. This is also the way in which I engage with the works of that remarkable generation of educators in the post-war period, namely James Britton, Douglas Barnes, Harold Rosen and John Dixon. The following essay might, indeed, be read as an account of my continuing dialogue with these theorists over the years, and how my reading of their works has varied whenever I have re-engaged with their ideas. *** Taken together, the works of Britton, Barnes, Rosen and Dixon could be read as affirming the crucial importance of English teaching as a vocation and field of inquiry in the post-war years. The discursive space in which we continue to operate as English teachers was given shape by their attempts to critically scrutinise the assumptions at the heart of English teaching and to explore its meaning as a social phenomenon. This involved casting an ethnographer’s eye
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over classroom exchanges, making those exchanges date by heralding their own approach to language and ‘strange’ and pondering their meaning – I’m think- literacy education as displacing all that has gone before. ing of Douglas Barnes’s opening chapter to From My discomfort might also be explained as arising from Communication to Curriculum, where he examines the the fact that ‘Personal Growth’ (so-called) has been formulaic answers of pupils in response to their decidedly unfashionable for some years now, and it is teacher’s questioning, as well as the surreptitious talk always difficult to cling to values and beliefs that every- in which the pupils continue to engage, whatever the one else seems to think are old hat. Over the past few UFBDIFSJTSFRVJSJOHUIFNUPEP #BSOFT years I have got into the habit of calling myself an ‘old Qù 5IJTGPDVTPOUIFUBMLUIBUXBTBDUVBMMZPDDVS- growthy’, because the values embodied in the pedagogy ring in classrooms, however, also gave rise to a recog- of ‘Growth’ still seem to be the best way to describe my nition of the potential of oral language to open up QSBDUJDFBTBO&OHMJTIUFBDIFS DG3FJE CVUUIF imaginative possibilities that went beyond the official self deprecating way in which I have applied this label curriculum (or, as Barnes characterised it, ‘what teach- shows that I have not been able to escape a sense of ers plan in advance for their pupils to learn’ (Barnes, clinging on to something that is passé. Qù QSPWJEJOHBQPXFSGVMSBUJPOBMFGPS I have, however, just reread the opening chapter an English curriculum and pedagogy that engaged of Dixon’s book, when I have found myself far less pupils in activities that were meaningful to them. inclined to rush to judgment about those three models, The key aim was to enable young people to draw on and far more attentive to the key claims he is making the resources of their experiences in order to make about English teaching. These include his emphasis meaning, to enable them to ‘learn to use language on the holistic nature of an English teacher’s work, for their own purposes’, to borrow from John Dixon on the way that an English teacher’s ‘knowledge or %JYPO Qù BXBSFOFTTBCPVUMBOHVBHF Qù TIBQFTIFSQSBDUJDF Whenever I re-read Britton, Barnes, Dixon or Rosen, That knowledge does not simply provide a content, as I am conscious of how my response to their writing is in the explicit teaching of grammar, but an awareness shaped by my ongoing work as an educator and the that informs crucial moments in her dialogue with current state of play with respect to policy and research. students, when, for example, she judges that a student This has sometimes given rise to a critical take on their might benefit from being given vocabulary that allows work, to a sense of differences between then and now him to name the effect that he has been trying to that seem to limit the applicability of their ideas to the achieve in his writing (‘You’re trying to put the events contemporary world. With John Dixon’s Growth Through in the right sequence’; ‘You’ve written this story in the English, for example, I have often been uncomfortable past tense. What would happen if you were to cast it in with his opening account of ‘the models or images of the present tense?’; ‘How would you describe the genre English that have been widely accepted in schools on of this text?’). Just as importantly, such a heightened both sides of the Atlantic’, namely ‘skills’, ‘cultural herit- linguistic awareness allows a teacher to be alert to BHFBOEAQFSTPOBMHSPXUI JCJE QQùo 1SFTFOUFEBT the language that is occurring in a classroom, sensing BSFQPSUPGUIFGBNPVT%BSUNPVUI$POGFSFODFJO its potential as a focus for play and inquiry. Only a Dixon’s account of three models of English has always teacher who is aware of how talk mediates learning struck me as schematic and (given Dixon’s obvious and experience can sensitively monitor the way her preference for ‘personal growth’) programmatic. This pupils are using language in classroom interactions, discomfort has partly derived from my abiding skep- enabling them to build on those interactions to achieve ticism towards the claims made by proponents of new insights into language and experience. As Dixon various pedagogical bandwagons (‘process’, ‘genre’, remarks, ‘the teacher of English will be particularly ‘critical literacy’, ‘multiliteracies’) that have been such concerned with helping pupils … to conceptualise a pronounced feature of the educational landscape their awareness of language’, an awareness that is in Australia over the past thirty years or so (cf. Ballis already ‘there in the pupil’s thinking, not yet explicit BOE3JDIBSETPO $PSTPO ùo*TBX%JYPOT or fully conscious perhaps, but something the alert ‘models’ as setting a bad precedent for this kind of UFBDIFSXJMMOPUJDFBOEESBXPO Qù thinking, something borne out by the way that propo- *** nents of subsequent pedagogical bandwagons have Two things have prompted me to revisit Dixon’s Growth uncritically repeated Dixon’s litany, bringing it up to Through English. One was a presentation by John Hattie
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BUBGPSVNPOUFBDIFSFEVDBUJPOBUUIFDPOGFSFODF sensitises them to the ways that the complexities of of the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English experience escape pat commentary and cliché (such (VATE), where Hattie threw up an overhead showing as the labelling of refugees as ‘Boat People’ or ‘Illegals’ his table of ‘effect sizes’, listing teachers’ subject knowl- that blinds us to their plight), as well as the gener- edge as having limited impact on the learning of pupils alisations that people apply when they take it upon JUJTMJTUFEBT/P BDDPSEJOHUPPOFPGUIFNBOZ themselves to judge the teaching and learning that QPUUFETVNNBSJFTBWBJMBCMFPOUIFJOUFSOFUIUUQWJTJ- occur within schools against a universal standard of ble-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes- measurement (such as occurs with NAPLAN and PISA learning-achievement). To quarrel with this ranking results). Without supposing that educators like Dixon, is to accept the logic of an analysis directed towards Barnes, Rosen and Britton worked within an identical itemising the range of factors that might impact on philosophical framework, their writing might none- a student’s learning. Such logic is characteristic of theless be said to reflect a sensitivity to the particular, a certain type of scientific discourse that constructs to the concrete, to the uniqueness of the pupil who classrooms differently from the way English teachers stands in front of a teacher, as well as the culture of the understand their work. English teachers are typically school community in which that teacher is working. outside this discourse community, subject to the calcu- Not to cultivate a receptivity to that uniqueness is lations and judgements of scientific experts that are to step back from the fundamental obligation that fundamentally alien to their disciplinary knowledge inheres within any social relationship to respect the and professional experience. But so, too, are those differences between ‘I’ and ‘You’, between my unique experts outside the world in which English teachers world of experience and your own, even as we use the operate, uncomprehending of the knowledge and tradi- language we share to communicate with one another tions of inquiry that have typically shaped how they and to achieve mutually agreed goals. understand and enact their professional practice. The works of Dixon, Britton, Rosen and Barnes are Hence my decision to pull out my old copy of imbued with a vision of English, schooling and democ- Growth Through English from my library shelf, asking racy that is arguably under serious threat at the present myself, as I thumbed through its pages, what it actually moment by the social engineering reflected in attempts has to say about an English teachers’ knowledge and to construct young people as citizens of a certain type, how it might mediate their exchanges with students. judging their capacities against universally applicable What I found, as I have just indicated, was a complexly performance indicators that ignore the diversity of layered representation of English teachers’ work, where languages and cultures that comprise an ethnically their subject knowledge, in the form of a refined diverse country like Australia. For that is what seems awareness of the way language mediates the sharing of to me to be at stake here, something that has been experiences and the joint construction of knowledge, brought home to me by my other reason for revisiting was crucial to their capacity to identify and respond to Dixon’s Growth Through English, namely my reading of their students’ needs and to respect the rich worlds of English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy: Emerging Choice language and experience that they bring to class. Let in London Schools, 1945–1965, by Peter Medway, John NFRVPUFGSPN%JYPOBHBJO )BSEDBTUMF (FPSHJOB#SFXJTBOE%BWJE$SPPL *** In an English classroom as we envisage it, pupils and teacher combine to keep alert to all that is challenging, English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy: Emerging Choice new, uncertain and even painful in experience. Refusing in London Schools, 1945–1965 is framed as a curriculum to accept the comfortable stereotypes, stock responses history, presenting an account of English teaching in and perfunctory arguments that deaden our sensitivity three London schools in the post-war years. This was to people and situations, they work together to keep the period of the establishment of comprehensive language alive and in so doing to enrich and diversify schools that were committed to educating a far wider QFSTPOBMHSPXUI %JYPO QQùo range of students from diverse social backgrounds Or, as William Blake famously put it, ‘To Generalise than grammar schools with their traditional focus is to be an Idiot. To particularise is the Alone Distinction on academically able students, posing challenges to of Merit. General Knowledges are those Knowledges English teachers to develop curriculum and pedagogy UIBU*EJPUTQPTTFTT #MBLF Qù &OHMJTIUFBDI- that those pupils would find inclusive and meaning- ers’ awareness of how language mediates experience ful. For the purposes of understanding the following
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discussion, it is important to know that Harold Rosen era, without supposing that we can ever transcend and John Dixon taught at Walworth and that Douglas our subjectivities, or that our dialogue with the past Barnes taught at Minchenden – two of the three can ever produce an ‘objective’ representation of those schools that the authors selected as cases studies in events. Every act of historical interpretation is shaped order to explore the challenges posed by setting up by our own values and circumstances (Thompson, comprehensive schools. Qù BOEDPOTUJUVUFTBOJOUFSWFOUJPOJODVSSFOU The fact that the book is a history might prompt debates about the society in which we live and the all sorts of clichés about the importance of knowledge history that we ourselves are making. about the past, and this book is not short of such The authors get close to articulating such a stand- statements. Indeed, I may as well begin with my one point, when they remark that their interest in the criticism of the book, which is that I do not find the changes that occurred in English teaching during metaphor of the past with which the volume begins, o AJT OPU QVSFMZ IJTUPSJDBM CVU BMTP SFMBUFT that it is ‘a great ship that has gone ashore’, requir- to the state of the subject in schools today, which ing the archivist and writer to ‘gather as much of the we think could benefit from some attention to what rich squandered cargo as they can’ (Medway et al., XBTEPOFJOUIFQBTU Qù :FU*BNTUJMMMFGUXJUIB Qù WFSZDPNQFMMJOH5IFCPPLRVJUFQSPQFSMZ nagging sense that they could have made bolder claims features an empirical approach to historical inquiry – about their purposes in attempting to reconstruct the to showing things as they really were, to echo Ranke cultures of the schools that form the subject of their $BSS Qù ù o CVU UIJT TPNFUJNFT CMVOUT study vis-à-vis the present moment. Hence my decision its critical edge. As much as I admire the way they to use Walter Benjamin’s statement about protecting have painstakingly gathered evidence by soliciting history from the victor as the epigraph to this essay. pupils’ recollections as well as uncovering samples 5IFZRVPUF)BSPME3PTFOBTTBZJOHAXFIBWFUPSFDPSE of students’ work and old syllabus documents, such all this… not just mentally. It is about saying there was ‘facts’ can never speak for themselves, and the ‘truth’ BOPUIFSXBZ Qù &YBDUMZ5IFOFPMJCFSBMSFGPSNT will never emerge simply through the accumulation of that are being imposed on teachers and their pupils at such ‘evidence’. the present moment represent a triumph of the victor. This kind of stance, when placed against the back- They are typically imposed without any acknowledge- ground of the prevailing scientism of the present ment of what might have existed before them. They moment to which I have already referred, is perfectly represent less a rewriting of history in the interests of understandable (it is difficult to think differently vis- corporate culture than its complete denial. They arrive à-vis the ‘common sense’ of neoliberal ideology and ‘brand new’, like the latest fad. Paradoxically, given the the ‘evidence’ produced by researchers in support of fact that such reforms are supposedly ‘evidence-based’, a neoliberal reform agenda). Yet although historians they resist any scrutiny of the research that might are obliged to subject their claims about the past to warrant the claims they are making and the tradition the empirical test of what the sources appear to tell of scientific inquiry in which those claims might be them, remaining open to discrepant detail that might located. And through their suppression of their sources challenge the generalisations they have hitherto held in a particular tradition of inquiry, they deny that there about a particular moment in history, it remains the was indeed ‘another way’. case that any history is the product of an interaction *** between present and past, an appropriation of the English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy is nonetheless past by people writing in the present, which is framed a richly rewarding study that is worth reading from CZUIFJSPXOWBMVFTBOEQVSQPTFT $BSS cover to cover. The focus is on three schools – Hackney Qù Qù (BSEOFS Qù 3JDPFVS Downs, Walworth, and Minchenden – all located in pp. 333–337). The past is only available to us in the London (or Greater London), but all with their own form of traces of the activities of people as they went histories, and all engaging in distinctive ways in the once about their everyday lives, driven by values and larger policy context and social changes that were beliefs that might seem strange to us. This requires occurring around them, as English society rebuilt itself a reflexive stance with regard to the standpoint from after the Second World War. Much of the empirical which we might be interpreting the actions and values detail that the authors accumulate in order to create of people swept up by events of a previous historical a sense of how these schools were being transformed
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as they moved from ‘then’ to ‘now’, from the patterns useful methodological rationale for choosing Hackney of behaviour and expectations that obtained prior Downs, Walworth and Minchenden as the basis for to the Second World War to the sense of promise of UIFJSDBTFTUVEJFT TUBUJOHUIBUUIFJSHPBMXBTUP the postwar period, will not necessarily be familiar work intensively on a small number of schools in order to Australian readers, though the broad outlines of to construct relatively deep, richly concrete, and fine- the story match a similar story to be told about the textured histories. Three schools was the most to which expectations of Australian soldiers returning after the we felt we could do sufficient justice. Such narrowly war and the promise of state education (cf. Esson et al., focused studies enable researchers to take account of particularities of situation and context the possible Qù $BNQCFMMBOE1SPDUPS Qù .Z significance of which general histories are likely to own reading of this book, however, has been driven occlude. Not only do schools differ but differences occur largely by what it has told me about Rosen, Dixon and within categories of schools. Thus grammar schools Barnes and the conditions in which they worked as are by no means all alike in intake, ethos, or practice. teachers that ultimately saw them produce works like Likewise, broad categories of location such as ‘suburb’ or From Communication to Curriculum, Language the Learner ‘inner-city working-class district’ conceal a wide range of often quite striking differences. (p. 7) and the School #BSOFT #SJUUPO BOE3PTFO Growth Through English, and Stories and Meaning (Rosen, Although life in Hackey Downs, Walworth and nd), enabling me to re-engage with those works anew. Minchenden was shaped by a common professional and What insights have I taken away with me? For me policy landscape that emerged in the postwar period, the primary value of the book lies in the way it prompts they were each the product of a distinct history, and the critical scrutiny of the summary accounts of so-called schools and teachers working within them responded ‘Personal Growth’ that have figured in debates about to their common situation differently. Hackney Downs English curriculum and pedagogy over the past thirty appears to undergo change in the way that English is years of so. The authors themselves are aware that their VOEFSTUPPEBOEUBVHIUJOUIFQFSJPEGSPNo study challenges received versions of ‘Growth’ peda- but the practices that obtain, as the authors have been gogy, specifically able to reconstruct them from interviews with former pupils, as well as extant exercise books and examina- the apparent orthodoxy that what supplanted traditional &OHMJTIUFBDIJOHXBTBTA/FX&OHMJTIUIBUTVCPS- tion papers, continue to have a more ‘traditional’ cast dinated intellectual development to creativity, expres- than is the case at either Walworth or Minchenden. The sivity, and reading for enjoyment, and that the preced- English teachers who successively headed the English ing period was largely stagnant and was dominated by Department at Hackney Downs were all remembered textbooks containing abstract grammatical exercises fondly by former pupils, especially with respect to the and literature lessons focusing on the appreciation of way they imbued in them a love of literature, even as long-dead great authors. (p. 3). they operated within an organisational structure that This, indeed, is the major contribution that the involved streaming. As the authors remark of John book makes to our understanding of the work we do Medcalf, the first of the three Senior English Masters as English teachers, and I want to devote most of the UIFZFYBNJOFA)FIBEUIFBCJMJUZUPmSFQVQJMTJNBHJ- remainder of this review essay to exploring how they nations and to engage their interests – sometimes at have been able to do this. the deepest levels. His lessons were neither unvaried The whole of the historical narrative turns on the nor dull, but of their time’ (p. 59). Medcalf’s succes- changes named by ‘Personal Growth’, and yet one of sors, Jo Brearley and John Kemp, likewise each gave the strengths of the analysis is the way it refrains from to the position of Head of English a personal stamp, constructing this as a sweeping educational trans- one actively usurping the official syllabus in a gesture formation, as though English teachers at this time similar to the famous moment in Dead Poets’ Society, uniformly embraced the ‘new’, jettisoning the bad old when Mr Keating forces his pupils to tear out the ways of the past. The authors resist making generali- introduction of the poetry anthology that had been set sations about the state of English teaching across the CFDBVTFIFEFFNTJUUPCFVOTBUJTGBDUPSZ Qù country in the immediate postwar period, arguing It is significant for the overall history of the period that the changes wrought were gradual and varied that emerges in the course of the book that both Brearley depending on the culture of the school in which they and Kemp were influenced by I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, were occurring. In this respect, the authors provide a and the moment of Scrutiny Qù QQùo ,FNQ
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recalls Leavis’s criticism as giving ‘a shape to every- what might work within classroom settings (to invoke thing, and for a time it became a bit of a salvation’ the narrow technicist mentality that characterises Qù 5IFBVUIPSTUIVTQPTFUIFRVFTUJPOPGUIFEJGGFS- standards-based reforms). They were, instead, asking ences between so-called Cambridge English and the questions about the meaning of their work and why ‘new’ English associated with the Institute of Education English teaching as they understood it might be impor- in London in a way that goes beyond hard-and-fast tant for the social wellbeing of their students and the binaries. What one senses in reading their account of maintenance of a genuinely participatory democracy. English at Hackney Downs is an abiding interest on the Their responsiveness to the challenge of bringing part of all three Heads in the imaginative possibilities a diverse range of pupils together in comprehensive of literature and the value of attentive reading, though schools shows their political engagement in their era, this did not stop them from given emphasis to the including a recognition that it is precisely at this level explicit teaching of grammar as a discrete component of that teachers should be aware if they are to implement the curriculum (p. 75). Noting that ‘the critical analysis change in a fully knowing way. Those larger contexts of demanding literary texts became the central activ- are inescapable, mediating everything that happens in ity under Kemp’ (p. 75), the authors remark that this schools, requiring of teachers a capacity to weigh up disposition made him open to ‘negotiating changes that the significance of any initiative within the context of led to the school becoming a nonselective comprehen- the whole, not simply with an eye to gauging immedi- sive school’ (p. 77). While Kemp’s emerging awareness ate effects but with a view to its ideological implica- that the ‘backwardness’ of working class children ‘with tions. What messages am I giving to my pupils about RVJUF B GBJS *2 XBT EVF UP UIFJS ATPDJBM FOWJSPONFOU the role that language plays in their lives when I treat Qù XBTBGBSDSZGSPN)BSPME3PTFOTBGmSNBUJPO texts as simply messages to be decoded? How am I of the linguistic and cultural resources that working opening up other ways of experiencing life when I class children brought to school (the dominant note equate language and literacy with the skills measured at Walworth), one can still sense a change in his prac- by standardised literacy testing? How am I enacting tices that was driven by a desire to provide a curricu- democratic values when I impose my will on students lum that was meaningful to students – and this was rather than negotiating the curriculum with them? The because of his commitment to the cultural mission set only way to answer such questions is to locate them out in books like Leavis and Thompson’s Culture and within the ideological framework that you have devel- Environment, rather than something in conflict with it oped in the course of your life. The complex nature of Qù TFF-FBWJTBOE5IPNQTPO the learning of the teachers who feature in this book I have been dwelling on Hackney Downs, not simply is due to the way that they were all able to make links because it provides a backdrop for the more innova- between what they were doing in schools and their tive practices that were being developed by Rosen beliefs and values as citizens of the postwar democracy and Dixon at Walworth and Barnes at Minchenden, that was emerging in England. but because it reflects one of the major strengths of It is worth noting that traditional practices persisted this study, which is the ingrained respect the authors in all the schools that provide the focus of this study. show for the workaday world of English teaching and Not all the teachers at Walworth and Minchenden the complex ways in which teachers learn from their shared the vision of English teaching espoused respec- practice. The teachers at Hackney Downs were no tively by Rosen and Barnes, especially with respect to less driven by beliefs and values than the teachers at abandoning the explicit teaching of grammar. On the the other schools, especially with respect to the way other hand, it is also noteworthy that, as the authors Brierley and Kemp embraced Leavis’s cultural project. remark, ‘many if not most of the methods associ- All the teachers who feature in the book – whether ated with progressive practice in English were already they were working at Hackney Downs, Walworth or BSPVOEJOUIFT Qù UIFPVUDPNFPGSFnFDUJWF Minchenden – were socially and culturally and indeed teachers responding to the changing policy environ- politically aware individuals who brought to their NFOUIFSBMEFECZUIF&EVDBUJPO"DU8IBU teaching a set of beliefs and values that they had devel- emerges in the course of the book is a richly textured oped in the course of their lives. One recognises in the account of a situation that continued to be shaped by stories of each school committed teachers who are each traditional practices and expectations (e.g. examina- deeply engaged with ideas, not simply with regard to tion requirements and ability streaming), but where
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educators had begun to participate in professional The overriding impression that emerges through their networks – most notably the London Association for accounts of Walworth under Harvey, Rosen, and the Teaching of English – in which they could share Dixon, as well as the work of the other players here their experiences and develop their ideas. These intel- who subsequently became known for their innovative lectual networks produced significant publications, practices, such as Alex McLeod, Simon Clements and such as Reflections UIF&OHMJTI$PVSTF Leslie Stratta, is that of individuals with strong ideolog- GPS TUVEFOUT BHFE o XSJUUFO CZ $MFNFOUT %JYPO ical and professional commitments, engaging with the and Stratta on the basis of their teaching experi- children they were teaching and learning from them in ences at Walworth (see Clements, Dixon and Stratta, the process of doing so. 5IFZBMTPHBWFSJTFUPDIBOHFT Part and parcel of the ideas that began to shape the in the way school and classroom life were organised – practice of these innovative educators are the collabo- I am thinking of the structures that need to be put in rative relationships they enacted through participat- place in classrooms in order to facilitate productive ing in the culture at Walworth, making the English classroom conversations as Barnes envisaged them. Department a forum for sharing their experiences and Such changes, however, are best understood, not on a insights and inquiring into the language and learn- spectrum from more traditional to progressive ideas, ing of their pupils. As John Yandell has remarked but as moments of intervention from which teachers in a recently published review of the book (Yandell, were all trying to learn, changes that were sometimes QQùo UIFEZOBNJDTPGUIF&OHMJTI successful and sometimes not. ‘You will not piss on my Department, as led by Rosen and then Dixon, are argu- Shakespeare’ – so John Kemp apparently exclaimed ably quite unlike anything that exists in the heavily when he attempted to introduce a more active engage- regulated environment typically imposed on schools ment on the part of pupils with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, today. Rosen produced a syllabus that was crafted only to see the class descend into chaos (p. 74). specifically with the needs of adolescents from working The core of the book, however, is undoubtedly class communities in mind, explicitly disavowing any the chapter on Walworth, a school that through its deficit construction of the language and experiences Principal, Anne O’Reilly, had embraced the ideal of a these young people were bringing to school. It is diffi- comprehensive education, articulating ‘the Walworth cult to imagine a similar statement being made today, Way of Life’ as providing ‘a rich social environment’ when so much that is said and done in schools is medi- for ‘the developing potentialities of the adolescent’, ated by the generalised language of standards-based making ‘provision for them to experience the demo- reforms and the language of performance appraisal cratic way of life with opportunities for the interplay and improvement directed towards achieving higher of personalities, for free speech and discussion, and literacy levels as measured by standardised tests. Here for the acceptance of responsibility for the well-being JTXIBU3PTFOXSPUF
PGUIFTDIPPMDPNNVOJUZ Qù 4DIPPM JOTIPSU The teaching of English at Walworth calls for a sympa- was not simply viewed as a preparation for entry into thetic understanding of the pupils’ environment and a democratic society but as an enactment of it. Within temperament. Their language experience is acquired the framework she established, successive Heads of from their environment and from communication with English – Arthur Harvey, Harold Rosen, John Dixon – the people who mean most to them. This highly local- developed curriculum and pedagogy to meet the needs ised language is likely to stand out in their own minds in strong contrast to the language experience being of the diverse range of students who had begun attend- consciously presented in the framework of English ing the school. As with their account of the Heads at lessons in particular and school work in general … Hackney Downs, the authors differentiate between Whatever language the pupils possess, it is this which these personalities, noting that Harvey’s teaching must be built on rather than driven underground. ‘was about bringing literary culture to children from However narrow the experience of our pupils may be an environment not normally regarded as favouring (and it is often wider than we think), it is this experi- ence alone which has given their language meaning. The such an endeavour’ – a recognisable stance that might starting point for English work must be the ability to have also been found in a traditional grammar school. IBOEMFFGGFDUJWFMZUIFJSPXOFYQFSJFODF Qù What distinguished his stance from that of teachers in grammar schools was ‘his emphasis on creative writing Such ideas, as they were taken up and implemented as well as on literature and grammar’ (pp. 83–84). by Rosen, Dixon and their colleagues, built Walworth’s
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reputation as ‘part of a larger, London-wide, experi- their own experience, to find out what they feel and mental scene’ (p. 89), supported by the network of the think, and how it relates to what other people feel and London Association for the Teaching of English (cf. UIJOL Qù .FEXBZ (JCCPOT *UJTBQQBSFOUMZ%JYPO This statement reflects characteristics that Barnes not Rosen, who must be given credit for facilitating shared with the educators at Walworth, without the emergence of a coherent vision and practice that supposing that we can collapse their ideas together. was ‘developed by the department rather than simply Barnes himself, as the product of a Leavisite education, by its head’ (p. 95), creating a ‘common approach’ experienced a shift in his own thinking in the time that involving the sharing of ideas, both within the school he worked at Minchenden ‘from his own earlier think- and beyond, that was characterised by a spirit of ing where he would start with literature and move out inquiry into the complexities of language and learn- into experience’ to ‘starting with experience and then ing. Their work showed a disposition to learn from NPWJOHUPMJUFSBUVSF Qù BDIBOHFUIBU#BSOFT children rather than narrowly focusing on instruc- himself describes in the autobiographical account he tion to be administered to them, the effectiveness of gives of his work at Minchenden, which he charac- which is judged according to pre-conceived outcomes, terises as a switch ‘from a reified version of culture rather than the unexpected possibilities that classroom to a culture that inhered in interpersonal and social FYDIBOHFTDBOHFOFSBUF"TUIFBVUIPSTSFNBSL interaction, and the active meanings they generated’ Rosen’s vision of the English curriculum became a #BSOFT Qù TFFBMTPQù Qù reality and the fragmented English of traditional text- books, exercises, essays, and literature, organised as *** unconnected elements, was replaced by a three-part I have been focusing on the way that English Teachers TJNQMJmDBUJPO TQPLFO MBOHVBHF JODMVEJOH JNQSPWJTFE in a Postwar Democracy: Emerging Choice in London drama), written language, and literature. (p. 98) Schools, 1945–1965 challenges conventional under- standings of the history of English curriculum and All these dimensions of language were integrated pedagogy as a series of models or paradigms that have through the respect these educators had for the each progressively been displaced by the other. Such a language and experiences the pupils brought with schematic view of the history of subject English hardly them to class, an attentiveness to the stories they had constitutes a history at all, eliding the complexities of to tell about their lives and the talk in which they naming any period in history as distinct from what engaged. The ‘distinctive feature of the new English has gone before and what follows it. This is not to deny developed at Walworth and in LATE’ was a ‘concept of that such rhetoric may have strategic value at certain working-class children from families with little educa- moments in history, though whether this is for good or tion coming to school with resources rather than a ill is another question – there are countless moments deficit to be remedied ‘ (p. 99). in history when advocates of change have signalled This book is worth reading for the story of Walworth a radical break from the past, a new beginning when alone (the Walworth chapter might usefully be supple- society was to be miraculously transformed, putting mented by Medway’s separate account of the innova- the evils of the past behind it. Such declarations are UJWFXPSLBU8BMXPSUI .FEXBZ )PXFWFS UIF usually belied by the actual course of events in which story of Minchenden Grammar School, where Douglas the actors are entangled (to echo the distinction that #BSOFTXBTBQQPJOUFE)FBEPG&OHMJTIJO BOE Barnes makes between the intended and the enacted the leadership he gave in building up ‘a strong and DVSSJDVMVN CVUQVUUJOHJUPOBXPSMEIJTUPSJDBMTDBMF NVUVBMMZTVQQPSUJWFUFBNPG&OHMJTIUFBDIFST Qù when people’s consciousness of their deeds typically is equally instructive. Again one senses change at the struggles to catch up with what they have actually hands of an educator with an emerging philosophy of done. education, who was prepared to circulate and argue The predominant narrative of pedagogical band- his ideas in the forums available to him. The authors wagons and successor regimes persists. Just as I was comment on Barnes’s stance, quoting from an essay he finishing English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy, a lively XSPUFBUUIFUJNF collection of essays fell into my hands, featuring a He argued that secondary pupils need to be given oppor- chapter by Terry Locke in which he describes how the tunities to ‘use language to explore in talk and writing ‘Cultural Heritage’ model was displaced by ‘Personal
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Growth’ (or ‘Progressive’ English), which in turn came another lends itself to analysis of this kind. There are under critique by the ‘Australian Genre School’, until any number of theorists whose work supports this finally we reach the advent of ‘Critical Literacy’ (Locke, approach to interpreting what happens in classrooms – Qù -PDLF DMBJNT UIBU BMM UIFTF EJTDPVSTFT I have found Dorothy Smith’s account of ‘institutional ‘need to be seen as historically and socially situated’ FUIOPHSBQIZ QBSUJDVMBSMZIFMQGVM TFF%PFDLF Qù UIBUOPOFPGUIFNJTMJLFMZUPFYJTUJOBOZQVSF .D$MFOBHIBO ùoCVU*XJMMHPOPGVSUIFSIFSF form in any classroom, and that ‘they are likely to than saying that it is precisely this kind of reflexive DPFYJTUJONPTUFEVDBUJPOBMTFUUJOHTUPEBZ Qù )F engagement with classroom life that is a hallmark of then concludes his survey of these paradigms with a the work of people like Dixon, Rosen, Barnes, and TFDUJPO FOUJUMFE A$SJUJDBM &DMFDUJDJTN Qù TVHHFTU- Britton, and, for that matter, of the work of Medway, ing that we have reached a point in our history when Hardcastle, Brewis and Crook. we can put this internecine strife behind us and simply My reading of English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy: get on with our jobs as English teachers. This ‘eclecti- Emerging Choice in London Schools, 1945–1965 has cism’ seems to me to be undermined, however, by the involved a dialectical play between the broad brush language he uses to characterise each paradigm, espe- stroke understanding of ‘Growth’ and the more finely cially when he repeats Cope and Kalantzis’s accusation nuanced account of the practices and beliefs of educa- (made at the time of the ascendency of the so-called tors at Walworth and Minchenden that emerges in the ‘Genre School’) that ‘Personal Growth’ ‘is ‘culture course of this study. What I have finally been left with bound’, and that after putting the book down is an enlivened sense of how ‘Growth Pedagogy’ developed as a response to the progressive mould with its prescriptions for indi- vidual control, student-centred learning, student moti- the social world that emerged after the Second World vation, purposeful writing, individual ownership, the War, as part of a vision of social democracy that was power of voice matches the moral temper and cultural current at that time. For the teachers at Walworth BTQJSBUJPOT PG NJEEMFDMBTT IPVTFIPMET -PDLF Qù and Minchenden this commitment to democracy was $PQF,BMBOU[JT Qù FYQSFTTFEJOUIFCFMJFGUIBU The account of Personal Growth in English Teachers a condition for their pupils’ fuller engagement was in a Postwar Democracy can only leave you puzzled bringing a sense of – from the pupils’ point of view – by Cope and Kalantzis’s caricature of the enormous reality into English. They therefore made changes to both intellectual achievement of Dixon and his contem- curriculum and pedagogy, making the pupils’ lives and poraries. But while a number of objections might be experiences the starting point of lessons and encourag- raised against Locke’s account of this and the other ing them to talk, using whatever language and forms of expression ‘came naturally’, under the immediate need ‘Paradigms’ he presents, the big question raised by or desire to communicate. It was no longer the case that English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy is why we school work involved leaving outside the classroom should continue to think in this way at all. When you door both everything you knew from your life and your walk into an English classroom, you do not initially accustomed ways of talking about things. Pupils were encounter ‘Paradigms’ or ‘Models’ of English, but positively encouraged to speak and write about the people interacting with one another, teachers with world they knew … [this work] was the best basis for enlarging language capabilities, since writing willingly their students, and students with each other. The undertaken about content that mattered to the writer phenomena of classroom life are mediated by multiple tapped, in Rosen’s phrase, ‘the springs of language’. The contexts, many of which are beyond the consciousness crucial insight – not Rosen’s alone – was that the devel- of the actors, but to understand how the particularities PQNFOUUIBUDIJMESFOIBWFBDIJFWFECZUIFBHFPGIBE of this scene are actually being played out within those been achieved in language learned and used in home larger contexts is a complex intellectual operation that and community, and that a language that was more versatile and capacious could only come by development renders any attempt to label anything that is occur- GSPNXIBUXBTUIFSFBMSFBEZ .FEXBZ FUBM Qù ring there as ‘Personal Growth’ or ‘Genre’ or ‘Critical Literacy’ utterly simplistic. What the actors see and do The experiences and languages of the young people within this setting will be shaped by their individual we are teaching form the indispensable basis for an standpoints, but it is impossible to say that what they education that is meaningful to them, requiring us to think determines what they do in any straightforward facilitate productive classroom dialogue that supports way. No setting in which people interact with one all students in their efforts to make sense of their lives.
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The radically impoverished nature of standards-based $PQF # ,BMBOU[JT . &ET The Powers of reforms and the measurement mindset that underpins Literacy: A Genre Approach to the Teaching of Writing. them is reflected in the way this fundamental insight -POEPO5IF'BMNFS1SFTT has been lost. However, this book not only enables us $PSTPO % $SJUJDBM-JUFSBDZ"OPUIFS-JOHVJTUJD Orthodoxy for the Lucky Country? English in Australia, to reclaim this insight, but to reaffirm the importance o of attentiveness to the language of students, as well as %JYPO + Growth through English: A Report an interpretive stance that is at the heart of our educa- Based on the Dartmouth Seminar 1966-POEPO0YGPSE tion as English teachers. This is something that we University Press. practice both through the literature we read and the %PFDLF # .D$MFOBHIBO % Confronting Practice: approach we take whenever we enter classrooms, where Classroom Investigations into Language and Learning. everything that occurs can be subject to multiple read- 1VUOFZ /481IPFOJY&EVDBUJPO ings and no one can claim to know the ‘truth’. &TTPO -FUBM Australian Writers Speak: Literature and English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy provides us Life in Australia4ZEOFZ"OHVTBOE3PCFSUTPO with an important intellectual resource that allows (BSEOFS 1 Hermeneutics, History and Memory. us to rethink what we do as English teachers and to "CJOHEPO 0YPO3PVUMFEHF English Teaching: reaffirm the richness of the intellectual and pedagogi- (JCCPOT 4 -FTTPOTGSPNUIF1BTU Practice and Critique. 8 oIUUQFEMJOLFETPF cal traditions in which we work vis-à-vis the ‘knowl- XBJLBUPBDO[SFTFBSDImMFTFUQDmMFTWOBSUQEG edge’ underpinning standards-based reforms. Through (SBNTDJ " Selections from the Prison Notebooks exploring an important moment in our ‘making’ as FE USBOT2)PBSFBOE(/PXFMM4NJUI -POEPO English teachers, the book opens up the possibility of Lawrence and Wishart. understanding our practice as a continuing process of -FBWJT '3 5IPNQTPO % Culture and making, as a history that cannot be contained by the Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness. Westport, reified knowledge of standards-based reforms. $POOFDUJDVU(SFFOXPPE1SFTT -PDLF 5 1BSBEJHNTPG&OHMJTI*O4#SJOEMFZ References Marshall, B. (Eds.). MasterClass in English Education: #BMMJT ) 3JDIBSETPO 1 3PBETUP%BNBTDVT Transforming Teaching and Learning QQùo -POEPO Conversion Stories and their Implications for Literacy Bloomsbury Publishing. Educators, English in Australia o o .FEXBZ 1 5FBDIFST-FBSOJOHJOB-POEPO #BSOFT % From Communication to Curriculum, 4DIPPM"VUPOPNZBOE%FWFMPQNFOUJOUIFTL-1 4FDPOE&EJUJPO 1PSUTNPVUI/)#PZOUPO$PPL Educational Studies in Language and Literature o Publishers. IUUQMQVCMJDBUJPOBSDIJWFDPNTIPXWPMVNF #BSOFT % Becoming an English Teacher4IFGmFME .FEXBZ 1 +)BSEDBTUMF + #SFXJT ( $SPPL % National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE). English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy: Emerging Choice #BSOFT % #SJUUPO + 3PTFO ) Language, in London Schools, 1945–1965/FX:PSL1BMHSBWF the Learner and the School )BSNPOETXPSUI1FOHVJO MacMillan. #FOKBNJO 8 5IFTFTPOUIF1IJMPTPQIZPG 3FJE * 5IF1FSTJTUFOU1FEBHPHZPGA(SPXUI*O# History. In H. Arendt (ed). Illuminations (Trans. H. Zohn) Doecke, D. Homer, & H. Nixon (Eds.). English Teachers QQùo -POEPO'POUBOB at Work: Narratives, Counter Narratives and Arguments #MBLF 8 "OOPUBUJPOTUP4JS+PTIVB3FZOPMETT o .JMF&OE8BLFmFME1SFTT""5& Discourses. In G. Keynes (Ed.) Blake Complete Writings 3JDPFVS 1 Memory, History, Forgetting (trans. with Variant Readings QQùo -POEPO0YGPSE ,#MBNFZ%1FMMBVFS $IJDBHP-POEPO6OJWFSTJUZ #SJUUPO + Language and Learning. of Chicago Press. )BSNPOETXPSUI1FOHVJO Rosen, H. (nd). Stories and Meaning. NATE Papers in $BNQCFMM $ 1SPDUPS ) A History of Australian &EVDBUJPO 4IFGmFMEUIF/BUJPOBM"TTPDJBUJPOGPSUIF Schooling4ZEOFZ"MMFO6OXJO Teaching of English. $BSS &) What is History?,)BSNPOETXPSUI 4NJUI % Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for Penguin. People-BOIBN .%"MUB.JSB1SFTT $MFNFOUT 4 %JYPO + 4USBUUB - Reflections: 5IPNQTPO &1 The Making of the English An English Course for students aged 14–18-POEPO0YGPSE Working Class)BSNPOETXPSUI1FOHVJO University Press. :BOEFMM + $IBOHJOHUIF4VCKFDU&OHMJTIJO-POEPO $MFNFOUT 4 %JYPO +4USBUUB - Reflections: oChanging English. 21 o An English Course for students aged 14–18: Teacher’s Book. -POEPO0YGPSE6OJWFSTJUZ1SFTT