Changing practices

Abstract

QuestionsIn considering questions asked about texts in secondary school English classrooms, the following might be read as unremarkable examples of the literal and inferential questions typically found after stories, extracts and poems in English text books for students.What is the name of the (main) character? What kind ofperson, do you think, the (main) character is?However, it seemed to us, teaching in English classrooms in Australia and the UK in the late sixties and early seventies, that the second question represented an exciting advance in thinking about the way we asked our students to engage with texts. Such a question avoided the superficial 'surface-sifting for right answers' that literal questioning seemed to produce and could, at the best of times we felt, encourage an active, sustained engagement with texts, which not only involved students in close reading but also allowed for their role in the meaning-making process to be acknowledged. It appeared to enable students to bring their own experience to bear on the text and to contribute what Britton (1983) calls the child's unparalleled 'directness of perception and emotional response'. As teachers, we saw in this the possibility of a democratic, individualising venture which would create an inclusive environment in which the responses of all students could be valued. Through personal engagement with texts, preferably those which they had chosen themselves, our students, we argued, would experience increased pleasure and enjoyment in reading and perceive the world of literary texts to be relevant to their lives. Growth model EnglishIn pedagogical terms it might be argued that we were rejecting, what increasingly in progressive English teaching circles, were perceived as the arid and elitist practices of heritage model English and its New Critical approaches to texts and embracing an amalgam of personal growth pedagogy and reader response theory made popular by such writers as Britton (1970), Dixon (1975), Moffett (1968) andRosenblatt (1970).In many classrooms, literal questions and analytical essays were being replaced by opportunities for students to demonstrate their responses to texts in more personal ways: it was argued, for example, that comprehension could be expressed (and assessed) through empathic

Reading publics and a curriculum in literature

“…By positioning poetry as epitomising the curriculum of a socially naïve aestheticism, it presents an overtly political position also akin to the arguments about student alienation. In the 1990s in particular in Australia these threads of critical literacy manifested in a number of ways, two of which were as follows: making explicit the constructedness of texts and the ways in which readers are positioned by texts so that those positionings can be ‘resisted’ (Griffith, 1992; Mellor & Patterson, 1994). calls for making the English classroom itself and its curriculum into the ‘text’ which is explicitly open to discussion and change (Boomer, 1989; Griffith, 1992), with the ‘institutional conditions’ of English itself becoming the curriculum (Patterson, 1990; Peim, 1993).…”

“…Far from literature being cast out of the classroom, it was to be directly critiqued for its ideological predilections. Many concerned with creating ‘critical, resistant readers’ were doing so very much in the context of the traditionally literary (Martino & Mellor, 1995; Mellor, 1989; Mellor et al, 1987; Worth & Guy, 1998)—hence, perhaps, the place of contesting complex and challenging ideas in the AC:E course, Literature . This very reality of ‘critical, resistant readers’ being created in Literature classrooms was, in fact, central to the ‘culture wars’ background to Australia's national curriculum—that it was actually the study of literature that was turning away from ‘appreciating’ the aesthetic and turning too far towards creating ‘resistant’ readers (Gannon & Sawyer, 2015).…”