W(h)ither the Radicals?
Abstract
It can be argued that nearly thirty years of heavily centralised intervention into English pedagogy, curriculum and assessment have had a deprofessionalising effect on teachers. The accountability stranglehold means it is safer for English teachers to implement accepted strategies that are perceived to enable pupils to negotiate assessment hurdles, rather than take risks with their practice and teach English in a way that reflects their own beliefs and political ideas about the transformative power of the subject for children. History shows us that some of the most radical reformers of subject English harnessed their political ideals in their pursuit of a progressive pedagogy; is it possible now to adopt such an approach?
Keywords:
Progressive English pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, classroom practice; teachers’ beliefs, motivations, politics.
It seems ludicrous to suggest that English could be anything but a political subject, whether we decide to talk about language or literature. The insights of Vygotsky tell us that our ability to command language is critical in the formation of our intellect, and in developing consciousness through language we are internalising the culture in which we grow. Our ability to use, interpret and analyse language – the essential work of the English curriculum – is critical in defining our relationship to the world and in forming and refining our concept of self and others. Language – whether we want to use a lower or upper case ‘p’ – is thus political. In literature, politics is similarly inescapable; I can’t think of many texts that pupils in the secondary school will encounter that don’t raise questions about society, ethics and beliefs.
However, my sense from visiting countless English lessons over the past twenty years, and being involved throughout that time in subject association networks, is that politics features in increasingly small ways in the actuality of what happens in the classroom. The study of both language and literature is increasingly a matter of analysis of form and structure, as if these things somehow existed in a benign state, independent of belief, motivation and ideology. English teachers, without doubt motivated by the admirable aim to see their children achieve at the highest possible of the prescribed levels and under the relentless pressure of the assessment and accountability frameworks, seem to deliver a curriculum or examination specification as if it were simply a series of inanimate obstacles to be negotiated and do so in ways that suggest they themselves are often cogs, albeit highly functioning ones, in an apolitical machine.
The politics are undeniably still there in whatever manifestation of curriculum we have, but the politics of English has been progressively centralised over the past twenty five years as decisions about curriculum, pedagogy and assessment have been taken by national policy bodies, made – despite nods to notions of consultation – in rooms by ministers and civil servants, not by teachers who are seeking to reflect their own beliefs and ideas in the way they aim to create a practice that works for their children. New teachers, many of whom enter the profession with deeply held beliefs about the transformative power of English, seem seldom to be encouraged to pursue their visions, to take risks or to think radically, for fear of falling foul of the system. Better to leave ideals at home and play the game the way that the rules appear to dictate. If as a teacher one can convince oneself that the ministers and civil servants are right, or at least reconcile oneself to a belief that they are acting in the interests of all children, a career as an English teacher is bearable. To cling to any alternative view leads to frustration and probably to work outside the profession; there doesn’t appear to the space anymore for alternative, leave alone, radical thinking about the teaching of English. The thinking has been done, and if you’re a successful teacher you take on the strategies and succeed; if you don’t succeed you’re probably not a very good teacher and the examination results will damn you to performance management hell.
It was not ever thus. My research (see, for example, Gibbons, 2014) on the development of a progressive English curriculum and pedagogy evolving from the work of London teachers and academics in the years following the second world war is a very different story of how the personal politics, beliefs and motivations of individual teachers were fundamental in their efforts to refashion the subject. Some of the key people involved in this work did not separate personal and professional identity in a neat and convenient way – they saw no sense in doing that in a job that was in fact a vocation. Their motivation to become involved in education and to teach English stemmed from their beliefs and these then informed their practice explicitly and led to innovation and reform. They drove reform in English and worked in ways that perfectly exemplify Goodson’s notion that:
‘Educational change works most successfully when reform sees …personal commitments of teachers as both an inspiration for reform (which works best when carried out by teachers as part of their personal – professional projects), and a necessary object of reform’
(Goodson, 2001, p.60)
I have written about many events and people involved in the refashioning of English in post war London, here – in the context of a short article – I intend only to touch on the work of two members of a larger group, two people I consider to be among the most radical reformers of English teaching in the past sixty years, two people driven by strong personal political beliefs and who were not afraid to allow these to steer the work they did with children. These are not English teachers who used the classroom as a platform to espouse their political views, rather they are English teachers whose political views were critical in helping to develop a version of the subject that responded to the needs of the children they taught. I want to remember them again as I try to argue that there is still, and will always be, space for English teachers to draw on their political beliefs as they shape their own pedagogy and practice, and to suggest that we must sometimes look back to find our way forward.
I want first to consider Harold Rosen, whose work – particularly on the language of the working class - should be known by all English teachers. Rosen grew up in the East End of London and began teaching as the London Plan for education had established the principle of comprehensive education in the capital in response to the 1944 Education Act. The London Plan was a political and moral statement of intent, with the ultimate aim of comprehensivisation being part, according to Rubenstein and Simon (1973), of a project for social unity. A member of the Communist Party in his formative years, in the early 1950s Rosen became the Head of English at Walworth School, one of the first experimental comprehensives in London, and it was here that his ideas about a curriculum for all crystallised. Working with sympathetic colleagues at Walworth, and deeply involved in the emerging wider professional network of the London Association for the Teaching of English (LATE) which had been formed in 1947, Rosen’s deep rooted concern with the prospects for the working class dominated his approach to developing English.
In an interview conducted as part of their research for the book English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy (Medway, Hardcastle, Brewis and Crook, 2014) Peter Medway and John Hardcastle allowed Rosen to reflect on this time:
for me was the need to prove that the comprehensive system would work. That was terribly important. And it was true of quite a few people on the staff, because whereas, when comprehensive schools began, they took whatever staff they had in the case of the interim comprehensives, but very soon they became magnets for adventurous, forward looking teachers, to use the clichés, and that was terribly important. But certainly my political views played a big part
Rosen’s overtly political stance was, however, taken with the genuine belief that education could improve the life chances of children, and he argued vehemently with those who questioned the value of education for the working classes – those who suggested that such an education would only support the status quo. Rosen suggested it was ‘rubbish’ to suggest education for the working classes was about feeding ‘the appropriate numbers into the appropriate slots’ since:
‘they don’t know the appropriate slots. As though capitalism has got it all worked out, successfully, which it manifestly has not. But it is a bit like going very fundamental and saying – what do you teach kids to read for? They will only read capitalist stuff. Well, the answer is, once you teach kids to read you don’t know what he or she will do with it. You just don’t know. And it is an incredible, potential weapon. And the whole area needs thinking about. Either you say – well …. or you say there is more to it than that, because you care about kids, and what is going to happen to them’
This notion of empowering children, or to consider reading and the mastery of language to be a ‘potential weapon’ may well be ideas that English teachers would still subscribe too, but to have it expressed in such overtly political terms is striking; it is not a view I encounter very frequently during lesson observations.
Rosen’s successor at Walworth as Head of English was John Dixon, another teacher with deeply held left wing views, who had previously worked at Holloway, another early comprehensive school. Dixon, too, has talked about the ways in which his politics – and those of his colleagues – created the fertile climate for the kinds of discussions about education that sought to better the experience of all children within the system:
‘So the immediate problem was what should you do in a comprehensive school about curriculum, and particularly with an English curriculum, how would you reshape it so that you didn’t have a division between – in the case of Holloway – the four streams into which they were divided on entry. And a group there were all left wing, and some of us were Labour teachers which was a little pressure group in the labour party, and talked about this. In fact we ran a discussion group in North-west London which some of my communist friends joined in to talk about curriculum and the development of the comprehensive, before actually Holloway became comprehensive. So I was armed, theoretically, to think – what about streaming, what would that do? Is setting an alterative, or not? What about a common curriculum, is that a conceivable idea?’
Dixon’s political affiliations saw him involved in discussions and networks beyond the school gates, but these directly impacted upon his professional behaviours. Dixon, too, has talked about how developments in education and in the English curriculum had links with wider social and cultural movements:
‘we also had the advantage that Richard Hoggart had just produced the book, Usesof Literacy, which was a very important book for us, and Raymond Williams’ TheLong Revolution was important. I probably heard both of them speak and they probably both wrote for the University Left Review early on. So it was quite important that you had people interested in cultural studies and English in the periphery. I kept contact with Richard and Stuart when they went to Birmingham.’
The sense that there was a wider social, cultural and political left leaning mood in the 1950s and into the 1960s was important to the group of English teachers who were developing new ideas in the classroom in London. Rosen believed that the key voices in LATE were ‘left wingers’ but Peter Medway has suggested that even less overtly political colleagues, such as Douglas Barnes who was working within the still functioning London grammar school system, were influenced by the time and mood, claiming there was:
‘a sort of social idealism, definitely, it really was a powerful motivating force, we were changing the world. I mean there was a new Labour government in 64, Harold Wilson, the end of 13 years of Tory misrule and stagnation, the end of the 50s, things were opening up, economic boom, population boom, loads of kids, loads of young teachers because there weren’t enough old teachers. The whole thing was expanding and going mad so this seemed to be a real opportunity and one outlet was – not on the English side – but in general was in 68 in Paris and a bit in London. There’s something of that headiness. I don’t know how far the grammar school people – people like Douglas – were motivated by a social, democratic unashamed sort of spirit. I think they were but it didn’t take the form of ….I think that they were fed up with what grammar schools were doing with bright kids. These kids were capable of much more, they were cleverer, and they weren’t being given the chance to be intelligent and articulate. So I think they wanted to open things up. And they were anti-authoritarian in a new way’
There was then, in London at least in the two decades following the Second World War, an influential move amongst English teachers to reshape the subject. These teachers responded to the social, cultural and political climate of the time, and to a greater or lesser extent drew on their own deeply held political beliefs as a key part of their professional makeup. They were – whether they would have individually classed themselves as such – radicals, seizing on what both Dorothy and Douglas Barnes referred to as the ‘zeitgiest’ and bringing a social and political activism to their work in education.
Dixon, of course, went on to define a new vision for the subject in his recount of the 1966 Dartmouth Conference, Growth through English (Dixon, 1967) articulating the oft maligned personal growth model of our subject that still, according to studies (e.g. Goodwyn and Findlay, 1999; Marshall, 2000) holds a special place in the belief system of many English teachers. Rosen moved into teacher training and continued to work on the language of working class children. Their legacy is clear, but it is tempting to trace the lines of this radical type of thinking about English from Rosen and Dixon, to Dartmouth, to the first post Dartmouth IFTE conference in York in 1971 where a group of radical teachers established an additional Commission to those already scheduled, what became known as ‘Commission 7’, remembered by Tony Burgess:
‘So I think there was a loosely progressive politics that tried to include both socialist and progressive dimensions and that would occasionally run into difficulties. Teaching London Kids was formed out of that row. During the Conference (IFTE, York 1971) we formed a group…. an extra commission – Commission 7 – to discuss the politics of English teaching. One of the outcomes of that – Mike Simons was involved – was the journal Teaching London Kids. That grew out of that row in 71.’
We might further trace this kind of radical thinking then, particularly in London, through the work of the English Centre (now the English and Media Centre) led by Michael Simons when it was part of the Inner London Education Authority. The Centre, and the many teachers who undertook projects and secondments for it, pioneered English work on aspects of gender and multiculturalism through the 1970s. I would argue it was this spirit that drove the boycott of the SATs in the early 1990s. It was predominantly a move led initially by London teachers, through LATE, that drew national support. These teachers argued not on the grounds of workload that would ultimately form the basis of the Union sanctioned boycott, but on educational grounds. These were teachers who were prepared to protest based on their beliefs about what English should be for children.
Things are clearly different now. I entered teaching in the year of the SATs boycott and in the space of what is only twenty years it now seems inconceivable to me that English teachers could ever protest in that shape or form again. The impact of the last twenty five years of centralist intervention in English has without doubt had its effect on the profession. First the National Curriculum dictated what should be taught and then the National Strategies defined how things should be taught. The passage of time has shown, if we take measures like A*-C at GCSE as an indication, that children have improved in English, or at least that they have got better at passing the exams as, one assumes, teachers have become increasingly skilled at enabling children to negotiate the assessment hurdles. In the context of performance management, accountability, Ofsted and league tables this is hardly unexpected. However, to what extent the changes have enabled new generations of English teachers to develop their own ideas about the subject are hugely questionable as indeed, is the cumulative effect on teachers. Some researchers have pointed to the negative effects of top down reform on teachers’ sense of self, suggesting that the result of such reform ‘is to erode teachers’ autonomy and challenge their individual and collective professional and personal identities’ (Day and Smethem, 2009, p.142). Such an explanation would account for much of what I see in English classrooms; teachers enter a culture where rules and values are established, where ways of teaching English have become unchallenged (see, for example, the all but ubiquitous acceptance of teaching ‘Point, Evidence, Explanation’ as the sole way to construct a response to text), where there is no sense of how personal beliefs, ideas and politics may have a part in shaping what happens in the English classroom. Is there still room for radical thinking as an English teacher?