SLIDE ONE
Teaching fat books again: the retreat from critical literacy in the Australian English Curriculum
David Hastie St Paul’s Grammar school/ Macquarie University
Notice the following, from the NSW draft syllabus:
FOR YEAR 7-8 STUDENTS4.22 spelling – understand how to use knowledge of the spelling system to spell unusual and technical words accurately, for example those based on uncommon Greek and Latin roots
4.19 nominalisation – understand the effect of nominalisation in the writing of informative and persuasive texts
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Well, arguing about Australian English curricula has been something of a national pastime, in particular in NSW since the English Forms I-V syllabus was introduced in 1953. In this discordant spirit, many responses have been offered so far to the new Australian English Curriculum (hereafter AEC[1]). Probably the most comprehensive is the NSW ETA response (ETA, 2010), which touches upon the whole breadth of what might be called an ‘English education’.
This paper offers an assessmentof the Australian English Curriculum, AND its recent adaptation into the NSW Context. SLIDE 5 TRACKING LITERATUREWe are going to do this by tracking one key arearelatively untreated by last year’s brilliantly comprehensive ETA response. It tracks ideas of ‘literature’ and canonicity from existing NSW syllabi into the AEC, and the NSW draft. SLIDE 6 OLD & NEW
I argue that the AEC constitutes a significant shift away from the current [2]Critical Literacy/ what I am calling Emancipatory approaches, to what I ‘soft canonical’ approaches. Then we will look at some resources for accommodating this shift.
Brief background to English curricula
Historically it can be seen that the number of syllabus ‘perspectives’ has been accumulating since the early20th century, roughly in NSW from two 1911-1971 (Golsby-Smith 2007: 18), three 1971- 1999 (Golsby-Smith 2007: 18; Brock, 1985), to four with the current syllabi (BOS, 1999; 2005).
SLIDE 7 HISTORY OF ENGLISH SYLLABI
Up until the 1960s the majority focus of Western English syllabi, gravitated around ‘bits’ of “‘skills base’ and ‘Cultural Heritage’”. These ‘Cultural Heritage’ ideas clustered around ‘literature’, based onMatthew Arnold’s didactic approach and a Leavisite/ Richards/ New Critic aesthetic approach (Eagleton, 1983; Golsby-Smith 2007: 25-26).This basically means that the great texts represent the ‘best done and said’, and have a kind of civilizing effect on us, although it didn’t seem to work with the NAZIS. Also, Leavisite or ‘new critical’ approaches to text have a reader submitting themselves to the devices and artistry of a text, to become immersed in them.
In NSW, this approach was supplemented (1971-1985) by ‘The New English’years 7-10 (Brock 1985), out of Reader Response literary theory and Personal Growth theory (after Dixon 1975; Moffett 1968). The 1999 stage 6 (11-12) NSW English syllabi, added a fourth ‘Emancipatory’perspective, or in shorthand, ‘Critical Literacy’. SLIDE 8 CONTEMORARY MODELS
These single ‘four voiced’ syllabi documents, with some variation,now found across existing (not the incoming) Australian English curricula. They can be seen as courageous attempts to hold the wild horses of social and literary theory corralled together.
SLIDE 9 MUTUALLY CONTRADICTORYHowever such different ‘perspectives’ stem from different, often mutually exclusive, knowledge approaches, a problem I argue lies at the root of our profession’s ongoing confusion and argument. That the breadth of contradiction in these quadrilateral English Syllabi is more of a self-destructive problem than a strength for the subject English, is one of my key assertions.
‘Canonical’ approaches of Cultural Heritage and Aesthetics
The idea of ‘Cultural Heritage’ is obviously primal across all education. However,it is particularly sharpened inArnoldean didacticism: ‘literary masterpieces to teach the best said and done’ (captured in ‘great literature’) has been variously present in criticism in Britain since [1531]through the 20th century figures such as Leavis and Richards and contemporary critics such as Frye (1988) Bloom (1994) and Said(2004). Literary ‘Aesthetics’ is also an ancienteducational device, yet took a particular textually-reifying significance under the New Critics (Eliot, 1920; Leavis 1952; Eagleton, 1983; Golsby-Smith 2007), whose critical DNA now indwells all Western English teachers, including us.SLIDE 10 CULTURAL HERITAGE
Such approaches require beliefs about the objective nature of truth and beauty (Leavis 1952; Gunn 1971; Steiner 1989, 2001; Ryken 1985), and I choose to muster these Cultural Heritage and Aesthetic approaches under the shorthand term ‘canonical’. Why? They share the habit of ‘storing’ ideas in authorized repositories,valorised educations and, recently, valorised literature. Hence the term ‘canonical’ has a particular symmetry for my purposes today: a unifying metaphor to encapsulate these ancient notions of hierarchical idealism contested in schooling, teaching, literary studies and English curriculum ‘wars’.
SLIDE 11 PERSONAL GROWTH
Personal Growth/ Emancipatory approaches
‘Personal Growth’ models of English Educationare a newer addition to curriculum, specifically emerging out of the Dartmoor Anglo- American conference of English in 1967 (Dixon 1975; Michaels 2001). However I would argue they have since been largely eaten up by ‘Emancipatory’ approaches, particularly in secondary English.
‘Emancipatory’ ideas in English teaching are new in curriculum, includingneo-marxisms, feminist, queer, postcolonial, discourse, New Historicist and psychoanalytical theories, emerging in strength through late 1990s curricula. Today I also cluster such theories together, as the BOS does in its loose term ‘Critical Literacy’, on the basis of their sceptical approach to knowledge hierarchy, ie: interrogating and revolutionizing knowledge power claims, including received ‘canons’. Secondly, they want a radically democratic/ libertarianstate (Marginson 1993), and English education is seen as central in civic formation towards that kind of society.
SLIDE 12 VOCATIONALISM Vocationalism
Neo-liberal Vocationalism is based on altogether different ideas, originating in Human Capital Theory.The mid 1980s Regan and Thatcher dispensations saw a revival of human capital theory as central to education, particularly under the OECD, the Metherall ministry in NSW [ahh happy days] (Keating, at CSA 2010) and the Federal Dawkins ministry in Australia (Dawkins 1987). Such thinking has progressively seeped into English curriculum since,via ‘basic skills’ debates, compulsory federal literacy tests (NAPLAN) for every second year of schooling, which by the way the Honourable Christopher Pyne wants to ramp up to every year of schooling, and we all know Mr Pyne is an honourable man. ‘Leaning for earning’ is now ‘commonsense’ in Australian Education, and inhabits all of the rationales of Australian curricula and master statements such as 2008 Melbourne Declaration.
SLIDE 13 ON EQUAL TERMS
Hence, I argue, ‘perspectives’ in current English syllabi cluster into three groups of more or less mutually incompatible theory.Canonical, Emancipatory, and Vocational.I would also characterize the current syllabi in NSW as dominated byEmancipatory approaches, not owing to the volume of its presence in the documents, but rather the catastrophic nature of its project: a negative critique ‘canonical’ approaches and Vocationalism.Ie. It’s like the US marines: fundamentally designed to invade something.
SLIDE 14 CHANGE AND CONTINUITY
The Australian English Curriculum
The new AEC is, in part, a response to growing alarm in the last decade about the drift towards the scepticism of these ‘Emancipatory’ approaches. It does this in three ways.
First canonical conceptions have been re-enshrined in one of three distinct strands, K-12, called ‘Literature’:“Literature is... valued for their form and style and are recognised as having enduring or artistic value.” (AEC)This is a significant shift away from critical literacy.
SLIDE 15 CRITICAL LITERACY
In contrast, the existing BOS K-6 English syllabus, contains no reference to ‘literature’ as a repository of valued texts. The BOS 7-10 has a very tentative notion of ‘literature’ subsumed under ‘Cultural Heritages’, which are to be seen as equal to ‘popular cultures and youth cultures’. Instead, Emancipatory approaches to text prevail. For example:
“[Year three students are] to discuss how people from different socio-cultural or minority groups or people in particular roles are represented in texts and whether these representations are accurate, fair, stereotypical..”
The approach from there compounds sequentially through the syllabus stages. By the BOS 7-10, students:
“identify bias and attitudes such as sexism and racism in texts...identify cultural assumptions in texts including those about gender, ethnicity, religion, youth, age, sexuality, disability, cultural diversity, social class and work.”
The entire structuring of the BOS Area of Study common unit in Advanced and Standard English in BOS HSC is ‘Emancipatory’, although we began the decade with change, then journeys, and now nestle on the more certain hearth of belonging.
I would assert that as an ultimate goal, Emancipatory ‘Critical Literacy’has been entirely subordinated in the Australian curriculum, mostly restricted to a few descriptors in yrs 7-8.
The draft senior AEC Lit and AEC Eng courses do contain elements of Critical Literacy, although they are subsumed under the more dominant approaches of Cultural Heritage. Critical Literacy elements have been more or less excised from the draft senior AECEss course.SLIDE 16 THE 1 AUGUST
So what has the 1 August NSW BOS draft response done with this shift?
Note the following: Every year, k-10, ie. Not just every stage, students must experience
“texts which are widely regarded as quality literature”. This is taken to apply to the various mandatory text forms that are set out in the document. Added to this, is the mandatory Shakespearean text in stage 5.
And again “a widely defined Australian literature, including texts written from the perspective of and about Aboriginal experiences in Australia.... a wide range of literary texts from other countries and times, including poetry, drama scripts, prose fiction and picture books.
students to explore and appreciate the rich tradition of texts from and about the people and countries of Asia
In the sub outcomes, the concept is much less visible in the early years, thank goodness. SLIDE 17 WHTA IS LEFT
And what of ‘critical literacy’/ emancipatory approaches. Well, it is a whole lot more visible than in the Federal documents. In stages 4-5, (although not stages 1-3) students must experience:
a wide range of cultural, social and gender perspectives, popular and youth cultures. The basic idea of Crit lit has been kind of retained in outcome 7.
Personal growth is much more present throughout the outcomes, k-10, so there seems to be retro shift back from the emancipatory to the ‘personal growth’ focus, and by far the mass of outcomes apply to technical language engagement, or, in other words, a focus on the mechanics of text, much of which is coming out of a what might be tautologically termed a neo new critical approach to language. SLIDE 18 TECHNIFICATION
Indeed this federal AEC K-10, habit of isolating ‘language’ into a distinct strand, implies a repository of ‘correct’ language knowledge, needing to be learnt before students can participate in language acts, an activity which seems to be implied by the third and last of the ‘strands’, literacy. Language includes “standard grammatical terminology within a contextual framework” and “structure (syntax) and meaning (semantics) at the level of the word, the sentence and the text.” (AEC K-10) Such reversion to pre-structuralism (and, hence pre-functional, pre-deconstructionist, pre-critical linguistics etc) denotes a significant -and many would say anachronistic (ETA 2010)- reversion to ‘hierarchy’ in language. SLIDE 19 THE TECHNIFICATION OF ENGLISH
The BOS draft has done away with such silly meta grammatical terms, but the massive technical approach that by far dominates the content of the draft, suggests that this approach to ‘authoritative’, rather than critical, language, has been absorbed throughout. We began this session by looking at some of this material, grammatical curios that have not been taught since before the inception of ‘the New English’ in NSW in 1971, when I was but a pre-literate pup, rolling about in the dirt of Billy McMahon’s Australia.
SHOW DAVID MITCHELL CLIP
The New Australian curriculum, then, can be seen to be moving away from the threecurrent theoretical foci, back to two (‘canonical’/ Vocationalism), with Emancipatory and Personal Growth theories subordinated. Professor Barry McGaw, chair of the ACARA stated in forum that he ‘agreed with [my] depiction of the change in the new Curriculum’ (CSA, 2010).TELL BARRY JOKES HERE.
The NSW Draft Adaptation of the Australian English Curriculum, on the other hand, subordinates emancipatory approaches, but keeps Personal Growth approaches quite central, while elevating Canonical approaches, both in its handling of ‘Literature’ and its approach to technical language.
Neither the Australian English Curriculum, nor the BOS draft, however,represent a simplisticreversion back to the bad good old days. ‘Emancipatory’ elements such as context and multi-focalizationare retained in sub-presence, but as an influence, rather than a curriculum master-outcome. The result is what I am terming ‘soft canonical’.SLIDE 20 SOFT CANONICAL
The NSW Draft has retained much more of the multi-media, the pop cultural, visual texts and notions of representation. It has also, notably, attempted to come to terms with digital technologies, which the Federal document, notably, does not. All in all, technically, I think it is a pretty good adaptation, with a much more sensible, integrated approach compared to the ‘three strand approach’, and a much more active awareness in its structural layout of evidence-based contemporary pedagogies focused around constructivist approaches to learning.
But running back up the barrel of the canon, this downgrading of critical literacy, is it the right move for English teaching, or indeed, for our society?Because, after all, that is what we are ultimately about as English teachers.
The weight of complaint against contemporary syllabi
In relation to theseEmancipatory perspectives, criticism of our subject English and English syllabi has been vigorous, caustic and sustained over the last decade.
SLIDE 21 THE WEIGHT The global assault upon ‘Emancipatory’ approaches in subject English has been mounted from a vast array of the tenured and the published amongst them heavy weights such as Steiner (1989; 2001) and Bloom (1991):
“This intolerance, the self-congratulation, smugness, sanctimoniousness, the retreat from imaginative values, the flight from the aesthetic. It's not worth being truly outraged about. Eventually these people will provide their own antidote, because they will perish of boredom.”
SLIDE 22 THE WEIGHT OF COMPLAINT
Bloom’s tone is characteristic of similar outrage in Australian media from the left (Turner 2008; Slattery 2008a, 2008b) and right (Donnelly 2006, 2008, my Divine Ranter, Miranda Divine), and many in between.
Tellingly, several key ‘emancipatory’ English theorists have expressed latter-day concern about contemporary teaching of ‘literature’ around the globe, including Eagleton(2008), recanting much of his position of 1983, Said (1991) and Derrida.
In NSW, deconstructionist teacher-practitioners such as Golsby-Smith (2007) and even key ‘postmodern’ figures in the conception of the current NSW syllabi, Mission and Morgan (2006; Howie 2008) have also expressed concern and qualification about the critical literacy directions of existing syllabi.SLIDE 23 DUMB AND DUMBER
There have also been multiple, sustained accusations over the last decade, of students ‘dumbing down’, paradoxically, for this most complex braining-up of curriculums.
SLIDE 24 SARAH GOLDSBY-SMITH
Neither is the goal of ‘emancipation’ being achieved through a ‘Critical theory’ approach to English, asserts Golsby-Smith (2007):
“the practical implications of the literary theories implemented by the Stage 6 2000 Syllabus are, ironically, the reverse of what the theories intend. They intend to open up a space for the ‘other’, but in doing so set the theory up as an untouchable ontology, and thus shut out questions and conversations that might threaten the sovereignty of that central ontology. The ‘other’ becomes almost inaccessible’.SLIDE 25 IS CANONICAL THOUGHT
Furthermore, it is defensible that canonical thought is socially natural. Every culture, everywhere, canonizescultural heritage in literature. Global habits of reading, film going and hysterical awards ceremonies reflect no retreat from this tendency, whether held to be theoretically true in our syllabi or not. Such concerns, in various degrees and intensities, are widespread, and I assert have reached tipping point, in part resulting in the current shape of the National English Curriculum.
The necessity of retaining critical approaches
Notwithstanding apparent support for ‘canonical’perspectivesout there in English land, however,the earlier knowledge problems of Cultural heritage/ Aesthetics modelsremain. Negative critiques of sceptical approaches, such as Eagleton’s, havedecisively undermined the various literary hand-maidens of mid-20th century rationalist arrogance. The author may not be dead, but F.R. Leavisand his exclusive social agenda most certainly is.
SLIDE 26 WHY SOME CRITICAL A likely target for these concerns is the AEC’s removal of Critical Literacy approaches from the problematically named ‘Essentials English’ lower-academic course in the senior curriculum.
Indeed, the whole definition of work and career in the AEC is unashamedly framed by utilitarian vocationalism, particularly in the language of supporting documents. However, it could be argued that the senior Essentials English course emulates a social class-structured/ social reproduction subtext (Harris, 1978).
Suggested texts include Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, Hollier’sConflict Resolution Trainers’ Manual, and Help with your Resume and CV. Students are to “Develop the language of negotiation and problem solving including: identifying examples of language that promote compromise and negotiation”, and enjoined to “share vision or mission statements that enshrine management perspectives”. Note the single bizarre concession to the political Left, where students might read management perspectives “compared with workers’ perspectives in other genres such as minutes from union meetings.” Such approaches are not without pragmatic merit for struggling students, but unaccompanied by a critical hermeneutic they appear designed to pre-destine students into a ‘workplace’ future, a long cry from whole-person education models proposed by many key figures in contemporary education