The Future of English Teaching Worldwide

Celebrating 50 Years From the Dartmouth Conference

Andrew Goodwyn, Cal Durrant, Wayne Sawyer, Lisa Scherff, Don Zancanella, Andrew Goodwyn, Cal Durrant, Wayne Sawyer, Lisa Scherff, Don Zancanella

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138495210
• eBook ISBN: 9781351024440
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The seminal Dartmouth Conference (1966) remains a remarkably influential moment in the history of English teaching. Bringing together leading voices in contemporary English education, this book celebrates the Conference and its legacy, drawing attention to what it has achieved, and the questions it has raised.

Encompassing a multitude of reflections on the Dartmouth Conference, The Future of English Teaching Worldwide provides fresh and revisionist readings of the meeting and its leading figures. Chapters showcase innovative and exciting new insights for English scholars, and address both theoretical and practical elements of teaching English in a variety of settings and countries. Covering topics including the place of new media in English curricula, the role of the canon, poetry and grammar, the text is divided into three accessible parts:

• Historical perspectives

• Dartmouth today: why it still matters

• Reflections: but for the future.

This powerful collection will be of value to researchers, postgraduate students, literature scholars, practitioners, teacher educators, trainee and in-service teachers, as well as other parties involved in the teaching and study of English.

PART I

Historical perspectives

1

LONDON ENGLISH, THE DARTMOUTH SEMINAR AND GROWTH THROUGH ENGLISH

Simon Gibbons

Introduction

For many, the most important tangible outcome of the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar was the publication of Growth through English (Dixon, 1967). Though there were other published outcomes from the seminar – an American summary of events appeared as The Uses of English (Muller, 1967) whilst other texts looked at drama and creativity in English (Barnes, 1968; Summerfield, 1968) – it is Growth through English that is considered to be the representative tome on proceedings. It is from the title to this text – ironically not Dixon’s preferred choice, as he favoured something like ‘Language in Operation’ as more fitting – that many people’s understanding of the growth model of English comes¹.

Within Growth through English is the claim – both explicit and implicit – that the text reflects the consensus reached by the seminar, that it is the acceptance of a new articulation of growth English, to supersede the heritage and skills models of the subject that had previously been seen to be dominant. There is debate surrounding to what extent any consensus was in fact reached at the Seminar. The relative contexts from which delegates from opposite sides of the Atlantic came meant that the starting points for discussions about the subject were very different. In the States, where things such as Russia’s apparent superiority is the space race were causing anxiety amongst policymakers, resulting in more prescriptive ideas about curriculum content, there was already a federally funded Project English underway. Its aim was ‘to define a sequenced curriculum for the study of language and literature from kindergarten to college’ (Harris, 1991, p.635). At Dartmouth, the Americans were apparently drawing on this in proposing a structured curriculum which would specify ‘certain literary works and genres to be studied based on the tripod of language, literature and composition’ (Shafer, 1986, p.22). The English delegates, on the other hand, were advocating ‘a shift in attention from the subject matter of English to the learners in English classes’ (Smagorinsky, 2002, p.24).

Following the Seminar, eleven points of agreement were published (see Simmons et al, 1990, p.109) but some evidence contradicts such a harmonious outcome. Whilst NCTE’s executive director regarded the event as ‘stimulating, often stunning’ (Squires, 1966) and claimed the group did reach ‘much general agreement’, one British delegate later recalled that there had been ‘very little meeting of minds’ and that there had been a ‘bemused intellectual climate’ (Whitehead, 1976, p.13). Apparently, ‘arguments rose to fever pitch every day and in virtually every gathering’ (Simmons, J., Shafer, R. and Shadiow, L., 1990, p.108). When talking of Dartmouth, Douglas Barnes,² another of the British delegation said ‘all sorts of other things went on there besides what John reported’ but that, significantly ‘many of them not so much to our taste’. NCTE, according to Barnes ‘weren’t unwilling to accept that [Growth through English] as a version of what happened’ however he confessed that ‘You still meet American teachers who know the truth is very different’. Ultimately, even Dixon himself has recently acknowledged that the synthesis reached at Dartmouth, although powerful, was not ‘all-inclusive’ (Dixon, 2015, p.432).

It is, then, highly contestable to claim that Growth through English is a reflection of any consensus reached at the Dartmouth Seminar. If not the product of the Seminar’s forty days of debate one might ask from where this version of English sprang. One clear answer to this question can be found in the work that Dixon and other British delegates James Britton, Harold Rosen and Douglas Barnes undertook in London in the decade and more prior to 1966. In this work in London schools and within the network of the London Association for the Teaching of English (LATE), a vision for English had been evolving since the post-war years. To a large extent it is this vision that appears in Growth through English, so much so that when one examines the development of this work it is not too fanciful to believe Growth through English might have contained more or less the same vision whether Dartmouth had happened or not. In this chapter I will briefly consider the development of a new English in London in the post-war years showing how, through the voices of Dixon, Barnes, Rosen and Britton, this view of the subject emerged as the perceived consensus of the seminar.

The development of London English: the formation and work of the London Association for the Teaching of English

That a new model for the teaching of English emerged from London schools in the immediate post-war years is no coincidence. A radical overhaul in secondary education in England had begun with the Education Act of 1944, which for the first time ensured all children to the age of fifteen, and ultimately sixteen, would attend school. Whilst the education act envisaged a tri-partite school system, with grammar, technical and secondary modern schools tailored to the perceived differing needs of different groups of young people, provision was made within the act for local education authorities to determine their own school landscape, with the scope offered for the introduction of comprehensive secondary schooling. The London County Council in its post-war educational London Plan seized this opportunity to boldly plan for a fully comprehensive system. It has been claimed that, uniquely, the London Plan powerfully promoted the development of the comprehensive as part of a project for social unity (Rubinstein and Simon, 1973). London’s plans for comprehensivisation were seemingly inspired by a hope for the enthusiasm and optimism that would be generated for those who would have been previously hopeless in establishments other than grammar schools (Limond, 2007). This was apparently not an educational decision – at least not one informed by any evidence that the comprehensive system would result in raised academic outcomes. It was a bold attempt to rebuild a city ravaged by war with schools seen as the building blocks of a fairer, more just society.

These noble aims resulted in some stark difficulties for English teachers in the capital, many of whom were either newly – and rapidly – trained to meet a teacher shortage, or used to teaching a literature-based Leavisite-version of English in the grammar schools. This version of English, Cambridge English as it is often termed, was not fit for the new purpose of educating the whole cohort of secondary-aged children in classes catering for the full ability range. The necessity for a new kind of English led colleagues working at the London Institute of Education, specifically Perceval Gurrey, James Britton and Nancy Martin, to launch the London Association for the Teaching of English in the summer of 1947. This new voluntary subject association was formed to provide a network for English teachers in the capital, and indeed beyond, to share and disseminate practice, research their own classroom teaching and campaign on key issues.

A full account of the birth, growth and development of the London Association for the Teaching of English (Gibbons, 2013) clearly illustrates how this new network functioned to fashion a new model for the teaching of English. Fundamental to the approach was that the emergence of this model was genuinely ‘bottom-up’; English teachers would identify challenges in their own classrooms, and – through working in LATE study groups – seek to find solutions to these problems. The findings would be disseminated through publications and conferences. Even in the earliest LATE projects, around aspects of the subject such as the marking of composition or the teaching of comprehension, a new English could be seen to be emerging. Those who have written about the emergence of this model (see for example Ball, 1985) have variously labelled it London English, English as Language or growth English, sometimes casting it as a directly opposing paradigm to the Cambridge, English as Literature, model that dominated in grammar schools in the pre-war years. As I have suggested (Gibbons, 2017) it may be unhelpful to seek an easy title for the model of English that was emerging. In reality there were many different strands, with key figures in LATE pursuing different strands of interest as years passed: James Britton, for example, became increasingly concerned with child language and thought development; Harold Rosen in the role and function of the language of the working classes; Douglas Barnes in talk in the classroom; Michael Halliday and Peter Doughty in grammar and knowledge about language. According to Tony Burgess,³ the task before LATE was ‘to try and build a sort of framework, or ongoing knowledge and theory. . . . the commitment to an underlying rationale for the teaching of English that could go on developing as a body of ideas’. A unifying philosophy or single overarching rationale did not emerge from the work of LATE and the teachers in London schools, but there were elements that brought the different strands together, notably the fundamental belief that the child, her language and her experience, should be the starting point and foundation for work in English. The subject was not about content – be that expressed as a canon of literature or the rules of the language – it was the means by which children would develop and express their growing understanding of their own worlds and the worlds of others.

This refocusing of the subject, the development of what might be termed child centredness in its most positive sense, was clearly evident in LATE’s campaign to transform the assessment of English of school leavers through the GCE ‘O’ level language examination in the early 1950s. This lengthy and hard-fought campaign (see Gibbons, 2009) saw LATE devise, pilot and ultimately introduce an alternative examination that sought to resolve what Britton saw for teachers as ‘the conflict of loyalties – to the subject they teach or the child who is taught’ (Britton, 1955, p.178). It was a campaign that began with what can only be described as Harold Rosen’s distain for then current ‘O’ level papers, given their apparent image of pupils taking the exam. Considering the types of choice offered for composition in the papers Rosen remarked at the time, ‘the sort of children the examiners had in mind were children who visited pen friends abroad, who were chairmen of school dramatic clubs, and who arranged private dances. Was this symptomatic of the examiners’ ‘sympathy’ with children?’ (LATE, 1952, p.1). The new English was not simply about putting children’s language and experience at the heart of the subject, it was about ensuring that the mass of ‘ordinary’ children now in the school system were represented in the curriculum and in assessment mechanisms.

LATE’s The Aims of English Teaching

By the mid-1950s, the work of LATE had already led to a relatively well-formed theory of English being articulated. This is evident in a document that was prepared by the Association and sent to members in 1956. This document (LATE, 1956), entitled The Aims of English Teaching was written by LATE for British Council Study Boxes to be used in schools in India. That LATE was approached to write this document is in itself striking; one must assume that the British Council considered that the Association would be able to offer something of an authoritative overview of subject English. Given LATE had been in existence less than a decade at this point, this would appear to indicate the impact the Association was having within the field of English education; there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to suggest that the LATE pamphlet was one of several springing from different sources (the English Association, for example), rather it appears to be the single publication used to offer a ‘definitive’ view on the subject for those studying overseas.

In its introduction The Aims of English Teaching acknowledged that in itself it could not be representative of the full range of work of the English teacher, and most notably in this respect it stressed that oral work ‘seems to us to be of utmost importance’ (p.1). Following the introduction, there were sections that outlined the scope of work in English. Significantly, the section placed at the beginning was ‘Language and Experience’, within which there were remarkably clear and confident statements that demonstrate the thinking of the Association.

‘Experience comes first’ (LATE, 1956, p.2) was the bold assertion and the English teacher’s aim was to ‘assist the development of language adequate to the child’s experience’ (p.2). No individual authors were named on the document but it is not unreasonable to suggest at least one member of the team responsible for its writing. The remarks on the relationship between language and experience indicated the emerging thinking of James Britton, and the growth of an as yet not fully developed philosophy, and one which was not yet supported by the theories of Vygotsky, theories that would ultimately reinforce the claims. The effect of language on experience was, the document proclaimed, ‘to deepen it, order it, and make it accessible’ (p.2). The pamphlet went on:

By language we require a measure of control over our own experience and thereby are able to learn from it. It is commonplace that language helps us to think: our formulation implies also that language similarly helps us to perceive and feel and act.

(LATE, 1956, p.2)

The use of language to represent experience, to make sense of one’s world, w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Contributors and Editors
• Introduction: The Enduring Significance of the Dartmouth Seminar of 1966
• Part I Historical Perspectives
• Part II Dartmouth Today: Why it Still Matters
• Part III Reflections: But for the Future
• Index