English and Its Teachers

A History of Policy, Pedagogy and Practice

Simon Gibbons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138948921
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317363880
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

English and Its Teachers offers a historical overview of the development of secondary English teaching in schools over the past 50 years. Initially charting the rise of a new progressive approach in the 1960s, the book then considers the implications for the subject and its teachers of three decades of central policy intervention. Throughout, document and interview data are combined to construct a narrative that details the fascinating and, at times, turbulent history.

The book is divided into two main parts – 'The age of invention' and 'The age of intervention'. The first of these sections details how innovative English teachers and academics helped to develop a new model. The second section explores how successive governments have sought to shape English through policy. A final part draws comparisons with the teaching of the subject in other major English-speaking nations and considers what the future might hold.

English and Its Teachers is a valuable resource for those interested in the teaching of English in secondary schools, from new entrants to the profession, to experienced teachers and academics working in the sector.

1

Introduction

I would argue that this book is long overdue. In terms of subjects taught in England’s schools, perhaps the focus of the most intense argument, debate and dispute over the last fifty years has been the content and nature of secondary English, its curriculum, its teaching and its assessment. After a period of such argument, debate and dispute the time is right for a retrospective reflection – an evaluation of where we’ve been, where we are and where we might be going.

Reasons for the arguments around the nature of English are obvious. Even those who would reduce an English curriculum to something they might call the basics of learning to read (or at least decode) fluently, use grammar correctly in speech and writing and spell and punctuate accurately would find it hard to defend a position that claims that the role of the subject in the education and development of children is not only profoundly important on an individual level but also in the way society itself evolves. A basic skills curriculum in itself works to reinforce and reproduce certain societal norms – in fact it could easily be argued that it seeks to reverse or at least stem the tide of inevitable changes in the way the world functions. This is not a neutral enterprise.

A broader English curriculum that embraces the seemingly ever-increasing varieties of language and dialect, explores how language changes over time, introduces children to the breadth of ways in which they can speak and write in the increasing forms of media available to them, and exposes them to literature from across times and continents and cultures has the potential to do so much more. The links between language development and thought attest to the significance of English in the way it can enable the growth of character, and how in developing linguistics resources children are internalising culture and society. Literature, in revealing the worlds, minds, sensibilities and beliefs of writers, allows children to deepen understanding of the way they and others live, and pursue fundamental moral, ethical and political questions. A schooling in English is powerful, or it is dangerous – or both, depending on one’s own perspective. Sophisticated users of language in all its forms are able to question, to criticise, to challenge. Little wonder battles have been fought, won and lost over what English should look like for children. Though the arguments may not be new, the battles have been at their most intense in England over the last five decades.

If we can generalise – as indeed one inevitably must to an extent when writing a history – it might be fair to characterise these last fifty years of subject English as being represented by three periods. The first, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, was a period when English as a subject was rapidly expanding – with teachers looking beyond its traditional boundaries to draw in new technologies, media and moving image, multicultural literature and new teenage fiction that reflected the challenges of an ever more diverse culture. The period saw the rapid expansion of comprehensive schooling in England. This was a time when significant numbers of English teachers, individually and collectively, were fighting for something; an English curriculum that would best serve the needs of children in changing contexts – both socially and educationally. It was, too, a time when increasing attention to ideas about cognitive development and psychology, and concerns about class, race and gender, were harnessed in efforts to articulate an overarching theory for the teaching and learning of the subject. This was the time of the growth of a new progressive pedagogy for the teaching of English in the secondary school.

The second period, which we can perhaps roughly date from the advent of the National Curriculum in the late 1980s to the early years of the new millennium, was a time of unprecedented central intervention in schools in terms of curriculum, assessment and pedagogy, symptomatic of a standards-based reform agenda in education that was taking hold in many parts of the globe. The period saw increased marketisation of education, and a move away from aspirations for a comprehensive system administered by strong local authorities towards a more fragmented school landscape, ultimately in the form of mass academisation.

English was always at the head of the queue when the latest policy intervention was to be delivered. During this period, many English teachers were fighting against central impositions, endeavouring to ensure the curriculum retained many of the progressive elements that had become part of orthodox practice, resisting assessment regimes that threatened to narrow the curriculum and constrain teaching, and trying to retain methods that came under threat from new, apparently evidence-based teaching strategies that did not always even seem to be English – at least not as many teachers knew it – and that intended the subject to serve ends that, for many teachers, were at least at odds with, if not anathema to, their own visions. New models of English, or attempts to return to more traditional models, more neatly fed the standards reform agenda so that, whether policymakers actually believed in them or not, they were promoted at the expense of progressive models of the subject.

The third and final period, dating from the mid-2000s and existing as the status quo today, is perhaps one where it is tempting to say that the fight has disappeared, perhaps because it is difficult to see where the fight is, how to fight it and to sustain any belief that it can be won. Even if, to an extent, central intervention has become less overtly direct, and even if the landscape now purports to offer schools and teachers more freedom, the legacy of nearly thirty years of top-down reform has been profound deprofessionalisation – leaving English teachers with the underlying sense that the critical decisions about what to teach and how to teach are no longer theirs to make. So hegemonic seems the discourse around standards, accountability, performance and attainment that it can appear that this is just the way things are. In such a context it is critical for English teachers to review how this came to be.

This division into three periods is, as I say, to generalise, and it is, further, my perspective. Reality, of course, is not so straightforward. I know I am not alone, however, in taking the view that the introduction of the National Curriculum was a watershed moment in the story of government intervention into the teaching and learning of English. Whether widely shared or not, this perspective is a critical starting point, and a foundation for my claim about the importance of this book. Many of those engaged in the researching and writing of educational history have made claims for the importance of history. As McCulloch has shown (McCulloch, 2011) there have been competing rationales within the study of the history of education, and in most recent decades, in the United Kingdom at least, the importance of research in the field seems to have been largely overlooked, certainly by policymakers – despite their claims to favour evidence-based policy reform. McCulloch argued for a reassertion of the value of historical research and its significance for the present and the future. If we consider the specific case of English in schools, the contested history of its development demands that those who genuinely want to make sense of current curriculum and assessment regimes appreciate how we got here.

I would argue that to be a genuinely effective teacher of English, one needs more than the ability to implement the most recently recommended teaching strategy or to download the latest inspection-proof lesson or unit of work. One needs to have a clear sense of what English is, what its purpose in the education of children should be, and the ways in which this is best effected in a given classroom, at a given time, with a particular group of pupils. For want of a more satisfactory term, it is about having an underpinning foundation – a philosophy – of the subject and how it is best learnt and taught. To establish this, and I am perfectly content to live with the ambiguity that different teachers of English have different, firmly held, philosophies, it seems self-evident that a knowledge of history is critical. To be able to evaluate the ideas that have emerged about the subject, how these have found favour – or not – in the minds of policymakers and how this has contributed to the current state seems unavoidable if one is going to learn from the past, embracing values and ideas that if not timeless are at least still valuable, and uncovering the blind alleys in the various directions that have been travelled. With this knowledge as foundation, an English teacher can, with some confidence, negotiate the future, assimilating in whatever sensible way they can the latest incarnations of curriculum and assessment policy. Without such a foundation, it is not that a philosophy or an ideology is not being played out in an English teacher’s lessons, it is that it is someone else’s philosophy or ideology, it is merely enacted rather than understood, and in the worst cases it is confused, incoherent and damaging for both teachers and learners.

I am not subscribing to a golden age theory that there was a time when English teaching was at its best and we should simply re-enact that period. I am simply arguing that the profession, as it seeks to continually redefine itself for new times, should have knowledge of the past and use that to inform and build a better future. History for me is about the present and the future as much as it is about the past; in the words of Brian Simon, the value of an understanding of history is to know that ‘things have not always been as they are and need not remain so’ (1991, p. 92).

So, why this book and why now? The principal answer is that no similar text exists that considers the development of English teaching policy and practice over the period from 1965 to the present day. That is not to say that there are not books, chapters and articles that contribute to our knowledge of the development of English in schools; there are many, and it has been claimed that there is ‘a rich archive that we now have available to us in English education and English curriculum studies’ (Green, 2004, p. 293).

What might be considered to be the seminal history of English is that by David Shayer, The Teaching of English in Schools, 1900–1970 (1972). This fascinating work carefully detailed developments in English over the period, drawing evidence primarily from text and method books, policy documents, inspection reports and examination papers. The timing of Shayer’s book was interesting, in that its publication came at a moment when what might be termed the new English, a progressive pupil-centred model emerging from the work of James Britton, Harold Rosen, Nancy Martin, John Dixon and others connected with both the National and London Associations for the Teaching of English, was beginning to develop as an orthodox method – both in England and more widely – in the aftermath of the seminal Dartmouth Seminar in 1966. Shayer’s book concluded with questions about the future of English; in some ways he was optimistic, suggesting that ‘English teaching priorities are now (theoretically) more thoughtful, humane, far-sighted, imaginative and worthwhile than they have ever been before’ (pp. 185–186), yet he warned against potential dangers of a theory he described as ‘pupil-centred, self-expressive, anti-examination, anti-grammar, common culture, “relevant” literature’ (pp. 184–185). That description, an unfair – but familiar – caricature of the progressive model of the subject gaining ground in England, would be employed by other harsher critics of the new method, particularly those seeking a return to a more traditional curriculum. Shayer, again optimistically, suggested that ‘We have reached a point where there is substantial agreement among teachers that the best – the only – way to approach English is by establishing a “philosophy” or total view first’ (p. 184) and he imagined that the subject would continue ‘to be pushed outwards in the next seventy years’ (p. 184).

Implicit in Shayer’s concluding thoughts was an invitation for a similar historical review to be conducted in 2040 to see how far English had indeed come. In some ways this book attempts to take up that invitation, albeit some years earlier than Shayer implied – a fact in part justified by the rapidity of change in the last 50 years and in part by a view that the current state of English teaching demands it. I’m unconvinced that the substantial agreement about the need for a philosophy remains; changes in curriculum and assessment policy and in the way teachers are trained and educated in service point, to many, to a deprofessionalisation of teachers that threatens to obscure the perceived need for a personal philosophy. Increasingly the rhetoric from policymakers has been about teachers drawing on what works. Even if what works is in some way evidence based, or research informed, the suggestion has been that effective teachers merely employ these strategies, rather than developing their own philosophies and ideas and basing their choices of strategy on these foundations. In such a climate, it becomes even more important that English teachers do establish a ‘total view first’; a knowledge of the past is critical to this.

This book is not an attempt to imitate Shayer, but the pace of change in the last 50 years means a similar historical consideration of how we have got here is necessary for English teachers to take stock of the ways in which there has genuinely been progress, and to consider what, if any, underpinning principles lay beneath the recommended approaches and downloadable lesson plans that are so freely available. Shayer acknowledged that changes in society, culture, the class system and so on would mean changes would be necessary to English, suggesting that the ‘new’ ideas of 1970 would seem ‘quaint at best, antediluvian at worst’ (p. 184) but it’s doubtful he could have ever imagined the massive shift to central intervention from the period of the National Curriculum onwards, and the ways in which elements of this would impact on progress in English. Nor is it likely that Shayer could have predicted the seismic shift in technology, particularly the internet. This advancement provides the space for any (often self-appointed) expert on English to blog their opinions on the right way to teach the subject and reach audiences that book and journal writers, whose work may well be rooted in well researched philosophies, may only dream of. The aim of this book is not to preach the right philosophy on the way to teach English; its aims are to tell the story of how we have reached the point we are at and invite all those involved in the teaching of English to consider their own practice in the light of this and to see to what extent these practices are rooted in a coherent vision of the subject in the way that they would like to see it taught. One would hope the result would be a reconsideration of one’s own practice from a standpoint of increased knowledge.

Aside from Shayer, the other much referred-to history of the subject is Margaret Mathieson’s The Preachers of Culture: A Study of English and its Teachers (1975). Although the title of this book has echoes of Mathieson’s work that is in no way intended to evoke a direct comparison. Whereas Shayer’s book is in some ways a relatively straightforward narrative of English in schools, Mathieson’s work is arguably more far reaching and philosophical. It deals with important landmarks in the development of English teaching in schools – like the Newbolt Report – but it has, too, a very distinct focus on the teachers themselves, particularly in its third section ‘The Ideology and The Teachers’.

Mathieson’s work, like Shayer’s, should be recommended reading for anyone entering the profession for it must be the case that in building one’s own philosophy and approach to English a knowledge of the past is a hugely valuable prerequisite. Interestingly, Shayer and Mathieson’s stories of English appear, in many senses, to portray the subject and its teachers as existing in a non-existent, or at least benign, policy context. They of course reference key governmental reports into the subject, but the authors wrote in a time that it is now almost impossible for English teachers to imagine, when the decisions about how and what to teach were taken far from the offices of policymakers and civil servants. Their stories have an enviable purity in that they tell of the development of a subject in the hands of the experts – experts that may have disagreed on what English should be, but who were all developing and advocating models of the subject from the basis of a set of beliefs and a stock of professional experience, all driven by visions of what English should be, and what it should do, for children and young people. Certainly War Words: Language, History and the Disciplining of English (Clark, 2001) much more clearly sets the debates about the development of the subject within the context of political intervention, written as it was at the turn of the twenty-first century. Yet the publication of this book predated the single most expensive central intervention into the teaching and learning of secondary English; as such it too, though still eminently readable, could not provide the deeply important perspective that this book can.

In dealing with the development of the subject over the last 30 years, this book has no choice but to focus on the impact and effect that centralisation has had on English teaching. Centralisation has almost invariably not been in the hands of subject experts, nor have policymakers often appeared to have a vision of the subject beyond the way in which it can contribute to the overall economic health and competitiveness of the nation, or to the way it might help to construct some notion of Britishness. Of course, the nation is made up of individuals and curriculum documents may be expressed in terms of what individuals should learn and be able to do, but it is a benevolent or naïve reader of these documents that doesn’t believe that for policymakers, whatever their rhetoric, the central function of schooling in the world today is the production of a competitive nation. A consideration of English and its teachers post-Shayer and post-Mathieson must in some ways be the reality of how the subject has fared at the hands of the policymakers. It is unavoidable.

International perspectives on the teaching of English have been relatively few and far between, with notable examples including the texts edited by Britton, Shafer and Watson (1990), Peel, Patterson and Gerlach (2000), Doecke, Homer and Nixon (2003) and Goodwyn, Reid and Durrant (2013). Whilst each of these has some historical perspective – the first in particular – they are essentially edited volumes that draw together researchers and authors from the major English-speaking nations of the world who contribute a view from their unique perspective on an aspect of English teaching. The aim of this text cannot be to provide a deep and extended comparative analysis of English overseas; its aim in exploring the subject in a selection of major English-speaking nations is to capture key developments in policy around the subject from those nations over the period under consideration, drawing comparisons with the development of English in England where relevant. In doing so the spread and influence of developments in English can be considered, and the nature of the treatment of the subject in the context of each country’s own education reforms can be reflected upon. I would hope that readers involved in the teaching of English in other jurisdictions will be encouraged to reflect on their own experience in the light of the story of English in England, whilst in offering snapshots of English overseas readers in this jurisdiction will be encouraged to see that we are not alone with our problems, but also, on a positive front, there may well be alternatives.

The structure and content of the book

Michael Barber, a key figure at the centre of the New Labour project to improve education in the late 1990s, famously divided the past 50 years into four categories: ‘uninformed professionalism’ covered the period of the 1970s when teachers were essentially allowed autonomy, ‘uninformed prescription’ described the 1980s and the introduction of the National Curriculum, ‘informed prescription’ the 1990s and the advent of the National Strategies, and ‘informed professionalism’ describes the way forward for the profession (see, for example, Street and Temperley, 2005, p. 14). There are many issues to take with this kind of analysis of the past 50 years, particularly the notion that prior to the introduction of central curriculum and assessment policy teachers were uninformed – that does a huge disservice to many of the English teachers who will feature in the early chapters of this book. However, the temptation to impose a structure on the history of education is powerfully tempting...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• PART I: The age of invention
• PART II: The age of intervention
• PART III: Abroad and beyond
• Index