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CHAPTER 1
Some of the problems of learning in English
It is a characteristic of English that it does not hold together as a body of knowledge that can be identified, quantified, then transmitted. Literary studies lead constantly outside themselves, as Leavis puts it; so, for that matter, does every other aspect of English. There are two possible responses for the teacher of English at whatever level. One is an attempt to draw in the boundaries, to impose shape on what seems amorphous, rigour on what seems undisciplined. The other is to regard English as a process, not content and take the all-inclusiveness as an opportunity rather than a handicap.
(DES 1975)
Because there is no generally agreed body of subject matter, the boundaries of the subject are notoriously unclear and cannot be neatly defined.
(Protherough and Atkinson 1994)
Discussing ‘learning’ in English, as the two quotations above suggest, is an extremely difficult prospect. Yet, as the attention of the educational community is turning inexorably to a re-evaluation of and improvement in the quality of learning across the whole curriculum, English cannot expect to be excused from this examination. An attempt has to be made at this time to focus more clearly and ‘draw in the boundaries, to impose shape on what seems amorphous, rigour on what seems undisciplined’ if English is to be able to claim a full and valid place in the modern curriculum. Whilst the idea of regarding English as a ‘process’, as one of the alternatives offered by the Bullock Report quotation above suggests, has been attractive in the past, the ‘learning landscape’ of which English forms a part has changed. More has been understood about the actual processes of learning, and research into the nature of English (Tweddle Kress 1995; 1995; Morgan 1996; Lankshear et al. 1997) indicates that, despite all manner of attempted political manoeuvring, its main centres of attention shifted significantly during the last third of the twentieth century, but such movements have not always been reflected in schools. These powerful reasons make a reconsideration of what might be meant by ‘learning in English’ worth undertaking in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
There are a number of complicating factors in this discussion that require early identification. ‘Learning’ in English is not a straightforward business; it is not smooth, staged and linear, but ‘messy’, context-based and requires frequent recursive experiences. ‘Learning’ in English, in the understanding of many of those who teach and advise on the subject daily, is not restricted solely to cognitive considerations, but also has to do with affective knowledge. For some teachers of English, especially those with more experience (Goodwyn 2004), the affective or feeling understanding is of greater importance, whilst there are many others who would want to promote learning programmes that certainly maintained a balance of both approaches. There are also those who are just as concerned with promoting a sense of enjoyment (Pike 2004) to be experienced by the pupils in their English lessons, and who insist that such a response plays a necessary motivational starting point in any learning in the subject. These various, and sometimes conflicting and overlapping, interests will be given more attention in later discussion.
English is a number of curricula, around which the English teacher has to construct some plausible principles of coherence. It is, first, a curriculum of communication, at the moment largely via its teaching around English language … this curriculum is coming into crisis, with the move in public communication from language to the visual and from ‘mind’ to the body. It is second a curriculum of notions of sociality and of culture: what England is, what it is to be English. This is carried through a plethora of means: how the English language is presented and talked about, especially in multilingual classrooms; what texts appear and how they are dealt with; what theories of text and language underlie pedagogies; and so on.
English is also a curriculum of values, of taste, and of aesthetics. Here the study of canonical texts is crucial, in particular their valuation in relation to texts of popular culture – media texts, the ‘fun’ material children use in their lives – and in relation to the texts of cultural groups of all kinds… so… English is the subject in which ethics, questions of social, public morality are constantly at issue; not in terms of the ‘right’ ways of thinking, but in terms of giving children the means of dealing with ethical, moral issues on the one hand and by absorbing, and perhaps this is most important, the ethos developed in the classroom.
(Kress 1995)
Possible reasons why a focus on ‘learning’ has beenneglected in the past
It has been argued that considerably more concern has been given in the past in English to setting up and conducting ‘teaching’, rather than to the matters of ‘learning’ in the subject that any teaching was intended to bring about (Davies 1996; Barton 1999). Therefore, before I actually engage with ideas of what might qualify as ‘learning’ (itself a hugely complex debate, as we can already see) in this area of the curriculum, I believe it is worth devoting a short section of this book to examining possible reasons why learning has not been well-documented or regularly explored and appropriately foregrounded within the field of English teaching in the past. I am proposing this early diversion partly to help in the better understanding of this issue, and partly to establish more realistic starting points for taking effective action to change and improve upon the status quo. The following hypotheses, therefore, are attempts to make sense of a very complicated situation, and are not meant at any stage to be critical judgements about some very committed and hard-working professionals. My comments will be made on what, as a professional classroom observer and teacher trainer, I perceive regularly as a de facto situation, not on what should be or might be desirable.
The first problem is twofold: some people who are concerned with the teaching of the subject in a variety of contexts would claim that it is simply impossible to pin down all the considerable learning that takes place in English, about English and through English – and even when any learning might have been identified, to concentrate on ‘learning’ itself is to miss the point. Such an approach, they argue, would be likely to lead to mechanistic and limited lessons.
Yet enjoyment is important too and is often left out of the debate about literacy… Policy-makers would do well to consider what makes 11–14 year olds want to read and write. Many teachers of English have long understood this and those with experience of adolescents are acutely aware that motivation is central to the achievement of our goals however egalitarian they may be. Any approach to secondary English teaching that focuses too exclusively on the acquisition of skills and does not take sufficient account of the human will and motivation of the adolescent learner is destined to fail.
(Pike 2004)
Other commentators increasingly suggest that there is simply too little focus on the worth of what takes place in English classrooms – particularly in a period of considerable cultural and linguistic change – and the current situation has to be challenged and kept more immediately up to date. Whilst recognising and respecting many of the powerful arguments of the first group (and for a strong contemporary exposition of this point of view it is worth reading Peter Medway’s ‘Teaching and learning the English method’ in the last issue of the English and Media Magazine (2003)), I am, nevertheless, positioning myself firmly alongside those practitioners who believe that careful scrutiny of the outcomes English teachers think they are bringing about as a result of their lessons is more likely to lead to greater success in meeting the needs of their pupils (particularly, but by no means exclusively, the least able) and lead to improved attainment for all. Jon Moss in his chapter ‘Which English?’, in a recent book intended for new teachers, makes the very same demand:
As you begin your development as an English teacher, one question which you should keep firmly at the centre of your thinking, despite the temptation to abandon it which may result from your having to address more immediate issues, concerns your pupils more than English. What futures do you imagine for them, and how can your English teaching contribute to their development towards those futures?
(Moss 2003)
Every day, in thousands of secondary schools, teachers engage with pupils in a subject called English. Those lessons have to be about improving the life chances, knowledge and overall abilities of the pupils concerned, otherwise they are not worth making time for. It is not acceptable that the young people involved in those lessons are presented with a collection of activities from which it is hoped, or assumed, that some improvements, positive changes or better insights are likely to result. Something of the shape and manner of the intended outcomes from those lessons must be anticipated and articulated by the teachers responsible for planning and presenting them, otherwise it will not be possible to ascertain how successful the lessons have been – or how well the real needs of those pupils have been properly met. If other progress, or positive personal change, or otherwise beneficial outcomes, not originally predicted by the teacher when the lesson was planned, come about from those lessons, then they should also be celebrated, and regarded as an important bonus. But the central core of what is intended in learning terms requires keen focus and attention, and must be properly understood by all the participants in those events.
Such a straightforward set of attitudes is not always apparent in the classrooms where English is taking place. It has not been traditional practice to declare quite so directly what is intended as the main learning outcomes of the various activities being put before the pupils. I maintain that there have been a number of traceable reasons why this situation has come to be the normal way of working in the subject. It is worth retracing some of the significant steps in the formation of the subject known as English, to better understand how the current tensions and positionings within those issues have evolved.
Early shaping of the subject
English professionals are keenly aware, day by day, that the problems suggested above are by no means new; they have been predicaments affecting any considerations in the subject from its earliest identifiable period. English, as most of us would understand it, is a relatively new school subject, generally agreed (Poulson 1998; Mathieson 1975; Ball et al. 1990) to have first evolved into something like its present state during the 1920s, having been significantly shaped by the Newbolt Report, written for the Board of Education (a distant forerunner of the Department for Education and Skills), and George Sampson’s book English for the English, both published in 1921.
The Newbolt Report and George Sampson’s book, English for the English, are landmarks on any survey of the subject’s development over the past one hundred and fifty years … Both documents have greatly influenced later discussion about English in schools; they are still referred to with appreciation today.
(Mathieson 1975)
Even at that early stage, quite different and mutually unsupportable tensions and priorities were vying for the greatest attention as the real core of the subject. On the one hand was the demand to provide basic literacy for a huge working-class population, recognised as being much less better educated than their German counterparts in a war only recently narrowly won. Gradual shifts had been made in previous years from the ‘rigid rote learning and memorization [that] had been the predominant approach to teaching in the mid-and late Victorian elementary schools’ (Poulson 1998), although most of the work taking place in classrooms was still based on fierce, decontextualised grammar exercises. A contrasting approach to the subject, however, was developing, as the direct legacy of the influence of Matthew Arnold and his belief that the only way to ‘save’ people from the morally corrosive effects of mass industrialisation was by learning large portions of great poetry. This belief in the capability of English, particularly English literature:
as providing moral ammunition against an increasingly materialistic world was a powerful influence on developments in the subject. English at Cambridge and other universities in the 1920s and 1930s, under individuals such as Quiller-Couch, Richards and, later, Leavis, was influential in establishing the centrality of the study of literature within the subject.
(Poulson 1998)
Attitudes about children and their potential for learning were also, however, changing from the sorts of perspectives that had prevailed for the most part during the late Victorian period. Less and less were they regarded as tabla rasa, merely blank documents on which to be written by the ‘pen’ of experience, or empty vessels waiting to be filled. They were, through the insights of educationalists such as John Dewey, being increasingly seen as developing individuals, with a potential creativity requiring the correct sort of motivation and encouragement to be properly developed. Sampson went so far as to claim that the English teacher’s chief concern was ‘not the minds he [sic] can measure but the souls he can save’! Alongside these developments, writers on the subject, such as Caldwell Cook, suggested a new sense of needing to meet requirements of pupils’ emotional growth, causing a further, humanely liberal approach to the subject to be adopted in some classrooms. Yet another emphasis, urged by some small groups of teachers, was to regard the study of English as a nationally uniting force. Through attention to its literary heritage, and by giving focus to a supposedly ‘common’ language – it was thought – a hugely disparate population could be unified and given a sense of shared identity, however many different regional and class-based variants of that language existed at the time.
Frighteningly, the Tory government of John Major in the 1990s resurrected this notion of the subject as part of its ‘back to basics’ fundamentalism, at a time when potential political European union seemed to be once again threatening the ‘English’ national identity. In a multicultural age such a movement was, not surprisingly, seen to be quite impractical as well as ideologically unsound, and was quickly squashed. But advocates of such a position still emerge regularly, and often come to the fore when the school subject of English is discussed (usually negatively) in the right-wing press.
The social history of English – from secondary modern and grammar schools to the ...
