Creating accessible texts for our students

The great majority of my students complain that the literature we ask them to read in our courses, the literature we require them to reference in their assessment tasks, is dry, inaccessible and unhelpful. A few persist and find (as I do) a community of scholars which connects and extends. The majority do what is needed to pass, forget what they’ve read, and are then easy prey for the staffroom cynics who tell them that academic learning is useless.

Art Bochner (Bochner, 2012)has some sympathy with this majority. Writing about the kind of research literature which dominates our courses, he remarks

Readers are not encouraged to see and feel the struggles and emotions of the research participants. Normally, we deprive them of an opportunity to care about the particular people whose struggles nourish the researcher’s hunger for truth. Thus, narrative inquiry has evolved as largely a cognitive activity in which investigators present themselves as disinterested spectators, surveying, watching, analyzing, and reporting at a distance about people’s personal, institutional and cultural lives. Although contradictions, emotions, and subjectivities may be recognized as concrete lived experiences, they usually are expressed in forms of writing that dissolve concrete events in solutions of abstract analysis. The reader is left to look through a stained glass window, to use Edith Turner’s (1993) apt analogy, seeing only murky and featureless profiles. The concrete details of sensual, emotional, and embodied experience are replaced by typologies and abstractions that remove events from their context, distancing readers from the actions and feelings of particular human beings engaged in the joint action of evolving relationships. 159

He concludes

If our research is to mean something to our readers — to be acts of meaning — our writing needs to attract, awaken, and arouse them, inviting readers into conversation with the incidents, feelings, contingencies, contradictions, memories, and desires that our research stories depict. 158

I agree. That’s why I’m drawn to what Bochner calls ‘fictionalised ethnography’ and what I’ve been calling ‘mythopoetic scholarship’.

At the same time, though, there’s an inherent danger in this move to create accessible texts. The challenge is to resist the lazy or over-committed student’s demand that everything be made easy, the growing tendency in the current competitive higher education environment to sacrifice rigour for instant gratification. Fictionalised ethnography could easily slip down this slope. We need to write stories that unsettle as well as attract.

If, as Bochner says in this article (and I love the way he says it!), ethnographic fictions are ‘both a means of knowing and a way of telling about the social world’, then significant struggle needs to have given birth to the knowing and be a consequence of the telling.

I’m pretty sure Bochner would agree.  He sees these kinds of stories as being ‘a material intervention into people’s lives, one that not only represents but also creates experience, putting meanings in motion’.  157

 *****

Bochner, A. P. (2012). Autoethnography as acts of meaning. Narrative Inquiry, 22(1), 155-164.

 

 

A means of knowing and a way of telling

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

For months, maybe years, I’ve been wrestling with how my love of story (telling them, reading them, writing them) can be reconciled with the serious research/scholarship world I find myself in. Can a story be considered scholarship? I’ve asked myself (out loud, often on this blog). I’ve hacked my way (it’s not been unpleasant) through journal articles, and I’ve been connecting all this with things I’ve learned during my years as a teacher and a therapist, and I’ve finally come to the conclusion that, yes, writing fiction can be considered scholarly, both because writers are involved in a scholarly search when they’re trying to write a particular kind of fiction, and the act of publishing the resultant story is a scholarly act in itself, because it’s a powerful way of communicating insights; I’ve suggested, in my writing and in a recent seminar, that a certain kind of fictional writing is both a scholarly method and a scholarly form.

If you’ve hacked your way through that last sentence, you’ll understand better my uncertainty about whether to laugh or cry. I’ve been trying to find the words to say what I’m thinking, my phrases are often frustratingly convoluted and unnecessarily wordy … and yesterday I picked up an article by Art Bochner who said all I’ve been trying to say in a simple, clear sentence.

Stories, he said, are ‘both a means of knowing and a way of telling about the social world.’ (Bochner, 2012, p. 155)

 ********

Bochner, A. P. (2012). Autoethnography as acts of meaning. Narrative Inquiry, 22(1), 155-164.

Speaking back to the undermining demons

Some time ago (was it 40 years ago when I started teaching? 3 years ago when I started talking to a colleague about mythopoetics? last year when I started writing blog posts about it?), I began to think about whether the telling of fictionalised stories could be considered legitimate scholarship. I’ve written about it, read others writing, and done some of it, all of this in the company of colleagues.

This being ‘in the company of colleagues’ has mattered. There’s this meme floating around – I sense it living a snug life inside my psyche – that the reading and writing of fiction is an escape from the realities of this world, rather than an attempted deeper engagement with what is. I’m regularly undermined by doubts about the scholarly legitimacy of where my work is taking me.

Dr Malcolm Reed

Being in the company of colleagues includes finding, in the literature, fellow travellers, and this week I found another one. A journal editor to whom I’d submitted a short story suggested I read some of Malcolm Reed’s articles and stories, and I’ve started to do that.

A fellow traveller? Reed is such an erudite one, so seemingly versed in the literature (Foucault, Bakhtin, Geertz, Barone, as well as scores of others I’ve never heard of) that again the internal gremlins, giggling at my scholarly adolescence, are nudged into action. It jabs at me that I know so little of the broader academic literature that scholars like Reed draw on. I wonder if it’s too late.

Discovering that Reed works in the Helen Wodehouse Building in the Bristol Graduate School of Education was a pleasant surprise. That’s where I did my teacher training in the early 1970s, with teachers I’ll never forget (Pat Smyth, Norman Stephenson and Charles Hannam), thinking about teaching philosophies in a way that has perhaps, sadly, gone out of fashion now. What did we think deeply motivated people? What fundamental reforms (beyond the naming of teacher competencies, the exercise of more effective classroom control and the extension of mandatory state testing) might benefit the education system? What kind of a teacher did our students need us to be?

So Malcolm Reed works there. And writes about ‘fictional ethnography’. Writes stories, too. The one I read yesterday was a beautifully written, totally engrossing, and I’ll use it in my teaching.

He’s also had rejections (along with many acceptances) for his ‘fictional ethnography’, and I enjoyed (because I’ve experienced) his description of some of the rejections. Some reviewers, he wrote, required

‘a rigorously reflexive and theoretically analytical explication of [the] significance that outweighed the (implied) intellectual paucity of needing to illustrate through ‘narrative’ in the first place … [but I] decided that I just could not drag out the viscera of a story and twist them outside its own body for interrogative or auspicial purposes (32)

Reed goes on to draw on ‘a tradition of fellow travellers’ to argue that we’re missing the point if we try to argue that mythopoetics (he doesn’t use the word – he prefers ‘fictional ethnography’) reveals truths or represents realities. He suggests that there is no remembering or conceptualizing, whether its in a scientific or a mythopoetic vein, that reveals objective truth or represents reality. All representations are fictions of one kind or another. He quotes Vaihinger (37).

This conceptual world is not a picture of the actual world but an instrument for grasping and subjectively understanding that world.

The world of ideas is essentially an expedient of thought, an instrument, for rendering action possible in the world of reality.

I called my PhD thesis (which looked at the nature and function of stories in psychotherapy) ‘Mating with the world’, and I think what Reed and Vaihinger are saying is what I was trying to say in my thesis: that stories are important less for what is contained in them and more for what they actually do. They help us to think, to connect, and to act.

Reed talks about the ‘semiotic traffic’ that travels between people when stories are told, how they function as connectors, mediators, bringing the ‘me’ and the ‘you’ together, giving us access to others’ worlds and affording us opportunities to reflect, differently, on our own. He draws on some of his fellow travellers to suggest a ‘transactional view’ of ethnographic fictions, that they evoke, provoke, engage ‘by their verisimilitude … authenticity or integrity … whereby readers correspond to experiences coded in the text with feelings, imaginations and understandings’ (35).

I’m off to Prague next month to speak at a conference about storytelling. I’ve been thinking, as I prepare, about story’s capacity to agitate, complicate, induct and animate. I think I’m discovering, through writings such as Reed’s, that while I might be visited by undermining demons from time to time, I’m not alone in thinking that the mythopoetic is worth thinking about and worth practising.

Reed, M. (2006). The visit. Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 13(3), 273-282.

Reed, M. (2011). Somewhere Between What Is and What If: Fictionalisation and Ethnographic Inquiry, . Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 18:1, 31-43, 18(1), 31-43.

Mythopoetics: useful word or distraction?

In my story ‘Sally and the Universarium’ I had one of the characters use the word ‘mythopoetics’ to describe his thinking about an undervalued aspect of English teaching. It’s a word that has been sitting uncomfortably with my colleague Rachel. She wrote on this blog, after reading the Sally story:

I thought I’d just come right out and say a few things about the word ‘mythopoetic’ and what has been bothering me about it for a while. We’ve of course written together on mythopoetics and mythopoesis – and I still don’t have a better expression that encapsulates some of the qualities of teaching and studying English and how it seems to differ from teaching and studying other current disciplines. But I’ve come to dislike this word, to be honest. When I google it, one of the first links is always something about the Men’s Movement, like the one here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoetic_men’s_movement. Personally, I want to distance myself from this movement and some (perhaps not all) of its tenets. The associations between the essentialism and rejection of cultural relativism here, and the mysterious, non-rational qualities of stories and fiction that we have wanted to describe, are uncomfortable to me. So my question to you and to your readers is: is there a better word? Or can a new word be created, one that redefines MacDonald’s categories, as Wilson describes them. It needs to be a word that defines itself against calibrated, technical neoliberal forms of scholarship. It needs to acknowledge – perhaps even privilege – the power of myths, stories and poetry in school curricula. What does everyone think? Any ideas?
Rachel

Lady Magpie responded:

This is so interesting, because my reaction to the word “mythopoetic” is so different! I didn’t study English much at university (I got my English teacher quals sneakily via linguistics) and the first time I ever heard the term was during the dip ed. I had no idea what it meant and I certainly knew nothing of any stigma or associations positive or negative that may have come along with it. All I knew of it was that it had something to do with myths and stories and poetry. I loved the word instantly and have come to love it more and more as I create my own associations with it, mostly through your (Rachel) and Steve’s writing. When I think of “mythopoetics” I think of the stories and the poetry that are in the real and every day, and the real and every day that are in powerful works of fiction and poetry. At the same time I think of the mysterious and out-of-the-ordinary; the things that seem ONLY to live in story worlds but in some way change the way we think and live. I still don’t know what “mythopoetic” means, really, but it’s been good to have a word to hang on a preoccupation: to say that I am searching for mythopoetics in life, or that I’m trying to enrich my students’ worlds by viewing them through a mythopoetic lens.

Like Lady Magpie, I’ve felt ‘it’s been good to have a word to hang on a preoccupation’. But is there a better one, Rachel is asking, one that doesn’t have other associations?

This has prompted me to ask myself what words some of the giants in this field have used. I’ve been reading Maxine Greene Releasing the Imagination, and this morning I retraced my steps with her book to see how she has described this elusive concept.

She never uses the word ‘mythopoetics’. Instead of relying on a portmanteau word, she tells a story about what a release of the imagination through an engagement with literature and language (and the arts more generally) can do. It discloses the unseen (28), evokes memories and desires (44), expands perspectives (58), returns us to our body and to its relationships to other bodies (61),  restores lost spontenaeity (78), reconstitutes the known world  (104), transcends the given (111), encourages action (116), creates hope and leads to repair (130), creates community and acknowledges plurality (155).  At one point, she uses the phrase ‘aesthetic education (137), but never ‘mythopoetics’.

Does the term ‘mythopoetics’ add anything? Why not just talk about ‘the release of the imagination’,  or ‘an aesthetic encounter with literature and language’? Surely Maxine’s Greene’s emphasis on action (release, encounter) conveys more than a possibly misleading and vague word like ‘mythopoetics’?

I want to keep thinking about this. But, for the time being, I find it useful to have a word that describes an element rather than an action. Having a word which describes what we sense is a missing or undervalued element might help us find a language with which to unite and put our case. The fact that an English teachers like Lady Magpie has fallen in love with the word is promising.

Maybe we should try to occupy the ground, rather than allow others with other associations to hold it. Maybe we should re-write the Wikipedia article. I wonder what we’d write?

*********

Since writing the post above, I came across the following from an article by Maxine Greene. She writes:

 To experience it is to come in touch with a “reality” deeper and richer than the everyday but underlying it, feeding the ongoing becoming of a self. To enter into a poem may be to come in touch with a lost landscape, a landscape of color and smell and sound brought into a kind of rebirth by an act of imagination. And so, in distinctive ways, is an aesthetic experience achieved. It may be dark and fearful like an encounter with Medea; it may be ripe and various and startling like Toni Morrison’s Jazz; it may arouse rhythms in our hearts and mind as may the improvisations of jazz. We grasp a little more if we can explore the medium of jazz, the medium of words, the medium of paint, but there is the remarkable possibility of awakening, of overcoming the “anesthetic” said to be the opposite of the “aesthetic,” of attaining the wide-awakeness that resists apathy and withdrawal. The new educator must be awake, critical, open to the world. It is an honor and a responsibility to be a teacher in such dark times—and to imagine, and to act on what we imagine, what we believe ought at last to be.

‘Teaching in a Moment of Crisis: the Spaces of Imagination’, New Educator, 1:2 2005

Secondary English: lost in the forest?

As with all good mythopoetic literature, a folk story is  layered enough to contain many meanings, and the story of Hansel and Gretel is no exception. This morning it came to mind as I was thinking about an article I’d just read about English teaching.

First the article.  It is called ‘The Challenge of English’, and it’s written by a senior English teacher at a Victorian private school. (It’s a school that I have a family connection with, as my grandfather was its Headmaster for a while and my father was brought up on its grounds.) The author gives advice to Victorian students beginning their final year of English studies.

First he describes the nature of the English course. It is, he says, ‘an English course that develops a variety of language, interpretive and writing skills. It is a course based on the use of language; every outcome has language at the heart’.

He then explains how best to tackle the course.

There is an implicit metaphor in the way he describes this course, that of a scientist observing, dissecting, describing and analysing an object.

Students need to have a mastery of their texts [in order to develop] insights into the key themes, characterisations and ideas of the text. [Students need to] have a thorough understanding of the structures, features and conventions used by writers or directors to construct meaning …. In what ways do the narrators present their stories and what are the limitations of their narration in respect to biases, personal beliefs and their world as they understand it? This is the sort of question a thoughtful VCE student should be asking. [With the section of the course devoted to the language of persuasion], the task of the student is … to surgically analyse [the language of texts] to demonstrate an understanding of the ways language and visual features are used to present that point of view.

This is all good, sound advice. Given the nature of the English course, and the way student responses are marked against explicit and measurable outcomes, to advise anything different would be irresponsible.

But the subject has wandered far from where it has its home. And that’s where the story of Hansel and Gretel comes in.

***

In the story, all at home is not beer and skittles, and the children – Hansel and Gretel –  are forced to leave and venture into the forest. They attempt to find their way back, but in the end are lost deep in the forest where, desperately hungry and tired, they stumble across a small house, tantalizingly made of bread, cake and sugar. As they begin to eat the house, an old woman comes out of a door, a woman who seems kindness itself.

The old woman, however, nodded her head, and said: ‘Oh, you dear children, who has brought you here? Do come in, and stay with me. No harm shall happen to you.’ She took them both by the hand, and led them into her little house. Then good food was set before them, milk and pancakes, with sugar, apples, and nuts. Afterwards two pretty little beds were covered with clean white linen, and Hansel and Gretel lay down in them, and thought they were in heaven.

It turns out they’re not in heaven at all, but in the clutches of a cannablistic witch.

Then she seized Hansel with her shrivelled hand, carried him into a little stable, and locked him in behind a grated door. Scream as he might, it would not help him. Then she went to Gretel, shook her till she awoke, and cried: ‘Get up, lazy thing, fetch some water, and cook something good for your brother, he is in the stable outside, and is to be made fat. When he is fat, I will eat him.’ Gretel began to weep bitterly, but it was all in vain, for she was forced to do what the wicked witch commanded

What was it about the newspaper article that had me thinking about the story of Hansel and Gretel?

It’s been my sense for some time that secondary English teaching, as it has been represented in curriculum documents and assessment protocols, has lost its way. It’s been cut off from its home (more about that later), and, in its search for some kind of recognized position alongside valued school subjects like maths and science, has tried to establish itself within the neoliberal discourse. It’s found itself feasting on a house made of cake and sugar. It has been seduced by the promise of rubrics and measurable outcomes into thinking that its real value lies in its potential to raise literacy standards and teach communication skills. For a while outcomes and rubrics gave us some relief, some welcome bread and cake, a sense that we could explain to the students what we were looking for and how they could succeed in our subject. But, instead, we find ourselves in a place where we’ve lost touch with our true home, the deeper essence of our discipline.

Which is what?

I’d like to come at this (in an attempt to do what good stories do) meanderingly.

***

Last weekend I read Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry.

There’s so much in that book that made me think, both about my own life and about the world in which I live. That’s the thing about great books, isn’t it; they make you think, they help you to see more, they give you words for feelings or intuitions that until then had remained below the surface. They help nudge us towards a greater connection with the world: the world out there or the world inside.

At one point Winterson has one of her characters say:

I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world.

This reminds me of Digger in David Malouf’s Great World,  who was ‘dizzied by the world. He could never, he felt, see it steady enough or at a sufficient distance to comprehend what it was, let alone to act on it. ‘

And this, in turn, reminds me of Spinoza, who said that our limited faculties mean that we are only able to comprehend a miniscule portion of what is, a tiny bit of the vastness that only ‘the eye of eternity’ can take in.

Reading these things doesn’t just help me make sense of my own confusions. They connect my experience to that of others. I am consoled that it’s not just me that finds things so complex, so dizzying, so endless. Reading these things tells me something about the nature of the world. Ironically, I end up knowing more, being less dizzied, more able to join in.

I do not read these books in order to dispassionately observe, dissect, describe and analyse. They are not objects like that. Instead they are minds with which I strive to have some kind of relationship; they are voices I listen to in order to know more about the world that I’m in. The focus here is not on the text-as-object, but on what happens when I, as reader, open myself up to a conversation which involves trying to see the world as the writer, or one of the writer’s characters, might have seen it, or to understand something more about a character’s – and therefore a human – experience . I’m not outside, looking in at the text. The text and I are standing shoulder to shoulder, looking together at the world and sharing thoughts about it.

English has lost its way because its become text-centric. The proper object of study for any discipline is not, as the article implies, the text; it is the world in which we live, and we enter into a relationship with useful texts only in order to help us understand that world just that little bit better.

***

I want to explore this idea some more in my next post.

English teaching: looking backwards to the past and forwards to the future

Hmmm. The authors I’ve been reading this past week have been unsettling my instinct that secondary English teaching might be thought about as a discipline, as a distinct way of explore the world. It’s more a hybrid subject than a discipline, they say, an evolving collection of components shaped partly by political and economic drivers (Green and Cormack 2008; Dixon 2012; Misson 2012), partly by its genealogy (Cormack 2008) and partly through individual teachers adapting curriculum frameworks in eclectic and various ways (Howie 2008).

I’ve just read an article (Kostogriz and Doecke 2008) which shifts the focus from what English is to what English should be.

They begin by describing the progressive turn in English teaching, led by Barnes, Britton and Rosen in the 70s and reaching its ‘high point’ in Australia at the International English Teachers’ Conference in Sydney in 1980. The leaders of this movement – people like Barnes, Britton and Rosen –

argued the need to negotiate the curriculum, making classrooms into sites where students are able to bring their experiences and values and use them as a basis for creating new understandings, new knowledge. (260)

This was a time then, say Kostogriz and Doecke, when English classrooms were seen (at least by the proponents of the progressivist turn) to be places where difference was central. I was one of those proponents, and I remember the times as being exciting, full of possibility and potential.

The progressivist turn failed and we live in different times. Kostogriz and Doecke argue that today’s English classrooms are heavily influenced by a quite different driver. Instead of difference, assimilation. Instead of a plurality of experiences and values, a drive towards a ‘cultural core of Australian-ness.

The paradox is that at a moment when classrooms are becoming increasingly culturally diverse, schools are being required to teach in a way that discourages difference… language and literacy education plays a crucial role in managing differences. (264)

This leads them to call for a re-imagining of English teaching ‘to transcend the moralism of modernity and find ways of acting ethically towards the Other’ (267). They draw on the thinking of Bakhtin,

in which neither the self nor the Other remain the same in a dialogical encounter, nor can they attempt to negate each other through cultural assimilation or domination. (269)

And here is the link with the progressivist turn, where the English classroom that Kostogriz and Doecke imagine once again is centred around diversity, around the valuing of different experiences and values and where there are

more numerous and more fluid relationships between people using literacies in multiple ways and contributing to the production of new meanings (272).

The authors began their article by describing the gap between the intended and the enacted curriculum, suggesting that teachers of a progressivist bent in the 70s and 80s found ways of teaching English in ways not necessarily envisioned by the curriculum designers. I suspect that nothing has changed, and that there are many classrooms around the country where you’d find numerous and fluid relationships between people using literacies in multiple ways and contributing to the production of new meanings’. The animating enacted curriculum lives on.

Perhaps, though (and this is where my thinking is leading me), we need a stronger sense of English as a discipline. Those English teachers in the trenches, making their classrooms places where new meanings are generated through engagement with other bodies through provocative and engaging texts, might have their confidence boosted and their loins girded if there was a more clearly articulated alternative version of English teaching to the one implied by our National Curriculum, or when it’s described as a hybrid of contextually defined elements making up a subject rather than a discipline.

***

Cormack, P. (2008). “Tracking Local Curriculum Histories: The Plural Forms of Subject English ” Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 15(3): 275-291.

Dixon, R. (2012). “‘English’ in the Australian Curriculum: English.” English in Australia 47(1).

Green, B. and P. Cormack (2008). “Curriculum history, ‘English’ and the New Education; or, installing the empire of English?” Pedagogy, Culture & Society 16(3): 253 — 267.

Howie, M. (2008). “Problematising Eclecticism and Rewriting English, .” Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 15:3, (3): 339-350.

Kostogriz, A. and B. Doecke (2008). “English and its Others: Towards an Ethics of Transculturation, .” Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 15(3): 259-274.

Misson, R. (2012). “Understanding about water in liquid modernity: Critical imperatives for English teaching.” English in Australia 47(1).

Ian Stronach and the globalized nature of education

It’s fun to pick up a book with an opening paragraph that sounds a bit like a war cry!

This book is about the globalized and globalizing nature of education in the postmodern. It considers how ‘hypernarratives’ have emerged. These are international, test-based comparative accounts of outcomes, like the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) or the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). They constitute the first global language of Education and enable politicians the world over to talk nonsense about educational outcomes, while all singing from the same hymn sheet. Thus the collapse of the meta-narrative (those Enlightenment discourses prefaced on an educational philosophy based on Kant, or Habermas and the like) have not been followed by mini-narratives, or extremely localized appeals, but by even larger hypernarratives, which spectacularize education, making it into a kind of Olympic Games. These hypernarratives make the same assumptions about the purposes of education. They posit an education for the economic, an education that fits the needs of a global capitalism, and the ‘need’ for international competitiveness. Such links are invariably poorly established in empirical terms and it is a ‘mythic economic instrumentalism’ that they offer, mimicking capitalist needs but not in any convincing sense meeting those ‘needs’, if indeed, they can sanely be dubbed ‘needs’. These discourses are here described as ‘paracapitalist’ for these mimetic reasons. The book approaches these phenomena, and the ways in which they re-write other educational discourses and identities from the point of view of a postmodernist anthropology, addressing the elements of cargo cult that they express. They are also the only game in town (or the global village, perhaps), reducing national education systems to the same status as national capitalisms, an eroded entity ‘hollowed out’ in the postmodern. The book calls for a ‘re-located’ education and educational research to break away from the globalizing discourses that both policy and research conventionally put forward, and instead seek to ‘educate the local’ in relation to its counter-educational impacts. That appeal is carried not just in the substantive argument about the various faces of the postmodern, and the need to break them up into more transformative narratives, but also the need to revolutionize qualitative inquiry, particularly in addressing a more performative rather than representational ideal.

Globalizing Education, Educating the Local: How Method Made us Mad by Ian Stronach

English as a discipline: what does geneology suggest?

In these past few blog posts, I’ve been trying to read and think my way towards greater clarity about the nature of secondary English. In particular, I’m asking: Is secondary English a discipline, with a distinct and recognized purpose, content, methods and forms? Or is it a hybrid subject and not a discipline at all?

This matters, I think. Students enter a secondary classroom in the expectation that what they learn in that class will be valuable, either because they will learn a collection of valuable skills (and a hybrid subject can teach them these), or because they will come to understand their worlds better (the promise of studying a discipline). Unless we, as English teachers, are clear about our work (do we teach a subject or a discipline), we’re likely to give out confusing messages to our students and have teaching programs that lack coherence and conviction.

Perhaps some would say that this question of the nature of English is not the business of the classroom teacher, but of policy and curriculum makers. But if, as some suggest, the new National English Curriculum is more a broad framework than a prescriptive syllabus, then how an individual teacher programs units of work will reflect a view – consciously or unconsciously held – about the function of English teaching. Greater clarity than we presently seem to have about the purpose of English would seem to be an important imperative.

So I’ve been reading.

[And here I want to make a quick diversion. As I drove into work this morning, I asked myself why I was reporting on my reading in my public blog. There are three reasons, I think. The first is that it helps me read if I record the questions I’m hoping the reading will address and the ideas that come to me as I read. Secondly, I always read better when I’m reading and discussing material with others, so I’m hoping to tempt others to join what would otherwise be just my cut-off and limited reflections. And finally, I want to demonstrate to my students how I go about reading, so that they understand something of its generative and evolving nature, something that they sometimes need to be reminded of.]

Yesterday I read an article by Phil Cormack (2008) where he traces some of the origins of English as a secondary subject. His study is of the genealogy of English in South Australia, though he suggests that what he has discovered there accurately tells us something about the origins of English as a secondary subject in Australia (and probably elsewhere).

His conclusion is that there is no single root version of English of which all subsequent versions are variants, thus denying me any chance of suggesting that we used to know what English was all about but have lost the plot. Instead, says Cormack, the subject (or different versions of the subject) have emerged out of the gradual expansion of education from Primary Schools (where different combinations of composition, grammar, reading, and spelling were taught) into new Secondary Schools who took up, in inconsistent and varying ways, these Primary-school components and began to call some or all of them ‘English’. English as a subject, in other words, grew not from any sense of it being a coherent discipline capable of offering secondary students a way of exploring and understanding the world, but out of contexualised and pragmatic preoccupations at the close of the 19^th Century and beginning of the 20^th, with preparing a skilled workforce, and ‘civilising’ a growing working class.

He concludes:

The purpose of this article is to tell a history of English from the margins, and at the level of the local, in order to trouble it as a story in the singular – in other words, to take a genealogical perspective on its emergence and subsequent forms. Genealogical approaches to history emphasise discontinuity and don’t seek to describe a ‘linear development’, which involves assuming that ideas/words keep their meaning over time, or that ideas developed at one time retain their logic in another (Cormack 1998; Foucault 1977, 139). Foucault counsels against the search for origins underpinned by the belief that understanding the moment of birth enables a special insight into the true nature of the thing being studied. He notes that genealogical study will find that ‘there is ‘‘something altogether different’’ behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in piecemeal fashion from alien forms’ (Foucault 1977, 142).

So, if I’m to successfully make the case for English as a discipline, Cormack is telling me that I can’t make it be referring to its origins. As I reported in previous posts, nor can I make it by analyzing its current forms, which reveal it to be more a hybrid subject ((Green and Cormack 2008; Dixon 2012), whose focus shifts over time (Misson 2012) and whose nature is determined by practitioners in their eclectic programming rather than being determined by any shared disciplinary understanding (Howie 2008).

Am I ready to give up the project to think about secondary English as a discipline? Not quite yet.

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Cormack, P. (2008). “Tracking Local Curriculum Histories: The Plural Forms of Subject English ” Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 15(3): 275-291.

Dixon, R. (2012). “‘English’ in the Australian Curriculum: English.” English in Australia 47(1).

Green, B. and P. Cormack (2008). “Curriculum history, ‘English’ and the New Education; or, installing the empire of English?” Pedagogy, Culture & Society 16(3): 253 — 267.

Howie, M. (2008). “Problematising Eclecticism and Rewriting English, .” Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 15:3, (3): 339-350.

Misson, R. (2012). “Understanding about water in liquid modernity: Critical imperatives for English teaching.” English in Australia 47(1).

Secondary English: hybrid subject or coherent discipline?

In my last blog post I talked about my current thought that English teaching in schools is missing a sense of itself as a discipline, as a way of knowing the world with its own methods (ways of gaining knowledge) and forms (ways of disseminating that knowledge). I added: ‘This is an argument which, obviously, I need to think much more about, both to test out its robustness and to tease out its implications.’

For the last couple of days I’ve entered the (temporarily?) disorienting labyrinth of journal articles on the nature of contemporary secondary school English. I’ve read Robert Dixon (2012), Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney University arguing that school English is a multidisciplinary subject, not an academic discipline. I’ve read Ray Misson (2012), recently retired from the School of Education at Melbourne University, suggesting that at the core of English teaching is the use and study of language, but that what this means in the classroom necessarily changes over time; an appropriate emphasis on popular texts and critical literacy in the 90’s, a coming to terms with digital literacy in the early years of this century, and so on. Then I read Mark Howie  (2008). past President of NSW ETA, bringing a post-structural perspective both appreciating and critiquing Sawyer’s idea that there’s no single idea at the heart of English teaching, but instead each English teacher ‘writes’ an eclectic version through his/her programming.

These are all perspectives which challenge my current thinking about the potential benefits of thinking about secondary English as a discipline, a specific and unique way of knowing the world.

In this attempt to test the robustness of my thinking, I’ll absorb more over the coming days. I’m currently making my way through Volume 15:3 of Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, a special edition called ‘English in the Antipodes’, with articles by Bill Green, Phil Cormack, Annette Patterson, Alex Kostogriz and Brenton Doecke.

Anyone want to join me in discussing one or more of these articles?

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Dixon, R. (2012). “‘English’ in the Australian Curriculum: English.” English in Australia 47(1).

Howie, M. (2008). “Problematising Eclecticism and Rewriting English, .” Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 15:3, (3): 339-350.

Misson, R. (2012). “Understanding about water in liquid modernity: Critical imperatives for English teaching.” English in Australia 47(1).

On writing fiction as an attempted act of scholarship

I’m doing my head in at the moment, trying to think about methodology in educational research. This started as a simple blog post which attempted to

1. describe the project I’m currently working on
2. ask myself if it’s a valid piece of educational research, or just a lot of fun
3. wonder aloud whether our project is ‘legitimate academic scholarship’ and if the way we’re approaching this project might be dignified with the impressive sounding word ‘methodology’.

What’s happened, however, is that as I’ve been writing I’ve found myself  asking more and more questions and my thinking keeps getting tangled up. I’ve ditched several drafts.

I’m going to try again.

For the past few months, I’ve been working with three beginning teachers (two in their first year out, one who’s just finished her teacher education course), and we’ve produced a fictional short story. At the moment (it’s not finished) the 8000 word story is called Both alike in dignity, a quote from the prologue of Romeo and Juliet. It describes a young pre-service teacher introducing Shakespeare’s play to his class, his mentor teacher’s reaction, and the distressing events that follow. We’re rather pleased with the outcome, though there’s still work to be done before we’re ready to attempt some kind of publication.

How have we got there?

In September of this year, I contacted these three students to see if they’d be interested in being part of a project to write some educational fiction. I described some of the relevant reading I’d been doing (Greene 1995; Stronach and MacLure 1997; Barone 2001; Clough 2002 ; Britzman 2003), and explained to them that I wanted to attempt to write a story, or a series of stories, that would in some way describe classrooms in a way that spoke to the complexity of being a teacher, that troubled simplistic accounts of a beginning teacher’s life. I wanted to look at a teacher’s work in terms of navigating a way through and around competing and intersecting discourses (Britzman 2003), intersecting life trajectories (Massey 2005) and desiring body-minds (Spinoza 1677; Semetsky and Depech-Ramey 2010). We would not set out, I suggested, to demonstrate any particular truth about any set of educational issues, but instead try to produce a creative piece which would evoke visceral responses and perhaps lead to useful conversations and even insights into the lived lives of teachers in schools.

Why fiction? There were two main reasons. The pragmatic reason was so that my colleagues could speak frankly about what they’d experienced without any concern that there might be repercussions for their young careers; we would create a fiction which, while informed by real experiences, transformed these into what Peter Clough calls ‘symbolic equivalents’. The deeper motivation was to draw on what is valued by our own discipline: we were all English teachers and we all believed that the creation of imagined worlds was a valid way of discovering and describing aspects of the world inaccessible to more rational disciplines and discourses (a belief supported by my own background in the ontologies and epistemologies of depth psychology). By writing a story, we felt we were opening ourselves up to discovering something. (And this morning I found a reference to a chapter by L. Richardson called ‘Writing: a method of inquiry’, which I will follow up when I can.)

My three students agreed to be a part of the project, and so we set about creating our story. First we talked together and wrote, them about their experiences and me about what seemed to me to be the emerging themes. I then produced a couple of tentative beginnings to a possible story (we still had no plot line), and we discussed the veracity of the emerging characters. There was a good deal of experimentation at this stage, with me drawing on my collaborators’ writing to create characters and scenes, and my colleagues responding, reacting, suggesting possibilities. Two characters emerged from this process. There was some initial antipathy expressed by some in our group towards these two characters as they appeared in these early versions, so we wrote to each other about how we might flesh them out in a more rounded and sympathetic way, how we might breathe some more convincing life into them.

We still had no plot for our story, and then I remembered an incident that had occurred a year or so ago and which (substantially fictionalised) might provide us with what we were seeking. I wrote a first draft, my colleagues responded,  and an iterative process ensued which saw me producing seven drafts before we were ready to show it to some valued and experienced outsiders. They, in turn, gave us further feedback, which we’re currently working with.

So, in conclusion, while the story was (in the end) written by me, it was a genuine collaboration: the initial inspiration was provided by the actual experiences of my colleagues and drafts of the early sketches and subsequent whole-story drafts were constantly being adjusted, reshaped by their responses and suggestions. While I have been the writer, and while the story has been shaped (largely unconsciously) by my theoretical lenses, it’s a story which has come out of our collaboration in its many forms.

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So, to return to my questions: what is the nature of the thing we have produced? Is it, and the process that led to its production, an example of scholarship? Is it research?

Before I try to answer this, I want to return to what I think is a relevant current preoccupation of mine, which is the question of whether English is a discipline (a valid and distinct way of knowing the world, with its own unique methods of inquiry and forms of representation). Bill Green and Phil Cormack (2008) and Robert Dixon (2012) have suggested that English as we encounter it in schools is a hybrid subject and not a discipline at all. I find myself wanting to suggest that this is precisely what is wrong with school English at the moment, and why students – in general – find it difficult to be enthusiastic about it.I’m beginning to think that we need to reclaim its disciplinary status, or to at least ask ourselves what would be different about our teaching of school English if we were to remember that at its core is the claim that to engage imaginatively with the world through what we read and what we write is to know the world in ways unique to the English discipline.

This is an argument which, obviously, I need to think much more about, both to test out its robustness and to tease out its implications. But it’s an important argument in my current thinking about the nature of our story-writing project.

Our writing of this story, it seems to me, is an attempt to use the methods which our discipline values (in particular, the way our discipline claims that an imaginative exploration through story gives us access to aspects of the human denied to other disciplines) in order to understand better the classroom worlds we experience and in which we do our work. The argument here is that the imaginative act of creating a piece of fiction is to draw on a valid disciplinary practice in order to see more of what is.

This imaginative move is not something that can be explained, though folk like Freud, Jung, Winnicott and Hillman have all had a go. It’s just that it seems to be a useful and disciplinary-valued source of insight.

But there’s a related argument which, while I come to no fixed conclusion about it, seems relevant here. Good theory helps us to see more than we would otherwise, and there are at least two theories that have informed my thinking (and perhaps have informed the unconscious imaginative act itself, though I have no way of knowing if this is the case and, if so, to what extent). A Spinoza/Deleuzian theorizing about desiring and relational body-minds informs the underlying ontology of the story, and Doreen Massey’s notions of the nature of space have directed my gaze at the way in which space is the product of relations. Her view of space is my view of classrooms and staffrooms:

In this open interactional space there are always connections yet to be made, juxtapositions yet to flower into interaction (or not, for not all potential connections have to be established), relations which may or may not be accomplished.

Further, I’d want to make a distinction between research/scholarship that is designed explain what is experienced and that which has as its aim to make visible what was previously underappreciated or only partially seen (Barone 2001; Clough 2002 ). In our story, we are not just attempting to further our own understanding (standing, as we do, on the shoulders of the educational, disciplinary and poststructuralist scholars who have influenced our thinking and helped us shape our methodology); we are also attempting to contribute in generative ways to the thinking of those who might read our story and who might then find themselves seeing new aspects of, and reflecting in new ways on, their own experiences, perceptions and theories.

References:

Barone, T. (2001). “Pragmatizing the imaginary: a response to a fictionalized case study of teaching.” Harvard Educational Review 71(4).

Britzman, D. (2003). Practice Makes Practice: A critical study of learning to teach, revised edition. Albany, State University of New York Press.

Clough, P. (2002 ). Narratives and Fictions in Educational Research Buckingham, Philadelphia, Open University Press.

Dixon, R. (2012). “‘English’ in the Australian Curriculum: English.” English in Australia 47(1).

Green, B. &. Cormack, Phil (2008). “Curriculum history, ‘English’ and the New Education; or, installing the empire of English?” Pedagogy, Culture & Society 16(3): 253 — 267.

Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

Massey, Doreen (2005). For space. London, Sage.

Semetsky, I. and J. A. Depech-Ramey (2010). “Jung’s Psychology and Deleuze’s Philosophy: The unconscious in learning.” Educational Philosophy and Theory online.

Spinoza, B. (1677). The Ethics. London, Everyman.

Stronach, I. and M. MacLure (1997). Educational research undone: the postmodern embrace. Buckingham, Open University Press.