Autumn 2004

Talking English

A checklist for English teachers

Coconvenors CATHERINE BEAVIS and JOANNE O’MARA report on the ten summary statements of the Literacy as textual diversity/English as cultural studies strand at the IFTE conference.

In July 2003, the eighth conference for the International Federation for the Teaching of English (IFTE) was held in Melbourne over four days. These conferences, held every four years, provide the opportunity for English and literacy teachers and teacher educators from across the world to meet and consider the state of English and literacy; explore key issues facing English and literacy teachers and curriculum nationally and internationally; plan for action and future directions; reaffirm and reconceptualise core features of English and literacy, and imagine into the future what these subjects might be.

The 2003 IFTE conference was organised into five strands: ‘English as a Global Language’, ‘Literacy for a Democratic Society’, ‘Professional Identity and Change’, ‘Literacy and Textual Diversity: English as Cultural Studies’ and ‘Twentyfirst Century Literacies’. In this article we describe some of the work and key questions raised in the ‘Literacy and Textual Diversity: English as Cultural Studies’ strand, convened by Catherine Beavis, Jo O’Mara and Bill Green. This strand took up central matters to do with what English should actually ‘be’ and ‘be about’, and explored the nature and future of the subject.

The conference planners described the focus of the strand in this way:

In the late twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, English and literacy curriculum has been seriously challenged. These challenges come from changing views of text and reading, reflected in the incorporation of a much wider range of visual and nonprint texts and literacies, by technology and popular culture, and a shift from print to digital literacies which have been described by Green as a major shift in the subject’s organising apparatus. Further, the role of literature in promoting civic and national cultural identities has been thrown into question in a climate where schools and society are composed of people with multiple cultural and ethnic histories and identities, and a recognition of the politics of texts in challenging or maintaining the status quo. In such a context, what place do texts have in the English and literacy curriculum? What kinds of texts and literacies should be the focus of study? How do the arts, and aesthetic, practical and performance approaches contribute to the production of the student citizen? What polarities might/should exist between high and popular culture? Where kids are reading different texts, and reading differently, how can we/should we bring these out-of-school literacies and knowledge back into the school?

Keynotes, papers and workshops ranged across many aspects of English/literacy teaching and texts—film, poetry, drama, literature, writing, assessment, ICTs, popular culture, history. Speakers included Bill Green (plenary), Helen Nixon, Dennis Sumara, Andrew Burn, Julian SeftonGreen and Deborah Hicks. In addition, the working group met throughout the conference to work towards a synthesised understanding of the many different strands that characterise the English subjects, and to make recommendations for framing English and literacy curriculum into the 21st century. Under the guidance of Dennis Sumara, a set of summary statements that represented the group’s deliberations were prepared for the closing plenary session:

1. Literacy is understood as a socially situated practice. This conceptual frame suggests that less emphasis be given tothe components of literacy practices and more be given to the complex relationships among language, culture, and teaching.
2. A cultural studies approach to English teaching emphasises the relationship between literacy/literary practices and the ongoing production of human individual and collective identities. What is produced in the English classroom includes new experiences of identities that coemerge with what is studied (including the identities of the teachers). This suggests that theories of learning that continue to emphasise theindividual as the locus of cognition must be reconsidered and replaced with theories of learning that emphasise the coemergence of individual and collective learning.
3. More attention must be given to technologies of practices. Using the Foucaultian understanding of ‘technologies’ as those social and cultural forms and practices that function to organise the production of knowledge (including knowledge about and performances of self and collective identities), a cultural studies approach to English teaching suggests that we continue to interrogate how our very practices of reading/writing/interpreting/ representing/teaching condition, constrain and enlarge what can be known (and who can know).
4. Teaching and learning are no longer considered only methods by which existing knowledge is transmitted and reproduced; it is understood as a way of interrupting commonsense— as a way of making interventions. The teaching and learning of subject matters are understood as explicit ways of ‘changing the subject’—where subject is understood broadly— as both product and producer.
5. Literacies and aesthetic productions are seen as social, cultural, and political acts (no longer merely innocent representations and/or interpretations of these).
6. A cultural studies approach to English teaching situates the teacher as researcher/ ethnographer. In addition to the usual questions of curriculum and pedagogy (what is to be taught? how is it to be taught? etc.), the teacher also remains interested in questions related to the purposes of schooling, the conditions of learning that limit and expand possibilities, etc. While these were considered by our group to be crucial features of English teaching as cultural studies, there were concerns expressed about how teachers might learn to do this work (in teacher education?), and how teachers might find the material conditions to support this extra layer of work.
7. A cultural studies approach to English teaching expands notions of what counts as a literary object and a literary experience. Following work in post-structural and post-colonial theories, as well as theories and practices of deconstructive reading and interpreting, the question of how literary experiences are defined and developed within the context of English teaching must continue to be explored— particularly in light of the ‘identity work’ that is now seen to be primary to the work of subject English in schools.
8. A cultural studies approach to teaching suggests the need to invent new ways to use language to describe subject English. Is it possible to continue to use the term ‘English’ as an umbrella term to capture the complexities of recent approaches to the study of language, culture and identity?
9. A cultural studies approach to subject English emphasises the importance of the teachers’ deep knowledge of the disciplines/ genres/practices that are particular to the field. The challenge for teacher education and for ongoing teacher development is to use the existing and emergent knowledge base in the field of cultural studies to support the specific challenges of English teaching.
10. A cultural studies approach to English teaching requires that the theories of learning that currently structure schooling practices be subject to a thorough and informed critique. Although teacher education has been informed by new theoretical insights (particularly from the constructivists and social constructionists), where new teachers become competent at applying progressive methods (for example, literature circles and writer’s workshop), the programs do not support students’ developing an informed and disciplined relationship with dramatic/poetic/ prosaic forms, including those that are organised and shaped by new media and computer technologies (Sumara 2004).

These ten principles provide a rich and cohesive overview of what still seems central in English and literacy curriculum in the present times, and a sense of where we might go. They provide a useful checklist against which to read curriculum guidelines, course outlines and teaching and assessment practice at compulsory and post-compulsory levels. They provide a timely prompt to help us reflect and consider, once again, how English can best serve the needs of all our students in these complex and challenging times.

Reference

Sumara, D (2004). ‘Literacy and textual studies: English as cultural studies’ EnglishinAustralia 138/LiteracyLearningintheMiddleYears 12.1.

Catherine Beavis is a senior lecturer in the School of Social and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Education, Deakin University.

Joanne O’Mara is a lecturer in Secondary English Education in the School of Social and Cultural Studies, Deakin University.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au