Autumn 2004

Talking English

More of the same only more so?

DAVID HOMER takes a long hard look at third generation attempts to create a nationally consistent English curriculum and reports that ‘curriculism’ is a language widely spoken in England, New Zealand and Southern Africa as well as in Australia.

JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, a document on behalf of MCEETYA, entitled ‘National Consistency in Curriculum Outcomes: Draft Statements of Learning for English’, went out for consultation by those members of the profession who were still at work and vertical.

What would you do if you were asked to produce a nationally consistent core curriculum for Australian students in English (or any other subject)? I imagine that you would consult with students, parents and teachers, draw on your experience as a teacher of English and literacy, and find what you considered were some useful and authoritative views about what constitutes English. You would draw in some relevant theory from a range of disciplines—linguistics, approaches to textual study, education and human development—and probably look at existing curriculum statements, from the Australian States and Territories. I am sure that you wouldn’t only do the last of these.

Yet twice, this is what has actually happened in Australia. In the late eighties, Australian English curriculum was mapped as the start of a process which led to the English Statement and Profile. Now, under the aegis of the National Consistency in Curriculum Outcomes project (NCCO), we find MCEETYA at it again. I might add that this mapping of existing documents to establish a tabulated set of outcomes (the curriculum) is a process that has been followed in many countries, in broadly similar local ways. In general I’d say that, so far, Australia’s English teachers and their students have suffered less interference than most of our overseas colleagues, though this might seem cold comfort, and might not last forever.

Of course, in between the appearance of the Statements and Profiles in 1994 and the NCCO project initiatives, the national, State and Territory bureaucracies have not been idle. A huge amount of Australia’s educational energy has been expended on the production of curriculum frameworks and reporting processes, which have impacted on the work of English and literacy teachers. Leaving the national literacy issues aside, it is clear that these second generation English profiles, and the overall curriculum frameworks they are part of, are more complex and confusing than their parents ever were. But they carry the same genes. The draft NCCO project English statement, which at the time of writing is all I have seen, clearly also carries the strands, levels and outcomes genes of its grandparent. It has been devised from a mapping of the existing curriculum, is iterated in the same language and modes of discourse that we are now so used to that it’s hard to find alternatives, and is embedded in an audit culture that infests education at all levels.

Before we go on, there is an in-built contradiction to this mapand-write approach to curriculum production. For example, with the NCCO project, the idea is that there are essential learning outcomes that have to be embedded in every State and Territory’s English curriculum. But that is where they came from in the first place. It would in fact be surprising if many, or any of them were thus absent from the States’ English curriculum documents right now. What then is the point of the exercise? It is also worth saying that there is no research that supports the idea that an outcomes-based strands and levels configuration/conception of the curriculum has any special validity, or is based on any particular developmental, pedagogical, philosophical, linguistic or critical theory. It is accounting in a currency of which no one knows the value. Such a configuration cannot but deliver a fragmented, reductionist curriculum, one particularly suited, if the will is there, to underpin mass testing, as it has in England. Mapping and selecting from a reductionist curriculum merely reduces it further.

Judging by the draft statements of learning for English the core curriculum is going to be a pretty hefty beast. If it is to be only part of the English curriculum, as it says, then there’s not much room left for ‘the rest’. Unfortunately, ‘the rest’ is always the heart of English, whatever is called for by some mandated core. This fact is acknowledged in the standards that Australian English teachers set for their own practice in the STELLA project; standards which have a basis in the need for English teachers to work effectively within specific contexts, and have been affirmed over and over in the history of the subject. At its best, as described by Brenton Doecke in this issue, the content of English shifts constantly according to circumstances, but under the influence of underlying principles which ensure relevance and excitement. That is why monitoring national consistency in terms of content or skills-based outcomes avoids expression of the essential relevances of English.

In a keynote address at the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) conference in 2002, Bruce Wilson delivered a stinging attack on the second generation curriculum frameworks developed by the States, especially those in English, for the opaqueness of their language and the disjunctive nature of their supposedly ‘natural’ sequences of outcomes. It is important to remember that this language and these sequences, with which English teachers have to work in quite prescribed ways, is not their language, it is the language of a discourse that I have long called ‘curriculism’. This is a discursive product born of the 1980s push for controlled national curriculum which I have seen at work not only in England, Australia and New Zealand, but in Southern Africa as well. It is a worldwide phenomenon. I remember a morning in Johannesburg in 1998 when I was shown some drafts of the new South African national curriculum, and found many outcomes worded exactly the same as in English—a Curriculum Profile for Australian schools. The language of ‘curriculism’ means that you don’t even have to think up ways of saying things since there are plenty of documents that have already said them—just find one. You might even know one by heart. The documents create realities, they do not respond to them. Their truths are so because they are said to be.

The draft statements of learning outcomes in English set out by the NCCO project cover— one should say, privilege— Reading narratives, Writing expositions, Speaking and listening (in) discussion, Reading and viewing news and Writing narratives. These are the core’s strands. It has four levels: years 3, 5, 7 and 9 for which outcomes are prescribed. It is of the family.

Now it might change in detail after the incredibly short consultation process but it won’t change its nature because this is never negotiable. It can’t be done since, like all its kin, the proposal is anonymous, atheoretical (and indeed impossible for theory to penetrate) and fragmented (there is no indication of how and why its parts relate to each other). And in this case, neither is there any indication of how the ‘consistent core’ might relate to ‘the rest’ of English. It is more of the same.

In 1994, in the early days of Statements and Profiles, I said in an address at the AATE conference that ‘if you look at the history of English and the manner in which it has evolved, particularly in the quarter-century 1960–85, you can see that it has several times re-made itself according to particular theoretical orientations. It has contained as an essential element the capacity to regenerate itself since it has taken theory seriously.’ I went on to point out that the discourses of ‘curriculism’ which were now those shaping subject English, do not permit such retheorising or even accurate descriptions of students’ growth in literacy. Exemplars had come to replace ideas as curriculum and teachers were positioned as agents of the implementation of curriculum rather than of knowledge. Many English teachers have not accepted this positioning, but at a time when teaching in general is poised on the brink of major generational change, the appearance of another level of outcomes-based curriculum, with the potential to further ‘close down’ English, is highly inopportune.

David Homer currently teaches at the University of South Australia. He was president of the International Federation for the Teaching of English from 1999 to 2003.

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