Autumn 2004

Talking English

Scrambling the Great Wall

What role do English teachers play in protecting or extending students’ cultural boundaries? JILL WILSON argues a case for using materials that take us across borders.

‘English teachers are the most tenacious gatekeepers I know.’ A university academic was speaking at a seminar about developing students’ cultural understandings. Affronted, challenged, I entered the debate. My lengthy experience as a practitioner told me otherwise. As a profession we were flexible, open-minded, innovative; surely the group in the school most open to change. And then I reflected— soapbox struggles at faculty meetings protecting Macbeth or Looking for Alibrandi; more passion spent arguing a case for Romeo and Juliet than is uncovered in the play itself; a text list that embodies the various enthusiasms, political views and backgrounds of its teaching cohort; teaching activities, resources and attitudes that resolutely provide a cultural construct for students about what is valued. Want to look at this more closely? What’s on your text list? What’s not there? What are the politics of the choices made in your school? How much does it matter?

Some years ago I found myself teaching Only the Heart, a narrative of family migration from South Vietnam to Australia. The family leaves on a boat that is soon overrun with pirates. A mother sacrifices herself by going off with the pirates, hoping to spare the young girls on the boat from a similar fate. Powerfully written, it raised the adrenalin rate in the classroom. What it also raised was the experiences of the culturally diverse bunch of students in the room. They began to talk about the ways they had come to Australia, about the sacrifices their families had made, about the clash of cultures they’d experienced. These stories tumbled out unstoppably and got caught up with those of the Ethiopian students, the Somalis and the Bosnians. It was one of the few times that a text with an Asian setting had been on the syllabus, despite the fact that almost half of the students had an Asian background. We had, in that class, begun to scramble the Great Wall for the first time.

‘Scrambling the Great Wall’ is a useful metaphor for what I want to explore. Most English teachers have experienced a largely Eurocentric education and culture. Concepts of ‘orientalism’ and ‘postmodernism’ were not part of our university education. The steep, hardtoclimb Great Wall represents the hurdle of engaging with nonWestern cultures; and the exoticism that we somehow overlook in working with writers as ‘foreign’ as Chaucer or Shakespeare. So why bother? ‘This constitutes best practice’, was part of the submission by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English to the National Summit Studies of Asia in Australian Schools in November 2003. ‘A study of Asian literature will enrich students’ experience and open them to new structures and some different ways that language is used.’

As English teachers we wrestle with many things: what will engage, what part of the ‘canon’ to include, what skills to emphasise and perhaps most importantly how to fit it all in. In the last two decades these issues have been explored in debates about ‘high’ and ‘pop’ culture: Shakespeare versus the Simpsons. More recently, debate about English as cultural studies has recognised the politics of texts in challenging or maintaining the status quo. Speaking at the 2003 International Federation of English Teachers (IFTE) Conference, Allan Luke located the work of English teachers in a post September 11 world, one where students encounter an increasingly globalised flow of information, image and discourse and the need to learn to live together in our differences rather than in spite of them. He writes compellingly about the capacity of text to ‘take us across borders, build bridges across cultures and communities, and enable us to see and hold up to critical scrutiny the competing and complex texts that vie to influence our beliefs and everyday lives’.

Luke argues that we, as a profession, have an ethical responsibility to provide an education focussed on ‘the imperative of learning to live together’. These aren’t new words, but I wonder how seriously they are reflected in the experiences which we bring to the classroom. How many English teachers are using texts from Afghanistan and the Middle East? What do our students learn of Islam? Of our nearest neighbour, Indonesia? Is the focus on the ‘mad’, ‘bad’ and ‘sad’ of the world’s trouble spots or a more rounded inclusion of material that reflects the rich traditions of these countries and belief systems?

This is not a case for a text list and teaching materials created through a politically correct checklist of attributes. This kind of worthy didacticism is satirised deftly in Ruth Starke’s novel Nips 11. This is an argument for using quality texts and resources, integrated into existing curriculum and teaching with the passion and confidence we might devote to Richard III, Strictly Ballroom or a favourite piece of John Donne.

It’s an argument for integrating some nonWestern perspectives within the existing English curriculum. For example, at Beechworth Secondary College a year 10 comparative film study of Romeo and Juliet and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has been enlivened by including Chicken Rice War. This contemporary Singaporean ‘mockumentary’ is a playful take on Romeo and Juliet and provides students with another genre to complement the contemporary surrealism of Lurhmann’s Verona Beach and the fantastical world of Crouching Tiger. Despite the rural location, this global student generation can identify with the Singapore food halls, designer shopping precincts and the school peer rivalry. Film Asia, published within the Access Asia series of resources, provided inspiration for using the film in this way.

Other schools are using the Voices and Visions (China, Indonesia, Japan) series of CDROMs to engage students with themes and issues that cross boundaries. Distributed free by the Commonwealth Government to all secondary schools, each CD includes up to 40 texts reflecting poets, novelists, filmmakers and artists from the specific country. Voices and Visions from Indonesia includes an ediscussion group of young Indonesian women on the pros and cons of wearing the veil. On the same CD, students can analyse the attributes of an Indonesian soap opera or explore urban nihilism in an excerpt from contemporary feature film Kuldesak. Representations of gender in the region might be explored across all three CDs in a thematic approach. Teachers who lack confidence in using materials from the region are supported by a wealth of contextual information provided for each text. Scrambling the wall is suddenly not as hard.

Gatekeeping is part of our role. Being passionate about what we choose to include in the curriculum is a key to engagement with students. Equipping students to engage thoughtfully with an increasingly interconnected world should also be part of our teaching repertoire.

References

Caswell, B (1997). Phu An Chiem, Only The Heart, UQP, Qld.

Kwok J, & McKnight, L (2002). Film Asia, Curriculum Corporation, Carlton South.

Luke, A (2003). Literacy Education for a New Ethics of Global Community, Language Arts, NCTE, USA. Starke, R (2002). Nips 11, Lothian, Melbourne.

Jill Wilson is the Victorian Advisor at the Asia Education Foundation. Prior to this, she taught English for many years in the western suburbs of Melbourne.

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