Autumn 2004

Talking English

Then and now: texts in English classrooms

What changes? What stays the same? What, if anything, has consistently been considered essential learning for students in English classes in secondary schools over the past fifty years? MARION MEIERS discusses the many facets of English texts in contemporary Australian classrooms.

IF A TIME MACHINE travelled back through the years to visit a secondary English classroomin the 1950s, and then sped forward in time to an English classroomin the 21st century, what similaritiesmight be observed, and what differences?

There is a strong likelihood that the time machine would be able to navigate fairly easily to English classrooms in both time zones. A class session called ‘English’ would be found on the 1950s secondary school timetable. English is a key learning area in Australian school curriculums at the beginning of the 21st century. A large class would occupy the 1950s classroom, seated in rows of desks on uncarpeted floors facing a blackboard at the front of the room. In the classroom of the present era, a smaller number of students might be seated in groups at easily moveable tables, talking together, or watching a video, or working individually at computer screens. What texts might students in both of these classrooms encounter?

In the 1950s, many students in Form 1, as the first year of secondary school was then described, might have been provided with the anthology, The Poets’ Way Stage 1. The foreword to this book acclaimed ‘the splendid heritage that is the birthright of all who speak English’, reflecting the curriculum purpose of transmitting this cultural heritage to Australian students. Poems, ‘already deservedly famous’ by poets such as Wordsworth, Keats, Longfellow, Browning, Burns, De La Mare and Masefield dominated the collection. The anthology also contained ‘modern’ poems, as well as a special section including Australian poems by Judith Wright, Douglas Stewart, Kenneth Slessor and others. The Australian content was, however, a minor element in the collection.

In the same era, older students in Form 4 could well have been reading from another popular anthology, In Fealty to Apollo. The anthologists noted that they had ‘done our best to suggest the variety of poetry’, and emphasise that ‘poetry can only be understood through enjoyment’. This collection, like The Poets’ Way, provides access to the cultural heritage. There is no Australian section in this collection, although A B Paterson (Clancy of the Overflow), Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright and Douglas Stewart are represented shoulder to shoulder with Kipling, Newbolt, Masefield, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson and Milton.

It is possible to be reasonably certain about the presence of these anthologies in the 1950s English classroom, as they remained in print over a very long period—both were first published in the 30s, and were still being reprinted 20 years later. Short stories, oneact plays, and, by Form 4, Shakespeare, had a wellestablished place on school syllabuses. Indeed, the English program was often organised according to the kind of text studied on particular days of the week—poetry on Monday, short stories on Tuesday, oneact plays on Thursdays.

Students in the English classroom of the 21st century, if the teacher was following the kind of curriculum guidelines in current use, would almost certainly be working with a much greater range of texts, including literary and nonliterary texts, texts sourced from popular culture and mass media texts. Australian texts would be commonplace, not confined to special sections of anthologies. Texts from many cultures would be accessible to students. The texts could be in print or film, but could also be computerbased. The differences between print, visual and spoken texts might be the subject of classroom investigation.

The 21st century students might well be working outside the classroom, making use of a range of information communication technologies, like the pair of students described in the following vignette:

... a research team of students drawn from History, English, and Social Science subjects across grade levels 8 to 12 ... is working in collaboration with three History professors at a local university. The project ... is to develop an oral history of long established migrant groups within the city. It involves conducting life history interviews with elderly residents, focussing on their experiences of settling in their adopted country.

Ben (year 8) and Monica (year 11) meet at McDonald’s to go over their interview questions. Their information about the couple that they are to interview has given rise to doubts about two of their proposed questions ... they call their university research partner on Monica’s mobile phone and ask her advice ... When they arrive at the house Monica text messages the teacher coordinating the project to confirm that they have arrived and everything is ready for the interview.

Ben takes the digital voice recorder from his pocket and gets it ready for recording. The recorder has a builtin camera that Ben will use throughout the semistructured interview, having obtained the necessary formal consent from the couple (Knobel & Lankshear 2003).

The text in this case is the story of migrants’ experience. It is not contained in a book, but is a multimodal text brought into being in the interview, captured by the students themselves. It is a narrative, and narrative texts were a staple of the 1950s curriculum, and continue to hold an important place in the teaching of English.

This cursory comparison of English classrooms of two different generations has hinted at some of the things that remain constant, and other that change. A parallel survey of the texts that students once composed and now compose would reveal a similar pattern of constants and change. In the present era, students create texts using pen and paper, as did their counterparts in the fifties, but they also create texts in a range of modalities, using information communication technologies to combine the written, visual and spoken language.

Across the halfcentury, texts have retained their central place in English classrooms. But the nature of the texts is different, reflecting broad social, cultural, technological and educational changes, and the dynamics of curriculum development. The ways in which students now access texts have expanded beyond the technology of the book. The 20th century texts were not available to students in the fifties, but the texts read in the fifties might still find a place in classrooms, although they might be read not only for enjoyment, but more critically, and in a more global cultural context. Texts still contribute to essential learning in English, as they did in the 1950s. Some of the learnings that students derive from their encounters with these texts will resonate with what students learnt from texts fifty years ago, and some of what they learn will be shaped by the social and cultural context of the 21st century. New possibilities unfold as the world changes.

One of the strand working parties at the eighth conference of the International Federation for the Teaching of English, held in Melbourne in July 2003, took up issues relating to ‘Literacies in the 21st century’. The theme of this conference, ‘elsewheres of potential’ (borrowed from Seamus Heaney’s introduction to his translation of Beowulf) invited delegates to share new insights, and catch glimpses of future possibilities. These ‘elsewheres of potential’ offer many challenges. The ‘Literacies in the 21st century’ strand working party, in reporting to the final conference plenary session, identified the need for a ‘new dynamic and dialogic theory of the visual and verbal’, taking up the challenge of considering what the textual interplay of visual and verbal made possible by information communication technologies might mean.

The conversations that will engage teachers and their students in articulating new theories, including a theory of the visual and the verbal, will be complex, provocative and even daunting, but in the end, we will have once again incorporated changes into the study of texts in English. Undoubtedly texts will continue their central role in English classrooms, but new kinds of texts will create rich, as yet unimagined opportunities for students to learn from these texts.

References

Parker, EW (ed) (1950). The Poets’ Way: Stage 1, Longmans Green & Co Ltd, Melbourne.

Phillips, AA & Maxwell, I (eds) (1950). In Fealty to Apollo: An Anthology, Melbourne University Press.

Knobel, M & Lankshear, C (2003). ‘Planning pedagogy for imode: From flogging to blogging via wifi’, keynote presentation at IFTE, Melbourne, July 2003, published in a special joint issue of English in Australia, 139, and Literacy Learning: the Middle Years, 12.1, ALEA and AATE, Adelaide, February 2004.

Marion Meiers is a senior research fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research. She is a member of the national executive council of the Australian Literacy Educators’ Association.

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