Summer 2007

Teachers and Teaching

When Ivy met Les

Mark Howie explains the need for English teachers to rise above any criticisms, and allow their students opportunities to understand themselves and the world.

Renowned Australian ethicist Margaret Somerville begins her recent book, The Ethical Imagination, in arresting fashion: ‘Common humanity and universal responsibility link us. But much of the time we act as if this is not the case…’. Reading these lines I am struck by the thought that English teachers have an important role to play in promoting the ‘ethical imagination’: the sense that we share a common humanity and a universal responsibility for each other and the world around us. However, this is not an easy belief to articulate publicly, as the teaching of English in this country is now engulfed by vehement contestation.

Critics argue that English teachers have rejected tradition, Western values and aesthetics. The subject has been ‘dumbed down’ and made ‘politically correct’. The language of division and battle is readily employed in much of this commentary. As the Senate Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations and Education report Quality of school education notes, English ‘has been subject to considerable criticism, much of it…based on “culture wars” beliefs, and betraying an ignorance of the needs and interests of contemporary students’.

Ethics and English teaching

Despite the doubts of the commentariat, the idea that English is crucial to the ethical formation of students remains relevant. Influential figures in the subject’s history have long suggested that this is the essential function of English. FR Leavis believed it promotes ‘awareness of the possibilities of life’. John Dixon argued that in English and through their developing mastery of language, students learn to understand themselves and the world. More recently, Gunther Kress has suggested that English is about designing productive futures for individuals and their societies.

In keeping with Somerville’s emphasis on the importance of story telling to the ‘matrix of law’ that we ‘construct to define and defend our humanity’, I believe that the best way to answer criticisms of English is to share stories that highlight its ethical centre. In fact, it is beholden on teachers to do so. For, as Emmanuel Levinas reminds us in his thinking about ethics and the ‘face to face relationship’, whenever another looks at us, our responsibilities are for them. Various commentators and politicians are looking at me—and all English teachers—now, and I am answerable for what they say about my teaching, students and colleagues.

In sharing a story from my classroom, I give voice to an alternative understanding of my subject to the ‘culture wars’ view. Such advocacy is neither rabble rousing, nor being political when one shouldn’t. It is nothing less than a moral imperative, arising from the complex social relations in and through which I work. It is, in short, inevitably and necessarily part of my professional identity: ‘in being-for-the Other we find our ourselves’, as Brenton Doecke and Alex Kostogriz from Monash University have written in a recent paper about the development of teachers. I also see the following story—my story, Ivy’s story, our story — as a reminder of the contribution English makes to what Glyn Davis has, in praising the work of teachers in his Australia Day address A Different Kind of Hero, described as the great historic achievement of the nation: the creation of unity in difference and strength in diversity.

Ivy and Les

At first glance, Ivy, the youngest child of Vietnamese refugees, who has grown up in a less-than-affluent housing estate in Sydney’s outer western suburbs, does not have much in common with Les Murray, a self-confessed redneck poet and champion of the rural underclass, whose work has been described as having ‘played an important role in creating and sustaining [a] conservative nationalist mythology’. Divided by such differences as age, gender, and geography, one would not expect these two to be able to find much common ground. Yet, while they have never actually met in person, in the imaginative and ethical, the textual and linguistic ‘space’ offered by a year 11 English classroom, a compelling meeting of minds has taken place. (That this should be so is made all the more remarkable when you take into account the fact that Ivy was placed in remedial class in year 1. Fortunately, it was soon discovered that her limited English was responsible for her apparent slow progress, not a learning difficulty. By year 9 she had come first in the NSW and ACT division of a national English competition.)

At this point I take my leave and let Ivy’s words, taken from an essay she wrote at the start of year 11, tell the story of what happened when she met Les Murray. As you read on, I ask you to consider how and why it has come to pass that the nation’s English teachers are being represented as dangerous radicals, whose moral and intellectual relativism pose a threat to the cultural and political foundations of the nation. Only a blinkered ideologue could find any truth in the ‘culture wars’ criticisms of contemporary English teaching in Ivy’s thoughtful responses to Murray’s poems, and the sensitive way she writes about ideas relating to art, family, the land, tradition and the consequences of economic change.

Extract 1

In ‘The Year of the Kiln Portraits’, the image of a happy, loving family, deeply attuned to each other, is created by their continuing practice of art and music. Murray’s diction reflects the positive effects of engaging with the arts—the ‘time-freed’ tiles that are ‘developed in successive kiln firings’ mirror each successive generation’s contributions to art, ensuring its continuing relevance to all.

Extract 2

The structure of ‘The Year of the Kiln Portraits’ demonstrates the necessity of a connection to nature. In the first line, the person comes in from ‘planting more trees’, symbolising his strong link to nature and its continuous cycle of death and rebirth. From this fertile basis, the poem slowly grows to examine the importance of art and music, of immaterial values such as love and family…the structure conveys the essential role of nature, from which other ideas and concepts firmly take root.

Extract 3

‘Blowfly Grass’ provides an example of what can happen in the absence of connections to the past and tradition. In this empty town, populated only by ‘snapping’ machines and a few desperate people, Murray captures the quiet desperation of a community destroyed by the relentless demands of the modern world. Murray’s vivid imagery conveys a hellish picture of a ‘grimed’, ‘vacant’ suburb slowly sliding into a ‘pit’ created by a beast-like crusher, showing modernity’s corrosion of this once booming area…Murray shows that by blindly welcoming the advent and facile benefits of modern industry, the town is slowly consumed by it.

Extract 4

In the declining town, where the only natural features are the weeds and the stones cut from the earth to be crushed into ‘dust’, Murray focuses on the disconnection between the people and the pallid, pitted land. Humans are reliant on the natural world, both in an aesthetic, almost spiritual sense, and more tangibly to sustain life. As the health of the natural environment fails, so too does the health of the human population. The girl, ‘cropped and wrong coloured like a chemist’s photo crying’, captures the distortion resulting from being raised in this violently scarred, sickly environment.

Mark Howie is head teacher of English at Penrith High School, NSW, and president-elect of The Australian Association for the Teaching of English.

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