Introduction

Abstract

Among other things, Applebee noted that there was "a need to reconceptualise the "literary heritage" and its implications for patterns of teaching'; that any such rethinking had to involve "prior assumptions about the nature and purpose of education'; and that a proper relation between learning about literature and acquiring certain communicative skills, such as grammar, was hard to establish because 'we know too little about fostering the kind of development we seem to cherish"! [...]the resulting pattern of change may well be unclear to many a practising teacher, preoccupied with more than enough urgent day-to-day matters, From all the research, the reflection, the trial and error of experimentation, what now emerges? In my own teaching - whether of five-yearolds, of postgraduates, or of students at any intervening stage between those poles of our formal education system - 1 have found that very similar pedagogic issues arise right through the scale. 1 do not believe that leading a discussion with first-graders of Munro Leafs The Stary of Ferdinand is a fundamentally different experience from annotating a draft chapter of a Ph.D thesis on Wordsworth's Prelude. For the most part this interconnectedness is not based on suppositions about sequential or 'spiral' learning; to study literature is not, in any substantial sense, to acquire a body of knowledge - either step by step or turning and turning in a widening gyre - as in French or mathematics· More and more information, to be sure, is progressively brought to each exchange of meanings, but this is seldom the kind of information that can be transmitted piecemeal in the classroom and consolidated in formal increments, No - fundamentally, a literary education remains, even at postgraduate level, the same kind of thing it was in infant school: a collaborative enterprise of creating significance through language, as reader and as writer, as speaker and as listener.

It is a decade since the appearance of Arthur Applebee's historical survey, Tradition and reform in the teaching of English. Although the particular episodes and evolutions that Applebee recounts are embedded within a North American context, his 'Afterword' on 'the problems remaining" would have struck a chord of recognition for any Australian teacher of English in the mid-1970s. Among other things, Applebee noted that there was "a need to reconceptualise the "literary heritage" and its implications for patterns of teaching'; that any such rethinking had to involve "prior assumptions about the nature and purpose of education'; and that a proper relation between learning about literature and acquiring certain communicative skills, such as grammar, was hard to establish because 'we know too little about fostering the kind of development we seem to cherish"! Anyone involved in English teaching at any level during the period since then knows that real progress has been made towards a solution of those problems. Discoveries in classrooms, in conferences, in research projects, have clarified considerably the aims and methods of literary studies. But the resulting pattern of change may well be unclear to many a practising teacher, preoccupied with more than enough urgent day-to-day matters, From all the research, the reflection, the trial and error of experimentation, what now emerges?

My attempt here is to draw together into a personal synthesis some implications of a broad range of recent theoretical and practical work in this large held. Some readers may well think that most of the directions 1 indicate are not remarkably new. In few areas of the teaching profession is there such diversity of attitudes as in literary studies; what 1s breathtakingly innovative to one person will seem very old hat to another. In describing the synthesis as personal 1 don't claim great originality for it but wish rather to acknowledge a perspective that is neither omniscient nor neutral. While I've drawn fairly widely on the inquiries and findings of others, this Е! cal wi lgitraliny 11 11 UUL WIDI LALLCI LU an WC a perspective that is neither omniscient nor neutral. While I've drawn fairly widely on the inquiries and findings of others, this book is no onlookers's digest. One's own experiences are always partial, one's convictions always presumptuous, Mine colour everything here - brightly, I hope, but at any rate unapologetically, -

A few preliminary indications, now, of the scope of the chapters that follow. If this is to be about rethinking the entire literary curriculum, what will be my working concepts of 'literature' and 'curriculum', and on what basis do I speak about primary, secondary and tertiary levels of education collectively?

"Literature": in brief, my argument will be that this has to be seen, in the light of current reappraisals, as a much more inclusive category than one could guess by looking at (say) Matriculation or Higher School Certificate course descriptions. Reasons for taking this view will be put forward in detail in chapter |; all 1 need-point out now as a prelude is that the very idea of enlarging our concept of literature implies an antiessentialist stance. That is to say, it seems to be quite plain that there 15 no fixed perennial set of criteria by which item X always qualifies as literary while item Z never does. Literature is something that we make - and "we" include not only authors but also readers and institutions. This doesn't mean that the term is indistinguishable from writing or verbal communication in general: obviously we apply 'literature' to acts of verbal communication that are widely valued. But values are always altering. Terry Eagleton sums up the matter succinctly:

Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature - Shakespeare, for example - can cease to be literature. Any belief that the study of literature is the study of a stable, well definable entity, as entymology is the study of sects, can be abandoned as a chimera . . . Literature. in the sense of a set of warks of assured and unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist...

"Value" is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes.?

I shall be proposing that there is good reason for teachers of literature in the 1980s to recognise value in a wider range of writings (and associated forms) than has traditionally been recognised,

As for the question of what constitutes a curriculum, let me confine myself at this early stage to a few broad assertions of principle. I believe that attempts to define a curriculum as if it were simply a programme of things-to-be-studied are bound to be utterly inadequate to the complex demands of any learning situation. 'Presented instructional content' (to quote one quaint formulation)? is not equivalent to 'curriculum', for the latter should include not only the what of learning but the how and the why as well. Aims and methods are inseparable from content. No doubt this is always so, in a sense, with any 'subject' or field of study. But it is especially important for literature, where language is the medium for materials studied as well as for the process of studying.

Much of the attention in this book will be directed towards upper secondary and undergraduate curricula. because it is there that literature as such is most elaborately demarcated. But what I have to say seems broadly applicable at all levels, We are in little danger of ignoring the steady drizzle of expert pronouncements about phases of cognitive growth; it's mare likely that we defer to them unduly. In my own teaching - whether of five-yearolds, of postgraduates, or of students at any intervening stage between those poles of our formal education system - 1 have found that very similar pedagogic issues arise right through the scale. 1 do not believe that leading a discussion with first-graders of Munro Leafs The Stary of Ferdinand is a fundamentally different experience from annotating a draft chapter of a Ph.D thesis on Wordsworth's Prelude. Certainly the complexity gap is huge. But in each case the focus should be on exchanges of meaning that occur through the medium of the text: there is what the author transacts with the reader, and - mediating that exchange - there is also what teachers and students transact among themselves. (As notions of 'exchange' will be developed at length in chapter 2, I shall not pause to expound them now.) Some matters discussed in the following pages will have specific application to one level of the education system rather than another; but in my view examples from the primary school ought to be seen as ultimately relevant to tertiary institutions, examples from university courses should have a bearing on the secondary classroom, and so on. For the most part this interconnectedness is not based on suppositions about sequential or 'spiral' learning; to study literature is not, in any substantial sense, to acquire a body of knowledge - either step by step or turning and turning in a widening gyre - as in French or mathematics· More and more information, to be sure, is progressively brought to each exchange of meanings, but this is seldom the kind of information that can be transmitted piecemeal in the classroom and consolidated in formal increments, No - fundamentally, a literary education remains, even at postgraduate level, the same kind of thing it was in infant school: a collaborative enterprise of creating significance through language, as reader and as writer, as speaker and as listener.

Running through this book is a polemical opposition between two models of literary study, which I label 'the Gallery' and 'the Workshop." Although the former is to some extent a convenient caricature, its real life manifestations are all 100 much with us in many established curricula. The Workshop, on the other hand, which has my partisan support, designates a cluster of emergent reforms and impulses towards reform. I am conscious that to some people my use of these polarised models may seem crudely and mischievously combative. Certainly 1 acknowledge that, as Bill Green puts it in the course of a generally favourable commentary on an earlier version of my first chapter, some-of what [ say is 'open to challenge on the grounds that it unfairly compartmentalises processes that are often complex, ambiguous and contradictory in actual classrooms. My justification is that the issues are urgent enough, and the reactionary pressures entrenched enough, to require a provocatively vehement intervention. There seems little point in hedging one's views with such cautious qualifications that they lose their challenge. In sharpening the contrast, then, between two distinguishable inclinations in what teachers think about literature, I hope to make it quite clear what important differences of principle are at stake, without denying that in practice these seldom range themselves so neatly into opposite camps,

Teachers familiar with John Dixon's Growth through English (1967) will recognise some similarities between my Gallery versus Workshop rhetoric and Dixon's dichotomy of a 'cultural heritage' model and a "personal growth' model. Much that Dixon had to say is still pertinent today, and 1 have not hesitated to restate some of it. But as lan Hansen has recently reminded us, Dixon's formulation of those two models is no longer entirely satisfactory, 'for the simple reason that the world is a different place from what it was in the 1960s'. Words such as heritage and personal, he points out, have undergone semantic shifts that can bring them into closer relationship." Dixon himself, in the concluding chapter added to a third (1975) edition of his book. candidly admits this and pushes the historical perspective | further, recognising the greater salience during the late sixties and early seventies of such vexed problems as 'coercive authority and inescapable subordination." This postscript shifts Dixon's emphasis nearer to my own. At any rate, the 'Gallery' represents a larger cluster of attitudes than simply respect for a "cultural heritage', and the ·Workshop' is less concerned with 'personal growth" than with interpersonal exchange.

In chapter I my main concern is to show that this Workshop mode represents an integrative principle vis-a-vis the what of curricular questions, while in chapter 2 the emphasis shifts to showing that the Workshop represents an interactive principle vis-a-vis the how and why. Baldly stated, these terms are mere slogans; the ensuing detail will, I hope, make them cogent, Chapter 3 focuses particularly on what appears to me to be a besetting problem in literary studies: the persistence of restrictive assumptions about textual 'unity'. Chapter 4 tries to face certain awkward practical questions for the would-be reformer: questions of educational politics, questions of sheer feasibility. As always, when all the talk about what ought to be done has subsided, it remains to be seen what can be done.

Footnote

NOTES

1Arthur N. Applebee, Tradition and reform in the teaching of English: a history (Urbana, Illinois, N.C. T.E., 1974), pp. 247, 252, 254.

2Terry Eagleton, Literary theory: an introduction (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 10-11.

3 Quoted from Elizabeth Maccia by Denis Lawton, Social change, educational theory and curriculum planning (London, University of London Press, 1973), p.11.

4 On "spiral curricula" and 'sequential programs", see Jerome S. Bruner, The process of education (N.Y., Vintage Books, 1963), pp. 52-4, 82.

5"Lifelines: on literature, classrooms and community - a conference report', in Life in literature/literature in life, ed. Bill Green (proceedings of a joint conference of the Western Australia English Teachers" Association, Perth 1983), р. 6. In my keynote address to that conference, also printed in the proceedings, I used the term 'Studio' for what I now prefer to call "Workshop:

6 'Strategies in English teaching: which leg first", in New essays in the reaching of literature, ed. David Mallick, Peter Moss and lan Hansen (proceedings of the Literature Commission, 3rd international conference on the teaching of English, Sydney 1980; published A.A.T.E. 1982), p. 172.

7 Growth through English: set in the perspective of the seventies (3rd edn; NATE. and O.U.P., 1975), р. 111. I was unaware of this revised edition with Dixon's postscript until after drafting this present book.