Debates in English Teaching

Jon Davison, Caroline Daly, Jon Davison, Caroline Daly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429015625
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Debates in English Teaching explores the major issues all English teachers encounter daily in their professional lives. Written by leading experts in the field, the chapters bring together theoretical knowledge and contemporary perspectives to offer fresh insight into the most salient debates in the field of English teaching.

The book supports critical reflection and will help both novice and experienced teachers to reach informed judgements and argue their point of view with deeper theoretical knowledge and understanding. This second edition has been fully updated throughout and features four new chapters. Key debates covered include:

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• Literacy and social class

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• English and difference

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• Digital literacy

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• English and mental wellbeing

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• Reading for pleasure

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• The literary canon

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• The importance of the media and new technologies

With its combination of expert opinion and fresh insight, Debates in English Teaching is an ideal companion for all student and practising teachers engaged in initial training, continuing professional development and master's level study.

Chapter 1

Literacy and social class

Jon Davison

Benjamin Disraeli’s description of society in Sybil or The Two Nations is now nearly two centuries’ old, but it resonates uncannily with contemporary life in the United Kingdom:

Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets ….

(Disraeli, 1845: 66)

The foreword of the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) Report State of the Nation 2017: Social Mobility in Great Britain opens with the following:

Britain is a deeply divided nation. Those divisions take many forms. Class, income, gender, race. In recent years, each has been subject to much scrutiny…There is a fracture line running deep through our labour and housing markets and our education system. Those on the wrong side of this divide are losing out and falling behind.

(SMC, 2017: iii)

Shortly after the publication of the SMC Report in November 2017, the Chair, Alan Milburn, resigned in December 2017 because of the ‘lack of progress towards a fairer Britain’ (Independent, 3 December 2017). In his letter to Prime Minister Teresa May, Milburn stated his reasons for resignation:

For almost a decade, I have been proud to serve under Labour, Coalition and Conservative governments in social mobility roles. I remain deeply committed to the issue, but I have little hope of the current government making the progress I believe necessary to bring about a fairer Britain. It seems unable to commit to the future of the Commission as an independent body or to give due priority to the social mobility challenge facing our nation.

(Independent, 3 December 2017)

Shortly afterwards, the entire Board of the Social Mobility Commission resigned.

In 2018, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) Report UK Poverty 2018 noted ‘Four million workers live in poverty, a rise of half a million over five years. In-work poverty has been rising even faster than employment, driven almost entirely by increasing poverty among working parents’ (JRF, 2018: 3).

An extensive and extremely detailed Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom by United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Philip Alston, endorsed the SMC and JRF reports. Among the conclusions on the current state of the UK, Professor Alston notes:

The experience of the United Kingdom, especially since 2010, underscores the conclusion that poverty is a political choice. Austerity could easily have spared the poor, if the political will had existed to do so. Resources were available to the Treasury at the last budget that could have transformed the situation of millions of people living in poverty, but the political choice was made to fund tax cuts for the wealthy instead.

(Alston, 2018: 22)

The SMC Report states, ‘There is a stark social mobility postcode lottery divide in our country today’ (SMC, 2017: iv). Consistently, academic attainment tends to be low in schools with high proportions of pupils from low-income homes: ‘In 2001, only a fifth of pupils in schools with the poorest intakes achieved five GCSE passes at grades A*–C, compared with 50% nationally’ (Lupton, 2004). Poor examination results at the end of secondary schooling preclude the opportunity to engage in further and higher education by attending college or university. UK Government figures produced in 1991 showed that only 5% of children from skilled manual home backgrounds attended university and despite a claimed 30% increase in access to university, in 1998 only approximately 5% of those at university came from the poorest post-coded areas (Halsey, 1998). And, like the SMC Report, data in The Widening Socio-Economic Gap in UK Higher Education shows that, far from improving, matters continued to get worse:

… the gap between rich and poor, in terms of HE participation, widened during the 1990s. Children from poor neighbourhoods have become relatively less likely to participate in HE since 1994/5, as compared to children from richer neighbourhoods.

(Galindo-Rueda et al., 2004)

In 1987, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher stated in an interview, ‘there is no such thing as society’ (Sunday Times, 10 July 1988), while ten years later New Labour Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott claimed ‘We’re all middle class now’ (Financial Times, 10 August 2010). In the Twenty-first Century it has become unfashionable to discuss social class and education: as is seen in the coalition Prime Minister David Cameron’s comment on the Today Programme, ‘I think this country has moved beyond class and all that sort of stuff’ (BBC, 7 January 2010). There appears to be an underlying assumption that it is now passé to do so: the debate has moved on; social class is an irrelevance.

However, despite the inception of a National Curriculum in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 1990, designed to ensure an equal curricular entitlement for all pupils, children from working-class backgrounds have continued to underachieve compared to children of the middle classes. ‘Parental background continues to exert a significant influence on the academic progress of recent generations of children’ (Blanden and Machin, 2007: 4). Furthermore, for ten years from 1997 the New Labour Government’s Widening Access and Increasing Participation initiative aimed at reaching a target of 50% university attendance from all social groups, but;

Inequalities in degree acquisition meanwhile persist across different income groups. While 44 per cent of young people from the richest 20 per cent of households acquired a degree in 2002, only 10 per cent from the poorest 20 per cent of households did so.

(Blanden and Machin, 2007: 3)

This chapter explores some of the reasons for educational achievement and the role that the teaching of English has played in promoting success or creating failure in pupils. A second aim of this chapter is to consider the importance of discursive practice in the social construction of knowledge and the need to make educational discourses visible to pupils. Finally, the chapter argues the need for developing in pupils an empowering literacy.

Cultural capital and cultural reproduction

The terms ‘cultural capital’ and ‘cultural reproduction’ stem from the work of Bourdieu (see for example Bourdieu, 2007). Bourdieu proposes that different social groups have different ‘cultural capital’, which may be seen as the knowledge, experience and connections an individual has and develops over time that enable a person to succeed more so than someone with knowledge, experience and connections that is seen in society as being of less value. Further, particular groups of people, notably social classes, act to reproduce the existing social structure in order to legitimate and preserve their social and cultural advantage.

Put simply, cultural reproduction is the process through which existing cultural values and norms are transmitted from generation to generation thereby ensuring continuity of cultural experience across time. Cultural reproduction, therefore, often results in ‘social reproduction’ – the process through which facets of society, such as class, are transferred from generation to generation.

Education as an agent of cultural reproduction

Dominant social and cultural groups have been able to establish their language, and their knowledge priorities, learning styles, pedagogical preferences, etc., as the ‘official examinable culture’ of school. Their notions of important and useful knowledge, their ways of presenting truth, their ways of arguing and establishing correctness, and their logics, grammars and language as institutional norms by which academic and scholastic success is defined and assessed.

(Lankshear, 1987: 30)

Brown (1973), Bourdieu (1973) and Bowles and Gintis (1976) propose that it is the stratification of school knowledge that reproduces inequalities in cultural capital. Bourdieu argues that the structural reproduction of disadvantages and inequalities is caused by cultural reproduction and is recycled through the education system, as well as through other social institutions. The education system, therefore, is an agent of cultural reproduction biased towards those of higher social class, not only in the curricular content of subjects taught, but also through what is known as the ‘hidden curriculum’, which includes the language, values and attitudes located in, and which an individual acquires from, the discourse of curricular subjects and all aspects of school life that contribute to an individual’s socialisation through the education process. An individual’s success or failure within the formal education system is determined by the ability to achieve formal educational qualifications and to acquire the appropriate language, values, attitudes and qualities through the process of socialisation within the system. The ability to complete successfully all aspects of schooling correlates strongly to an individual’s capacity subsequently to enjoy high cultural capital such as inter alia, adequate pay, occupational prestige and social status in adult life.

The chapter will now consider some of the perceived specific causes of educational underachievement related to social class.

Social class and underachievement

In the latter half of the Twentieth Century a variety of aspects of school life were examined in order to identify the causes of pupil underachievement, such as access, institutional structures and the nature of school knowledge. For example, Hargreaves (1967), Lacey (1970) and Ball (1981) cited the institutional structures of schools, such as streaming and banding, as being influential in determining the performance of working-class pupils: a disproportionate number of whom were found to be represented in the lower streams and bands.

It is well-documented that, despite the intentions of Education Acts from 1944 to 1988, children from the working class in the UK continued to underachieve at school. The need for ‘11 plus’ testing was created by the 1944 Education Act, which proposed the establishment of a tripartite system of secondary schooling comprising ‘modern’, ‘technical’ and ‘grammar’ schools. Success or failure in the ‘11 plus’ determined the type of school an individual attended. Floud et al. (1966) exposed massive underrepresentation of working-class boys at grammar schools. The ‘11 plus’ examination included an Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test (see below). Douglas (1964) showed how working-class pupils with the same IQ scores as middle-class children were failing to gain grammar school places, because of the class bias of teachers in primary schools.

Of equal concern is how both working-class and middle-class girls were institutionally discriminated against in the ‘11 plus’ examination. It is now well known that the ‘11 plus’ examination scores of all girls were adjusted down because they were far outstripping boys’ achievement. Thousands of girls who passed the ‘11 plus’ and should have, therefore, attended grammar schools were prevented from doing so because their scores were downgraded. It was feared that all grammar schools were otherwise going to be filled with far more girls than boys (see The Report of the Task Group on Assessment and Testing (TGAT) (DES, 1987: 40–53) for a discussion of these issues in relation to the establishment of the National Curriculum).

The ‘11 plus’ and IQ tests were criticised for a middle-class bias in their content, their use of middle-class cultural references, their vocabulary and language register. The ‘11 plus’ was seen as culturally biased towards the middle-class children (for example a question might be related to classical composers, something a middle-class child would be more likely to answer correctly than would a child from the working class because of social and cultural differences in their home backgrounds):

…within societies like our own there is a tendency for forms of literacy to prevail which effectively maintain patterned inequalities of power within the social structure.

(Lankshear, 1987: 79–80)

Additionally, in Class, codes and control Basil Bernstein (1971) showed marked differences in the language use of members of different social classes, with middle-class children having access in their language to a more formal ‘elaborated code’ while working-class language was characterised as operating within a simple ‘restricted code’. However, many researchers including Trudgill (1974), Boocook (1980) and Bennett and LeCompte (1990) criticised Bernstein as a proponent of ‘deficit theory’, which;

…implies that the academically successful really are smarter, ready to engage in a discourse capable of expressing ‘universal meaning’, eschewing the fragmentation and ‘logical simplicity’ of the underclass… In such a society, the oppressed are required to climb the ladder of ‘equal opportunity’. The higher they get, the more they resemble the oppressors and the more their efforts are rewarded.

(MacSwan and McLaren, 1997: 334–340)

For Ball et al. (1990), Gee (1991) and Lankshear (1987, 1997) the challenge for those who would wish to address such issues lies in the development of an alternative to the dominant model of English and in inculcating a ‘proper’ literacy that will empower pupils.

Social class and educational policy-makers

If there are such determinants that militate against success of working-class children in the education system, how were these structures and systems put in place? The answer, of course, is that they are, inter alia, the results of a combination of national and local education policy, which is espoused in the discourse of dominant social and cultural groups.

The quotation earlier from Colin Lankshear et al.’s Changing Literacies (1997: 30) states that dominant social and cultural groups have been able to establish the ‘official examinable culture of school’. However, he goes on to say that the determination of the official examinable culture of the school by dominant social and cultural groups is not necessarily a conscious process and far less a conspiracy:

It is simply what tends to happen, with the result that discourse and discourses of dominant groups become those which dominate education, and become established as major legitimate routes to securing social goods (like wealth and status).

(Lankshear et al., 1997: 30)

The Board of Education

For Gossman (1981: 82), state education, introduced by the 1870 Education Act (The Forster Act), was ‘advocated in a hard-headed way as a means of social control’ and an examination of Twentieth Centu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Literacy and social class
• 2. English and difference
• 3. Unable to go it alone: re-stating the case for a strengthened English/media relationship
• 4. Reading and writing media texts: critical digital literacy in the making
• 5. Literacy and mental wellbeing
• 6. Creativity in English learning and teaching
• 7. Reading for pleasure: challenges and opportunities
• 8. Wheeling out the big guns: the literary canon in the English classroom
• 9. Living language, live debates: grammar and Standard English
• 10. Embedding a dialogic pedagogy in the teaching of English
• 11. Teacher research in English classrooms: questions that are worth asking?
• Bibliography
• Index