The Art of Teaching Secondary English

Innovative and Creative Approaches

Nicholas McGuinn, David Stevens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134426614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

At a time when school-based English is in danger of becoming reductive and mechanistic, the authors of this book reconsider the fundamental philosophy of English teaching, evaluate current practice and offer a practical framework for new approaches to teaching this important subject.

The authors draw on recent initiatives in the area, including the National Literacy Strategy, but also offer wider perspectives on the formation and development of both English and English teaching in a modern society. This will help teachers develop both a personal philosophy and a critical perspective on the various traditions of English teaching as well as on current initiatives and reforms. The book includes:

• provocative quotations from writers, artists and thinkers
• responses to key figures in modern educational thought
• exploration and development of the principle areas, illuminating key issues, tensions and opportunities
• practical possibilities for classroom practice.

The Art of Teaching Secondary English is a practical and accessible resource for everyone involved in English teaching.

1 The arts of English teaching

I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.
William Blake, from ‘Jerusalem’

Even more than usual, writing this book is no easy matter. Secondary-level English teaching in England and Wales at the start of the twenty-first century appears to be in a state of some confusion. In our experience, its practitioners often feel beset by internal philosophical and practical divisions, and by externally formulated governmental and quasi-governmental policies and targets. In the context of this book especially, offering an essentially Romantic conception of the nature of English teaching and learning, there arise particularly contentious – and fiercely contested – assertions, issues and tensions.

The vast majority of practising English teachers and student teachers continue to be drawn to creative, inspirational models of English teaching, as underlined by recent research (Marshall 2000; Marshall et al. 2001), and by countless professional conversations with practising and preparing English teachers. Yet, it is precisely these pedagogical models which are frequently perceived to be under threat in what may be seen as an overcrowded, over-prescribed, over-tested curriculum overly focused on basic literacy. As Ellis (2002: 1) puts it:

The prodigious volume of initiatives, frameworks, standards, audits, skills tests, performance indicators and all the other monstrous paraphernalia of a technocratic, accountability-obsessed bureaucracy have truly destructive effects; they sap teachers’ creative energies, they regard the teaching of reading and writing as a science (in which we can guarantee exactly what effect X or Y will have on children) and they disengage individual teachers from a community of shared knowledge and values . . . that gives us a sense of purpose and an identity.

Whether this kind of perception is justified – and if so in what ways and how much – is part of the purpose of this book. Our larger intention is to formulate and demonstrate positive theoretical and practical responses to the current climate, building on diverse but complementary approaches to the arts of English teaching. In other words, to find ways of remaining creatively engaged with English teaching while working with – or on occasion subverting – the various initiatives handed down to us. We are essentially concerned with re-positioning English, and certainly not with replacing it: on the contrary, as we experience more and more complex issues of language and meaning across fast-multiplying textual genres, more than ever the subject should be seen as the centrepiece of the curriculum.

So much depends on our overall aims as English teachers: what exactly are our overarching intentions in the classroom and beyond? Beyond the establishment of basic, functional literacy (and even this notion is complicated and contentious), what kind of education are we offering to tomorrow’s adult citizens? The particular social, linguistic, technological, intercultural complexities of life at the start of the twenty-first century make for a certain urgency in at least reflecting on tentative responses to these questions. The National Curriculum (DfEE 1999) itself, in its all too often ignored preamble presenting ‘Values, Aims and Purposes’, is interesting in this context. Following a statement of fundamental values, the document goes on to elaborate on two basic aims: the first, dealing with opportunities to learn and achieve, concludes that: ‘the curriculum should enable pupils to think creatively and critically . . . to make a difference for the better. It should give them the opportunity to become creative, innovative, enterprising and capable of leadership’.

The second aim endorses spiritual, moral, social and cultural education, including the development of pupils’ ‘knowledge, understanding and appreciation of their own and different beliefs and cultures, and how these influence individuals and societies’ (DfEE/QCA 1999: 11).

Statements such as these are rich with significance for English teaching and, legally and ethically, lie at the very heart of the curriculum. In terms of creativity, critical thinking and intercultural understanding they also provide important principles for the present book.

But issues like these are certainly not new. The English poet and prose writer Thomas Traherne (1637–1674), for example, described both the opportunities and limitations of his own highly privileged Oxford education. In one of the autobiographical sections of his seminal work, Centuries, Traherne discusses these contradictions; having initially paid tribute to the breadth of learning possible at this august university,

Nevertheless some things were defective too. There was never a tutor that did professly teach Felicity, though that be the mistress of all other sciences. Nor did any of us study those things but as aliena, which we ought to have studied as our enjoyments. We studied to inform our knowledge but knew not for what end we so studied. And for lack of aiming at a certain end we erred in the manner.

(Century 3, 37)

So, for Traherne, mere knowledge without a strong sense of purpose is clearly insufficient: it leaves people unrealised, unsatisfied, seventeenth-century Oxford students of divinity or twenty-first-century teachers and learners of English, perhaps, alike. The relevance is striking, if the terminology perhaps unfamiliar. Traherne’s notion of ‘felicity’ is the full, active and celebratory enjoyment of life: his vision of the world is powerfully child-like and profoundly personal; and yet it espouses the potential of others too, precisely because of its subjectivity:

You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea tself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.

(Century 1, 29, my italics)

That a sense of wonder at the nature of existence may be combined with a strongly critical and reflective standpoint, and that both these distanced positions may complement active, engaged immersion in teaching and learning, are key ideas of this book. In effect, this is what the notion of felicity means in the context of the twenty-first century. The implications of these combinations will be explored in a range of contexts, helping to illuminate the particular issues involved in the teaching of English as a native language. One tension being explored here is that between engaged involvement on the one hand, and critical, reflective distance on the other. As a traditional Sufi saying advises: ‘be in the world, not of the world’. In a sense, of course, this tension is at the heart of any creative act, any artistic endeavour – and it is our contention that teaching – of English in this instance – is, essentially, an art. Ideally, the sense of involvement is the powerful motivating force in teaching and learning, and the sense of critical distance leads to greater understanding. Both are essential. And both derive their power, broadly, from a Romantic position. The purpose is critically to challenge prejudice – even when it is effectively prejudice couched in the everyday language of ‘common sense’, just as the scientific discipline of sociology, for example, seeks to deconstruct and question common-sense views about the nature of individuals and society. In this sense, the subject English is especially significant, beyond the generic concerns of teaching and learning which affect all disciplines, in its sharp focus on language – how it both expresses and conceals meaning, often simultaneously. For, as Wittgenstein (in Kenny 1994: 24) reminded us, ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’, but that word ‘limits’ is, itself, a slippery one, contentious and open to various interpretations. In an important sense – certainly important for the intentions of the English classroom – for ‘limits’ we could read ‘infinite possibilities of meaning’, for that is precisely how language operates.

Broad notions – of awe and wonder on the one hand, and of critical, evaluative distance on the other – were taken up a century or so after Traherne’s time by many of the Romantics, although it is the former position that has come widely to characterise Romanticism. As Abbs has noted (1976: 5), the very roots of English as a subject are embedded in ‘the tougher side of Romanticism’ – the celebratory and the critical complementing each other – and it seems timely now to re-establish, and develop, this foundation. The important principle is in the discovery and in the making of meaning. In this context, subjectivity (the intensely personal) and objectivity (the social and cultural context which enables meanings to be explored and found) should be held to be mutually beneficial rather than mutually exclusive as is often, and damagingly, supposed. An important principle in the English classroom is that of ‘informed subjectivity’: an acknowledgement – a celebration, indeed – that we are dealing with complex relationships between subjectivities, but that this has to be carefully balanced by rigorously gathered and sensitively applied information concerning broader contexts – what might be commonly understood as ‘objective’ reality. Kress (1995: 90) shows a subtle awareness of the creative possibilities here:

In a view of English as central in the making of a culture of innovation the production of subjectivity is at the centre, between social and cultural possibilities and forces on the one hand – available resources, structures of power – and the individual’s action in the making of signs on the other . . . [the child’s] interest in the making of signs may range from dispositions called ‘conformity’ to those called ‘resistance’ . . . Whether in solidarity or subversion, the child’s own production of her representational resources is intimately connected, in a relation of reciprocity, with her production of her subjectivity.

This kind of formulation does, indeed, amount to a tough side of Romanticism, especially if we enlarge the illuminating focus to include the English teacher as well as the English taught. The author John Fowles has suggested something similar, furthering the connection between teaching and any artistic project:

All artefacts please and teach the artist first, and other people later. The pleasing and teaching come from the explanation of self by the expression of self; by seeing the self, and all the selves in the whole self, in the mirror of what the self created.

(Fowles 1981: 146)

This is not a justification for self-indulgence in teaching: far from it, it is, rather, an argument for pride in engagement with the noble profession. Unless the processes of teaching and learning may be seen in this sort of perspective, there is the distinct and very real danger that teachers – and by implication learners too – may become merely functionaries, alienated – in the Marxist sense to be explored later, and particularly with reference to ICT in Chapter 6 – from the essential nature of their activity.

Many in the teaching profession, in our experience, are acutely aware of this danger. Rex Gibson has characterised it as essentially ‘a structure of feeling’, although it clearly has its foundation in the realities of politically motivated educational legislation. If it is indeed a structure of feeling – like Blake’s ‘mind forg’d manacles’ in his similarly radical critique of contemporary society, the poem London – it is all the more insidious and, therefore, dangerous. Structures of feeling tend to become deeply embedded, and take some shifting. Gibson went on to analyse this tendency as ‘instrumental rationality’. As such, it

signifies a preoccupation with ‘How to do it?’ questions rather than with questions of ‘Why do it?’ or ‘Where are we going?’. It is thus concerned with means rather than ends, with efficiency more than with consideration of purposes. In schools one manifestation is a stress on management and organisation at the expense of consideration of ‘What is education for?’.

(Gibson 1984: 83)

All this amounts to a potentially disastrous, alienating and dichotomous separation of means and ends, of activity and purpose, with the process spawning its own dubious justification and particular – often impenetrable – rationality. Maybe all this sounds only too familiar for those professionally engaged in education, and this realisation can, itself, be rather debilitating. But, perhaps, precisely through a principled awareness of this precarious situation, there could be something far more positive at stake here: an awakened appreciation of the possibility of a new synthesis between the functional aspects of the subject English and its creative facets, based on a radical re-interpretation of the Romantic foundations of English teaching. Any such synthesis, however, has to be rigorously grounded in good practice and carefully reflective thought.

This is not to suggest that all we need to do to avoid the trap of instrumental rationality is to reconsider and clarify our original aims in the teaching of English. The relationship between means and ends is at once more complex, more subtle, and more potentially exciting than that. In practice, aims and activities inform and constantly modify each other, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes – rather more often, perhaps – in terms of struggle for coherent meaning-in-practice. The process is best seen as a dialectical one, with the meanings of teaching and learning constantly renewing themselves through praxis. Unavoidable in this context, as it determines the real possibilities of teaching and learning, is the culture of the classroom. As for other forms of culture, the term is complex and contentious, but its manifestations lie at the heart of English teaching. Many of the broader implications, especially along the lines of interculturality, will be explored subsequently. Some consideration, however, ought to take place right away – not least because it is often claimed by English teachers that the culture of the English classroom (the microcosmic notion of culture, in effect) is unlike that of any other subject classroom, and that English is fundamentally concerned with the transmission or mediation of particular models of culture (in its macrocosmic sense, ranging from notions of ‘high culture’ to multicultural ideas). As Eagleton has pointed out in his important consideration of the nature of culture (Eagleton 2000), the term is often considered in opposition to an equally complex, slippery term – ‘nature’ – which from this rather narrowly conceived ‘cultural heritage’ viewpoint may be likened to the pupils themselves.

So, underlying much of what is generally understood as education, especially in the particular context of schooling, is precisely this sort of binary opposition, where the raw material of the classroom – pupils in their untaught state, in effect – correspond to ‘nature’, to be modified – taught – by those representing, in some form or other, ‘culture’. Eagleton, though, cuts into this all too familiar notion of culture, noting that

Within this single term, questions of freedom and determinism, agency and endurance, change and identity, the given and the created, come dimly into focus. If culture means the active tending of natural growth, then it suggests a dialectic between the artificial and the natural, what we do to the world and what the world does to us. . . . So it is less a matter of deconstructing the opposition between culture and nature than of recognising that the term ‘culture’ is already such a deconstruction.

(Eagleton 2000: 2)

As far as the English classroom is concerned, the matter is significant, and centres on notions of empowerment. Perhaps the cardinal rule of effective, adventurous English teaching is to recognise, develop and celebrate what is already there in the classroom, inevitably, as embodied in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Arts of English Teaching
• 2. Romantically Linked: Notions of Creativity
• 3. Romantic Words and Worlds
• 4 The Challenge of ‘Instrumental Rationality’
• 5. ‘Taking the Mind to Other Things’: Romanticism and the New Technologies
• 6. Romantic Culture and the Intercultural Imperative
• Notes
• Bibliography