Knowledge in English

Canon, Curriculum and Cultural Literacy

Victoria Elliott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000299069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Focusing on a key area of debate within the world of secondary English, the 'knowledge-based curriculum', this book explores in detail the question of knowledge in the teaching of English in secondary schools, drawing on specific concrete cases and a range of academic theories. Knowledge in English also investigates how to teach both facts and skills through the required texts to produce a balanced educational experience.

Elliott brings together classic texts with contemporary knowledge and viewpoints to critically examine teaching in the English literature classroom, and situates them within the broader cultural and political context. The book includes discussions on race and gender in texts, Shakespeare and his influence, facts and emotions in poetry, and reading experiences.

Knowledge in English is a foundational and accessible guide for researchers, practitioners, teacher educators and teachers around the world. It is a valuable resource for those involved in the English curriculum to keep the subject relevant and useful to students in the contemporary classroom.

1

INTRODUCTION

The ‘knowledge turn’ and ‘facts’ in English

In recent years the curriculum in England, and more broadly, has been undergoing a ‘knowledge turn’ (Lambert, 2011) – a shift towards a focus on knowledge over skills and preparing workers for the ‘knowledge economy’ (Lauder et al., 2012) – which has reached its peak in the reform of the English schools inspectorate’s framework for inspection. Ofsted is now most interested in curriculum and in the provision of knowledge to students. ‘The end result of a good, well-taught curriculum is that pupils know more and are able to do more’ (Ofsted, 2019a, p. 3).

‘Knowledge’ is a difficult beast. It feels as if it should be simple, but in taking a simplistic route we may trip ourselves up over the difference between ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’, or dismiss as ‘skills’ things which are also forms of knowledge. Philosopher A. J. Ayer, in his book The Problem of Knowledge, starts by considering the meanings of the verb ‘to know’ in a familiar opening gambit from the sixth form essay – defining terms from the dictionary:

A glance at the dictionary will show that the verb ‘to know’ is used in a variety of ways. We can speak of knowing, in the sense of being familiar with, a person or a place, of knowing something in the sense of having had experience of it, as when someone says that he has known hunger or fear, of knowing in the sense of being able to recognize or distinguish, as when we claim to know an honest man when we see one or to know butter from margarine. I may be said to know my Dickens, if I have read, remember, and can perhaps also quote his writings, to know a subject such as trigonometry, if I have mastered it, to know how to swim or drive a car, to know how to behave myself. Most important of all, perhaps, are the uses for which the dictionary gives the definition of ‘to be aware or apprised of’, ‘to apprehend or comprehend as fact or truth’, the sense, or senses in which to have knowledge is to know that something or other is the case.

(Ayer, 1956/1990, p. 8)

The usage of ‘knowledge’ in the knowledge turn in education in recent years is primarily in the last form Ayer notes, to ‘know that’. To ‘know how’ in particular has been denigrated as mere skill, although there has also been quite reasonable discussion that to exercise skill one must also have knowledge. The corollary, that to exercise knowledge one must also have skill, has not been widely considered. As far as I am concerned, it is a strawman to say that so-called ‘progressives’ only wish to teach skills without any knowledge; to write an essay takes skill and knowledge. To develop knowledge, particularly in English Literature, as I will argue in Chapter 2, takes skill – the skills of analysis, for example, and of argument.

The Platonic definition of knowledge is as ‘justified true belief’; that is, that Mary knows *a thing* if *a thing* is true; Mary believes *a thing*; and Mary is justified in believing *a thing*. This has been somewhat challenged by 20th-century philosophers (see ‘the Gettier problem’, for example) by the production of a handful of counter examples, but the knottier problems of philosophy of knowledge are not entirely relevant to our general use of a rule of thumb about the nature of knowledge. The role of justification in the generation of knowledge in English Literature, and conversely the question of what is ‘true’, will also be further considered in Chapter 2.

One particular aspect of knowledge in English Literature which challenges the focus on factual knowledge is the fact that it is a discipline that prizes personal interpretation. To deliver ‘knowledge that’ in the form of information can cause problems:

[I]f you are studying Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and an authority figure bombards you with a catalogue of historical facts about the novel and its nineteenth-century context, this knowledge may drown out your own responses, ideas and interpretation and leave you feeling ignorant and, probably, a bit intimidated … [I]f you have been told that Jane Eyre is about the oppression of women in the Victorian period (it’s how the catalogue presented it and it’s not incorrect), then that’s what you are expected to spot and talk about. In contrast, the moments in which the novel questions or subverts this idea or where it explores other aspects of the world falls out of focus or even becomes invisible because you are concentrating your gaze so intently on making the novel fit the data from the catalogue.

(Eaglestone, 2019, pp. 36–7)

One of the consequences of this is that each person who reads a text creates their own particular schema – a mental map – of that text and their interpretation of it. Each additional piece of information, or knowledge, or meaning that we uncover becomes adopted into that mental map and affects how we then understand or adopt later input on that text. The impact of this on reading in class will be discussed in Chapter 3. Our schemas are also affected by the entirety of our previous reading and life experience – because reading occurs at what Louise Rosenblatt described as ‘the coming together’ ‘of a reader and a text’, not independently of the reader (Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 12). Narrative schemas accrete (Mason, 2014) from reading, re-reading, contextual knowledge, what we are told and our own experiences.

Validating knowledge in English Literature

There are four potential ways in which we might validate what constitutes knowledge in English Literature. First, we might look to school examinations and assessment: the knowledge required to pass those examinations is the true form of knowledge for school English Literature as far as many are concerned. In England, those examinations are governed by a mixture of factors: the subject experts who advise the Awarding Bodies on setting their specifications, which are composed in line with guidance issued from political sources, and modified in relation to requirements from Ofqual who validate the qualifications and employ their own subject experts.

Second, we might look to the field of English Literature more broadly, and specifically to progression after school into university-level study of English Literature. This is an area of anxiety for the discipline. As Carol Atherton has written:

I get very twitchy about the issue of transition. I am uneasy with the deficit model that it seems to set up: the assumption that students are not adequately prepared for degree level study and that this is because teachers are not doing their jobs properly.

(Atherton, 2010, p. 56)

Ten years later, this remains an area of concern (Stevens, 2018), but in the different light of reduced applications to study English at university. What counts as valid knowledge in English Literature, we might say, is closely linked to the discipline of literature outside school, and the needs of students who are going to progress in the subject. One particular issue raised by this type of validation is the question of literary critical approaches, and of the work of specific critics; the engagement with critical opinions of texts that is required varies wildly between specifications for study at GCSE and A level. The tension caused for our subject by the fact that it is both a foundational one studied by all students and also has the same desires to prepare a smaller subset for onward progression is one that is drawn on at points throughout this book, in the core question: What are we teaching English Literature for? It is evident that we cannot rely only on disciplinary knowledge for advanced study as the source of valid knowledge, because that ignores the other purposes of teaching English Literature in school, although it may echo some of those purposes. Equally, the questions over preparedness for university study in the discipline suggest that examination and assessment cannot provide complete validation either. (Both these types of validity are what is called, in assessment terms, consequential validity – the fitness for purpose of the study is based on the consequences of that study – that is, passing exams or being prepared for university.)

Third, the validity of knowledge in English Literature in particular has to pass the ‘common sense’ test for the general public: because it is a subject which everybody studies, it is a subject which everyone has an opinion on (much like education in general, as every teacher and education researcher can, I am sure, attest). This is felt through governmental commentary, media coverage and parental response. An example would be the periodic uproar to keep Shakespeare compulsory (usually not stimulated by any suggestion that he should not be); this level of validation tends to be at the level of text choice, rather than some of the more complex issues relating to knowledge that will also be discussed later in this book. This kind of validity might also reject critical approaches as unnecessary or irrelevant to the study of ‘great literature’, particularly if the approach chosen contradicts personal political beliefs of parents.

Finally, again on the level of text choice, we could appeal to a unified objective standard, something established over time. We might call this the canon, or the ‘core knowledge’ required for cultural literacy (Hirsch, 1987). The problems with the objectivity of both of these concepts is examined in Chapters 5 and 7 of this book, which broadly take the line that ‘there is no neutral knowledge and every discipline is saturated with its cultural history’ (Grumet, 2014, p. 15). This fourth approach to validity, as with the one above, leads to the second core question of this book: Whose knowledge is it anyway?

Whose knowledge is it anyway?

Too rarely do we acknowledge in the knowledge-driven curriculum that knowledge has come from somewhere: it is selected by someone and has originated in a particular paradigm. For English teachers, that brings up a number of questions: Who chooses? Whose values do we espouse, whose text choices do we follow, whose version of culture is the one we teach for?

It is almost axiomatic to quote Gradgrind from Dickens’ Hard Times when discussing education and knowledge, and I cannot disappoint. Pupils are ‘little vessels’, ‘arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until them were full to the brim’ (Dickens, 1854/2000, p. 3). The onomatopoeically and evocatively named head teacher declaims:

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.

(Dickens, 1854/2000, p. 3)

The capitalisation of ‘Facts’ suggests they are undebatable, objective, easily identifiable and easily transmitted. Later, Dickens uses the definition of the horse as graminivorous quadruped to demonstrate that facts are perhaps not everything there is to the story of knowledge, and raises the question: Whose facts? The dictionary’s? Gradgrind’s? Or those of Sissy Jupe, the poor girl whose intrinsic knowledge of horses learned at her father’s side has no place in the formal classroom?

Eaglestone (2019) highlights the bias in Hirsch’s cultural literacy model, which we will return to in Chapter 7: too often the culture is that of white men. But ‘Whose facts?’ is just as valid a question. Facts are not valueless, and the delineation of the fact which is to be learned reveals the values behind it. Many of us learned as children, for example, that ‘In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue’. In the USA, children know a far longer version, with another 13 couplets recounting the voyage, in which Columbus is ‘brave’ and ‘bright’, ‘joyful’ to have found America, where the ‘Arkarawa natives were very nice’. The facts might be that Columbus left Spain with his three ships, seeking the Indies, and ‘discovered’ America; the names of his ships; the year. Few of us learned that Columbus was instrumental in the genocide of the Taíno people (referred to as Arkarawa natives in the poem), who were the indigenous population of the Caribbean. Columbus excitedly wrote in his diaries of trading even ‘broken pottery’ for their riches, and of the native population’s suitability for being servants – he later sent thousands of Taínos back to Spain as slaves, many of whom died, and many of the rest were enslaved as forced labour in gold mines, meaning that there was no labour left to raise food. Within as little as 60 years, there were only a few hundred of an estimated quarter of a million left on the island on which Columbus had landed on his way to mainland America. Memorialisation and memorisation often demands a simple story, not a complex one.

More recently, this was demonstrated by the tearing down of a statue of Edward Colston, the Bristol slave trader, from its plinth in Bristol where it had been erected by the Victorians as a memorial to his philanthropy more than 150 years after his death. The plaque on the statue made no mention of his role in the slave trade; attempts to have a re-contextualising plaque put on the statue had been thwarted by vested interests in the four years leading up to the demolition of the statue. Whose facts?

On the day Colston’s statue was pulled down, there was an instant link made on Twitter by English teachers to the widely taught poem Ozymandias, which brings us back to the other core question of this book: What are we teaching when we teach English Literature? Here is a vivid moment for a classical poem to be used to help students process and make sense of events in their own lives, rather than to use their own lives to make sense of literature. Jane Davis, writing of her practice in Continuing Education, talks of reading ‘literature as myself, through my own eyes, trying to apply it to my own life and my own moral problems’; her classes were ‘a community of regular readers attending, teaching and learning in these classes … to a greater or lesser degree using literature as a practical tool for life’ (Davis, 2018, p. 211). In such a context, how can the ‘facts’ of literature be anything other than pliable?

Some of the concern, both in this section, and more widely in this book, is about the question of representation in knowledge: whose views are represented, who is seen? But as a tool to unpack our own lives, this question is transcended:

Yes, representation matters, but there is more to transformation than looking into a book the way you would look into a mirror. Instead, at Spelman College I learned to understand literature as a means of unravelling the thorny questions of my life as a black woman. Literature wasn’t just about inclusion, it was the springboard to intense questioning.

(Jones, 2019, p. 24)

In the face of ‘intense questioning’, which facts stand?

There are some facts, some concrete knowledge, more or less objectively true, which do stand in English Literature. The year a text was published, the birthplace of the author, for whom it was written perhaps. These facts are easily graspable, as with some of the socio-historical contextual knowledge which is taught alongside literary texts and often forced into GCSE essays by students whether or not it is relevant and helpful to the argument. The things that are easily learnable, however, are not always the most valuable, either within the discipline of English Literature or more widely outside the classroom. Green (2018) asks: ‘What knowledge is of most worth?’ (p. 24), and the truth is that there is not one undebatable answer to that question, as the fierce debates that have rage...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1  Introduction: the ‘knowledge turn’ and ‘facts’ in English
• 2  The construction of knowledge in English Literature
• 3  Shared experiences of reading
• 4  The case of Shakespeare
• 5  Race and gender in the English curriculum
• 6  Pinning down poetry: facts, emotion and attitudes
• 7  Cultural literacy in a UK context
• References
• Index