English and the Knowledge Question (Revisited)

The ‘knowledge turn’ in curriculum studies has proved highly influential in the past two decades. But what is meant by knowledge remains both unclear and subject to contestation, particularly in relation to English as a school subject. Two recent books address the knowledge question in very different ways

Growth and the category of experience

In John Dixon’s account of Dartmouth, experience is seen as central to the business of English as a school subject. Experience, for Dixon, is the raw material that is worked on in the classroom. What kinds of theory inform this emphasis on experience, and what are the curricular and pedagogic implications of this version of English? How does Dixon’s argument about experience sit with the work of other Dartmouth participants, such as D. W. Harding and James Britton? Does it have anything to offer us now, fifty years on

The creative sociability of English classrooms and ‘the true nature of stories'

In currently dominant accounts, English as a school subject, its content and processes, are construed as an induction into a well-defined, already-established disciplinary discourse or set of discourses. In an attempt to challenge this version of English, I present some examples of autobiographical writing by secondary students and I tell the story of an observed lesson. From these instances of practice, a different picture of English emerges – one where the English classroom might be regarded as a place of literary sociability, where students enter into dialogue with each other and with the literature that they read, and where the complex challenges entailed in any attempt to represent experience in words is properly acknowledged

Knowledge, English and the formation of teachers

This paper explores some widespread assumptions about knowledge, and particularly the disciplinary or subject knowledge that is construed as an essential property of effective teachers. Drawing on close observation of pre-service teachers’ work in secondary school classrooms, it argues that knowledge is born from social engagement and has its life in social activity; thus to conceptualise knowledge as the possession of the teacher, to be passed on to learners, is misleading and unhelpful. What is required is a much more complex, nuanced understanding of the knowledge work that is accomplished in and through the interactions of the classroom

English and Inclusion

Arguments over inclusion are generally located in relation to school admissions policies and in the vexed issue of pupil grouping. These are important questions of policy and practice, but they are not the main focus of this chapter.1 Beyond such concerns, it might appear that there is nothing to debate about inclusion and English. After all, we all aspire to be inclusive, don’t we? What I want to suggest in what follows is that issues around inclusion are not reducible to questions of organisation and access, but are, crucially, questions of pedagogy: what inclusion means and how it can be instantiated in practice in the classroom is, therefore, fundamentally important to the work of English teachers

Questions in/of English

Our starting point is provided by two accounts of observed lessons. The two lessons happened, at more or less the same time, in the same English department in an East London secondary school. Both lessons, observed by the second- and third-named authors, involved the shared reading of the same novel. We are interested in the difference between these two lessons, a difference that is manifested most clearly in the different ways in which questions enter in the two lessons. We argue that this difference is symptomatic of two fundamentally different versions of English as a school subject

Exploring (and Contesting) Literary Knowledge: Pedagogy, Agency and Cultural Capital

Authoritative voices in the Anglophone world have interpellated teachers as responsible for the transmission of an already-fixed canon: their task is thus conceptualised as both providing their students with access to such knowledge and inculcating in their students an appropriate attitude of appreciation towards the already-valorised literary works. Recent research in Australia and England suggests that some teachers, at least, are able to represent their work somewhat differently. This paper will explore these alternative conceptions of literary knowledge and pedagogy