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The Future of English
A draft response to English 21 from the English Group,
School of Culture, Language and Communication, Institute of Education
We welcome the
initiative taken by QCA in opening up a public debate, under the
aegis of English 21, about the future of English. To understand
where English is going, let alone to seek to establish a future
direction for English as a school subject, we need some understanding
of the history of English, and hence of how it comes to be what
it is now. Or, to put it another way, to debate the future of English
inevitably involves a debate about the current dispensation.
In our experience as PGCE tutors, visiting trainees in around a
hundred schools across London, we find little space for innovation
or the exploration of texts beyond an increasingly narrow and predictable
canon. We are concerned about the effect that this is already having
on new teachers, their conception of English and their capacity
to set new directions in the subject. English teachers once had
a key role in developing the curriculum: it was a central part of
their professional work and identity. The current climate does not
encourage experimentation or innovation, and English teachers’
professional responsibilities have been curtailed.
We need a coherent picture of English, one that encompasses the
full breadth of what English is, and perhaps even what it might
become. To suggest this is to indicate what is most problematic
about the framework for debate that the QCA has provided: a discussion
about texts and technologies, for example, cannot neatly be separated
from consideration of the learners on the one hand, or of assessment
on the other. Developments over the past two decades have made it
perfectly clear to English teachers that it is not possible to consider
questions of the construction of the curriculum in isolation from
the assessment systems and processes, particularly when high-stakes
testing plays so prominent a part in the experience of schooling.
In arguing the need for a coherent, comprehensive picture of English,
we would want to foreground certain features of this coherence/comprehensiveness.
Within the domain of school English, there is an important, desirable
and productive interplay between different fields of study: between
the study of language and the reading of literature; between literary
analysis and work with texts in a range of media; between language
in all its modes and other semiotic systems.
More than this, though, is implicated in the scope of English. As
a school subject, English is concerned with the development of certain
skills, but it is not reducible to a list of such skills. There
are affective, aesthetic, ethical, social and political dimensions
to English, and, while there may be no absolute reasons why such
dimensions should have become part of the experience of English,
that they have become so is a matter of historical fact. Social
and moral interests and responsibilities are central to what English
has become; school students tend to experience such dimensions of
their education with greater richness and complexity within English
than, for example, in Citizenship/PSHCE, as it is currently conceived,
timetabled and taught.
To make these claims for what English is and what English does is
also to recognise that the content of the English curriculum matters.
Questions of value and taste are, thus, almost inevitable –
even if their expression as sets of binary alternatives, Macbeth
or MTV, Chaucer or Coronation Street, Tennyson or text messaging,
seems neither accurate nor helpful. It is through the content of
English lessons – the texts that are read, analysed and argued
over – that students’ interests are engaged and that
they are enabled to make connections between the classroom and the
world beyond the school gates.
At present, however, there is precious little space for schools,
departments and individual teachers to choose texts, to pursue specific
lines of inquiry, to take ownership of the content of English lessons.
This is not only because prescribed texts, in the form of anthologies
and set books, have come to occupy an increasingly dominant place
in the (test-driven) curriculum, but also because the impact of
a series of initiatives, most prominent among them the Key Stage
3 Strategy with its emphasis on objective-oriented lesson-planning,
has been to prioritise the teaching of relatively content- and context-free
skills. The approach is underpinned by an assumption that it is
possible (and desirable) to separate linguistic from cognitive,
affective and social development; this assumption seems to us to
be both false and counterproductive: it is, we would argue, precisely
the strength of English that it is a curricular space where the
full multifaceted complexity of students’ development –
linguistic, cultural, cognitive, affective and social – can
be attended to.
If recent developments in English have limited teachers’ room
for manoeuvre, they have also had a significant, and significantly
negative, impact on students’ experience of this part of the
curriculum. We are troubled by the mass of anecdotal evidence that
would suggest that many school students now actively dislike English,
or are merely bored by it. We are concerned that the effect of a
test-driven, objective-led and skills-based approach to teaching
has created for students a deeply fragmented experience of English,
in which nothing need be known of the Key Stage 3 Shakespeare play
beyond the set scenes, nothing is discovered in the poems read within
the context of the GCSE Anthology other than a teacher-fed list
of effects and points of comparison. Somewhere, somehow, pleasure
needs to be reinserted into students’ experience of English
– alongside a reconfiguration of teaching and learning that
allows for the agency of the learners.
Contemporary classrooms, particularly in London, are constituted
in difference. The content of the English curriculum allows these
differences – linguistic, cultural, historical as well as
ethical and aesthetic – to be recognised, explored, interrogated
and celebrated. What has happened in recent years, however, is that
the content of English has been increasingly prescribed by the centre.
If the traditional strength of English is to be maintained, as the
site where meanings could be made that took full account of local
as well as global experiences and contexts, then there is a pressing
need for greater flexibility, to encourage local curriculum development
and innovation, to create spaces in which teachers and students
can explore and create other texts.
What we are
arguing for, then, is:
• the reinsertion of content, coupled with an awareness of
the breadth and coherence of the whole subject;
• the need to move towards systems and structures of monitoring
and assessment that are supportive of learners’ development;
• the creation of opportunities for local curriculum development
initiatives.
Tony Burgess,
Caroline Daly, Anton Franks, John Hardcastle, Anne Turvey,
John Yandell
We would welcome
comments and responses to this draft. Please email them to j.yandell@ioe.ac.uk
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