E-Books: Improving Learning in Secondary English By Geoff Dean
Chapter 1
Some of the problems of learning in English
It is a characteristic of English that it does not hold together as a body of knowledge that can be identified, quantified, then transmitted. Literary studies lead constantly outside themselves, as Leavis puts it; so, for that matter, does every other aspect of English. There are two possible responses for the teacher of English at whatever level.
One is an attempt to draw in the boundaries, to impose shape on what seems amorphous, rigour on what seems undisciplined. The other is to regard English as a process, not content and take the all-inclusiveness as an opportunity rather than a handicap.
(DES 1975)
Because there is no generally agreed body of subject matter, the boundaries of the subject are notoriously unclear and cannot be neatly defined.
(Protherough and Atkinson 1994)
Discussing ‘learning’ in English, as the two quotations above suggest, is an extremely difficult prospect. Yet, as the attention of the educational community is turning inexorably to a re-evaluation of and improvement in the quality of learning across the whole curriculum, English cannot expect to be excused from this examination. An attempt has to be made at this time to focus more clearly and ‘draw in the boundaries, to impose shape on what seems amorphous, rigour on what seems undisciplined’ if English is to be able to claim a full and valid place in the modern curriculum. Whilst the idea of regarding English as a ‘process’, as one of the alternatives offered by the Bullock Report quotation above suggests, has been attractive in the past, the ‘learning landscape’ of which English forms a part has changed. More has been understood about the actual processes of learning, and research into the nature of English (Tweddle 1995; Kress 1995;
Morgan 1996; Lankshear et al. 1997) indicates that, despite all manner of attempted political manoeuvring, its main centres of attention shifted significantly during the last third of the twentieth century, but such movements have not always been reflected in schools. These powerful reasons make a 1 Some of the problems of learning in English CHAPTER 1 reconsideration of what might be meant by ‘learning in English’ worth undertaking in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
There are a number of complicating factors in this discussion that require early identification. ‘Learning’ in English is not a straightforward business; it is not smooth, staged and linear, but ‘messy’, context-based and requires frequent recursive experiences. ‘Learning’ in English, in the understanding of many of those who teach and advise on the subject daily, is not restricted solely to cognitive considerations, but also has to do with affective knowledge. For some teachers of English, especially those with more experience (Goodwyn 2004), the affective or feeling understanding is of greater importance, whilst there are many others who would want to promote learning programmes that certainly maintained a balance of both approaches. There are also those who are just as concerned with promoting a sense of enjoyment (Pike 2004) to be experienced by the pupils in their English lessons, and who insist that such a response plays a necessary motivational starting point in any learning in the subject. These various, and sometimes conflicting and overlapping, interests will be given more attention in later discussion.
English is a number of curricula, around which the English teacher has to construct some plausible principles of coherence. It is, first, a curriculum of communication, at the moment largely via its teaching around English language . . . this curriculum is coming into crisis, with the move in public communication from language to the visual and from ‘mind’ to the body. It is second a curriculum of notions of sociality and of culture: what England is, what it is to be English. This is carried through a plethora of means: how the English language is presented and talked about, especially in multilingual classrooms; what texts appear and how they are dealt with; what theories of text and language underlie pedagogies; and so on.
English is also a curriculum of values, of taste, and of aesthetics. Here the study of canonical texts is crucial, in particular their valuation in relation to texts of popular culture – media texts, the ‘fun’ material children use in their lives – and in relation to the texts of cultural groups of all kinds . . . so . . . English is the subject in which ethics, questions of social, public morality are constantly at issue; not in terms of the ‘right’ ways of thinking, but in terms of giving children the means of dealing with ethical, moral issues on the one hand and by absorbing, and perhaps this is most important, the ethos developed in the classroom.
(Kress 1995)
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