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Board of Studies HSC Syllabus review 7/3/98
Wayne Sawyer
Introduction
This very conference is the necessary beginning step in Syllabus development. I think one of the problems with the short-lived Draft Syllabus - in many ways an admirable document- was its avoidance of two basic questions:
* just what a Syllabus IS - is it a set of specific programs or does it represent a broader level of conceptualisation of principles, or some mix of these things?
* what view or views of what "English" is does it represent?
Any Syllabus may consistently represent a particular model of the subject - growth, cultural studies, cultural heritage etc - or it may represent a more pragmatic eclecticism, but whichever of these is chosen, there is a necessity for the Syllabus developers to discuss the theories on which the document is based in somewhat more depth than did the Draft Syllabus. The current Syllabus for Years 7-10 and those for Years 11-12 deal with these issues. They are all clearly statements of principle about the nature of the subject and each dwells in detail on its theoretical underpinnings. The Draft Syllabus did not enunciate directly and in detail a theoretical position on such basic issues as:
* the nature of language learning
* the nature and the parameters of subject English
* the nature of "texts" within English
My brief today is to briefly discuss the second of these, viz. the nature and parameters of "subject English". In doing so, I will of necessity touch briefly on the other two issues.
Models of English
Key paradigms are listed in your course pre-readings in the document, "Perspectives on English" and I don't want to re-visit that material in great detail. Briefly, it seems to me, the paradigms currently operating (competing?) in NSW Syllabuses are :
* the Personal Growth Model of English, which emphasises:
- the importance of personal experience in the classroom
- the importance of talk and writing
- an integrated curriculum
- a workshop-based classroom organisation
- above all, the active USE of language
This, of course, is the model on which the current 7-10 Syllabus is based, as is the Contemporary Syllabus.
Because of Dixon's emphasis on it in Growth through English the reader-response paradigm is generally seen as a sub-set of the "growth" model. A careful reading of the current HSC 2Unit Related and 2Unit General Syllabuses reveals, I believe, this view of the world behind these Syllabuses:
Students will be engaged in reading and thinking critically about what they
have read, defining their attitudes to the text, trying to account for
their enjoyment or for their initial inability to respond. They will be
occupied in discussing and exchanging opinions as well as in writing about
their own, in taking part in "workshop" productions of scenes from a play,
and in activities like reading poetry aloud.
(NSW English Syllabus, Years 11 and 12: 2/3 UNIT [Related] COURSE)
But of course these aims of these Syllabuses are somewhat undermined by exam system.
The "Prescribed Texts" List is another institutional constraint which highlights a particular model of English, in emphasising, at least as far as 2Unit Related goes, a:
* Cultural Heritage model - the view, of course, which says that the aim of English should be inculcation of students into the great literature of their heritage.
English in the academy has been moving beyond that view of itself into the much broader Cultural Studies view. To define this, I draw on a mix of attributes identified by Robin Peel and Ray Misson:
a) using the word "culture" to include anything from novels to supermarket architecture
b) an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on ideas from sociology, politics and semiotics
c) using conceptual tools largely derived from post-structuralist theory, including the influence of Marxist and Gramscian criticism, feminism, post-colonial studies etc ( important for our purposes because it gives Cultural Studies an overt social purpose)
d) cultural products seen as artefacts that transcend national boundaries
e) cultural studies attends to the historical moment, locating specifics such as gender, race and class in any discussion of the way cultural products are represented
In the secondary classroom, this formidable sounding intellectual baggage has meant the addressing of such questions about cultural products as :
- Why, and with whom, is (or was) this phenomenon popular?
- What implicit messages is it sending out?
- How is it read?
Peel discusses secondary classrooms bringing these questions to bear on topics such as : the Vietnam War, the way we display the past in museums, superstitions in various communities and the way foreign language coursebooks represent other countries. Obviously, in such a model, what we have traditionally called "literature" is no longer privileged. So, such a model can represent a threat to teachers' views about their traditional job with senior classes, and it certainly represents a threat to the cultural heritage view of the world. The key word is no longer "literature", but "text". Students aren't restricted to anything vaguely canonical, when political speeches, Melrose Place, the Internet, even the classroom itself are all available for scrutiny.
Obviously also, those three I just listed link Cultural Studies very much to the notion of
* Critical Literacy , which has taken off in Australia as nowhere else, it seems, under the influence of people such as Wendy Morgan.
As Morgan writes, a critical literacy goes beyond simply "responding" to texts to ask questions like:
- How is this the text encouraging you to think and respond?
- What other ways are there of writing about this topic?
- What wasn't said about the topic, and why?
(Morgan, of course, has applied these questions in her earlier ground-breaking work on the Ned Kelly legend). In asking such questions and unpacking the ideology behind texts, critical literacy is "uncompromising about the centrality of social conscience in educational practice" (Knoblauch and Brannon, 1993,p.49). And certainly in Thatcher's Australia of the 1990s, we cannot have enough of social conscience, nor can we have enough of interrogating the economic-rationalist values of that society even as we operate in it. Critical literacy is about empowerment over texts and over language. "Empowerment" is a key word in the critical armoury. And in exams, critical literacy asks very different questions about texts - questions not about characters or themes, but about how readers are being positioned in particular extracts from texts.
Review of these models
Well, what does each of these have to offer a new HSC English Syllabus?
Growth: the criticism that the growth model has undergone at the hands of the critical literacy people has been based on its alleged privileging of the personal over the social. "Personal Growth", so goes the argument, puts too much emphasis on "personal" and leaves students in no position to analyse or critique the ideology or language of texts, including their own language as text ie it lacks a sense of leading students to understand how texts, including their own language, are socially constructed. Also, the emphasis on a reader-response approach to literature, it is argued, encourages students to envisage literature as if it represented a slice of real-life and hence fails to take the opportunity of teaching students that literature and its characters are social constructs. The problem with this, it is argued, is a lost opportunity to critique the ideology of the text. A " critical literacy", it is argued, will leave students more empowered.
Certainly there is some truth to these claims, especially if what is most emphasised about "Growth" is personal experience. Nevertheless, even in the 90s, I believe the growth model has a substantial contribution to make, particularly if what we emphasise about it is the "growth" of the individual as a USER of language. "Growth" emphasises the aim of English as the individual's growth as a reader, writer, listener and speaker. It is this aspect of the growth model that I believe is underplayed in the definition in your pre-conference reading material. I believe the "Growth" model remains important in two ways:
- in continuing to stress language development through active use. The Draft Syllabus of 1996 made a distinction between "creating" and "critiquing". This distinction had a number of problems, not least of which was its seemingly a-theoretical nature; but I think it also had a number of pragmatic advantages and I personally would want to preserve VERY MUCH the importance (indeed equal importance) of " creating" in a future senior Syllabus and for this aspect of the Syllabus, I think development as a language user needs to be a central aim.
- the issue of pleasure and enjoyment in reading and listening. Critical literacy approaches to texts demand a certain sophisticated detachment. A very big part of our problem in schools is still to get kids, even at the senior level, to even engage with texts, let alone to take the detached kind of stance that a critical literacy demands. This tension between detachment and engagement is a crucial one. There is a related issue in writing and speaking, where our job will remain encouraging many of our students even to find a voice, to articulate real or imagined thoughts or experiences - a self-evident good, surely, beyond the issue of any empowerment that might come from critiquing the ideological parameters of that voice (cf Gill, 1993, 1998).
The 1987 Years 7-10 English Syllabus is still regarded as one of the best in the world. The hard-won battle for a Syllabus based on response to literature and experience-based writing should not be given over easily. "Growth", I believe, remains a valid model, now potentially extended by adding a deeper understanding of the political and ideological contexts in which personal language growth takes place.
Cultural heritage: surely this had had its day when Leavis died? A lot of books have been written since Jane Austen; why this continuing fascination with forcing our best students to study a number of pre-20thC texts? On the other hand, won't a Cultural Studies Syllabus, especially one in which popular culture is key, just pander to a kind of lowest common denominator in our students?
Well, Cultural Studies is about preparing students to intelligently read the central texts of their culture and to see how these are operating in their lives - surely a laudable aim.
The problem with this debate is that it is set up as if High and Popular culture were mutually exclusive in the classroom. Is Baz Luhrmann's version of Romeo and Juliet "High" or "Popular"? Among 14 year-olds, it's certainly popular. I've spent a lot of my time in English curriculum writing and teaching about engaging ways of presenting Shakespeare in the classroom, especially in the Junior classroom, so I'm hardly going to be arguing against the canon. Like the cultural heritage school, I'll argue passionately for the value of introducing "classic" texts to kids who may have the classroom as their only chance of engaging with them (but even as I write that sentence, I'm also reminded of what the film industry has done for sales of Jane Austen).
The point is we have the potential for treating both "High" and "Popular" in junior classrooms now - why fear Melrose Place in senior school while we're deconstructing Neighbours with Year 9? The fear that the cultural heritage lobby have about popular culture is to do with relative value. I don't think we really need to worry about this. As Ray Misson argues, "one must keep the value of texts in proportion. One does not want to fail to do justice to a text by treating it as rubbish compared with more complex, classic texts, but equally one does not want to inflate its value and make extravagant claims for it. There are some who wish to move outside the value game altogether, and who imply that all texts are of equal value, or see value as purely subjective. However, this is not how we operate on texts, indeed on anything, in the real world. We are constantly valuing. The trick is to be flexible in the criteria for our valuations and do justice to the positive aspects of a text while being fully aware of both its negative aspects and its limitations... One wants the students to be able to recognise the value (or lack of it) in any text " (Misson, 1998). Peel (1996) discusses how one can try to avoid this problem by substituting ideas about complexity for those about value.
Some directions
So where does this leave us? Where would I like to see the HSC going?
* I believe it IS important to widen the kinds of texts available for examinable study: biography, journalism, popular science or polemical texts on social issues, film, screenplays, picture books, myths, fables, sagas and folk tales and popular fiction, for example, but also other artefacts of that could be grouped thematically in order to throw light on some aspect of culture. "English" HAS evolved since the current Syllabuses were written and we need to evolve with it. I believe the much more generous definition of "text" in the 1996 Draft Syllabus showed the way here in bringing film and other media texts into the "mainstream".
* This grouping of texts in a way that is currently limited to Topic Area and Contemporary Issues has great potential for widening the scope of the study of subject English. Grouping of texts in imaginative ways allows them to be studied for something more than their own aesthetic isolation. Grouping could even be open-ended, nominating genre, theme, author etc and allowing schools to nominate the texts.
* I would like to see real status given to kids' own writing and speaking, film-making, media creating etc. Again I think the Draft Syllabus' distinction between critiquing and creating was a useful pragmatic one, whatever its theoretical shortcomings - not least because it gave it equal weight to a paradigm of English which says that producing texts is at least as worthy a notion of what "English" means as consuming the texts created by other people.
* On the issue of critical literacy as the METHOD of analysis : again, the subject has grown in this direction and the kinds of questions that critical literacy asks has potential for creating a "resistant" generation, something we sorely need. Nevertheless, I would sound two notes of caution:
- the first was a problem evident in the Draft Syllabus about just what was meant by "critiquing". Did it simply refer to "analysing" or was it more definitely implying a critical literacy in which texts were to be critiqued for their underlying ideologies? There is a difference of definition here that makes a great difference to the kinds of questions students are asked in assessments. We cannot be vague about this.
- the second is the issue that I mentioned earlier of simply getting kids to engage with texts. For this reason, I'd want to advocate some kind of genuine credit being given to wide reading. Current Syllabuses all say that Year 11 should be a year of wide reading. All sorts of reasons that ultimately come back to the nature of the HSC prevent this from being realised in any ideal way. Credit needs to be given to students simply for engaging with a large number of books. This would probably necessitate some form of school-based accreditation.
Conclusion
The question to finally ask is whether we favour one model or a generous eclecticism. In some areas, such as whether we are going to ask kids to critique the ideology of texts or respond in more traditional ways, we have to make a decision because of assessment implications. This decision could still differ for different sub-sets of the Syllabus.
But in other areas, perhaps a range of possibilities from a number of models can be allowed to apply.
References
Dixon, John (1967) Growth through English, London: Oxford.
Gill, Margaret (1993) Opening address, AATE National Conference, Adelaide, July
Gill, Margaret (1998) "'That's what I no': revisiting David Holbrook's
English for the rejected", in Wayne Sawyer, KenWatson and Eva Gold (eds)
Re-Viewing English, Sydney: St Clair Press.
Knoblauch, C. and Brannon, L. (1993) Critical teaching and the idea of
literacy. NH: Boynton/Cook: Heinemann.
Misson, Ray (1998) "Questioning popular culture", in Wayne Sawyer,
KenWatson and Eva Gold (eds) Re-Viewing English, Sydney: St Clair
Press.
Morgan, Wendy et al (1997) Critical literacy, Norwood: AATE.
Morgan, Wendy (1998) "Critical literacy", in Wayne Sawyer, KenWatson and
Eva Gold (eds) Re- Viewing English, Sydney: St Clair Press.
Morgan, Wendy (1997) Critical literacy in the classroom, London: Routledge.
Morgan, Wendy (19XX) The example of Ned Kelly: the post-structuralist
English classroom. Norwood: AATE.
Peel, Robin (1996) "The 'Cultural Studies' or 'Textual Studies' moel of
English", in Ken Watson English teaching in perspective: in the
context of the 1990s. Sydney: St Clair Press.
Peel, Robin (1998) "Towards critical literacy: the 'Cultural Studies' model
of English", in Wayne Sawyer, KenWatson and Eva Gold (eds) Re-Viewing
English, Sydney: St Clair Press.
Sawyer, Wayne (1998) "Growth through English", in Wayne Sawyer, KenWatson
and Eva Gold (eds) Re-Viewing English, Sydney: St Clair Press.
Thomson, Jack (1998) "Post-Dartmouth developments in English teaching in
Australia", in Wayne Sawyer, KenWatson and Eva Gold (eds) Re-Viewing
English, Sydney: St Clair Press.
Watson, Ken (1996) English teaching in perspective: in the context of the
1990s. Sydney: St Clair Press.
Wayne Sawyer
Lecturer in English Education
University of Western Sydney Nepean
PO Box 10
Kingswood NSW 2747
Australia
Email address: w.sawyer@nepean.uws.edu.au
Ph: (02) 47360 795
Fax:(02) 47360 400
International:
Ph: 61 247360 795
Fax: 61 247360 400