Peter Medway

Worlds apart : acting and writing in academic and workplace contexts

Contents: Editors Introduction. Preface. Part I: Introduction. Introduction: Researching Writing at School and at Work. Situating Writing. Part II: University Writing. The Social Motive of University Writing. Complications and Tensions. Writing and the Formation of the Architect. Part III: Workplace Writing. The Complexity of Social Motive in Workplace Writing. Distributed Cognition at Work. From Words to Bricks: Writing in an Architectural Practice. Part IV: Transitions. Students and Workers Learning. Virtual Realities: Transitions From University to Workplace Writing. Contexts for Writing: University and Work Compared.

Imagining the building: architectural design as semiotic construction

Abstract Reporting on three days of observation and recording in a Canadian architects’ practice, the authors display the progress of the collaborative design of one element of a large building as a ‘design stream’ into which various influences flow, affecting what is being constructed. That construction is seen in semiotic terms as a complex of signs in which three components can be distinguished: a ‘virtual building’, an envelope of considerations and a network of associated references and meanings. The primary product is thus not the drawings and written specifications but an ‘idea’. ‘Maps’ of the sequence of design events show the semiotic transactions that take place, and attention is drawn to the role played by different semiotic (or symbolic) modes, and especially to that of spoken language.

Genre, Genres, and the Teaching of Genre

From the placement of this article and from the headings above with the bibliographical citations of three books, readers of this piece know that this is a type of writing commonly called a review essay. From the editors invitation, I knew that what I was to write was a review essay. What does that generic knowledge for writers and readers mean? The significance of this potentially shared understanding is much of what the developing new field of genre study-and these three books-is all about. To understand how writing works, theorists argue, we must understand how genre works, for writing is embedded within genre, writing is never genre-free.

English and Enlightenment

English is best advanced by being relocated within the central aims of education, which in turn need to be drawn from Enlightenment values. Central among the latter is knowledge. The article argues that the least obviously ‘factual’ side of English – novels and poetry – contributes to knowledge in direct and indirect ways. These include conveying sorts of knowledge that can’t be expressed propositionally, giving a sense of other subjectivities, ‘reporting’ on unfamiliar social worlds and developing the conceptual apparatus through which we gain knowledge. Enlightenment attitudes are promoted through literature’s encouragement of philosophical reflection and resistance to current forms of instrumentalism strengthened.

Literacy and the idea of English

The possibility is considered that the intuitive judgments of experienced English teachers about what is and is not appropriate ‘English’ content embody knowledge, and indeed potential theory, that are worth studying and making explicit as a way of moving towards an adequate theory for English. As an example, a text by Isaiah Berlin is examined, which both enacts a quality important to English and makes a relevant statement. Before that, a curricular initiative, deriving not from professional knowledge but from inadequate doctrine that makes ‘literacy’ the overarching business of English, is found wanting.

A curriculum in its place: English teaching in one school 1946–1963

Contrary to what has usually been asserted, the ‘New English’ that became a near‐orthodoxy in the later 1960s and ‘70s had its essential origins in the apparently less promising setting of the later 1950s. Current research into English teaching in three postwar London secondary schools is revealing that in at least one working‐class school in Southwark the pupils’ experience of their urban environment came in a quite new way to constitute the matter for talking and writing in English lessons. The vigorous reconstruction of English that took place in Walworth School was one fruit of the London County Council’s idealistic creation in 1946 of five ‘experimental comprehensive schools’. The article argues for the historic significance of the local and environmental focus of English at Walworth between 1956 and 1963.

The Period, the Education System, and the Teaching of English

This chapter is about the context within which English in our case study schools took place, nationally and in London. In it we briefly mention key political, economic, and social developments within the period, the state of the education system nationally and in London, and, at more length, the situation in English teaching. This is not a comprehensive survey and the sources we draw on are a selection from published accounts, contemporary commentary, and archival records.

The Three Schools—What We Have Learned

In this chapter, we first summarize the story of English in each school between 1945 and 1965 and then consider the picture in terms of aspects of English rather than school by school, both elements that changed and ones that stayed the same. Moving beyond curriculum and pedagogy we next address school English departments and associations outside the school. We review our findings in terms of the national picture we presented in chapter two and comment on how far they reflect what the histories of English teaching say about the period. Finally we describe in a more general way the character of the changes we have reported, and speculate briefly on connections between the changing or stable nature of English and social and cultural change.

The Groves of Academe and the ‘edgerows of Experience

‘Come in, Missy’, said Bevin ‘and sit down here beside me.’ He was puffing with defiant satisfaction at a forbidden cigar. Then, gazing quizzically up at the gilded girders on the ceiling, the Foreign Secretary slipped, as it were, con sordino [in music: with a mute on the instrument] into a rambling after-luncheon monologue, uninhibited by considerations of grammar or syntax, and punctuated less by any vocal equivalent of commas or semi-colons or full stops than by the occasional pauses required for blowing smoke, coughing, removing tobacco leaf from his tongue, or dusting the ash from the lapels of his coat.... And then, at the fifth or sixth page of her shorthand notes, the soliloquy ceased as softly, almost imperceptibly, as it had begun. ‘All over, Missy,’ said the new Secretary of State with a wink... ‘and Lawford here,’ he added, looking still at her and not at me, ‘will just turn that into English if he can.’ (Lawford 1956–1957, quoted by Bullock 1985, 71)