Phil Cormack

Curriculum history, ‘English’ and the New Education; or, installing the empire of English?

The paper takes as its starting point the relationship between the ‘New English’, a curriculum movement commonly associated with the 1960s and 1970s, and the New Education, an influential general educational reform movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. It inquires into the discursive‐ideological (dis)continuities between these two moments in educational history, with a view to positing that developments and debates in English teaching always need to be understood historically, within the larger context of the history of education and schooling and the politics of nation and empire. Its immediate reference‐points being Britain and Australia, but with implications more broadly for the curriculum history of post‐Imperial, Anglophone countries more generally as well as the history of educational ideas, the paper seeks to explore why it was that ‘English’ was installed at the heart of the modern(ist) school curriculum.

Looking Beyond ‘Skills’ and ‘Processes’: Literacy as Social and Cultural Practices in Classrooms

This article explores the thinking and research that has led to a view of literacy as social and cultural practices. Literacy is described not as an internal cognitive state or a universal set of skills and processes that individuals must learn, but as social and cultural ways of doing things through the use of text. This view adds to our understanding of literacy by switching the focus to the ways in which individuals, groups, communities and societies put literate practices to work. For teachers, this means thinking about the sorts of literacies they are trying to produce through their programmes. This implies studying classrooms and preschools as social and cultural settings where particular practices count as good work – asking which kinds of texts, ways of talking, reading, writing and behaving are preferred and why.

Tracking Local Curriculum Histories: The Plural Forms of Subject English

What is English as a school subject? What is its story? Where did it come from? These are all questions that have long exercised curriculum scholars and historians without general resolution. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at this, given the ways in which school-subject English has consistently been reconstituted and remade over its entire history, including in the present. However, rather than regarding this situation as a lack (that is, in subject English’s capacity to find a ‘true’ centre), or an unresolved narrative (one day English will sort itself out and decide what it really is), it may be more productive to look in other ways at the ‘problem’ of English and its history. What if, for example, we regarded English’s long-established instability, and lack of an agreed ‘core’ and rationale, this enduring variability, as something that is a central feature of the curriculum field? A range of histories of English has demonstrated the different streams that make up its lineage. Reid (2004) has traced the significance of the ideology of Romanticism in shaping the introduction of the study of English literature at the University of London from its formation in 1828, the consequent expansion of English across universities, and the influence of university scholars on the English curriculum in the expanding high school system in nineteenth-century England. The influence of university versions of English on the high school systems of Australia has also been outlined by Christie (1991) in her major report on the subject, emphasising a point that had already been made by Mathieson (1975), that English had long been a site of the formation of culture, with literature as its primary tool. On the other hand, as has been pointed out by Green and Beavis (1996) and others, there are alternative stories to be told of English, such as along its ‘grammar’ axis, accounting for the way that, in the late nineteenth century for figures such as Matthew Arnold, ‘‘‘literature’’ and ‘‘grammar’’ were two sides of the one linguistic and cultural coin’ (Green and Hodgens 1996, 210). Also, there have been historical accounts that have emphasised the role of English as a set of technologies for selfformation that preceded and hence didn’t depend on literature (Hunter 1987, 1988; Patterson 1993, 2002). Perhaps most significantly for the purposes of this paper, histories of English have been critiqued for being overly focused on the subject at the high school level (Green and Beavis 1996; Patterson 2002) and failing to account adequately for the elementary-school roots of the subject (Patterson 2003) where issues of language and grammar have always played a significant role. In this last

Redesigning pedagogies in middle years classrooms: challenges for teachers working with disadvantaged students

This paper describes a heuristic framework developed to provide a common vocabulary with which to discuss pedagogy within a collaborative university–school research team studying pedagogical redesign in middle‐years classrooms (Years 6–9) serving disadvantaged students. The framework was developed in response to discussions about teaching in such settings, during which teacher talk about pedagogy emphasised ‘relationships’ with students and left the detail of such relationships relatively opaque. In response, the pedagogical processes described in this framework have been developed to provide a vocabulary with which researchers and teachers can talk to each other – with increased conceptual purchase – about pedagogy at the micro‐scale of relational interaction between student, teacher and the knowledge they together produce. The use of this framework to analyse teachers’ descriptions of their work is suggestive of reasons why difficulties were encountered when trying to talk explicitly about pedagogy with teachers, and of productive pathways for further research about pedagogies as teachers’ work. This framework may also be used as a supplement to other pedagogical frames which more strongly emphasise outcomes rather than process.

Literacy research and the uses of history: Studying literacy, schooling and young people in new times

ConclusionThis paper has discussed the potential for using a genealogical approach to the critical study of a problematisation. In a time when discourses and media proliferate, when there is almost a flood of texts, images and productions of truth about young people, literacy and schooling, it is easy for researchers to be swept along in this flood and view as ‘natural’ the current versions of the common sense of schooling, adolescence and literacy studies. Historical study has the potential to denaturalise that process-not so that we as researchers can stand aside from it, on the banks of the swollen river, as it were (there are no fixed points from which we can research these issues). Rather, a genealogical approach provides some tools and devices, like snags and logs in the river, to help researchers swim against and across the discursive current, as well as with it.

‘Pupils differently circumstanced and with other aims’: governing the post-primary child in early twentieth-century Australia

Writing in 1927, five leading scholars and administrators of the Australian schooling systems published a book entitled Education in Australia: a comparative study of the educational systems of the six Australian states. These authors wrote of Australian education in a time of great optimism, and one of the key areas of reform they addressed was the introduction of forms of post-primary schooling for a ‘problem’ population of 12–15-year-olds who were not attracted to, or staying with, the high school curriculum which led towards university study. Through the lens of Education in Australia, this paper undertakes a genealogical exploration of the way the adolescent emerged as an object of school reforms in the early twentieth century and shows that these reforms were articulated with discourses of race, social efficiency, science and culture.