Phillip Cormack

Re-reading the reading lesson: episodes in the history of reading pedagogy

Reading pedagogy is constantly an object of discussion and debate in contemporary policy and practice but is rarely a matter for historical inquiry. This paper reports from a recent study of the history of reading pedagogy in Australia and beyond. It focuses on a recurring figure in the historical record—the ‘reading lesson’. Presented as a distinctive trope, the reading lesson is traced in its regularity in and through the discourse of reading pedagogy, starting in 1930s Australia and moving back into 19th-century Europe, and with specific reference to the UK and the USA. Teaching reading is expressly identified as a moral project—something that, it can be argued, clearly continues into the present.

The child, the text and the teacher: reading primers and reading instruction

From the late sixteenth century, in response to the problem of how best to teach children to read, a variety of texts, such as primers, spellers and readers were produced in England for vernacular instruction. This paper describes how these materials were used by teachers to develop, first, a specific religious understanding according to the stricture of the time and, second, a moral reading practice that provided the child with a guide to secular conduct. The analysis focuses on the use of these texts as a productive means for shaping the child-reader in the context of newly emerging educational spaces, which fostered a particular, morally formative relation among teacher, child and text.

Children's school reading and curriculum innovation at the edge of Empire

Purpose – Using the example of a “school paper” titled The Childrens Hour, developed in South Australia in the late nineteenth century, the purpose of this paper is to show the way that the colonial margins could act as sites of innovation in curriculum and pedagogy and not just as importers of ideas from the imperial centre. Design/methodology/approach – The analysis on which the examination of The Childrens Hour is based is a combination of Foucaultian discourse analysis and a genealogical approach to curriculum history which tracks different formations of techniques and programmes for shaping the human subject. Findings – The Childrens Hour (1889-1963), featured the innovative use of literature and other genres, and provided new ways to shape the identities of school students and teachers. School papers were strongly implicated in the discursive construction of both a global/imperial and local/Australian identities and represent an informative case of the ways in which teaching and learning practice...