Tony Burgess

‘How One Learns to Discourse’: Writing and Abstraction in the Work of James Moffett and James Britton

James Moffetts Teaching the Universe of Discourse set out an agenda for the study of development in writing, which influenced James Brittons work in the UK. Subsequently, however, the work of both these thinkers was largely set aside in the approach to writing taken by national strategies in England. In this article, we trace the history of these developments, and seek to rescue Moffetts and Brittons work from being characterised as no more than a ‘failed progressivism’. We argue for return to a focus on thinking and abstraction, as fundamental considerations for a writing pedagogy.

‘Operating on a Basis of Student Consent’: Peter Medway’s Work in Finding a Language

Written nearly 40 years ago, Peter Medway’s Finding a Language continues to be an arresting read, which offers a powerful vision of what might be possible in education. In this brief introduction, I set the work in context, referring to ideas that Pete engaged with and recalling a little of the times.

Remembering Harold Rosen

The editors have learned with great regret of the death of Harold Rosen, at the age of 89 – warm supporter of Changing English from its beginning; teacher, colleague, friend and inspirational influence for many who have written for it. Harold helped to lead and shape the making of English in the last century. Through his pioneering work at Walworth School, and as Head of English and Professor of the Teaching of English, at London University’s Institute of Education, he was responsible with colleagues for charting many of contemporary English teaching’s key concerns with language, literature and culture. Harold was co-author of Language, the Learner and the School, the founding document for work on language across the curriculum, and his interest in language led onto further work on language and social class, setting out to document the richness of vernaculars, and to oppose prevailing orthodoxies of language deficit, and then to the collaborative research on language in inner city schools. Conferences of this latter project attracted upward of five hundred teachers and researchers, nationally and internationally, and played a major part in formulating English for a world that is linguistically and culturally diverse. Harold will be remembered by English teachers for his passionate advocacy for the culture and the language that young people brought with them into school, a priority grounded in his lifelong socialist commitment. His influence was international. Readers will detect it, directly or indirectly, in more than one contribution to this special Antipodean issue of the journal. We will return more fully to the significance of Harold’s work in future issues.

The London Association for the Teaching of English 1947–67: a history Simon Gibbons Institute of Education Press, University of London (2013) ISBN 978‐1‐85856‐520‐0 £23.99 (paperback)

Introduction I am sitting in a school hall, one amongst a group of teachers. One of us is fiddling with a reel to reel tape recorder lugged up for the session – clipping the tape into the corresponding spool, winding it painstakingly into place. The voices start – a group of girls talking about Yevtushenko’s Companion. We listen section by section; speculate about the contrast with a teacher-led lesson; seek to identify the processes at work. We track relationships. We note the patterns of contribution by individual pupils.

The Teaching of English in Schools 1900–1970

David Shayer’s The Teaching of English in schools 1900-1970 has been reissued by Routledge in their Library Editions series of works in the History of Education. The reappearance of this classic work is welcome. Its chronological coverage and extensive range of reference, together with Shayer’s judicious, cautiously progressive and critical commentary, make it an indispensable guide to the slow, accretive developments in English teaching in the schools, within the British system, in the last century.

Harold at the Institute

Harold Rosen’s work in English teaching combined commitment to the living language of young people with attention to major issues of our times concerning social class and cultural and linguistic diversity. He drew increasingly on sociolinguistics for concepts in his work, but ultimately his approach to language was as much aesthetic and psychological as linguistic. He valued pupils’ language for the quality of their speech, when freed from imposed constraints and shaped by interest and experience and their own meanings. It was, moreover, the psychological as well as the linguistic challenge of finding ways to communicate, often in the face of educational expectations for objectivity and academic language, or of disabling versions of linguistic deficit, which fired his most important writing. It will be my argument here that these positions still offer a distinctive strength for English teaching. Harold joined the Institute as a lecturer in 1962, and retired in 1984 as Head of English and holder of the first Chair at the Institute in the Teaching of English as a Mother Tongue. His work across these years can be interpreted from two perspectives. Centrally, he carried forward work in English teaching already begun at Walworth School and in LATE (London Association for the Teaching of English). The themes he brought to English teaching, his critical interrogation of policies and positions, his posing of directions and ideas are the central story. But associated with this was the task of building and developing the work of the department as a university resource for teachers, and I want to say a little about this by way of a beginning. Part of Harold’s achievement, and that of his collaborators, Jimmy Britton and Nancy Martin, was in co-ordinating these two aspects in a single enterprise. The department that Harold joined had been formed historically through work in PGCE and in initial training. The tradition of this work in UDEs (University Departments of Education) was the employment of one person, perhaps assisted, to cover ‘methods’ in each curriculum subject, as had been the case for English at the Institute until after the war years, in the hands of Percival Gurrey and Maura Gwynne. Gurrey’s work on language had helped to reshape the teaching of grammar, and he was, as Britton noted (Britton 1973, 13), the ‘father figure’ of LATE, since many of its early members were former students. But the institutional and policy perception, then widely shared, was that initial training, which was not even made compulsory for secondary teachers until 1969, was merely a matter of the practical skills of teaching. With their acquisition, work in the curriculum subject ended. Meanwhile, advanced studies in education were intended for those seeking specialism in child development or comparative education or sociology. Few