Reading a literary education: sociability and disciplinary knowledge in subject English

• Larissa McLean Davies & Brenton Doecke & Lyn Yates
  This paper will review some conceptual debates about the purpose and form of English literary studies in the curriculum, both from within perspectives and changing views of those working in English, and from debates about knowledge, disciplines and curriculum purposes more generally. The first half of the paper will take up the issues as seen from within the literature and history of English. Traditionally subject English cultivated sensitivity towards language and a capacity for critical and imaginative engagement with literary works (Hunter 1988; Mathieson 1975). This understanding of English has come under severe critique from those challenging the privileging of a literature-centered English as an educational and ‘moral technology’ (Eagleton 1985) and of a select body of texts as ‘literature’ (Beavis 2013; Morgan 2007). These critiques of such ideas of ‘literature’ typically advocate a more inclusive focus on cultural expression through media forms and non-traditional ‘literary’ texts (e.g. Buckingham & Sefton-Green 1994), thus expanding and reformulating the literary field. This has prompted debate about the purpose of subject English, and the relationship of literary study to literacy teaching (Frow 2001; Green 2008). While literature remains a component of English in Australian schools, questions about what constitutes literature and the purpose of literary study–whether it is essentially an aesthetic pursuit, an instrument for personal growth, a vehicle for instilling social justice dispositions, a component of national cultural heritage, or an elite pursuit that distracts English teachers from a proper focus on basic literacy (Peel 2000, McLean Davies 2008, 2011) - contest any assumption of a homogeneous educational field. The second half of the paper will discuss the kinds of questions about the specificity of English suggested by recent sociological arguments about knowledge and curriculum and as an extension of a recent project whose focus was history and science (Yates, Woelert, Millar & O’Connor 2016).
• Larissa McLean Davies & Wayne Sawyer
  The paper explores the ways in which understandings of literature at the secondary level are conceived and mediated through policy and curriculum documents and, in relation to Australia, makes an argument for the importance of bringing historical knowledge to bear on current practice. Analysis will focus on statements and positions on/assumptions about/silences on aspects of an education in literature. Specifically, this paper will analyse the ways in which knowledge is presented in the Australian Curriculum: English will then offer a comparative mapping of the terrain of secondary English teaching in New South Wales and Victorian documents, and consider the characteristic practices that arise from written curricula in each jurisdiction. Of key interest to this discourse analysis is they ways in which conceptions of literary knowledge are positioned, contested and renegotiated in and through these documents. Consequently, the paper will take particular theoretical approaches to analysing those curricula – it will explore the way that knowledge is represented in the notion of ‘literature as conversation’, in the relationship between literature and ideas, and/or the understanding of literature as textuality. The work of Peel on English teacher identity, of Green, Scholes and Milner on textuality and the literature/cultural studies debate, and Pope and McCallum on creativity are also important theoretical drivers.
• Larissa McLean Davies & Brenton Doecke & Wayne Sawyer & Philip Mead
  The concept of ‘literary sociability’ (Kirkpatrick & Dixon 2012) reflects a move on the part of literary scholars and critics away from a traditional focus on ‘individual writers and great books’ to an investigation of the contexts and interactions that ‘facilitate and sustain writing and reading, and also the kinds of communal identities that are formed by the practices of writing and reading. The concept challenges the traditional preoccupation of literary scholars with locating the work of an individual writer within a literary canon that exists outside the social and historical conditions in which that work is produced and valued. Attention is given, rather, to the variegated social relationships and institutional settings in which reading and writing occur. Such scholarship emphasises the intensely social character of the production and reception of literary works. While recent literary scholarship includes schools as sites that generate literary sociability (Kirkpatrick & Dixon, 2012, vi), teachers and schools have not generally been the focus of sustained research from this perspective. This is symptomatic of the gap that exists between literary scholarship and Educational research (Doecke, McLean Davies & Mead 2011).
  
  In this paper, presenters will explore the ways in which this theoretical approach, which sees literary study (involving understandings of the nature of reading and the uses of literature) as positioned in inter-personal, social and institutionally mediated practice (Guillory 1993, viii) can be appropriated to investigate the dynamic nature of English teachers’ knowledge. Drawing of data from a pilot project which investigated the ways in which mid-career English teachers’ articulated disciplinary knowledge, this paper will offer a language-sensitive analysis of the links between sociability, discipline knowledge and professional identity-formation.