Rhetoric, Textuality and Cultural Change: Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era
Submitted by:
Bill Green
Abstract:
What are the changing prospects for L1 education in an era now increasingly organised in terms of globalisation and transnationalism? What are the challenges facing L1 education now, and in the future, given that the classical national(ist) project is no longer viable, or at least in the ways it has been for the past few centuries? This paper takes the newly installed national curriculum in Australia – the Australian Curriculum – as both its reference- and its starting-point, in reconsidering more broadly the relationship between curriculum history and language education. Hitherto called ‘mother-tongue education’, this field is now known as L1 education, with its current-traditional focus being on education in language and literature. That focus, especially with regard to the emergence and consolidation of nation-states within modernity, was centrally concerned with national language and literatures, albeit sometimes framed by empire. Now clearly there are new global and trans-national imperatives and agendas to take into account, in rethinking the project of L1 education.
The paper is organised in two parts. The first is addressed to a contextual account of English teaching and L1 education more generally, highlighting the role and significance of written language (‘writing’) with regard to curriculum and schooling. The second focuses on what has been called a paradigmatic media-shift, from ‘print’ to ‘digital-electronics’, with its various implications and challenges in terms of changing forms of culture and knowledge. Of particular concern here is the issue what comes after ‘literacy’ and ‘writing’? After the historical projects of English teaching and L1 education? This paper provides one such account, focusing on reformulated notions of rhetoric and textuality, and the emergence of a new global-cultural dominant. Working methodologically from a theoretical-philosophical perspective, it asks: What role might L1 education play in nation-(re)building in the current conjuncture, given the increasingly significance of digital cultures and multimodal-communicative practices in an increasingly hyper-semiotic lifeworld?
References
Vilém Flusser (2011). Does Writing Have a Future?, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.
Bill Green (2017). “English as Rhetoric? – Once More, with Feeling...”, English in Australia, Vol 52, No. 1, [forthcoming].
Bill Green & Catherine Beavis (2013). “Literacy Education in the Age of New Media”, in Kathy Hall, Teresa Cremin, Barbara Comber & Luis Moll (Eds.), International Handbook of Research on Children’s Literacy, Learning and Culture, Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 42-53.
Ellen Krogh & Sylvi Penne (2015). “Languages, Literacies, Literatures: Researching Paradoxes and Negotiations in Scandinavian L1 Subjects”, L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. 15, pp. 1-16 [http://dx.doi.org/10.17239/L1ESLL-2015.15.01.12].