Literary knowledge: A curricular archive.
Submitted by:
Wayne Sawyer
Abstract:
This conceptual paper arises out of a recently completed Australian Research Council project on Investigating literary knowledge in the making of English teachers. It examines the contested question of literary knowledge by analysing how such knowledge has been presented in an archive of official curriculum documents in subject English in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, since WWII. The documents under consideration will be those which define the official curricula for English in the senior (Years 11/12) secondary years. The paper will ask how literary knowledge is conceptualised and positioned in and through these documents – and whether and how these conceptualisations shift over time. Drawing on such localised history of English curriculum, the paper explores how forms of literary knowledge are realised in official curricula, how student knowledge is positioned, and the implications for pedagogy. It explores how knowledge is represented at different times via the often competing notions of literature and its role in senior secondary English. This analysis sheds light on the competing imperatives and purposes of subject English as realised through literary study – and how, and whether, these are conceptualised as questions of knowledge. It also offers a framework through which teachers might interrogate understandings of literary knowledge, and how this links to concerns about teacher and student agency and understandings of the purposes of subject English.The paper is conceptualised, firstly, around the place of knowledge in literary education (Gibson, 2009;McLean Davies & Sawyer, 2018; Medway, 2010; Pike, 2003; Simpson, 2013; Yates et al, 2019): the status of knowledge as a construct and the particular kinds of knowledges in play. Particular literary theories (eg Felski, 2008; Rosenblatt, 1978; Scholes, 1986) frame the discussion of pedagogy as (effectively) positions on a literary education that play into contestations over state conceptualisations of the literate citizen.