Literacy and Growth: a Genealogy of English Teaching
Submitted by:
John M P Hodgson
Abstract:
This presentation will report on a four-year genealogical study of L1 English teaching in the UK and other countries. A genealogy of educational ideas in relation to their social and political contexts helps us understand where we are today and what matters educationally, socially, culturally and politically. Our project has examined the origins and significance of key ideas of “literacy” and “growth” over three centuries. Starting with Adam Smith and Hugh Blair, the university teachers of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres who instructed young Scots in the mid eighteenth century, we reveal the Enlightenment forebears of such contemporary concepts as “cultural capital” and “critical literacy”. We consider the importance of “growth” to the writers and critics who opposed Victorian Utilitarianism and to the late 19th and early 20th century influencers that established English as a humane study in the UK, Australia and the US. We reflect on the turbulent aftermath of Dartmouth, the changes in the “growth” model following the cultural turn in English studies, and the politics behind the shift from “English” to “literacy” in the 1990s. Importantly, we redefine the growth model for the 21st century to support teachers and students in the current context of performativity, high stakes assessment, the “knowledge curriculum” and artificial intelligence.
The Australian experience is an important part of our genealogy. As Jackie Manuel and Don Carter (2019) have shown, Romantic approaches to the teaching of language and literature imbued the New South Wales 1911 English curriculum and influenced the 2021 Newbolt Report, which, as Ian Reid (2004) demonstrated, was written largely by members of the UK English Association, which grew out of the Wordsworth society.
Manuel, J. & Carter, D. (2019) ‘Resonant continuities: the influence of the Newbolt Report on the formation of the English curriculum in New South Wales, Australia’. English in Education 53 (3) 223-239
Reid, I., (2004) Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies. Ashgate