ABSTRACTS
2008; Routledge; Volume: 15; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13586840802364319
ISSN1469-3585
ResumoEnglish and its Others: Towards an Ethics of Transculturation English and its Others: Towards an Ethics of Transculturation Alex Kostogriz and Brenton Doecke At the International English Teachers' Conference in Sydney in 1980, James Britton and Harold Rosen re‐affirmed the connection between language and learning, urging their audience to resist drawing ‘a sharp distinction between the language of the home and the street and the language of the school’ and to move beyond their ‘mono‐lingual Englishness’ in order to embrace the ‘linguistic‐cultural diversity’ that students bring with them into the school yard. The history of English curriculum and pedagogy in Australia since the 1980 conference shows that Australian educators have experienced enormous difficulties in responding to the challenges posed by Britton and Rosen. This paper examines the continuing struggle on the part of English language educators in Australia to address the question of the linguistic‐cultural diversity of students in Australian schools. We begin by briefly revisiting the moment of the 1980 conference. We then look beyond this moment, examining the politics of multiculturalism, and reconceptualising the challenge of cultural diversity within an alternative philosophical framework. Drawing on Bakhtin's scholarship, we question cultural monologism in the teaching of English to ‘Others’ and attempt to conceptualise a dialogical ethics of pedagogical answerability, such as needed in multicultural conditions. Tracking Local Curriculum Histories: The Plural Forms of Subject English Phil Cormack The purpose of this article is to tell a history of English from the margins and at the level of the local and take a genealogical perspective on its emergence and subsequent forms. It provides an analysis of the primary and post‐primary English curriculum for the older child, or ‘adolescent’, beyond the compulsory years of schooling from the 1870s until the 1920s in one site: the colony/State of South Australia. A key insight presented is that English could not be seen as a unitary subject at any time in the period examined. Overall, there was as much difference between post‐primary English courses as there was between English's primary and post‐primary forms. Englishes were developed in and for the diverse post‐primary schools that were established, and these differences were based on the kind of citizen‐subject that those schools were designed to produce. A productive way of viewing the English subjects is as a set of allied technologies that could be deployed strategically for different and often prosaic ends, rather than as a singular project of culture. English in a Surveillance Regime: Tightening the Noose in New Zealand Terry Locke A number of factors impact on the construction of English and ways in which English teachers envisage their professional work. These factors include the nature of English as a degree subject in university Humanities faculties; discourses related to the production, consumption and dissemination of texts in the wider society; pre‐service teacher education programmes, national curriculum policy documents, and the technologies attendant upon their implementation; and the various ways in which assessment and qualifications regimes impact on classroom practice. This article focuses on the latter, specifically discussing ways in which the recently introduced national qualifications system in New Zealand – the NCEA (National Certificate of Educational Achievement) – is producing a range of what Foucault might term ‘power effects’. I will be arguing that a number of the technologies associated with the NCEA, in particular technologies related to assessment and moderation, constitute a ‘surveillance regime’ that is having a powerful impact on the construction of English. I will conclude by sounding a warning about the pitfalls of qualifications systems built around discrete outcomes and standards. Teaching Literature in Australia: Examining and Reviewing Senior English Annette Patterson In this paper I explore this relationship through the comments of examiners on English examination papers written by final‐year high school students across Australia. Each year, various Australian education authorities in states where public examinations are administered for the purposes of ranking students for tertiary entrance selection release reports from the examiners. These reports contain a great deal of commentary by examiners who are, in the main, senior teachers of English and literature. The commentary points to significant shifts in thinking about the means for inculcating specific competencies in relation to ethics, aesthetics and rhetoric. Whereas pupils' ethical selves were once drawn out through literature, in recent years they have been drawn out through engagement with real‐world social issues. This shift has led to a debate about the role of traditional literature in the formation of ethical, aesthetic and rhetorical competencies among English students. English Teaching in New South Wales since 1971: Versions of Growth? Wayne Sawyer This article covers the recent history of English in Years 7–10 in New South Wales, Australia, as represented by its syllabuses. It argues the proposition that this history is an evolution characterised by a very particular version of the ‘growth model’ of English. This version of growth begins in 1971 with a syllabus highly influenced by James Moffett, thus giving a particular rhetorical aspect to the syllabus. This version of rhetoric was not that advocated by later writers as an important direction for the subject, but in time syllabuses moved in that direction. As a result of this evolution, the subject in New South Wales has been much more focused on language study than it has often been credited with. Problematising Eclecticism and Rewriting English Mark Howie In this paper, I explore the subject possibilities anticipated by a recent example of English curriculum renewal in Australia – the NSW Years 7–10 English Syllabus. Drawing on the Derridean understanding of writing as writing‐in‐general, I consider some of the possibilities and limitations of the NSW syllabus's foundational metaphor of ‘intelligent and intellectualised eclecticism’, particularly the renewed emphasis this places on English teacher programming as professional writing practice, for the renewal of the English subjects. The question of (English teacher) agency is central here. Consideration is given to the ways in which personalist and poststructuralist conceptualisations of programming as a form of professional writing anticipate a different English teacher ‘self’. I argue that agency properly resides in teachers seeing their programming as being much more complex than the totalising metaphor of ‘eclecticism’ allows, grounded as it is in a personalist discourse of writing that emphasises individual expression, creativity and unity. As the programming of English teachers cannot escape the historicised play of difference, I conclude that it can be most productively understood as a dialogical mediation of discourses that allows different (historicised English teacher) ‘consciousnesses’ to exist side by side. Everybody Loves Raymond Williams: Critical Literacy, Cultural Studies and the New International Niall Lucy Critical literacy as taught in Australian high schools today is not so much a perfectible ‘discipline’, answerable only to its own internal methods and projected outcomes, as an affirmation of democracy on the side of what Derrida calls the ‘new international’. I argue this by way of a discussion of Graeme Turner's recent attempt to separate secondary‐school critical literacy from university cultural studies, to the intended advantage of the latter. Such an attempt forgets, however, that cultural studies' own history is owed to the democratic spirit that animates critical literacy, in opposition to the conservative idea that moral values are enshrined in literary texts according to a narrow understanding of both literature and textuality.
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