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Trainee English teachers and thestruggle for subject knowledgeCaroline Daly aa University of London , UKPublished online: 21 Oct 2010.
To cite this article: Caroline Daly (2004) Trainee English teachers and the struggle forsubject knowledge, Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 11:2, 189-204, DOI:10.1080/09540250042000252631
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Trainee English teachers and the
struggle for subject knowledge
Caroline Daly*University of London, UK
These words are written on a sheet of A3 paper, pinned above the whiteboard in an
English classroom in a North London school:
Studying English literature at school was my ®rst, and probably my biggest, step towards
mental freedom. It was like falling in love with life (16 December 2002).
It was pinned up where we usually ®nd the `Learning Objectives' in many classrooms
these days. The teacher in this classroom is sending a message about the kind of
learning that literature involves, about the kind of knowledge that is promised. It will
have an effect on student teachers' experience of learning about English teaching in
that school, as well as on the pupils themselves. It is rather different from declaring
predetermined lesson outcomes, promising `to identify complex sentences in the
opening chapter of the novel' or `to identify the use of imagery in the poem and write a
poem using at least three similes'. To be able to do these things is also important and it
is no easy matter to assess `mental freedom' or `falling in love with life'. Even if it were,
it would not be enough to satisfy the demands of prospective employers and HEIs that
a school leaver is suf®ciently equipped to cope with the complex demands of
continuous learning in those environments. Neither is it enough, however, to have
learnt to `identify complex sentences'.
Here is just one context which frames the issues faced by Beginning Teachers as
they start to teach a range of literature within the requirements of the National
Curriculum, the National Framework and GCSE, as they try to develop an awareness
of the complexity of teacher knowledge in this ®eld, its special tensions and the
possibilities of resolving some of them. These teachers share a growing knowledge of
the need for an active participatory understanding by pupils of themselves as learners,
as users of language and readers of texts: a recognition and validation of their own
*Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK.
Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1358±684X (print)/ISSN 1469±3585 (online)/04/020189-16
ã 2004 The editors of Changing English
DOI: 10.1080/09540250042000252631
Changing English, Vol. 11, No. 2, October 2004
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language resources. Fairclough insists that this is the foundation on which
`emancipatory discourse' is built (1992). It is a dif®cult area, and their stories
recount, to some extent, how they have emerged from a process of attrition, re¯ecting
the real con¯icts concerning the teaching of literature in contemporary contexts. In
particular, they warn against the appropriation of literary texts as vehicles for the
teaching of literacy skills in reductive ways, which may furnish readily assessable
outcomes, but which lead to fragmented and mechanistic approaches to textual
analysis. At worst, the literature classroom can seem a world away from that promised
in the words above the board in North London, in which pupils fail to learn how to
learn, and instead become teacher-dependent and performance-oriented. These
Beginning Teachers, however, reveal how their personal convictions about the power
of literature can be developed into teaching which inspires young readers and
encourages them to be critically informed, as well as equipping them with tools of
linguistic and literary analysis.
Patrick
Patrick is a lover of literature. His own account of what literature means to him speaks
of the power of the subject. It is hopefully not unrepresentative of the majority of new
entrants to English teaching:
My views on war have been shaped by Catch-22, the Regeneration Trilogy and Das Boot
amongst others. My views on gender have been in¯uenced by The Passion of New Eve and
The Female Man. My views on power and society have been aided by reading 1984 and
The First Circle. My views on Japan, America, Africa, the past, the present, the future, us
and them, life and death, love and hate, modern preoccupations and past concerns have
all been in¯uenced greatly by the books that I have read. Books have made me laugh and
cry and be angry and sad and feel violent and vulnerable and be amazed and surprised.
Books have made me see myself with different eyes and perceived the world in an utterly
altered way. When I pick up a book I am excited about the journey it will be taking me on,
whether it is the psychological journey of a solitary Japanese male trying to make sense of
his extraordinary life, or the physical journey of a nineteenth-century sailor heading
towards the edge of humanity. Reading is also an activity that gives me an immense and
unsullied pleasure; a perfectly legitimate end in itself. This is why I love literature and this
is why it is a subject that has to be taught in school.
It is easy to see why Patrick wants to be an English teacher. His subject knowledge
extends to a belief in the intrinsic value of reading, the importance of intensely
personal engagement with texts, and of the transformational possibilities of literature.
He, like most new entrants to the profession, already possesses an implicit `model of
English' which is based on ideas about personal growth that are long-established
within the history of ideas about English teaching. Cox, in 1991, contemplating a
curriculum for the 1990s, draws on Hughes to argue for a continuum of fundamental
principles in the teaching of literature:
It is occasionally possible, just for brief moments to ®nd the words that will unlock the
doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express somethingÐperhaps not
much, just something ¼ we call this poetry (Hughes, 1967, cited in Cox, 1991).
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This is what Patrick already knows, not only from his experience of his degree, but
also from his broader encounters with literature throughout his life. It has not
prepared him particularly, however, for how this knowledge will work in a London
classroom, nor for how it will fare within a skills-focused agenda which privileges the
assessment of `literacy' as a separate entity from `English'.
Picture the scene. It is after lunch on a Friday afternoon in a classroom in the East
End of London. There are 30 girls in the Year 8 class who arrive boisterously for their
English lesson, calling out, grabbing each other, noisy and excited. Two thirds of the
girls are of Asian origin, in this school where so many languages are spoken. More
than half the girls have their heads covered by the hejab. The lesson, at one hour and
twenty minutes, is one of the longest being taught in the city on any afternoon, and it
certainly seems that way to Patrick, the young white male student teacher whose task
it is to introduce these girls to the traditional English ballad form this afternoon, as
required by the departmental Key Stage 3 curriculum.
The poem to be the focus of the introduction is The Gresford Disaster, based upon a
real life mining disaster in a Welsh community during the 1930s; and we must ask the
following question: what other kinds of knowledge will Patrick need to be able to teach
this poem in this classroom? Before worrying about approaches to the text, techniques
or tasks, and certainly before setting learning objectives, there is a vital piece of teacher
learning to be undertaken, by asking himself the following sorts of questions:
d What experience can he estimate the girls are able to rely on to help them
understand the world of the poem?d What do they know about coal-mining? Have they ever seen a mineÐjust from the
outsideÐin Wales or in any part of the world?d How many of the girls would be able to point to Wales on a map on the British Isles,
and what could they tell us about small Welsh communities from 70 years ago?d How many of these words from the poem will hold meaning for them?d What are their stories of disasters?
These types of questions are about extending teacher knowledge of the complexity of
teaching any text to diverse readers. It is a step beyond the knowledge about texts
which he brings to his initial training, and is vital in developing teacher knowledge.
`Pedagogical content knowledge' is not just about learning teaching `techniques', but
about the factors which ensure learner readiness, to be receptive to the learning on
offer. Here, it involves transforming knowledge about literary texts into knowledge
about how they apply in the contexts of pupils' worlds, their experiences, language
and knowledge of other literature. Only then is the teacher in any position to think
about `objectives'. The problem for many new teachers is that the `objectives' are
frequently extrinsic to the learners, set for homogenous learners in anonymous
contexts, and imposed by national, local or school-based authorities, irrespective of
the unique situations in which they are taught.
For Patrick, the pressure to `assess' ®rst and foremost, is overwhelming. He
identi®es his concern with meeting assessment targets for the class: `During the four
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week course of the unit (on ballads) three formal assessments were to be made; one
speaking and listening, one reading and one writing. The effect that this had on the
way in which the unit was approached from a pedagogical point of view was huge.
This immediately meant that the focus of my attention was put into `̀ solving'' the
problem of ®tting in these three assessments rather than thinking about the best way
of introducing ballads to a class of unruly Year 8s'. He had decided to ask the girls to
try to write a modern day ballad, using The Gresford Disaster as a model. It was selected
because he saw it as ideal for teaching the ballad form, `following as it did an ABCB
rhyme scheme and a simple metre'. His subsequent re¯ections show that this concern
to teach `form' came to override the fact that it is, ®rst and foremost, a poem, a piece of
literature and that the girls are readers with a complex set of relations to that text. He
writes after the lesson that his primary concern had been `How am I going to assess the
English skills of this class?' rather than `How am I going to introduce this class to the
pleasures and rewards of listening to and reading ballads?'
Patrick's ®rst attempt at teaching ballads found the girls were unable to engage with
the poem. They found it irrelevant to their lives. Pupils' responses to texts are partly
constituted by their identity as part of a group that shares experience of power and
powerlessness, through gender, class, ethnicity, age: cohesion between the individual
and the group is maintained through the negotiation of the types of power available to
them. For adolescent pupils, their relationship with school texts is a critical aspect of
the development of subjectivity, through the properties of texts to project cultural
values, with varying representations of the world. The teacher became the last thing he
wanted to beÐa gatekeeper to an alien culture, faced with the task of marching the
girls through what they perceived as a meaningless text in order to get them to
produce an appropriate ballad that would meet the requirements of the genre and
display the correct language techniques. Management issues arose. The girls became
disruptive, hostile to the literature on offer and to the prospect of writing a ballad of
their own. The experience of teaching literature in this context provided a crucial
learning episode for the new teacher. In his later re¯ections, he revisits the episode:
`The pupils could not in any way claim the events of The Gresford Disaster to be part of
their histories and thus they had no investment or interest in the events of the ballad';
but signi®cantly goes on to write `beyond the empathy that one would share with any
victim of human suffering'. He has understood some of the complexity of teaching
literature, and rediscovered the importance of personal engagement, which had been
the source of his own pleasure in reading, but which had been drowned in the
demands, as he saw them, meeting the learning objectives of the Key Stage 3
curriculum. He writes `The idea that pupils should be concentrating on the structural
forms of a piece of writing whilst ignoring the content shows not only an ignorance of
how pupils react to literature but also entirely opposes my own philosophy of
teaching'. He has been hard on himself. The pressures to focus on what Watkins
(2001) would describe as a `performance' orientation towards learning makes it a very
big task indeed for new teachers to retain sight of that knowledge which inspires them
to teach in the ®rst place. What is important is that Patrick was able to see this
experience as part of a continuum of his own learning, and is able to identify the
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continuities between his personal beliefs about literature and where this lesson went
wrong. It is this continuum of understanding which is so critical. It helps new teachers
resist the pressure to replace what they know to be the point of reading anything with
short cuts to `assessable' skills for pupils to perform as evidence that they are `learning'
something.
The episode has reinforced for Patrick the idea that the learners are the starting
point for making decisions about teaching. The factors of ethnicity and gender, and
also wider cultural displacement between contemporary twenty-®rst century East
London and a 1930s Welsh mining village, have to be fundamental to decisions about
how knowledge develops in this classroom. It is an important step beyond the
teacher's literary knowledge about the ballad form. Of course, it would be different
teaching this poem in a traditional mining community, in a boys' school, in Wales. But
that would avoid the dif®cult questions to be addressed about the possibilities that
literature holds for all readers. The student teacher was right to believe in the
possibilities of literature connecting human beings through `empathy' with `any victim
of human suffering'. It is a complex business to help students learn through
experience of the unfamiliar, but that is at the heart of any debate about what
literature teaching is for. It has become far more dif®cult since the growing trend to
teach texts as a means of demonstrating form, rendering them `useful' for teaching
different genres.
The quandaries posed by assessment-driven teaching are felt acutely by those who
®nd it the most puzzling: new entrants who arrive with a fresh store of passion and
commitment to their subject. Patrick writes of how he has been reminded of `the
central position of the text within the subject', and the pitfalls of `putting the emphasis
on assessment rather than learning'. Initially, the frameworks he is starting to
negotiate had seemed overwhelming. `Instead of being assessed on the text that they
had studied, they studied the text in order to be competent in the assessment that they
had to complete.' This experience helped him to dismantle the current orthodoxies
which he had started to accept, and to question the relegation of `meaning' in the
pursuit of assessable outcomes.
Patrick's aim had been that the pupils produced a ballad of their own. This
principal objective is one that is worthwhile. In his concern to have the correct
material to assess, he had given them the `story' for the ballad, based on events in their
own school, as well as the `model' ballad with the ABCB rhyme scheme. Getting in
the way of learning is the overwhelming pressure to get pupils to perform the requisite
skillsÐto use rhyme, verse and basic narrative, without them having anything real to
say. The pressure of ®nding something to assess, so that `performance' can be proven,
is an understandable pitfall for new teachers, who are anxious to convince themselves
and their mentors and tutors that pupils are really `learning something'. This is not
just an issue for new teachers. Dominant education policy foregrounds a matrix of
skills and predetermined objectives, charted on maps of things to be assessed and
accompanied by rigid monitoring of both pupils and teachers. In this climate,
literature is increasingly reduced to a vehicle for text modelling, an instant `writing
frame', by which the genre can be handed down from teacher to pupil. It can result in
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pupils of all abilities adopting a fragmentary, mechanistic approach to text authorship,
producing writing which Thomas describes as `assessable' but `dull' and which,
crucially, impedes motivation to write (2001). Teachers' insecurity in working with
national initiatives is an important factor here, where they become focused on the
bureaucratic aspects of delivering their recommendations (Frater, 2000; Wray et al.,
2002).
Pupils need a `knowledge of the craft of writing' (Higgins, 2002), but negotiating
the relationship between meaning and form can be an area of dif®culty for teachers.
Teachers who are less secure can adopt an over-mechanistic application of planning
`regulations' which leads pupils to disengage from both reading literature and the
composition process which it should support. By reconnecting with his own
knowledge about literature, Patrick is able to analyse the conceptions behind his
teaching, and its accompanying assessment discourse.
Ian
Ian's story begins before the beginning of his PGCE course, when he spends a week
observing the daily literacy hour in a primary school. He has been observing pupils in
Year 6 working with a poem by Roald Dahl during the literacy hour:
The poem was funny and was about one particularly naughty child and one particularly
well-behaved child. After having the poem read through to them, the pupils were asked to
point out which words rhyme. Having done this the pupils were then asked to try and see
why the words rhyme. The pupils soon realised that the endings were the same and were
set a task in which they had to ®nd other words that rhymed on a worksheet. That was the
end of the literacy hour and no one at any point had mentioned that the poem was funny.
At this pre-training stage, Ian's subject knowledge is already alert to the dangers of
using literature as a vehicle for decontextualized language practice. He knows nothing
yet about learning objectives, lesson planning and assessment, but he knows what the
experience of reading literature ought to feel like. This conviction does not desert him
during the course, but only makes him more uncertain of what it is he should be
aiming for when teaching literature. His concerns about what happens to the
experience of being a reader in order to facilitate assessment return again and again
throughout his re¯ections on his teaching and observation experiences. Teachers'
professional learning is subject to the pressure to achieve ever-improving performance
from their pupils. Watkins exposes the paradoxical nature of focusing on performance
at the cost of learning, making the critical point that `A focus on learning can enhance
performance, whereas a focus on performance can depress performance' (2001). A
target-setting culture has implications for how learning is conceived. Part of Ian's
concerns is where he sees the confusion of `performance' with `learning' in an
education agenda driven by target-setting and a quantifying approach to knowledge.
As a student teacher, it is hard for him to know what he can do about it.
Ian ®nds it dif®cult to know how to respond to aspects of the National Strategy, and
writes:
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`Pupils in one school studying, for example, Treasure Island and Animal Farm, will, one
way or another, have covered the same objectives by the end of the key stage as pupils in
another school who have studied quite different texts' (Key Stage 3 National Strategy,
DfEE, 2001, p. 14). I, on the other hand, think that the pupils studying Animal Farm
should understand how Orwell re¯ects on the nature of society and fascism, they should
be able to discuss whether they like the book or not, whether they like the talking animals
or not, develop opinions and enjoy reading a story. Instead, both sets of pupils will
explain to their parents on arrival home from school, that they have `done' Shakespeare/
Orwell and now know about persuasive speech. ¼ I don't want to ¼ look at the Diary of
Anne Frank, read an extract through to the class, then ask who can point out three
conventions of a diary entry.
The Strategy does not, in fact, expect that this is all a teacher would do: it is a matter of
professional interpretation of the external frameworks. But these re¯ections are in
response to what he is seeing. This tells the story of a new entrant and what he is to
make of the impact of external frameworks on English classrooms today, where
assessment has tyrannized the curriculum instead of being an intrinsic and supportive
element of individual pupils' learning. Ian's knowledge about literature has made him
resistant to learning that has been conceived of as a commodity, which supplies skills
which are explicit, instrumental, `countable' and can be readily checked. Like most of
his peers, he ®nds it dif®cult to reconcile his beliefs about poetry with teaching a pre-
packaged GCSE `anthology':
There is something inherently wrong with the systematic collection of poetry for
assessment ¼ I have heard discussions between ¼ students indicating that many of them
know the poems by page number in the anthology, not by poet. In fact, they often refer to
the poems by their basic structural features, e.g. `You know, the one with dramatic
monologue in'.
The pupils in the GCSE group that I worked with said they knew `How to do poetry'.
What could they possibly mean by this? It was explained to me by a student that each of
the poems from the anthology that they study is `done' in the same way. The poem is
placed on the OHP and they go through it, line by line, picking out the features of
language and techniques that are being used. They annotate their copies of the poem and
then answer some exam style questions on the text. Then the poem is considered `done'.
It seems that it may be more than just a coincidence that the majority of the students I
talked to told me they did not like poetry ¼
If I teach Mid-Term Break by Heaney then I want the pupils to appreciate how sad it is. I
want the pupils to perceive the emotion that the poet has put into his words. If I decide to
teach Jabberwocky I want the pupils to laugh at the nonsense words and enjoy the strange
imaginary world that Lewis Carroll creates.
He has learned that pupils learn much more than teachers set out to teach. He has
realized that these pupils have learned to be helpless; they have learned to be passive,
to receive knowledge from the teacher without the effort and unique rewards of
enquiry, that `literature' is a set of linguistic tricks strung together to be unscrambled
ef®ciently and uniformly in an exam. These pupils have developed a `performance
orientation', which Watkins describes as a `negative pattern' in learners' beliefs about
how they learn, and which is based on concern to be `judged as able', to perform with
an `emphasis on public evaluation'. Ian is already interested in a `learner orientation'
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which Watkins identi®es as a `positive pattern' in beliefs about learning, and which
promotes belief that effort leads to success and focuses on personal satisfaction gained
from dif®cult tasks, problem-solving and self-instruction. For English teachers,
understanding the relationship between learning and performance helps to explain the
puzzlement about the apparent `plateauing' of pupils who simply fail to maintain ever-
improving assessments (for example, boys' writing performance at Key Stage 2,
GCSE pass-rates). Watkins argues that
d promoting learners as active and collaborative constructors of meaning with
autonomy and self-direction can enhance performance;d learning about learning is a necessary element for learners to select and use
appropriate strategies and to be effective learners in a range of situations (2001).
Ian already knows that he wants his pupils to be autonomous learners, and to
construct their own meanings out of the literature he will teach. For this he needs to
consider their particular needs and resist the common-sense orthodoxies and highly
plausible arguments for implementing external frameworks for teaching and assess-
mentÐthat teachers don't need to `re-invent the wheel'. This sounds so persuasive at
a time when teachers are so overburdened with bureaucratic administrative roles. It is
so persuasive when they are told (rightly) that a mass of teacher knowledge already
exists (Hargreaves, 1999; Jackson, 2002). If this is the case, should it not be made
readily available for new teachers to apply, through centralized curriculum models
and lesson plans, geared to predetermined learning paths and common assessments?
Of course there is a huge knowledge base amongst English teachers about the teaching
and learning of English. But there is no such thing as `re-inventing' the wheel when it
comes to teaching literature. There is however, re-invention. Re-invention is about
the construction of new knowledges which have meaning for individuals in relation to
the communities in which they existÐschool, home, local communities. Re-invention
is exactly what is generative in the English classroom. Effective teachers re-invent
every time they teach the same poem. This is not to imply a series of lone individuals
toiling in isolation to ®nd effective ways of teaching poetry, when they could be
downloading some really good material from the `teach-it' website. Learning requires
the re-interpretation of any teaching material. It is applied fresh to each situation, each
class. The practice of teaching is about a constant process of meaning-making, within
a social theory of learning which requires teachers to be active participants in the
learning in their classrooms. If we believe that learning in fact comes from the
interfaces between what children bring and what teachers offer, how can they work
with any prescribed set of tools and methods? A knowledge base for English teaching
comes rather from the shared experiences of teachers as and with learners, critically
interpreted through instruments for re¯ection. It is not about managerialist
applications of methods which remove the critical thinking bitÐthe intellectual
creativity of teaching.
Teachers need to know how to learn from experience beyond basic re¯ection upon
it. They need to go beyond what Furlong et al. have called `lay re¯ection', if knowledge
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gained from experience is to have professional currency in the face of external and top-
down de®nitions of knowledge about teaching and learning. What counts as `subject
knowledge', professional expertise or skill, is increasingly identi®ed externally in ways
which quantify and classify teacher knowledge through criterion-based referencing,
e.g. standards for gaining Quali®ed Teacher Status; Ofsted inspection criteria,
quali®cation for threshold application. For over a decade now, `what teachers know'
has been increasingly what they are told, and is of®cially endorsed by an evidence base
of statistics, policy-making, statutory regulations and testing regimes. Teachers need a
secure and informed theoretical base for their critical judgements about what pupils
are really learning in this environment, and to make shared interpretations of what is
signi®cant.
Gareth
Gareth would certainly recognize that `negative' pattern of learned helplessness which
Ian describes in his pupils. Gareth shares a learning history with his pupils, based on
exclusion from `making meaning': `I had all too vivid memories of staring at the poem
on the page in front of me and not having a single clue what the poet was talking about
¼ where the teacher essentially annotated copies of the poem and explained
meanings'. He recognized in his pupils his own past experiencesÐas a passive learner
of an elusive ®xed knowledge about meanings which exist independently of the reader.
These continuities helped Gareth to understand the problems of engaging his pupils
in their learning, but are also a source of anxiety about `getting it right'. Gareth's
values about teaching and learning are centred on the pupils' experiences and his
acute awareness of the responsibility he has for creating a learning environment: `I was
determined that I was not going to put anybody through that in my classroom'. The
problem is that this can seem an enormous task, rooted as it is here, in tensions
surrounding knowledge about literature as something `®xed', which had been
Gareth's experience of `doing' poetry at school. For many student teachers, such
experiences inform the most dif®cult aspects of what they need to un-learn during the
PGCE. Despite their study of contemporary literary theory at university, the
transition from their own experience of learning `school English' to teaching it is a
dif®cult one for many. The reversion to the hierarchical teacher±pupil relations
around learning which they experienced at school can be dif®cult to resist. Prior to
meeting with pupils, Gareth's perception was still of a teacher as `expert', as a source
of unquestioned knowledge. It is a long way from conceptions of the classroom as a
social place where meanings are forged, and where the teacher is also a learner:
¼ pupils complain they `don't get it' and I was no exception. Struggling to come to terms
with meanings and having them `slip through your ®ngers like water' (Andrews, 1991, p.
2) was a very frustrating thing for me as a pupil. ¼ As I had always struggled with the
study of poetry in school, for A level and during my degree, the thought of attempting to
teach it toÐin my imaginationÐa class of unwilling teenagers was the part of my English
PGCE that I was least looking forward to ¼ If I don't know what it means how can I
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teach it? ¼ Can I get a book that will give me the answers and tell me what the poems
mean?
His own learning history reveals the irresistible pressure to subscribe to the premise
that inherent meaning in texts, and their unquestioned `value', can be veri®ed
objectively, outside the reading experience. This is what disturbs these teachers about
the selection of poems authorized and anthologized for assessment. It ignores the
development of literary theory in hermeneutics since the 1960s, summarized so
uncompromisingly by Terry Eagleton: `Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves:
they are processes of signi®cation materialised only in the practice of reading. For
literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author' (1983) .
Gareth's knowledge about literature is informed by contemporary analyses of the
relationship between the reader and the text, but this only serves to intensify the
con¯icts at work in how he is to be a school teacher of English. In particular, he is
troubled by the responses of his male pupils:
However ¼ I realised that my `problems' with poetry were almost all inextricably linked
with the classroom, teaching and assessment as opposed to poetry as an entity in itself ¼
The problem for me was how I was going to convince these boys that poetry was actually
a very real and valid form of communicationÐa type of literature that dealt with `sex,
death, politics, power and injustice, parents ¼ and children ¼ religion, sorrow, loss and
memory, jealousy, guilt, joy, desire and every kind of love' (Padel, 2002, p. 18) . These
were all issues that adolescent boys could relate toÐmaybe I just had to show them that
they could if they wanted to ¼ It was crucial for me to make it explicit ¼ that I was not
attempting to catch them out, looking for them to give me a right or a wrong answer. The
climate had to be one where speculative, tentative exploration was encouraged and was
indeed the norm. I wanted to create an environment where there was a forum provided
for pupils to investigate, speculate and predict without a fear of being wrong ¼ In essence
I wanted to create `a learning environment where meaning is made and shared through
dialogue and negotiation, and not handed down from teacher to student' (Trelawny-
Ross, 1998, p. 47) . On re¯ection I wanted to create this because of my own personal
belief that teaching and education is not simply about transferring the knowledge that I
may have into the empty vessels which the pupils are viewed by some to be ¼ for me
education is about going on the journey together.
This was not an easy undertaking. The introduction of open-ended exploratory tasks
to investigate poetry involved considerable adjustments for the pupils. Gareth records
the boys' consternation about a `perceived lack of structure' in the tasks: `As one Year
10 boy put it: `̀ What exactly are we looking for in this Sir? Metaphors?'' ¼ Because I
had not speci®cally asked them to `̀ Find me a metaphor'' or `̀ Highlight all the similes''
some were hesitant to begin with'. Gareth is learning about the amount of dismantling
that has to be done, and the risk-taking for both the teacher and the pupils. `I was
trying to create an atmosphere within the class where the pupils used me the teacher
less as a crutch and more as a catalyst for their own ideas.' It was dif®cult for Gareth to
implement the transition to a new kind of knowledge when actually applied to the
classroom. It took time for Gareth to structure the work so that pupils were learning
for themselves. It took time for the pupils to stop looking to the teacher as a source of
the `truth' about texts, and to knowledge as predetermined answers. They were
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resistant to change, not only in themselves, but in their perceptions of knowledge
about texts and how it is made and who is responsible for making it.
Gareth relied initially on pupils `identifying' with a text, to provoke a personal
engagementÐ'these were all issues that adolescent boys could relate to'Ðbut
discovered that the notion of pupils `identifying' with a text is highly problematic. As
many student teachers reveal in their accounts, the relation between a concept of
`self', and engagement in a text, is highly complex, where meaning is derived from
how the individual realizes him/herself through the text, which may well be from an
oppositional viewpoint. Gareth is committed to emancipatory ideas about literature,
but is still working out the dif®culties of this in a classroom where the pupils have
multiple investments in `lessons' and are cautious about renegotiating the roles which
have taught them how to acquire the requisite knowledge to pass the exams.
Emma
Emma has been observing Year 9 pupils studying a unit in which two short crime
®ction stories are compared, one contemporary and one pre-1914. They have written
essays to demonstrate what they have learnt. The essay title shows particular reference
to the National Curriculum as the pupils must compare the two stories, `referring to
the structure, language and characterization'. They must then answer: `Are the stories
typical of the detective ®ction genre?' Emma re¯ects on what the pupils really know in
her ®rst study of a pupil's learning:
In the ®rst page of his essay, Vincent writes `I think that `̀ The specklet band'' is typical of
a detective genre because all detective stories usually ®nd the murderer and they just as
`̀ the speckled band'' usually have twists'. The use of `a detective genre' rather than `the
detective genre' may show that Vincent has not fully grasped the idea of genre. I wonder if
it might have been a better approach to give his class a range of crime stories and ask them
if they can see a pattern, rather than to give them two stories and a guide to the
characteristics of the genre, and see if they ®t. The need to ®nd texts that are useful for
comparison may sometimes be misleadingÐnot everything is easily comparable, and
writers play around with genre constantly. Vincent needs to notice the exceptions, as well
as the rules, and to do this he would need a wider breadth of study here.
It would have been easy for her to criticize the pupils' lack of control of the genre, of
the language and form required for the essayÐbut she has learned to look in more
complex ways. She noticed the tendency for the pupils to make generalized statements
about the texts they are studying, writing `later in his essay, Vincent says that the
`̀ language of the `Speckled Band' is typical of its time because of the way they base
opinion on inaccurate facts'''. She asks the critical questionÐ'How does he know
this?'. She is already able to recognize the pitfalls of pupils trying to inhabit a
knowledge which is not based in their own learning experiences. The skills prescribed
by the National Curriculum (1999) are based on a concept of `genre' which excludes
critical reading activities. Reading skills are offered as though they possess an
absolute, objective value, and exist within a universally agreed construct of `genre' and
its characteristics. The opposite premise is that texts operate within a world that is
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linguistically negotiable. This takes a far broader view of what constitutes the meaning
of a text, and demands consciousness of disparity and difference in the ways meanings
are realized, as well as in the meanings themselves. She noted `Vincent needs to see
the exceptions, as well as the rules ¼'. She is aware that knowledge about language is
complex and contested, and that pupils need to examine their own relation to it. This
is about critical literacy.
Emma is curious about the gap between a pupil's ideas about what it is that he is
supposed to write to please the teacher or examiner, and what critical knowledge
might look like. She knows from a careful assessment of their writing that they are
already playing the assessment game. She understands `¼ how much pupils have
interpreted the perceived special language of essays, and replicated them here without
much thought about what they mean'. She is worried that they are not learning to
`write what they actually know rather than what they think we want them to say'. She
has a sharp and critically informed understanding of writing about literature that is
purposeful for the writer.
Half way through her PGCE year, Emma is learning to make careful analyses of
pupils' work in order to work out what they are really learning. This is about how they
are learning to acquire certain types of knowledge, and what types have greater
assessment currency. She has learnt, and so have the pupils, that this is the type of
work that achieves a level 4 according to the National Curriculum criteria. What has
been really important, though, is that she can see the reductiveness of what some
pupils believe learning in English to be, and how as a teacher she needs to be aware of
this in how she decides what to assess, and how this is mediated to the pupils.
It should be honest and meaningful ¼ we have the opportunity to engage young people in
literature and debate that will shape their development as human beings. Instead there is
a tendency to focus on snippets of textsÐon technique rather than contentÐbecause we
need to make a summative assessment at KS3.
This new teacher has learnt that meeting the assessment targets is becoming the
predominant factor affecting decisions about planning her lessons, despite the aims of
the National Curriculum that pupils at Key Stages 3 and 4 should be taught to read `a
wide range of texts independently, both for pleasure and for study'.
The relentless pursuit of targets, and ever-increasing performance statistics have
provided a pressure which can seem irresistible to new teachers. It is also counter-
productive. New teachers frequently have to unlearn this practice, having been
inducted into the performance machinery during early teaching practices in many
schools. This is why being in touch with their own histories as learners is vital, and
focusing on pupils as complex individuals is vital too. In her study of Vincent, Emma
is able to identify closely the obstacles to his real learning in his reading of literature,
and this informs her choices about planning lessons based on reading potentially
`dif®cult' texts based in unfamiliar contexts: nineteenth-century short stories, for
example.
Emma's own grasp of subject knowledge is strong enough to query short-cuts to
knowledge for pupils. She is secure enough to query formulaic response patterns in
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children's writing about literature. Her knowledge is based on her own reading
history, that is not necessarily strong in the ®eld of crime ®ction, but which is secure in
understanding how texts work. This has equipped her to see through the surface
features of the pupil's essay, in which he religiously assembles the required form and
terminology and regurgitates what he has been taught is necessary to pass the
assessment. She is able to spot tensions between the fragmentary approach to
literature study against a `features checklist'. She is disturbed that the essay title given
to the class was chosen because it ful®ls SATs criteria, and asks herself `how can it be
that we have managed to make Sherlock Holmes so boring?' She is concerned that the
teaching of literary `techniques' for assessment purposes is encouraging students to
masquerade in knowledge they do not properly own. `Is it possible that he could ®nd
these characteristics himself, if we encouraged an enthusiasm for these stories? ¼
(in)Ðcreating drama, watching some of the lovely TV adaptations of Holmes,
researching the Victorians, creating his own detective hero and dastardly villain ¼ .'
Through careful observation, evaluation and informed re¯ection, she has dis-
covered for herself the dangers of over-zealous application of tools by English teachers
that has been well-described by Debra Myhill as `death by writing frame'. The misuse
and overuse of writing frames is a feature of teachers' insecurity about the teaching of
writing. Their `ubiquitous' presence in writing lessons `may do more harm than good'
(Myhill, 2001). Frames which are inexpertly constructed or undifferentiated deliver a
writing experience which pre-empts thinking as well as writing (Barrs & Cork, 2001;
Fones, 2002), and contributes to pupils' frustration at their ideas being marginalized:
`I didn't like writing this because you told us how to write it' (Fones, 2002, p. 23).
Where teachers have incomplete understanding of the methods advocated by the
national literacy initiatives, they can focus on managerial and bureaucratic aspects of
`covering' the recommendations at the expense of pupils' learning. The Effective
Teaching Research Project, commissioned by the Teacher Training Agency, goes
some way towards interpreting the range of small-scale research projects that report
an increasingly fragmentary experience of learning to write (Wray et al., 2002). There
is a growing acknowledgement of the detrimental effects of literacy teaching that is not
fully contextualized, and the negative impact this can have on pupil motivation and
orientation towards literacy learning (Frater, 2000). Experiencing emotionally
powerful texts with engaging narratives is a prime factor in the development of
writing for all pupils (Barrs & Cork, 2001; Barrs & Pidgeon, 2002). These student
teachers know this implicitly. To transform this into explicit teacher knowledge
requires informed interpretation of interaction with pupils and a critical analysis of
how they adopt a performance orientation towards learning and writing about texts.
The teachers have recovered complex subject knowledge from their university studies
of language, literature and meaning making. The application of this kind of
knowledge in the classroom is highly problematic, but all have found it central to
making sense of what they see.
From the evidence of her pupils' writing, Emma is able to analyse the
problems of over-application of tools. It is an informed criticality, and she needs
to share her misgivings about the orthodoxies with others. At the root of this is
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her conviction that learning about literature is rooted in personal engagement,
which does not feature as a `learning objective'. This is dif®cult, and her early
attempts re¯ect the desire to engage pupils independently with literature, at the
cost of being able to identify exactly what they have learnt. She describes how,
in her early lessons, she has designed an interesting task for her pupils to
complete in studying Macbeth, believing that they will be able to relate to it
more readily. She sets a letter from Lady Macbeth responding to her husband's
letter in Act IV and gives instructions for it to be completed as homework. The
pupils do not write all that she was hoping for, and she is helped by the regular
class teacher's questionÐwhat had she been looking for from pupils in this task?
She realized that she had not thought in terms of what the pupils would learn: it
had been something `good to get them to do'. `If Vincent is failing to engage in
his work, then it is OUR failure to engage him, not his.' She has made a vital
discovery, that relating to literature is not something she can anticipate for every
pupil. Texts and tasks which pupils will `relate to' can be surprisingly elusive.
Participatory approaches to teaching literature demand something more. She
goes on, `we need to be using assessment as a collaborative effort here, with
Vincent seeing clear goals that he wants to attain for himself'.
Later in the year, this is developed further when Emma is on her second practice,
and is teaching literature to a Year 8 mixed-ability class in an inner London school.
She becomes even more focused on learning. Her ®rst lesson plan aimed to `Read and
understand Chapter 5' of the class novel she was taking over from the regular teacher.
She can see the problems hereÐ'what measure can there be of `̀ understanding'' for
the class? The word is a lazy one to use. I needed something better but the answer
eluded me'. She goes on to outline some of the obstacles to this. Immediately, she
identi®es the distraction of `starters' or starter activitiesÐwhich is an orthodox
response in current literacy teaching initiatives. She voices tentative misgivings about
them, but as a student teacher this is hard. Once again, her knowledge about literature
seems superseded by a new orthodoxy concerning `performance', and starter tasks
give a very quick sense that something is indeed being `performed'. She begins to see
that the three-part lesson plan advocated by the Key Stage 3 Strategy may be a
distraction from real learning, and she begins to realize how much teachers need to
`own' the methods they choose in the classroom.
Learning is complex, and there are vital connections between pupils' and teachers'
learning. For all teachers, the ability to re¯ect critically on learning, their own and
their pupils', will be more productive than the pursuit of an elusive consensus about
`best practice'. The increasing rates of social, cultural and economic change demand
that learners are able to engage with an ever-changing world.
What about the long-term future of the children we teach? I will not be there when my
pupils are adultsÐwriting love letters, or emails to their colleagues, or a poem to read at
their mother's funeral. Hopefully I will have helped them get there with con®dence and
an understanding of what they want to say, and how they will say it. Their success at these
times will never be measured in a mark book, or a league table, but we cannot deny that,
as teachers, we are responsible for these things too (Emma).
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In order to prepare pupils for this world, education needs to embrace `creativity,
imagination, autonomy and risk-taking' and teaching needs to be redirected towards
the purpose of educationÐ'learningÐlearning to create, solve problems, think
critically, unlearn and relearn, and to care about others and the environment' (Stoll et
al., 2003, p. 18). Substantial developments in understanding learning have been
made during the past century, but every revision of the curriculum or assessment
brings out into the open a singular lack of consensus about how people really learn,
and what counts as valid learning. `Best practice' is in fact elusive: there may be more
bene®t in focussing on learning about `best practices'. In order to do this, English
teachers need to be able to engage in debates about learning in an informed way. This
will be more valuable than seeking a `method' or `strategy' which claims to meet all
learners' needs. These new teachers are learning that in classrooms texts must be
accounted forÐand pupils, as readers, can ask `account for me and my reading of this
text'. Student teachers can learn to teach texts where both they and their pupils are
allowed scope to be puzzled, culturally, emotionally, linguistically, but there are
considerable obstacles to negotiate in order to do this in the current climate.
There is a growing acknowledgement of the detrimental effects of literacy teaching
that is not fully contextualized, and of the negative impact this can have on pupil
motivation and orientation towards learning. Experiencing emotionally powerful texts
with engaging narratives is a prime factor in the development of writing for all pupils
(Barrs & Cork, 2001; Barrs & Pidgeon, 2002). These student teachers know this
implicitly. To transform this into explicit teacher knowledge requires informed
interpretation of interaction with pupils and a critical analysis of how they adopt a
performance orientation towards learning and writing about texts. The teachers have
recovered complex subject knowledge from their university studies of language,
literature and meaning making. The application of this kind of knowledge in the
classroom is highly problematic, but all have found it central to making sense of what
they see.
Notes on contributor
Caroline Daly taught English in secondary schools for 11 years. She is currently a
lecturer at the University of London Institute of Education, teaching courses in
initial and continuing teacher education. She recently conducted the literature
review for the HMI research project into gender in English, Yes He Can, and has
research interests in English teaching, gender in education and teachers'
professional development.
Note
1. The National Literacy Strategy (NLS) began in English primary schools in 1998, and is aimed
at pupils from Reception to Year 6. It includes the Framework for Teaching (FFT), which
lists teaching objectives and prescribes the teaching of a daily literacy hour.
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Barrs, M. & Pidgeon, S. (2002) Boys and writing (London, CLPE).
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Eagleton, T. (1983) Literacy theory: an introduction (Oxford, Blackwells).
Fairclough, N. (1992) Critical language awareness (Harlow, Longman).
Fones, D. (2001) Blocking them in to free them to act: using writing frames to shape boys'
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