The Australian’s campaign against po/mo in English teaching has scored a scalp – the Queensland English curriculum:
Mr Welford [the Education Minister] said while there was nothing wrong with senior students analysing the agendas behind a writer’s work, the syllabus should not “give undue emphasis to marginal theories” that were better taught at university.
“It’s really not a very constructive pathway for English learning at school,” he said. “Nothing will leave this department that I don’t understand.”
I’m in two minds about this. On one hand, I’m inclined to agree with the Minister that deconstructive or critical literacy approaches to English are better taught at University. The concepts are complex ones, lend themselves to being dumbed down and caricatured as a sort of “all texts are just ideology” mantra, and having had experience of teaching first-year Education students – are difficult to get across to young University students without a sufficient background in sociology and philosophy. They’re also only partially representative of what an approach to literacy and literature should be. However, I would certainly oppose a return to the sort of curriculum I had in Senior English which approached literature as if aesthetics were completely separable from politics and society.
On the other hand, is it right that Ministers should issue diktats about the shape of an entire curriculum? Is it right that educational decisions should be made as a result of an alleged furore stirred up by the almost daily rants of Luke Slattery in the Oz?
The other question that needs to be raised is the practicality of implementing the decision. Critical literacy in Australian curricula has largely been a Queensland creation, driven by academics at the UQ Graduate School of Education, and in particular Professor Alan Luke, formerly Deputy Director-General of Education and UQ academic and now working at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. I’d have thought that the approach would be pretty much embedded in University Education Faculties, and also in the curriculum design areas of Education Queensland.
Elsewhere: More at John Quiggin’s place. I agree with his take on the matter.
Update: It turns out that the curriculum covers the canon after all. The Minister might have been too swift to react to op/ed criticism.
An interesting parallel is Bush now adding his intellectual weight to the debate over whether ID should be taught in science classes. I’ll work up an LP post on this tonight. In a first criticism is coming from both the right and left of the US blogosphere.
Regard po-mo lit crit I agree with the JQ. Though if there are still advanced English classes (been a long time since school) could lit crit of various form be taught then? In the end I regard po mo as a epistemological tool, one of many, that does have its worth when applied judiciously.
Yes, saw a link to a right wing US blogger rubbishing Bush on this, Irant. Was going to email you about it, but glad to hear you’re on the case!
Queensland has always just had the one-size-fits-all Senior English, unlike NSW. I’d have no problem with some aspects of literary theory and criticism being part of the curriculum at senior level – including po/mo theory – but it should be presented as one way of looking at literature and critical literacy should not displace the study of English as such. So hopefully the baby doesn’t get thrown out with the bathwater.
I agree; but what is behind Luke Slattery’s one-man war against po/mo in schools, I wonder?
I don’t know, Kate, but it’s an interesting question. Since he’s pretty much a one horse columnist who spends most of his time attacking po/mo, could he do himself out of a job if his conspicuous indignation actually produces the anti po/mo backlash?
There’s always room for “think of the children!” type missives, isn’t there? He’d just need to refocus his energies. Perhaps he could join the ‘war on childhood obesity’, for instance?
Yes, that would be an original!
There’s also an issue with his journalistic ethics, I’d have thought. As an op/edder, he tells us his opinion that po/mo is tosh. As a “reporter”, he writes constant stories on what he finds on education department websites without any significant comment from defenders of either po/mo theory or critical literacy.
Slattery should be delated to Media Watch! But they’ve probably got some spelling mistakes or stock photos to expose, or something.
Alas, poor pomo, I knew it well. Whatever its latterday excesses, it started off as a glorious adventure. I wrote a half-and-half piece (half for, half against) on pomo for a certain right-wing periodical last year which I’m not brave enough to link to.
This one, Rob?
Looks like it’s not the market but political diktat!
That’s putting your foot in it.
Bob’s argument was that generational change and lack of employment options for dedicated pomo’ers would eventually purge the ‘contaminated’ disciplines – English, history, sociology and anthropology – of their worst excesses. Seems reasonable to me. But stronger action is probably required to clean out the secondary and primary sectors, where I suspect most of the real damage is done.
Generational change isn’t “the market” per se – the labour market in universities is very constrained by a generational bulge of academics appointed in the 70s and all sorts of exogenous factors affecting recruitment. But Catley – as a political scientist – probably doesn’t know what he means by “the market”.
Sociology and history have been little affected in Australia by po/mo (funny how all the metaphors imply a virus). I’d like to see someone provide evidence of much po/mo work in these disciplines rather than just assertion. It’s hard to calculate a po/mo chi squared for instance.
And what Windschuttle is criticising is not po/mo history – just history whose conclusions he doesn’t agree with.
Anyway, the sort of “clean out” metaphors, which imply some sort of purge, are some of the reasons why I hate to agree – in part – with you, Rob.
By way of example, the consultancy reports I’m working on at the moment needs to assess different sociological and demographic data – which are capable of different interpretations – and where the interpretation has strategic, policy and operational implications.
But that’s not po/mo. That’s just intellectual work.
Same with Windschuttle’s criticism of method and conclusions in history. His argument that data speak for themselves is belied by his own revisionist position.
Anyway, I’m constrained by confidentiality requirements in talking about the stuff I’m working on – but hopefully you will get the drift. And I have a meeting at 5pm so will not be able to return to the discussion for quite some time, probably.
I suspect there is more than a grain of truth to Robert Manne’s suggestion (in his debate with Mark Davis over Gangland and the generational-cultural wars) that part of the problem with po-mo in Australia is that most Australian academics who trade in this currency (and this would apply a fortiori for those in the primary and secondary ed sectors) are not sufficiently grounded in Continental philosophy, and are not generally intellectually equipped, to really engage with what is worthwhile and interesting in the po-mo project. (NB: I’m not a po-mo-ist myself, and whilst I think discourse analysis offers some powerful insights, it needs to remember that a discourse is only useful and powerful insofar as it corresponds to something actually happening in the real world.)
I agree with JQ’s take on the Queensland situation.
Paul, I quite agree that one of the problems with post-modernism is that it fell into the hands of some pretty indifferent practitioners. I’d hate to see the pendulum swing back too far, and wind up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Bob Catley’s article is here, for anyone who’s interested.
His use of the word ‘insurgent’ is quite intriguing.
Here.
has anyone got a link to the actual syllabus in question?
it seems like everyone is talking about something without any concrete examples of what they are talking about.
It’s no mystery to me why behind Luke Slattery is on a one-man war against po/mo. The clues are all here:
“[In the early '80s] I finished a BA honours thesis using a Foucauldian perspective on an aspect of US foreign policy.
[Then], postmodern theory, later badged Theory, seemed like a funky new analytical tool with a dash of French glamour and some serious avant-gardist pretensions. It rose to prominence in France after May 1968: radical intellectuals, frustrated by their inability to overthrow the state, decided to subvert texts instead. Postmodernism was the place Marxism went when Marxism went (or left the building).
Halfway through a masters degree – recycling the same old Foucauldian notions – I got the call-up to newspapers and left university behind. When I turned a few years later to check Theory’s progress in the academy I was shocked: that bright analytical thread had been fashioned into a suffocating blanket of orthodoxy”.
- Luke Slattery “Put literacy before ‘radical’ vanity” The Australian 30 Jul 2005
http://www.ethics.org.au/ethics_forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=1130&get=last
Translation: young baby boomer postgrad with serious intellectual pretensions finds a relatively secure and high-paying job in the real world, c.1983. Faster than he can say “so long, and thank you” to the academy — which had made him so employable in the first place — he develops Oedipal/parricidal feelings towards it. (More than a bit ironically, Slattery must have often thought how he got out in a nick of time — journalism jobs started seriously evaporating just as GenX graduates came on line in the mid-80s (when he was originally due to finish his Masters). Had he thus decided then to re-double his academic career efforts by doing a PhD through the rest of the 80s, chances are that this would have sent him even further backwards career-wise — straight onto the dole in the early-90s recession).
For a cogent demolition of one of Slattery’s previous anti po/mo campaigns, see here: http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/002642.html As Gary Sauer-Thompson notes, Slattery not only refuses to entertain the thought that he himself might be an example, and an expression, of the process of cultural dumbing down, he also arrogates the mantle of public intellectual for himself (almost) alone.
Other Slattery snippets corroborate the man as a vapid, self-important bore:
- his Francophilia. Alert readers might have detected a sense of repressed wistfulness in his (otherwise all-pejorative) description of po/mo as having “a dash of French glamour”, but this is only scratching the surface. From wine snobbery http://www.smh.com.au/news/Good-Living/Terroirist-attack-smacks-of-sour-grapes/2005/01/10/1105206042676.html to a recent stint living in Paris
http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/005827.php Slattery is au fait with the best and French-est. Curiously, though, when it comes to literature by long-dead white males, Slattery sticks to the UniMelb English Department party-line-for-first-years, on modernism’s ancestry apparently side-stepping the French realists.*
- his stated sympathy for what amounts to an apologia for clerical paedophilia by Cardinal George Pell:
http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2002_08_18_paulwatson_archive.html#80548603
- his GenX hating. Okay, this is a bit of a concurrent personal axe-grinding also, but it was a actually a piece from quite early in Slattery‚Äôs journalistic career (“Tax issue lost in the melee” Age 27 March 1989) that made me realise — for the very first time — that someone with a similar background to me (UniMelb Arts Faculty in the 80s) and only a bit older, not only had nothing in common with me, but would be actively using a position of public power to nakedly campaign *against* my own (and more broadly, my generation‚Äôs) interests.
Slattery‚Äôs 1989 feature article trumped-up the “violence” (meaning minor property damage) of a student protest against HECS (then known as the “graduate tax”, and just introduced a few weeks earlier) and concluded by pontificating:
“Interestingly, the [protesting] students . . . were demanding that charges against students at the sit-in [of a few days earlier] be dropped and that police leave the campus. Calls for an end to the graduate tax were conspicuously absent”.
And boomers have gotten away with such flawless logic ever since.
* Luke Slattery “Rings resound old truths” The Australian 2 Jan 2004:
“The impulses that drove the literary modernism of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce are precisely those that drew Tolkien into the forest. Pound tried to restore the dead languages of antiquity (Latin and Greek); Eliot’s guides included Dante and the Psalmists; while Joyce grafted Homer on to a day in the life of Dublin.”
http://www.ethics.org.au/ethics_forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=1130&get=last
Glen, the Qld government has recently redesigned most of its websites but Education Queensland is here. I haven’t time to work out the new configuration of the site to find it. But searching for “critical literacies” etc might do the trick.
Having said that, it wouldn’t at all surprise me if the documents have disappeared off the web – or been placed on the Intranet. They were certainly publicly available about a month ago or so.
Most of the relevant links are password-protected and appear to be accessible by teachers only.
The Beloved teaches English and History and so I have dragged her to the computer and got her input. In general English there is nothing that can be really regarded is lit crit.
However we went to the NSW Board of Studies website and checked the extensions for the English syllabus. If you have a look through there are modules with options to study explore postmodernism, gender and so on. But it doesn’t seem to be full on lit crit and nothing beyond what should be expected of advanced year 12 English students I say.
Rob, I have to say this;
Your Quadrant piece (if it is you, that Mark found), was reasoned and had an argument and a point that I could follow and in the main part agree with. So much so that I won’t bother to bring up my nuanced points against your critique here.
What I do want to raise is Bob Cately’s piece. It start off OK bu by the mid-section, it is off with the pixies. To me, it reads like an ill-informed rant of the highest order. It sounds like (and he half admits it) something catasrophic happened to him while at Adelaide and he’s got a very large axe to grind and he’s grinding away as fast as can.
In relation to his piece and his valorisation of the vocational degrees, I can only say that personally I feel the greatest damage to the university system has been the leeching into it not of “1969ism” but the very occupational degree mill that he so obviously beloves. Call me an elist if you like, but I snort in derision at business degrees. Degrees are for knowledge, not for a job, and this pretence that a University is just a high-falutin’ TAFE has been their gratest downfall.
In my view there should be only two sorts of undergraduate degree: Arts or Science, take your pick. These should be free, or as free as possible. Post-graduate, full-fee Masters By Coursework style degrees should be substituted for the vocational undergraduate degrees. Anything else, consigned to the TAFE. The rest,, the brightest and best, if they want it, are streamed into research in their chosen School or Faculty.
Tell the guy that IT degrees taught by the academy are practically worthless. They teach knowledge that is outdated even as its students graduate. They no longer teach foundational knowledge of the field, eg Discrete Logic, Set Theory, Counting and Number theory. Instead they just fill their students up with a lot of technology-specific mumbo jumbo that’s completely out maneuvered by the fast paced market. Most IT academics are useless programmers or managers of real systems development.
Perhaps he ought to stick that in his pipe and smoke it, ‘cos whatever crack it is that he has been smoking have obviously fried some of his critical faculties.
Buggered the link. This should work.
Looks largely harmless, I agree, but rather anodyne.
Don’t know how this translates into actual classroom practice, though:
Dr Donnelly would probably have something to say about it.
Rex, thanks. Catley was torn into at Quadrant a couple of months ago (no link) by an academic who made many of the same points you do. He also had a dig at Bob for having spent most of the last few years in New Zealand and was not really qualified to talk about what had happened in Australia. I cited him because he seemed a rare optimistic voice in right-wing circles when it came to discussing the influence of PM in universities. On that issue, if not on others, I think he has a point.
You are certainly right about IT. Things are moving too fast in that discipline for textbooks and university courses to have any hope of keeping pace. Perhaps it points to the futility of migrating some areas of expertise away from TAFE or apprenticeship-based programs that have to reflect and respond to the market in order to survive and remain relevant.
Donnelly would. But I regard him as part of the problem re teaching as well. Schools not having hot water in the toilets is a far greater problem for a number of reasons. When he turns his strident teacher bashing to the real problems I might listen to him (maybe he has but what I have read has no relation to the problems teachers actually face daily).
Re IT degrees, they are useful as a basis to build knowledge. However, as someone who works in the industry having a degree is often mistaken as having knowledge not a basis for building knowledge.
My job is support for the ANZ region for a hardware manufacturer. I know plenty of guys who have greater knowledge than I do. Hence I come across all types. The best IT guys I know usually have no formal qualifications. Those with qualifcations tend to be the worst at actually understanding problems and troubleshooting. There is no course that can teach you common sense.
My position on this one is fluid at the moment. I do think that Welford should tkae care about arbitrary interventions. I’m not sure of the present curriculum decision-making structure, but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t an overarching independent board, which the Minister no doubt appointed. Underneath this probably sits a subject specific committee, which probably has strategic representatives to draw on the input of the ’stakeholders’. Very possibly there is also a healthy secretariat, maybe with some research capacity, or maybe that sort of support has been thinned out in the name of ‘efficiency.’
Pollies coming over the top can be very demoralising. Of course the Minister probably needs to sign off on their decisions and is perfectly right to use his brain before he does. But public pronouncement is not the way to go.
On the substantive issue I’m inclined to agree with Glen’s comment over at Quiggin’s (linked by Mark at the foot of the post) where he said in part:
“If English is to be about how to understand ‘language‚Äô better then I cannot possibly fathom why you would not want to have critical reading skills, etc. Surely every parent wants their child to have the skills to interrogate the language used in suspect advertising, journalism, political issues, etc? Don‚Äôt you want your children to be able to one day explain to their children how the latest Commodore ad, for example, encourages the circulation of certain beliefs about technology, speed and so on and to understand the complex play of signifiers that constructs the ad as a text? If not Commodores then political ads like for IR reform (union or govt)?
“Isn‚Äôt there an ethical issue here of sending your children out into the world with the best set of tools possible for dealing with tide after tide of bullshit from people marketing both commodities and political views?”
Our young bloke is doing Year 12 this year. The guide sent out by the school emphasises that English can lead directly to variety of careers, including “anthropologist, teacher, solicitor, diplomat, editor, film/TV producer, journalist, librarian, psychologist, social worker, public relations consultant.”
I think the idea is that in all these careers and more the understanding of communication beyond using language in a superficial sense is central. Certainly a focus on aesthetics and the canon would be entirely inadequate and counter-productive.
It is further noted that senior English is a prerequisite for damn near everything else at a tertiary level, so the syllabus constructors need to take their place in the scheme of things very seriously.
As such English is compulsory for an academic Senior certificate. But you only need to pass. Your OP (Overall Placement) score is determined by your achievement in your best 5 subjects and kids normally take at least 6. So our bloke has loaded up on three maths subjects and two science in the not unreasonable expectation that he’ll do better in all of them than in English.
I’ve got a course outline I might type up tomorrow (just the headings would be misleading). There is a fair argument that it should be called something other than English, but in practical terms they’d never get away with making English non-compulsory. That would really frighten the horses.
I’ve got a heavy day tomorrow and my cardiologist keeps telling me to take it easy, so I’ll try to get back to this tomorrow night.
Welford, I think, is a nice bloke. He was our (not too spectacular) local member when I was in the ALP in the late 80s. But – moving from Attorney-General to Education Minister – given that his predecessor Anna Bligh has moved up to Deputy Premier – has been seen as a demotion. It’s unfortunate – whatever the merits of the issue – that a Minister of one week’s standing – who’s trying to prove that he’s not on the way out – has picked up on Slattery’s campaign to make an early headline.
I would imagine that the Department, and the University Ed Faculties/Schools who’ve been growing fat off the critical literacy research money are all in a state of panic tonight.
The intent of the decision might be good, but the process, and the caving in to a beatup press campaign, are not.
Bob Catley is Professor of the School of Business at Newcastle University, and undoubtedly regards it as an exemplar of all the trends that he regards as most positive in Australian higher education. The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption may have an opinion about that.
You may also be interested in the following email I sent to my Griffith colleagues about this matter last year.
**************************
Dear Colleagues,
Here is the text of a letter I’ve sent to the Sydney Morning Herald in relation to the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption investigation of Newcastle University’s handling of a case of alleged plagiarism by 15 full fee-paying international students.
—–Forwarded by Paul Norton/Staff/Griffith on 09/10/2004 09:13AM —–
To: letters@smh.com.au
From: Paul Norton/Staff/Griffith
Date: 09/10/2004 09:00AM
Subject: Newcastle University Plagiarism Affair
In Friday’s Herald report on the ICAC investigation of the alleged plagiarism affair at Newcastle University, we learn that a key figure in the affair, the University’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Internationalisation, is called Ronald McDonald.
In order to avoid confusing Professor McDonald with another well-known personality of the same name, we simply need to remember that one of the two Ronald McDonalds is a clown associated with an ethically challenged multinational enterprise. The other one sells hamburgers.
Paul, funny letter. Yes I was going to bring up the Newcastle Uni thing, but I thought it might be a bit of a low blow. Catley after all might not be implicated.
Some more digging on Luke Slattery has revealed there‚Äôs more than first meets the eye, re his abandoned masters degree (the one that “recycl[ed] the same old Foucauldian notions” as a “Foucauldian perspective” (finished) BA honours thesis in politics), and his subsequent Oedipal acting out.
Slattery‚Äôs intended masters degree, in fact, would seem to have been far from “Foucauldian” in any sense:
“I began an MA on Meanjin and Overland only to abandon it when journalism beckoned”*
The back-story here is that (i) Slattery was once a “protege” of (very much Left-leaning) Overland founder Stephen Murray-Smith**, and (ii) the coy admission — that Slattery once seriously flirted *not* with po/mo, but with a very mainstream form of academic brown-nosing (aka writing up one‚Äôs mentor‚Äôs good works) — was only reluctantly made, upon Slattery‚Äôs assuming the editorship of the Australian‚Äôs Review of Books, while possessing only a scant literary background and quals.
But truth-twisting by Slattery — in the interests of career air-brushing and betterment — appears to be a serial predilection for him. In his July 2000 editorial, heralding a cover and name re-vamp of the Australian‚Äôs Review of Books three months into his editorship, Slattery says that it coincides with the publication now being fully funded by News Ltd (upon its 1996 inception, it was co-funded by the Australia Council). In fact, Australia Council co-funding for the ARB clearly petered out much earlier, in Nov1998#, a date which Slattery himself corroborates in his final ARB editorial, 11 months later (June 2001). What on earth was Slattery thinking, in his Mitty-esque big-noting of his own agency with respect to the otherwise unremarkable July 2000 changes at the ARB?
The explanation here, I am guessing, would be connected with the sheer abruptness of Slattery‚Äôs change from de-riguer Left-ism c.1983, to a position of knee-jerk, Right anti-intellectualism seemingly ever since. Such a transition is far from uncommon — e.g. Keith Windschuttle and Macquarie‚Äôs Andrew Fraser — but in their cases, it took decades.
Onto other matters —
Rob Foot wrote:
“Bob‚Äôs argument was that generational change and lack of employment options for dedicated pomo‚Äôers would eventually purge the ‘contaminated‚Äô disciplines – English, history, sociology and anthropology – of their worst excesses. Seems reasonable to me. But stronger action is probably required to clean out the secondary and primary sectors, where I suspect most of the real damage is done”.
Sweet. Under this analysis — which my personal corroborates — talented young Left academics have had basically nowhere to go since the mid-80s. Well, fair enough — no one can really fight “market forces” (even though the changes have been actually achieved through government policies that pretended they was doing no such thing; a policy process driven by, and at the other end, aided and abetted by informal lobbyists/formal commentators like Slattery).
My only beef here really is with what was expected to happen to these talented young Left academics — and there‚Äôs quite a few out there. Two decades on, the “generational change” project is still a work-in-progress. For reasons Mark alludes to, the academic labour market is a highly distorted one, with the result that in 2005, the Left clings on, stronger, if greyer, than ever. Obviously, this will change, and soon — within five to ten years. But the trouble with Rob‚Äôs euphemism “eventually” is that it collapses 25 years, involving real people, and so real human costs, into a single, neat, programmatic “change”.
A similar collapse, in which GenX is denied any existence or agency other than in the context of school-teachers needing re-programming, has been made in the “phonics” debate:
http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2004_11_07_paulwatson_archive.html#110005661185965107
Meanwhile, in a slightly different context, over-educated and deeply frustrated GenXers become suicidal terrorists. All part of the Right‚Äôs plan, perhaps — or if not, an unforeseen transactional cost of the Left-purging project that will “eventually” come to pass?
* The Australian’s Review of Books, March 2000 editorial
** Mark Davis, Gangland (1997) 120
# David Brearley, “Big idea‚Äôs prosaic end” The Australian “Media” 7 June 2001
Oops – just correcting a couple of typos. Para in q’n should read:
Sweet. Under this analysis — which my personal experience corroborates — talented young Left academics have had basically nowhere to go since the mid-80s. Well, fair enough — no one can really fight “market forces” (even though the changes have been actually achieved through government policies that pretended they were doing no such thing; a policy process driven by, and at the other end, aided and abetted by informal lobbyists/formal commentators like Slattery).
Here’s the Qld Senior English outline I promised. It is divided into four semesters over Years 11 & 12.
Semester 1: Constructing Australian Identity
Semester 2: Constructing Adolescence
Semester 3: Contemporary discourses
Semester 4: Different Times/Different Texts
Just to foreshadow, the final semester is a study of the canon.
Constructing Australian Identity
The unit aims to help students understand how language and images both shape and are shaped by our notions of nationhood. Students will examine stereotypes and how discourses can operate to marginalise some voices and promote others. There will be particular emphasis on Australian poetry, film and drama.
Constructing Adolescence
This unit will examine the construction of youth, exploring the ways in which they view themselves and are viewed in society. Students will critically examine representations of youth in the media and in popular fiction. There will be particular emphasis on the representation of adolescent love. Texts include “Looking for Alibrandi”, Romeo and Juliet” and “Guitar Highway Rose”.
Contemporary discourses
This unit uses the students’ knowledge accumulated in Year 11 to investigate the constructedness of texts in their peculiarly modern form. The first section deals with a range of non-fiction texts such as advertising, travel and documentary texts. Students will examine these texts in order to determine the ways in which ‘factual’ texts are constructed to present a particular version of reality. The second section deals with popular fiction such as crime, coutroom, mystery and action texts and will extend students’ knowledge of intertextuality with an examination of the intertextual relationships among texts eg. generic patterns and conventions.
Different Times/Different Texts
This unit provides an opportunity for students to read a range of traditional and contemporary canonical texts. Possible works for study are: The Great Gatsby, Sense and Sensibility, The Wife of Martin Guerre, Hamlet, Macbeth and a range of poetry from Romantic, Victorian and Modern periods. Students will build on and develop the critical theory and discourse ananlysis that provided the foundation of their Semester 1, 2 and 3 studies by comparing and contrasting the representation of these issues from different times and cultures.
Compulsory components stipulated by the Queensland Studies Authority:
Texts
4-6 prose works (one must be non-fiction)
2-4 plays (one preferably by Shakespeare)
20-30 poems
2-3 multimedia texts eg. CD-ROM, worldwide web, documentary, television
Assessments
Assessment tasks must be completed each year under strict guidelines
7-9 tasks pa (4-5 must be written, 2-3 must be spoken)
Students must reach ’sound achievement’ in both written and spoken.
There you have it. I must say I’ve warmed to it somewhat over the past two years, but more particularly this year when our bloke has had a teacher he likes more.
I think the syllabus tries to lead kids to an understanding of the nature of various forms of communication, the social contexts within which it occurs, power, positioning etc. Also the kids get practice in creating texts in a variety of forms and situations. I think it can only help them to transact in whatever field they choose to work. Leaving it to university means it won’t get done except by those who a fairly good at it.
I know it seems demanding, but so is everything else they do in other subjects. Much depends on the personality and skill of the teacher.
If you look again at the report of what Welford said (see Mark’s post) all may not be lost. Since it is a trial syllabus its advocates are certain to want to change it anyway. I assume they will work on the Minister so that he understands what he needs to before they ask him to sign anything. There is at least a prospect that a bit of dialogue could lead to a reasonable solution.
i’ll be buggered if anyone can point out what exactly is wrong with the course outline brian has posted above?
Seems like students move through two empirical examples (australian identity and youth) — both very straightforward examples that most people would be able to understand — to a third more general exposition of the critical methodology (‘discourses’) — engaging with the bullshit circulated on TV and newspapers can only be good — to a deployment of this methodology across time and place — thus allowing students to learn about the historical specificity of discourse/language use.
I can see a real problem with students learning this stuff becoming dissatisfied with a future of boring 9-5 jobs, a nice car, family, mortgage, etc. Perhaps they shouldn’t learn how to critique the society they live in as it will only spread disaffection when they learn that contemptuous bastards are in positions of power and making things worse.
I don’t have a massive problem with it, Glen. As I said at JQ’s:
A couple of other observations, though.
First, I’d be interested in the degree to which there’s overlap with the SOSE (Studies of Society and Environment) syllabus over the curriculum for all years.
Secondly, there’s more to English than subject positions, ideologies and discourses.
I do have an objection to it, but it might seem a bit arcane and not make a whole lot of sense. It has to do with some things belonging in the students’ own space as inquisitive adolescents, and not being the business of the education system as such.
It’s longer ago than I care to acknowledge since I was an adolescent, but when I was, me, my firends and family all talked about advertising, books, genres, popular music, and popular culture all the time, and outside of school. In other words, we worked that stuff out for ourselves. After all, we were in the middle of it. We sneered at advertising, bubblegum music, crappy books, all the un-cool things. We didn’t need any help with any of it. To me, the ‘Constructing Adolescence’ and ‘Contemporary Discourses’ modules that Brian cites look like piffle – and condescending piffle at that – because kids will be switched on to all this stuff anyway (minus the theoretical overlay, but who needs it) if they’ve got their wits about them. You don’t have to learn it at school, you learn it on the street. It’s almost like an attempt to displace or de-signify the adolescents’ own experience, and substitute an institutional one from a still incredibly-distant adulthood.
We had teachers who tried to get into our space and join our conversations. Sad to say, we despised them for it. Keep to your space – e.g. teaching landforms, algebra and Ancient Sumer – and leave us alone to get on with ours, was our attitude.
But this is all based on memories and the realities of long ago.
Tallies with my recollection as well, Rob, and makes a very good point – while they’re doing this crap, they’re not doing something more worthwhile.
Social Studies when I went to school wasn’t much chop, but my kid’s SOSE content is absolute tripe.
So I’ll pose the obvious question, gentlemen, what should be taught in Senior English?
Well, now THERE’s a conversation stopper, Mark.
“Darling, can you get me that Senior English syllabus I wrote out of the hall cupboard – underneath the pillowslips?”
I could go all Harold Bloom & talk “the Western canon”, but I’ve never read most of it either. But that’s the general ethos I’d be going for – the vibe, if you will.
Rob – from your Quadrant article, it seems like you finished high school in the late 70s. What a golden era for middle-class rebellion — just rip your clothes, wear some safety pins, and affect a snarl; and bingo! you get a recording contract.
My point is that your memories of precocious culture-sifting (“We sneered at advertising, bubblegum music, crappy books, all the un-cool things [like teachers]” belong to a very specific time — a time, that like punk music, is very, very dead, and has been since the early 80s. (Thanks to Reagan, Maggie T and Ayatollah Khomeini — but that’s another story.)
Anyway, in my Year 12 (1982), I was too busy being shit-scared about getting a job etc, to sneer at anything. I’m not saying that my experience here is universal, but your implication that *your’s* is/was is frankly OTT.
. We didn‚Äôt need any help with any of it. To me, the ‘Constructing Adolescence‚Äô and ‘Contemporary Discourses‚Äô modules that Brian cites look like piffle – and condescending piffle at that – because kids will be switched on to all this stuff anyway (minus the theoretical overlay, but who needs it) if they‚Äôve got their wits about them. You don‚Äôt have to learn it at school, you learn it on the street. It‚Äôs almost like an attempt to displace or de-signify the adolescents‚Äô own experience, and substitute an institutional one from a still incredibly-distant adulthood.
We had teachers who tried to get into our space and join our conversations. Sad to say, we despised them for it. Keep to your space – e.g. teaching landforms, algebra and Ancient Sumer – and leave us alone to get on with ours, was our attitude.
Fair point about the time-frame, Paul. I don’t think we had that fear of not getting a job. But I still would have thought that the spirited members of any generation would have gone through something similar. Everyone embarks on a voyage of discovery and only a part of it has anything to do with school – which is as it should be, IMO. However…..
Thanks for reading the article, btw.
Rob, you say that “we worked that stuff out for ourselves.” I doubt this was ever true of all the kids. Observa talks about the common man (?) in Australia having a great bullshit detector. I tend to agree with him and your youthful critique is perhaps in the same vein. But perhaps in that youthful rebelliousness you don’t get to critique your own taken-for-granted assumptions. Nor, I fancy, do observa’s mob.
How well the Qld syllabus does at this, I really don’t know. I think one needs to sit in on a sample of classes, talk to teachers and kids before you can really evaluate it.
But I do agree that school is only part of the journey, and the formal curriculum is only part of what happens in school. At least it brought you and your mates together and gave you space to talk about whatever you wanted to. Just the notion of throwing different groupings of kids together in various settings has value.
I did find your article of very great interest. Here are a couple of snippets from near the beginning:
“…in some at least of its constructions postmodernism has offered a set of powerful heuristic and explanative tools…”
“…as a new and revolutionary way of approaching the past, the postmodern project… presented conventional historicism with a number of challenges – it threw down the gauntlet, as it were, to established ways of seeing. At the place of intersection of fact and interpretation where truth might be presumed to lie, postmodernism inserted an ambiguity. This confuses and often infuriates its critics. But the ambiguity is itself a truth.”
“That truth is lost; it died with the men and women for whom it was a truth. Their experience is not recoverable save in the texts that preserve it; and those texts reflect the preoccupations, presumptions and agendas of those that wrote them. They cannot therefore be taken as absolute.”
I know you are talking about historical truth, but are there not the same implications for truth generally. When God died he/she was replaced by reason, science and human progress. The adequacy of these replacements is something we can ponder, but given the uniqueness of each person’s experience, which is where knowledge and truth are finally constituted for each of us, did not Absolute Truth die also?
Towards the end I think you say that it did.
You then counterposed “objective truth” and “opinion” which was then characterised as inevitably based on “bias” which then “permits the politicisation of whole schools of thought, and entire university departments.”
Rob, I find the binary of ‘truth’ and ‘opinion’ problematic. Objective truth in my tentative scheme of things is is an abstract concept, possibly somthing to aim for but never achievable. When we don’t achieve it we are left with uncertainty, or better, degrees of certainty. Opinion is in a different ball park.
But we never start with an empty mind, we have memories, ideas, values and attitudes, emotions and feelings, desires and hopes, and habitual ways of acting. And we are ourselves changing every minute of every day.
This should not paralyse us. On the contrary when all is flux and change the scope for action is enhanced.
We have to accept that we live with a personal ideology (system of thought and ideas). We also have to learn to live not just with ambiguity, but with uncertainty. We can advocate our ideology, but it only becomes a problem if we make absolute truth claims about it. In short I don’t see “politicisation” in the pejorative sense you use it as the inevitable outcome of a postmodern critique.
Getting back to the syllabus, I would prefer learning in schools to develop from the experience of kids and their curiosity. But at upper secondary level the curriculum comes from the academy, the requirements of work or the culture. Ivan Illich had a go at ‘deschooling society’ over 30 years ago but he failed comprehensively.
I only have a few peep-holes into how the Qld English Syllabus is taught. I know of one school that rounded up all the deconstructionist jargon, handed the kids sheets with definitions and taught them to play the verbal game. Another teacher rang up the radio the other day and said he didn’t use jargon at all and his kids got good results.
Talking to our bloke’s teacher the other night she said she despaired of making Wordsworth interesting. She ended up asking the students what they thought he meant by his daffodills. They were hopelessly off-target of course (all opinions are NOT equally valid) but at least she started with their experience and ended up having a good session.
Given the state of my brain this is probably disconnected and rambling. The bottom line is that I think the Qld syllabus is attempting something worthwhile in the context we find ourselves in. How succesful it is I can’t really say.
It’s nice that you were a cool kid, Rob. But sneering at advertising is not the same as looking at how texts construct meanings. Me, I spent most of my time at High School outside class talking about sex, girls, gossip, tv, films and sport.
Mark, on the question of what should be taught in Senior English, I think Senior English as presently conceived should be called something else, but what I am not sure.
We have three mathematics subjects (A, B and C) as part of the academic curriculum. Maths A in a kind of maths for living. Maths B is serious maths for serious use in tertiary studies. Maths C is an extension of that for the truly interested/talented.
In English the ‘English for living’ subject is in the non-academic stream in the sense of helping those who can’t write proper.
English does have a related academic subject in Drama. I think there is also still a Film and Television Studies course with emphasis on production as well as criticism.
SOSE (Social Studies and the Environment) cuts out at Year 10. In Year 11 it separates into Geography, Modern History etc.
I know some primary schools run themes right ocross the curriculum, indeed right across the school. Certainly they tend to talk of subject of curriculum areas or use other terms like ‘key learning areas’. I think you’d find English is probably ‘language arts’, or even ‘communication’. I suspect they are conceptually distinct at the syllabus document level but with blurring and overlapping in classroom delivery. Not sure I can say anything sensible beyond that at present.
If we are going to have a subject based on the Western canon (if more than the English canon, why stop at the West?) it definitely shouldn’t be compulsory.
Thanks for the post, Brian, and I’d like to think about it some more before I respond. I think our difference might be between ‘absolute’ and ‘objective’ truth – which I don’t see as being the same things – but I need to try to sort that out for myself first.
All I can say at this time of night is that I’d be awfully worried if students today didn’t spit (metaphorically speaking) in the eyes of their teachers as we did in the seventies, whoever was right or wrong, then or now.
Remember the insufferable, moralistic Saffy in Absolutely Fabulous:
Years ago there was a program on the ABC full of Western – and some non-Western – pundits talking about children’s education, hosted by the egregious Geraldine Doogue. The only thing of any real substance among all the blather was said by a Bangladeshi woman, who remarked that there is a secret world of childhood that adults should not try to interfere with. I think the same is true of adolescents (still children, after all).
Brian, re. your last post – a lot of what you’re looking at (stepping outside my deological box for the moment) is managerialism. Mission statements, goal statements, strategy definitions, end-states, ‘key results areas’, forward pathways, outcomes orientation. We get a bucket load of it in the public service and it makes everybody puke. Nobody takes it seriously. Why it has infected the education system is more than I can guess, but unfortunately for the students, they are (it seems, going by Sophie’s posts at Troppo) obliged to take it seriously, or lose their grades.
Rob re your last comment, education was infected about the same time or a bit later than every-one else. Schooling is generally on the safe, conservative side of social change, so it reflects and follows trends in society.
…not the same as looking at how texts construct meanings.
Mark, I believe you’re talking here about the ‘theoretical overlay’ that I think was not and is not important to adolescents trying to understand and respond to the street-level reality of their own lived experience. But hey, I’m out of date on all this. Maybe things are very different now, and ‘kids’ nowadays really do need theories to enable them to understand their world(s).
Rob, my point simply was that thinking that advertising is uncool is not the same as looking at how it works in reproducing stereotypes (for instance, you might want to look at Kim’s post for an example of what we’re talking about).
Your comments suggest to me that you seem to have a very romanticised view of adolescence.
I doubt that teenagers need a “theoretical overlay” to make sense of their world in many ways. Perhaps they do if they want to critically engage with it. And perhaps they do if they want to prepare themselves for a workplace where creativity and multiliteracies are part of the toolkit for success.
I repeat the point I made above. There is no such thing as a common sense approach to literature or anything else. It’s just that anti-theoretical positions refuse to admit that they have a limited take on the world where truths are selected according to theoretical criteria.
I think it’s better that people expose their presuppositions, and as I also said above, I’d hate to see po/mo harden into an orthodoxy, and I would see value in looking at English from a variety of theoretical perspectives, and with a variety of ends in mind, including the appreciation of literature as well as the understanding of language and culture/society.
Romanticised?!?! What? My lot were a disgusting bunch. Radical ratbags to a person – but much worse: cruel, thoughtless, narcissistic. But that goes with the territory. We had some countervailing good points too: cynicism, inquisitiveness, doubt. And that goes (or went) with the territory as well.
“cruel, thoughtless, narcissistic”
The school that our young bloke goes to pays a lot of attention to co-curricular and extra-curricular activities and to the personal development of each young person. Teachers seem to get along pretty well with the students, although I’m sure they respect their need to have their own space.
From what I’ve seen of his friends (male and female) kind, thoughtful and looking out for each other is how I’d describe them.
I’m not sure how much their ability to deconstruct texts helps, but I’m pretty damn sure it does no harm.
A feature of education in schools often overlooked is its capacity to plant sleepers. The payoff may not be immediate but may be way down the track. Which is why it’s hard to evaluate anything you do.
“…cruel, thoughtless, narcissistic…” or “…kind, thoughtful and looking out for each other….”
A far better generation than mine is this one, then, Brian. No wonder we made such a mess of things.
Sorry, Brian, that was not intended as a snark.
Rob, I didn’t see it as a snark and I’m a long way from saying that the bunch of kids my youngest gets around with are typical of his generation. Unfortunately I think they are not.
There are probably two reasons why they are a decent bunch of kids. First is the selection factor. Their parents selected the school, which is a good school. Amongst the kids who go there they selected each other.
The second reason is the work the school has put into them over the past 5 years, which goes well beyond the curriculum.
The reason I made the comment was to indicate (and I should have made this point explicitly) that there are problems in generalising on the basis of your own experience.