Perspectives on the Teaching of English in Post-Primary Education
Independent and well-informed analyses of English as a school subject have been thin on the ground in Ireland. There has been no equivalent of David Didau’s Making Meaning in English: exploring the role of knowledge in the English curriculum, which looks in depth at the subject as it has developed over decades for our neighbours. So a warm welcome is due to a new book from Cork University Press, Perspectives on the Teaching of English in Post-Primary Education, edited by Kevin Cahill and Niamh Dennehy. Unlike Didau’s book, this is a multi-perspective volume written by 15 people in 16 chapters and an introduction, a genuine breadth which is turned into part of its strength. Many academic tones like this never escape from the straitjacket of deadening third-level jargon; they tend to float grandly well over the realities of classroom practice. But here we have a good number of practitioners from Ireland’s second-level classrooms, as well as academics.
The editors’ introduction lays out their purpose: the book aims to contextualise our systems and practices here in the Republic of Ireland, and thereby ideally, we envisage this text making a contribution to the constant conversation in the teaching of English:
Our intention here is not to prescribe a pedagogical diet for English teachers but rather a tasting menu into which they can plunge from time to time in search of some inspiration and advice to inform their practice in the classroom.
They point out that in a time of persistent change, English offers endless potential for the growth of the individual in society.
One of the things that strikes me most on reading this book is the extraordinary range of our subject, and the way that such a reach might be both an opportunity and a challenge, a strength and a weakness. Unlike in the UK, English here has remained a core subject all the way through school, but we cannot be complacent in assuming that that will continue into the future: check out Kate Barry’s recent post Literature: What’s the Point? during which she points out some of the socio-economic and political pressures which might all too easily degrade the integrity of the subject:
You won’t ever find anyone (unless you go to Florida) who says they are against the teaching of literature. Yet the place of literature is increasingly on the margins. English as a subject overall has lost its identity as a core subject and, even more strikingly, literature now occupies less and less space within this reduced space. The point of literature is its pointlessness, by which I mean its irrelevance to the economic circle model of education.
The potential weakness was illustrated in the recent controversy about moving the Language Paper 1 in the Leaving Certificate to a year earlier, a foolish and lazy idea (my various posts on that topic) that came from a shallowness of understanding of what makes English important. The proposed change was lazy because it treated a core element of the subject as superficial and disposable, an easy thing to move for administrative reasons because it appeared inessential (a similar move for Mathematics was quickly dropped - imagine the outcry).
Chapter 1 provides a short overview of the English Curriculum in Ireland by Hal O’Neill, now retired from the NCCA. He opens with a 1975 quotation from Laurence Stenhouse on the curriculum problem (the differences between intention and reality - also examined by Craig Skerritt in his paper about the document Looking at Our School 2022: a quality framework). I think also of another statement by Stenhouse, cited by Professor Dylan Wiliam, applicable to Irish education: all too often teachers are treated like intellectual navvies who are told where to dig, but not why.
O’Neill ends with a brief reference to the Paper 1 fiasco. The deeper problem with that foolishness is symbolic: teachers of all subjects who are already suspicious of the evidence-base for some Senior Cycle reform now have no trust that the authorities will propose (rather than impose) sensible and sustainable changes. Another major issue that the Department of Education seems right now not to be thinking about is AI. O’Neill suggests that assessment in the future might fruitfully include classroom-based assessment of the comparative study. The pieces in this book were obviously written before the November 2022 arrival of ChatGPT and its now-plentiful siblings, but AI has made any form of non-supervised writing for high stakes qualification purposes meaningless. Many teachers around the country will have spent time in these summer holidays thinking about AI and how to manage it in their own assessment routines: currently the Leaving Certificate is ‘safe’ in English, but colleagues in Leaving Certificate subjects which have project-based assessments like the RSR in History say that they have had no indications how these will be handled. English must not go down that route without stringent protections.
The breadth that English offers is well described by Brian Murphy in Chapter 5, ‘Towards a Framework to Understand, Plan for and Support the Development of Adolescent Literacy in the Post-Primary English Classroom: the five-pillar model.’ Those pillars are Vocabulary, Oracy (recently causing a stir in England), Reading, Comprehension and Writing. The interplay between these in Junior and Senior Cycle has been a strength of the subject in our country (all the more dismaying that it was threatened by the Paper 1 cluelessness). As Brian Murphy states, there has been an evolution in how adolescents engage with texts:
‘they must be able to comprehend and construct information using print and non-print materials in fixed and virtual platforms across disciplines.’
I would add to this that it is all the more important in this digital environment that the core of English as an aesthetic discipline is not abandoned for a mere functional or instrumental purpose, and that we should be careful in thinking of our pupils as mini-citizens, not neglecting that deeper than that they are individual human beings. Our subject helps them think and feel, to explore the deepest things in their lives, not just to get into college or be fitted up for a job.
As I mentioned at the start, this volume valuably foregrounds current English teachers, rather than remaining uselessly marooned in theory. Naturally I was most drawn to the chapters by these teachers.
In Chapter 12, ‘The Writing Journey’, Selena Wilkes (who spoke at the 2022 English Meet) coherently outlines a variety of approach to writing skills, and explains the importance of initial explicit teaching and the provision of high-quality exemplars by ‘writer-teachers’:
who can use the craft of writing to move beyond the limitations of the classroom in their writing endeavours. It is important for us as teachers to demonstrate that success in writing is not spontaneous, but comes from repeated practice and learning from errors.
This idea is echoed by Caragh Bell, a teacher and professionally-published writer, in Chapter 14, ‘Should Teachers of English Be Writers Themselves?’ As she says, sharing our own writing processes takes some courage but can be extremely fruitful:
I admit my feelings of vulnerability and this leads to increased trust in the classroom community. My students feel as though they can make mistakes and, crucially, are more comfortable when they do so. When teachers present themselves as writers, warts and all, students are more willing to take risks. Mistakes are seen as stepping stones and the standard of student writing improves.
As the American teacher and writer Kelly Gallagher says, we are the best writers in the room, and we should have the confidence to share this expertise openly. Caragh Bell points out that
as a neophyte in the profession, I relied on notes from other sources to inform my teaching and was reluctant to express my own opinion … nowadays, with years of practice and life lessons, I do just that I feel relaxed and willing to take chances.
That level of teaching experience is echoed in Conor Murphy’s Chapter 10, ‘Teaching Film’, a model of clarity informed by deep knowledge of his subject. Here is no anodyne academic jargon. The way his film curriculum progresses from First to Fifth Year is entirely coherent (there is a summary grid on page 149), and this is woven fruitfully in and out of other forms and genres. He links film to the study of poetry and shows interestingly how ‘cross-genre connections’ generate ideas and progression in the classroom:
How many times have students doubted you when you said a poet picks a word for a particular reason? Well, through film studies, students are now more open to this idea of intentional decision-making.
In Chapter 8 Clare Madden (who spoke at researchED 2022), explores ‘Visual Literacy in the English Classroom: what can we learn from cognitive psychology?’. This is most welcome: in conversations I have had recently with student and recently-qualified teachers, it is evident that they have hardly been exposed at all to cognitive science and the kind of ideas which might help them in, say, Daniel Willingham’s crucial book Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. This neglect is the reason I will be giving a webinar in January 2024 via Tralee Education Centre as an introduction to cognitive science for English teachers: free registration. In her chapter, Clare Madden lays out with admirable brevity the basics of complex areas like long-term memory, cognitive load theory and dual-coding, and uses helpful graphic organisers to show how students can benefit from their teachers’ knowledge of the area.
This piece is not supposed to be a comprehensive review of everything in the book: I have read all of it and gained much from other writers (naturally, I did not agree with everything), but for this review I have merely skimmed the surface of things I noticed. The volume is a most valuable snapshot in time of our subject as it is taught and learned in Ireland. And this may well be a particularly sensitive time, possibly a Frostian moment in which ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’: many teachers are nervous that while for the moment we have a generally respected, reasonably well-constructed and dispassionately assessed Senior Cycle, this may not last: a poorly conceived and implemented Junior Cycle has partially eroded one ‘end’ of the post-primary spectrum. However, from many angles there are serious and important statements being made about the integrity of English in Ireland - see the ongoing work of INOTE, many individual teachers online, and now the writers in this book. We have to hope that all that matters, and that it will be listened to.
Certainly we can see here that English is an exhilaratingly wide-ranging discipline, in the words of co-editor Niamh Dennehy a multi-faceted subject. Generations of children in our classrooms have gained deeply from the ways it has been taught. As we start a new school year, this is the right time to reaffirm that this must continue.