Robert Eaglestone in 'Impact' 26

Being a teacher in Ireland can be like hearing from afar the sounds of a naval battle, while billowing plumes of grey smoke form in the sky somewhere in the middle distance. That is, if you pay some attention to education in the UK (not really Northern Ireland at all, and primarily England). The philosophical, pedagogical and political battles over education are much milder in Ireland (where most ‘noise’ is about the organisation and operation of schools). Most teachers here would be astonished by the vitriolic extremity of the debates ‘across the water’ if they ever tuned in to them.

There is also a positive side to those debates: here, there tends to be a lack of intellectual rigour and an unchallenged consensus from officialdom, with ordinary teachers largely bypassed and having no sense of agency in the development of the curriculum. This was evident in the construction of the Junior Cycle system, and now the signs are that this is being repeated in the review of the Senior Cycle, a topic for a different post. By contrast, the current depth of discussion of pedagogy and practice we see in England (in books, at conferences, online) is impressive.

I write this because otherwise Professor Robert Eaglestone’s IMPACT pamphlet Powerful knowledge, ‘cultural literacy’ and the study of literature in schools (number 26 in a series from the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, and a free download here) may puzzle some readers in Ireland. Essentially it is a rebuttal of and an argument against ideas about English teaching which he feels have taken root in England, but which have scarcely troubled the waters here, to continue the maritime metaphor. In the Editorial Introduction Michael Hand starts by pinpointing the thinking of E.D.Hirsch in America and Michael Young in England. I think if I mentioned these names at the annual conference of the Irish National Organisation for Teachers of English, there would be a lot of blank faces: the majority of teachers would just not have heard of them.

Eaglestone’s central argument is that ideas of cultural literacy and powerful knowledge have been imported from scientific disciplines - a form of scientism - and that instead teaching of English should be informed by literary disciplines. He writes that there is a

profound philosophical mistake about the nature of knowledge

in the teaching of English in the UK today (I’ve never taught in a school in England and am not confident enough to say how widespread that attitude is).

He believes that English teaching should be subject-centred and there should be

ways of teaching that reflect both the practitioner and the developing tradition of the discipline.

As before, most teachers here would regard that as a blandly true statement, one to which no-one would possibly take exception. He goes on to suggest that in England there is insufficient focus on literature itself, and he has

New learning plans championed by many senior management teams which seem to focus on literature - on, say, narrative, style, plot, character - but instead assume that dates and simplistic versions of historical facts are what’s necessary to understand a novel, or that drill can teaching the meaning of a poem.

Again, I don’t know if such a crude reductive method is actually a widespread practice in England. It sounds very much like what Dylan Wiliam calls a lethal mutation. It is certainly a long way from the excellent practice promoted by - for instance - two English teachers I follow online whose books I have read, Jennifer Webb (How to Teach English Literature) and Chris Curtis (How To Teach: English: Novels, non-fiction and their artful navigation), and very different to what I witnessed in two recent online English teachers’ conferences (the Team English national conference, and one focussed solely on Othello organised by Heidi Drake). Have a look too at Stuart Pryke and Amy Staniforth’s formidable Ready to Teach: Macbeth: A compendium of subject knowledge, resources and pedagogy or the fine work of Andy @__codexterous on Twitter.

Eaglestone goes on to look at different forms of knowledge, and what he writes is surely incontestable:

English is mandated to reach out to pleasure, to values and to the imagination.

In contrast,

Scientism is the mission-creep of scientific ideas from their right realm of understanding nature into a wider world [and] … The knowledge is in and arises from the personal experience.

In his fourth chapter Eaglestone turns his attention to The Scientism of Cultural Literacy and E.D.Hirsch’s work. Hirsch’s ideas have not made the trip from America via England to Ireland to any measurable degree. The fifth chapter, Practical consequences in the classroom, examines an example of a ‘knowledge-rich’ course from Ark Mastery, and complains that

This is not teaching the student how to read novels but offering an ersatz Victorian social history for ‘Oliver Twist’, …. [and] the curriculum map for studying ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ prioritises historical context over how a play works or what a comedy is.

I do see this tendency in some online commentary in England, but again it is foreign to us here. I also have an intellectual objection to it: deep historical and contextual knowledge is just what we as teachers should have, but we are expert adult readers and thinkers, who can be far more cautious about presuming a simplistic direct link between context and text. Anyone who has taught Sylvia Plath knows this: the moment pupils hear of how she ended her life, nothing else matters: every poem is now ‘about’ suicide, every line ‘obviously’ points the way to her tragic death. I have just finished Othello’s Secret: the Cyprus Problem by R.M. Christofides, which was most interesting (review coming soon), but very little of this will resurface directly in my Leaving Certificate lessons on the play, for school pupils who would be unnecessarily distracted by the (admittedly fascinating) minutiae of Cypriot history.

However, I am not sure of Eaglestone’s point a few pages later when he suggests that

In the study of literature, a firm distinction between the novice and the expert does not exist.

No, indeed not firm (there is a very firm distinction between an expert Chemistry teacher and a novice 15 year-old), but nevertheless there is a real one which can be so wide that it amounts to such a distinction, and it does not have to result in the attitude that

Novice learners cannot say much of worth and [this] devalues their own response and experience.

Good English teachers spend all their time eliciting subjective responses from their pupils, and respecting these, while (gently) helping them refine and deepen them. (Are there teachers in England who are refusing personal response from their pupils and thus devaluing their ideas?) But they are still expert readers and thinkers compared to pupils experiencing Macbeth for the first time: our problem is the curse of knowledge, our job to put ourselves in the shoes of those novices and lead them (Latin: educere) closer to expertise.

On this, Eaglestone later quotes John Hattie, that

a crucial factor for improving the quality of student outcomes is not ‘the amount of knowledge’ a teacher has but ‘how teachers see the surface and the deeper understandings of the subjects that they teach’. Expert teachers, he says, organise and use their content knowledge differently: that is, they understand the deep ideas of their subject.

In my mind the amount of knowledge is precisely the extent to which teachers see the surface and the deeper understandings of the subjects that they teach rather than knowledge being some separate form of matter.

Like Eaglestone’s book Literature: Why It Matters, which I read last year, this pamphlet is well worth your attention. He writes well, is blessedly free of the jargon too many university academics employ when discussing classroom practice, and he comes from precisely the right place: that literature is and must continue to be a source of joy.