The English Teacher’s Role: Strain and Conflict

Notes from The Preachers of Culture by Margaret Mathieson (1975)

Chapter 13 – The English Teacher’s Role: Strain and Conflict

In this chapter English is presented as placing its teachers into stressful and vulnerable roles due to its diffuse nature and conflicting ideologies.

Mathieson: “This chapter suggests that progressive English teachers are likely to experience strains and tensions that are more severe than those felt by other members of staff.”
Gerald Grace – Role Conflict and the Teacher – “Grace’s research showed that the greatest professional confidence, that is the least role conflict, existed in those teachers whose aims were the most narrowly defined, whose role was clearly prescribed, and whose certainty of consensus of purpose with fellow staff, parents and pupils was the strongest.”
“Conversely, teachers in the ‘value’ subjects experienced the greatest role conflict, particularly when they were working with low-ability pupils or in situations where they ‘felt uncertainty about actual learning achievements’. This response about satisfaction within teaching illustrates something of the difference between the cognitive and the affective subjects as represented by mathematics and English.”
Mathieson: “As it has been seen to touch upon every aspect of pupils’ lives, most particularly the emotional, English has become increasingly diffuse. Moreover, there are within it, more than most other subjects, marked political differences between the leading figures in the field. As they relate to decision-making about priorities and responsibilities in the classroom, these differences must affect many English teachers’ sense of purpose and professional confidence.”
Widespread dissatisfaction with traditional grammar school education in last 10 years (from 1975 perspective). Progressives and radicals supporting reorganisation of schools support non-streaming, dismantling traditional subjects by rearranging them through interdisciplinary work/projects/themes and the elitism of grammars.
Literature has received the most severe overhauling – “every activity in English has been given a different set of emphases.”
Others than progressives have questioned the value of academic approaches for working class pupils. G.H. Bantock and David Holbrook, concerned about exploitation by commercial culture, are concerned that a watered-down grammar school curriculum has failed to affect the lives of the great majority. They have proposed the revival of popular culture. Instead of set texts, periods of literature etc, they propose more mime, dance, poetry reading and writing. An affective education.
Question of which culture and for whom? Imposing an alien “middle class” cultural values on working class children.
Mathieson: “…many conscientious English teachers see themselves faced with strongly expressed views about their role which are based upon different interpretations of social justice. Are they perpetuating social divisions by exclusively concentrating upon the child’s own culture, or encouraging sensitive response to environment and pride in individual identity?”
Promotion of different “cultures” (left-wing and right-wing seem agreed?).
Teaching of Literature most affected by conflicting views. Followers of Leavis’ “Great Tradition”. Bantock and Holbrook attack a “watered down” curriculum for secondary modern children they insist on the value of literature. Myth, folk song lead on to poetry of Blake and Shakespeare.
Mathieson: “Today, Holbrook and his supporters, opposing the shift of emphasis to ‘relevant’ social or environmental studies, simply disclaim the accusation of endors ing middle-class values; they insist upon the universality of the literary experience which, if neglected, will mean severe imaginative deprivation for children continually exposed to what, they argue, are the banalities of the mass media.”
Language in Use team argue that English should be used as a means of improving social competence and literature introduced after children have achieved linguistic confidence.
Halliday and Doughty want literature to have a lesser place.
Language in Use team tend to regard complete teaching of a text as suspiciously supportive of a traditional teacher-directed curriculum. “Controversial issues” given priority over literature. Mathieson: “Several significant trends in education are discernible here. There is the wish to give children greater opportunity to talk, thus removing importance from the text and the teacher to the pupils; ‘discussion diffuses power, or at least suggests that it might be diffused’. There is the desire to blur distinctions between subjects in order to show children how knowledge is related rather than separated, strengthened by the I radical conviction that dismantling the traditional curriculum is part of a movement to promote greater social justice.”
Some English teachers unwilling to teach literature from convictions about the neglected richness of working class culture. Resistance to literature on the grounds it is part of the syllabus of middle-class culture.
Chris Searle – This New Season – about English teaching in Stepney. Literature – apart from Liverpool poets – is excluded. Instead pupils write personally about their feelings and the environment. Identifies exams/academic curriculum with status-seeking of the middle classes.
Mathieson: “Arguing that the curriculum of the working-class pupils should be specially chosen to suit their environment, experiences and abilities, they indicate their lack of interest in the question of academic achievement with its possibility of pupils’ upward social mobility. Bantock and Holbrook seek no reorgansation of the social structure, investing their hopes for greater happiness in the power of creativity and great art to bring self-awareness and fulfilment. Searle, and teachers with his views, reject the present social system, recommend ing that ways be found to give working-class pupils confidence and pride in their cultural identity. They do not propose to enter into work in school which makes achievement in competitive examinations possible, having judged this to be highly undesirable.”
Children’s creativity is an area in which most are agreed. Differences are whether it should be Literature or children’s own experiences that should provide stimuli. Mathieson: “While Bantock, Holbrook, Inglis and those English teachers who support the ‘elitists’, recommend the employment of stimuli drawn exclusively from the music, painting and literature of high art, and make it clear that they view creativity partly as a way back into appreciation, a radical teacher like Searle rejects this culture completely. Unlike the elitists, many of whom wish to compensate for working-class children’s loss of traditional agricultural satisfactions through a mainly affective curriculum, Searle recommends creativity to strengthen working-class children’s confidence and pride in their own identity.”
Quotes Peter Doughty: “The only kind of written work acceptable to many teachers at present is written work that is recognisable as one variety of the language of literature, that is, intensely autobiographic, densely metaphoric, syntactically highly informal, and devoted to the accurate reporting of personal response to experience. . . . From the point of view of the pupils’ needs as a whole … the limitations of this assumption are immediately apparent… it ignores the nature and function of technical varieties of English, that is, the workaday language of a complex industrial society.”
Exclusive concentration on personal can be socially divisive. Limiting working class children to “personal” writing prevents social mobility.
Mathieson: “the English teacher has a heavier responsibility when he attempts to resolve it than staff concerned with other parts of the curriculum. He has to decide whether it is more in his pupils’ interests for him to accept the existence of the present social structure and to give them help to advance within it, or for him to have rejected it, on their behalf, as stifling, competitive and exploitative and to encourage them to find fulfilment within themselves and their environment. It will be appreciated that these decisions within English teaching, as they are seen as likely to affect pupils’ future working and leisure conditions, might be poignantly uncomfortable to resolve for working-class teachers. Having achieved professional status by means of success in competitive examinations, they are likely to feel a sense of obligation to working-class pupils to equip them in a similar way. It is unlikely to be easy for them to decide, on their working-class pupils’ behalf, that personal fulfilment derives solely from their inner selves and their environment, unrelated to questions of higher social status and improved working and leisure conditions. What is certain, however, is that currently English teachers are being urged by the majority of voices in their midst to concentrate upon encouragement of their pupils’ creativity.”
In area of critical discrimination there is a general consensus that it is highly desirable. Mathieson: “Where differences exist they are about how far into the mass media the teacher will go in order to create dissatisfaction with its worst products.”
English teachers opposed to mass media and children as “lambs to the slaughter” or “zombies” and that they are providers of some sort of antidote.
Quotes a School Council Project on the Mass Media and the Secondary School: “it is in English lessons that the assumptions of curriculum culture come into head-on collision with the pupils’ experience of the pop media. English and pop offer pupils two contrasting modes of under standing and expressing emotional experience, the one based on linear communication and literary skills, the other on multiplicity and movement.”
Basil Bernstein‘s work on elaborated and restricted code. English teachers enthusiastic and offered compensatory experiences . More recent (from 1975 standpoint) criticisms who argue that Bernstein over-rates “middle-class speech”.
W. Labov and Harold Rosen argue that in some respects working class speech is superior (middle-class speech seen as “table manners”).
Quotes Labov: “in many ways working-class speakers are more effective narrators, reasoners and debators than many middle-class speakers who temporise, qualify and lose their argument in a mass of irrelevant detail”
English teachers have an important decision: to accept the difficult conditions and disguise their sense of superiority of their own language skills while leading working class children into a greater range of linguistic skills or to encourage greater informality to give working class children confidence in their own identity and culture.
Nell Kiddie – Tinker Tailor – most schools assume goals of making children more like teachers rather than make teachers bicultural, more like the children they teach.
Sometime more elaborate speech is not used to clarify and more likely to complicate and confuse.
Conflict when there is a lack of consensus about goals (eg. between teachers and parents). Parental anxieties about attainment and dissatisfaction with what are commonly perceived failures of discipline.
Mathieson: “To a far greater degree than teachers of other subjects with a measurable and recognisable cognitive content, conscientious English staff influenced by progressive notions deliberately set out to seek expression of childrens personal experiences and opinions. Informality, personal confidences, criticism of established middle-class institutions, and acceptance of playground language are likely to be viewed by parents as particularly characteristic of the English teach ing in innovative schools.”
In traditionally organised schools Headteachers and older staff see themselves as custodians of society’s values and are “unsympathetic towards the new radicalism” in English teaching.
English teachers who are most interested in oral and written expression of individual experiences are at the centre of a school’s expressive relationships with its pupils.
Mathieson: “The conscientious English teacher who wishes to increase his pupils’ confidence will be more ready than other staff members to ignore language normally unacceptable in school. This ‘permissive ness’, along with his encouragement of accounts and discussions of normally unacceptable subjects, can, therefore, bring the English teacher into conflict with his headmaster, fellow staff and, in a special sense, even with the pupils themselves.”
Quotes Harold Rosen (1973 NATE conference): “We are concerned with fostering teaching of English in which children are encouraged to use their own language about things which concern them, as opposed to English as simply literature or a means of communication. This has led to controversy recently and will con tinue to do so in the future. I think the backlash against this kind of teaching is now beginning at grass roots level in particular areas and schools.”
Mathieson: “The somewhat disturbing implication for English teachers seems to be that hostile reactions to their work indicate the extent to which they are being successful; it leads once more back to the insistence in the prescriptive writing upon the need for exceptional men and women to do the work effectively.”
Gives account of Churchfields School where other staff were suspicious of English teachers’ informality but also irritated by the self-righteousness of their defensiveness. The English Department appeared at odds with the social and cultural values of the school. Individuals foundered because they struggled alone. Needs to be part of a team.
Mathieson: “It must, of course, be acknowledged that ever since the Cambridge School insisted upon its special role in affecting the quality of pupils’ lives, ‘good’ English teachers have risked conflict with authority, particularly with headmasters representing traditional values. Indeed, the militant imagery of the Leavisite prescriptive writing underlined the view the Cambridge English teachers held of themselves as doing battle with the current literary orthodoxy. Resisting the classical treatment of English, with its emphasis upon grammar and elegantly written essays, many Leavisite teachers deliberately conflicted with the academic establishment. Encouraging the personal response to literature, valuing experience above knowledge, critical of anthologies’ noble sentiments and refined sensibilities, teachers from the Cambridge English School appeared to threaten prevailing definitions of literary studies. Nevertheless, in spite of the School’s hostility to belles lettrism, its own elitism has fused gradually with the conservatism of public and grammar schools. As developments in wider society have diminished the status of the classics, schools have accommodated the Leavisite English teacher as supportive of traditional values. It seems likely that today only his literary elitism and sense of messianic purpose might antagonise his colleagues, many of whom may share their pupils’ enjoyment of popular culture. The radical English teacher, though, is much more likely to be perceived as embodying a threat within most traditionally organised schools and must, unless working in a team, be prepared to be discouraged when he is misunderstood by other members of staff. The conscientious English teacher who supports any of the current orthodoxies, most par ticularly those recommending pupil-directed learning, sometimes deliberately setting out to redistribute power through changed approaches in the classroom, is likely to antagonise or mystify some groups with whom he comes into contact inside and outside school. Except in the few highly innovative schools, he must be prepared to be either a stranger in the staff room or hope to belong to a closely knit team, defensively united against the rest of the staff. What appears to happen (from descriptions in books and articles, accounts from rueful English teachers at conferences and students on teaching practice) is that a committed group of English staff are in running battle with a confused headmaster until the central inspirational figure of the team loses heart and leaves for another post. The highly personal nature of the subject means that any successful group of staff is bound by inward loyalties rather than supported by the school as an institution. Thus, when these weaken, little remains to support the other members of the group.”
New entrants to teaching English often suffer “cultural shock” and result in disappointment and cynicism. Mathieson: “In this area, knowledge about social structure, the school as an institution, and the history of their profession might be more helpful during the period of training than prescriptive, activist approaches characteristic of colleges and departments of education.”
Quotes J.R. Squire and R.K. Applebee – Teaching English in the United Kingdom (1969): “At its best the spirit is crusading and alive; at its worst, it is intolerant and neglectful of many literary values … too many lessons lack closure, direction, or planning… and time passed in the classroom is not easily distinguishable from time out of school.”