A New Progressivism: English in the 1960s and into the 1970s

Notes from English and Its Teachers by Simon Gibbons (2017)

Chapter 2 – A New Progressivism: English in the 1960s and into the 1970s

In this chapter Gibbons presents the period from the Dartmouth Seminar (1966) to the mid-1970s as “pivotal” in the development of English. He identifies the influence of Growth Through English as well as that of the Language in Use Project.

  • Comprehensive Schools + beginning of new progressive English
    • Not until Circular 10/65 (1965) that the requirement was made for all local authorities for a fully comprehensive schooling system.
    • Formation of the London Association for the Teaching of English (LATE).
    • John Dixon – Growth through English (1967) – was the direct product of the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar.
    • Old-style grammar school curriculum not suited to post-war schools and new teachers not equipped for challenges of teaching children. Comprehensive teaching in London from 1940s meant that London teachers better prepared.
    • Gibbons: “In general terms the new model was progressive; it was child centred, had a focus on pupils’ own uses of language, emphasised the expression of personal experience and, though it valued literature, it did so in very different ways to the reverential appreciation of the canon that characterised the Leavisite-inspired Cambridge school of English that was at the heart of the bulk of traditional English teaching in the grammar school.”
    • Growth English model (English as language) evolved from work of James Britton, Nancy Martin, Harold Rosen, Douglas Barnes and others criticised for neglecting literature (Gibbons: “but they still wanted children to take ownership of the canon”).
    • Model of English emerging from London was not “a formulated theory that was converted into practice”. Work of LATE was diverse.
    • For the first time popular culture not treated as corrupting influence on character and language.
    • Strong emphasis on teachers as professionals (evening programmes, conferences).
    • LATE also a campaigning organisation.
    • Gibbons: “LATE was never a top-down policy-making body that decided on some theoretical or ideological sense of the best way to teach English; its approaches evolved from the projects of its study groups, and these study groups published reports and convened conference workshops that enabled new practices to be dis­seminated more widely. LATE supported the setting up of similar regional networks across the country. Always the individual and collective drive was not to promote a particular view of the subject, but to seek practical ways by which to improve the quality of teaching and learning for children. Theoretical ideas were harnessed when these shed light on the practical challenges faced and the solutions proposed. Academics and practitioners worked together in ways that appeared to have cut across any perceived hierarchies; theory and practice seemed genuinely to be in dia­logue.”
    • Gibbons: “The diverse nature of activities and practices meant that a simple definition or title for this model of English was difficult to ascribe with any real accuracy. It can be called growth English, or English as language, or London English; no single title accurately encompasses the range of ideas contained therein nor recognises that for different teachers different areas of work were more important than others. It was a new, broad progressive English, the boundaries of which continued to expand.”
    • The Aims of English Teaching (1956) described “the aims that lie behind current practice in teaching the mother tongue”. Released via British Council and shows the influence that LATE. A time when the judgement of the profession was respected.
    • The Aims of English Teaching (1956) “forefronted language and experience as the critical building blocks for the subject, highlighted the importance of the relevance of English to children’s lives, stressed the need for personal response and engagement with poetry rather than traditional literary critical analysis and emphasised the need to talk about language in context rather than promoting the teaching of formal grammar.”
    • Reflections (1963) – text book first articulation as a formed philosophy. Gibbons: “It was the first mass commercially produced concrete and practical embodiment of the English that has been variously termed London English, English as language or personal growth English”.
  • Growth of growth English
    • NATE formed in 1963.
    • In embryonic stages there was a struggle between London and Cambridge representatives (mainly argument about NATE being top-down or bottom-up).
    • Cambridge views realigned with The Use of English magazine and the English Association.
    • English-as-language was central place in policy forums of NATE by mid-1960s.
  • 1966 Dartmouth Seminar
    • Gibbons: “It was perhaps the Dartmouth Seminar that proved to be the most significant single event in establishing the personal growth, English-as-language, model as what might be termed the accepted orthodoxy, in one form or another, for the teaching of English from the mid-1960s until – still for many – the current day, not only in England, but across countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia.”
    • Gibbons: “The seminar itself appears now as an almost unbelievable historical phenomenon”.
    • 50 teachers (half British, half American) met for six weeks at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to make decisions about the role of English in the curriculum.
    • Americans were already starting on an early form of the standards-based reform agenda and proposed a structured curriculum.
    • English were advocating a shift from subject to learner.
    • Gibbons: “Whether or not the 40 days of debate at Dartmouth resulted in a consensus, however, is unclear.”
    • 11 points of agreement were published (student centred, prioritised speaking and listening, argued against setting and streaming and put a high value on creativity and imaginative writing.
    • Series of papers:
      • Douglas Barnes – Drama in the English Classroom
      • Geoffrey Summerfield – Creativity in English
      • John Dixon – Growth Through English
      • Herbert Muller – The Uses of English
    • Gibbons (on Growth Through English): “it is from this tide – whether they know it or not – that most English teachers’ definition of the personal growth model of the subject comes, and it formed the basis of one of Brian Cox’s five models of English when he came to write the first National Curriculum for English in the late 1980s.”
    • Gibbons discusses Growth Through English. Dixon attacked Cambridge cultural heritage model of the subject. Dixon’s model was termed “language and personal growth”. Gibbons: “This model would have a strong respect for children’s own language and dialect, and children’s own attempts at writing were to be placed on the same language continuum as the work of the literary greats; even children’s gossip should exist on the very same continuum”.
    • Gibbons: “In reality, there were most certainly differences of opinion even within the British contingent on the interpretation of growth in itself – it meant something very different to Leavis-inspired Cambridge English teachers, who would have more closely aligned growth with great literature and the power of such material to nurture and develop young minds than it did to those teachers from the NATE representation who were advocates of what is now commonly accepted to be personal growth English.”
    • Gibbons: “Surveys of English teachers (see, for example, research carried out by Goodwyn and Findlay (1999) and Marshall (2000)) have repeatedly shown that personal growth is the model the largest pro­ portion of the English teaching community point to as being central to their motivation and to their practice”
    • D. Allen – English Teaching Since 1965: How Much Growth (1980) – critical of the impact of the growth model (but suggests it had real impact in classrooms).
    • Gibbons: “However, in championing the growth model as the consensus ofDartmouth, Crowlh through English effectively established an English orthodoxy that – as time passed, and as its advocates increasingly took leading positions in NATE, engaged with government bodies as representatives of the English teaching community and played prominent roles in nationally funded projects – was seen to stand in opposition to the traditional Leavisite model of the subject and which undoubtedly held a prominent position in a majority of secondary English teachers’ hearts and minds. This new progressive English was certainly not merely personal growth, it was a broader notion of a progressive English that continued to develop and embrace new strands of thinking.”
  • The Theorising of English
    • English in Leavisite tradition had no overarching theory (just objectives); growth model articulated vision of English underpinned by theoretical ideas.
    • Tony Burgess: “the commitment to an underlying rationale for the teaching of English that could go on developing as a body of ideas … to try and build a sort of framework, or ongoing knowledge and theory… [others] resist the notion of a synthesis. It sounds too grand. They resist the idea of trying to coordinate different bodies of thought – they prefer to take intellectual positions that are not about the whole of English teaching.”
  • James Britton’s Language and Learning
    • James Britton was a founding member of LATE and a “driving force” behind research and campaigns around assessment of language and literature.
    • He forcefully sought to develop the over-arching philosophy of the subject. Gibbons: “He did this, in part, by drawing on his back­ ground in psychology, using this to help him to articulate ideas that would offer an account of the learning and development of children through their development and uses of language. It was this that formed his view of what the subject English ought to look like.”
    • Language and Learning was “an articulation ofgrowth pedagogy or the English as language model in its most overtly theoretical form, and as such it was a text that provided what might be termed a philosophical underpinning or foundation for English teachers who, in the wake of Dartmouth and Growth through English, were helping to establish the new child-centred version of English as the dominant pedagogy in England’s schools.”
    • Played significant role in bringing Vygotsky’s ideas to wider recognition.
    • Vygotsky’s ideas supported teachers instinctive feelings for the value of oracy in the classroom. (Britton incorporated them in spectator and participant roles – included in the Bullock Report.)
    • Gibbons: “In forefronting the importance of language in development, highlighting the value of oracy, emphasising the absolute need for children to be encouraged to bring their own language and experience into their learning and placing literature as an integral part of learning, and eclectically drawing on a breadth of key thinkers to shed light on examples of real children’s language use, Language and Learning was the book that to a large extent theorised the new progressive growth English. As such it sits as a powerful companion to Crowth through English – Dixon’s work a model of what English should look like, Britton’s the theoretical underpinning to add weight to the method.”
  • Language in Use Project
    • The Schools Council Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching began life as the Nuffield Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching in 1964, with Michael Halliday as its director.
    • (Halliday’s work on functional grammar seems to be influential in development of KS3 Literacy Strategies of 2000s.)
    • Peter Doughty, Pearce, Thornton – Language in Use (1971) – explored the functions of language in society but insisted that the starting point was children’s own language use.
    • Language in Use was 110 units of work, each made up of a sequence of lessons. Gibbons: “With activities employing discussion, group work, scripted and improvised drama and the use of tape recordings of real language in use, the heritage of the work was clearly the post-war London model of English. And whilst the focus of the activities was linguistic, there was no oppressive focus on grammatical terminology — the whole thrust of the material was for pupils to ‘understand much more fully than before the nature of their own experience as users of language’ with the level of explicit termi­nology expected to be left to ‘the judgement of those who teach them’ (ibid., p. 9). The aim, ultimately, was to develop pupils’ own competence as users of language themselves, but the text acknowledged that the link between developed under­ standing and increased competence was not straightforward.”
    • (Direct antecedent to LiNC in the early 1990s.)
    • Gibbons: “The success of the programme was in making this kind of language study in the classroom a serious pursuit, rooted in evidence and research from linguistic experts. It supported this approach to language work in a way that has always been blatantly missing for advocates of formal grammar teaching with explicit forefronting of facts and rules about correct usage.”
    • Unifying factor of different approaches was the idea of English being about the child and seeing the subject that began with the learner and the learner’s language and experience.
  • Progressive Growth English: increasingly political
    • Gibbons: “The focus of work on pupils’ own language use inevitably brought politics into the classroom as it would be impossible not to consider issues of gender, class and – increasingly in multicultural environments — ethnicity in English lessons.”
    • Commission 7 formed at the 1971 NATE conference to discuss the politics of English teaching.
    • Gibbons: “Commission 7 and what followed pointed towards a more explicitly political strand in the development of English – one that much more explicitly focused on race, class, gender and ethnicity and championed the advancement of equal opportunities as a major role for the subject and its teachers. In essence, there was a form of progressive politics that formed an umbrella for growth English, under which colleagues with differing views could congregate.”
  • Politics and Pupil Voice
    • Pupil strike in East London in 1971.
    • Chris Searle, probationary English teacher created anthology of children’s writing called Stepney Words. Was dismissed which caused walkout by children.
  • The New Progressive Growth English: backlash
    • Right-wing educationalists viewed progressive model of English as part of a failing progressive system. Perceived as coming from the Left.
    • The Black Papers. Discusses views of Arthur Pollard, English professor from Hull Uni.
    • Gibbons: “The Black Papers were influential in that they attracted much attention from sections of the media and from some policymakers and they were significant in marking the beginning of the kind of right-wing, traditionalist assault on progressive English that would be seen time and time again over subsequent decades.”
  • Conclusion:
    • No “coherent, neatly defined model” of English – there wasn’t a consensus. Gibbons: “English was during the period a highly contested subject.” But there had been significant changes to teaching of English.
    • Gibbons: “in the years following Dartmouth, this model of English – whether informed in individual teachers’ perspectives by thinking from psychology, cognitive develop­ ment, sociology or linguistics – had assumed a prominent position within English departments and that this was being reflected in both curricula and examinations in a decisive shift ‘from a Scrutiny conception of English in schools’ (Hilliard, 2012).”
    • C. Hillard – English as a Vocation (2012) – a lament to the loss of the Leavisite approach to English in schools.
    • Terry Eagleton: “there is no more need to be a card-carrying Leavisite today then there is to be a card-carrying Copernican: that current has entered the bloodstream of English studies in England as Copernicus reshaped our astronomical beliefs”