A TEACHING SUBJECT

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................ixPreface to New Edition................................................xiForeword(s): Research and Teaching....................................xv1 Growth..............................................................1Postscript, 2012: Students as Writers.................................21Interchapter..........................................................272 Voice...............................................................32Postscript, 2012: Intensive Academic Writing..........................59Interchapter..........................................................653 Process.............................................................72Postscript, 2012: Track Changes.......................................91Interchapter..........................................................954 Error...............................................................102Postscript, 2012: Difference as a Resource............................121Interchapter..........................................................1265 Community...........................................................132Postscript, 2012: From the Social to the Material.....................155Afterword(s): Contact and Negotiation.................................161References............................................................175Index.................................................................185About the Author......................................................192

Chapter One

In the late summer of 1966, some fifty American and British teachers met at the three-week Seminar on the Teaching and Learning of English at Dart mouth College (the Dartmouth Seminar). The seminar was organized by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the British National Association of Teachers of English (NATE), and funded by the Carnegie Corporation; its aim was to define English as a school subject and to outline the ways it might be best taught. The participants at Dartmouth proved in fact unable to agree on much in either theory or practice, but this lack of consensus did not limit their impact on the work of many teachers then and since—for whom Dart mouth has symbolized a kind of Copernican shift from a view of English as something you learn about to a sense of it as something you do. After Dartmouth, that is, you could think of English as not simply a patchwork of literary texts, figures, and periods (The Fairie Queen, Swinburne, the eighteenth century) but as the study of how language in all its forms is put into use—from gossip to tragedies to advertising to the talk and writings of schoolchildren. An old model of teaching centered on the transmission of skills (composition) and knowledge (literature) gave way to a growth model focusing on the experiences of students and how these are shaped by their uses of language.

Or that at least is the heroic view of Dartmouth—one that can be traced in large part to John Dixon's eloquent, influential, and highly skewed report on the seminar, Growth through English, published in 1967 and reprinted twice afterward. Dixon was himself a leading British growth theorist, and his report offered less an account of what was argued at Dartmouth than a brief for a particular view of teaching. His aim was to draw from the seminar "such ideas as are directly relevant to my own work in class" (xi), and so he made little attempt to account for the subject-centered views held by many Americans at the seminar, except to suggest that they were perhaps a necessary step toward his own position. The result was an articulate and con tentious book, but one that tended to report Dixon's own views as the find ings of the seminar—and thus in its pages Dartmouth began to seem less a debate than the starting point of a new consensus about the aims and methods of English teaching.

A number of other international conferences on English teaching followed Dartmouth—at York in 1970, Sydney in 1980, Ottawa in 1986, Auckland in 1990, and New York in 1995—but none have yet had its impact. Several of the leading speakers at these conferences had been among the participants at Dartmouth, and so many of the themes and ideas of these meetings often seemed reworkings of those first articulated there. The 1987 English Coalition Conference at Wye billed itself as a kind of all-American successor to Dartmouth, and its report shows that most thinking about teaching has changed little since 1966. As Wayne Booth, a participant at both Dartmouth and Wye, remarks in an otherwise enthusiastic foreword to the Coalition Report: "There was nothing radically new in this enterprise" (1989, x).

But although they continue to shape the kinds of talk about teaching that go on at conferences and in journals, the Dartmouth ideas have probably had less impact than might be hoped on what actually goes on in many classrooms. Rather, the day-to-day work of most teachers, in both America and Britain, from preschool to the university, seems only too often to have continued on after Dartmouth much as it had before—marching lockstep to the demands of fixed school curricula standardized tests, and calls for improved skills and increased cultural unity. And, in any case, most of the actual recommendations of the Dartmouth Seminar were remarkably vague—statements it is hard to imagine anyone disagreeing with and thus equally hard to imagine anyone acting on: "The wisdom of providing young people at all ages with significant opportunities for the creative uses of language.... The significance of rich literary experiences in the educative process." And so on. The few recommendations that were more pointed—like those against tracking and standardized testing—have been for the most part ignored.

Even still, most comments about Dartmouth have been nostalgic. Despite its lack of practical effect on teaching, Dartmouth has often been invoked as showing what, in a better time and world, work in English could be. An antinomian streak colors this talk, as institutional politics and academic vanity are cast as the real blocks to reform in teaching. By 1974, for instance, James Squire and James Britton were to remark that "the impact of the Dartmouth ideas—perhaps the Dartmouth ideal" was to be found not in programs but "in the enterprise of individuals, in the new insights of young teachers" (x). Similarly, in his 1974 Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English, Arthur Applebee described the growth model as the "better alternative" among current approaches to teaching, yet admitted that most American teachers stuck to traditional, subject- centered views of their work (228–32). A few years later, in 1979, Robert Parker argued that the reforms suggested at Dartmouth never stood a chance of competing against the federally funded programs of the 1960s Project English. Writing in the same issue of English Journal, Ken Kantor suggested more simply that the ideas of Dart mouth were too "romantic" and "revolutionary" to be widely accepted. And in 1988, Sharon Hamilton-Wieler worried that we seem left now with only "empty echoes of Dartmouth" as students and teachers once again bow to the pressures of uniform tests and curricula.

There is...