by Brenton Doecke
Emeritus Professor, Deakin University
I am going to offer three reflections that build on each other without necessarily amounting to a seamless argument about the significance of the Dartmouth Seminar or the influence that John Dixon’s Growth through English (1967) has had on my work as an English teacher. Dixon’s account of ‘personal growth’ is inevitably at the centre of any conversation about Dartmouth, and I will try to convey a sense of the impact that his work has had on me, although I shall also be arguing that the value of the Dartmouth '66 Seminar Exhibit partly consists in challenging the canonical status of this text and allowing other voices to be heard.
(i)
E.P. Thompson begins his enormously influential history, The Making of the English Working Class, by declaring his intention to rescue ordinary people whose lives had been radically upturned by the Industrial Revolution from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ (Thompson, 1968 [1963], p.13). However deluded or foolhardy their reactions to the changes that were happening around them might seem from our vantage point—you just have to think of how the word ‘Luddite’ is now used to denigrate people who resist technological innovation—those people ‘lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not’, and ‘their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience’ (p.13).
Thompson’s words reflect a standpoint that is worth emulating whenever we try to understand the actions and beliefs of people from a bygone era, even when that era might not be as remote from us as the decades that were the focus of his inquiry. The world of the 1960s is still recognizable to us, a time within living memory that alternately prompts bemusement, nostalgia, as well as recollections of significant political struggle. Yet it was, after all, a different time and place from the current moment, and the participants in the Dartmouth seminar were responding to a different policy environment from the one we know at present. They were speaking out of a different set of experiences and large historical changes (the moment of post-war reconstruction and the Cold War) that shaped their beliefs and values in a way that was specific to that era.
Although the individuals who participated at Dartmouth may be recognizable to us, they are also different—differences that can be traced in the very way they talk about why they had been brought together to reflect on how English teaching was being taught on both sides of the Atlantic. Who, for example, would think these days to refer to English teaching in elementary school as ‘native language instruction’ in the way that Albert Marckwardt does in his contribution to the papers arising from the working party and group focusing on ‘language problems’ (Marckwardt,1968, p.2)? Or who could any longer be satisfied with the definition of an English teacher with which John M. Sinclair begins his paper in the same collection as someone ‘who teaches English to young native English speakers’ (Sinclair, 1968, p.31)? And how should we respond to Albert Kitzhaber’s opening address to the Seminar when he proffers a definition of English as ‘a body of knowledge called grammar, and a body of knowledge called literature, with the skills of communication as a unifying element’ (Kitzhaber, Abstract, 1966)? It’s not only the insufficiency of this definition that signals the gulf between then and now but the image of public schooling that it evokes.
The value of the resources that comprise the Dartmouth '66 Seminar Exhibit in no small part derives from the fact that they allow us to register difference as much as sameness when it comes to appreciating the significance of this event within the history of English curriculum and pedagogy. This sense of sameness and difference should be enough to forestall any sweeping judgments about Dartmouth and especially John Dixon’s account of what happened there. We can begin to read Dixon’s book as arising out of conversations that occurred at the Seminar. Those conversations involved a diverse range of interlocutors occupying markedly different standpoints. This can only enhance our appreciation of Dixon’s text, enabling us to read it dialogically, as a response to the many voices that were in play at the conference as the participants attempted to understand the role that English curriculum and pedagogy might play in the education of young people.
(ii)
The sweeping judgements that have been made about Dixon’s account of the Dartmouth Seminar in Growth Through English nonetheless comprise part of the history of its reception that should give us pause for thought.
It is not as if Dixon’s book and the Dartmouth Seminar itself were initially recognised as being of momentous significance for English teachers. If you skim through some contemporaneous accounts of English teaching, you find that it hardly rates a mention (e.g. Shayer, 1972). Although some participants may have felt that they were part of a major shift in thinking about English teaching, the significance of Dartmouth has only unfolded through continuing dialogue within professional networks and educational institutions, and sometimes that dialogue has involved vigorous dissent from the model that Dixon was propounding (e.g. Allen, 1980).
And for all the liveliness of those debates, there remains the question as to whether the ideas arising out of the Seminar really had much effect on the everyday practice of English teachers. When I started English teaching in the 1970s, there were certainly theoretical and practical resources available to me that reflected ideas about language and learning associated with Dartmouth (or at least that is how I see them retrospectively, for it was not as though I necessarily recognised them as such at the time), but there was also plenty of other material around that supported traditional practices, such as explicit grammar teaching, spelling lists and comprehension exercises. My everyday world comprised an heterogenous mix of habitual practices and other practices that reflected emergent ways of understanding and supporting the language and learning of my students.
But here I am less concerned about the way the ideas associated with ‘personal growth’ were actually received and taken up by systems and teachers in the decades immediately following Dartmouth than with a certain uniformity in the responses of more recent commentators to Dixon’s account of the Seminar. I can illustrate this uniformity by quoting some remarks that are representative in this respect.
—Peter Smagorinksy, 2019, pp.128-129
—Frances Christie, 1991, p.77
—Annette Patterson, 1992, ‘p.134, p.138
—Brenton Doecke and Douglas McClenaghan, 2009, p.245
I have now come to feel that this construction of Dixon’s Growth through English as promoting a Romantic ideal of the individual outside language and society reflects as much on the values and assumptions of the people who are making this claim as it does on Dixon’s book. A symposium celebrating fifty years since Dartmouth that I helped to organise in Australia in 2016 sent me back to Growth through English, in order to gauge my own intellectual journey by seeing whether I could read the text anew (see Dowsett, Doecke and Green, 2016, for contributions to the 2016 symposium) This led me to interrogate the way that along with everyone else I had slipped into attributing a Romantic view of individual ‘experience’ to Dixon’s work. Call me a contrarian, but the fact that so many people had repeated this claim had begun to make me question its validity. It had begun to seem like a cliché.
This then prompted me to write an essay on Dartmouth with John Yandell, who had likewise been attempting to gain a perspective on his own education as an educator by rereading Growth through English, when we tried to distance ourselves from summary judgements about Dixon’s book by engaging in a close reading that was attentive to the way the language of the text unfolds (Doecke and Yandell, 2019). The problem with many of the claims that have been made about the Romantic nature of ‘personal growth’ is after all that hardly any of them cite the words that Dixon uses, choosing instead to make generalising statements rather than grappling with the language of the text. Dixon, for example, can hardly be accused of invoking some kind of pristine sense of self that is the focus of ‘personal growth’. He describes the boy who wrote the diary entries that he analyses in the first chapter of Growth through English as writing in order to ‘make his experience real again’, and in so doing making more ‘discoveries’ (Dixon, 1967, p.5). The process of sharing your experiences with others is a matter of using language to make that experience ‘real’ to yourself (p.6). Dixon posits, in short, the divided character of experience, divided not least because of the way language mediates our awareness of self. There is always a difference between the ‘I’ who is doing the ‘seeing’ and the ‘I’ who is telling. Dixon recognises the dual character of language as both enabling students to arrive at a sense of the meaning of their experiences, as well as providing a vehicle for sharing their thoughts and feelings in a public realm. The upshot of our rereading of Growth through English was the realization that collectively as English educators we had been ascribing a meaning to the text deriving from our own values and beliefs that was not warranted.
Yet it is not simply a matter of arriving at a ‘correct’ reading of Growth through English. By invoking the practice of ‘close reading’, John and I were certainly not supposing that it was possible to arrive at a meaning that inheres within the text that only required an attentive reader for it to become available to everyone. Whatever the intellectual baggage associated with the term ‘close reading’ (see North, 2017, pp.104-109), for us it implies a reflexivity on our part as readers that strives to be mindful of how our own standpoints are mediating the way we read and respond to the words of the text while simultaneously striving to be aware of the multiple contexts that have shaped the text’s production and reception: what these words mean to me, what these words might have meant to the author, what they have meant to a larger readership over time. The process of ‘close reading’ for us is a dialogical one that is sensitive to the clash of meanings within any text, within any word.
Rather than treating Growth through English as a canonical text whose meaning inheres within it, it is more generative to see its significance as comprising the history of the ways that it has variously been interpreted, as part of a continuing conversation stretching over the decades since it was first published. This obviously has both a personal and an historical dimension. Any attempt to pose the question as to why this text does or does not speak to me at a particular moment in time inevitably raises questions about the larger history that mediates my response to it. I still admit to my embarrassment about repeating the cliché that Growth through English celebrates a ‘Romantic’ ideal of the individual as existing prior to society and language, just as I continue to feel annoyed by statements by other educators that repeat this reading in pursuance of other agendas. Growth through English, in my view, does not sustain this interpretation, prompting me to ask about the nature of the ideological work that is variously being performed when people judge the text to be ‘Romantic’. Yet I also want to affirm the conversations that have occurred around Growth through English, to see them as part of a continuing effort on the part of English educators to understand their work better, whatever the limitations of the standpoints that we each bring to such an enterprise (cf. Doecke, 2019).
I think the Dartmouth '66 Seminar Exhibit provides an important stimulus for continuing such conversations.
(iii)
Perhaps the various readings of Growth through English as being mired in putatively Romantic assumptions about the individual can be explained as reflecting a disquiet about the utopian impulse behind the book and the disjunction between the ideal of personal growth and the conditions that typically obtain in schools. There is a gap between what is and what ought to be that the book does not satisfactorily bridge, leaving it open to the criticism that growth pedagogy can only be realised in certain settings, namely schools catering for middle class communities, where students are motivated to participate in the meaning-making practices that Dixon valorises.
Yet even with respect to the utopian impulse behind Growth through English, I now believe that it can be reread to yield a far subtler account of the tensions between what is and what ought to be, although there is no doubt that the programmatic nature of the text partially compromises the claims Dixon is making about the salience of ‘personal growth’ as a framework for continuing inquiry into the complexities of language and learning within classroom settings. Dixon famously begins his book by invoking a chronology comprising three ‘models’ of English, the third model, ‘personal growth’, displacing the ‘skills’ and ‘cultural’ heritages models and thus bringing us up to the present. I’ve written about the reductive character of any exercise that posits the history of English curriculum and pedagogy in the form of a series of so-called ‘models’, and I won’t dwell on this issue at any length here (see Doecke and Mead, 2018). It’s possibly in the nature of things that new approaches to English curriculum and pedagogy should be heralded as ushering in a brand new day and a radical break from a benighted past. Dixon himself sums up his account of ‘skills’ and ‘cultural heritage’ by referring to them as ‘past mistakes’, although he concedes that ‘it is rather easy to be wise after the event’ (p.4).
But in turning to the third model, ‘language and personal growth’, he also does more than consign the other models to the rubbish bin of history, as though we now have the answers that will enable us to enact a meaningful English curriculum in which all students can participate. Indeed, he remarks that any recognition of deficiencies in the understandings and practices of the past should involve a preparedness to engage in inquiry in order ‘to build English teaching on a second axis, based on our observations of language in operation from day to day’ (1967, p.4). He returns us, in short, to the everyday – you might say, to the ‘ordinariness’ of the language we use every day, including the exchanges that take place within the social space of English classrooms. The sample of writing he then chooses for analysis (pp.4-5) is not presented as exemplary, but as something from which as educators we can learn. It is compelling because of its ordinariness, because it arises from the everyday experiences of this student, who is able to recognise the English classroom as ‘a place where pupils meet to share experience of some importance, to talk about people and situations in the world as they know it, gathering experience into new wholes and enjoying the satisfaction and power that this gives’ (p.6). Dixon’s advocacy of practitioner inquiry is at a far remove from the evangelism that has often been ascribed to him, along with the claim that ‘personal growth’ is a hopelessly romantic ideal that can hardly be realised in classrooms that are organised around discipline and hierarchical structures. Dixon is very well aware of how those structures operate, and of the way teachers often feel themselves obliged to play roles that they would rather choose not to do, as becomes apparent in the afterword to the 1975 edition of his book, when he critically reflects on his own teaching, finding traces within his own practice of dominating classroom exchanges and closing down talk (Dixon, 1975, p.112). The ideal of ‘personal growth’ was always something he understood to require complex mediations between a teacher’s expectations and the attitudes and values students bring into class, when what is accomplished always exceeds what we may have intended to do.
Dixon was not alone in promoting the need for English teachers to learn from the exchanges that occur in classroom settings. What I’ve just said about his standpoint as a teacher and researcher applies equally well to James Britton and Douglas Barnes, not to mention other names. These educators did not become significant for me because they were providing answers, let alone a radically new ‘model’ of English teaching, but because they were setting a powerful example of inquiry that helped me to enact my professional practice in a more fully aware way.
I hope that the Dartmouth '66 Seminar Exhibit prompts English teachers to reaffirm the spirit of practitioner inquiry reflected in the original Seminar and the work arising from it and to continue in that tradition.
Reference List
Allen, D. (1980). English Teaching since 1965: How much Growth? London: Heinemann Educational Books.
Christie, F. (1991). The “Received Tradition” of English Teaching: The Decline of Rhetoric and the Corruption of Grammar. In B. Bill Green (ed), The Insistence of the Letter (pp.75-106), London: Falmer.
Dixon, J. (1967). Growth through English: A Report based on the Dartmouth Seminar 1966. Huddersfield, Yorkshire: National Association for the Teaching of English/Oxford University Press.
Dixon, J. (1975). Growth through English: Set in the Perspective of the Seventies. Huddersfield, Yorkshire: National Association for the Teaching of English/Oxford University Press.
Doecke, B. (2019) Rewriting the History of Subject English through the Lens of ‘Literary Sociability’, Changing English, 26:4, 339-356, DOI: 10.1080/1358684X.2019.1649116
Doecke, B. and McClenaghan, D. (2009). ‘Process writing: Confessions’. In Susanne Gannon, Mark Howie and Wayne Sawyer (eds), Charged with Meaning: Re-viewing English (Third edition) Putney NSW: Phoenix Education, 2009, pp.243-250.
Doecke, B. and Mead, P. (2018) English and the knowledge question, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 26:2, 249-264, DOI: 10.1080/14681366.2017.1380691
Doecke, B. and Yandell, J. [2019], ‘Language and Experience: Rereading Growth through English’. In Andrew Goodwyn, Cal Durrant, Wayne Sawyer and Don Zancanella (eds) The Future of English Teaching Worldwide: Celebrating 50 Years from the Dartmouth Conference, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019, pp.159-171).
Dowsett, P., Doecke, B., Green, B. (2016) (eds). Revisiting Dartmouth – 50 Years on. Special issue of English in Australia. 51 (3). The Journal of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English.
Kitzhaber, A. R. (1996) What Is English, Working Party Paper No. 1. Working papers of the Anglo-American Seminar on the Teaching and Learning of English. Dartmouth College,, Hanover, New Hampshire, Aug. 20-Sept. 16, 1966. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED082201.pdf
Marckwardt, A.H. (1968). Language Standards and Attitudes. In A.H. Marckwardt (ed.) Language and Language Learning: Papers relating to the Anglo-American Seminar on the Teaching of English at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire 1966 (pp.1-22). Champaign, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English.
North, J. (2017). Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Patterson, A. (1992). Individualism in English: From Personal Growth to Discursive Construction. English Education, 24 (3), October, pp. 131-146.
Shayer, D. (1972). The Teaching of English in Schools 1900-1970. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Sinclair, J. M. (1968). Linguistics and the Teaching of English. In A.H. Marckwardt (ed.) Language and Language Learning: Papers relating to the Anglo-American Seminar on the Teaching of English at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire 1966 (pp.31-42). Champaign, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English.
Smagorinsky, P. (2019), Dartmouth’s Growth Model Reconceived from a Social Perspective. In Andrew Goodwyn, Cal Durrant, Wayne Sawyer and Don Zancanella (eds) The Future of English Teaching Worldwide: Celebrating 50 Years from the Dartmouth Conference, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019, pp.123-132.
Thompson, E. P. (1968 [1963]). The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.