by John Hardcastle
Associate Researcher, University College London Institute of Education
A neglected fragment from 1962—we have it only in the form of a roughly typed version that we rescued from a forgotten filing cabinet deep in the basement of the London Institute of Education—foreshadows James Britton’s contribution to Dartmouth Seminar four years later. In it, Britton was proposing a radical shift in focus for discussion and debate about English—a shift from the contents of English studies (pre-specified knowledge about literature language and communications skills) towards a concentration on learners: their processes; their resources; and, above all, the role of language and literature—there can be no separation—in their cognitive and affective development.
Britton framed his Dartmouth intervention on similar lines. The overall aim of the Dartmouth Seminar was to define English, and to outline how best it should be taught. Britton’s intervention altered the course of discussions at the Seminar and signposted alternative directions for both teaching and research.
Dartmouth matters because it marks a pivotal moment in the larger story of how we (English teachers and educators) have come to be where we are now. This is not merely of historical interest. The archive provides much-needed resources for a critique of the present.
Thanks to Annette Vee and Megan McIntyre, it is now possible to place archive materials gathered elsewhere, in relation to an extraordinarily rich core collection displayed in the Dartmouth '66 Seminar Exhibit hosted by WAC Clearinghouse.
The forgotten filing cabinet also contained a folder with five pages of faded hand-written personal notes marked ‘Hanover, Dartmouth, 1966.’ The notes outline the main points of Britton’s intervention and they provide the focus for what follows.
At the Seminar, Albert Kitzhaber had identified three constituent elements of English: a body of knowledge called language, a body of knowledge called literature and a body of skills called communication.
Britton replied that Kitzhaber’s search for a central organizing principle contained a flawed underlying assumption about English as a subject: that if we find out what 'it' is, it follows that this is what English teachers should be teaching. Britton’s point was partly that English is just a single element in a larger educational structure. There is a difference between university and school English, he said, and, moreover, there is a difference between English for college-bound students and English for so-called ‘terminal students’—the majority of students in the UK, who left school age 16. He proposed to change the question:
‘I strongly suggest’ he writes, ‘that to avoid reification, we need to rephrase the question: not ask what English is, but ask more simply ‘What ought English teachers to be doing?’
This represented a major intervention that, in my view, altered the whole course of the seminar.
Britton advocated what he calls an ‘operational view of language and an operational view of the teaching of the mother tongue’, a view that takes account of the learner. He acknowledged that there is body of knowledge about the English language—grammatical, linguistic and so on. However, he questioned the notion of a body of knowledge called ‘literature.’ Indeed, the British party generally resisted the idea that literature itself can be regarded as a body of knowledge. This proved controversial.
He also questioned what constitutes the function of language (the so-called ‘mother tongue’) regarding education and the learning process. What followed contained the very essence of Britton’s project. He quotes Edward Sapir:
It is best to admit that language is primarily a vocal actualisation of the tendency to see reality symbolically – an articulation in terms of vocal expression of the tendency to master reality not by direct and ad hoc handling of this element [reality] but by the reduction of experience to familiar form.
‘Through language,’ Britton insisted, ‘we learn to operate effectively by representing the world (including the self) to ourselves symbolically. Thereafter—we may operate in the real world via this representation; and we may operate on the representation itself.’
He went on to make a seminal distinction between what he called participant and spectator roles. He suggested that we learn from ‘experience’—not as a meaningless flux of raw sense impressions, but rather as it is shaped. Language, he insists—our own and other people’s—is the primary means of shaping experience. And learning, he says, lies in its actual operation. We learn to write by writing for real purposes.
In summary,
Britton’s hand-written notes reveal the sketchiness of his remarks on literature. He simply jots down single words: ‘historical? critical?’ A distinction he made between cumulative experience and the linear nature of growth is left undeveloped. And, by the way, this is where he introduces the word ‘growth’.
Finally, he says, with an air of resignation, ‘We have to face the possibility that this is as far as we can go.’
Britton’s former colleague and friend, Tony Burgess, looks back:
In the debates of the 1970s, Britton’s work was incorrectly supposed by some to have elevated language above literature and to have set aside questions about ‘value’. This was not the case. What concerned him was the neglect of ‘processes’ and ‘development’ within a view of literature allied to a specific critical tradition.
The alternative argument was itself incomplete, still sketchy in its formulation and happier with philosophical and psychological issues than social ones. The argument looked back to Suzanne Langer and Ernst Cassirer, and to an account of the role of literature within human symbolizing. (Burgess 1993)
Britton’s critics claimed that he ‘insinuated’ a higher educational value for children’s talk and writing than for their reading ‘real literature’ (Whitehead 1975). Burgess insisted (because he appreciated the philosophical depth and refinement of Britton’s argument) that he had forged a coherent synthesis that viewed reading, writing and talking as aspects of the same process. (However, Burgess conceded that the synthesis required further development.) And here is an instance of the importance of archives generally. Where there is disagreement, drill down. Archives constitute the ‘geological strata’ of evidence—they make up the primary and secondary sources for continuing interpretation.
Britton explored writings from outside the Anglo tradition—Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), Alexandre Luria (1902-1967), Jean Piaget (1896-1980), Ernst Cassirer (1874 -1945), Susanne Langer (1895-1985), Edward Sapir (1894-1939), Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), and Jerome Bruner (1915-2016). He continually crossed and re-crossed disciplinary boundaries: philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics and literary criticism. These thinkers (especially Langer, Cassirer and Vygotsky) helped him to conclude that symbolic activity (of which language is the central function) is the principle means by which we produce ourselves as human beings. On this view, symbolization is a universal, constitutive human function.
But I do not wish to mislead. Britton was not especially concerned with the history of these developments. He was not, as far as I am aware, eager to establish prestigious forebears.
What, I think, appealed to him so powerfully, and this emerges in the rescued personal notes—‘Hanover, Dartmouth, 1966—was the sense that certain ideas about the role of language in human development—‘the tendency to see realities symbolically’—could be profitably employed to forge a coherent synthesis that might provide a powerful rationale for the teaching of English. Britton’s contribution at Dartmouth 66 held far-reaching implications for the way that the domain of English studies was thought about and discussed in the context of education reforms and research over three decades.
References
Burgess T. ‘Returning History: Literacy, Difference and English Teaching in the Post-War Period’ in The Insistence of the Letter: Literacy Studies and Curriculum Theorizing edited by Bill Green London: Falmer Press 1993 107-119.
Whitehead F. ‘The present state of English teaching,’ Use of English, 1975 Volume 28, Issue 1 11-17, 1975.