Interviews conducted by Annette Vee over email.
AV: How were you invited to join the Seminar, and why did you decide to participate?
JD: My invitation. As an elected member of NATE Executive, (newly formed in 1964) I was known for two things: a) a pioneering course, ‘Reflections’, published in 1963 by OUP, produced by my English dept. at Walworth Comprehensive School (in Inner-city London) – with literary extracts, documentary material and media references, photographs and artists drawings; and b) writing up NATE’s recent survey of new 16+ exams and courses. My name was second string to Stuart Hall’s, but he was engrossed in setting up the new Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies with Richard Hoggart (who also couldn’t come.)
As the intended reporter, I decided not to contribute in the formal sessions.
AV: Can you tell us about the delegates for the conference? Who was there that you remember, or how were they invited to be there? What role did the consultants play?
JD: Delegates. The British delegates were proposed by a sub-committee, which included Frank Whitehead (NATE chair), Deny Thompson (Editor, Use of English) and Douglas Barnes (Exec member, Head of English, a London Grammar School) and maybe others. I remember that a group of us on the Exec. had to insist that Connie Rosen (a Primary teacher, and another woman!) should be included.
AV: What do you remember about the women delegates and consultants? Were there any non-white delegates or consultants that you know of? Non-native English speakers?
JD: Reps. There were no non-white reps (because Stuart [Hall] couldn’t come) and few – though very distinguished – women.
AV: To what extent is it true that some American delegates were surprised by the numbers of High School (secondary) school teachers among the British delegates?
JD: School teachers. In the UK, teacher education had recently expanded, so several of us had recently moved from pioneering comprehensives to Colleges of Education etc.
UK delegation. Surprisingly, a majority had been in contact with or taught by FR Leavis at Cambridge; several of the others had contacts with the London Institute of Education and Jimmy Britton (widely read in Language and Psychology).
AV: What notable interactions or incidents do you remember from the Seminar? What significant points of difference stood out between the American and the British participants?
JD: Turning points. a) In the first week, Britton persuaded us to consider not “What is English?” but ‘What at our best are we doing in English?” – a pragmatic approach, favouring classroom experience. b) In reviewing Models of development, Frank Whitehead demonstrated that only a developmental model stood up to critical scrutiny (but his paper was not published, despite expectations). c) In the Response to Literature SG, Denys Harding (social psychologist) was extremely influential on all members (US and UK), so his very broad – and rather revolutionary - proposals about both Literature and Response carried the group. d) Jim Moffett’s radical proposals on Levels of Abstraction were not adequately discussed, and were published independently, alas. e) The assembled linguists agreed not to recommend teaching of grammar until 17-19, but did not – I think – offer a rationale. A mistake.
In other words, in framing the Dartmouth discussions several of the UK seemed to offer more compelling positions, and the innovating US positions (Moffett and Olson) were not developed adequately, in my view.
AV: What role has the Dartmouth Seminar played in your scholarly formation?
JD: Effects on Scholarly formation. As it happened, in the following decade I became a spokesperson for the Dartmouth model and practices – quite unexpectedly - in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and N Ireland and Scotland (with their independent systems). In England meanwhile, my friends and I were roaming on, partly in investigations of writing development, partly in analyses of small group discussion, partly (with Dr Irene Farmer at Bretton) in an honours course on Language & Communication. By the 1980s I’d come across the Bakhtin Circle and especially Volosinov (1974) in translation. So since the 1990s I’ve been exploring a Dialogue model, and revising elements of the earlier Developmental model accordingly. This has led me (and others) to see writing and reading as essentially dialogic, and also to introduce new elements into the modelling of dialogues. Thus a strong critique of current practices, especially in tests and exams.
JD: I’ve been thinking over the question about race. It would be easy for this generation of researchers - many of them still suffering from prejudice perhaps - to mis-read the UK position in the mid-Sixties.
The main groups of immigrants then were blacks from the Caribbean recruited to help run London transport (the Windrush generation) , and Pakistanis (mostly villagers) recruited by northern textile towns like Bradford to run first the night shifts in the mills then day shifts too.
Thus in central London the first black boy, Richard, came to my school in 1962-3 and joined my class. One in a thousand, that is.
After Dartmouth (around 1968 perhaps) I arranged to meet the leaders of the Sikh community in Bradford, all of them ex-teachers from a high school in the Punjab (they were effectively political refugees). They were quite exceptional at the time and already thinking about the effects on the next generation, I remember: we organised a visit by local teachers on a Yorkshire summer course.
Stuart Hall, a black from the Caribbean who I knew quite well at the time, was different: he’d come to Oxford on a scholarship - a very rare opportunity.
So the chances of a teacher from those communities being active in the UK were very small in the early sixties. Like many of us in the inner-city, they had plenty of other things to deal with.
Later, I can testify that racism was still prevalent among groups in London in the 1980s, when my late wife was persuaded by a multi-ethnic group to be their secretary: they were all nominated by Labour branches in Camden to formulate an anti-racist policy for the borough, and did so with some success - mainly through quotas being laid down for Labour committees and councillors (the majority party).
But as you can imagine, that isn’t the end of the story in the UK. Still, my friend, Joan Goody, led a NATE committee from the 1970s, among other things organising Caribbean poets to speak in schools and conferences. (The first school anthology to include their work, ’This Day and Age’ (1962 or 63) was edited by a friend, a college lecturer who used our school for teaching practice.)
I hope this will help researchers today to get a historical perspective on the world-wide suffering and tensions we are now facing. But we could have done more, I’m sure.
AV: Olson mentioned that Kitzhaber was quite sensitive to the tenor of the conference, “couldn’t take a punch.” Olson wrote a letter about halfway through, asking for a gentler tone in the deliberations, perhaps Frank Whitehead in particular. He delivered the letter to Hardy or Robson (he couldn’t remember which, but a friendlier representative from the British side) to mediate. He said that he couldn’t attribute it to the letter and didn’t know what happened in that mediation, but perhaps the tone was a little improved later in the conference. Olson said though that Kitzhaber left halfway through, frustrated. Do you recall if he left the conference early? Given how instrumental he was in the organizing, that’s very interesting.
JD: Four or five things to cover. First Al Kitzhaber. Yes, there was a rather shocking attack on his massive Program in the main forum, by David Holbrook, not the most tactful of people at best! - according to David it was all a betrayal of literary values etc. Jim Squire had to rescue Al as he started to pack his bags and explain that DH was liable to sound off like that. Maybe Frank Whitehead chimed in too and disowned the diatribe?
AV: In our interview, Paul Olson alluded to Basil Bernstein as the “bête noir” of the conference, and while he didn’t agree with him, felt bad for him, wondered if any of the treatment was even antisemitic. He mentioned that he had heard something about Bernstein attempting suicide at the conference. John H thought that mention might be connected instead to an incident where Bernstein clashed with Ford, and cut himself badly on a broken glass. Do you have any recollection of this incident, or anything to add?
JD: Basil B did come in for some flack, it’s true. People on the Left like me regarded his notion of ‘restricted code’ as just another way of putting down working class speakers. There were plenty of prominent left-wing Jews in our politics at the time - I remember going over to Manchester to speak for one, Koni Zilliacus MP - so I doubt modern anti-semitism was involved at Dartmouth, though who knows elsewhere? Anyway I later found that Basil had made an elementary logical mistake about his so-called ‘codes’, and of course Harold Rosen wrote a booklet against him. But he had academic power by then and in my view kept promoting an older version of sociological enquiry over here, which really got in the way.
AV: The biggest question I have right now is about the women present at Dartmouth, or not there. Paul Olson, whom I was able to talk to this summer, said that they were mostly silent in the conversations. Except for Connie Rosen, whom he admired greatly—brilliant, gentle, he said. And to a lesser degree, Miriam Wilt, an American who was a powerhouse in elementary education, did contribute. I’d read elsewhere that Barbara Hardy was notably assertive for a woman at the time, but he didn’t mention her in that context. If you have any insight on the participation or particular contributions of the women at Dartmouth, or the terms of their invitations, I would welcome your thoughts! By my records, the participants were: Connie Rosen, Barbara Hardy, Barbara Strang (on the British side) and the Americans were Miriam Wilt and Bernice Christensen. Nancy Martin (UK) and Ann Berthoff (US) were not present, though they maybe should have been invited…
JD: Barbara Hardy was in the powerful Response to Literature group, and you’ll be pleased to hear made some lasting points about narrative (in life). She also had a fascinating theory of Lyric, which she later told NATE conference about. Nancy was one of several close friends - like Les Stratta, in my case - who didn’t get selected because Jimmy (and I) already were going: and maybe the Cambridge tendency was stronger in NATE's early days?
As for the other women you mention, my guess is that your generation can’t easily imagine how taken for granted they could be at the time. Women’s liberation emerged here around 1969, and still didn’t feel combative - they didn’t even get women’s courses in universities till the late 1970s I seem to remember Cora Kaplan saying. And there were all those men at Dartmouth - even Connie had to talk to us outside the sessions, which she did. (The conflict in the Exec was probably just about who didn’t go, if she went?)
I wonder why Louise Rosenblatt was missing from the US delegation? - she was a stronger theoretician than many of the men, of course: I did admire her when we met later. But there were others, I’m sure. That’s 1966…
Still plenty to struggle for...
[on Wayne O'Neil]
JD: Did I tell you already that the Harvard Educational Review (HER) asked me to do a piece about Dartmouth and published it along with a serious challenge from Wayne O’Neil? [NB: These pieces are included in the bibliography for this exhibit.] He took me to task for not being scientific enough. (Wayne was the only linguistics expert to be a follower of Chomsky and I think he produced the Language bit of the Oregon Tripod for Al Kitzhaber’s project.) He probably felt a bit left out from the study group on language in any case. HER much later asked in a friendly way to republish my article in a collection.
Wayne was the only member to appear in jeans, I seem to recall, but we didn’t know then that he claimed descent from an Aboriginal American tribe. He and I did meet much later at the Squires - without any animosity, If I remember right. (That was Jim’s way!)
[on Louise Rosenblatt, who had the scholar profile to be one of the delegates, but wasn't]
JD: About Louise Rosenblatt: I didn’t even meet her till Steve Tchudi’s conference much later, when social and political issues came to the fore. I remember she and my friend Harold Rosen took a speaker to task for under-estimating his audience!
When I went on to read her “The Reader, the Text, and the Poem’ I admired the way she had disentangled so clearly things literary people often mix up. So when they came to London, she and her partner, Henry, called to see us, and it turned out Henry like my late wife was a classicist (in his earlier days) and enjoyed hearing Mollie’s recent work. It was a memorable visit!
Jim Squire put me on to her pre-War book on Response, a vaguer memory now, but it may explain why her branch of literary theory felt out of fashion in 1966. Also I seem to remember that Henry had been close to John Dewey, also out of fashion in the States, though I had probably met Dewey's work through my tutor at the Institute, Frank Whitehead?
My guess is that among those older historical philologists at Dartmouth, Wayne had been made to feel uncomfortable with his Chomskyan convictions; maybe? Whatever the case, developmental processes would be the last thing his theoretical background could accommodate, I guess. (Not that the others had much to offer at the time.). But don’t get me onto Linguistics and assumptions - about which I’ve just been sending out a cheerful letter to friends.