Rhetorics of Meaning; or, Renovating the Subject of English Teaching

Rhetorics of Meaning; or, Renovating the Subject of English Teaching?#

BILL GREEN

What possibilities for curriculum and social praxis exist in rethinking English teaching as ideology? In this chapter I seek to engage this question by focussing on the question of meaning, and in particular the role and significance of what I want to call rhetorics of meaning in English teaching. Within this, I am especially concerned with a critical re-assessment of the so-called ‘New English’, on the grounds that for me there are still possibilities, albeit largely unrealised, in a curriculum discourse that emphasises process, agency, experience, meaning and difference, however problematic each and all of these categories may now be (Green, 1995a, 1995b). Understanding English teaching as ideology, moreover, needs to be undertaken in full cognisance of recent theoretical developments and debates, in terms of which the very category of ideology has been subjected to extensive critique and review (Hoy, 1994; Larrain, 1994), and also, in particular, of what I have elsewhere called the ‘modernism-postmodernism’ debate (Green, 1993). I reserve for another occasion an examination of ideology as such. Here it must suffice to say that I understand ideology as a contradictory discursive-historical resource for social praxis and meaning, and therefore as having an important productive dimension. Along with the concept of power, meaning is a critical organising concept for contemporary English curriculum debates. Indeed the two concepts are closely associated, within an emergent view of schooling, literacy and English teaching as necessarily and inescapably social practices. In such a view, meaning and power come together in what must now be formulated as a postmodernised, ‘post-critical’ understanding of discourse and ideology. This remains, however, a complex and contentious matter, especially since the very compatibility of these latter notions has been sharply questioned. What is urgently needed now, in this context, are careful, informed, critical-reconceptualist accounts of power and meaning, drawing upon various theoretical resources, not least of which are the # Published in: Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 7-30.

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poststructuralist insights and arguments associated with Foucault and Derrida1. Of particular interest here is the relationship between rhetoric and ideology. As Berlin (1988) has argued, rhetoric must be seen as contextualized within, as well as an enactment and embodiment of, ideology, and hence not as standing outside it and dissociated from it: ‘instead of rhetoric acting as the transcendental recorder or arbiter of competing ideological claims, rhetoric is regarded as always already ideological’. Consequently, the proper consideration of any rhetoric needs to examine ‘the ways its very discursive structure can be read so as to favour one version of economic, social and political arrangements over other versions’ (Berlin, 1988, p. 477). Hence the nature and availability of different rhetorics of meaning become matters of compelling political, as much as pedagogic, interest. That is precisely my concern in this chapter. My starting-point is the position to be broadly identified with rather unsatisfactory formulations such as the ‘New English’, the ‘New Literacy’ and ‘Whole Language’ English teaching, referring to what is still appropriately described as the leading-edge in post-Dartmouth developments in English teaching (Willinsky, 1990; Watson et al., 1994; Green, 1995b, 1995c). I then seek to relate this to various challenges emerging over the course of the last decade and a half, in particular concentrating on those associated with critical linguistics, social semiotics and (post)structuralism. The account I provide here is informed by the view that curriculum history is an important—albeit all too often overlooked or slighted—resource for curriculum theory and practice, and yet I am not convinced that, in this case, the lessons of history have indeed been learnt, or acknowledged and properly appreciated in their always complex, contradictory value. At issue here is the possibility and problematic of renewal, of remaining within a particular discourse in and of ‘English’ as a distinctive school-subject, while seeking to change it; of renovating the subject—literally, re novum, of making anew or perhaps simply like new, or more intriguingly, of opening up the subject to the project of the new (Green 1995a). Whether or not renewal or reconstruction is possible or desirable remains of course a moot point, and an increasingly contested one (e.g. Morgan 1993). My

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own feeling is that the institution remains obdurately resistant and indeed productive, for now and the immediate future at least, and might well accordingly be assailed and transformed from ‘within’ as ‘without’, to good effect. One lesson of curriculum history is that existing structures and formations exert considerable pressure on the imagination of educational change, and that is certainly the case, I suggest, for English teaching as the current-traditional cornerstone of mainstream Anglophone schooling.

[I]

It is commonplace now to observe that textbooks represent the codification and consolidation of paradigms and knowledges. The following is taken from one such textbook, originally published in 1981, and slightly revised for reprinting in 19872:

meaning-making is what English teaching is all about. As readers, children learn to join with a writer in a collaborative making of meaning; as speakers and writers, they struggle to discover and articulate meaning. In language study, they explore the ways in which language conveys—or obscures—meaning, examining the doublespeak of politicians and the blandishments of advertisements. By ‘exploring their common universe’, with their teacher as guide, they grow towards mastery of their language, and they grow also in understanding of themselves and of their world. (Watson 1987 [1981], p. 165)

For me, this is a particularly succinct and emblematic statement of the distinctive ethos informing what I have called here, with due trepidation, the ‘New English’. Although the textbook itself was originally written in the context of the late 1970s, it makes for particularly interesting reading in the present educational climate. Indeed, while there is force and timeliness in such an assertion, there is also a certain pathos. This is particularly so when one considers the general movement in English-speaking countries towards a new social logic based on principles of performativity, accountability, efficiency and control, the consequent forms of curriculum change and educational restructuring, and the new formations and intensities of postmodern culture.

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There is, too, a strong sense of hindsight in Watson’s formulation. The notion that ‘meaning-making is what English teaching is all about’, expressed in this manner, is implicit in the textbook in question, which effectively articulates its underlying thesis. Yet there is also, I suggest, a sense of something like relief in such a neat summary-statement, in all its banality. It can be taken now as a last gasping attempt to secure the identity and purpose of English teaching, in the midst of all the conflict, lack of consensus, and general flux that has characterized the discourse on English teaching not only in recent times but also in its social history more generally. An attempt, that is, to have ‘the last word’, literally as well as rhetorically, and so foreclose on the possibility of further discussion and debate, the play of the text and the proliferation of meanings. Hence, there is much that is symptomatic in such a formulation, as in the following: ‘The most urgent task facing English teachers today is to restore meaning to its central place in the classroom’ (Watson 1987 [1981] p. 165, my emphasis). It is not hard to find confirmation of this position in key documents of the New English, as post-Dartmouth developments and discourses in English teaching are all too commonly referred to. For instance, a characteristic and influential statement of the 1970s, referring specifically to the Australian situation, is provided in Little (1977). He emphasized the necessary linkage of ‘meaning’ and maturation’ in and for English curriculum, observing that:

My personal interpretation of current knowledge about language and the curriculum is that the key may prove to be maturation or development of ability to mean. The forms of language are seen, on such a model, as subservient to meaning, and meaning is seen as subservient to the person’s background and general development. (Little, 1977 p. 142)

Further, having emphasized ‘wholes’ over ‘parts’, the superordinate significance of ‘the total meaning’ over ‘the “elements”’ in determining ‘the pattern’, he went on to assert:

The basic skill, and the highest skill, is meaning, as an active verb. And until meaning is fully attended to in the context of human maturation, there will be no improvements in curriculum; only confusion and tinkering. (Little 1977, p. 144)


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A decade on, Barnes (1987) made the following assertion, in reviewing a publication by Boomer (1985):

At the centre is [a] vision of learning as ‘making meaning’. Borrowed from linguistics as a way of thinking about talking and writing, the idea of making meaning expands through the book until it becomes a metaphor for all true education. (Barnes 1987, p. 79)

A position Barnes clearly endorses, it can be argued that it is certainly central to the educational project of the New English. Perhaps it can be summarized best in the phrase ‘a curriculum of meaning’, which Boomer (1981) has appropriated in the service of a similar endorsement. More recently still, Sawyer and Watson (1987), in what has been construed as a paradigmatic defence of New English principles and the ideology of educational progressivism, have argued strongly for the primacy of meaning in curriculum discussion3. Setting themselves in sharp opposition to recent linguistic initiatives in writing pedagogy which propose the foregrounding of generic considerations, they refuse what they see as the formalism and structuralism of such initiatives and refer to ‘the essential emphasis on meaning’, which they see as a major advance in recent English curriculum theory and related pedagogies: ‘The whole thrust of language education in recent years has been to put meaning at the centre of learning in all language modes’ (Sawyer and Watson 1987, p. 50). On the North American side of things, post-Dartmouth, a similar concern for and understanding of meaning is evident, along with an attendant rhetoric of ‘meaning-making’. Describing what he called ‘a remarkable consensus’ among the assembly of English teachers and educators he was reporting on, Elbow (1990, p. 18) stresses the relationship between language and learning, as at once active and reflexive, involving ‘the making of meaning and the reflecting back on this process of meaning-making’, activity which is ‘deeply social’. The ‘consensus’ that he refers to, across elementary, secondary and college sectors of English teaching, was organised around the following position:

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[W]e see the same constructive and social activity as the central process at all levels of the profession of English. Inherent in this overarching emphasis on making meaning is the principle of getting the learner to be active, not passive: learning as hypothesis making, world building, experiential—and active, especially in the process of questioning and reflecting back on what one has been doing. (Elbow 1990, pp. 18-19)

Writers such as Willinsky (1990) and Mayher (1990) similarly adopt a social-constructivist stance, drawing on critical theory and poststructuralism to bolster and inform their accounts of a ‘new literacy’ and a ‘new pedagogy’, expressly identified with the post-Dartmouth discourse on English teaching. In Morgan’s (1993, p. 30) succinct summary: ‘Any account of English as an ensemble of techniques for constituting a textual economy in relation to other regions of the social formation ... has to reckon with [a] concept central to the discipline: the focus on meaning’. These statements have been marshalled here to indicate the significance of what I want to call the rhetoric of meaning in contemporary English curriculum discussion. Clearly, the category of ‘meaning’ is central to understanding and practising English teaching, within the terms of its dominant-hegemonic expression over the period extending from the mid-1960s through the 1970s, and still clearly in evidence today (Mayher 1990; Griffith 1992)4. This has been an important development and, in many ways, a strategic gain in English curriculum. But I believe also that, to date, there has been a tendency to accept what I have described as a rhetoric rather uncritically and perhaps even naively. On its own self-understanding, the New English is characterized by a particular—and selective—view of ‘meaning’, and an emphasis on curriculum as ‘the making of meaning’. This certainly needs to be better understood, expressly in curriculum-theoretical terms. But it is important, all the same, not to accept this self-understanding at face-value, or uncritically, because to do so would be to overlook the political and ideological dimensions of the discourse of the New English, its partiality as the counterpart to its persuasiveness, its blindnesses as the necessary complement to its insights; in short, its character as ideological discourse.


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In what follows, my concern is to highlight and examine what I want to present as available rhetorics of meaning—that is, particular and distinct ways of talking about meaning, of deploying the concept ‘meaning’ in the service of certain interests and within a certain range of effects. My focus is the present significance of different rhetorics of meaning, with specific reference to English teaching. As I have already suggested, English teaching in the post-Dartmouth era is associated with one such rhetoric. Clearly, however, this needs to be seen within the terms of, and with direct reference to, a larger rhetoric, within what has been described as the dominant discursive practice of Western culture. As well, attention needs to be given to the specific realization of this practice in capitalism, and within this, to modernism as a dominant cultural logic since the seventeenth century.

[II]

Ball (1985, 1987) has argued that what he describes as the ‘English-as-Language’ paradigm has been clearly in the ascendancy in the post-Dartmouth period, and it is important to recognize, as fundamental to the rhetoric of meaning and meaning-making, the role and significance of language. This has been understood, however, in a particular way, which has become increasingly evident in the course of time as limited and constraining, and ultimately as unproductive. For Dixon (1975 [1967]), outlining what has come to be known as a ‘Growth Model’ perspective in English teaching, the emphasis is on language in the context of ‘personal growth’, and hence the curriculum matrix of language, meaning and development. Little’s (1977) formulation, already cited, clearly articulates what this involves, in a characteristic metaphysics of developmentalism and individualism. Gilbert (1989, p. 5) describes the New English as an ‘increasingly speech-oriented and personalist discourse on language and learning for the English curriculum’. In a similarly critical vein, albeit more sympathetic to the work in question, Burgess and Hardcastle (1991, p. 10) point to the persistence in mainstream English teaching of a focus on ‘language and learning ... presented solely in universalist and individualist terms’. Donald (1989, p. 20) notes the new emphasis on ‘linguistic and cultural diversity’ and

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points to two emergent approaches to English, one which he identifies as ‘the progressive strand’ and the other ‘more radical strand’; in both cases, however, there is an ‘expressivist’ understanding of language and culture5. For Griffith (1988, p. 203), what is notable about what he calls ‘the liberal approach to the teaching of English’, organized as it is on the notion of ‘personal growth’, is its atomistic individualism linked to a ‘process-developmental’ view of learning ‘in which the social dimension is often weak and occasionally negligible’. More recently, Rothery (1989) writes of the New English that, although certainly informed and influenced by work in socio-linguistics, it nonetheless emphasised the personal and psychological dimensions of language usage and meaning-making, while effectively occluding the nature and materiality of language per se. Post-Dartmouth, language education was characteristically conceived in terms of a predominantly British model, identified with the work of educators such as Britton, Dixon, Rosen and Barnes, among others:

From their educational stance the insights of linguistic research pointed to language development as a means for personal growth and development. Although many of the insights embraced came from a sociocultural perspective of language, that language was learned through use and in interaction with adult caretakers, the overriding educational perspective was one of the role of language in the life of the individual and, in particular, the inner life of the person.

As she goes on: Such a focus was more in keeping with the romantic literary tradition regarding the nature of childhood and the development of personality. In a sense this focus was not surprising as the teaching of literature was preeminent in the English curriculum. As a consequence the school focus on language development that emerged from the Dartmouth conference was strongly psychologically and individually oriented. (Rothery 1989, p. 203)


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For Christie (1993, p. 77), ‘the “growth model” that emerged actually promised more than it could ever really deliver, in terms of an improved pedagogy for the teaching of English’. She sees ‘broadly, two reasons for this’:

First, the ‘growth model’ had an essentially romantic notion of the individual, conceived in some idealized sense as ‘growing’ while developing personally important meanings, and it failed to acknowledge the social nature of human existence. Second, and for related reasons, in that the model focused primarily on persons constructing their ‘own’ meanings in an idealized way, its effect was to deflect attention from the nature of language itself. (Christie 1993, p. 77)

Such criticisms are echoed by commentators such as Medway (1990), Willinsky (1990), Gilbert (1989) and Patterson (1992), from varying theoretical standpoints and with varying degrees of sympathy. Brock (1993) rightly points to the influence of Moffett’s work, which can be described as a distinctive amalgam of constructivist psychology, educational progressivism, and American pragmatism, and Mayher (1990) similarly traces the North American traditions and influences that entered into the post-Dartmouth English curriculum synthesis. However, as Willinsky (1990, p. 23) puts it, most appositely: ‘The New Literacy is set upon sketchy theories of meaning and self which need to meet current thinking about the nature of subjectivity that arises within language’. What these commentaries suggest is that, despite the significant advances of the New English, it has been significantly flawed in its classical phase, and arguably remains at least compromised as a consequence, principally because of its enduring commitment to a personalist ideology and an insistent logocentricism. For Gilbert (1989), and other such critics (e.g. Patterson 1992, 1993), there has been little significant movement beyond this position. My argument is, however, that there has been such a move, in some quarters at least, although it may be that these innovations and renovations remain as yet largely and perhaps too much ‘in the practical state’. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to elaborate on and substantiate this assertion, it is pertinent here to consider something of how the matter is to be understood.

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What is notable about the view of meaning presented so far is that it rests upon the assertion of a relatively unfettered individual agency, conceived in liberal humanist terms as ‘a unified, rational, self-determining consciousness’ (Giroux 1990, p. 24). Little (1977, p. 144), for instance, refers to ‘meaning, as an active verb’—meaning, that is, as human action, understood in a generalized but still individualist way (one ‘means’, as one ‘acts’...). Moreover, ‘meaning is seen as subservient to the person’s background and general development’ (Little 1977, p. 141, my emphasis). Meaning is grounded in ‘the person’, in his or her individual actions and intentions, within a socio-historical context which operates as a ‘frame’ and little more. For Britton, meaning is firstly a matter of substitution and representation6 (‘meaning has to do with some one thing standing in for another’), and then linked directly to ‘understanding’: ‘meaning is associated with a substitute used for the purpose of understanding and not for any other kind of performance’ (Britton 1982, p. 112). This needs to be seen in relation to his view of learning and meaning, as quintessentially intentional-expressive forms of activity: ‘Learning in the school of experience is the pursuit of curiosity; that means growth from an individual centre on an individual, unified pattern’ (Britton 1982, p. 158). This view of learning and meaning is a particularly insistent feature of the New English; there is a firm and enduring commitment to the notion that ‘children can make meanings’ (Barnes 1987 p. 79), that at the centre of curriculum is the solitary figure of the learner, learning; that is, transforming information into personalized, ‘internally persuasive’ understandings (Rosen, 1986)7. A key statement in this view of curriculum and learning is provided in the Bullock Report:

It is a confusion of everyday thought that we tend to regard ‘knowledge’ as something which exists independently of someone who knows. ‘What is known’ must in fact be brought to life afresh with every ‘knower’, by his [sic] own efforts. To bring knowledge into being is a formulating process, and language is its ordinary means, whether in speaking or writing, or the inner monologue of thought. (Bullock 1975, p. 50)


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In this view, ‘knowledge’ is that which makes sense and matters to the learner, as it becomes ‘meaningful’, by dint of his or her effort, engagement and capacity. ‘Knowledge’, understood via Polanyi (1958) as by definition ‘personal knowledge’, is ‘[brought] into being’, is ‘formulated’ given ‘form’ and ‘expression’, that is, literally ‘expressed’ as such. The linking of ‘form’ and ‘expression’ is significant. Gilbert (1989, p. 10) refers critically to ‘the elevation of pro-speech, pro-expressionist and pro-personal discourse on language’ in the New English, while Scruton (1987), in a sharp critique directly informed by the political project of the New Right, describes educational developments associated with ‘the “cultural revolution” of the sixties’, with which the New English is characteristically identified, as ‘expressionist education’, which he sees as committed to what clearly is for him the unacceptable notion of ‘expressionist egalitarianism’ (Scruton 1987, p. 42). ‘Expression’, therefore, must be understood as a keyword in the discourse of the New English, and it is important to tease out its full implications and complexities. Here, simply linking the notions of ‘form’ and ‘expression’, as problematical terms, is sufficient for my immediate purpose, which is to indicate the difficulties associated with the primary notion of meaning, as it is characteristically employed in the New English. A similar and extremely influential position is outlined in Barnes (1976). He distinguishes between transmission and interpretation orientations in curriculum, which he presents as ‘two contrasting views of the part played by the learner and teacher in classroom communication’ (Barnes 1976, p. 142). At issue here are differing versions of the nature of, and relations among, pedagogic authority, school knowledge and student learning. For ‘transmission’ forms of curriculum and pedagogy, the figure of the teacher is a dominant consideration; as authoritative mediator of culture and tradition, s/he represents the authority and priority of the ‘outside’, which acts upon and enters into the social practice of learning, seeking to replicate and replenish itself. In contrast, working with a quite different epistemological and political agenda, ‘interpretation’ forms of curriculum and pedagogy emphasise the prior significance of learning and the learner, and the active engagement between learner and environment, in the spirit of invention, production,

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creativity and renewal. As expressed in the quote from the Bullock Report, cited previously, learning involves making knowledge ‘afresh’, each and every time; ‘knowledge’ is inseparable from ‘one who knows’; meaning is first and foremost a matter of predication, and hence firmly grounded in the reassurance of presence, or subjectivity’s being-present. What is important to note in this context is that the New English needs to be recognized, at least in its classical phase, as a paradigmatic expression of interpretation pedagogy8. Kantor (1983) provides a particularly useful perspective on post-1960s developments in English teaching; locating them more specifically in the context of English curriculum development in the United States, he refers to ‘the student-centred model’ which he presents as an alternative to ‘Project English: the content-centred model’, in particular associating the former with the work of James Moffett (1968). This is explicitly linked, via the Dartmouth Conference of 1966, with the “‘personal growth” model, based on principles of language in operation and creative expression’ (Kantor 1983, p. 176). Kantor goes on to outline what he describes as ‘a model of curriculum theorising’ based on ‘the creative processes of language development themselves’ (Kantor 1983, p. 179); that is, ‘curriculum from inside out’ (Kantor 1983, p. 178). Bringing together the theoretical work of Britton (1970) and Moffett, he poses a view of English curriculum as:

an inside-out process, beginning with the resources of the self, then diverging outward toward knowledge of the world and awareness of audiences beyond the self. At the same time, the developing [learner] continues to spiral back into expressive language, using it to refine meanings and invest [learning] with personal voice. (Kantor 1983, p. 179)

In a more recent account of the position in question, similarly with reference to English teaching and language education in the United States, Mayher (1989, 1990) contrasts the ‘outside-in’ perspective of what he describes as ‘educational commonsense’ with ‘the progressive position in language education’, which he associates with the notion of ‘uncommon sense’ (Mayher 1989, p. 1). This position is still clearly constructivist and ‘learner-’ or ‘student-centred’, in a manner consistent with Kantor’s view, but has


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understandably moved towards a more complex formulation of this position. It is neatly summarized in the following way:

Everywhere I look these days, I see common themes: humans as meaning-makers in a social context; interpretation as a constructive and reconstructive activity; mind in society; relevance theory; transactions (reader/text, writer/text, viewer/film); whole language education; both inside-out and outside-in in learning; apprenticeship as a model for teaching and learning; critical literacy for a democracy; the language of possibility; transformative intellectuals; reflective practitioners. (Mayher 1990, pp. 2-3)9

This general view is similarly evidenced in Elbow’s (1990) account of the English Coalition, in what he acknowledged to be a difficult and possibly intractable problem for post-Dartmouth English teaching, arising from the tensions associated with the ‘freedom and agency versus constraint’ debate. As he put it, noting various criticisms in this regard: ‘I sensed that there was more emphasis at the conference on the student as an active learner who constructs knowledge’ (Elbow 1990, p. 19)10. What needs to be recognised here is that ‘meaning’ is similarly understood in such a formulation in primarily ‘inside-out’ terms, and hence as first and foremost an expression of ‘the inner self’. In such a view, there is a fundamental link between ‘meaning’ and ‘subjectivity’, with the former conceived as an intrinsic, articulatable property of the subject and the latter understood as a self-possessing plenitude, an organising, authorising and foundational presence.

[III]

Directly linked to the problematic relationship between meaning and subjectivity in the New English is the question of language; in particular, the question of how language is implicated in this relationship, and the way in which language itself is understood and realised in post-Dartmouth curriculum discourse. It has already been noted that, since the 1960s, there has been a concerted attempt to locate ‘language’ at the centre of English curriculum, rather than

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‘literature’, as had been the case at least since the 1920s. That this has been a largely successful move, at least at the level of research and policy, is indicated in various references to ‘a new orthodoxy’ (e.g. Medway 1990; Patterson 1992), perceived as arising out of the combined work of the London Institute of Education and the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE), which Ball (1985, 1987) refers to as ‘the London School’. What is clear, however, is that, rather than a singular, monolithic phenomenon about which there is a natural consensus, ‘language’ can be theorised in different ways, with various consequences. What is meant by the term ‘language’ can differ, that is, according to the discourse or discursive context within which it occurs. Hence, there is a growing recognition that language can be seen in quite different ways, with marked consequences for classroom and research practice and generally for curriculum discussion (Harste et al. 1984; Phillips & Walker 1987; Morgan 1987). The view that still dominates the field, in practice at least, rests upon a correspondence and transparency theory of language. Language in this view is essentially a transparent, self-effacing medium, a means of more or less neutral exchange between the individual psyche and the world as a natural referent, in a one-to-one correspondence between the order of words and the order of things—‘an innocent medium through which pre-linguistic meanings pass’ (Morgan 1987, p. 450). As Belsey (1980, p. 44) puts it, language perceived in this way, within the terms of commonsense, is ‘a neutral nomenclature functioning as an instrument of communication of meanings which exist independently of it’. There are several points to consider here, and in elaborating them it is appropriate to refer back to the statements on meaning and meaning-making previously drawn from the public rhetoric of the New English. Central to this rhetoric is a particular view of language and meaning, and as has already been indicated, a view which is fundamentally contradictory. On the one hand, language is actively foregrounded; on the other, it effectively disappears altogether. This is only ostensibly a paradox, however, which becomes clear when it is recognised as a version of language, and hence a certain ideological and metaphysical framework for thinking about language. It is this that is at issue in mainstream accounts of English teaching,


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then, and not language per se; as Morgan expresses it, a ‘dream’ of language, in which the emphasis is on ‘the origins and essences beyond language’ (Morgan 1987, p. 455). In effect, therefore, this view of language—which he describes in terms of expressive realism—represents the refusal of language as such. It involves two distinct but, as he argues, related orientations: one turned towards the world, which he identifies as ‘empiricist’, and the other turned inwards, towards the ‘active psychological subject’, which he identifies as an ‘expressionist variation of this model’11. As he observes: ‘In the English classroom the stress generally falls on this second or Personalist version since English teachers often see themselves as in the business of helping students “make” or “own” meaning by expressing their ideas clearly in speech or writing’ (Morgan 1987, p. 450). The position argued by Watson (1987) and Little (1977), as representative statements of ‘classical’ New English rhetoric, is clearly of this kind. Watson refers, for instance, to speakers and writers ‘discovering’ and ‘articulating’ meaning, to language ‘conveying’ or ‘obscuring’ meaning, and suggests that there is an intimate relationship between ‘growth’ in terms of ‘mastery of [one’s] language’ and ‘growth’ in understanding of oneself and the world, and presumably the relation-ship between them. It is pre-eminently, therefore, an instrumental view of language and meaning. It is moreover a strong assertion of the view that language is somehow distinct from meaning and at the service of meaning, which exists not only independently of language but also, in effect, prior to it. How this is to be understood is illustrated dramatically in Little’s claim that not only are the forms of language ‘... subservient to meaning’ but meaning is, in turn, ‘subservient to the person’s background and general development’ (Little 1977, p. 142, my emphases). In such a view, language is seen within the terms of what Threadgold (1988), following Reddy (1979), describes as ‘the conduit metaphor, the metaphor that “expression contains the content”, with its active/passive ideology’:

This metaphor is what leads [language reform] to believe that form/ expression is the active member of this duo, and that content/meaning is its passive/contained partner. It contributes

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also to the idea that expression consists primarily of words/lexical items. What is involved here is a view of language as primarily a ‘naming’ device. (Threadgold 1987, p. 48)

Language, that is, ‘names’ and ‘contains’, and also refers back, even as it defers, to a prior authorisation. This is, then, the correspondence thesis, to be associated with a particular politics of language, meaning and representation. This becomes particularly clear in the position articulated by Sawyer and Watson (1987), arguing against the systemic-functional linguistic perspective emanating from the work of Michael Halliday (1978). This was identified elsewhere (Green, 1987) as the latest episode in an on-going struggle over the category ‘language’ within the New English and related forms of literacy pedagogy, although clearly there is more at stake here than simply which version of language is to prevail. Sawyer and Watson assert that ‘children (or anyone else for that matter) do not write in order to write essays but in order to communicate ideas; that is, the focus is rarely on form but rather is on content’; what we need to do, accordingly, is to ‘re-address the question of content in writing’ (Sawyer & Watson 1987, p. 49), and presumably in language practice generally. Hence they equate ‘content’ and ‘meaning’, and in doing so perpetuate the classical dualism between ‘form’ and ‘content’, ‘expression’ and ‘meaning’, and between ‘meaning’ on the one hand and ‘form’ and ‘structure’ on the other. In responding to this argument, Martin et al. (1987) argue for the priority and necessity of generic consideration, on the grounds that ‘genres make meanings; they are not simply a set of formal structures into which meaning is poured’ (Martin et al. 1987, p. 64; see also Christie et al. 1989). As they observe:

Our culture prefers to dualise meaning and form, separating what we think and feel from the language we use to express ourselves. It thus feels comfortable thinking about genres as arbitrary sets of conventions we employ when we want to pass our ideas on to others. Genre-based approaches to writing development take a very different view of meaning and form to this. They argue that language makes meaning and that dualising


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meaning and form is fundamentally misleading. (Martin et al. 1987, p. 64)

However, the traditional, humanist view can be seen as not only misleading but actively harmful, in that, authorised and underwritten as it is by commonsense, it involves a particular politics which can be seen as associated with, and even as instrumental in, the maintenance of a social order characterized by injustice and oppression. Hence, language ‘is not to be conceptualised as a transparent window to the world but rather constitutes a symbolic medium that actively shapes and transforms the wor[l]d’ (McLaren 1988, p. 3). Language is never a neutral or even necessarily benign transmitter of pre-existent and otherwise quite discrete and self-sufficient meanings; language both precedes and produces meaning and subjectivity, ‘speaking’ human beings and other agent-forms, and positioning and constructing them as subjects. There is a necessary shift to be made, then, from a view of language in terms of correspondence and realism, towards other perspectives emphasising structure, sign and discourse. This is to shift towards a social account of language, meaning and subjectivity, in which notions of difference, conflict and contradiction are foregrounded, as are questions of power, ideology, culture and history. McLaren is worth citing at length in this context:

Language ... is always situated within ideology and power/knowledge relations that govern and regulate the access particular interpretive communities have to language practices. Meanings of any event or experience are only available through the language available and selected by the particular interpretive community wishing to render itself intelligible. Language is always located in discourses and the range of discourses is always limited or ‘selective’ since the dominant culture has legitimated certain discourses and discredited others. (McLaren 1988, p. 3)

This means, in turn, that there are significant social constraints to be reckoned into any account of agency and meaning, which throws into an extremely problematical and voluntarist light the mainstream rhetoric of the New English. More needs to be made of the politics of meaning (Ray 1984; Belsey 1984), in terms specifically of what can

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be called the problem of meaning—that is, meaning must be seen from the outset as necessarily problematized and, as Belsey (1984, p. 28) observes, ‘plural, not fixed, not rooted in intention, experience, the world or the mind, not guaranteed by reason, science or law, but the material of ideology, produced in the interests of power and open to contest in the interests of politics’. Hence, there is a strong relationship to be observed between meaning and ideology, which suggests in turn the importance of contemporary notions of ideology and cultural politics for English curriculum discussion. However, to point to the productivity of language in this way is not enough, as if it is language itself—conceived more or less strictly within the terms of a structuralist-scientific ideology of representation and meaning—that is responsible for making sense of and for human beings. That is to say, it is not simply insufficient and even profoundly misleading but also extremely questionable politically to accept such a view of language, in which all notions of human agency are entirely suppressed, in an excess of anti-humanist fervour. Morgan expresses this eloquently when he observes that, whereas in correspondence theories meaning is ‘owned’ ostensibly by its ‘authors’ as fully constituted subjects, in linguistic–semiotic accounts, meaning is merely ‘rented’, in the sense that authorship and authority reside in language itself, as an abstract system of signs characterized by ‘a structured set of differences’ and ‘a socialized practice’ of signification (Morgan 1987, p. 451). Subjects are constructed and positioned in discourse, in the flow and play of discursive practice; hence, they are functions and effects of language as ‘a productive activity in its own right’ (Morgan 1987, p. 453), extending across the entirety of the social field, and ‘the objectivised form par excellence of our collective social life’ (Morgan 1987, p. 451). It becomes entirely feasible in this line of thinking, therefore, to assert that, in sharp contrast and indeed opposition to the humanist rhetoric of meaning, ‘genres make meaning’, ‘language makes meaning’ (Martin et al. 1987, p. 64)12. Agency, that is, is located in language; language produces meaning and subjectivity, ‘you’ and ‘I’, ‘us’ and ‘them’; ‘our identities dissolve outside the language practices we employ’ (McLaren 1988, p. 5). But just as this is a particular view of language, it is also a particular and highly partial view of ‘agency’ which is in contention


19

here, one which puts the emphasis firmly on one side of the structure-agency dualism that has been such a central and much-debated theme in social theory (Giddens 1979; Giroux 1983), and arguably one which is fraught with difficulty and at once limited in its understanding of social life and textual practice and limiting in its effects. What is needed, then, is a more adequate view of language, meaning, subjectivity and human agency, one which goes beyond the undeniable insights and advances of linguistic-semiotic theory, and one which works with a stronger emphasis on social structure and the symbolic order, in their complex relationship; that is, a properly social account of language and meaning. In such a view, the emphasis shifts from language as such to ‘social structure as the guarantor of meaning’ (Morgan 1987, p. 453). At the same time, it is important to understand this appropriately. Morgan’s argument can be taken as implying that ‘social structure’ has at least ultimately a fixed, and hence knowable, identity. The three perspectives on language and meaning that he presents can be seen, consequently, as a series of slippages and displacements, from one order of identity (the subject-object couple, as an ontological given) to another (‘language’, similarly reified), and finally on to a third (‘social structure’, or ‘society’). Another way of understanding this point is to present it in terms of ‘self’, ‘language’ and ‘society’ as distinct principles, as well as forms, of identity and self-sufficiency. The assertion of ‘social structure’ as ‘the guarantor of meaning’ can involve, therefore, what Laclau (1983, p. 21) describes as a ‘conception of society as an intelligible entity, itself conceived as the structure upon which its partial elements and processes are founded’—in short, a re-assertion of foundationalism and the logocentric fallacy. Laclau argues that this notion must be seen as the other side of a similarly problematical notion of human agency, as referring to ‘a subject having an ultimate essential homogeneity’, a unity; consequently, both sides are characterized by an unwarrantable essentialism (Laclau 1983, p. 22). For him, what needs to be stressed is what he presents as ‘the impossibility of fixing meaning’, in any absolute sense, and yet the necessity of doing so, at least temporarily or provisionally. As he writes elsewhere: ‘[T]he social is groundless; if we accept the relational character of all identity, the ideal conditions for closure of

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a system are never achieved, and therefore all identity is more or less a floating signifier’ (Laclau 1988, p. 78). This suggests that, rather than being located in or proceeding from any single, pre-established principle of identity, meaning is produced in the relations among ‘self’, ‘language’ and ‘society’—each of these, in themselves, as ‘non-entities’, in the most literal sense. Further, it is to be understood as involving a ceaseless fixing and unfixing of identities, itself a dynamic, unstable process, within complex fields of non-originary differences. Moreover, it is precisely this complex and dynamic process which must be understood in terms of social practice, and hence as the articulation of ‘the social’, given that this latter is to be identified, firstly, with ‘the infinite play of differences’, and then with ‘the attempt ... to domesticate infinitude, to embrace it within the finitude of an order’.

[IV]

What might such a view have to offer, as a resource for developing a critical-pedagogic perspective on English teaching? Morgan (1987) suggests that the answer lies in formulating what he terms a dialogic-discursive paradigm, one which builds on the achievements associated with Saussure and linguistic-semiotic research generally, but draws increasingly on the work of Foucault and Bakhtin, with particular emphasis on notions of dialogue and discourse. He presents this as a move beyond the binary that presently characterizes the field: ‘expressive realism’, on the one hand, and on the other, a scientific or scientised structuralism. Similarly, Burgess (1984, 1988) argues for a socially-critical perspective on curriculum, language and English teaching, which emphasises the crucial importance of questions of culture and history. He also draws on Bakhtin and Foucault, as critical theorists of the social, to which he adds the work of Gramsci, on the one hand, as a central theoretical figure in neo-Marxist formulations of cultural practice and social process, and on the other, that of Vygotsky, for whom there is a fundamental relationship between a social theory of language and development ‘seen as a historical process, mediated by tools and signs’ (Burgess 1984, p. 8). Here, the focus is placed firmly on ‘how thought and language and social processes are interrelated’


21

(Burgess 1984, p. 7), and on ‘... the making and remaking of meaning ... seen as a social and historical process’ (Burgess 1984, p. 13). Burgess’s work is particularly important in this present context. While he argues for a movement beyond the New English, it is one which is in his view consistent with its implicit logic, in certain versions at least; a movement, that is, which must necessarily pass through the New English, rather than bypassing it altogether or rejecting it out of hand. Central to the reformulation that is proposed in these accounts is a firm emphasis on language and learning in socio-historical context, in which notions of social conflict and social difference, of heteroglossia and ideological struggle, are fore-grounded and perceived as the starting-point for curriculum discussion, rather than peripheral, supplementary considerations or as, at best, external constraints on educational practice. English curriculum in such a view is explicitly reconceptualized in terms of the politics of meaning, such that meaning is no longer a matter either of ‘ownership’ or ‘rental’ but rather something which is ‘fought over’ (Morgan 1987, p. 454), and hence perceived from the outset in an intimate relation to social power13. We can add two further important contributions to the formulation of a critical pedagogy to English teaching. One arises from recent developments in systemic-functional linguistics, particularly where these connect up with the projects of critical linguistics (Fowler & Kress 1979; Thompson 1984) and social semiotics (Lemke 1990)14. What makes this work of particular relevance is its insistent focus on meaning conceived within a social-semiotic framework, and hence its provision of a social account of language, meaning and history. What such work provides, above all, is a theoretical understanding of, and a sophisticated methodology for analyzing, the intricate co-patterning of social and linguistic structure; hence, it provides the basis of what Threadgold (1988; 1989) describes in terms of realization—something arguably missing, hitherto, in curriculum accounts of English teaching and literacy education. Further, the assertion of three interrelated, simultaneous orders of meaning in textual practice—corresponding to the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual meta-functions (Halliday 1978)—is a particularly significant contribution, cutting

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across and displacing as it does the naivety of the traditional ‘form/content’ distinction. Elsewhere (Green 1995b), I have presented an account of English curriculum history in terms of three distinct ‘schools’ (‘Cambridge’, ‘London’, ‘Birmingham’). Recently, an extension to this model becomes appropriate, to take account of the growing significance and influence of what might be called ‘the Sydney School’15. This is to acknowledge the emergence and resurgence, in Australia in particular, of work based in systemic-functional linguistics, with Michael Halliday being until recently Professor of Linguistics and Head of Department at Sydney University. It has meant, among other things, heightened engagement between educational linguistics and literacy pedagogy, which has had various implications for English teaching; indeed, in a sense representing a major challenge to its traditional self-understanding, as well as its power-base and its significance within the school curriculum. The appointment of Gunther Kress, formerly based in Sydney, to the Chair of English in Education at the London Institute of Education adds a further intriguing dimension to this present account (e.g. Stratta & Dixon 1992; Kress & Knapp 1992). In this regard, having noted the ‘puzzling’ situation of language study, Michael Green’s (1987, p. 6) observation becomes particularly suggestive: ‘Language remains a main area where cultural studies and English might come together but which both recurrently neglect’ (my added emphasis). However, it needs to be said that there are particular positions within this theory which are more useful than others; that is, those which seek to move beyond narrowly-conceived linguistic considerations and disciplinary boundaries and move more freely in the realms of social and cultural theory (Lemke 1984, 1990; Kress 1985, 1989; Threadgold 1988, 1992a, 1992b; Kress & Threadgold 1988; see also Poynton 1993). At the same time, there are significant limitations in many currently-available initiatives in linguistic theory of this orientation, stemming from its tendency towards disciplinary insularity and its insufficiency as a ‘metanarrative’ for curriculum theorising and classroom practice, and hence it needs to be supplemented by other theoretical perspectives if it is to be drawn more effectively into English curriculum discussion (Green & Lee 1994). There comes a point, indeed, when it becomes tempting to


23

refer to the need for a post-linguistic perspective in English teaching, one which draws upon the undeniably important advances associated with (post-)Hallidayan linguistics but seeks to relate this work more directly to the insights and arguments of postmodernism (Threadgold 1991; Lather 1991; Faigley 1992). There is little doubt that poststructuralist theory has a particularly important contribution to make in reformulating English curriculum, especially in terms of its evolution out of and beyond the New English. Given that it can be seen emphatically as ‘a theory of social meaning and power’ (Weedon 1987, p. 27), poststructuralism provides a number of theoretical tools for developing a coherent critical-pedagogic project for English teaching. These relate, in particular, to its reformulations of the notions of meaning and subjectivity, ‘as a way of conceptualizing the relationship between language, social institutions and individual consciousness which focuses on how power is exercised and the possibilities for change’ (Weedon 1987, p. 19). As Weedon observes, there are various versions of poststructuralism in circulation, and hence the term itself, quite appropriately, is necessarily and inescapably plural. Nevertheless, there are enough consistencies to warrant making reference to ‘poststructuralist theory’ in this context, given that in this and other cases theories need to be regarded strategically and used accordingly. It is necessary now, however, to go beyond ‘received’ poststructuralist understandings of meaning and power alike, along with what are now familiar tensions associated with the respective projects of Derrida and Foucault. Commonly identified respectively with the reconceptualisation of meaning and power, a more adequate picture is one which sees these projects and categories as linked, significantly through the category of difference as an organising principle for the postmodern. Hence Derrida’s concern for what Morgan (1993, p. 32) describes as an ‘energetics’ (‘a process fundamentally different from that posited by the problematics of representation’), in which ‘force’ has priority over ‘signification’ (Derrida 1978), which might well be usefully seen in relation to Foucault’s (1983) formulations of subjectivity and power, and in particular his concept of ‘blocks of capacity-communication-power’ (Foucault 1983, p. 218)16. This is new and intriguing territory. My

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hypothesis is that following this line of argument through is likely to be particularly helpful in framing a ‘post-poststructuralist’ account of meaning and power for English teaching. While problematizing meaning and subjectivity, then, via concepts of sign, discourse, textuality and institution, critical poststructuralism provides important insights into the nature of a post-humanist theory of social agency. These can be harnessed to existing work, specifically in English teaching, which is either already available or else in the process of being formulated. For instance, central to the program of the New English from the outset has been a strong emphasis on the learner’s activity and engagement in curriculum and on a process-developmental view of classroom learning, within which the role and significance of language has been a constant theme. A fundamental feature of this perspective has been the notion of intention—that is, learners ‘intending to learn’, their engagement and involvement in the learning activity, such that it acquires an illocutionary force and a compelling integrity for them; in short, a ‘meaningfulness’, and indeed a significant use-value. This may indeed have originally been conceived largely in a liberal, individualistic framework, but it is by no means necessarily locked into that framework, and needs therefore to be explicitly drawn into and reformulated in terms of a social theory of curriculum17. This involves a view of meaning as ‘negotiated and constructed through practice, conceived as both a group and individual process’ (Burgess 1984, p. 14, my emphasis); in such a view, language cannot be dissociated ‘from its connection with individual intention, with social practice and wider cultural understandings’ (Burgess 1984, p. 5). The linking of ‘individual intention’ and ‘social practice’ is of particular importance, because it speaks to the dialectic of structure and agency that Giroux (1983, 1988) has consistently seen as central to a properly-conceived critical theory of curriculum and pedagogy. While there is clearly nothing, therefore, to be gained in denying or refusing the poststructuralist critique of humanism and its associated notions of consciousness, identity, experience and human action—indeed, much to be lost—this does not mean abandoning these notions altogether. Indeed, what it demands is their reformulation and reconceptualization. In Lather’s (1991, pp. 117-118) terms:


25

A post-humanist theory of the subject combines Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence with a post-Althusserian focus on human agency. The result is a shift in cultural theory to seeing subjectivity as both socially produced in language, at conscious and unconscious levels, and as a site of struggle and potential change.

The specific curriculum implications of this kind of reformulation are at least implicit in Burgess’s (1984, 1988) recent work on discourse theory and classroom learning (see also Hardcastle 1985; Burgess & Hardcastle 1991). Of particular importance in this work is a socially-critical reconstruction of the pedagogy of learner-centredness, conceived with due regard for ‘the dialectical moment of uncertainty in human behaviour’ (Giroux 1983, p. 120). This is to emphasize the ‘space’ that always already exists between the moments of teaching and learning, the disjunction and difference, allied to which is the way in which learning conceived as a matter of agency involves movement and a measure of freedom, and hence a necessary incompleteness, an unpredictability. This means, in essence, learning within available structures, but also to some degree against them. It involves therefore a view of authentic learning as the production of difference; in Rosen’s (1986, p. 235) terms, ‘the replacing of authoritative discourse with internally persuasive discourse’. Moreover, learners viewed in these terms are engaged in ‘liberating themselves from the authority of another’s discourse while not rejecting the discourse itself’ (Rosen 1986, p. 236). For Burgess (1984, p. 7), ‘the demanding and continuously exciting challenge in this is nothing less than to describe how consciousness is constructed’, and hence an account linking together language, thought and society is highly relevant to curriculum. Burgess is worth citing at length on this:

The social theory of the sign, developed in post-revolutionary Russian thought, and revived within contemporary cultural studies, offers for English teaching an important extension to a unified theory of language and literature. In this, language is seen as a social and historical practice and is not divided from practices and relations in society more widely. The inwardly transforming power of the sign, the dialectic between thought

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and language, the human achievement of representations, are similarly theorized as social and cultural processes. (Burgess 1984, p. 15)

This is a powerful and eloquent account of the way in which a notion of interiority can be preserved, without slipping into a humanist ‘mentalism’ (Green 1991). Arguably, a social theory of ‘mind’, of one kind or another, is necessary in understanding curriculum within a socially-critical framework. At the same time, it is important to perceive curriculum as a social practice, within which ‘language learning is, inseparably, social and cultural. Uses of language, ways of speaking, genres, goals in reading and tasks in writing cannot be divided from the cultural expectations and the social histories by which they have been created’ (Burgess & Hardcastle 1991, p. 40). I see this as underlying the necessary reformulation of the notion of intention in and for classroom learning, within a critical-pedagogic framework. Student intentions within the social space of the classroom and the school are always embedded in a complex socio-cultural process. The moment of pedagogy and what Moffett (1968) has described, evocatively, as the ‘communication drama’ of the classroom are always overdetermined and marked by the play of power and difference. Yet the possibility exists, always, to seize the moment and to assert one’s freedom and agency, working at once within structures and limits and against them. McLaren suggests the political significance of the reflexive moment in human action in the following:

Agency in this case refers to the ability of individuals to analyze subjectivity, reflect upon subject positions they have assumed, and choose those which are the least oppressive to themselves, to others, and to society as a whole. This amounts to intervening in one’s own self formation and the self formation of others. (McLaren 1988, p. 6)

Teaching and learning, conceived dialogically and dialectically, need to be under-stood in these terms, therefore, as an intentional-reflexive social activity, involving processes of negotiation, exchange, transaction and contextualization. Curriculum thus understood involves the production of difference, as a positive value: student learning, that is, as cultural production.


27

[V]

The phrase ‘making meanings’ has become all but banal in the popular-professional rhetoric of English teaching in the post-Dartmouth period. Like other phrases, it has entered into a slogan system which operates to announce the distinctiveness and innovation of the New English, even as it seeks to close off argument and debate. Once an undeniably powerful and compelling metaphor, energizing pedagogic action in a new recognition of the principle of social constructionism and of the role and significance of interpretation, construal and individual agency in curriculum practice, it has in the course of time become all but emptied of its original force. Cut off from history, including its own historical necessity, it has acquired the character of myth, losing in the process its own energy and effectivity, while increasingly becoming negatively ideological and limited in its critical-pedagogic value. The task is to reclaim that history, then, so as to use it in the service of educational possibility and the reconstruction of English teaching within a (re)new(ed) rhetoric of social justice, freedom and critical democracy. As we have seen, the programmatic stress in the New English has been very firmly on meaning as activity, grounded in the metaphysical reassurances of presence and identity; of meaning as consciousness, moreover, as an intentional-expressive activity. The philosophical idealism links up directly with a methodological psychologism, and together they create the conditions whereby the New English is shaped and oriented towards a personalist and individualist discourse on language-educational practice. The whole thrust of this development is towards theoretical and political closure. Yet, as various commentators have noted (e.g. Burgess 1984, 1988; Medway 1990, 1995), this is not at all the totality of the curriculum project I am calling here the New English; it is not, in short, exhausted by such a description. There have been other important orientations and emphases, some of which have been openly socially-critical and others at least potentially so, geared towards a quite different social mission that draws on principles of community and democracy, and endorsing notions of critical dialogue and negotiation.

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The point that must not be lost sight of, and which indeed must be continually stressed, is that the phrase ‘making meanings’ points to an extremely important set of curriculum issues. The question of ‘agency’ in the social production of meaning cannot be avoided, whether it is located in social and linguistic structures, in economic forces, or in human individuals and social groups of various kinds, or in some combination of these. Who or what is it that produces meaning in and through social practice, including reading, writing and other forms of textual practice? Which meanings are to prevail? Which are to be valued? To what extent is there necessarily and unavoidably a plurality of meanings in any social practice, and hence a need to incorporate right from the outset notions of polysemy, radical ambiguity and heteroglossia into curriculum practice, in what can be described as a critical-dialogic view of curriculum and meaning? And if these things are unavoidable, what are the consequences of this? For instance, is meaning and authority—or more precisely, the authority of meaning—to be located in, on the one hand, either reading or writing, and on the other, either the teacher or the learner, or is it necessarily in their relation and interaction? Or is it, rather, the complex system and processes of higher-order contextualizations that are most significant in this regard? In which case, what is the relationship between these higher-order contextualizations and the more specific relations and contextualizations of the classroom?18 What is, indeed, the status of the classroom in the social production of meaning? These are extremely important questions. They need to be placed unequivocally on the agenda of English curriculum discussion, and it is my argument that the interventions and innovations of the New English have been particularly important in making this clear. Moreover, it is not enough or—beyond a certain historical limit—particularly productive simply to counterpose a neo-structuralist rhetoric of meaning to the humanist and culturalist rhetorics of the New English. In this counter-rhetoric, emphasis is placed on notions of structure, institution, discourse, system and context, existing above and beyond the consciousness, intentions and individual actions of human subjects. The shift from ‘text’ to ‘context’ and from ‘entities’ and ‘identities’ to ‘structures’ and


29

‘relations’, which is directly linked to the intellectual revolutions associated with structuralism and modernism, involves a new anti-humanist rhetoric, in which meaning is always overdetermined, underwritten and organized by pre-existing ideological and socio-economic formations. Structures make meaning, not human agents; or, at best, agents are positioned in and through discourse and structure, so as to produce authorised meanings, that is, in full accordance with a larger, all-encompassing and at times even overbearing social logic. What is being enacted, then, in the ideological struggle over competing rhetorics of meaning in English teaching is the classical sociological opposition between structure and agency, or between human creativity and social determination. Specifically, it involves here a simple opposition between meaning as agency and activity, on the one hand, and meaning as structure, on the other. The problem is, however, that it is constituted as a simple and closed binary relation, to be grasped with the terms of a strict either/or logic. Either way, it involves a fantasy of omnipotence and the mastery of meaning, the view that meaning is at least ultimately knowable and hence controllable, whether the principle of order is located in ‘structure’ or in ‘agency’, as distinct and fixable conceptual identities. The movement beyond the binary logic that this involves, and the theoretical and political impasse that it represents, becomes, therefore, a matter of considerable import and urgency. To that end, it is important to argue for a view of meaning in English teaching which brings together structure and agency, reconceptualized, as a new form of open-ended, dynamic unity. That is, a view of meaning as, at once, activity and structure, system and practice, bound together as a complex dialectic which is entirely caught up in the play of history and social process. This involves a paradoxical oscillation between the moment and perspective of structure, on the one hand, and on the other, those of agency and individual action. The one is fully intelligible only in relation to the other, and both their necessary relation and its realization at any one time, are similarly intelligible only from the vantage-point of a theoretical third term which is itself, strictly, undecidable (Derrida, 1981).

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In conclusion, then: a proper engagement with the relationship between social determinacy and human agency is a crucial feature of the attempt to reconstruct English teaching in accordance with the contemporary insights, investments and imperatives of critical pedagogy and postmodernism. The role and significance of the New English, both historically and strategically, is of particular interest in this regard, and hence an important consideration in understanding—and reconceiving—the crucial relationship between curriculum and meaning. The argument in this chapter turns on recognizing the importance of an English curriculum praxis organised around a postmodern politics of meaning, conceived explicitly in terms of ideological struggle: one which operates not simply on the macro-level of social abstraction but also, importantly, in the micro-level processes of classroom practice and student learning. Hence, it is realized equally and reciprocally in terms of self-production and social formation. This is a matter of profound pedagogic significance, to be seen as reaching to the very heart of educational and cultural politics. As Giroux (1987, p. 175) writes: ‘How can we as educators make learning meaningful in order to make it critical and how can we make it critical in order to make it emancipatory?’ The sequence presented in this formulation is worth stressing: from the ‘meaningful’ to the ‘critical’, and then on to the ‘emancipatory’. This allows for the notion of a developmental politics, a politics which is neither given in advance nor something to be simply assumed or imposed; rather, one which must be actively constructed and developed over time and through effort and struggle, thus bringing together the labour of learning and the pedagogy of politics. A crucial reference-point, however, is meaning. How to make education ‘meaningful’, and why this is important, become important questions for renewing English teaching, understood and practised as critical-postmodernist pedagogy, and it remains important to examine and re-assess how the contradictory discourse of the New English offers both possibilities and problems in this respect.

NOTES 1 Morgan (1993) presents a challenging and particularly important account along these lines.


31

2 Re-issued with additional chapters in 1994. This statement, presented in a Postscript to the 1987 version, does not appear as such in the later edition, although arguably it still informs the position in question. The tension here between accommodation and challenge, identity and difference, is very noticeable.

3 Although undergoing constant ‘renovation’, the basic ideological position remains the same in their later work (e.g. Sawyer & Watson 1989, 1995).

4 See, for example, Watson et al. (1994) and Sawyer & Watson (1995). 5 Ball (1988) presents a rather similar picture of the New English, using the terms

‘progressive English’ and ‘radical English’ (see also Ball et al. 1990). Although he begins by identifying the latter with what might be broadly called a ‘culturalist’ politics, in a similar way to Donald, there are indications of a shift in emphasis towards an orientation which takes more account of the structural dimensions of literacy and power.

6 Understood, of course, in a particular way; however, the potential exists, I believe, to rearticulate Britton’s argument in accordance with later theories of signification and representation.

7 That this orientation towards learning as the expression of a radical individualism is not exclusively the logic of the New English is suggested in Medway (1990). A further consideration in this regard is the movement in Britton’s work from a psychology organized by Piaget to one in which the dominant reference point is, increasing, Vygotsky (e.g. Britton 1985, 1987)—a movement arguably at least implied and even foreshadowed in his original 1970 account (Britton, 1970). There is, similarly, a social dimension in Moffett’s work which is often overlooked, while the later work of Barnes (1988) and Boomer (1985, 1992) is clearly oriented towards a social and increasingly critical, understanding of curriculum. See Willinsky (1990), and also Dixon (1991).

8 A third position worth noting at this point is organized around the concept of ‘negotiation’ (Boomer [Ed.] 1982; Boomer et al. 1992). Although it can be seen as developing out of the ‘interpretation’ position and hence as consistent with it, it can also be seen as offering a more critical-dialogical understanding of the relationship between teaching and learning and the notion of ‘meaning-making’.

9 Hence, in various ways, the account offered here is consistent with the position I am seeking to expound and defend here. Even so, it remains within a particular version of the ‘New English’ logic, which I see as problematical. Although it is not something to elaborate on here, it would be useful and revealing to do so, I suggest, given the arguments I am marshalling here and elsewhere (e.g. Green 1995b).

10 As Harris (1991, p. 632) puts it: ‘[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 and [English] teaching has changed little since 1966’.

11 Part of what is at issue here is what has been described as ‘the crisis in representation’ (e.g. Arac 1986, p. xx). The two positions Morgan presents need to be discussed in terms of the relationship between representation and modernism—a matter which is also pertinent, although differently, to his later account of structuralism. On (post)modernism and the problem of representation, see Giroux (1990) and Lather (1991).

12 See also Harris’s (1991) account of different positions at Dartmouth and after in terms of ‘research’ and ‘scholarship’, on the one hand, and ‘teaching’ and ‘classrooms’, on the other, linked in turn to a ‘subject-centred’ and a ‘learner-

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centred’ view respectively—a rhetorical division that is strongly in evidence in the Australian work in question here.

13 It is appropriate to note at this point that Morgan later explicitly challenges the notion that ‘meaning’ is to be considered a viable organising principle for English teaching (Morgan 1993).

14 See also Faigley’s (1992) account of ‘the linguistic subject as agent’ for a similarly critical, albeit sympathetic, assessment of this work.

15 For further orchestrations, and a recent renewal, of the debate surrounding this ‘School’, see Freedman and Medway [Eds] (1994a, 19946) and Christie’s (1996) review of the latter.

16 That is, ‘“blocks” in which the adjustment of abilities, the resources of communication, and power relations constitute regulated and concerted systems’ (Foucault, 1983, p. 218). See Griffith (1992) for an initial account of English teaching in terms of this concept.

17 For one attempt to do this, drawing on postmodern(ist) theories of textuality and rhetoric, see Green (1995a).

18 See in this regard Lemke (1990), who makes explicit use of social semiotics in developing his own rhetoric of ‘making meaning’—an important orientation that, as yet, has not been utilised to any significant degree in English curriculum debates, which is somewhat surprising. I have elsewhere drawn on this work in presenting what I called ‘a postmodern reading pedagogy’ (Green, 1991).

REFERENCES

Arac, J. (1986). Introduction. In J. ARAC (Ed.), Postmodernism and politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Ball, S.J. (1985). English for the English since 1906. In I. Goodson (Ed.), Social Histories of the Secondary Curriculum: subjects for study (pp. 53-88). London: The Falmer Press.

Ball, S.J. (1987). Relations, structures and conditions in curriculum change: A political history of English teaching 1970–85 (1). In I. Goodson (Ed.), International Perspectives in Curriculum History (pp. 17-45). London, Croom Helm.

Ball, S.J. (1988). Comprehensive schooling, effectiveness and control: An analysis of educational discourses. In R. Slee (Ed.), Discipline and Schools: A curriculum perspective (pp. 132-152). Sydney: Macmillan.

Ball, S.J., Kenny, A., & Gardiner, D. (1990). Literacy, politics and the teaching of English. In I. Goodson & P. Medway (Eds.), Bringing English to Order: the history and politics of a school subject (pp. 47-86). London: The Falmer Press.

Barnes, D. (1976). From Communication to Curriculum. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Barnes, D. (1987). Review: give power to the pupils. English in Education, 21(2), 79-86. Summer.

Barnes, D. (1988). Knowledge as action. In M. Lightfoot & N. Martin (Eds.), The Word for Teaching is Learning: essays for James Britton (pp. 14-32). London: Heinemann.

Belsey, C. (1980). Critical Practice. London: Methuen. Belsey, C. (1984). The politics of meaning. In F. Barker, P. Hulme, M.

Iverson & D. Loxley (Eds.), Confronting the crisis: War, politics and culture in the eighties (pp.27-38). Colchester: University of Essex.


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Documents

Rhetorics of Meaning; or, Renovating the Subject of English Teaching