Innovative pedagogies series:

Textbook Cinderellas

How metacognition takes a worn format to

the ball

Bob Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature

and Thought

Royal Holloway, University of London

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Contents

Section Page

Contents 2

Introduction 3

How the practice was developed 4

The issue 4

The existing practice 4

Challenges and change 5

Consequences 6

Future Impact 8

Conceptualisations of learning and teaching: textbook as pedagogy within my

teaching philosophy 9

Dialogic pedagogy and English 10

Practical advice and tips 11

Textbooks 11

From wider practice 11

Conclusion 12

References 12

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Introduction Dr Johnson, in his dictionary, defined a lexicographer as “a harmless drudge”. Writers of textbooks are often

seen in the same light and textbooks in the humanities are generally understood to be at the bottom of the

pile intellectually and pedagogically, offering, as a character in Umberto Eco’s bestselling 1980 novel The

Name of the Rose says, not innovative research but “a continuous and sublime recapitulation” of what is

known. However, in this account I want to demonstrate that textbooks can and should be more than the

summary of courses one teaches or an account of the ‘state of the discipline’. Textbooks can and should be

pedagogically innovative in their own right, responding dialogically to their audience and context: indeed, in

my view, textbooks are the prime location for beginning to stimulate the reflection on ends and purposes –

what educational theorists call ‘metacognition’ – which is so central to university education. Textbook writers

may be drudges – but textbooks can still go to the ball.

This account stresses the role of dialogical teaching and learning and of metacognition, and explains how I

came to write and edit textbooks in the context terms of the development of English, my discipline. I discuss

the impact of the textbooks, how they developed, the principles underlying them and then speculate on

some practical advice. I don’t think that these exact steps need or should be replicated in other disciplines

(indeed, part of my point is the specificity of textbooks to their discipline and its development): but I do think

that the sense of how textbooks relate to a subject area, its community, its pedagogy, its students and their

own experience of a subject is very significant and should engender more consideration.

My argument about textbooks comes from my reflection on my own experience and seeks to explain the

success of my text book and the series of textbooks I edit. I am the author of Doing English: a guide for

literature students, published by Routledge, now in its third edition (1999, second edition, 2002; third in 2009)

with a fourth edition planned). A US edition, entitled Studying English (‘doing’ was considered too suggestive

for the American market!), is in press and due for publication in the US in November. The impact of this book

is shown by its high sales (I’m not allowed, by the publisher, to divulge the figures), the sequence of new

editions, its widespread adoption, its wide use in anthologies (for example, in a set text for A-level called

Critical Anthology for OCR A/S English Literature), and its positive reviews:

an immensely helpful introduction to the academic transition from school to university ways

of studying English. The sudden appearance of literary theory on the syllabus… can be very

disconcerting. Eaglestone’s clear and stimulating guide is exactly what students need to get

their bearings. (TES 2000)1.

It has also had a global impact, as it has also been translated in to into Japanese (2003) and Arabic (2011). I

am also the series editor of Routledge Critical Thinkers. These books are books are ‘first point of call’

introductions to major theoretical and critical figures. These books both stimulate students’ curiosity and

interest and organise and present high quality resources in accessible, coherent and imaginative ways. The

impact of this series is shown by its success: 42 volumes to date; high sales (again, I’m not allowed to reveal

the figure, although it is considerable); new editions (six in second edition); international impact with

translations into Korean and Persian. These books are high-quality resources which, in accessible, coherent

and imaginative ways, clearly enhance students’ learning. As the key terms ‘metacognition’ and ‘dialogue’, as

well as the context, pedagogic design, implementation and impact are so interwoven, I discuss them in detail

below.

1 See: https://www.tes.com/news/tes-archive/tes-publication/secondary-4

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How the practice was developed

The issue

As is widely known, and much written about, English as a discipline, globally and in the UK, had a sort of

paradigm shift from the late ‘70s through to the early ‘90s with the arrival of ‘literary theory’, a term which

rather clumsily clumped together various ideas taken from patterns of Marxist thought, feminism,

continental philosophy, psychology and other areas. ‘Theory’ contended with, depending on who you believe,

either a dominant Leavisite tradition or a more unfocussed sort of liberal critical historicism. Whatever the

case, this influx of ideas led to a great deal of academic friction: the ‘McCabe affair’ in Cambridge was perhaps

the most celebrated, but the ‘theory wars’ had all sorts of effects, personal, intellectual and institutional.

However, as theory came to be widely accepted into university curricula, there was one highly significant

impact that was unforeseen and mostly ignored. While English in higher education had undergone a ‘theory’

paradigm shift, English at secondary level had not: this meant that a chasm opened up between teaching

English Literature in schools and what went on in universities. Students, having studied Shakespeare using

traditional methods for A-level, for example, found at university a new and baffling array of theoretical

approaches for which their teachers had not prepared them. For students, this was not simply the normal

leap from one tier of education to another, as in many subjects, but from an older version of a discipline to a

radically new, almost unrecognisable subject. It was not simply that there were new terms for things, but, as

it were, the very point of the subject had shifted and changed. And this impact was not simply intellectual: it

was also social and political. Some students, from better supported secondary education, found this jump

easier: others, where their teachers had had less subject support, struggled. That this chasm came to exist,

that secondary level English and Higher Education English became ‘de-coupled’ is one of the shames of the

discipline in my view and the subject is only now, some 20 years later, getting over this foolish oversight by

those who should have known better. (See: Eaglestone 2000).

Further, there were very few, if any, books that explained this at all. Terry Eagleton’s celebrated and

successful Literary Theory from 1983 (more bought than read) was quite complex and, in one way at least,

dishonest, in that it failed it explain its own cultural materialist/Marxism, and instead criticised (rather than

introduced) a range of other theoretical views from this one vantage point. (A sign of its position is that ends,

of course, with a demand for a central revolutionary government to take over the free press and other forms

of media: I’ve often wondered if this was a kind of joke on the author’s part or a sincere application of the

policy of the Socialist Workers Party to which, at this stage, he belonged). Its success lay more in its branding

as the literary theory book (a 80s irony that its author was aware of, I think) than its content. The first edition

of Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory was published in 1995, but

this, while much more student-focused and an excellent book, still did not address the question of why

English. Others, too, like Andrew Bennet and Nicholas Royle’s An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory

(1995) were idiosyncratic, or Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice (1980) very involved in particular debates. The

numerous ‘Readers’ on the market were described by Peter Barry as “The Longest Suicide Notes in Theory”

(Barry 2001a) and, while they occasionally helped teaching in some cases, they were often rather unwieldy.

The existing practice

At this stage, in the 1990s, I was beginning my career teaching literary theory. However, I found it very hard,

in addition to all the more normal reasons that teaching is hard, because of the difficulty of generating

student engagement in what I found so rewarding. Andrew Green offers a very significant statistic from his

survey on this matter (Green 2005). Using a Lickert scale from one (not useful) to four (very useful), 92% of

undergraduate students rated theory useful (categories three and four) in lectures. Presumably this reflects

the ways in which lectures use theory and criticism to bring out the significance of texts. However, in

seminars, which in English are where in general the more active learning and engagement takes place, where

the material should be owned by the students, 54% think theory is not useful, and 21% think it only a little bit

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useful: that is, basically, 75% of the student body do not use – resist – theory in the work which is closest to

them. That is, that are (in the main) happy to have theory talked at them, but not happy about using it

themselves, which, as Green suggests, indicates a strong antipathy. Theory is often intellectually hard of

course, and it is often hard to teach because each ‘theory’ is itself a whole world view (Peter Barry writes that

there ‘are many ways of teaching literary theory’ and adds that the ‘tragedy is that none of them work’ (Barry

2001b, n.p.)). However, in the 1990s this antipathy stemmed in no small part because it was just not at all

what the students, fresh from A-level, expected. Students, reading literature, criticism and especially reading

theory, and sometimes struggling, demanded to know why they were reading this or that particular text and

how to use it.

Challenges and change

Crucially, I discovered that when I explained why they were studying this text or topic, why this cluster of ideas

was important, they found their study significantly easier, more enjoyable and they did better. Basically, I had

stumbled over what educationalists called metacognition. Roughly, this means knowing what you are doing

and why: knowing this not only makes you better at doing it, it makes it more rewarding and pleasurable too

the idea that knowing what you’re doing is crucial to doing it. John Hattie calls this “self-regulation” which

allows students to “learn to become their own teachers” (Hattie 2012, p. 1). (The path that led me to this, I

discuss below in section three). Understanding the wider context helps focus the more specific learning which

is taking place. Metacognition is crucial for making students informed, independent learners who can make

connections and develop interests for themselves in their education.

However, metacognition goes further than educational theory. Indeed, it is central to traditions of intellectual

inquiry and to higher education. The leading philosopher Alastair MacIntyre, for example, discusses what is at

root metacognition in relation to the idea of tradition. While noting that we are “apt to be misled here by the

ideological uses to which the concept of a tradition has been put by conservative political theorists” – Burke

centrally – who “contrast tradition with reason and the stability of tradition with conflict”, MacIntyre argues

that:

all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought,

transcending through criticism and invention the limitations of what had hitherto been

reasoned in that tradition; this is as true of modern physics as medieval logic.

(MacIntrye 1985, p. 221).

He goes on:

Moreover when a tradition is in good order it is always partially constituted by an argument

about the goods that pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.

So when an institution – a university, say, or a farm or a hospital – is the bearer of a tradition

or practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way,

constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good

farming is or what good medicine is. Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict.

(MacIntrye 1985, pp. 221-2).

(I note that this isn’t very dissimilar to much in the later Derrida – about reading the philosophical canon in

ways that, as it were, keep it alive; to the way we inhabit traditions; to the way that we can’t get outside

philosophy – or ‘the Graeco-European adventure’ – to question it but work from within its boundaries – the

typical ‘counter’, the ‘with/against’ movement of his thought). This is to say that a university is a bearer of

traditions, both in the sense that it is a ‘carrier’ for other traditions (the humanities, say, or even practices like:

the lecture or the seminar) and that it is a ‘tradition’ itself. And we can tell when it is in rude health precisely

when it is constituted by a ‘continuous argument’ about what it does. (Interestingly, at the beginning of Being

and Time, Heidegger says a similar thing about disciplines: that they have only achieved maturity when they

question and assess the grounds which constituted them). This means that, really, at the core of all

disciplines in university – humanities, social sciences and sciences – is a reflection on their ends and

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purposes: more, that thinking about why we research, study, teach and learn them shapes the processes of

how we do them. Intellectual advances in disciplines are not just about what they know, but about why they

know it. For example, chemistry is widely understood to come from alchemy: but while chemistry explores

how matter is composed, its properties and reactions, Alchemy aimed to purify not simply matter but the

soul, and so gain power over supernatural beings. The evolution of one from the one to the other is less

about how an experiment is done than the point of that experiment, the why.

Consequences

It was because of this realisation that I decided to write the book that was to become Doing English and then,

a year later, to take on the role as editor of Routledge Critical Thinkers. The books, responding seek to explain

why things are the way they are, and so aim at reflection on ends and purposes, on metacognition. In his 1997

autobiography, Not Entitled, the literary critic Frank Kermode wrote of a time in the 1960s:

On beautiful summer lawns, young people lay together all night, recovering from their

daytime exertions and listening to a troupe of Balinese musicians. Under their blankets or

their sleeping bags, they would chat drowsily about the gurus of the time... What they

repeated was largely hearsay; hence my lunchtime suggestion, quite impromptu, for a series

of short, very cheap books offering authoritative but intelligible introductions to such figures.

(Kermode 1996, p. 224).

There is still a need for ‘authoritative and intelligible introductions’. But this series aimed to reflect a different

world from the 1960s. New thinkers and new methodologies have emerged: with these changes, new

problems have emerged. The ideas and issues behind these radical changes in the humanities were often

presented without reference to wider contexts or as theories which could be added on to texts students read.

These books aimed to reflect the need to go back to the thinker’s own texts and ideas, to explain why ideas

have arisen and why they are applied in certain ways. Part of their dialogic approach stems precisely from

listening to and responding to student needs.

My decision to do this – which turned out, in a Research Assessment Exercise/Research Excellence

Framework-driven environment, to have adverse impacts on my career – was shaped by four forces. First, the

pedagogical/ intellectual realisation I explored above.

Second, especially early in my career, with significant debts, living in London and without a full-time or

permanent academic job, and before the Blair government ‘rectified the anomaly’ of academic salaries, I can’t

deny that there was a financial incentive behind my wish to write a book that sold more than a few hundred

copies (‘no one but a blockhead…’ etc.).

Third, as I was teaching in three institutions, it was as book I knew I could write without considerable research

time. Both of these forces stemmed from my own at that stage precarious situation.

Fourth, and most significantly and ambitiously, the book was also shaped by my reading of Michael Foucault,

whose interest was in the ‘institution’. Not simply a particular institution, like a university or a hospital, but

more abstract institutions: the whole ‘institution’ or ‘tradition’ of university education, for example. (I will

explore the relevance of this to my pedagogy in more detail below).

I was aware that to effect change, it was not enough to create an impact on one or two people, but on a

whole institution, the ‘teaching of English’. (This is also behind my very conscious and continuing decisions to

be involved with a range of organisations to do with English, as I discuss below) And I was aware that, oddly,

textbooks in English are a way to do this. Indeed, textbooks are the Cinderellas of English in higher education

(do all the work, have none of the glory). They are neither face-to-face teaching nor original texts nor the

cutting edge research texts at which we expect our students to be looking. Yet in English in particular, the

principal form of pedagogic support to contact teaching has been the text book. They have been written and

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edited for that very specific purpose with that audience in mind, very often the transition audience. These

books in fact shape the discipline. This is not a new discovery.

Ian Watt’s classic study, The Rise of the Novel, from 1957 is, in many ways, recognisably a textbook combining a

range of ideas and previously established research into a discipline-shaping work: however, in many cases

this is still the book that shapes debate in this field. Likewise, Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory (1983), for all its

flaws, is a text book that shaped a generation of critical inquiry. Despite their importance, little is written

about them at the literary end of English (there has been a lively discussion of the nature of textbook in

English Language since the 1960s, but very little in English Literature. For an exception see Parrinder 1993).

These form part of the disciplinary consciousness in terms of providing a shared based of knowledge – or at

least of received opinion – from which communal work and argument can then expand (‘we’ve all read what

Eagleton says, but…’). But textbooks also shape the discipline in another other way, especially in the now

mass education system at higher education.

In writing Doing English and, and then in editing Routledge Critical Thinkers, I made a number of pedagogical

decisions.

Most importantly, the books are involved with metacognition: explaining what they are doing and crucially,

why. They are less about offering positions than about framing debates and so empowering students to

explore further and develop their own views. In this way they are dialogic, not in the more familiar sense of

being interactive, but in the sense that they aim to provide the explanations that lead easily to dialogue. To

this end, neither Doing English nor Routledge Critical Thinkers assume a high level of knowledge of anything

outside what a new English student might expect (that is, even, say figures as widely known as Karl Marx or

Margaret Thatcher need explanation).

This is not to underestimate the audience, but to make sure that they are all, as on says, on board. However,

this also means that all the books stress the fact that they are a ‘first point of call’ which survey a sense of the

wider environment and lead the student on to a deeper engagement. (The image I have is of a student faced

with an array of books on shelves or articles online: the question is ‘where to begin?’. These books aim to

answer this question and explain its choices). Crucially, this is embodied at the level of the prose, which

needs to be clear. Academic prose is often – and rightly – full of qualifications and complex relations. In

general, this is quite correct and reflects both that we stand on the shoulders of giants and that we are

properly hesitant about our conclusions. However, in a didactic book these concerns need to be temporarily

put to one side: the first in favour of clarity and the second, as I’ve suggested, because the role of these books

is to put and frame questions rather than provide answers. (Of course, the questions one poses are an

implicit way of focusing concentration on some issues rather than others: this is a perfectly valid criticism of

textbooks and ‘liberal’ forms of teaching. In my view, however, the benefits of this approach outweigh the

risks: climbing a ladder begins with the first step).

The books in the series have the same ‘template’ structure, beginning with a chapter on why that thinker is

especially important. This explains to the student the point of the book immediately, and shows why they

should read and study the figure. The ‘why’ chapter also outlines the shape and argument of the rest of the

book. The books chapters focus on the key ideas of the thinker and both focus and ground them. The books

are not research monographs but ‘first points of call’, which provide context for understanding the thinker’s

ideas. The final section is called ‘After’ the thinker and explores in a brief way their legacy. Finally, and

importantly, there is a heavily annotated further reading section, which will tell students what to read next:

this section has turned out to be very popular with both student readers and academics. As one of the series

aims is to build a bridge to primary texts, the first part of this section lists and annotates these. The second

part of this section covers secondary works which will be genuinely useful for students. The books also have

similar style features. They have signposting and subheadings and end with a concise summary of the

chapter’s key points. Each time a figure is mentioned, they are glossed and given dates (‘French philosopher,

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1988)’ so that are not simply ‘floating’ in the text. A few words of gloss are

strangely comforting: suddenly the reader knows something about this person, or is reminded of something,

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and can feel both included and clever. Moreover, words the students might not have heard of are glossed, as

in the seminar room. For example, when teaching first year English students, one might use the word

‘epistemology’: quite fairly, they might look blank, so one explains it roughly. Glossing in the text has the same

effect. Sometimes, other thinkers or terms might need more than a gloss, but might also interrupt the flow. In

this case the books use ‘boxes’ to convey short, encyclopaedia style entries or to highlight definitions which

form part of the main text. The books are short, with short chapters that are easy to read in one sitting, or to

photocopy or scan.

Finally, textbooks, or good ones, at least, perform or imitate the experience of learning, taking the student

through the process, rather than simply asserting (or ‘banking’) the information. To explain many of the key

ideas that are influential in literary studies often relies on arguments that cannot be easily summarised into

short bits of information. Textbooks allow for these arguments to be explained, developed and anchored

with examples over a span of several pages. For example, the work of the Judith Butler is central to for a

number of influential literary thinkers. And central to Butler’s work, certainly to her early work, is her

commitment to a Hegelian dialectical process. In her text book Judith Butler (2002), Sara Salih take 21 pages to

slowly explain and work this through. Butler’s ideas presuppose knowledge of several generations of

philosophers, writers and debates, and the slow coming to have a sense of the issues is enacted in the text,

which reflects the ways of coming to understand the world that English as a discipline offers and is a worked

example of disciplinary thinking rather than simply just relaying facts.

In all this, which often involved quite close rewriting (Doing English) or editorial intervention, I was supported

by the succession of editors at Routledge: Thalia Rodgers, Liz Thompson and Polly Dodson. I know that it is

common place to hear academics saying uncharitable things about publishers, but dealing with these editors

was constructive, productive and generally raised the quality of the work significantly.

A number of experts and educators in the field have very kindly commented on the impact of the book (in my

HEA Fellowship application). One, a leading educational consultant and author, wrote that I had transformed

the student experience nationally:

Bob’s work… has affected virtually every A-level English Literature teacher to some extent,

and has seen many teachers engage with ideas about textual production, consumption and

reception in A-level classes in ways that would have been unlikely previously.

Another, a director of an educational charity that works with teachers and students of English, wrote that:

Doing English has made a very important contribution to bridging the gap between A- level

and university, giving students an overview of the subject discipline and explaining in

superbly clear and lucid terms complex meta-level ideas about the nature of English and the

practices of literary criticism.

This is precisely what I had hoped: that the book would in some way influence the discipline and aid with the

process of transition.

Future Impact

The success of the books and the series has led to invitations to become involved in the ‘institutions’ of

English. Indeed, as my pedagogy suggests, I have always also focused on the ‘institution’ of English and so I

have taken every chance to contribute to national initiatives which facilitate student learning and to

contribute to meaningful and positive change with respect to pedagogic practice and policy. From the late

‘90s I was involved with disciplinary pressure groups. In 2005, I was invited to advise the Qualifications and

Curriculum Development Authority on the A-level literature curriculum, assessing Curriculum 2000 and, in the

light of that, rewriting the A/AS-level specifications for English Literature. Since then I have advised the

Department for Education and OfQual about the new specifications for English A/AS. I am regularly consulted

by both OCR and AQA on matters to do with English: these are all ways of changing a hard-to-pin-down

institution).

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Conceptualisations of learning and teaching: textbook as pedagogy within

my teaching philosophy

One’s teaching philosophy is, usually, what literary theorists in the 1980s called a ‘bricolage’: a DIY patch-up

job rather than fully worked out pedagogical system. However in my case, my teaching was shaped by two

key moments. One, as I’ve outlined above, was my rather ad hoc discovery of metacognition: the other was

my encounter with the work - or perhaps more accurately, with the intellectual trajectory - of the Brazilian

theorist of education, Paulo Freire. In addition, of course, many of the thinkers and critics I have been

fortunate enough to read have had much to say about pedagogy.

I began my academic career in 1992 as a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Wales, Lampeter. In

one part of my professional life, I was researching the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida in

order to explore questions about the relationship between ethics and literature for my doctorate. In another,

I was teaching ‘Introduction to Literary Study’ to six first-year seminar groups. There seemed to be a divide

between the abstraction of my research and my concrete day-to-day teaching experience. Struggling with this

diremption inside myself, I began to seek for answers by reading higher education pedagogy and this was

how I came to discover Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and his analysis of pedagogical practice.

There isn’t space here for a full exploration of Freire’s sources, but it’s clear that he drew on the same the

European existential tradition (Hegel, Sartre, Heidegger and others) that I was researching, and that these

were even more central to his work than the Marxism he also espoused (indeed, it’s very possible to read the

Marxism of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed as a veneer over deeper ethical concerns summed up by Freire’s

term ‘humanisation’: this has been the source of some criticism of Freire (see for example. Irwin 2012, pp.

198-9). Indeed, while I was intellectually fascinated by his seamless adaption of existential and

phenomenological philosophy for pedagogy, I was transformed as an educator by his argument that teaching

is not simply ‘depositing’ ideas but instead is a creative, constructive dialogue between partners in

community. And I was inspired by his belief that this dialogue is not “a crafty instrument for the domination

of one person by another” (Freire 1997, p. 57) but a liberating and transformational experience for both

teacher and student. I read the educationalists he influenced - Henry Giroux, bell hooks - who argued that

education should establish a sense of democratic community, should cherish diversity, should create a

language of possibility and hope, building engaged critics and transformative intellectuals.

Central to Freire is his rejections of what he calls the ‘banking’ model of education in which knowledge is

simply narrated to or “deposited” in students:

the teacher teaches and the students are taught…the teacher knows everything and the

students know nothing…the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined …the teacher

is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. (Freire 1997, p. 54).

For Freire, the

more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the

critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers

of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more

they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited

in them. (Freire 1997, p. 54).

We don’t have to accept the whole – or indeed any – of Freire’s revolutionary logic to see that to construct the

student as a passive consumer, lacking in critical consciousness, simply responding to the world is to prevent

that student actively engaged in their learning and becoming critical and responsive. And these

characteristics – although supporters of Freire’s politics might not appreciate the point – are as vital to

entrepreneurs, innovators and creators as they are to revolutionaries. The very idea of such a ‘narrative’

immediately runs counter to precisely the pedagogical practices at which I aim.

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In contrast to the ‘banking’ model, Freire offers the idea of education as ‘dialogue’. Through ‘dialogue’, the

world is not simply given but made and remade between student and teacher, the student becomes an active

participant in their own education and the process becomes a shared process engaged in problem-solving.

Indeed, ‘my distinctive and innovative pedagogic practice’ is based precisely in, or described by, this idea from

Freire.

Also central for Freire’s work is the idea that no pedagogy stands outside a social context: rather, it implicitly

or explicitly embodies an array of philosophical and moral concepts. More, every element of a pedagogy,

from the smallest (say, how one uses a PowerPoint) to the largest (say, one’s often unacknowledged

intentions) are inextricably interwoven with that context and one’s relation to it. No ‘distinctive element’ of a

pedagogical practice can, really, be excerpted from a pedagogic philosophy, and that in turn is part of a wider

educational, social and philosophical context. Any one element can only be an expression of this often

unarticulated wider pedagogy (this idea – that one pedagogic moment is a metonym for a whole world-view -

is commonly used in fiction and in drama about teaching, incidentally).

Dialogic pedagogy and English

There were a number of complications in applying Freire’s ideas to my context. However, rather like the dove

in Kant’s allegory, who thought how much more easily he would fly if there were no air, not realising that the

air itself provided the very possibility of flight, these turned out to be rather advantageous.

Freire’s approach began in his experience of teaching peasants in Brazil: very different from highly educated

students reading English in British HE. The difference lay not so much in the nationality or, oddly, level of

education, but in the fact that the UK students were training in an established discipline, English, not simply

learning to read or other primary tasks. As numerous historians and critics have demonstrated, English has a

complex history as a subject, in which many of its practices have developed: indeed it is a fissiparous complex

family of disciplines and sub-disciplines, each characterised by practices which sometimes converge and

sometimes diverge.

These include philology (Turner 2013), the study of rhetoric, a nationalistic study of language (Underwood

2013), a colonial form of propaganda (Viswanathan 1989; Gardiner 2013), a humanist (and suspect) social

mission (Baldick 1983; Atherton 2005). Learning a discipline is not the same as the more basic education

Freire outlines. It is a form of taking on an identity, joining a tribe (Becher and Trowler 2001) ‘coming to be’

something (a historian, a biologist): in this case – a literary critic. However, for me and for Freire-inclined

pedagogy, this is was much an advantage as a hindrance because the idea of dialogue has historically been

part of the shape of English studies. Indeed, a central current of English, begun in earnest by I.A. Richards in

Cambridge and exported by him to the USA was known as ‘New Criticism’ (See: Graff 2007; Harpham 2011;

Menard 2010). Crucial to this was the event of dialogue: the teaching began in response to the students’

‘close reading’ of a poem, and so a dialogue about the meaning of the poetry began in which the students

and the teacher mutually developed an interpretation. Similarity, the critic F.R. Leavis described his method

of asking ‘this is so, is it not?’ and expecting the reply ‘yes, but…’: his work – for all his reputation as a master

who demanded disciples – was profoundly rooted in dialogue. This meant that Freire’s ideas settled very well

in the discipline.

However, while Freire himself engaged with educational institutions (see Freire 1996), the germinal seed of

his reflections in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed lies in the face-to-face encounters and an experience of

authenticity. Indeed, a problem for Freire-inspired - pedagogy (perhaps the central problem) lies in precisely

the complexity of turning his ‘face-to-face’ pedagogy into an ‘institutional’ pedagogy, mediated not only by

educational institutions but by technology, other social changes and, in fact, by the nature of writing itself.

The aim, then, is to somehow effect the changes in pedagogy that Freire championed not only in the face-to-

face ‘seminar room encounter’ but, through forms of representation into the institution itself.

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My pedagogical practice, then, had to reflect and respond to these complexities: based in Freire and in his

heritage in the ethical debates of European philosophy, seeded in the fertile dialogic ground of English

studies, but working with a disjunction between student expectations and the curriculum in English and

developing not only a seminar-led form of dialogic teaching, but a form that responded to discipline-wide and

institutional needs which enabled dialogic student work. I attempted to resolve these by reference to the idea

of metacognition.

Practical advice and tips The practical advice I have to offer is in two parts: the first comes from constructing textbooks, the second

from my wider practice.

Textbooks

First, textbooks, even in the Arts and Humanities are important interventions and should be seen and valued

as such.

Second, a textbook needs to take account of more than its ostensible subject. It has to respond to the

institution and context of its subject. Doing English is not simply a list of things. It is an intervention into a field

at a particular time: it responds to wider changes and challenges in the field (that had made transition

especially difficult).

Third, and completely fortuitously, Doing English and the Routledge Critical Thinker series have responded to

the changing information environment. Students have massive amounts of information available free via the

internet. Wikipedia is increasing reliable – and that is simply the easiest course. Online resources like the

Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy are superb, free and full of information. And, of course, there are many

similar resources that universities pay for.

However, there are three problems with this wonderful superfluity. Firstly, there is simply too much

information, which can leave a student baffled about where to look. Secondly, the resources are rarely

focused on a particular discipline or vector of learning. Third, and stemming from these two, the resources

don’t explain why or how these ideas are important: they lack the focused metacognitive context that explains

why some ideas are relevant and significant. The point of a textbook now – and as I say, this was totally

fortuitous and unplanned in my case – is to contextualise and explain information, rather than supply it.

Fourth: don’t be afraid of working with publishers. They are usually helpful and improve the work.

From wider practice

One reason student struggle is that they can’t see the point of some part of the curriculum: how or why it’s

necessary. Here, engaging metacognitively with students can be of real use. There are many different ways to

do this: many are discipline-dependent, of course, but the underlying principle is the same.

Another key issue is transition from secondary to higher education. My experience of being involved with

teachers is that – contra what many people in the media imply – is that teaching and learning at secondary

level has continued to improve, partially though increases professionalisation and raised subject knowledge,

partially due to technology and partially due to the stresses on those in education to succeed. However, this

improvement has sometimes had the effect of focusing students on certain tasks and ideas, especially about

what a discipline is. Helping students make the transition into university means recognising that the students

have made a change not only in the level but also in the purpose of their study. Again, some extensive

dialogic metacognition work can be very effective in this process. Further, it means outreach into the

secondary sector by academics to find out what is taught (mostly) at A-level and how this might relate to

particular HE curricula. This is important across all disciplines.

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Although dialogue is, as I’ve suggested, built into the nature of English as a discipline, I think that this is a

central part of all higher education, for the Freirean reasons that, at this level, education is not simply the

‘deposit’ of information but an active engagement with and transformation of bodies of knowledge and

practice. There are many means to adopt dialogue in addition to seminars (and textbooks) and again, they

vary from discipline to discipline. However, the core idea – of exchange and intellectual engagement –

remains.

My final point is about pedagogical innovation. The idea of dialogical pedagogy (from Freire) and

metacognition both arose from the interaction of my experience of teaching, the nature of my discipline, the

research into pedagogy that I undertook and – crucially – the links between this and both the doctoral and

later research undertook. That is to say, the ideas I was working with in my publications (on literature and

ethics, on European philosophy on the Holocaust) turned out to be linked to have some intellectual-

pedagogical content. I don’t think this is by chance. Plato’s dialogues are a form of pedagogy, as are Aristotle’s

surviving writings (they are supposed to be lecture notes).

As Ben Knights has argued:

Bodies of knowledge and pedagogic practices are inextricably linked. Subjects are produced in

the dialogues of the corridor and classroom as much as in the monograph or learned journal.

Professional debates embed and promote styles of pedagogy: intellectual history is

simultaneously the history of educational practices. All disciplines are simultaneously bodies

of knowledge and communities of practice, performing their own protocols for argument and

dialogue. (Knights 2005, p. 33)

That is to say, pedagogy is built-in to forms of knowledge and it doesn’t take very much to draw this out from

them to orient one’s own pedagogy.

Conclusion As a colleague has suggested

2, it is possible to transform deeply unloved and overlooked pedagogic tools:

Cinderellas can go to the ball. Much that we take for granted in our teaching can seem exhausted and worn

through. However, responding to student needs, perhaps uncovering some sense of its original purpose or

developing new aspects of some long-established practice can have very constructive and wide-ranging

results. In this piece, I have discussed how and why I wrote a text book and edited a text book series.

Centrally, I see textbooks – in the information age – less as providing information as orientation:

metacognition. Indeed, I think that metacognition is crucial to the traditions of higher education. Combined

with dialogical approach to education, developed from Paulo Freire, and responding to the particular history

of the discipline of English, this led to the particular approach that I have taken in the construction of my

writing for students.

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Baldick, C. (1983) The social mission of English criticism, 1848–1932. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Barry, P. (2001a) The longest suicide notes in theory?’ The English Association Newsletter Summer 2001 n.p.

2 Dr Jennie Osborn, former Consultant in Academic Practice at the Higher Education Academy.

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Barry, P. (2001b) English Association Discussion Documents: The “Good Science” approach to teaching

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Eaglestone, R. (2007) Transition, ‘hard’ theory and disciplinary consciousness. International Journal of

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