KEN WATSON

RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN THE TEACHING OFLITERATURE IN AUSTRALIAN SECONDARY SCHOOLS:

THE LAST THIRTY YEARS

ABSTRACT. Over the last 30 years there have been profound changes in theteaching of literature in Australian secondary schools. These changes have sprungpartly from the insights offered into reading practices by new critical theories andclassroom research, and partly from a realisation that of all subjects, literature

teaching, indeed mother-tongue teaching in general, is the least suited to a model ofteaching based on the transmission of inert knowledge. This article highlights someof the work emanating from Australian scholars and adapted within Australian

secondary school curricula.

KEY WORDS: action research, literary theory, models of teaching, reading prac-

tices, reader response

Over the last 30 years there have been profound changes in the teaching of

literature in Australian secondary schools, changes which make the subject

in the preceding 30 years seem, in retrospect, to have been in a state of

suspended animation. These changes have sprung partly from the insights

offered into reading practices by new critical theories and classroom re-

search, and partly from a realisation that of all subjects, literature teaching,

indeed English teaching in general, is the least suited to a model of teaching

based on the transmission of inert knowledge. (This is not to say, of course,

that the teacher has nothing in the way of specialised knowledge to offer

students. At the moment I am engaged in preparing a selection of Shake-

speare’s sonnets for use in senior classes; clearly, there are things senior

students need to be told about, or placed in a position to profitably research

the sonnet form and its history. To deprive them of background cultural

and historical knowledge is to place blinkers on their understanding.)

In the 1960s, the late James Britton argued that ‘subject English’ had

taken a wrong turning when it chose literary criticism, rather than literary

production, as its model. The literary critical model, particularly in its New

Critical period, inevitably elevated a literary canon which students were

called upon to admire – an invitation to intellectual passivity. Ian Reid has

called this the Gallery Model of English (Reid, 1984, p. 11). When New

L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature (2005) 5: 95–103 � Springer 2005

DOI 10.1007/s10674-004-5957-9

MOTHER-TONGUE EDUCATION IN SPECIFIC REGIONS

Criticism was dominant,1 texts were seen as formal, self-contained objects,

‘‘verbal icons’’ able to be discussed without reference to the conditions

(social, material, political) of their production. As American Gore Vidal

has put it in a recent novel, The Golden Age, ‘‘all historical context … was

to be sternly stripped away to reveal the text in its shy nakedness, weakly

etherised upon a table, prepared for critical autopsy’’ (Vidal, 2001, p. 353).

The more sophisticated the critic, the more accurate and revealing the

autopsy. This critical stance was profoundly disempowering, not only for

the students in the classroom, but for most of their teachers who tended to

latch on to the interpretations authorised by the most prestigious critics

and present them to the students, who were then expected to regurgitate

these interpretations in examinations. Hence the enormous market for

‘cribs’.

While there are still many teachers whose own education in New Critical

modes of thinking lead them to impose interpretations upon their students,

there is now a widespread curricular recognition of the value of students’

initial responses, which can then be refined in group or class discussion. In

place of the Gallery Model there is a Workshop Model, one which is

‘‘integrative and interactive’’ (Reid, p. 13). In part, this change has been

shaped by overseas research and experience (e.g., Dixon, 1975), but it has

also been supported by a considerable body of Australian research, mainly

of the kind known as action research but also by some larger-scale inves-

tigations.

Undoubtedly the most significant piece of research into the teaching of

literature in this country has been Jack Thomson’s Understanding Teen-

agers’ Reading (1987). Through questionnaires and a series of in-depth

interviews with school students about what they read and how they went

about the task of reading, Thomson was able to tap into the students’

reading-learning processes and trace the developmental stages involved and

the strategies they used. His model(see Table 1) of the process-stages and the

process-strategies has clear implications for the teaching of literature, and

seems as true today as it was when developed, nearly 20 years ago. He has

provided teachers with a map of the territory, and a recognition of the

importance of his stress on ‘‘reflexiveness’’ as a higher-order reading skill

1Leigh Dale’s study of literature teaching in Australian universities (Dale, 1997,passim) makes it clear that the approaches to literature advocated by the New Critics

and by F.R. Leavis were still dominant in Australian universities in the 1970s, andhence were a powerful influence in the schools for some time after that.

KEN WATSON96

can be seen in subsequent classroom textbooks and teaching materials (e.g.,

Forrestal et al., 1992; Watson, 1992b).

The starting point for Thomson’s research was Reader-Response The-

ory. Though poets and novelists over the centuries have voiced opinions that

TABLE 1

Reading literature: a developmental model.

Process stages: kinds of satisfaction

(Requirements for satisfaction at

all stages: enjoyment and

elementary understanding.)

Process strategies

1. Unreflective interest in action (a) rudimentary mental images

(stereotypes from film and television);

(b) predicting what might happen in the

short term;

2. Empathising (c) mental images of affect;

(d) expectations about characters;

3. Analogising (e) drawing on the repertoire of personal

and cultural experiences; making connec-

tions between characters and one’s life;

4. Reflecting on the significance

of events (theme) and behaviour

(distanced evaluation of the characters)

(f) generating expectations about

alternative possible long-term outcomes;

(g) filling in textual gaps;

(h) formulating puzzles, enigmas, accept-

ing larger textual hermeneutic challenges;

5. Reviewing the whole work

as the author’s creation

(i) drawing on literary and cultural

repertoires;

(j) interrogating the text to match the

world view offered by the text with one’s

own;

(k) recognition of implied author;

6. Consciously considered

relationship with the text, recogniton

of textual ideology, and understanding

of self (identity theme) and of

one’s own reading processes

(l) recogniton of implied reader in the text,

and the relationship between implied

author and implied reader;

(m) reflexiveness, leading to understand-

ing of textual ideology, personal identity

and one’s own reading processes.

(Thomson, 1987).

MOTHER-TONGUE EDUCATION IN SPECIFIC REGIONS 97

endorse the central principle of Reader Response,2 the theory itself was not

given substantial form until 1938 when Louise Rosenblatt’s Literature as

Exploration was published, and not taken much notice of until the late 1970s

when Rosenblatt returned to it in her The Reader the Text the Poem : the

Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978), and Wolfgang Iser’s The

Act of Reading (1978) was also published. (It should be noted, however, that

much of the classroom practice resulting from the increasingly widespread

acceptance of a Personal Growth Model of English teaching had led

teachers in the same direction.)

Both Rosenblatt and Iser were concerned with the experience whereby

the reader realises a work of literature. As Rosenblatt wrote:

The poem, then, must be thought of as an event in time. It is not an object or an ideal entity. It

happens during a coming-together, a compenetration, of a reader and a text. The reader brings

to the text his[sic] past experience and present personality. Under the magnetism of the ordered

symbols of the text, he marshals his resources and crystallises out from the stuff of memory,

thought and feeling a new order, a new experience, which he sees as the poem. This becomes

part of the ongoing stream of his life experience, to be reflected on from any angle important to

him as a human being. (Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 12).

In summary, then, the Reader-Response Theory of literature regards

reading as a creative act. As developed by Rosenblatt and Iser, the theory

asserts that:

• no two people read a text in exactly the same way because no two people

bring exactly the same background experience to the text;

• at the same time, it is possible to validate readings: a reader’s interpre-

tation must not be contradicted by any element of the text, and nothing

should be projected for which there is no verbal basis;

• writers leave ‘‘telling gaps’’ (Iser’s phrase) and ask the reader to be cre-

ative in filling them.

For those teachers who cared to reflect upon its possibilities, Reader-Re-

sponse Theory proved profoundly liberating. Since there was no one ‘right’

interpretation, their task no longer became one of imparting a definitive

reading of a text; instead, they were being invited to value their students’

2For example, Laurence Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, wrote:

no author … would presume to think all: the truest respect which you can pay to thereader’s understanding is to halve the matter amicably, and leave him something to

image, in his turn, as well as yourself. For my own part, I … do all that lies in mypower to keep his imagination as busy as my own.W.H. Auden has said:What a poem means is the outcome of a dialogue between the words on the page and

the person who happens to be reading it; that is to say, its meaning varies fromperson to person. (Auden, 1973)

KEN WATSON98

initial responses, and to devise activities which would encourage the students

to refine their interpretations through active exploration and discussion. It

ought to have proved liberating, too, for those students who grasped the

central tenet of the theory, but it seemed that most students – particularly the

younger ones – still believed that there was a right interpretation to which the

teacher alone held the key. In many apparently free-ranging class discussions

it seemed that from the pupils’ point of view it was still a game of ‘guess what

teacher’s thinking’. It was one thing to tell them that a range of interpreta-

tions was possible; it was quite another to convince them that this was so.

This led to the research questions: ‘Can Reader-Response Theory be made

explicit to junior and middle secondary students? Will such explicit knowl-

edge lead students to value their initial responses, and build upon them,

rather than wait for the teacher’s definitive interpretation?’ (Watson, 1992a).

In seeking a way of convincing younger students that a range of inter-

pretations was not only possible but almost inevitable, even with a short

text, it was hypothesised that picture books could provide an economical

and pleasurable way into an understanding, not only of Reader Response,

but of other literary theories as well. The modern picture book, while

ostensibly for audiences of young children from the ages of about three to

about seven, has become increasingly sophisticated, readily providing

teachers with examples of almost every textual feature or potential reading

act identified as significant by Reader-Response theorists, Post-structural-

ists, New Historicists, Cultural Materialists, Feminists (see, e.g., Bonny-

castle, 1996).

In the first stage of the research, the prize-winning John Brown, Rose and

the Midnight Cat (Wagner & Brooks, 1977) was used with classes in Years 8,

9 and 10; later the experiment was replicated with children as young as 10.

The written text consists of about 400 words; the illustrations are, however,

no mere accompaniment, but in a very real way complement and form a

dialogue with the words. After the story was read, and the illustrations

shown, the students were asked to write down, in as few words as possible,

what the story was about. Three different interpretations emerged. Even the

Year 8 students (i.e., 13–14 years old) readily recognised that if even so

short a story could lead to a range of interpretations, one would expect

longer works to generate an even greater range of responses. Hence the piece

of action research gave support to the belief that at least one major literary

theory, Reader Response, could be made explicit to junior secondary stu-

dents, and that having that explicit knowledge was an encouragement to

them to value their own initial responses, and build upon them, rather than

wait for the teacher’s definitive interpretation. Later, the experiment went a

stage further with small groups of Year 10 students, who, when advancing

yet a fourth interpretation of the story – one that saw it as being about death

MOTHER-TONGUE EDUCATION IN SPECIFIC REGIONS 99

and the acceptance of death – made the discovery that their readings were to

a degree culturally constructed. The experiment both here and with sub-

sequent Year 10 groups did show that yet another important insight pro-

vided by modern literary theory – that readers are to a degree constructed by

the society and culture within which they live – could be grasped by fifteen-

year-olds (Watson, 1992a, b).

Another aspect of modern literary theory that seemed important for

adolescents to grasp was the fact that all texts embody an ideology: ‘no text

is innocent’. Not surprisingly, students find ideology a difficult concept, the

more so because it is a characteristic of the structure called ‘ideology’ that it

conceals its own existence by producing a web of ‘evident truths’ (see, e.g.,

McCormick,1994, pp. 72–74). Here again, picture books proved a conve-

nient and economical way of exploring with students not only ideology but a

whole range of literary concepts. With groups of Year 9 students, Perrault’s

Cinderella, Babette Cole’s Prince Cinders and Princess Smartypants were

used to explore ideology, John Burningham’s Granpa to have them inves-

tigate the notion of ‘telling gaps’, and various versions of Hansel and Gretel

to enable them to grasp the distinction between ‘story’ and ‘discourse’.

These pieces of action research ultimately led to From Picture Book to

Literary Theory (Stephens & Watson, 1994; 2nd ed., 2003).

A more elaborate study than those involving the use of picture books

was based on the questions: ‘Can young readers be encouraged to reflect on

their processes of response? Is such an endeavour worthwhile?’ A research

model based on the work of Thomson (1987) and Benton and Fox (1985)

was developed for use with two groups of Year 9 students. The investigation

did seem to illustrate ‘‘the importance of ensuring that all students discover

for themselves not only what they have learnt, but how they have learnt it’’

(Durrant, Goodwin & Watson, 1990, p. 217). Further, the protocol mate-

rials (running commentary into a tape recorder, two pieces of writing, taped

small-group discussion) showed that in the small group situation these

young readers could make use of complex and diverse reading strategies:

‘‘questioning the text about motives, events, characters, settings; predicting

outcomes; … adjusting theories in the light of new evidence; holding judg-

ments in abeyance while awaiting more information; … empathising … ;

analogising’’ (p. 218).

The work of Bronwyn Mellor, Marnie O’Neill and Annette Paterson also

seems to have begun with concerns about students’ lack of awareness of ‘‘the

ways in which they operate to construct meanings and who, thus, are unable

to ‘read’ not only the terms of their own readings but those of others as well’’

(Mellor et al., 1992, p. 42). They argue that the growth model (and a reader

response theory that takes little account of cultural pressures) ‘‘disenfran-

chise[s] those students whose cultural experiences and values are not the

KEN WATSON100

dominant ones’’. Drawing heavily on post-structuralist theory, these three

Australian writers have produced a series of innovative and enormously

influential classroom texts which encourage students to recognise ‘‘the plu-

rality of a text’s meanings and the partiality of all texts and readings’’.

In their texts Reading Stories (1987), Reading Hamlet (1989), Reading

Fictions (1991) and Investigating Texts (1996), their aims have been to en-

able students to:

• ‘‘analyse the construction of readings,

• ‘‘read’’ other readings or interpretations,

• consider what is at stake in the disagreement between readings,

• make visible the gaps and silences of texts and readings,

• analyse what readings support in terms of the values they affirm,

• challenge other, especially dominant, readings,

• construct new readings.’’ (1992, p. 45)

Working from much the same premises, Wendy Morgan has shown the

value of using ‘‘unconventional’’ texts which, since they do not carry a load

of prior critical baggage, are more likely to help students become aware of

how active their role is in constructing meaning. A Post-Structuralist English

Classroom: the Example of Ned Kelly (1992) provides an account of an

extended unit based on a range of written and visual materials about Ned

Kelly – a significant Australian iconic figure, seen by many as a folk-hero –

at the end of which one student commented:

After studying the history of Ned Kelly I understand that different texts produce different

meanings dependingofwho they’rewrittenby,what [social ] class it is done for,whether the people

are pro or con to the Kellys and what kind of character is needed as if in a ‘fictional’ story.

I came to understand how people write in such away to let the reader stand from the angle of their

point of view, just as cameras are used to provide special effects. Each text showed me a different

way of telling the story or in some cases a completely different story. Texts encourage you to be on

their side, take on their views. (pp. 75–76)

The Workshop Model of teaching is, of course, ideally suited to such

explorations, but in one particular area of English, the teaching of Shake-

speare, the Gallery Model with its ancient apparatus of read-around-the-

class, character analyses, paraphrases and dictated notes was alive and well,

even into the late 1990s (Watson, 2003). At that point, it seemed that only a

minority were experiencing what could be described as an active approach

to Shakespeare (i.e., the Workshop Model, together with techniques bor-

rowed from drama classes). This was despite the pioneering work of David

Mallick (1984) and Wendy Michaels (1986) in Australia, and in the 1990s a

range of excellent teaching materials, some home-grown (The St Clair

Shakespeare Workshop Series) and some imported (the Cambridge School

Shakespeare).

MOTHER-TONGUE EDUCATION IN SPECIFIC REGIONS 101

During the period under review, there has been a large-scale national

survey designed to keep teachers in touch with the leisure reading of teenagers

(Bunbury et al., 1995), and several smaller surveys based on particular states

or cities (e.g., Watson, 1987; Martino, 2001; Manuel & Robinson, 2002).

While Sawyer (2002) detected in the professional literature of the early

1990s a slight revival of Leavisite/New Critical thinking in Australia, as he

shows, this was not sustained. Instead, there has been a steady movement,

slower in some aspects of the subject than in others, in the opposite direc-

tion: away from a view of literature as a body of objective knowledge to a

view of it as a site for active exploration and contest of meanings. The real

danger is not a return to the Gallery Model and the thinking that under-

pinned it, but in losing sight of the need to provide classroom conditions

which will encourage enthusiastic enjoyment as well as a critical awareness

of the constructedness of text.

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P.O. Box 287Rozelle, NSW 2039AustraliaE-mail: kendw@bigpond.com

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