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ABSTRACT
The focus here is on English teaching and media education, with particular reference to the Australian and English contexts. It considers the role and significance of media in and for English teaching, as a school subject. It asks: What are the legacies of Cultural Studies in this regard? English teaching is considered in relation to, first, the UK national curriculum, the 1989 Cox Report and what was called ‘Cultural Analysis’, and second, the Australian Curriculum, and the programmatic shift in focus to ‘texts’. In particular, we want to think about the lost legacies of Cultural Studies: those insights and orientations that don’t seem to have been taken up, or perhaps have withered, or have fallen away. This includes Cultural Studies’ key concern with everyday life and media culture, as practice and flow. Some questions remain: What remains of Cultural Studies today, with regard to English teaching and media education? Moreover, What possibilities and prospects for curriculum renewal are there in the current conjecture, in the third decade of the 21st century?
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. An especially relevant text, although curiously overlooked in these interviews, and well worth revisiting (Baron et al. Citation1980/2005).
2. The case of Media Studies in schools is a separate matter, and dealt with extensively elsewhere (e.g. Sefton-Green Citation2011; Connolly, Citation2021a; see also Dezuanni, Citation2016).
3. It should be noted, however, that CCCS did have a pedagogical emphasis, especially early on, focused more specifically on postgraduate study (Johnson Citation2013).
4. See Goodwyn (Citation2019) for an overview of this version of English teaching, fifty years after the event itself (‘Dartmouth’), in 1966. See also Green (Citation2018a) for a more contextual account.
5. The situation is somewhat different in Australia, as elaborated below.
6. See Koh (Citation2015) for a recent account of Cultural Studies and secondary curriculum reform in Hong Kong – a good instance, in fact, of the constrained manner in which Cultural Studies did ‘go to school’, for a while at least. It needs also to be taken into account that neither subject English teaching nor Cultural Studies are ever fixed or singular as curriculum identities.
8. The others being ‘Adult Needs’ and ‘Cross-Curricular’ – however, both of these so-called ‘models’ are widely seen as pertaining less immediately to English teaching as a distinctive subject-area in its own right.
9. This was most certainly not the case for Cultural Studies Goes to School, however – quite the opposite, in fact.
10. For one critical response to Turner, see Lucy (Citation2008).
11. She also points specifically to the influence of ‘cultural studies’ (Morgan Citation1997, 23). It is interesting that Turner makes no reference to Morgan’s work or that of others influenced by Cultural Studies in similar ways (e.g. Ray Misson). In this regard, see also Misson and Morgan (Citation2006).
12. All this further indicates, moreover, the need to be sensitive to national-cultural differences in discussions such as the present one.
13. Nonetheless, the relationship between Cultural Studies and ‘critical literacy’ clearly warrants further investigation in its own right, especially since it is far from straightforward. See the Special Issue on ‘Cultural Studies and Critical Literacies’ in the International Journal of Cultural Studies (Vol. 16, No. 5, 2015). See also Luke (Citation2018) for a particular view of this relationship, although it is not his primary concern, and his focus overall is more sociological.
14. It needs to be noted here that this applied to England and Wales, and not to the United Kingdom more generally – something which has been maintained since then.
15. Again, for a more detailed account of this period, see Connolly (Citation2021a [Ch4]).
16. These influences are discussed in more detail elsewhere (see Connolly Citation2021b).
17. This is partly recognized elsewhere in the Australian Curriculum’s Cross-Curriculum Priorities, making explicit reference to Asia and to Australian indigenous cultures and histories (and also to ‘sustainability’).
18. Sawyer (Citation2007) points to the 2000 senior secondary English Syllabus in New South Wales as an important register of English curriculum change in this regard, stating that ‘it was this Syllabus which helped broaden the model of English to include cultural studies with an accompanying critical literacy pedagogy, while still retaining the traditional emphasis on close textual study’ (p. 77).
19. As Buckingham and Sefton-Green (Citation1994, 215) similarly concluded, regarding media education: ‘It will need to move beyond its traditional focus on texts and pay closer attention to the ways in which texts are socially circulated and used’. They continued thus: ‘In this context, the specialist study of particular media will need to be located within the broader studies of cultural processes: Media Studies (like English) will need to become part of a broader discipline, one which might be called Cultural Studies’.
20. It is worth noting here the early CCCS position on literary studies: ‘while drawing on the analysis of texts, [it] breaks with the literary-critical tradition of a too text-bound practice, as well as with the text-context framework of the so-called “sociology of literature”, and relocates both in the analysis of literary formations and in literature as an institutional practice’ (Baron et al. Citation1980/2005, p. viii).
21. As ‘field-work’, for instance – although it is worth recalling the pedagogical significance of excursions and the like in work such as Reflections, often seen as evincing an early form of cultural studies in English teaching. On Reflections, a celebrated English coursebook, see Gibbons (Citation2019, 21–22).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Bill Green
Bill Green is Emeritus Professor of Education at Charles Sturt University, NSW, Australia. His research and scholarly interests range across curriculum theory and history, English teaching, and literacy education, as well as doctoral research education. His recent publications include Engaging Curriculum: Bridging the Curriculum Theory and English Education Divide (Routledge, 2018), and two co-edited books Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era: Understanding the (Post-)National L1 Subjects in New and Uncertain Times (Springer, 2020) and Curriculum Challenges and Opportunities in a Changing World: Essays in Transnational Curriculum Inquiry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Steve Connolly
Steve Connolly is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and Social Care at Anglia Ruskin University, UK, where he teaches on a range of postgraduate courses. His research interests focus on questions of media literacies and other learning processes and how these relate to wider issues involving both curriculum and teacher education. He recently published his first single-authored monograph entitled The Changing Role of Media in The English Curriculum: Returning to Nowhere (Routledge, 2021). He has also authored a number of book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles in the areas of media education, literacies and curriculum.