Personally (and Passively) Yours: girls, literacy and education

Abstract

The dominant language and literature teaching methodologies popularised in Australia, North America and the United Kingdom emphasise individualism and personalism. In addition, common assumptions held by many teachers are that language and literature are ideologically innocent, neutral fields of study. As a result, discourses about school writing and school reading maintain a rather insistent emphasis on the personal and the individual, with the result that the concept of language as a social semiotic system is obscured. This has obvious implications for a study of gender and literacy, because populist pedagogical discourses cannot account for textual ideology or for the construction of gendered subjectivity. This paper offers a critical discussion of the dominant pedagogical discourses about language and language learning, and about reading and textual analysis, and suggests a range of alternative approaches to language and literature education which offer a more productive field for feminist classroom textual practice. Discourse and genre theory, feminist aesthetics, and theories of language and subjectivity are all addressed briefly as alternative positions from which to consider issues of textuality in the classroom.