Memory/History

The essays that comprise this special issue of Changing English explore the lessons that we might learn from memory. All the contributors have rich stories to tell about moments in their pasts as educators, evoking circumstances and opportunities that contrast with the world as we know it now. Yet this is no exercise in nostalgia, as though there was once a time when life was better – when (say) educators were able to engage in richer forms of professional learning than appears to be the case at present. None of the contributors is making a claim of this kind. The question that motivates the following essays is: how can memory (and the history that memory implies) provide a standpoint within the present? If there is anything to lament, it is not the passing of a mythical golden age, but (as Ian Reid observes in the opening essay to this issue) the fact that an historical consciousness no longer shapes our awareness of the present, reflecting a loss of a significant body of experience and knowledge that surely diminishes our work as educators.

This special issue has partly been prompted by the publication of English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy, by Peter Medway, John Hardcastle, Georgina Brewis, and David Crook, a richly detailed account of life in three schools at the time of the emergence of the so-called ‘New English’ or ‘Growth Pedagogy’ (Medway et al. 2014). The study performs a useful function in dislodging us from broad brush-stroke claims about ‘Growth’, challenging, in particular, the notion that it was quintessentially a pedagogy for articulate, middle-class students. The authors revisit the circumstances in which educators like Harold Rosen and John Dixon began formulating an alternative vision of the role that English might play in the school curriculum, showing how they were driven by a belief in the importance of acknowledging and valuing the experiences of the working-class students with whom they were working. To explain their motivation for writing their study, Medway and his co-authors quote Rosen as remarking that history ‘is about saying there was another way’ (see Medway et al. 2014, 6). Rosen’s point is that people have not always thought about education in the manner they do now, that the very language we use at the present moment to give an account of our practice (‘outcomes’, ‘effect size’, ‘impact factor’, for example) is not the language that educators once used. To trace how this change has occurred and to mark the differences between then and now is an important way to put contemporary attitudes and practices into a critical perspective.

All the essays assembled in this issue are about showing ‘there was another way’. This is not to say, however, that this awareness of alternative possibilities is simply about the choices these educators made then (or might make now). The subtle play between memory and history that is a feature of the essays in this issue reflects, rather, the complexities of reflexively engaging with one’s circumstances (past and present), opening up new ways of seeing that point beyond accepted accounts of life (then and now). Several of the contributors reflect on how, as a result of their inquiries into their pasts, their essays finally took on a form that they had not initially envisaged (see essays by Monica Brady, Piet-Hein van de Ven, Wayne Sawyer and Prue Gill). Rather than reporting on existing knowledge, they have, instead, used the essay form to engage in an inquiry that has yielded unexpected insights into their situations as educators and historical actors. The act of writing has been a means of interrogating the memories that they thought they had as well as the larger histories which shaped and were shaped by their actions.

None of the contributors understands memory as purely an individual experience: their personal memories prompt them to engage in larger socio-cultural analyses, teasing out the multiple contexts that mediate their personal experiences and giving them a larger significance than might be suggested by the idea of writing about one’s memories. Piet-Hein van de Ven conveys the tenor of several essays when he remarks that ‘all that I have been (and am) as a teacher is crucially a function of the institutional settings in which I have worked, of the opportunities they have given me to learn and to grow’, an insight that might also be taken from the essays by Monica Brady and Prue Gill. By the same token, through beginning with the rich particularities of their individual experiences, the authors have avoided positing history as somehow defining the experiences they reconstruct, as when we reify history by referring to periods (‘The Victorian Age’) or events (‘The Great Depression’) or, for that matter, pedagogical bandwagons (‘Growth’, ‘Genre’, ‘Critical Literacy’), as though these larger abstractions somehow exist apart from the people and circumstances they are used to explain. In his essay, John Hardcastle quotes Harold Rosen again, recalling his steadfast refusal to treat social contexts as sociological abstractions, as when we invoke students’ ‘backgrounds’ as somehow explaining their attitudes and values, rather than thinking of social context as something that we live and negotiate each day as we interact with students in our classrooms.

So it is with the various ways that the contributors to this issue transcend any notion of history as something that has simply happened to them. Instead, they explore the past as moments in which they themselves have participated, showing how those moments were significant in the making of themselves, and thus opening the prospect that history is still ultimately something we make, even when we might not be fully aware of our intentions or the full implications of our actions (or, indeed, when we might be momentarily rendered speechless vis-à-vis the enormity of events that have taken place). Hardcastle might point out that there is yet another lesson from Rosen embedded in what we have just written. He notes that Rosen apparently set E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class ([1963] 1968) as prescribed reading for his Masters students. We are also thinking, however, of Walter Benjamin’s various meditations on history (from which both Hardcastle and Gill also draw), specifically his injunction to try to take a standpoint within the present, rather than imagining that it is tenable to position ourselves vis-à-vis the events that we are witnessing (Benjamin 1973, 87). The latter position, paradoxically, disables us when it comes to taking action that might change the world, reducing us to the position of passive observers of what is happening.

With Benjamin in mind, it is finally worth noting that the essays that follow predominantly take the form of narrative, or at least combine narrative with more analytical language in ways that challenge accepted conventions of academic writing, as when Tony Petrosky and Vivian Mihalakis deliberately interrupt their inquiry into the collective amnesia surrounding Donald Graves’ work with personal accounts of their experiences of teaching writing. Along with memory, storytelling is another activity that has been devalued at the current moment (an influential statement about professional learning in Victoria, for example, dismisses teachers’ ‘anecdotes’ as an unreliable vehicle for inquiring into teaching and learning, invoking the importance of standardised test data as the only way to gauge a teacher’s effectiveness; DE&T 2005). But it is precisely through telling their stories that the contributors to this issue have been able to convey a sense of history as they have lived it. They all construct accounts of the past in human terms that invite readers to share in the insights opened up by the historical imagination.

Brenton Doecke
[email protected] Turvey
[email protected] Yandell
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