The Struggle with Cultural Consecration in English: Turning Towards Youth Literacies

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the continued cultural consecration of narrow forms of knowledge and literate practice in senior Australian English curricula. Despite the prevalence of Personal Growth approaches to English throughout Australia in the latter decades of the Twentieth century, the analysis of curricula reveals a contradiction between stated goals of access and relevance and the impact they have on producing a hierarchical English curriculum. Bourdieu’s work on fields of cultural production is employed to analyse the processes and power structures that define and explain how knowledge becomes available for study. The second part of this paper inquires into the range of discourses, practices and texts associated with ‘youth literacies’, those fluid, hybrid, diverse, and multiple ways that young people engage in the world using a wide array of digital, multimodal media, and how these might challenge consecrated forms of knowledge and knowing.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth literacies
• subject-English
• curriculum
• consecration
• Pierre Bourdieu

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the reviewers, as well as Bill Green and Richard Teese for their support in the preparation of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As control over education in Australia is constitutionally delegated to states, each has its own senior English curriculum.

2. For a more detailed analysis of these text lists, see Bacalja and Bliss (2018) and Bliss and Bacalja (2020).

3. Each year, the curriculum authorities in Victoria release data which shows the percentage of students studying each text as well as the average score for each text on the final Examination.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alex Bacalja

Alex Bacalja is a lecturer in language and literacy and member of the Language and Literacy Research Hub in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne. He is currently the Victorian Delegate for the Australian Association for the Teaching of English. His work and publications have focused on critical and digital literacies and the impact of digital technologies on the teaching of English.