What can history offer literacy research in new times?

Phil Cormack

Paper presented as part of Symposium: 'New Times For Literacy, Pedagogy

and Young People: Research Challenges'

Presenters: Bill Green (chair), Barbara Comber, Phil Cormack, Helen

Nixon, Jo-Anne Reid.

Presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education

national conference, Brisbane, Nov 30 - Dec 4, 1997

Contact details:

Phil Cormack

Language and Literacy Research Centre

University of South Australia

Holbrooks Rd

Underdale SA 5032

Tel: +61 8 8302 6471

Fax: +61 8 8302 6315

Email: phil.cormack@unisa.edu.au

Introduction

This paper explores the issues involved in designing an historical

study arising out of a contemporary educational issue and the

contributions such a study can make to research. This paper arises from

a project that examines broad issues of schooling, literacy and the

young adolescent as they are being brought together as objects of study

and concern in these 'new times'.

In relation to literacy, conceptions of 'new times' emphasise the ways

that communication and information technology have been inserted into

even the most mundane aspects of life in postindustrial 'northern

hemisphere' societies. All aspects of life have become saturated with

print-based and multi-media texts such that expanded (multi-)literacies

(New London Group 1996), conceived of as encompassing new kinds of text

production and consumption, are seen as essential to accessing social,

economic and cultural opportunities.

In a related way, schooling is being regarded as a key site for

responding to these new kinds of literacy and other changes to society.

Different versions of what it is to be literate and the pedagogical

technologies that accompany these visions have been the subject of

renewed debate in the 1980s and 1990s eg phonics vs whole language,

genre vs process, immersion vs direct instruction ([Cormack & Comber,

1996; Comber & Cormack, 1995). Also conceptions of the structure of

schooling have come under challenge as the vast majority of the school

population has been locked into remaining until year 12. Arguments have

been made for introducing a 'middle' phase of schooling better suited

to young adolescents who currently work in the upper primary and lower

seconDIN ENRef (Moore, Monaghan, and Harman (1997) provide a useful

summary of what might be gained from such approaches), rather it is to

explore the potential of a genealogical study a 'history of the

present' to inform research and debate about a contemporary issue

broadly conceived as the production of the adolescent as a literate

subject in new times.

This will involve investigation into the ways in which the adolescent,

literacy and schooling have come together in a variety of policy and

other contexts in Australian history. Genealogical method is based on

the work of Foucault whose studies of institutions and practices

including prisons (1977) and sexuality (1978, 1985, 1990) provided

insights into the constitution of people as objects and subjects in and

through discourse. Foucault's work, and the work of those who have

followed him, emphasised the study of the 'immediate' and 'local'

(Foucault 1978, p.97) in examining how power is exercised, emphasising

the complexity and fragility of events in history.

Thus my concern is to be alert for continuities and discontinuities in

the histories of literacy, adolescence and schooling and to consider

the mode of their intersection at different times as contingent or even

haphazard (Rose 1996, p.129).

Genealogy opposes itself to traditional historical method... For the

genealogist there are no fixed essences, no underlying laws, no

metaphysical finalities. Genealogy seeks out discontinuities where

others found continuous development. It finds recurrences and play

where others found progress and seriousness. (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1986,

p.106)

A key concept within such an approach is the 'problematisation'. This

is a term which has arisen out of the genealogical work of Foucault in

which he uses the study of history to problematise a contemporary

issue. Broadly speaking a problematisation is an object of discursive

and non-discursive practices something that has been (re)created

within discourses, institutions and practices Ð that is held up as a

site for study, debate or consideration.

Problematization is not the representation of a preexisting object, or

the creation through discourse of an object that does not exist. It is

the totality of discursive and non-discursive practices that brings

something into the play of truth and falsehood, and sets it up as an

object for the mind (Foucault 1984, quoted in Castel 1994)

Rose (1996) illustrates how the concept of a problematisation might

work in relation to a genealogy of human subjectivity.

Where, how and by whom are aspects of the human being rendered

problematic, according to what systems of judgement and in relation to

what concerns? To take some pertinent examples, one might consider ways

in which the language of constitutions and character comes to operate

within the themes of urban decline and degeneracy articulated by

psychiatrists, urban reformers and politicians in the last decades of

the nineteenth century, or the ways in which the vocabulary of

adjustment and maladjustment comes to be used to problematize conduct

in sites as diverse as the workplace, the courtroom and the school in

the 1920s and 1930s. ADDIN ENRef (Rose, 1996, p.131)

My study can be considered as an aspect of the broader issues that Rose

discusses. I am exploring how, through the construction of literacy in

and beyond schooling, that adolescents came to be constituted as

problem and object of concern. My study will consider the ways that

literacy and schooling have intersected in Australian history this

century with the figure of the adolescent. In conducting this research,

I hope to use history to unpick taken for granted notions about young

people, literacy and schooling.

[T]he project of histories of the present can be understood as the

making of histories that locate the present as a strange, rather than

familiar landscape, where that which has gone without saying becomes

problematic. (Tyler & Johnson 1991, p.2)

Genealogy as a critical strategy

To explore the potential of such an approach, I have considered the

strategies employed by genealogical studies, or those with genealogical

dimensions, to make contemporary discursive and non-discursive

practices a 'strange, rather than familiar landscape'. Three strategies

are discussed here:

1 identifying continuities

2 identifying breaks and discontinuities

3 illustrating contingencies, accidents and the impact of the local

Identifying continuities

A key strategy in a genealogy is to start with a particular problematic

in the present and trace the continuities in its constitution through

history. It is to ask at what time and in what circumstances did this

issue come to be formulated as an object of study and concern and in

what ways has that issue been (re)constituted since that time? In

educational terms, policy issues and pedagogical practices can be

analysed with such continuities in mind to consider where and when they

arose and how they are being played out in the present. This is the use

of history to distance the reader and researcher from the present, to

read against the grain of contemporary common knowledge and consider

the present from the perspective of the past.

In relation to children and schooling, Valerie Walkerdine makes

exemplary use of history in this way. In her studies of early childhood

education ADDIN ENRef (Walkerdine, 1984) , mathematics and development

ADDIN ENRef (Walkerdine, 1988) , and young girls and popular culture

ADDIN ENRef (Walkerdine, 1997) , she shows how the construction of

childhood has been modelled on the ideal of the rational western male

since the nineteenth century. She traces that continuity to show how

this norm has been reconfigured within current educational practices

such as teaching approaches and curriculum materials (eg, the focus on

the creative child, discovery learning) to maintain the centrality of a

masculinist construction of the child in school. It is her uses of

history that form the basis of these powerful and effective critiques.

The identification of this and other continuities has been useful in my

own 'readings' of contemporary representations of young adolescents in

policy and other educational texts. For example an examination of a

pamphlet produced for parents about young adolescents and middle

schooling (Cormack, forthcoming), shows how the presentation of a set

of 'characteristics' of students in the middle years constitutes the

normal adolescent as a rational, male subject in the way that

Walkerdine describes.

I have argued that 'the nature of the child' is not discovered but

produced in regimes of truth created on those very practice which

proclaim the child in all his naturalness. I write 'his' advisedly,

because a central plank of my argument has been that although this

child is taken to be gender neutral, actually he is always figured as a

boy, a boy who is playful, creative, naughty, rule-breaking, rational.

ADDIN ENRef (Walkerdine, 1997, p.169)

The brochure describes characteristics of adolescence which constructs

the adolescent as rule-breaking and naughty such as:

¥ wanting to set boundaries while at the same time wanting to push these

¥ wanting to be treated like adults yet sometimes displaying child-like

¥ wanting to exercise their rights but sometimes without accepting

Conceptions of rationality, of maintaining a rational middle ground,

are also present as represented by these characteristics:

¥ maintaining a degree of conformity while still being an individual

¥ feeling an overwhelming desire to belong to a peer group and facing

These critiques based on historical continuities reveal that in much of

the discourse that describes and analyses young people and their

relations to new technologies and other features of new times, there is

the continued re-invention of gendered binaries. History can help show

how the brave new technological world is being invested with many of

the same old systemic forms of privilege and disenfranchisement of

people according to gender, culture, race and class.

Questions for educational research in new times arising from this insight:

¥ what versions of past structures and representations are being

¥ what opportunities for challenging essentialist norms and binaries are

Identifying breaks and discontinuities

As well as focusing on the continuities inherent in a problematisation,

genealogical approaches can identify breaks and discontinuities.

History shows that alliances of ideas and issues are constantly being

formed and reformed in relation to adolescents and their schooling. A

recent example has been the reinvigoration of the view in the early

1990s from genrists that grammar and rhetoric are important components

of literacy education ADDIN ENRef (Green, in press) . Unlike earlier

versions of grammar in the curriculum, this approach has been justified

in part from an equity perspective in the name of giving disadvantaged

students access to important cultural capital and schooling

credentials. Thus while grammar has to some extent remained a

continuity, it has been invested with different meanings at different

times. This insight can alert researchers to the importance of tracing

the genealogy of various practices and being aware that some ideas and

labels can be reconfigures as vehicles for new intentions and

practices.

A second value of identifying breaks and discontinuities lies in the

opportunity it provides to relate the constitution of the problematic

that occurs at any one time to broader social, political, economic and

cultural circumstances. The foregrounding, backgrounding and/or

rediscovery of a problematisation can be related to historical

configurations of these circumstances. which, if identified, can be

used to analyse current circumstances.

One study that brings home both of the benefits just described is the

Green, Hodgens and Luke (1994) examination of the history of literacy

debates in Australia since World War 2. This history tracks the

different versions of literacy that have been promulgated in Australian

media. They conclude that literacy acts as a 'code word' (p.478) or a

'stand in' for both positive and negative values. Table 1 summarises

the values they describe.

Table 1: Values attached to literacy as identified in Green Hodgens &

Luke (1994, p.478)

Negative values Positive values ¥ delinquency

¥ revolutionary or subversive ideologies

¥ sexual immorality and moral decay

¥ barbarity

¥ technological incompetence

¥ American cultural influence

¥ mental and physical handicap

¥ republicanism

¥ socioeconomic 'disadvantage'

¥ inadequate assimilation into Anglo/Australian culture

¥ poor initial education ¥ allegiance to the crown and commonwealth

¥ Protestant religious virtues

¥ discipline and obedience to authority

¥ mastery of British 'proper speech'

¥ innate intellectual gifts

¥ monocultural Anglo/Australian nationalism

¥ scientific and technological competitiveness

¥ mental and physical health

¥ employability and job competence

This study illustrates the way that concepts such as literacy can act

as an empty signifier to which can be brought various political, moral,

social, economic and other concerns. Green, Hodgens and Luke also show

that the versions of literacy are implicated in valorising particular

literate subjectivities at different times eg a 'moral' subject in

the 1950s; an 'economic' subject in the 1980s and that these

subjectivities have been formed in the context of various literacy

crises. The analysis of these crises reveals that they are related to

broader social, cultural and economic factors such as globalisation,

technological change and demographic factors (pp.478-9).

Such insights about literacy have implications for my own study. They

demonstrate that concepts such as literacy, adolescence, school are the

focus of constant struggle as to their signification. While these terms

bear the traces of their history, they are also being reconfigured in

terms of broader social, cultural and economic circumstances.

An examination of the experience of adolescents and related issues of

school reform and the teaching of English in relation to broader social

circumstances seems to have potential. For example, in the first

decades of the century in Australia, vocational and national efficiency

arguments for the extension of public schooling into the adolescent

years were justified in terms of the need for greater levels of reading

and writing and the civilising force of English literature (Austin &

Selleck 1975, King 1982). In the same era, the so-called 'father' of

adolescent psychology, G. Stanley Hall, linked declining standards in

English with the shortcomings of schools in the USA.

By general consent both high school and college youth in this country

are in an advanced stage of degeneration in the command of this world's

greatest organ of the intellect, and that despite the fact that the

study of English often continues from primary into college grades, that

no topic counts for more, and that marked deficiency here often debars

from all other courses. Every careful study of the subject for nearly

twenty years shows deterioration... (Hall 1904, p.456)

In the 1950s and 1960s, a period of massive expansion of secondary

schooling to the entire population, coinciding with economic expansion,

concerns about adolescents were often built around young peoples'

connections with popular culture including the 'reading' of comics,

television and music (Bessant 1991).

Today, in a new era of focus on adolescent 'middle schooling',

commentators from critical theorists (Freire & Giroux 1989; Fine 1994)

to neo-conservatives (Hirsch 1987) cite (their own versions of)

literacy as saviour and/or problem for young people. There is a concern

about the impact of popular cultural texts on young people (Gilbert &

Taylor 1991). There are calls for schools to teach disadvantaged youth

how to use a range of texts in a time when literacy is more important

than ever in allowing access to adequate work and life opportunities

(Fine 1994). Others call for cultural studies in schools that will

allow young people to understand and engage in the politics of

representation in a postmodern society (Giroux 1996).

Questions for educational research in new times arising from this

insight:

¥ what meanings have been applied to 'literacy' and 'adolescents' in the past?

¥ how are those meanings being (re)configured in new times?

¥ what broad social, cultural, economic and other forces for change are

Illustrating contingencies, accidents and the impact of the local

Beyond illustrating continuities and discontinuities in the

constitution of literacy, adolescence and schooling, historical studies

can also illustrate the contingencies, accidents and particular

circumstances that have led to their contemporary constitution in

order to show that it could have been otherwise.

[T]he 'history of the present' may be loosely characterised by its use

of historical resources to reflect upon the contingency, singularity,

interconnections, and potentialities of the diverse trajectories of

those elements which compose present social arrangements and

experience. Such a history renews a quest for methodologies adequate to

the problems of division, dispersion, and difference within history,

and seeks to prevent anachronistic understandings of the past that make

the present a necessary outcome of a necessarily continuous past. (Dean

1994 p.21)

In other words this is an approach that resists the tendency in

conventional approaches to history to produce present circumstances as

inevitable.

Stephen Ball's ADDIN ENRef (Ball, 1990) ; ADDIN ENRef (Ball, 1994)

examination of education reform in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s,

illustrates the ways that the curriculum, pedagogy and schools were the

site of discursive struggle within political, bureaucratic and public

spaces. The particular value of his study is the way that he makes

visible not only the 'cultural-restorationist' ideology that eventually

came to dominate curriculum discourse but also those other viewpoints

which came to be silenced.

In effect, genealogy identifies and counterpoints antagonistic

discourses - the dominant and the silenced, the 'truthful' and

illegitimate. (Ball, 1994, p.4)

His interviews with key participants and examination of the micro level

of reform demonstrate that circumstance, personal alliances and

political deal-making are significant factors alongside ideology and

policy in deciding the eventual shape of education reform. Ball also

demonstrates that while some aspects of education reform have a

history, appearing to arise out of what has come before, other aspects

are 'shots in the dark, policies without pedigree' ADDIN ENRef (Ball,

1990, p.3) shaped by intersections of opportunity and chance.

For my own work this implies that issues of the local and the

particular must be considered in any consideration of the history of a

problematisation. Luke and Freebody ADDIN ENRef (Luke & Freebody, in

press/1996) illustrate this in their examination of the place of

'critical' literacy within official discourse in Australian schools and

curricula and show that it is very different from the experience in

other countries.

The discourses and contexts for curriculum policy in the US, UK and

Canada differ considerably, each presenting to literacy educators

particular sets of practical possibilities, community cultural

resources and local thresholds that constrain what will count as

'official knowledge', literate practice and competence. (Luke &

Freebody, in press, p.14)

In my own Australian based study, consideration of the local involves

the allowing for differences within the nation as state-based

bureaucracies and particular educators have inflected broader policy

and ideologies with their own local circumstances and possibilities.

'Critical literacy' is one case in point, as also are the various

versions of middle schooling being developed from state to state and in

the different school sectors.

Questions for educational research in new times arising from this

insight:

¥ what aspects of schooling policy in relation to new technologies are

¥ how are local circumstances and personnel inflecting official versions

This paper has discussed the potential for using a genealogical

approach to critically study the history of a problematisation. Three

strategies with potential to inform research focussing on literacy,

schooling and young people in new times have been discussed:

identification of continuities; identification of breaks and

discontinuities and; highlighting the contingent, circumstantial and

local nature of change.

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