Negotiating the Curriculum.

Abstract

In the late 1970s in Australia, it had become fashionable for schools in Australia to produce language policies across the curriculum. Because I was at that time convinced that such policies would be ineffectual unless they were accompanied by changes to the school’s administrative structure, its curriculum and its educational philosophy, I wanted to explore an issue that went behind language to the eternal triangle of education: the teacher, the child and the curriculum. This exploration owes a considerable debt to Professor James Britton, who offered valuable encouragement and advice in the early years of the work of the various ‘language and learning’ teams in Australia. Britton supported our growing belief that the more profitable question to put to whole school staffs is not ‘How can we develop the child’s language?’, but ‘How do children (and for that matter, we) learn? The first question quite often threatens those teachers who consider themselves unqualified to teach language, and it can also lead to petty bickering about the perennial bogey surface-features of spelling, punctuation and ‘proper’ presentation. If language across the curriculum is associated with the English faculty, Sampson’s ‘Every teacher is a teacher of English’ (1926) becomes a misleading focus. But put the second question, and all teachers, lecturers and administrators are, or should be, equal. This is a question to which we all should have personal, articulate and perpetually speculative responses. Allied to the question of ‘How do children learn?’ are further teasers, such as ‘Under which conditions do children learn most effectively?’, ‘What is learning?’, and ‘Do we all learn in the same way?’