Changing English

Studies in Culture and Education

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccen20

What Do We Want Students to Know from Being

Taught a Poem?

Wayne Sawyer & Larissa McLean Davies

To cite this article: Wayne Sawyer & Larissa McLean Davies (2021) What Do We Want
Students to Know from Being Taught a Poem?, Changing English, 28:1, 103-117, DOI:
10.1080/1358684X.2020.1842174

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2020.1842174

Published online: 04 Feb 2021.

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CHANGING ENGLISH
2021, VOL. 28, NO. 1, 103–117
https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2020.1842174

What Do We Want Students to Know from Being Taught a Poem?

a b
Wayne Sawyer and Larissa McLean Davies
a
School of Education, Western Sydney University, Penrith, Australia; bMelbourne Graduate School of
Education, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This paper uses a Gwen Harwood poem to open up questions of Literature; knowledge;
“knowing” around the teaching of Literature. Following our own knowing; poetry
brief reading of the poem, we particularly discuss ways in which
questions of knowing/knowledge have been considered in
Literature teaching historically, such as: - the binary of “knowledge”
and “experience” - the role of the cognitive in teaching/studying
Literature - forms of knowing that include the aesthetic and affect -
how knowledge might be “made” in the Literature classroom: the
role of pedagogy and the question of “producing culture” The
article concludes with a discussion of how such issues have arisen
in a set of interviews with a small number of teachers in Australia
and England. Their views on the teaching of Literature help us
reflect on the knowledge issues opened up earlier in the article.

Suburban Sonnet
Gwen Harwood

She practises a fugue, though it can matter

to no one now if she plays well or not.
Beside her on the floor two children chatter,
then scream and fight. She hushes them. A pot
boils over. As she rushes to the stove
too late, a wave of nausea overpowers
subject and counter-subject. Zest and love
drain out with soapy water as she scours
the crusted milk. Her veins ache. Once she played
for Rubinstein, who yawned. The children caper
round a sprung mousetrap where a mouse lies dead.
When the soft corpse won’t move they seem afraid.
She comforts them; and wraps it in a paper
featuring: Tasty dishes from stale bread.1

Though at many levels instantly recognisable, large areas of the parental experience
presented in Gwen Harwood’s poem might seem removed from the lives of our mostly
adolescent students. Of course, much of the Literature we offer students might at first

CONTACT Wayne Sawyer W.Sawyer@westernsydney.edu.au

© 2021 The editors of Changing English
104 W. SAWYER AND L. MCLEAN DAVIES

glance seem equally problematic, but, like Harwood’s poetry, is set for study particularly
in the senior secondary years of schooling. We begin our discussion with this point to
reiterate the importance of the knowledge that students bring into the classroom in
discussions of Literature. Questions around knowledge, as we discuss below, have
historically been more problematic in English than in many other areas of the curricu­
lum. The bluntness of our essay title we hope highlights that – it probably strikes readers
of this journal as not a question we usually ask in just that way. If we ask related questions
such as, ‘What would we want students to know when they had completed their study of
this poem? What knowledge would we want them to take away from classroom time
spent on the poem?’, why do such questions seem odd when we might regard them as
perfectly legitimate questions to ask in discussions of curriculum?
As a way of opening up what we hope are relevant issues, we begin with our own
selective ‘close reading’ of the poem, to take stock of what some of its meanings might
look like for us.
The horror-frustration of Harwood’s suburban mother plays out partly in the trope of the
fugue. A fugue is a composition characterised by melodic and harmonic complexity. The
principal theme (the ‘subject’) is placed in tension with an alternative, secondary theme
(‘counter-subject’) – terminology specifically referenced in the poem itself. It is
a mathematically intricate, highly formalised and symmetrical musical form, where harmonic
and melodic excursions away from the subject are ultimately resolved in favour of the subject.
For us, at one level, this mother’s life itself plays out such a fugue in which the subject/
counter-subject demands of motherhood and musical ambition compete for attention
(we call it ambition because she doesn’t just ‘play’, but ‘practises’ and she’s played for
Rubinstein himself, [‘who yawned’]). While Rubinstein’s yawning might lightly suggest
questions about the worth of pursuing musical ambitions, we feel that in ‘her’ eyes there’s
a loss. But, of course, this view rests on assumptions about the ‘subject’ and ‘counter-
subject’ and particulars of reading that not all readers will accept. Our reading evidences
especially the way the lines use enjambment to play out what for us is the subject/
counter-subject tussle. In l.1, the fugue ‘can matter’, but actually by l.2 that ‘mattering’ is
‘to no one’. In l.3 ‘Beside her on the floor two children chatter’- which chatter in l 4
becomes a ‘scream and fight’. ‘A pot’ appears in l.4, but it ‘boils over’ in l.5. She rushes to
the stove in l.5, but is ‘too late’ by l.6. ‘Zest and love’ appear in l.7, but ‘drain out’ in l. 8 etc.
etc. We read this as how the subject/counter-subject works through Harwood’s skilful use
of enjambment. The poem is a sonnet with a strict ababcdcdfghfgh rhyme scheme. Given
the sonnet form’s general historical connections to romantic love via Petrarch,
Shakespeare and Sidney, Harwood’s choice of the form for us is not so much parodic
as ironic. Some of this – the effects enjambment can produce, the sonnet form and
something of its role in English literary history – we would probably want students to
know after studying this poem. Other aspects of it – the substantive meanings produced
by these things as they play out here and as they intersect with what students bring to the
study themselves – will clearly be the subject of discussion and classroom exchange.

What knowledge for Literature?

Literature holds a definite position of value in L1 curricula throughout the world. In
English, for example, Glazener argues that it is:
 CHANGING ENGLISH 105

identified as a measure of excellence . . . made an index of the health and strength of a people;
credited with fostering modes of public reflection crucial to civil society; entrusted with
values and forms of experience believed to be at risk in modern life; and held to play a special
role in readers’ intellectual, moral, and emotional development (Glazener 2015, 4–5)

Knowledge, though, is not usually the default characteristic we think of when we are
discussing Literature. As Glazener goes on to argue:
Literature can offer knowledge, certainly, but it is usually characterized by its capacity to
offer something else: wisdom; enhanced attunement to certain registers of human experi­
ence; exposure to core national values or problems; sharper awareness of the capacities of
language as a medium; or intense, transformative experiences. (Glazener 2015, 5)

The Bullock Report, A Language for Life, went so far as to maintain that subject English in
general ‘does not hold together as a body of knowledge which can be identified,
quantified, then transmitted’ (DES 1975, 5). Peel begins an important study of the subject
with the sentence, ‘From its earliest days as a school and university subject English has
been concerned with attempts to define itself.’ (Peel 2000, 1). The difficulty of ‘fitting’
English neatly within a particular epistemological framework means that it has often been
constructed as a problem, as what Medway has called ‘the deviant case’, in comparison
with other school subjects (Medway 1990, 1).
Here, our particular contribution is confined to the discussion of Literature in that
larger subject called ‘English’. Of course, it would be easy enough to create a taxonomy of
what might constitute the kind of knowledge appropriate to Literature itself and to what
students might gain from reading it. In the Harwood poem, we might begin with a list
we’ve already hinted at that includes: symbolism (such as the fugue); how enjambment
works and its effects; the history of the sonnet and its connection to various conventions
around love. Suggestions about what might constitute such lists have been made pre­
viously. Marshall (2014) has suggested, for example, that what students generally need to
know about a Shakespearean play includes elements such as: the plot, the characters,
thematic knowledge, metaphoric or symbolic references, aspects of language and knowl­
edge of genres (eg the fool/comedy conventions) – or what Kress et al. (2005) refer to as
‘curricular entities’. Others suggest that appropriate literary knowledge includes histor­
ical knowledge, because ‘a more precise understanding of the historical character of
a literary work might enhance its relevance to the present’ (Zabka 2016, 233). Also
appropriate would be a ‘broader and more conceptual grasp of the nature of Literature
and literary study and response . . . to learn effectively about the nature of the discipline,
and to become truly engaged in some of the fundamental theoretical and conceptual
issues in literary studies’ (Snapper 2014, 60). The latter might include:
a broad overview of the development of literary genres and periods, an underpinning
exploration of the significance of form, genre and narrative, a basic consideration of
processes of literary production, reception and consumption, an introductory consideration
of the nature and purpose of criticism, some reflection on issues of cultural value (Snapper
2014, 59)

These lists are all valuable and all relevant, but, even for a single poem such as Harwood’s,
how do we select from the infinite possibilities of relevant knowledge? How central, if
central at all, is Harwood’s own life, the historical context in which the poem was written,
any particular literary movements of the time? And what of Harwood’s other works?
106 W. SAWYER AND L. MCLEAN DAVIES

Sometimes the mandated curriculum lays down relevant knowledge for study, but this is
not always so, and, in any case, will not always constitute a conceptually satisfactory
answer to the question of ‘What knowledge?’
The problem is, of course, that there is no sufficient answer to that question. Any
serious list of knowledge is relevant, and the number of potential lists is probably infinite.
Where in the classroom do we call a halt to this accumulation of knowledge? Perhaps
a more interesting way of thinking about the issue is to substitute the verbal form
knowing for the noun knowledge. This shifts the emphasis from thinking about what is
appropriately ‘accumulated’ to thinking about characteristic features of operating in the
discipline, coming close at the secondary level to Snapper’s ‘grasp of the nature of . . .
literary study and response’. Meanwhile, it is worthwhile briefly highlighting some key
relationships that have historically held between the entities ‘knowledge’ and ‘Literature’.

‘Knowledge’ vs ‘experience’
One such relationship is that between ‘knowledge’ and ‘experience’. We use ‘experience’
in this context to refer to direct experience of the text itself, manifested in a primary
concern with ‘response’ or in critical practice such as ‘close reading’. At various times in
the history of English teaching, ‘experience’ has been a central idea in curriculum
thinking, whether conceptualised in terms of Literature, or in the subject more generally.
During the 1960s and 1970s, for example – in Dixon’s Growth through English (Dixon
[1967] 1972), in the Bullock Report (DES 1975), indeed in the reader response theory that
figured so largely in Dixon’s discussions of Literature – ‘experience’ was central in
a number of ways that we do not have space to tease out here: what one brings to
a text; what one takes away from a text; how text-based concerns connect to our larger
world; what constitutes a normative starting point for curriculum, along with a number
of other meanings. Suffice to say that we are concerned here with one specific focus for
that capacious term: the ways in which it has been used to mark an encounter with a text
and how such an encounter has been used as a contrast to ‘knowledge’.
In the historical struggle to establish English Literature as a university discipline,
identifying an ‘objective’ body of knowledge became an important issue. In Victorian
Britain, literary criticism was often seen as lacking ‘academic validity . . . on the belief that
it was concerned with judgements rather than knowledge, making it difficult to teach and
assess’ (Atherton 2005, 221). Particular universities according to Atherton, looked
especially to history to give the subject academic rigour:
The knowledge students were expected to acquire was factual rather than critical, with an
emphasis being placed on the historical and social contexts of canonical authors (Atherton
2005, 225)

Christopher Hilliard’s study of Leavis and the Scrutiny Movement argues that such
a distinction had become something of a dualism in the subject in later years:
Oxford and London . . . valued a scholarly command of literary history over individual
response to texts. The claims of ‘criticism’ with which Scrutiny and (to a lesser extent)
‘Cambridge English’ were identified, had much less institutional purchase. As late as the
1950s, an examiner could still decline to award a PhD because the thesis in question was ‘not
a contribution to knowledge, but a piece of literary criticism’ (Hilliard 2012, 9)2
 CHANGING ENGLISH 107

Nevertheless, positions on knowledge are rarely straightforward enough to be repre­

sented fully by such binaries. In the academy, even a partially related point such as
the isolation of the text from social, historical and cultural contexts that is tradi­
tionally perceived to mark the original work of I.A. Richards’ ‘Practical Criticism’,
for example, has been increasingly called into question (Hilliard 2012, 253; North
2017).
In the secondary schooling context, John Adams made the same distinction in 1918
between reading ‘books about books’ and reading ‘the books themselves’ (see Shayer
1972, 60). The 1921 Newbolt Report was also very strong on this issue:
We do not emphasise the study of the history of literature, as the danger
always is that too much rather than too little attention may be given to it . . .
the essential thing is that the text of the writers should be the first consideration
(Newbolt 1921, 118–119)

Much later, this same binary was reported by Herbert Muller as still playing out at the
Dartmouth conference in 1966:
In the teaching of literature (the British) shied away from any emphasis on “knowledge”
which to them implied a body of inert facts; they deplored the tendency to present a body of
historical or critical knowledge about literature, instead wanting to concentrate on the
understanding and appreciation of particular literary works (Muller 1967, 12; see also 51,
81, 85–87)

A joint Anglo-American statement on the teaching of Literature that was issued out of
Dartmouth suggested a curriculum based on ‘experience, rather than knowledge’ (Muller
1967, 81). In the year after Muller’s book, James Moffett questioned an American
tendency to organise ‘the whole literature course in historical-survey fashion’ or to assign
‘books of literary history’ over simply treating historical context as ‘a reasonable adjunct
to the reading of some works of literature’ (Moffett 1968, 4). Contemporaneously with
Moffett, Squire and Applebee’s High School English Instruction Today commented on the
substance of American high school programmes with their knowledge about ‘the age . . .
in which a work was written . . . the writer himself . . . the literary genre as an abstraction
to be perceived in and for itself’ (Squire and Applebee 1968, 106) and contrasted this with
a focus ‘the experience of literature itself’ (Squire and Applebee 1968, 97).3
There are two crucial moves across this debate. One is the clear positioning of
‘knowledge’ itself as lying outside direct experience of the text that manifested as
‘response’ or ‘criticism’. The logical corollary that criticism and direct textual experience
were positioned as outside the domain of ‘knowledge’ was one – perhaps minor – strand
feeding into the notion that ‘knowledge’ was not to be the default characteristic in
a subject strongly concerned with textual experience as ‘response’.

Literature and cognition

The reader will have noted that in our earlier discussion of lists of topics on which
Literature might be focused, we tended to be focusing on propositional knowledge only.
Epistemology, of course, recognises other forms of knowledge, but we want to continue
the focus on propositional knowledge for now, since it raises one of the thorniest issues in
epistemological discussions of Literature: the place of the cognitive. The Newbolt Report in
108 W. SAWYER AND L. MCLEAN DAVIES

1921 in positioning Literature as art saw Literature as part of the training of the emotions
(Newbolt 1921, 8; see also 118), while grammar, philology and the Classics were bundled
in another camp as ‘training of the intellect’ to be equated with ‘science’ (Newbolt 1921, 9).
What, then, is the place of the cognitive in literary studies? While many dismiss the idea
that Literature is a route to propositional knowledge at all (see Swirski’s 1998 discussion of
the work of Goodman or of post-structuralism), Park (2015) shows cognitive-oriented
literary studies as a burgeoning area, listing such fields as cognitive poetics, cognitive
stylistics, cognitive aesthetics, cognitive narratology, ‘mindreading’ and fiction, ‘evo’ (evo­
lutionary) literary studies and ‘neuro’ (neuroscientific) literary studies as fields. Gibson
lists improving the faculty of imagination, developing cognitive skills, discovering other
points of view on the world, and the development of moral reason as among the concerns
of those interested in Literature and cognition (Gibson 2009).
Does Literature present us with cognitive propositions? Swirski (2007) argues that
Literature can be conceptualised as a series of thought experiments. Literature is strongly
presented by Medway as sitting inside the epistemologies valued by the Enlightenment.
He argues that

. . . novels like War and Peace can contribute to students’ historical understanding and refine
their linguistic, and thereby conceptual, resources – two sorts of cognitive gain – (and)
a Jacobean song can provide, as well as an experience of beauty, a sort of experiential
knowledge of what it was like to think in a seventeenth century way and, less specifically,
offer ideas or symbols that can serve as foci for things students think and feel about the
human condition or the state of the world (Medway 2010, 10).

In a similar vein, Australian English education writer Gerry Tickell had argued in 1972
that, ‘A student who reads The Grapes of Wrath . . . knows something about the
Depression that he could not otherwise know’ (Tickell 1972, 20). Tickell at that time
justified the place of the arts in education as ‘a constant source of new hypotheses, novel
formulations through which the mind may re-examine reality’ (Tickell 1972, 18) – a view
with some echoes of Swirski’s ‘Literature as thought experiment’.
Nuancing such cognitivist senses of knowing have been writers such as Gibson, who
sees the essential cognitive offering of Literature as ‘understanding’, not only consisting
of ‘the stating of truths or the offering of knowledge of matters of fact’:

It is rather a matter of literature’s ability to open up for us a world of value and significance
and of all that this implies about our capacity to understand fully the import of various forms
of human activity. . . . When literary works are successful dramatic achievements, it is always
in part because they fashion a sense of what is at stake in the specific regions of human
circumstance they represent (Gibson 2009, 482 – our italics.)

In Harwood’s poem, part of this is the understanding of the import of the playing out of
the subject/counter-subject in this woman’s life and its consequences for her.

Literature and non-cognitive ‘knowing’

In Harwood’s poem, there is a whole history of felt frustration and failure suggested by
certain words and phrases. Rubinstein’s yawning is read by the protagonist as commen­
tary on her playing. The draining out of ‘(z)est and love’ suggests a picture of a time when
 CHANGING ENGLISH 109

zest and love were at least stronger, but which over time – not just here and now – have
been draining away.
In the context of English teaching, Pike has reminded us of Heidegger’s description of
the effect of a van Gogh painting of a pair of boots:

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker
stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of
her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever uniform furrows of the field swept by
a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles
stretches the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call
of the earth . . . (Heidegger, as quoted in Pike 2003, 98).

As Pike says of this passage from Heidegger (Pike 2003, 98), ‘Neither science, nor
experience, nor the literacy lesson could reveal the reality of the shoes to us’ in the way
that the painting does. If we’re right about the suggestion of a history in Harwood’s
draining out of zest and love, we have a similar set of effects, and only Literature can do
this in quite this way. We might equally argue that no sociological report into mother­
hood in the suburbs can give us that history in the same way that these words can. ‘Zest
and love’ opens a whole of history for us in which one side of the subject/counter-subject
tension has been gradually overcoming the other and which (we’d argue) the reader is
meant to suspect will win out. Rubinstein’s yawn suggests to us that the battle has
probably always been a futile, horrifyingly wasted effort. The poem, then, provides its
own way of ‘knowing’, which is different from the kind of knowing that may be
contained, as we said, in Science or in Sociology.
While acknowledging the controversy that Heidegger’s essay on van Gogh’s shoes
opened up (Sassen 2001) more generally, we can appreciate Pike’s discussion of
Heidegger as highlighting a key aspect of ‘knowing’ through artistic work, viz.
Heidegger’s insistence on ‘aspects of our knowing that are simply not open to scientific
or rational understanding because we are always placed in a situation . . . that cannot be
exhaustively analysed. For Heidegger, knowing is a mode of Dasein (givenness, existence
or there-being) . . . which is founded on the involvement which he terms In-der-Welt-sein
or “Being-in-the-world” . . . This has significant implications for English teaching today,
where knowing is increasingly privileged over being . . .. Essentially, Heidegger’s view is
that our fundamental way of being is not cognitive’ (Pike 2003, 91).
Forms of ‘knowing’, of course, are often placed in the realm of affect. Hegel, for
example, argues that ‘art presents itself to sense, feeling, intuition, imagination’ which
‘demands an organ other than scientific thinking’ (Hegel 1997, 142). Misson and Morgan
(2006) also define the aesthetic as a way of knowing in which the intellectual is not
necessarily privileged over the emotional/sensory/affective (26). This is partly what has
been behind other historical arguments about Literature extending students’ human
sympathies (Scott 1982) – not just as Gibson’s cognitive gain, but as part of Literature’s
role in identity work in the classroom (Robinson 1978; Scott 1982).

How literary knowledge is made in a classroom

In 1980, Medway characterised knowledge in English in the following terms:
110 W. SAWYER AND L. MCLEAN DAVIES

(English) has come to enact nothing less than a different model of education . . . knowledge to
be made, not given; knowledge comprising more than can be discursively stated; learning as
a diverse range of processes, including affective ones; educational processes to be embarked on
with outcomes unpredictable; students’ perceptions, experiences, imaginings and unsystema­
tically acquired knowledge admitted as legitimate curricular content (Medway 1980, 10)

Among other things, Medway raises here another of the relationships that has historically
held between Literature and knowledge, viz. that which has asked how literary knowledge
comes about, especially in classrooms. How will students come to understand what Medway
understands from War and Peace? How will our students come to understand what we
understand from Harwood? Are these even legitimate questions when we would resist the
idea that students simply ‘take on’ our readings? Would we present a classroom demonstra­
tion of our ‘doing’ of our own reading so as to make clear our own assumptions as part of the
classroom ‘mix’ around the poem? Making assumptions highly visible could both demon­
strate a way of reading and at the same time lessen the risk that students do simply ‘take on’
our reading. In a poem such as Harwood’s, the opportunity is there for students to add to
their ongoing knowledge of Kress et al’s ‘curricular entities’ – such as of the sonnet form and
the possibilities for reading opened up by a technique like enjambment. Similarly, a trope
such as (here) the fugue is an opportunity for reminding students of how poetry can pack
density into language, of its being ‘charged with meaning’, to use Ezra Pound’s phrase (Pound
[1934] 1991, 28). How these things actually play out for Harwood in this poem would be part
of the interpretive discussion of the lesson, of classroom exchange.
Clearly, thinking about literary knowledge and its making in educational contexts
shifts concern from curriculum alone to pedagogy (can these be separated?). Though he
is talking specifically about canonical texts and their inherent strangeness, Zabka’s notion
of a ‘play between familiarity and strangeness’ characterising ‘a reader’s response to texts’
(Zabka 2016, 227) seems to us to describe an important pedagogical tension for
Literature. Classroom knowledge as itself ‘cultural production’ (Anderson 2015, 36)
seems another valuable starting point.
Here’s John Yandell on a moment of new knowledge for him arising from a student’s
perspective on Juliet’s ‘ . . . wherefore art thou Romeo?’ speech:

(Michael, a student): Juliet . . . talks about getting rid of her name, or Romeo getting rid of his
name, but it’s not as easy as that. She’s part of a rich family. Her family name means
something: without that name, she’d be no-one . . . .
. . . (JY): What he said made me reconsider the whole speech and its relation to the rest of the
play. The problem that many students have with Romeo and Juliet is that they find it difficult
to understand why Juliet doesn’t just leave home and find somewhere to live with Romeo.
Michael . . . presents an answer to this, an answer that is rooted in the realities of class
society. In presenting a reading of Juliet’s speech, Michael shows how her demand that
Romeo doff his name, and her whole attempt to separate Romeo’s identity from his name, is
a desperate attempt to deny the reality and determining power of the society in which they
both live. Michael’s reading makes Juliet’s words infinitely more poignant, precisely because
he has understood the complexity of the relation between her words and her situation.
(Yandell 2001, 146)

So, what is presented as a moment of new literary knowledge arises from the interactions
of the classroom – literary knowledge can be cognitive and can be ‘inside’ the text, but it is
also built in the interactions of the classroom. Yandell argues that ‘to treat knowledge as
 CHANGING ENGLISH 111

an entity that can become the possession of an individual is to reify it, to remove it from
the social semiotic processes that are implicated in the production of knowledge’ (Yandell
2017, 6). This was certainly (as Yandell points out) the view of the Bullock Report:
It is a confusion of everyday thought that we tend to regard “knowledge” as something that
exists independently of someone who knows. “What is known” must in fact be brought to
life afresh within every “knower” by his own efforts. To bring knowledge into being is
a formulating process, and language is its ordinary means, whether in speaking or writing or
the inner monologue of thought (DES 1975, 50)

As Doecke and Mead (2018) argue, ‘To read a text is to engage in a process of making
meaning through interaction with others. The social exchanges that occur within class­
room settings are not simply incidental or instrumental to this process but the necessary
conditions for meaning making to occur at all.’ (Doecke and Mead 2018, 3). Medway’s
(1980) description above of how English plays out as a deviant case in curriculum
thinking is couched in just such terms.
This is all important and pedagogically sound, and largely what one would want to
characterise as a key ‘mindset’ in Literature classrooms but we also want to ask how
Yandell, for example, recognised and accepted that what Michael offered him was valid
learning in subject English. The view that knowledge is made in interactions has to face the
epistemological issue – including for us – that what is going on in these classroom interac­
tions can be recognised a priori as ‘English’ (and not just because the topic at hand is
Shakespeare). Similar lessons about the roles of class and ‘name’ could have come out of
a History lesson on Tudor England. What the Bullock Report is discussing is less about
knowledge, or even ‘knowing’, and more about learning. How do we recognise that what
knowledge is being built is ‘English?’ In other words what knowledge makes the subject
recognisable? It can’t be practice alone – despite the special role for considerations of language
and its connections to thought and knowledge that are provided by subject English, the
particular extract from the Bullock Report above could apply to any subject area.

Knowledge and knowing – Literature in English

In the final part of this paper, we take up this issue of what knowledge or knowing makes
subject English recognisable for teachers and students in the classroom. To do this, we
draw on material from an international pilot project that was conducted in 2016 as
a precursor to the Australian Research Council Project, Investigating Literary Knowledge
in the Making of English Teachers.4 The pilot project was conducted in two states of
Australia – New South Wales and Victoria – and in two cities in England – London and
Reading. In each of these sites, up to six English teachers who had taught for five years or
more were interviewed. Interview questions focused on teacher’s views about what con­
stitutes literary knowledge and how their understanding of this concept shaped their
approaches to designing/working with the English curriculum within their respective
contexts. Interview questions also explored the influence of both personal and institutional
experiences of literary learning and teaching on teachers’ perceptions of literary knowledge,
and the ways in which these mid-career teachers negotiated curriculum.
We found that teachers were drawing on a range of approaches to literary knowledge
as their context and the texts they were teaching required – one view of literary
112 W. SAWYER AND L. MCLEAN DAVIES

knowledge did not dominate practice. Rather, teachers were variously mobilising: knowl­
edge of texts, knowledge of historical and world events in relation to texts, and students’
experiences of, and engagement with, texts, in order to support classroom work. This
range can be seen in the responses of one teacher from Australia, Lisa, when asked about
her understanding of literary knowledge in subject English:

I think it can be very personal . . . . about knowing your place in the world and where you fit
in amongst others, but I think it can be about understanding the history and what shaped us
and why, and how language has evolved, and what it tells us about us and being human. So,
understanding genre, historical periods, context and values that come with it . . . My knowl­
edge is evolving each time I teach; every year it changes . . . I think your appreciation and
understanding of texts changes, as do you as you become changed in different ways with
different experiences . . . .

For Lisa, as for several of the teachers in this pilot study, there was no choosing between
‘knowledge’ and ‘experience’, as this binary was produced in the subject’s history, but
rather both knowledge of the text, and knowledge about literature (including the history
of the particular texts under consideration), contributed to rich literary engagement.
Even though Lisa names areas such as genre and the evolution of language, there is no
sense that her own literary knowledge is ‘fixed’. Rather, as for many teachers in our study
in both England and Australia, Lisa’s own literary knowledge is cumulative – it is
something that has been evolving since she was a child. Medway’s argument that knowl­
edge in English includes ‘students’ perceptions, experiences, imaginings and unsystema­
tically acquired knowledge admitted as legitimate curricular content’ (Medway 1980, 10)
can also be applied to teachers.
Lisa also identifies the key role that sociability and social interactions play in making
meaning in texts (Doecke 2019; Yandell 2017). In a similar way, Michelle, from England,
talks at some length about the significance of her peers in both learning to become an
English teacher and in expanding her own understandings of literary knowing. She also
highlights the role of conversations as powerful acts of meaning making, both in her
classroom and beyond:

I think it’s important in itself to have enjoyed fiction and discussion and to have those
experiences, but also I think that no matter what you go on and do, I think that the . . .
conversations you have had to have about things that are out of what you might naturally do
(are) good for you . . . .

In both the English and Australian contexts, teachers registered that their understandings
of literary knowledge were being mediated by curriculum and assessment documents and
practices. This was most marked in England, as Year 10 is a crucial year for the General
Certificate of Education (GCSE) examination preparation, and at the time of interviews,
teachers participating in the study from England were still coming to terms with the new
Michael Gove-driven curriculum. This curriculum returns the focus of Literature in
English to texts from the past, notably the 19th century, and controversially limits
students’ engagements with classic and contemporary texts from other parts of the
world. For Susannah, this focus on texts from the 19th century, and the subsequent
‘loss’ of favourite texts from the curriculum was causing grief, and was a perceived
challenge to engaging her students with literary learning:
 CHANGING ENGLISH 113

I think it’s a real shame that what we are allowed to teach has been restricted so much over
the last couple of years . . . I wanted to cry when I taught Of Mice and Men for the last time at
GCSE. And there’s so many . . . so many world texts, because that to me is the point, as I said
before, of Literature, the looking at different cultures. And we can still do that but I do think
it’s been, at GCSE, really pulled back, and I think that we’re making our own jobs really
difficult by teaching teenagers these 19th century texts . . . . I think it’s important that they do
have some access to it – of course it is, and we’ve got these wonderful classics. But they’re
struggling so much with the language, and it just feels like we’re turning them off from
English and from reading, and if we’re saying you know, “This is what Literature is”, I think
that we’re going to lose a lot of them, and I just . . . it makes me sad.

Susannah’s feeling of grief regarding the removal of Steinbeck’s text points not only
towards the limitations of a new, more nationalistic GCSE, but also draws attention to the
twin ideas that important literary knowledge is accessed through particular texts and that
it is particular texts themselves that matter as the key literary knowledge. Elsewhere
(Yates et al. 2019), we have discussed the way text selection often functions as a proxy for
identifiable knowledge or knowing in English, particularly in the absence of agreement
about what constitutes the ‘knowing subject’.
For other teachers in England, classroom tasks in preparation for encountering
‘unseen’ texts5 in the new GSCE paradoxically provided opportunities for some expan­
sion of the curriculum, and the opportunity for reading a range of texts critically,
employing a range of theoretical lenses. For Joe, the unpredictable nature of the exam
has led to a more dialogic, exploratory pedagogy:

developing students’ “unseen” skills in English . . . has been quite an enjoyable thing, and it’s
informed I think my teaching of literature quite significantly because more and more so now
I work with students approaching particularly poems unseen together, so it’s not like “I’ll
teach it”. We’ll look at it together first and explore it together, and where students need
directing perhaps, you know you can offer that . . .

Although Australian teachers in the study were not faced with the same immediate
pressures in the ‘junior’ Years 7–10 as their English counterparts, in terms of preparation
for a high-stakes testing, they nonetheless felt the downward pressure from the later end-
of-schooling assessments – the Higher School Certificate (HSC) in New South Wales, and
the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE). For Billy, who is interested in multimodal
texts and their affordances, this downward pressure was reflected in the limitation and
narrowing of what are understood as ‘literary’ texts:

Yeah, I’m very concerned with the effect . . . standardised testing and the increasing
accountability agenda will have on the space that teachers have for engaging with a wide
range of literary texts and the wide range of literary practices associated with those texts . . .
there’s a real concern there about what subject English teaching will look like, and I even
found in the last three or four years that the emphasis on the results of those tests were
changing practice.

For Lisa, the long shadow of high-stakes assessment also impacted on assessment
practices. When asked if she was able to employ pedagogies such as imaginative recrea­
tion (Stratta, Dixon, and Wilkinson 1973), with her more junior students, Lisa reflected
that she and her colleagues often defaulted to assessments that mirrored the expectations
of students in the senior years:
114 W. SAWYER AND L. MCLEAN DAVIES

So let’s just do what we’ve done, the traditional thing, let’s write some essays, let’s do it in
timed conditions because if we take a chance we might screw it up, and we can’t screw these
kids up . . . this is their chance

This tension between doing the ‘right thing by the kids’ under pressure of immediate or
future assessment regimes and teaching Literature in a stimulating and engaging manner
is a theme throughout many interviews. It points towards the kinds of compromises and
sacrifices with regard to literary knowing that are felt in the neoliberal environments that
both English and Australian teachers are negotiating.

Conclusion
We began this paper by asking, through the example of Gwen Harwood’s sonnet, what
we are expecting students to ‘know’ after encountering a work of Literature. Amongst
other dimensions, we may hope students will expand their understanding of ‘curricular
entities’, but also of themselves and their world, of literary form(s), histories, and/or
culture/s more broadly. These notions of literary knowing have been variously explored
over time through both the academic discipline and the school subject and, as we have
attempted to show through some examples from our literary knowledge pilot project, are
often mobilised alongside one another through the core role of sociable meaning making.
Examination of the history of English shows us that knowledge as a concept has often sat
problematically in this curriculum area. Recent claims for ‘powerful knowledge’ (Young
2013) which can sit so at odds with the work of English teachers (Doecke 2017; Doecke
and Mead 2018) arguably act as further impetus to turn away from discussions of
knowledge in English, at least in the terms in which they are being brought forward.
However, we argue that there is value in teachers reflecting on the kinds of literary
knowing their students are encountering in subject English. Indeed, there is an impera­
tive to do this, not only because questions of knowledge are being galvanised by
neoliberal governments and their emissaries (and as a profession, it is important to
respond to this) but also because in articulating some of the forms of ‘knowing’ in English
we open up these understandings to be claimed, considered, challenged and contested.

Notes
1. Gwen Harwood’s Suburban Sonnet. Gwen Harwood: Selected Poems by Gwen Harwood.
Text Copyright © Gwen Harwood. First published by Penguin Books Australia 2001.
Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd.
2. Though we are not suggesting the terms of these debates are identical, one can see similar
kinds of arguments being played out in what North characterises as the field’s ‘central axis of
dispute’ prior to the 1970s as that between ‘literary ‘scholars’ and literary ‘critics’’ (North
2017, 1). The ‘scholarly turn’ is marked by treating literary texts as ‘opportunities for cultural
and historical analysis’, and as having replaced ‘critical’ approaches, which ‘in their day, had
tended to treat literary texts as means of cultivating readers’ aesthetic sensibilities’ (North
2017, 2). Graff, too, highlights further the ways in which ‘scholarship’ and ‘criticism’ became
antithetical terms (Graff 1987, 122).
3. For a discussion of literature, knowledge and experience in this period, especially through
Muller’s book and Dixon’s Growth Through English, see Sawyer (2019).
4. Investigating Literary Knowledge in the Making of English Teachers was funded by the
Australian Research Council under its Discovery Scheme for 2016–2020 (DP160101084).
 CHANGING ENGLISH 115

Its Chief Investigators are: Larissa McLean Davies, Brenton Doecke, Philip Mead, Wayne
Sawyer and Lyn Yates. The international pilot study also included John Yandell, Andy
Goodwyn and Rachel Roberts.
5. ‘Unseen’ texts are texts which have not been studied in class and are encountered for the first
time for analysis in an exam setting.

Acknowledgments
The pilot project reported in this paper was funded by The University of Melbourne.
Gwen Harwood’s Suburban Sonnet is reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House
Australia Pty Ltd.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Emeritus Professor Wayne Sawyer researches in the areas of secondary English curriculum,
curriculum history, literacy policy, literary knowledge and pedagogy in low SES schools and he
has published widely in these fields. He is a past Chair of the New South Wales (NSW) Board of
Studies English Curriculum Committee and is an Honorary Life Member of both the NSW English
Teachers Association and the Australian Association for the Teaching of English.
Associate Professor Larissa McLean Davies is recognised for research combining English educa­
tion and literary studies through a body of publications on literary knowledge, text selection,
curriculum and the teaching of Australian literature. Larissa is also the lead Chief Investigator of
the ARC Discovery Project Investigating Literary Knowledge in the Making of English Teachers. She
is regularly invited to deliver national and international keynote addresses on topics related to
these research areas.

ORCID
Wayne Sawyer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5757-7551
Larissa McLean Davies http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6963-2474

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