Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era: Understanding the (Post-)National L1 Subjects in New and Difficult Times [1st ed.] 9783030559960, 9783030559977

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Educational Linguistics

Bill Green Per-Olof Erixon  Editors

Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era Understanding the (Post-)National L1 Subjects in New and Difficult Times

Educational Linguistics Volume 48

Series Editor Francis M. Hult, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, USA Editorial Board Members Marilda C. Cavalcanti, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, Brazil Jasone Cenoz, University of the Basque Country, Leioa, Spain Angela Creese, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK Ingrid Gogolin, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Christine Hélot, Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France Hilary Janks, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Claire Kramsch, University of California, Berkeley, USA Constant Leung, King’s College London, London, UK Angel Lin, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada Alastair Pennycook, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Educational Linguistics is dedicated to innovative studies of language use and language learning. The series is based on the idea that there is a need for studies that break barriers. Accordingly, it provides a space for research that crosses traditional disciplinary, theoretical, and/or methodological boundaries in ways that advance knowledge about language (in) education. The series focuses on critical and contextualized work that offers alternatives to current approaches as well as practical, substantive ways forward. Contributions explore the dynamic and multi-­ layered nature of theory-practice relationships, creative applications of linguistic and symbolic resources, individual and societal considerations, and diverse social spaces related to language learning. The series publishes in-depth studies of educational innovation in contexts throughout the world: issues of linguistic equity and diversity; educational language policy; revalorization of indigenous languages; socially responsible (additional) language teaching; language assessment; first- and additional language literacy; language teacher education; language development and socialization in non-­ traditional settings; the integration of language across academic subjects; language and technology; and other relevant topics. The Educational Linguistics series invites authors to contact the general editor with suggestions and/or proposals for new monographs or edited volumes. For more information, please contact the Editor: Natalie Rieborn, Van Godewijckstraat 30, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. All proposals and manuscripts submitted to the Series will undergo at least two rounds of external peer review. This series is indexed in Scopus and the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers (NSD). More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5894

Bill Green  •  Per-Olof Erixon Editors

Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era Understanding the (Post-)National L1 Subjects in New and Difficult Times

Editors Bill Green Faculty of Arts & Education Charles Sturt University Bathurst, NSW, Australia

Per-Olof Erixon Department of Creative Studies Umeå University Umeå, Sweden

ISSN 1572-0292     ISSN 2215-1656 (electronic) Educational Linguistics ISBN 978-3-030-55996-0    ISBN 978-3-030-55997-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The seeds of this project were first sown at the ARLE conference in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2017. That initial conversation led to a book proposal mapped out over the next six or so months, including the commitment of our invited contributors, with the proposal being accepted in late 2018. We subsequently presented a symposium on work in progress at the 2019 ARLE Conference, held in Lisbon, Portugal, which drew on early versions of some of the chapters gathered together here. Finally, early in 2020, we organised an online forum which brought all the contributors together, where the penultimate versions of their chapters were read and critiqued, and links established where appropriate. Accordingly we want to acknowledge the scholarly contributions of all our colleagues participating in this project and in the book itself, and thank them for their hard work and patience, and for hanging in there. We want also to acknowledge two other people, in particular: Jo-Anne Reid, who read a number of the chapters in development and helped us clarify our own thinking/writing (more particularly BG), and Wayne Sawyer, who participated in the online forum as a ‘critical friend’ and external reviewer, reading through all the chapters and offering invaluable feedback, and who has been an enthusiastic supporter of the project right from the outset.

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Contents

 Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era: The Subject in Focus��������������    1 Per-Olof Erixon and Bill Green Part I History/Theory/Culture Curriculum Inquiry, Didaktik Studies and L1 Education: Framing and Informing the L1 Subjects ������������������������������������������������������   17 Bill Green and Ellen Krogh  From Grammar to Socio-interactionism: L1 Education in Brazil��������������   39 Luciene Simões and Rildo Cosson  English Teaching as L1 Education and the Ambivalent Project of National Schooling: Subject English in Comparative-Historical Perspective��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   61 Jory Brass and Bill Green  Curricular L1 Disciplinarities: Between Norwegianness and Internationality ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   83 Sigmund Ongstad Part II Teaching the L1 Subjects  Education and the Place of Literature ����������������������������������������������������  115 L1 Irene Pieper  The Marginalisation of Literature in Swedish L1: A Victim of Socio-Political Forces and Paradigmatic Changes�����������������������������������  133 Per-Olof Erixon and Maria Löfgren Bildung and Literacy in Subject Danish: Changing L1 Education������������  157 Ellen Krogh

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 Between Grammar and Communication: Teaching L1 in the Czech Republic and England ��������������������������������������������������������������  177 Stanislav Štěpáník Part III The Future, Now  The Ongoing Technocultural Production of L1: Current Practices and Future Prospects ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  209 Nikolaj Elf, Scott Bulfin, and Dimitrios Koutsogiannis  Nation and Nature in L1 Education: Changing the Mission of Subject English��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  235 Sasha Matthewman Part IV Conclusion  Understanding the (Post-)National L1 Subjects: Three Problematics��������  259 Bill Green and Per-Olof Erixon

Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era: The Subject in Focus Per-Olof Erixon and Bill Green

Abstract  In addition to a short overview of each of the chapter in this book, in this Introduction we present the four distinct and related meta-themes in L1 that the idea of the book started from, and which from the outset have been a reference-point for our contributors. The first and perhaps primary meta-theme is globalization, a process by which national and regional economics, societies, and cultures, and thereby school and curricula, have become integrated through global networks of trade, communication, and dominating political ideologies. The second meta-theme is pluriculturalism, including escalating challenges of migration and population diaspora, worldwide. The third meta-theme focuses on technocultural change, or ‘technologisation’, with regard to changing technologies and their associated cultures and cultural politics. The fourth of these meta-themes, and perhaps more innovative in this context, is educationalization, a historical phenomenon involving the way in which mass popular education came to be increasingly conceived as a key solution to perceived social, moral, economic and political problems, something which remains just as relevant today. These meta-themes are seen as variously informing the chapters that follow, as well as the book project overall. Keywords  Meta-themes · Globalization · Pluriculturalism · Technocultural change · Educationalization · L1 education

1  Introduction This book is addressed to the school-subject L1, which in some countries – Sweden, for instance – used to be called simply ‘mother tongue’. It is about the role and function that this subject once had and what has become of it since. Our starting point is

P.-O. Erixon (*) Department of Creative Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] B. Green Faculty of Arts & Education, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Green, P.-O. Erixon (eds.), Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era, Educational Linguistics 48, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7_1

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that schooling and school subjects change in accordance with economic, cultural and social changes over time; curriculum change is organically connected to changing social and discursive conditions. Schools are emphatically a part of society and what happens in society creates conditions of possibility for schools and curricula. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the newly developed L1 subject was assigned the task of consolidating and strengthening national identity and thus national borders. Hence, among other school subjects, mother-tongue education played a major role in nation-building in the long nineteenth century all over the world. In his historical work on English teaching in America, for instance, Brass (2016) recovers what he finds as overlooked ways in which the teaching of English as mother-tongue was positioned later in the nineteenth century to improve the moral and social conditions of the population, to develop young people’s capacities for self-governance, and to attune their ‘souls’ to a range of governmental norms. School as an institution and L1 as a school-subject are intimately connected to the building of a nation, where not only the sovereign or president, God and the motherland were mentioned in singular and revered ways, but also the written language and its associated cultural formations. Among other things, constructing a nation required writing standards, in the same way as the railway required common time-­ zones (Elmfeldt and Erixon 2007). Boser and Brühwiller (2017) show how language and writing systems were intertwined with local, cantonal and national identities in Switzerland. A nation-state without a singular uniform national language, it was through the use of language and writing, nonetheless, that ideas of the Swiss people as ‘us’ and the non-Swiss as ‘others’ were constructed, disseminated, and perpetuated. Nation-building is clearly a central aspect of understanding the L1 subjects historically, both in their emergence and in their consolidation. Today, national borders today are increasingly questioned by global neoliberal ideology, since such borders make it difficult for international capital and labour to flow freely across them. When this happens, the task of L1 education becomes something else. L1 education is currently assigned tasks, such as the ability to read and write in an increasingly mediatized and globalized world, that will hopefully contribute to resolving today’s social problems in various ways. Our view is that neoliberal ideas such as New Public Management (NPM) have influenced the educational sector in all the countries represented in this volume, to varying degrees. Sahlberg (2016) named this the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), identifying five interrelated and distinctive features of its development, namely: standardisation of education; a focus on core subjects; applicants for low-risk routes to achieve the goals; the use of business management models; and test-based accountability. Globalization in its various manifestations is clearly a major issue for the L1 subjects today, as we consider further below, and as various chapters in this book indicate. Indeed, we want to argue for the continuing significance of nation and empire in understanding and researching L1 education, and in particular, the notion of nation-(re)building as a resource for rethinking L1 education in the global era.1 1  We take up this issue at greater length in chapter “Understanding the (Post-)National L1 Subjects: Three Problematics” of this volume (Green and Erixon 2020).

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2  Focus and Territory It is important to have a clear sense, right from the outset, of what this book is about, and also what it is not about. The first thing to say is that our concern here is with L1 as a school-subject, and not with L1 education in its entirety. This is indeed a more restricted focus, but only in one sense, since we argue that such a perspective opens up new opportunities for both scholarship and praxis. In focusing on L1 as a school subject, it needs to be recognised that our project is as much framed by curriculum inquiry as by language education; that is, curriculum is to be set alongside language as key terms of reference. As such, the book falls within the ambit of what has been called “school subject studies” (Englund 2015, p. 50) as much as it is a matter of language education per se. The school subject, as a distinctive epistemic community, is an important issue in its own right, as is the relationship between ‘subject’ and ‘discipline’. Bernstein’s (1996/2000) notion of recontextualisation is pertinent here: the manner in which knowledge is necessarily transformed in moving from one context to another. In this case, the focus is on the L1 subject(s), or subject L1 – itself arguably a distinctive curriculum space, within the subject-array of schooling. Regarding L1 education more generally, Gagne et al. (1987, pp. 5–6) point to three distinct concepts pertaining to the area (for them, ‘mother tongue education’), which they describe as the “primary-socialisational”,2 the “politico-cultural” and the “educational”. They further note that these can be intertwined in practice, and suggest that a distinction can be made between these and what tends to be “taken for granted in ordinary speech” as ‘mother tongue’. It is the “politico-cultural” (and to some extent, the “educational”) dimensions of L1 education that we are concerned with in this book. The “politico-cultural” concept is “closely related to national or regional identity formation or to state formation”, and to issues of language standardization (see Green and Erixon 2020), while the “educational” concept pertains more to the way in which L1 is pedagogized. Conversely, we are not concerned here, directly at least, with matters of language development, or the “primary-­ socialisational” – except by implication, with regard to social subjectivity and the symbolic order, which has always been integral to the L1 subjects.

3  The Meta-themes At the outset of our thinking about this book, we started from a sense of four distinct but related meta-themes in L1, i.e. four major changes across the world that, as we saw it, had particular bearing on school and teaching L1. These might be understood 2  For a contemporary account of this in terms of ‘home language’, or the language one is born into, see UNESCO (2016). The is also clearly a connection with the ‘educational’ concept, as outlined in Gagné et al. (1987).

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as prevailing conditions of curriculum change. Although similar observations have been made previously (e.g. Liberg et al. 2012, pp. 477–478), and indeed such matters have become increasingly significant over the past 30–40 years, they seemed to us to be all the more pressing now, and explicitly so, in these early decades of the twenty-first century. Our first and perhaps primary meta-theme is globalization, as a process by which national and regional economies, societies, and cultures, and thereby school and curricula, have become integrated through the global network of trade, communication, and dominating political ideologies. This has been presented in terms of global flows, or ‘scapes’, of people, ideas, images, media, technologies, ideologies, as well as finance, and new dynamics of state and nation, culture and economy (Appadurai 2010). Rizvi and Lingard (2010) argue that globalization refers not only to shifts in patterns of transnational economic activities, especially with respect to the movement of capital and finance, but also to the ways in which contemporary political and cultural configurations have been reshaped by major advances in information technologies. Hence globalization, as a concept, refers not only to a set of empirical changes, but also to desired interpretations of, and responses to, these changes. Within this mix, globalization affects the ways in which we both interpret and imagine the possibilities of our lives. An important aspect of this meta-theme is what has been called ‘Anglification’ (Trimbur 2008), leading us to ask: what is the impact of English as a ‘global’ or ‘international’ language on other languages and their associated forms of L1 language education. This is something, indeed, to be critical and reflexive about, and it is touched on in various ways in the chapters to follow. Our second meta-theme is pluriculturalism, referring to challenges of migration and diaspora, including refugee issues, worldwide. We use the term ‘pluriculturalism’ deliberately here, in preference to ‘multiculturalism’, which is arguably the more common term, because we are wary of how the latter has been played out politically as well as in academic-intellectual contexts. How does the pluricultural nature of contemporary societies register in education policy and curriculum theory, and what more specifically are the implications of this for L1 education? What has been the impact on language and education of the shift towards increased heterogeneity in terms of population, worldwide? What are the particular challenges associated with heightened forms of linguistic and cultural diversity? Our third meta-theme focuses on technocultural change, which highlights changing technologies and their associated cultures and cultural politics. While for symmetry’s sake this might be termed ‘technologisation’, it is more correctly understood as digitalisation – the digital transformation of the social world. Further, our working thesis is that an inherent tension exists between teaching based on digital media, and traditional ways of judging and examining subject L1 work in schools. Our point of departure is that, while the medium of education traditionally (and as an idea) was based on older (‘print’) technologies, and media such as books, paper and pencils, etc., this condition is being ever more challenged under the influence of new digital technology, and as the balance-point among the different modes and ecologies is shifting. The inherent physical structures and symbolic forms of media play a decisive role in the design of what and how information is coded and

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transferred, and hence also how it is decoded. It is the structure of the medium that determines the content and nature of the information. What new relations are created by digital-electronic media, not only between the senses and media, but also between people? The fourth meta-theme, and perhaps more innovative in this context, is educationalization, as “a transnational phenomenon”, albeit originating in Europe, that involves “the expansion of educational action in a number of countries, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries, when mass popular education was increasingly conceived as the solution to perceived social, moral, economic and political problems” (Brass 2016, p. 222). What is especially important about this meta-theme, as we see it, is that it introduces and highlights the significance of the historical, in seeking to understand the L1 subjects. While clearly an issue in and for earlier periods, certainly when L1 emerged on the educational scene as a distinctive school subject, it is just as relevant to the contemporary situation, we suggest, with the rise into prominence (if not dominance) of PISA and the like, and new global logics of efficiency and accountability. Crucially, educationalization refers to the manner in which social problems are assigned to the school, which is asked to take on responsibility for their solution and otherwise their management. This is clearly evident in the L1 subjects – for instance, in how, in the Anglophone world, it is English teaching that is blamed for declining or deficit literacy in children and young people (Green et al. 1997), without due consideration of social context. As Smeyers and Depaepe (2008, p. 379) put it, educationalization refers to “the overall orientation or trend toward thinking about education as the focal point for addressing or solving larger human problems”. As such, it seems eminently appropriate that it is drawn into consideration here. Clearly, too, contextual and cultural differences between countries mean that there are differences in the way that school systems and thus L1 education relate to the changes we have identified in mobilising our four meta-themes, i.e. globalization, pluriculturalism, technocultural change, and educationalization. For example, today we see how resistance is growing towards globalization and internationalization, along with the rise of political populism. Trump in the USA and Brexit in Europe are striking expressions of this. In summary, then: The meta-themes thus constitute the starting point for the book, although they by no means constrain it. While they provide a background to all the chapters, they appear in their different manifestations and contexts, and with different emphases, in and across each of them, thus informing the book as a whole.

4  A Methodological Note In an early account of mother-tongue education (MTE) research and scholarship, Kroon and Sturm (1987) observe of what they call “empirical-interpretive” work in the field, that a key methodological challenge lies in being able “to give up on [one’s] own perspective for some time and change it for that of the ‘other’” (p. 3).

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We have become cognizant of this, ourselves, in the development of this book. We have both long taken an explicitly political or socially-critical perspective in this area – for example, in the curriculum history of English teaching and the English subjects (e.g. Green 1990, 1999, 2017), and also with regard to subject Swedish (Erixon 2010a, b; Erixon et al. 2012), and believe moreover that such a perspective is broadly relevant to L1 education more generally. It needs to be acknowledged, though, that this may not be a consensus view among other scholars, including our contributors here – even though clearly it has informed the conceptualisation and shaping of the book. We remain adamant nonetheless that this book is positioned overall as in opposition to the neoliberal turn in educational theory and practice.3 Moreover, we suggest that the injunction to be reflexive regarding one’s own positioning and construction applies as much to reading comparative inquiry as it does to conducting it. The reader is therefore cautioned to be wary of reading the following accounts too much from their own standpoint, and indeed is encouraged to welcome such defamiliarization. It seems to us that this kind of cognitive and cultural estrangement is precisely what a book such as this is aimed at, and is attempting. Relatedly, and something we believe even more strongly now, at the end of this project, is that it is profoundly misleading to assume too much in the way of conceptual identity regarding what might otherwise seem common terms of reference. This has been said before, of course: “… though on the surface much in the field of mother tongue education seems similar, if not identical, below this surface, the meaning and function of apparently general concepts are to a large extent culture-­ specific and may differ considerably from country to country – sometimes without the participants in the discussion even realising this” (Kroon and Sturm 1987, p.  119 [cf. Herrlitz and van de Ven 2007, pp.  22]; our added emphasis). A good example here is the term ‘grammar’. As Herrlitz and van de Ven (2007, p. 13) wrote, over a decade ago now: “[t]he meaning of the word ‘grammar’ (German ‘Grammatik’, Dutch ‘grammatica’)” in different contexts “turned out to be rather different (in spite of the common Latin root)”: [W]hereas in German mother tongue education, the teaching of grammar may include reflections on language structure and use, in Dutch mother tongue teaching there is a sharp opposition between ‘grammatica’ and ‘taalbeschouwing’ (i.e. ‘thinking about language’).

As they conclude: “[T]his proved to be only the tip of the iceberg” (p.13). That has been our experience, too. It would be possible to indicate much the same with other ostensibly common keywords in the L1/MTE discourse, such as ‘reading’ or even ‘literature’. It is also appropriate at this point to highlight similar issues of translatability and commensurability with other key and recurring terms of reference in this book – most notably perhaps, notions such as Bildung and didaktik, which feature so heavily in the continental European tradition. The position we have adopted here is that, 3  We acknowledge however that neoliberalism cannot be assumed to be uniform across the globe, as a singular identity – a point well made by Windle (2019), specifically with regard to Brazil and the Global South.

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since they are so linguistically and culturally specific, they need to be marked as such, which is why we have tried to present them always in italics. There are ready links to be made between such concepts and the Anglo notion of ‘liberal education’ (Løvlie and Standish 2002), and also with the humanist tradition associated with modernity and the Enlightenment. That discussion is not developed here, however. Nonetheless terminology constitutes an ongoing challenge for a project such as this, and a glossary of keywords might well be generated in order to take comparative-­ historical inquiry of this kind further. Something else that might be briefly noted here: this project is conducted in an age which is informed by rich theoretical and political understandings, including those associated with feminism and postcolonialism, as well as poststructuralist theory and philosophy. Things have changed, inside and outside the field. This can be gauged, in part, by referring back to a 1953 publication by UNESCO entitled “The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education”. It is a fascinating document, and in many ways symptomatic. A glossary of related terms is presented which includes “mother or native language”, “national language” and “vernacular language” (UNESCO 1953, p. 56). These and other terms utilized here need to be problematised and critiqued. This is partly what is at issue in the shift from ‘mother tongue’ to ‘L1’, following on from the ARLE initiative whereby the focus of the Association, in “tak[ing] up the work of its precedessor IAIMTE”,4 remains nonetheless on the teaching of national languages while seeking to take into account “the heterogeneous cultural and linguistic backgrounds of learners in a global world”. It can be argued however that this shift in terminology is still poorly understood, and incompletely theorised. As Yildiz (2012, p. 13) notes, the problematical aspects of ‘mother tongue’ are “very much in effect today, even when the term itself is not explicitly invoked”.5

5  The Book We have always envisaged this book as concerned not so much with questions of what to teach and how to teach in L1 education and the L1 subjects – instrumental questions, as we see it  – as with questions of why: why teach ‘L1’? Why is this particular subject taught? These constitute more reflexive, critical questions, of a conceptual and normative nature. Why L1 education? (Relatedly: why the shift from ‘mother tongue’ to ‘L1’?) How best to understand this field, historically and 4  Respectively, International Association for Research in L1 Education (ARLE) and International Association for the Improvement of Mother Tongue Education (IAIMTE) – the field’s key professional associations, from the 1980s to the present day. See Herrlitz and van de Ven (2007) for an account of the history of IAIMTE up to that time. It precedes therefore the shift from ‘mother tongue’ to ‘L1’, as linked with ARLE – see http://www.arle.be/about.html 5  Our emphasis. See Green and Erixon (2020) for further elaboration of this matter, and of Yildiz’s overall argument.

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comparatively? What are the prospects of the field in the future that is emerging even now, all around us, in a dramatically changing, already globalised, increasingly risky world? These are the questions we invite the reader to reflect upon here, working with the resources provided by the authors, our colleagues. The chapters in this volume are authored by a range of L1 curriculum scholars from ten countries, each with its own distinctive educational culture and history. They present detailed accounts of subjects Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, English, German, and Portuguese (in Brazil), working overall, to varying degrees, from a broadly comparative-historical perspective. Moreover, they range across the globe, taking in both hemispheres, with their common focus being specifically on the L1 subjects as distinctive school-subjects. Although they may be read separately or out of sequence, they are organised into three general sections, each with its own broad focus – which is not to say that other tracks can’t be traced through and across them (for example, what has been called recently the ‘knowledge question’, with regard to which the L1 subjects might be seen as particularly problematical, from some perspectives at least). The first four chapters (Part I) deal with L1 from a conceptual and historical perspective, with examples and foci drawn from various national contexts. Both explicit and implicit comparisons or historical dialogues are described between the different contexts as well as between distinctive traditions. In ‘Curriculum Inquiry, Didaktik Studies and L1 Education: Framing and Informing the L1 Subjects’, Bill Green and Ellen Krogh address the possibilities for dialogue between (Anglo-Saxon) curriculum inquiry and (European) Didaktik studies. These respective fields of inquiry are understood as distinctive traditions serving as intellectual resources and organisational frameworks, as well as distinct fields of scholarship and inquiry in these different contexts. In the chapter, they provide a review of the debate and also of the two fields, and their organising concepts, along with some of the challenges and opportunities that this debate presents for (re)thinking L1 education and the L1 subjects. In ‘From Grammar to Socio-Interactionism: L1 Education in Brazil’, Luciene Simões and Rildo Cosson analyze the construction and historical course of L1 education in Brazil. They specifically address three ‘paradigms’ that achieved hegemonic position in the Brazilian L1 education, i.e. the ‘literary-grammatical’ paradigm, the ‘communicative’ paradigm, and the ‘utilitarian’ paradigm. Due to Brazil’s historical context, the authors’ interest is in investigating the historical singularities that characterize L1 education in the specific context of Brazilian schooling, in order to unveil how these paradigms are articulated in the present framework of Portuguese L1 teaching in Brazil. While the chapter is not a conventional historical study, and the authors themselves are careful to note that its main purpose is to understand the challenges confronting L1 education in Brazil today, its historical basis is well informed and useful. The teaching of English as L1 has been a necessary and even inescapable feature of curriculum and schooling around the globe and especially across the ex-British imperial countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA, as well as in the UK, and England itself. In ‘English Teaching as L1 Education and the Ambivalent

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Project of National Schooling: Subject English in Comparative-Historical Perspective’, Jory Brass and Bill Green argue that there is a close and organic relationship between English as a school-subject and English as the language, although this needs to be understood as complex and contradictory. The authors contend that this relationship – crucial to the L1 subjects more generally – must be seen as mythic and ideological, and as inextricable from questions of culture and history, discourse and power, nation and empire. The argument is explored through a comparative-­ historical study of the emergence of English teaching in Australia and the United States. Their account highlights the risks inherent in assuming too ready a common identity across the English subjects, transnationally. The same might be said of other L1 subjects caught up in the historical dynamics of nation and empire. In ‘Curricular L1 Disciplinarities: Between Norwegianness and Internationality’, Sigmund Ongstad investigates Norwegian L1 curricula from a historical perspective, with a specific focus on how ‘disciplinarity’ may shift over time. The disciplinary focus is on tensions of inner and external L1 forces, and of ‘Norwegianness’ as a constitutional element of Norwegian L1’s disciplinarity in contrast to the dynamic force of ‘internationality’. When tracing possible international sources for particular changes in L1 curricula, Ongstad presents a hypothesis that the main theories of language, text, and communication occur as paradigmatic patterns in L1 curricula, and that, although delayed, such new ideas may provoke more familiar, established ones. The following four chapters (Part II) deal with the profoundly educational issues of what many have considered to be, and to some extent still remains, at the core of L1  – namely, teaching language and literature, and also literacy, at least more recently. They consider how socio-political and other circumstances may change the conditions for teaching these content domains in the field. Two matters emerge that are of particular interest here: the decline of ‘literature’, and the emergence of ‘literacy’, as key reference-points and organising principles for L1 education and the L1 subjects. This is notwithstanding literature’s traditional role in this regard, and indeed its continuing significance, as Pieper demonstrates in her chapter, which opens up this section. ‘L1 Education and the Place of Literature’ by Irene Pieper first sketches specifics of literature education in the curriculum and points to the high expectations that are connected to literature and the development of self – despite the fact that the globalisation of formal curriculum means that nowadays this is often structured in terms of competences. Reconstructed paradigmatic shifts are linked to shifts in perceptions of literature (to some degree, represented in literary theory). They are also linked to shifts in perceptions of the student as a person and a learner, and to shifts regarding expectations regarding institutional education in society. Pieper traces ways in which teachers approach literature as subject, focussing on tensions between a strong will on teachers’ part to support reading experiences related to the paradigm of ‘personal growth’, and aims that are closer to disciplinary knowledge. To elaborate on these frictions, she refers to two recent empirical studies from her own German-speaking context, focusing on potential challenges of literature education today.

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Against a background of widespread concern about ‘decline’ in reading skills in Swedish schools, as shown by large-scale international surveys such as PISA, Per-­ Olof Erixon and Maria Löfgren investigate a reading-promotion programme for primary and secondary school Years 4–9 in Swedish schools in ‘The Marginalisation of Literature in Swedish L1: A Victim of Socio-Political Forces and Paradigmatic Changes’. Called “Läslyftet” (‘The Reading Lift’), this is a further education programme for teachers aimed at strengthening students’ reading skills and the literature competence of L1 teachers themselves, and emphasising the importance of the L1 teacher’s role. In particular, they study the changing role given to literature and how literature itself is viewed, after being subsumed in the established frameworks of the central school administration, and with the positive political intentions behind the programme interpreted by ‘street-level bureaucrats’ at the Swedish National Agency for Education. In ‘Bildung and Literacy in Subject Danish: Changing L1 Education’, Ellen Krogh discusses the disciplinarity of the Danish L1 school-subject, making particular reference to the concept of Bildung. Her point of departure and main contribution to the discussion is an earlier study of subject Danish in the early twenty-first century. She finds that the basic dyadic subject construction of Danish language and literature has survived in subject Danish over centuries, and to a certain degree, still holds strong. Her main interest is to find (tentative) answers to questions of disciplinarity, relevance and meaning: How is it that subject Danish – effectively dethroned as a proud nation-building subject in the 1970s, and suffering from identity struggles ever since – still appears to be productive in young people’s projects of competence and Bildung? In the chapter, Krogh discusses the current relevance of her original study in a wider global perspective, with regard to both subject Danish and L1 education, especially given the strengthened position of literacy – what she calls elsewhere the ‘literacy age’. In ‘Between Grammar and Communication: Teaching L1 in the Czech Republic and England’, Stanislav Štěpáník investigates why there is, as he sees it, a disharmony between grammar as understood in modern linguistics and grammar as taught in schools. Hence his focus is on the language component of L1 education. Historically, in L1 teaching models of various languages all around the world, there have been periods which favoured grammar in L1 teaching, but also periods which saw grammar rejected altogether. Working comparatively, Štěpáník uses the teaching of English in England and Czech in the Czech Republic as representative of the ‘grammar wars’, outlining the oscillation between these poles. His aim is to compare and contrast the paths of teaching Czech and teaching English, respectively, and to clarify the position of teaching grammar in relation to developing pupils’ communication skills, diachronically and synchronically, and in relation to both the English and Czech systems. The following two chapters (Part III) move the L1 subjects into a more future-­ oriented perspective. In this regard, they draw attention to new media culture and digitalization but also to new environmental anxieties and climate change as an urgent global challenge – and hence see these together as creating new conditions and imperatives for the L1 subjects and associated curriculum change. Regarding

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the former, we concur entirely with the observation that “[t]he relationship between education and technology” is now patently “on the agenda globally”, and already having “great impact on the L1 subject, albeit in quite complex and differentiating ways” (Elf et al. 2015, p. 40). Similarly, climate change is undoubtedly emerging worldwide, albeit unevenly, as a priority concern for governments and institutions alike – including education. What does all this mean for the L1 subjects? Is it part of a new agenda for L1 education? Accordingly, then, these concluding chapters seek to orient the field more emphatically to the future, acknowledging all the same that these are clearly matters of interest and concern even now, and indeed pressingly and even urgently so. In ‘The Ongoing Technocultural Production of L1: Current Practices and Future Prospects’, Nikolaj Elf, Scott Bulfin and Dimitrios Koutsogiannis start from the fact that a reconfiguration of the L1 subject is taking place in terms of alterations in communicative forms and utterances. Their point of departure is that technology is inseparable from L1 as a set of utterances, practices, and discourses, which together are (re)constructing L1 subject cultures around the globe, i.e. as captured by the notion of ‘technocultural production’. This idea is based on a sociocultural view of teaching and learning, understanding the L1 subject, like other school subjects, as a dynamic interplay between its utterances related to knowledge, form and use, which, on a more abstract level of contextualisation, are related to disciplinary discourses, and paradigmatic understandings of, the subject locally, super-nationally and globally. Technology is embedded in and co-shapes all these aspects of the L1 subject. Alongside this matter, in ‘Nation and Nature in L1 Education: Changing the Mission of Subject English’, Sasha Matthewman argues that L1 educators must now re-evaluate their curriculum missions in the context of an epoch of intensifying climate anxiety that has come to be called the Anthropocene. In the chapter, she discusses the curriculum case of English from opposite sides of the world: in the UK (more specifically, England) and in Aotearoa New Zealand. Both nations retain strong curriculum connections, with the New Zealand nation itself arising out of a then dominant colonial British culture and the Crown’s settlement with indigenous Maori iwi (tribes). She asks what role the L1 subjects might play in mobilising individuals and populations with specific regard to engaging climate change and the global ecological challenge? Is teaching ‘ecoliteracy’, however radicalised, now a necessary part of the new agenda not just for English teaching but for the L1 subjects more generally? Finally, in a (re)framing chapter (Part IV), “Understanding the (Post-)National L1 Subjects: Three Problematics”, Bill Green and Per-Olof Erixon discuss various matters of interest in existing research in the field, looking in particular at what we see as the problematical notions of ‘nation’, ‘literacy’ and ‘paradigm’. Although the aim here is not to reflect systematically on the preceding chapters, it was written with their accounts and arguments in mind, and may therefore be seen as raising issues of more general theoretical and thematic concern, the traces and effects of which are readily discernible in and across the chapters themselves. It should be noted that this concluding chapter ( “Understanding the (Post-)National L1 Subjects:

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Three Problematics”) is to be seen in explicit relation to the present one, the two constituting thereby a frame for the book as a whole.

6  A Final (Personal) Note As this chapter is written, the world is in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis; borders are closed, planes are on the ground, industries are at a stand-still, and people are advised to stay at home. This is a very rapid change, and thus fully visible. But another change has been going on for quite some time and is also visible, and that applies to the increasingly vociferous criticism of the effects and consequences of globalization, open borders, and migration. When Donald Trump announced the slogan ‘America first’, he was not alone; in many countries before his pronouncement, such changes in sentiment had already been evident, and for quite some time. Even while these renewed nationalist movements are about protecting one’s own economy, they are also about the restoration of nations and national identities, which have long been challenged by digitalisation, internationalisation, and strong liberal currents. As already noted, L1 education and the L1 subjects have long been in the service of nation and national identity. L1 may be given a similar task in the near future. In February 2020 the Hungarian government announced that it will change its national literary canon in L1. Jewish authors like Imre Kertész are to be removed, and replaced by anti-semitic and nationalist writers who idealized the nation before the First World War. Hungary is one of several countries in Europe, along with Poland, which, despite economic support from the EU, is increasingly questioning the EU project and looking back to what is described as the nation’s ‘soul’. The suspicion of supranational activities is great, as it is of internationalization in general  – a movement marked, it must be said, by strong support from the Church. To come back to this project, then – Nations and national languages might well be inventions of modernity and caught up in a fading dream of social homogeneity. But when migrations, population displacements, and other influences from outside challenge the dream of a homogeneous society, with its supposed ‘one language/one culture’, the feeling of a failed state might easily arise (cf. Salvio 2014). It may be a matter of dreaming – but ‘politics is to want’, to quote former Prime Minister in Sweden, Olof Palme, and politics are built upon dreams. How we imagine and interpret the possibilities of our lives is dependent on the language and meanings we have at our disposal. This is why the L1 subjects remain so central to our future.

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References Appadurai, A. (2010). Disjuncture and difference in the global economy. In Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (pp.  27–47). Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Bernstein, B. (1996/2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique. Lanham/Boulder/New York/Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc (Revised edition). Boser, L., & Brühwiler, I. (2017). Languages, script and national identity: Struggles over linguistic heterogeneity in Switzerland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. History of Education, 46(3), 306–323. https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2016.1267267. Brass, J. (2016). English teaching and the educationalisation of social problems in the United States, 1894-1918. Paedagogica Historica, 52(3), 221–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/0030923 0.2016.1151056. Elf, N., Hanghøj, T., Skaar, H., & Erixon, P. (2015). Technology in L1. Contribution to a special issue Paradoxes and Negotiations in Scandinavian L1 Research in Languages, Literatures and Literacies, edited by Ellen Krogh and Sylvi Penne. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 15, p. 1–88. Elmfeldt, J., & Erixon, P. O. (2007). Skrift i rörelse: Om genrer och kommunikativ förmåga i skola och medielandskap (296 s). Stockholm/Stehag: Symposion. Englund, T. (2015). Toward a deliberative curriculum? Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, pp. 48–54– NordSTEP 2015, 1: 26558. https://doi.org/10.3402/nstep.v1.26558. Erixon, P. O. (2010a). School subject paradigms and teaching practice in lower secondary Swedish schools influenced by ICT and media. Computers & Education, 54(4), 1212–1221. Erixon, P. O. (2010b). From texts to pictures in teaching civics: Participant observation in Mark’s classroom. JSSE – Journal of Social Science Education, 9(3), 15–25. Erixon, P. O., Marner, A., Scheid, M., Strandberg, T., & Örtegren, H. (2012). School subject paradigms and teaching practice in the screen culture: Art, music and the mother tongue (Swedish) under pressure. European Educational Research Journal, 1(2), 255–273. Gagné, G., Daems, F., Kroon, S., Sturm, J., & Tarrab, E. (1987). Defining research in mother tongue education. In Selected papers in mother tongue education [Etudes en pédagogie de la langue maternelle] (pp. 1–18). Dordrecht/Montréal: Foris/Centre de diffusion. Green, B. (1990). A dividing practice: ‘Literature’, English teaching and cultural politics. In I. Goodson & P. Medway (Eds.), Bringing English to order: The history and politics of a school subject (pp. 135–161). London/Philadelphia: The Falmer Press. Green, B. (1999). Curriculum, literacy and the state: (re-)‘right’-ing English? Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 7(3), 385–407. Green, B. (2017). English as rhetoric?  – Once more, with feeling…. English in Australia, 52(1), 74–82. Green, B., & Erixon, P. O. (2020). Understanding the (post-)national L1 subjects: Three problematics. In B. Green & P. O. Erixon (Eds.), Rethinking L1 education in a global era: Understanding the (post-)national L1 subjects in new and difficult times. Dordrecht: Springer. Green, B., Hodgens, J., & Luke, A. (1997). Debating literacy in Australia? History lessons and popular f(r)ictions. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 20(1), 6–25. Herrlitz, W., & van de Ven, P.-H. (2007). Comparative research on mother tongue education: IMEN’s aims, points of departure, history and methodology. In W.  Herrlitz, S.  Ongstad, & P.-H. van de Ven (Eds.), Research on mother tongue education in a comparative international perspective: Theoretical and methodological issues (pp. 13–41). Amsterdam/New York: Rudopi Press. Kroon, S., & Sturm, J. (1987). Research on mother tongue education in an international perspective: Some introductory and admonishing remarks. In S. Kroon & J. Sturm (Eds.), Research on mother tongue education in an international perspective: Papers of the second international symposium of the international mother tongue education network, Antwerp, December, 1986 (Studies in mother tongue education No. 3, pp. 1–7). Enschede: VALO-M.

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Liberg, C., Wiksten Folkeryd, J., & Af Geijerstam, Å. (2012). Swedish – An updated school subject? Education Inquiry, 3(4), 477–493. Løvlie, L., & Standish, P. (2002). Introduction: Bildung and the idea of a liberal education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 36(3), 317–340. Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing education policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press/ Routledge. Sahlberg, P. (2016). The global educational reform movement and its impact on schooling. In K. Mundy, A. Green, B. Lingard, & A. Verger (Eds.), The handbook of global education policy (pp. 128–144). Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Salvio, P.  M. (2014). ‘Cities and signs’: Curriculum studies in Italy. In W.  F. Pinar (Ed.), International handbook of curriculum research (2nd ed., pp.  269–277). New  York/London: Routledge. Smeyers, P., & Depaepe, M. (Eds.). (2008). Educational research: The educationalization of social problems. New York: Springer. Trimbur, J. (2008). The Dartmouth conference and the geo-history of the native speaker. College English, 71(2), 142–169. UNESCO. (1953). The use of vernacular language in education (Monographs of fundamental education – VIII). Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO. (2016, February). If you don’t understand, how can you learn? (Global education monitoring report – Policy Paper 24). Paris: UNESCO. van de Ven, P.-H. (2007). Understanding mother tongue education from a historical(-comparative) perspective. In W. Herrlitz, S. Ongstad, & P.-H. van de Ven (Eds.), Research on mother tongue education in a comparative international perspective: Theoretical and methodological issues (pp. 227–250). Amsterdam/New York: Rudopi. Windle, J. (2019). Neoliberalism, imperialism and conservatism: Tangled logics of educational inequality in the global south. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(2), 191–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2019.1569878. Yildiz, Y. (2012). Beyond the mother tongue: The postmonolingual condition. New York: Fordham University Press. Per-Olof Erixon  is Professor of Educational Work at Umeå University, Sweden. Formerly an upper secondary teacher, he took his PhD in Comparative Literature, and has subsequently worked within the field of Teacher Education. He has held different leadership positions as Head of Department, Head of National Postgraduate School, and most recently Dean for the Faculty of Arts at Umeå University. His research has ranged across academic literacies, new media studies in L1-education, and national and international issues connected to teacher education Bill Green  is Emeritus Professor of Education at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Originally a secondary English teacher, he has worked in a range of Australian universities in a career focused on educational research and teacher education. His scholarship has ranged across literacy studies and curriculum inquiry, English curriculum history, doctoral research education, and professional practice education. His most recent publications are the books Engaging Curriculum: Bridging the Curriculum Theory and English Education Divide (Routledge, 2018) and The Insistence of the Letter: Literacy Studies and Curriculum Theorizing (Routledge, 2019 – an edited volume originally published in 1993).

Part I

History/Theory/Culture

Curriculum Inquiry, Didaktik Studies and L1 Education: Framing and Informing the L1 Subjects Bill Green and Ellen Krogh

Abstract  This chapter takes as its reference point an important debate in recent times addressed to the possibilities for dialogue between (Anglo-Saxon) curriculum inquiry and (European) Didaktik studies. At issue is the significance and value of the concepts of ‘curriculum’ and ‘didaktik’, respectively, for understanding and informing educational practice. In this chapter we provide a review of this debate, and hence the fields in question here and their organising concepts – curriculum inquiry and Didaktik studies – and then consider some of the challenges and implications that this debate presents for (re)thinking L1 education and the L1 subjects. In this account, the need for attention to the notion of ‘pedagogy’ is highlighted, based on recent arguments for the revalorisation of this concept in curriculum inquiry. Also relevant here is the distinction between general didactics and disciplinary didactics in the Didaktik tradition. A further focus is on questions of knowledge (and ‘content’), and the manner in which this issue manifests itself in L1 as a school subject. The case is made that L1 education – otherwise known as national mother-tongue education, or education in and for the national standard language – presents a unique context for engaging (in) the debate. As such, this chapter is particularly timely, given the changing circumstances of education and schooling worldwide and new social imperatives. Keywords  Curriculum · Didaktik · Knowledge · Practice theory · L1 education · School subjects

B. Green (*) Faculty of Arts & Education, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] E. Krogh Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Green, P.-O. Erixon (eds.), Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era, Educational Linguistics 48, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7_2

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1  Introduction An important debate in recent times is addressed to the possibilities for dialogue between (Anglo-Saxon) curriculum inquiry and (European) Didaktik studies. At issue is the significance and value of the concepts of ‘curriculum’ and ‘didaktik’, respectively, for understanding and informing educational practice. In this chapter we provide, firstly, a review of this debate and the fields of curriculum inquiry and Didaktik studies, and their organising concepts. We then consider some of the challenges and opportunities that this debate presents for (re)thinking L1 education and the L1 subjects. The case we develop here is that L1 education – otherwise known as national mother-tongue education, or education in and for the national standard language1 – presents a unique context for engaging (in) the debate. In this context, these distinctive traditions can be understood as intellectual resources and organisational frameworks, as well as distinct fields of scholarship and inquiry. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that drawing these perspectives together is by no means straightforward. This is not only because there is clearly no simple relationship between them, but also because many if not most of the L1 subjects have shown a marked reluctance to move outside their own internal terms of reference, with an instrumental focus on classroom practice. This has recently been described as, effectively, a “divide” (Green 2018a). Some contextualising remarks, first off. We are writing out of our respective locations within subject English, on the one hand, and subject Danish, on the other, within which we have long histories of personal-professional involvement. As well, we have both come more recently to researching more broadly in the curriculum field of L1 education. Furthermore, we are both currently engaged in thinking through the issues and challenges associated with curriculum inquiry and what we are calling didaktik studies, as they enter into their own complicated conversation. It is this sense of converging paths in our own work to date that led us to the project of this chapter, which is addressed specifically to the ‘curriculum/didaktik’ debate. For our purposes here, we can take a recent account of the “knowledge domain of Nordic L1”, as indicative of the general territory at issue vis-á-vis L1 education: Holmberg et  al. (2019) describe this as comprising “three interlinked, but partly independent fields”, namely the school subject, teacher education (“supporting the L1 school subject”), and also L1 research and scholarship, understood as “relatively free research related to the school subject” (pp. 3–4). In effect, we are focussing on a specific subject-disciplinary community whose work extends across school and university, engaging both classroom teaching and academic work. Moreover, the state has a particular role to play in terms of regulation and employment, as well as accreditation and resourcing. This seems as applicable to the Anglophone countries as to the Nordic countries, and elsewhere, though there are likely to be differences in how this plays out in practice across different national jurisdictions. There is 1  It should be borne in mind here that we are referring more specifically to the L1 subjects – see Chap. 12 (“Understanding the (Post-)National L1 Subjects: Three Problematics”).

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much to be gained, we believe, in extending discussion and debate beyond the single, nationally-specific school-subject (L1), while still maintaining a strong connection with it, and across national frames of reference. We begin with an overview of the ‘curriculum/didaktik’ debate itself, before going on to present specific accounts of curriculum and didaktik perspectives, respectively, on L1 education and the L1 subjects.

2  Dialogue/Debate? There is a sense in which the ‘curriculum/didaktik’ debate stages a marked disjunction between the Old and New Worlds – between anglophone America, on the one hand, and continental Europe, on the other. Here, Europe does not include England or more broadly the United Kingdom, so that one side of the debate is more appropriately presented as an Anglo-American perspective, with the common point being the (educational) use of the English language. Here as elsewhere, it is perhaps better to think of the history of L1 education in terms of the geo-dynamics of nation and empire, bearing in mind the significantly Euro-centric course of colonialism and imperialism. There may well still be some value in such a view. The European tradition has a much longer provenance, historically, than does the Anglo-American tradition, with ‘didaktik’ having been around earlier than ‘curriculum’ (Alexander 2000; Hamilton 1989). It is grounded therefore more deeply and intimately in European history and philosophy. Although that is not to suggest that North American curriculum studies is unmarked by such influence, the point is, rather, that these different traditions or perspectives have their own historical specificity, their situatedness, their own cultural relativity (cf. Tröhler 2016). A key text in the debate is the 1998 volume entitled Didaktik and/or Curriculum, edited by Bjørg Gundem and Stefan Hopmann.2 It emerged from a series of meetings responding to growing interest in curriculum theory and was addressed to the question of its relationship with and implications for Central European work in ‘didactics’, or Didaktik studies. As Petterssen et al. (2015, p. 2) note: “The Didaktik versus Curriculum Network was established over 20 years ago by Stefan Hopmann, Ian Westbury, Bjørg Gundem and colleagues to improve understanding and to develop analytical instruments concerning the relation between the organization of schooling in its nation-specific context”. More recently, there have been several symposia on precisely such issues held at the University of Southern Denmark (most recently, in January 2018), organised by Ellen Krogh and others. A wider, more comprehensive dialogue is developing, with ongoing publications in contexts such as the Journal of Curriculum Studies (JCS) and the European Educational Research Journal (EERJ) and increasingly engagement on the part of Anglo-­American, Australian and Asian scholars (e.g. Li and Kennedy 2017; Green

 See also Westbury et al. (2000).

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2018a). Yet already there are limits to that dialogue. This is partly a matter of selection and focus, which is understandable, and perhaps unavoidable – but there are also signs here of what Foucault famously called a ‘dividing practice’, with certain aspects of curriculum inquiry, certain discourses within the field, being foregrounded and others backgrounded, or even at times misrepresented. Indeed, too often the curriculum field is seen as more or less identified with North American work in this area, and more especially the USA. Little account is taken, at least until recently, of work arising from other countries or regions – for instance, the action research tradition associated with Lawrence Stenhouse and John Elliott in the UK and Stephen Kemmis in Australia (Green 2018b).3 With regard to the US scene, a similar selectivity and partiality can be discerned. One way of understanding this is to point to different dominant groupings in recent American curriculum studies – for instance, what might be called the ‘Criticalists’ associated with Michael Apple, the ‘Reconceptualists’ associated with William Pinar, and the ‘Institutionalists’ associated with Joseph Schwab and also with Ian Westbury. It is this latter grouping that seems most congruent with the European Didaktik tradition. An intriguing account in this regard is Westbury’s (1998)4 discussion of the differences between (current-traditional) American curriculum studies and German Didaktik work. He describes these two perspectives as constituting “two distinct ways of thinking about teaching, schooling and educating … two traditions of educational practice” (Westbury 1998, p. 47). Seeing each perspective as deeply rooted in its own social and cultural milieu, he locates Didaktik usefully in inter- and post-­ war social and intellectual movements in Germany (see also Klafki 1998), while pointing to the management context for curriculum studies. Hence Westbury refers to “the assumption of a managerial framework for curriculum development and specification and, later, for the control and evaluation of educational ‘service delivery’” (p.  49). The focus here is on building and maintaining an effective public-­ school system, as the origin and the frame for curriculum studies as it emerged in the early twentieth century and as it developed and professionalized subsequently. Curriculum thinking was thus hand-in-hand with “institutional development” (p. 51). Hence: “for curriculum [studies] the central construct is the school system as an agency for the institutionalized teaching of a ‘content’, seen unproblematically in terms of this or that view of and selection from a subject matter” (p. 62). In contrast: “For Didaktik, on the other hand, it is the teacher – and of course the interaction between a particular teacher and his or her own students – who nurtures the character-formation which is at the heart of education seen as Bildung” (p. 63). These are two very different perspectives – the rational and effective school, on the one hand, and the professional teacher, on the other – distinguishing the social system and the human agent. Yet such a portrayal seems far too loaded. Is it indeed the case that American curriculum studies in this particular tradition has so starkly 3  A notable exception is the work of the British educational sociologist Basil Bernstein. More recently, one could also point to Michael Young, another sociologist, as an increasingly prevalent reference in Europe, as elsewhere. 4  See also Westbury (2000).

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positioned what might appropriately be called the administrative and the pedagogical? It is unlikely, surely. Yet there are similarities here with the broad case that Pinar (2012) presents, in arguing for his version of curriculum theory, which might be seen as similarly problematical. Perhaps the problem lies partly in the manner in which the debate is characteristically depicted, as a matter of ‘either/or’ rather than ‘both/and’? In this regard, it is worth noting that Westbury refers to what he calls a “complementarity”, describing it variously as “constructive” (p. 48) and “intriguing” (p. 69). This is a position that we want to adopt here. We see rich possibilities in bringing together these two traditions, and are in broad agreement with the following observation: “despite their differences, there are several similarities between the European Didaktik and the Anglo-American curriculum theory, which are relevant beyond the contexts in which each originally developed” (Sivesind and Luimes 2017, p. 218). In what follows, we shall endeavour to indicate how this can be done, with specific regard to L1 education and the L1 subjects. First, however, it is useful to indicate very briefly what these respective terms refer to, both within the debate itself and perhaps more generally. ‘Curriculum’ in anglophone contexts tends to refer more specifically to ‘knowledge’ and also ‘course of study’, with the unfortunate consequence that it is thereby separated from pedagogy. This leads to the common Anglo-American notion of ‘curriculum and instruction’, or even ‘curriculum and pedagogy’, as at best complementary terms of reference. And while the relatively recent ‘Reconceptualist’ movement brought a broadened, more flexible and dynamic understanding of curriculum to the scene, this all too often has had an ambivalence towards teaching and schooling. Yet it meant that the scope of curriculum theorizing was opened up considerably to engage the social world, and hence draw in issues related to social practice and cultural politics more generally. With regard to didaktik studies, what has been called “the didaktik triangle” (Hopmann 2015, p. 18), bringing together ‘teacher’, ‘learner’ and ‘content’, is central.5 Here it is the relationship between these three terms that matters, without necessarily privileging any one of them. Hence: “Didactics deals with teacher, student(s) and subject matter […]: teachers teach students, and at the same time, they teach subject matter” (Meyer et al. 2017, p. 188). In what follows, we elaborate on what these different perspectives involve, with particular reference to L1 education.

3  A Curriculum (Inquiry) Perspective What does curriculum theory have to offer to L1 education – and specifically, to an enhanced understanding of the L1 subjects? What value is there, in this regard, in drawing on a curriculum perspective? Pinar (2004) has proposed that curriculum 5  In this context it is worth noting this formulation, from one of the key participants in the debate, regarding “… ‘pedagogy’, the functional equivalent of Didaktik” (Hopmann 2015, p. 16). Whether that is indeed the case, or as simple as this suggests, remains to be explored.

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theory is “the interdisciplinary study of educational experience”.6 While it is not all that clear what he means by “educational experience”, and it might well be that his position is somewhat restricted by his own emphasis on the autobiographical and the psychoanalytic (and also the academic-intellectual), this view nonetheless remains of interest here. This is because it allows for different disciplinary perspectives to be brought to bear in looking at and thinking about L1 lessons and classrooms, beyond the psychological and the sociological. Indeed, what characterises Reconceptualist work is its openness to the arts and humanities, as well as to social theory and the social sciences, as disciplinary and conceptual resources (Pinar 2004, p. 2). At the very least, such a view can be seen as foregrounding the lived-through experience of classroom practice, which arguably is central to understanding and enacting education, as schooling. Interestingly enough, that view would be at odds in important respects with certain strands of contemporary curriculum theory, which seem to operate programmatically at some distance from classrooms, and indeed from school practice. In the context of the curriculum/didaktik’ debate, this is evoked in calls for “a revitalised curriculum theory that addresses ‘the practical’, the actual educational context, rather than theorising texts” (Linné 2015, p. 32).7 Such a view can be seen as misleading, however, based as it seems to be on a misapprehension of textuality. In generating an opposition between ‘practice’ and ‘texts’, it ignores the insight and intervention of poststructuralist theory and philosophy, which is surely an important resource for such work (Green 2018c, p. 82). At issue here is the Reconceptualist argument that curriculum is usefully and appropriately understood in terms of ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ – that is, in accordance with the (post-)linguistic turn.8 While curriculum inquiry can be seen in terms of an intricated set of ‘discourses’, curriculum itself, as a “highly symbolic concept”, is at once “intensely historical, political, racial, gendered, phenomenological, autobiographical, aesthetic, theological and international” (Pinar et al. 1995, pp. 857–858). An early formulation, this has since been extended but also modulated, somewhat rather ambivalently (Green 2018c). Rather than seeing this simply as a proliferation of curriculum discourses, serially related, it is better grasped as an intertwining  – that is, with these “various discourses as more closely and systematically interwoven into and with each other, rather than existing more or less side by side, or serially” (Green 2018c, p. 83). In 6  This can also be presented in terms of the ‘trans-disciplinary’ and the ‘pre-disciplinary’ – thereby usefully complicating the whole notion of disciplinarity in this context. 7  Once again it is Westbury (e.g. 2007) who is being cited here. It is worth noting that he also refers in this context to the ‘practical’ as “a meta-theory of schooling” (Linné 2015, p. 31). 8  See Autio (2009) for a critical observation on the European tradition’s reluctance to engage with “postmodern or poststructural or any other ‘post’-theorizing” (p. 9). For a useful account of ‘curriculum-as-text’, see Whitson (2009). As Whitson writes, further, while “… no [single] study will do justice to all the dimensions of reality that are interwoven in curriculum-as-text”, nonetheless “[w]hat distinguishes curriculum inquiry from research that lacks a framework of curriculum consciousness” is that “even when our inquiry pursues a partial focus, it must do so in a way that appreciates its own partiality”, vis-á-vis “the full manifold reality of curriculum” (Whitson 2009, p. 352).

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such a view, the ‘practical’ and the ‘discursive’ are brought together, curriculum as text and as action, or activity. What this enables is a richer view of (in this instance) L1 education as at once a matter of institutionalised practice, a profoundly practical endeavour, and open to social and cultural recontextualization, spilling over into the world. Curriculum-as-institutional-text is brought together with curriculum-as-­ political-text or curriculum-as-gendered-text, or curriculum-as-bioregional-text, or whatever, across the total set of discourses outlined in recent curriculum theory. Hence, attending to what goes on in the L1 classroom involves the interplay of pedagogy, the interaction of teachers and students around particular texts, with a view to generating understandings that are at once authorised and internally persuasive – new knowledge, effectively, or knowledge-in-use. Among other things, this might allow for a (eco)socially-critical view of the L1 subjects – of English teaching as critical pedagogy, perhaps, addressing (didactised) questions of environmental crisis and technocapitalism, or of subject Danish as a rich and generative site for culturally-sensitive pedagogy, working pro-actively with issues of linguistic and cultural diversity, racial and ethnic difference. “The political and the institutional are always already implicated in curriculum inquiry, whatever its focus is” (Green 2018c, p. 83). Classrooms are always-already complex sites of socio-cultural practice – and teaching and learning is thereby necessarily constrained and contextualized – looking both inward and outward. In this way, L1 educational practice draws in social context, as a matter of course. Indeed, in certain respects the L1 subjects are particularly open in this regard, dealing as they do characteristically with language and experience, culture and identity. At the same time, it is important to take due account here of what has been called ‘the knowledge question’ in recent curriculum debates: What knowledge is of most worth? This has been described as the quintessential curriculum question (Green 2018a; Pinar 2012). Relatedly, then, what knowledge is of most worth in L1 education? What constitutes knowledge in the L1 subjects? What counts as knowledge in these subjects? In what sense are subjects Danish and English, or whatever the L1 teaching area, to be seen as knowledge subjects? What is taught in these subject areas? What is the object of study? It is relatively commonplace, traditionally, to point to ‘language’ and ‘literature’ as the dual focus of concern. Studies in language and literature, often with a national orientation but sometimes more regionally understood (e.g. European literature), are a central and enduring feature of the modern(ist) school curriculum. More recently, ‘literacy’ has emerged as a reference-­ point in this regard internationally, notwithstanding that the term itself has no counterpart in some languages, and refers to a general capacity with regard to written language and textuality. A difficulty that arises immediately, however, is how language and literature (and literacy, perhaps even more so) might be understood as knowledge, at least in the traditional sense? This question is rarely asked in some quarters, but it is undeniably important, and it is good to see recent work increasingly addressed to it (e.g. Yates et al. 2019). If we take ‘language’ as our initial focus here, the challenge becomes very clear. What is it to see L1 education as language education? What does it mean to teach and learn one’s own (‘native’) language? What is involved in being schooled in one’s

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mother-tongue? A common way that this is understood is to point to grammar, as a focus for teaching and learning. Studying grammar is indeed a staple feature of L1 education (Schneuwly and Vollmer 2018), albeit oftentimes a controversial issue (e.g. Green and Hodgens 1996). More generally, the knowledge base of grammar is drawn from linguistics, as the formal (i.e. scientific) study of language. A tendency exists, in fact, to see linguistics as the key disciplinary resource for L1 education – alongside literary studies, as its counterpart with regard to literature. In both cases, however, this is often still largely conceived as substantive, propositional knowledge, of a particular kind, or knowledge about language and literature. This is certainly the case with language and linguistics. Hence, alongside grammar, literary criticism and to some extent literary history have traditionally been part of the L1 curriculum, perhaps more particularly in the senior secondary school – knowledge about major periods and genres, or about aspects such as metaphor and irony, etc. In both cases, this has often been linked to a transmission pedagogy, with teachers as the (authoritative) source of (authorized) knowledge, charged with relaying it to students. At various times, however, and right across the L1 subjects, this structure has been challenged. Concern has developed about the doctrinal and even authoritarian nature of education, and about associated forms of student resistance and disengagement, or their constrained opportunities for learning and enjoyment. Hence, marked curriculum change is evident at different moments in history – for example, the 1970s for Danish L1 teaching, and the 1960s for English (Goodson and Medway 1990), This is when curriculum orientation shifts from ‘transmission’ to ‘interpretation’ (Barnes 1976), and then to ‘negotiation’ (Green 2018a, p. 87). What needs also to be realized is that this presents a shift in terms of knowledge: what it is, who it is associated with, where it is located, and even the very form it takes. A key document in English curriculum history, the Bullock Report, made the following observation: 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’. To bring knowledge into being is a formulating process, and language is its ordinary means. (Department of Education and Science 1975, p. 50)

Needless to say, this has been a controversial statement – but a clear, situated statement of position it is, nonetheless. It puts the focus firmly on the ‘knower’, the learner, the agent, and more generally, on knowledge-in-use.9 Such a view is sharply at odds with the recent turn to (‘powerful’) knowledge in curriculum inquiry, notably associated with Michael Young (2013), which avowedly seeks to restore a sense of knowledge as significant and valuable, and meaningful, in and of itself. There are major implications and challenges here for L1 teaching, and indications already of an ongoing debate, and this is likely to be of major import for the field.10

9  It is worth noting that this is also a key moment when traditional grammar teaching became a matter of often heated public debate, certainly in Anglophone contexts (Green 1998). It should be said, too, that this does not necessarily mean a de-emphasis on teaching and the teacher. 10  See for instance Doecke and Mead (2017) and Yates et  al. (2019)  – the project these papers emerge from is an important initiative in this regard within English L1 teaching.

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In considering the issue of how best to understand the knowledge question in L1 education, Michael Halliday’s classic view of language education is apposite (Halliday 1993). He presents it in terms of learning language, learning through language, and learning about language.11 Language as a resource for learning and language as an object of learning are both indisputably part of the L1 curriculum field, and ongoing work is addressed to each of them. But what about learning language? – particularly one’s ‘mother-tongue’. What is involved in language learning of this kind, something that begins relatively soon after birth and continues on through schooling, from the early years to upper secondary? This would appear specifically the remit of the L1 subjects – for example, subject English – especially in the high school. Here it becomes a matter of increasingly sophisticated and effective usage that needs to be emphasized, across an ever-expanding repertoire. This is where literature comes in, as a key site in which language use is played out, to best effect. Literature is both an arena and a laboratory for language-in-use. It is not the only site for this, however – hence, the increasing significance of the media, both print and electronic. At this point it is useful to take up the view of language as practice. The question then becomes: what is involved in learning practice? – that is, learning language-as-­ practice. This is to approach the matter from the point of view of practice theory and philosophy (Schatzki et  al. 2010; Green and Hopwood 2015). There are several strands of such work, with various implication and challenges for language and literacy education. A key line of thought links figures such as Volosinov, Bakhtin, and Williams, as well as Gramsci, which Crowley (2018) has discussed in terms of Marxist theories of language. Raymond Williams is especially relevant here. Language became crucial to his investigations of culture and society, and also education. Crowley (2018, p. 40) notes “Williams’s perception … that signs are both shaped by past use, but also deployed in the creative making of the present (which also means, crucially, that they are open to the future)”. Language is conceived above all else as language-in-use, in society  – language-in-use-in-society  – and hence as social practice. For Williams (1977), language is to be grasped first and foremost as “… as practical, constitutive activity” (p. 29), as creative, as material activity, as praxis, as thoroughly implicated in history. He thus provides a basis for linking practice and institution with regard to language, and hence also for learning. In presenting such a view of language as activity, as “sensuous human practice”, we can better see a way of thinking of reading and writing as forms of activity, and as social practices. The L1 classroom is conceived therefore as a site for language activities of various kinds, across the modalities of speech and writing, and also beyond, into the digital-electronic realm. Language is realized in usage; and language practices are primarily learnt in and through practice, by using texts to make and re-make meanings that are at once authoritative and internally-persuasive (Bakhtin (1981) – both personalized and socially intelligible. The important point  It might even be appropriate, as well as generative, to consider literature and literacy in these terms (i.e. learning/learning through/learning about). It is important to remember, moreover, that both literacy and literature are historically linked with written language (Green 2018a).

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here is that this is surely knowledge, albeit of a different, distinctive kind – subjectified in students through their engagement in practice. It is difficult to articulate this in an orthodox or conventional way. Consider student writing, for example – what are the knowledges that writers bring to bear in their writing, what is it that they produce, as writers?12 Texts, certainly, but are these also to be understood as knowledge, as knowledge-constitutive? And how does writing produce students as knowledgeable subjects? It is especially intriguing to think of so-called ‘creative writing’ in these terms, or of students’ self-initiated writing, more often than not in L1, and outside of the context of traditionally more ‘content’-oriented school-subjects. That is, it is perhaps particularly within L1 education as a distinctive school-subject, with its own historical and cultural specificity, and with its own claims to worthwhile knowledge and educational value, that opportunities open up for students to embody and realise their own knowledge projects in this way.13

4  A Didaktik Perspective How do Didaktik studies and L1 education relate to each other, in theory and practice? How do the two fields inform, enrich, and challenge each other? The relation between Didaktik and L1 education is embedded in the distinction between general didactics and disciplinary didactics.14 General didactics represents the overarching theory of pedagogic decision-making as well as general theories of teaching and learning (Arnold 2012). Disciplinary didactics concerns the didactic issues of school subjects and disciplinary knowledge, i.e. the relations among the content of disciplines (the ‘what’), approaches and methods (the ‘how’), and reasons and justifications for choosing content and approaches (the ‘why’) (Gundem 1998; Ongstad 2002a, b). Within German general didactics, two main theoretical positions can currently be found (Seel and Zierer 2012), a position that takes Bildung as its code and source of orientation, and a position that makes teaching and learning the centerpiece of didactic theory and practice. Within the hermeneutic, Bildung-centered tradition, Didaktik is viewed as the “theory of intellectual encounters between the  An important albeit somewhat controversial consideration in this regard is what has been called genre theory, with ‘genres’ understood as effectively the interface between knowledge and language (Christie and Maton 2011; Ongstad 2002b). 13  The other side of this, of course, is identity-work. In this regard, see Jakobsen’s (2019) account of what she calls ‘identity drafts’ in student writing. 14  In the didaktik literature, the common English language term is ‘subject didactics’ or ‘subject matter didactics’, relating the field to the school subject. The reference terms, French ‘discipline’, German ‘Fach’, Danish and Norwegian ‘fag’, are, however, used for both academic and school disciplines as well as for other institutionalised knowledge fields. Since, further, contemporary conceptions of disciplinary didactics are much wider than the reference to school subjects would indicate, we consider disciplinary didactics to be a more relevant term. Hence this term is used in the chapter, except in the case of direct quotations. 12

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generations” which requires “existential concentration” in the person of the teacher (Weniger 1990, quoted by Künzli and Horton Krüger 2000). This branch of Didaktik studies focuses on teachers’ selection and subjectivisation of ‘content’ to initiate and support students’ processes of self-Bildung. Wolfgang Klafki developed a scientific foundation for this practice in his salient article on Didaktik analysis as the core of preparation of instruction (Klafki 2000). In Künzli & Horton Krüger’s words: The essential, fundamental question of Didaktik is Why is the student to learn the material in the first place? No objectives are worth teaching or learning that cannot be said to contribute at least indirectly to Bildung. The first task is to find the point of a prospective object of learning in terms of Bildung, then to ask what it can and should signify to the student, and how students can themselves experience this significance. (Künzli and Horton Krüger 2000, p. 46)

Bildung adds a normative, moral dimension to education. Inherent in the notion is the double aim of socialization into one’s culture and individuation through one’s own studies and practices, so as to be able to participate in cultural activities, public affairs, and politics, making subjective yet knowledgeable judgments and decisions, thinking against the subject matter, thinking against oneself, transcending, and transforming (Autio 2014). The second, teaching-and-learning centred branch of Didaktik studies has developed theories and models of instruction that incorporate the wider social and institutional context and represent the instructional task as a systemic model of interrelated aspects (Seel and Zierer 2012). The classical teacher-learner-content ‘didactic triangle’, noted above, is foundational here, in that it offers a theory of what is essentially at stake in teaching. The triangle framework as well as associated contemporary models provide heuristics both for teachers’ reflections and preparations of teaching and for descriptive analyses of instructional practices. General didactics has little interest in the knowledge fields and epistemologies of school subjects since these are considered mere concretizations of general theories and educational decisions concerning content and learning (cf. Künzli and Horton-­ Krüger 2000, p. 44). In parallel, general didactics has historically had limited direct impact on the field of L1 education, whose driving force has been to develop the distinctive character of L1 content, methods of knowledge production, and classroom practices, and not least the Bildung potentials inherent in these. L1 education is, however, directly related to disciplinary didactics, which established itself as a growing academic field in the wake of the 1960s’ reorganization or “massification” of secondary school systems (Schneuwly 2011). The field originated in a growing reflection within individual school subjects on their own distinctive character, and, more concretely, the realization that specialized subject content calls for the development of specialized ways of teaching and learning (Lorentzen et  al. 1998; Ongstad 2006). This research took a step further by raising general-­ didactic questions of teaching and learning, knowledge production, and Bildung, within the subjects and from within the subjects (cf. Krogh 2003). At the turn of the century, Hopmann and Riquarts (2000) stated that a radical turn toward content and disciplinary didactics has taken place within academic institutions as well as within schooling, arguing that a similar movement can be found within curriculum studies:

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B. Green and E. Krogh What all these efforts have in common is the strong belief that we need an integrative approach, as intended by Herbart and Comenius, that can do justice to each corner of the Didaktik triangle: the teacher, the content, and not least, the learner who has to come to terms with this ever more complicated world. (Hopmann and Riquarts 2000, p. 10)

The demand for disciplinary-didactic research was strengthened by the advance of comparative international studies, in particular PISA, and the political calls for empirical evidence of students’ learning (cf. Vollmer 2014). The wave of educational reforms in the wake of these trends has given rise to research on the core issue of knowledge and content. As elaborated by Schneuwly (2011), a key tenet of contemporary disciplinary didactics is the criticism of “applicationism”, i.e. the direct application of scientific (‘academic’) theories into curricula. Whereas the structure of knowledge in academic disciplines can legitimize knowledge to be learned and guarantee its epistemological validity, the pertinence of knowledge and the reasons for selection imply analyses and studies proper to didactics as a disciplinary field. Schneuwly and Vollmer (2018) document this point in an historical study of the development of the teaching of grammar in the Swiss L1 subjects, drawing on Chevallard’s (2007) influential anthropological theory of the didactical transposition of academic knowledge into institutional disciplines. To further elucidate the issue of didactical knowledge processes, they include Vygotsky’s theory of grammar teaching as a transformation of students’ relation to language and to themselves. Schneuwly and Vollmer discuss this study as a case of generalized disciplinary didactics relating to the pertinent issue of knowledge and Bildung. How can knowledge building and Bildung be strived for and achieved at the same time? They argue that teaching and learning a subject is much more than acquiring knowledge of or within that subject. It implies the acquisition of transferable skills and categories to be used within other contexts, and the development of general educational values, skills and competencies that can be captured in the notion of subject-based Bildung. Hence, three levels of disciplinary15 learning are identified: 1. Learning of or within a subject (knowledge, skills, subject-specific competences). This means the reconstruction of content and practices that are specific to a subject. 2. Learning alongside or with a subject (transferable skills and competences). This means identifying and using what is generalizable and applicable in other contexts. 3. Learning through a subject (long-range educational effects that result in Bildung). This means the construction of the individual and social self in dealing, while dealing or through dealing with a specific subject or problem/topic. (Schneuwly and Vollmer 2018, p. 10)

 In German and also in Danish and Norwegian, the terms fachlich/faglig (disciplinary) and Fachlichkeit/faglighed (disciplinarity) have a wide field of reference. The disciplinarity of subject German or subject Danish refers to the knowledge field of the subjects as well as to teachers’ professional identity, and is actualized in both the teaching of the subject and in students’ learning.

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Disciplinary didactics rests on strong pillars of specialized disciplinary studies. Further, as illustrated above, a generalized disciplinary-didactic field has been developed in the German and Scandinavian regions, giving rise to meta-disciplinary research and general theories that may inform individual disciplinary studies as well as comparative research (Vollmer 2014; Ongstad 2006). In the Scandinavian context, Sigmund Ongstad’s (2006) theory of disciplinary didactics as a communicative, semiotic project has been highly influential.16 The constitutive tenet, that disciplinary teaching and learning are basically semiotic, communicative processes, and should be studied as such, is hardly controversial in the educational community, albeit less widespread within Didaktik studies and curriculum studies than within writing and literacy research.17 Ongstad argues, however, that semiotic communication is constitutive for the field of disciplinary didactics, and, further, that the field reaches further than education and schooling. Thus, although disciplinary specialization is a fundamental feature of knowledge societies, formally established disciplinarities will be under pressure to contribute to economic competitiveness in the highly dynamized, global knowledge society. Academic disciplines are under pressure to provide usable and useful knowledge, and school subjects are consequently increasingly under pressure to focus on training students to become human resources, with relevant workforce competences. In the face of these eternal demands for adaptability and flexibility, established disciplinarities need to discuss and justify their specific contribution to education. According to Ongstad, this need for meta-didactic reflection and communication constitutes the primary task for contemporary disciplinary didactics (in the plural): these need to take on a strategic responsibility to preserve, continue and develop specialized knowledge under pressure by change. Within this theoretical approach, disciplinary didactics occurs as communication in time and space, and hence, as a processual and contextualized scientific field, captured by the concept of didactization, “a discursive, semiotic, or textual process that weaves a subject or a field of knowledge closer together with meta knowledge about the disciplinary knowledge in new contexts under pressure from a society in change” (Ongstad 2006, p. 36). Drawing on Bakhtin and Habermas, Ongstad argues that the triadic communicative utterance actualizes the lifeworld aspects of subject, world and society, and relations between them (cf. Ongstad 2007). In the utterance, the speaker expresses him/herself and gives form to a content through an addressive, communicative act. Thus, the conceptualization of disciplinary didactics as communication and reflection actualizes issues of human existence and Bildung that derive from the communication as such. While the school subjects actualize 16  See Ongstad’ chapter, this volume, and also Ongstad (2015), for further accounts of disciplinarity along such lines. 17  More recently, the communicative approach to disciplinary didactics has inspired a Nordic wave of research into disciplinary literacies (e.g. see Krogh and Jakobsen 2019), in parallel with the growing research field of disciplinary literacy within the Anglophone context (Shanahan and Shanahan 2008, 2012; cf. also functional-linguistic research into specialized school languages, e.g. Schleppegrell 2004; Christie and Derewianka 2008).

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different lifeworld aspects, L1 subjects contribute basic resources to the Bildung project, since language and communication are core L1 disciplinary knowledge fields. Nordic L1 school subjects, including subject Danish, have a long Bildung tradition that originates in the subject’s own content fields, primarily related to the national language, especially in its most advanced actualizations in the national literature. During most of the twentieth century, L1 and History as school subjects were conceived as key incarnations of the general educational Bildung project. Since the 1970s, however, the textual content of L1 has been widened to include non-literary prose, popular culture and media texts, and, further, a turn towards rhetoric and writing. Currently, it is a condition of L1 education (as well as of school subjects in general) that the balancing act of tradition and change demands constant re-thinking. While historical and contemporary studies of national languages, literatures, and cultures are still basic aspects of the L1  subjects, the diversity of languages and practices in today’s L1 classrooms call for new understandings of identity and culture, and for changing reflections on the selection of content and approaches. Further, digital media constitute an uncontrollable resonance chamber for the L1 disciplinary forms of text and communication, with new technologies shedding a changing light on the traditional technologies of the subject: verbal language, the voice, and the book. Finally, PISA and subsequent introduction of test measures established a new frame of reference for L1 literacy practices which, as embedded in a Bildung tradition, were traditionally aversive to test-oriented teaching practices (cf. Autio 2014). Currently, the disciplinary identity of contemporary L1 subjects can be captured by the notion of text, or textual practices, as coined by Robert Scholes (1998) in the double set of text consumption and text production. Further, literacy – a term not directly translatable into many European languages – has gained recognition within the educational community as an imported term that may effectively capture the contemporary complex field of reading, writing, and communication. The strengthened political interest in national literacy testing has further led to reform programs that turned literacy into a responsibility for all the school subjects. While new balances of tradition and change in L1 subjects have made it necessary to rethink the L1 Bildung contribution, as well as textual content and literacy practices, the permanent need for didactization has also spurred a growing interest and need for the wider theoretical frameworks of disciplinary didactics and general didactics. Disciplinary didactics offers a frame of reference for reflecting on the specific knowledge contribution of L1, as compared to the knowledge contributions by the range of other school subjects. General didactics, as noted above, offers Bildung theories and models of teaching and learning (cf. Schneuwly & Vollmer above). These wider perspectives contribute a didactic – or educational – rationale for L1 education and further offer analytical tools and models for didactic analysis and Bildung reflections within the field.

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5  C  onclusion: L1 Education and the ‘Curriculum-­Didaktik’ Debate We set out here to explore the potential of L1 education as a context for engaging (in) the debate on curriculum and Didaktik, as intellectual resources and organisational frameworks, as well as distinct fields of scholarship and inquiry. Following Sivesind and Luimes (2017) and others, we have endeavoured to indicate that there are relevant similarities between the two traditions in relation to L1 education and L1 subjects, focussing on those with which we are most familiar – subject English and subject Danish. Our argument for the relevance of curriculum inquiry is made along two key lines. Firstly, we foreground the view that curriculum as text and as practice should be systematically brought together (Green 2018c). Relating this view to L1 education, we see L1 education as at once a matter of (re)productive, institutionalized practice and simultaneously open to social and cultural recontextualization, an interplay of pedagogy with a view to generating new knowledge or knowledge in use. This allows for (re)conceptualisations of L1 practice that draw in social context, a particularly relevant matter since L1 subjects deal with language and experience, culture and identity. Secondly, we discuss the issue of knowledge as highlighted in the key curriculum question: What knowledge is of most worth? Posing this question to L1 education, we discuss the character of knowledge about, respectively, language, literature, and literacy, as a historical-conceptual field. Drawing on Michael Halliday (1993), we suggest that language education may be captured in terms of the threefold formulation of learning language, learning through language, and learning about language, a pattern of thought that may also transfer to literature and literacy education. While language as a resource for learning and language as an object of learning are clearly part of the L1 curriculum field, what is involved in learning language within L1 is more complicated. With reference to practice theory and philosophy, language can be conceived as practical, constitutive activity and a sensuous human practice, linking L1 language learning to forms of activities and social practices. Thus, the L1 classroom is conceived as a site for language activities, across the modalities of speech and writing and into the digital-electronic realm, using texts to make and remake meanings that are at once personalized and socially intelligible (cf. Bakhtin 1986). We argue that this constitutes knowledge of a distinctive kind, and hence provides one answer to the classical curriculum question. Accordingly, the question of what knowledge is of most worth needs a differentiated answer, relating at once to different disciplinarities and to different practices of teaching and learning. David Hamilton (1998/2002) states that if a reasonable curriculum question is ‘What should they know’, the equivalent Didaktik (Bildung) question is ‘What should they become?’ As we have seen, contemporary L1 curriculum inquiry, appropriately reconceptualised, problematizes the traditional curriculum question and construes a bridge towards Didaktik. The opposite movement can be detected within Didaktik studies when, as elaborated below, L1 didactics insists that

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students’ processes of becoming within L1 need to build on their struggling with disciplinary-specific work in terms of both text consumption and text production (learning through language?). The double construction of general didactics and disciplinary didactics may obscure the core ideas of the Didaktik field. There are issues of sub-optimization when proponents of the two fields argue for the superiority of their respective fields in addressing pertinent educational questions. Recent research argues, however, that the two fields should be viewed as providing different and complementary perspectives on education, subject-areas, teaching, learning, and classroom practice (Krogh and Qvortrup forthcoming 2020). With regard to contemporary L1 didactics, this approach appears fruitful. Both fields offer relevant theoretical resources for L1 research and practice in a historical situation where reflection and justification of the L1 knowledge fields, as well as their disciplinary (re)construction, is permanently called for. While curriculum inquiry initiates questions of the systematic relation of discourse and practice, general didactics initiates theoretical questions of didactic analysis in the light of the aims of Bildung. Although drawing on different references, we find a shared call for an integrative understanding of practice and theory, or activity and text, within (L1) education. In response to the curriculum question of what knowledge is of most worth, in L1 education, the eventual answer is: students’ language and text practices, in making meanings that are at once personalized and intelligible within the subject-disciplinary frame of reference. Within Didaktik studies, while the question of knowledge within L1 education is articulated differently, as what ‘content’ may at once frame students’ knowledge-building and self-­Bildung, the eventual answer is quite similar, namely: text consumption and text production processes that are capable of framing students’ work as at once personally invested and knowledgeable. The theoretical reference, disciplinary didactics, underscores that language and communication are at once medium and disciplinary references for these processes. In this regard, an interesting parallel can be drawn between Halliday’s proposal of three aspects of language education (language learning, learning through language, learning about language) and Schneuwly and Vollmer’s identification of three levels of disciplinary learning (learning of or within a subject, learning alongside a subject, learning through a subject). The difference occurs in the third learning aspect, respectively, with the linguist calling for meta-­ understanding, while the didacticians call for Bildung, i.e. the formation of the individual and social self in dealing with the specific subject. Concerning L1 language learning, we could argue accordingly that a rich and informed meta-understanding of language in all its possibilities and modalities18 is a crucial and necessary component of Bildung. We are left, finally, with a sense that two further issues are still to be resolved. One is the question of how ‘knowledge’ equates to ‘content’ as it is deployed in Didaktik studies. The other is the question of framing with regard to curriculum

18

 That is, drawing from both linguistics and philosophy, at the very least.

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inquiry and Didaktik studies respectively. In the first instance, it has been noted already that the triangle model seeks to bring together ‘teacher’, ‘student’ and ‘content’. Accordingly it can be asked firstly how is ‘knowledge’ rendered into ‘content’ (i.e. how these are to be understood as different, or distinct), and secondly, more specifically, what this means for the L1 subjects.19 We have already suggested that a tendency exists not to perceive the L1 subjects as ‘knowledge subjects’, in the same way as various other school subjects, perhaps particularly those located higher in the curriculum hierarchy. This is clearly a matter for further collaborative-­ comparative investigation. In the second instance, what is at issue here is the extent to which Didaktik studies remain committed to and perhaps constrained by the project of modernity, along with its associated rationality (Autio 2009), while curriculum inquiry can be seen as being at least more open to a ‘postmodern’ framing of educational practice and possibility, within new understandings of textuality and power (Green 2017). This is work scarcely begun in L1 education, worldwide. It has however particular implications and challenges for the L1 subjects, internationally, and may open up new opportunities for transnational dialogue. Clearly there is much to be learnt from what has been described as “a conversation of traditions”,20 and we look forward to participating in how all this plays out in the emerging future of the L1 field.

References Alexander, R. (2000). Culture and pedagogy: International comparisons in primary education. Oxford: Blackwell. Arnold, K. H. (2012). Didactics, didactic models and learning. In N. M. Seel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the sciences of learning. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer. Autio, T. (2009). Globalization, curriculum and new belongings of subjectivity. In E.  Ropo & T. Autio (Eds.), International conversations on curriculum studies: Subject, society and curriculum (pp. 1–20). Rotterdam: Sense. Autio, T. (2014). The internalization of curriculum research. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), International handbook of curriculum research (2nd ed., pp. 17–31). New York/London: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M.  M. (1986). The problem of speech genres. In C.  Emerson & M.  Holquist (Eds.), Speech genres and other late essays (pp. 60–102). Austin: The University of Texas Press. Barnes, D. (1976). From communication to curriculum. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Chevallard, Y. (2007). Readjusting didactics to a changing epistemology. European Educational Research Journal, 6, 131–134. Christie, F., & Derewianka, B. (2008). School discourse. London/New York: Continuum.  A crucial concept here is the notion of “didactic transposition” (Schneuwly and Vollmer 2018, p. 40) – how knowledge is changed in accordance with its mediations and recontextualisations, including those directly related to the classroom curriculum-in-use. 20  A formulation taken from the Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) research program, an international network initiated by and associated with Stephen Kemmis at Charles Sturt University, Australia, and in many ways a complement to the ‘dialogue’ we focus on here. See EdwardsGroves and Kemmis (2015). 19

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Christie, F., & Maton, K. (Eds.). (2011). Disciplinarity: Functional linguistic and sociological perspectives. London/New York: Continuum. Crowley, T. (2018). Marx, Volosinov, Williams: Language, history, practice. Language Sciences, 70, 37–44. Department of Education and Science. (1975). A language for life: Report of the Committee of Inquiry appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Science under the Chairmanship of Sir Alan Bullock FBA. London: Department of Education and Science [The Bullock Report]. Doecke, B., & Mead, P. (2017). English and the knowledge question. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 26(2), 249–264. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2017.1380691. Edwards-Groves, C., & Kemmis, S. (2015). Pedagogy, education and praxis: Understanding new forms of intersubjectivity through action research and practice theory. Educational Action Research, 24(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2015.1076730. Goodson, I., & Medway, P. (Eds.). (1990). Bringing English to order: The history and politics of a school subject. East Sussex: The Falmer Press. Green, B. (1998). Born again teaching? Governmentality, ‘grammar’ and public schooling. In T. S. Popkewitz & M. Brennan (Eds.), Foucault’s challenge: Discourse, knowledge, and power in education (pp. 173–204). New York: Teachers College Press. Green, B. (2017). Curriculum, politics and the postmodern; Or, beyond the knowledge question in curriculum inquiry. mimeo, Charles Sturt University. https://www.academia.edu/35788551/ Curriculum_Politics_and_the_Postmodern_or_Beyond_the_Knowledge_Question_in_ Curriculum_Inquiry Green, B. (2018a). Engaging curriculum: Bridging the curriculum theory and English education divide. New York/London: Routledge. Green, B. (2018b). Curriculum studies in Australia: Stephen Kemmis and the Deakin legacy. In C. Edwards-Grove, P. Grootenboer, & J. Wilkinson (Eds.), Education in an era of schooling: Critical perspectives of educational practice and action research – A Festschrift for Stephen Kemmis (pp. 27–45). Singapore: Springer. Green, B. (2018c). Understanding curriculum? Notes towards a conceptual basis for curriculum inquiry. Curriculum Perspectives, 38(1), 81–84. Green, B., & Hodgens, J. (1996). Manners, morals, meanings: English teaching, language education, and the subject of ‘grammar’. In B. Green & C. Beavis (Eds.), Teaching the English subjects: Essays on English curriculum history and Australian schooling (pp. 204–228). Geelong: Deakin University Press. Green, B., & Hopwood, N. (Eds.). (2015). The body in professional practice, learning and education: Body/practice (pp. 15–33). Dordrecht: Springer. Gundem, B. B. (1998). Skolens oppgave og indhold. En studiebog i didaktikk [The task and content of the school: A study book in didactics]. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Gundem, B. B., & Hopmann, S. (Eds.). (1998). Didaktik and/or curriculum. New York: Peter Lang. Halliday, M. (1993). Towards a language-based theory of learning. Linguistics and Education, 5, 93–116. Hamilton, D. (1989). Towards a theory of schooling. London: Falmer. Hamilton, D. (1998/2002). Didaktik, deliberation, reflection. In B.  B. Gundem & S.  Hopmann (Eds.), Didaktik and/or curriculum (pp. 79–86). New York: Peter Lang. Holmberg, P., Krogh, E., Nordenstam, A., Penne, S., Skarstein, D., Karlskov Skyggebjerg, A., Tainio, L., & Heilä-Ylikallio, R. (2019). On the emergence of the L1 research field. A comparative study of PhD abstracts in the Nordic countries 2000–2017. L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 19, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.17239/L1ESLL-2019.19.01.05. Hopmann, S. (2015). ‘Didaktik meets curriculum’ revisited: Historical encounters, systematic experience, empirical limits. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 1, 27007, 14–27. https://doi.org/10.3402/nstep.v1.27007. Hopmann, S., & Riquarts, H. (2000). Starting a dialogue: Issues in a beginning conversation between Didaktik and the curriculum traditions. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 27(1), 3–12.

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Jacobsen, K. S. (2019). Creativity in student writing development. In E. Krogh & K. S. Jakobsen (Eds.), Understanding young people’s writing development: Identity, disciplinarity and development (pp. 160–180). London/New York: Routledge. Klafki, W. (1998). Characteristics of critical-constructive Didaktik. In B. B. Gundem & S. Hopmann (Eds.), Didaktik/curriculum: An international dialogue (pp. 307–330). New York: Peter Lang. Klafki, W. (2000/1958). Didaktik analysis as the core of preparation of instruction. In I. Westbury, S. Hopmann, & K. Riquarts (Eds.), Teaching as a reflective practice: The German Didaktik tradition (pp. 139–159). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Krogh, E. (2003). Et fag i moderniteten. Danskfagets didaktiske diskurser [A subject in modernity: The didactic discourses of subject Danish]. PhD thesis. Odense: The University of Southern Denmark. Krogh, E., & Jakobsen, K. S. (2019). Understanding young people’s writing development, identity, disciplinarity, and education. London/New York: Routledge. Krogh, E., & Qvortrup, A. (forthcoming 2020). Towards laboratories for meta reflective didactics: On dialogues between the fields of general didactics and disciplinary didactics. In S. T. Graf, E. Krogh, & A. Qvortrup (Eds.), Didaktik and curriculum in ongoing dialogue. To be published by Routledge. Künzli, R., & Horton-Krüger, G. (2000). German Didaktik: Models of re-presentation, of intercourse, and of experience. In I. Westbury, S. Hopmann, & K. Riquarts (Eds.), Teaching as a reflective practice. The German Didaktik tradition (pp. 41–55). New York: Routledge. Li, Z., & Kennedy, K. J. (Eds.). (2017). Theorizing teaching and learning in Asia and Europe: A conversation between Chinese curriculum and European didactics. London/New York: Routledge. Linné, A. (2015). Curriculum theory and didactics  – Towards a theoretical rethinking. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, pp. 31–39 – NordSTEP 2015, 1: 27002. https://doi. org/10.3402/nstep.v1.27002. Lorentzen, S., Streitlien, Å., Høstmark Tarrou, A.-L., & Aase, L. (1998). Fagdidaktikk. Innføring i fagdidaktikkens forudsetninger og utvikling [Disciplinary didactics. Introduction to the basis and development of disciplinary didactics]. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Meyer, M. A., Meyer, H., & Ren, P. (2017). The German Didaktik tradition revisited. In J. C.-K. Lee & K. J. Kennedy (Eds.), Theorizing teaching and learning in Asia and Europe: A conversation between Chinese curriculum and European didactics (pp. 179–216). London/New York: Routledge. Ongstad, S. (2002a). Positioning early research on writing in Norway. Written Communication, 19(3), 345–381. https://doi.org/10.1177/074108802237749. Ongstad, S. (2002b). Genres – From static, closed, extrinsic, verbal dyads to dynamic, open, intrinsic semiotic triads. In R. Coe et al. (Eds.), The rhetoric and ideology of genre: Strategies for stability and change (pp. 297–320). Creskill: Hampton Press. Ongstad, S. (2006). Fag i endring: Om didaktisering av kunnskap [Subjects in transformation: On the didactization of knowledge]. In S. Ongstad (Ed.), Fag og didaktikk i lærerutdanning. Kunnskap i grenseland (pp. 19–60). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Ongstad, S. (2007). The concepts of ‘language’ and ‘discipline’ in transgression. In W. Martinyuk (Ed.), Towards a common European framework of reference for language(s) of school education? (pp. 117–130). Krakow: Universitas. Ongstad, S. (2015). Competing disciplinarities in curricular L1. A Norwegian case. L1  – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 15, 1–28. (Special Issue guest-edited by S. Penne & E. Krogh: Paradoxes and negotiations in Scandinavian L1 research in languages, literatures and literacies). Petterssen, D., Prøitz, T. S., Roman, H., & Wermke, W. (2015). Curriculum versus Didaktik revisited: Towards a transnational curriculum theory. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 1, 27014, 2–4. https://doi.org/10.3402/nstep.v1.27014. Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? (1st ed.). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pinar, W. F. (2012). What is curriculum theory? (2nd ed.). New York/London: Routledge.

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Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. M. (Eds.). (1995). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary discourses. New York: Peter Lang. Schatzki, T. R., Knorr Cetina, K., & von Savigny, E. (Eds.). (2010). The practice turn in contemporary theory. London/New York: Routledge. Schleppegrell, M. (2004). The languages of schooling: A functional linguistics perspective. Mahwah/London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Schneuwly, B. (2011). Subject didactics – An academic field related to the teacher profession and teacher education. In B.  Hudson & M.  A. Meyer (Eds.), Beyond fragmentation: Didactics, learning and teaching in Europe (pp.  275–286). Opladen/Farming Hills: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Schneuwly, B., & Vollmer, H. J. (2018). Bildung and subject didactics: Exploring a classical concept for building new insights. European Educational Research Journal, 17(1), 37–50. Scholes, R. (1998). The rise and fall of English. New Haven: Yale University Press. Seel, N. M., & Zierer, K. (2012). General didactics and instructional design. In S. T. Hopmann, B. Hudson, N. M. Seel, & K. Zierer (Eds.), Jahrbuch für Allgemeine Didaktik 2012. Thementeil: International perspectives on the German didactics tradition (pp. 77–107). Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Hohengehren. Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 40–59. https://doi.org/10.17763/hae r.78.1.v62444321p602101. Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2012). What is disciplinary literacy and why does it matter? Topics in Language Disorders, 32(1), 7–18. https://doi.org/10.1097/TLD.0b013e318244557a. Sivesind, K., & Luimes, M. (2017). Didaktik and curriculum studies: A European perspective. In Z. Li & K. J. Kennedy (Eds.), Theorizing teaching and learning in Asia and Europe: A conversation between sChinese curriculum and European didactics (pp. 27–231). London/New York: Routledge. Tröhler, D. (2016). Curriculum history or the educational construction of Europe in the long nineteenth century. European Educational Research Journal, 15(3), 279–297. Vollmer, H.  J. (2014). Fachdidaktik and the development of a generalised subject didactics in Germany. Éducation et Didactique, 8(7), 24–34. Weniger, E. (1990). Theorie der Bildunginhalte und des Lehrplans (1930/1952). In E.  Weniger (Ed.), Ausgewählte Schriften zur geistenswissenschaftlichen Pädagogik (pp.  199–294). Weinheim/Basel: Beltz. Westbury, I. (1998). Didaktik and curriculum studies. In B. B. Gundem & S. Hopmann (Eds.), Didaktik/curriculum: An international dialogue (pp. 47–78). New York: Peter Lang. Westbury, I. (2000). Teaching as a reflexive practice: What might Didaktik teach curriculum. In I. Westbury, S. Hopmann, & K. Riquarts (Eds.), Teaching as a reflective practice: The German Didaktik tradition (pp. 15–39). Mahway: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Westbury, I. (2007). Theory and theorizing in curriculum studies. In E. Forsberg (Ed.), Curriculum theory revisited: Studies in educational policy and educational philosophy (Research reports 7, pp. 1–19). Uppsala: Uppsala University. Westbury, I., Stefan Hopmann, S., & Riquarts, K. (Eds.). (2000). Teaching as a reflective practice: The German Didaktik tradition. Mahway: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Whitson. (2009). Is there no outside to curriculum-as-text? In E.  Ropo & T.  Autio (Eds.), International conversations in curriculum studies (pp. 339–354). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yates, L., McLean Davies, L., Buzacott, L., Doecke, B., Mead, P., & Sawyer, W. (2019). School English, literature and the knowledge-base question. The Curriculum Journal, 18, 51–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2018.1543603. Young, M. (2013). Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: A knowledge-based approach. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 4(2), 101–118.

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Bill Green  is Emeritus Professor of Education at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Originally a secondary English teacher, he has worked in a range of Australian universities in a career focused on educational research and teacher education. His scholarship has ranged across literacy studies and curriculum inquiry, English curriculum history, doctoral research education, and professional practice education. His most recent publications are the books Engaging Curriculum: Bridging the Curriculum Theory and English Education Divide (Routledge, 2018) and The Insistence of the Letter: Literacy Studies and Curriculum Theorizing (Routledge, 2019 – an edited volume originally published in 1993). Ellen Krogh  is Emeritus Professor in subject Danish at the University of Southern Denmark. Her publication record is within L1 education, writing in school subjects, and disciplinary didactics, with a methodological focus on longitudinal ethnography. Her most recent publications are Understanding Young People’s Writing development (Krogh and Jakobsen 2019), and Didaktik and Curriculum in Ongoing Dialogue (Routledge, forthcoming).

From Grammar to Socio-interactionism: L1 Education in Brazil Luciene Simões and Rildo Cosson

Abstract  L1 education in Brazil has been based on at least three paradigms, which are common to most Western countries since the second half of the nineteenth century. In the Brazilian context, these paradigms have been referred to as the traditional paradigm, the communicative paradigm, and the socio-interactionist paradigm. This study aims to analyse how these three paradigms evolved from the Latin-Jesuitic heritage, in which classic culture was central, to contemporary multiliteracies education, associated to the development of competences by learners and monitoring through international assessment exams. The analysis highlights as key to this historical process: the construction of the national standard language and literary canon; the strong influence of communication theory for a conception of language as instrumental; the downgrading of literary text in favor of journalistic and public texts; the submission of lessons to textbook models; the interference of academic research on language and literature; and the legitimate presence of children’s and youth literature at school. Once these factors are identified and the historical construction of Portuguese Language and Literature as a school subject outlined, conclusions point to the simultaneous and unbalanced presence of the three paradigms in contemporary representations of Portuguese teaching in Brazil. As a consequence, teachers are faced with the challenge of coping with contradictions and ambiguities arising from the presence of these mixed paradigms in public policies, official curricula, and teaching materials. Keywords  Brazilian language education · Portuguese language teaching · Brazilian literature teaching · Language education history · Language education paradigms

L. Simões Department of Classic and Vernacular Languages, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil R. Cosson (*) Department of Classical and Vernacular Letters, Federal University of Paraiba, João Pessoa, Paraiba, Brazil © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Green, P.-O. Erixon (eds.), Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era, Educational Linguistics 48, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7_3

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L1 education in Brazil was originally inspired by the teaching of Latin to the young in the context of schooling institutions. By the end of the nineteenth century, Portuguese and its corresponding literary tradition started to replace Latin as the centre of language education curricula. From then on, the dispute concerning what should constitute its curriculum, and its function in a broader educational framework, can be assimilated, in very general lines, to the coexisting paradigms present in other Western countries’ mother-tongue education curricula (Dixon 1967; Applebee 1974; Sawyer and Watson 2001; Bonset and Rijlaarsdam 2004; Sawyer and Van de Ven 2007). In this chapter, we will draw upon both the concept of paradigm and the classification proposed by Sawyer and Van de Ven (2007)1 to analyze the construction and historical course of L1 education in Brazil. In the appropriation of the paradigms identified by Sawyer and Van de Ven, our analysis will focus on three of them only: the literary-grammatical paradigm, the communicative paradigm, and the utilitarian paradigm. These three paradigms achieved a hegemonic position in the Brazilian L1 education history, whereas the developmental paradigm did not go further, although some of its features can be traced in school curricula influenced by Dewey’s ideas and the New School Movement. We also propose that the first and the last paradigms to be distinguished are better named as the traditional paradigm and the socio-interactionist paradigm, due to the emblematic designation that they have assumed in Brazilian academic discourse. Moreover, we claim that the communicative paradigm is constructed in a very specific way in Brazil, due to the country’s historical context at the time. We aim at examining the transformations that the teaching of Portuguese as a school subject underwent since it was first established at the influential Colégio D. Pedro II, in imperial Rio de Janeiro, and at characterizing what paradigms for L1 education have been hegemonic in Brazil, from that time to the present day. Our interest is in investigating the historical singularities that characterize L1 education in the specific context of Brazilian schooling, in order to unveil how these paradigms are articulated in the present framework of Portuguese L1 teaching in Brazil. In that sense, it is not properly a historical study, since our main purpose is to understand, based on the analysis of these different paradigms, the challenges confronting L1 education in Brazil today. In order to achieve such an objective, therefore, we will not search for similarities between the Brazilian case and that of other countries, nor will we seek to follow these classifications exactly as outlined there, since they are general tendencies that do not account for all the nuances that a case-study naturally brings to light. Our analysis will be interpretive, and based on a bibliographical survey of previous studies investigating the history of L1 as a school subject in Brazil. The chapter is divided in five parts. In the first four parts, we present the origins and the three paradigms so as to propose an understanding of L1 education in Brazil; and in the

1  A well-established formulation in the literature of the field. See Green and Erixon (2020) for an elaboration of the three ‘paradigms’, along with a discussion of the ‘paradigm’ concept itself.

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fifth, we discuss the challenges faced by Portuguese and Brazilian Literature teachers as they have to deal with the conflicting permanence of elements of these three paradigms in classroom practices, in didactic materials, and in curriculum prescriptions.

1  B  eginnings: The Construction of a Portuguese Language Teaching Tradition L1 education in Brazil can be said to have had a prehistory and a proto-history that precede its institutionalization in the end of the nineteenth century. The prehistory comprehends two periods: the first period comprises early colonial times, when language education was conducted by Jesuit missionaries; the second period succeeds the Pombaline reforms,2 when Jesuitic education was substituted by a system of isolated, state-supported classes in the Portuguese colonies, towards the end of the eighteenth century. During these two periods, Latin was the scholarly and prestigious language, and the teaching of Portuguese was introductory or secondary. It is important to note that the spread of Portuguese as a hegemonic language in the territory today known as Brazil was a slow process, only completed by the end of the nineteenth century. Between the first extractivist and sugar-based colonial economy and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Portuguese minority that colonized Brazil was confined to a few coastal settlements, and the use of Portuguese for everyday interactions has been said to be insular in this period (Faraco 2016; Silva 2004; Soares 2002). Apart from the multilingual indigenous population, in many cities people would speak the tupi-based lingua franca called General language, which was systematically described by the Jesuits, who adopted it for evangelization and other missionary purposes. The African population, forced into slavery, would learn Portuguese as a second language for very restricted functions. It was not before the establishment of internal commerce, after gold mines were discovered in Minas Gerais, that a more widespread use of Portuguese emerged in the country. It was not until economic activity became more diversified, and considerable population mobility towards the interior regions, that Brazil would actually have a widespread use of Portuguese. Between the sixteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, Portuguese settlers and their descendants were no more than 30% of the population, while the African descendants reached 60% of the 2  The Pombaline reforms were several administrative acts issued by the Marquis of Pombal, Minister of D.  José I, king of Portugal, from 1750 to 1777. These reforms intended to make Portugal a modern and strong state, and reached all areas of the Portuguese society. The main act in the educational area was the expulsion of Jesuits from all Portuguese territories. This ended the dominion of the Jesuits over schooling in Brazil, a Portuguese colony. Education became a responsibility of the Crown, despite not having either money or interest to improve education in the colonies. See Maciel and Shigunov Neto (2006).

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population at a certain point. The Afro-Brazilian and indigenous population had no access to formal education. The most widely accepted hypothesis in the history of the dominance of Portuguese as a spoken language in Brazil, hence, has been that it was a process of “spread from below” (Silva 2004). This process often resulted from its acquisition as a second language, and later as a first language acquired by several generations that still did not go to school or even learned how to read and write. Apart from economic factors, the Pombaline reforms were also instrumental for the language constitution of colonial Brazil, since one of its central tenets was a monolingual language policy. From then on, Brazil has always had Portuguese appointed as an official language, and the 1759 reforms resulted in the repression of the use of the General language, and other languages, in the public spheres. This linguistic landscape will have consequences for the adoption of language education paradigms later on. In this prehistory of schooling in Brazil, there were neither external nor internal conditions for the development of L1 education (Soares 2002; Bunzen 2011). Portuguese was not generally spoken in the territory mostly inhabited by indigenous tribes, and it competed with the General language for functional dominance. In the academic sphere, Latin remained the language of prestige. It is important to note, however, that with Pombal’s policies of curricular control, the historical processes through which the school teaching of Portuguese would later be institutionalized had a start regarding language standardization as well as the revision of the role of Portuguese in early education and in the teaching of Latin. From a very detailed set of curriculum instructions to be followed by certified teachers, both for the teaching of Portuguese grammar and the further and even parallel teaching of Latin, the Pombaline reforms approached the study and the teaching of Portuguese within a framework inspired by classical studies. This invention of the Portuguese vernacular as a “classical language” was an explicit language policy that supported, through education, a nationalistic language project for the Portuguese empire (Mendonça 2013). Still, schooling in Brazil at the time was restricted to isolated classes taught by certified teachers, and those who taught Latin were the same teachers who taught Portuguese grammar as a means to guarantee the learning of Latin. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the presence of the royal family in Rio de Janeiro, followed by independence from Portugal in 1822, some fundamental changes ensued. This is when the proto-history of the school subject unfolds. An external set of factors were relevant for Portuguese education in this period, such as the foundation of higher education schools, and the emergence of a local press, and with it, not only a system of editors, printed materials, and readers, but also the printing and later the production of school grammars and textbooks. In 1837 the model secondary school, Colégio Dom Pedro II, was founded, and National Language studies were explicitly included in the curriculum by 1838 (Razzini 2000, 2010). Nevertheless, some decades elapsed before Portuguese would finally be institutionalized as a subject-matter in the emergent school system of the Brazilian empire.

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Throughout the proto-historical period, the Portuguese vernacular was given a central role in the early years of schooling, with the spread of schools for primary education in urban areas. As for secondary education, the number of schools, following a French model of education, increased in the biggest coastal cities. These schools were committed to the further education of a commercial class and, mainly, the preparation for professional careers of the sons of élite families. Even so, during the proto-history Latin was the subject required for further studies, and Portuguese teaching remained subordinate to classical education. Finally, in the 1870s, L1 schooling was effectively institutionalized, and the history of L1 education can be said to have started. Three conditions are landmarks for the final transition between Latin and Portuguese as the central language to be taught as a school subject in Brazil: its inclusion as a requirement for higher education, the employment of Portuguese teachers, and the institutionalization of the vernacular as a school subject throughout the secondary school years. The requirements for admissions to higher education regulated secondary education curricula since its very beginning. At the time, in order to enter a higher education school, students needed to obtain a certificate in each required school subject separately, so it was only a small minority that actually graduated in secondary education, even from Colégio Pedro II.  In 1869, a preparatory examination in Portuguese became mandatory for admission in all higher education schools of the empire, by law. In 1871, the position of Portuguese teacher, separate from Latin teacher, was created by the Emperor, and in the same year the Portuguese preparatory examinations started to be taken by students. From this point on, an array of factors shows how Portuguese becomes a full and central school-subject: its preparatory examinations started to be required before all others; the time invested in its study both in years of schooling and in the number of hours per week increased; the publication of textbooks by Portuguese teachers became prolific and editorially successful; Portuguese grammar books were not only published, but they started being written in Brazil; Portuguese literature and, by the century’s end, even Brazilian literary texts were taken as models of language use; and the subject became a secondary school subject taught until the final years of this level of schooling. Although later decades would consolidate and bring specificities to the workings of the traditional paradigm, it can be said that it continues as the sole model for L1 teaching from this date until the 1940s. Still, it is important to acknowledge the existence of the proto-history from the 1759, the year that Jesuits were expelled from Brazil, to 1871, when Portuguese becomes a fully formalized and independent school subject, because the elements characterizing the traditional paradigm were forged in this period, for both Language education and Literature education. In fact, it is in this period that the predominant study of Latin progressively gives way to Portuguese. In this transition, the contents as well as the pedagogical practices recommended in the Jesuits’ Ratio Studiorum shape the school curriculum (França 1952; Medeiros 2015). This is how, for example, the subject matter of the National Language will have Grammar, Poetics, and Rhetoric as its components, later partitioned and distributed in the school subjects

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related to Portuguese and Literature. The syllabus is a direct copy from that of Latin: the emphasis on syntax; the morphological lists, such as those of verb conjugations; the description of literary genres and its variations; the figures of speech. These among other topics can be found in various documents such as school programs and textbooks for the study of the new school subjects. As for classroom practices, these are also adopted from the model prescribed for teaching and learning a written and foreign language, taken as an ideal (Faraco 2006): spelling exercises, the use of excerpts as privileged reading material, reading constructed as reading aloud from the written page, and the presence of recitation (Razzini 2000, 2010; Soares 2002; Medeiros 2015; Souza 2015). All these characteristics are at the heart of the traditional paradigm, and have a long presence in Brazilian L1 education, and still felt nowadays.

2  The Latin-Jesuit Heritage and Nationalism The traditional paradigm emergence in Brazil’s L1 education in the 1870s coincides with the appearance of Portuguese grammar description, and a succession of school grammars became available, all of them within a framework of general or philosophical grammar. Many of these grammars take Latin as an ideal with which Portuguese should be compared. Grammar is seen as the foundation for direct contact with texts through recitation, reading and writing exercises, and is initially present in the early years of schooling for such a purpose. Literature is understood as a body of selected texts given by tradition, and thus considered as classical, and taken as models for language use. Apart from this transposition of a Latin into a Portuguese pedagogy, a very important and distinctive feature of the Brazilian L1 curriculum in the traditional paradigm is its division in two separate school subjects: Portuguese (or the National Language), and Brazilian Literature. In such division, the study of the language, and of its grammar, gets the lion’s share. Portuguese or the National Language is present as a curricular subject from elementary until the end of secondary schools, with a high number of hours per week; while the study of Brazilian Literature takes some two hours a week, and only in secondary school. This difference is very clear if one considers the fact that National Literature becomes a required subject for higher education admissions only in 1936, and only for Law School. It is just in 1942, when it is included as a preparatory examination for other university degrees, that it is clearly institutionalized as a secondary-school subject (Razzini 2000, 2010). It is in large part due to this peripheral role in curricular structures that Literature as a school subject will, in a sense, encapsulate itself and function as an entirely segregated secondary school subject. It has only recently, within a socio-interactionist paradigm, and under the threat of extinction, that literature pedagogy begins to undergo some innovation. Another important feature of the traditional paradigm in L1 education in Brazil is its link with nationalism. Already visible in the case of Portuguese language

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policies which have a direct impact in L1 education since its prehistory (Guimarães 2005; Mendonça 2013; Faraco; 2016), this becomes increasingly important as well for the history of Brazilian Literature as a school subject. Nationalism takes literary texts as representations of the nation’s cultural identity, within a Romantic conceptual framework adopted from Europe. As for language, its original foundation is monolingualism: ‘one nation, one language’. The construction of such an identity in Brazil is a product of the nineteenth century, even if it has colonial roots. It starts with Brazil’s political independence in 1822, when the country becomes a monarchy, and the interests of the great estate owners that belong to the élite are provided by the throne. In the end of the nineteenth century, this political arrangement collapses under economic and political crises, leading to a military coup in 1889, when the Republican regime is adopted. In the transition from one regime to the next, the Romantic ideals are challenged (Bueno 1995), and the construction of a different national identity is advocated. However, the new ideas do not go very far and the preservation of national unity becomes a central concern in schooling, with a recasting of Romantic nationalism that will have impact throughout the next decades (Oliveira 1990; Schelbauer 1998; Nagle 2001). As what pertains to language schooling, this nationalistic impulse takes on a very singular shape. As we have pointed out, Brazilian linguistic unity was achieved through a struggle against multilingualism, and it was only made possible by a process of extensive language change, as people acquired the language in conditions that led to remarkable variation. This language variation was never accepted by the Brazilian élite. Above all, the variants spoken by the non-white population were clearly named as deviations, and seen as sub-languages, to be corrected, or extinguished. This created very specific conditions for the systematic description of Portuguese in school grammar. This school grammar is strongly determined by a lusophone orientation that took the dominant Portuguese standard as a set of prescriptive rules, to be strictly obeyed. Some classical, and mainly Romantic, Portuguese authors were taken as models for the standard language in such a way that even language patterns largely used by the Brazilian educated élite are not systematically described as standard, and have never been accepted by grammarians for literary and other prestigious written usages. This ideological struggle around the language standard is very blatantly expressed in debates around the name of the language; and consequently around the name of the school subject, whether the language should be named Brazilian or Portuguese, and at school, whether it should be designated as Portuguese or National Language (Pagotto 1998; Faraco 2008; Guedes 2012). This leads to a symbolically violent version of nationalism in matters of language education. The national language is seen as a symbol of unity, and must be preserved from its own speakers, since its standard is established in accordance with European use. Hence, these normative, highly artificial grammars proliferated in the late decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. Some of them were to be issued from the 1870s on and reach some hundred editions, with many written by Colégio Pedro II’s Portuguese teachers. Also, they were extensively copied in the writing of contemporary normative school grammars (Bagno

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2002). This also leads to the conceptualization of language education as inculcation of prescriptive attitudes, and its contents as the grammar models, along with, if so, some attention to decontextualized exercises to secure standard uses of morphosyntax and spelling. This ideology will guarantee the long permanence of the traditional paradigm in L1 education, and its everlasting presence in the Portuguese classroom until nowadays, even when other paradigms of schooling became hegemonic. In dealing specifically with literature teaching, the traditional paradigm presents very different characteristics for each level of education. In secondary education, the subject of Literature is literary history, built initially on a chronological foundation of phases and, later, on literary movements. This timeline approach begins with the Portuguese heritage of Trovadorismo, and the first literary, written manifestations in Portuguese language, and goes on to Classicism, with Os Lusíadas, by Camões, as the milestone. From then on, it passes to Baroque and Neoclassicism, with an emphasis on authors and works linked to Brazil thematically or in some other way. Finally, it arrives at Romanticism, which along with political independence would ensure a literary independence. To this initial scheme, other movements are added, according to the updating of French artistic movements, that is to say, Realism, Naturalism, Parnasianism, Symbolism and finally Modernism, with several phases. The chronological periods that comprise these later movements are those when, supposedly, Brazilian literature has its formal independence. The didactic materials supporting this teaching are, in a first moment, collections of excerpts and manuals of literary history. The first ones bring texts that are simultaneously significant in terms of vernacularity, author’s production, school or style to which these texts belong. These collections represent the national culture and are taken as the privileged reading material in Portuguese language classes at any level. The manuals, which are exclusive of the discipline Brazilian Literature (or National Literature), bring historical-contextual and stylistic information for each movement, with critical studies of works and authors that better or more adequately represent the national literature aesthetically, in addition to a general introduction to poetics, and explanations about the principles for the chosen collections. Classes are strongly transmissive, based on teacher lectures and student notes, which complement or expand the information in textbooks, and in the critical analysis of excerpts. Evaluation is based on the student’s ability to memorize data regarding literary-­ movement characteristics, works, and biography of the authors. It is fundamentally a teaching about literature, although partially supported in the critical reading of excerpts from literary texts. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is assimilated to an erudite and ornamental knowledge that is worth more for its ideological role of representing the nation than for the formation that it provides to the student. In relation to primary education, the literary text is the basic matter for the formation of the reader, and serves as an inspiration, if not an example, for writing. Beyond cultural nationalism, here the dominant trait is the subordination of literature to the didactic purposes of teaching writing and other subjects, or more simply the pedagogization of literature. In this way, unlike Latin teaching, which was based entirely on classical texts, there is a great concern with the adequacy of the texts to

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the age of the students, generating a production simultaneously focused on children and on teaching. These texts, adapted or written for primary schooling, are transmitted through single texts or serials, selected books and children’s anthologies, among other text-types (Batista et al. 2002). On the whole, they are basically narratives and poems that thematize love for the country, respect for the family, obedience to moral precepts and good manners, emulation of Christian virtues, and the like. Literary texts are, in sum, a vehicle for the early inculcation of values considered relevant for all. Emerging in the late nineteenth century, when Brazil reconfigures or reaffirms its national identity, the traditional paradigm reconciles the legacy of Latin teaching with nationalism. Keeping track of the country’s historical transformations in the first half of the twentieth century, this paradigm sets up concepts and practices for L1 education in a school system that begins to be organized and expanded, as new school models and successive educational reforms arise. This is how the traditional paradigm remains relatively stable until the 1950s, when it begins to be contested, eventually giving way to the emergence of the communicative paradigm.

3  Communication and Expression In the beginning of the twentieth century, as much as 75% of the Brazilian adult population was illiterate (Faraco 2016). Moreover, the school system itself contributed to a markedly élitist social organization by successively selecting students, first by an admission examination that separated primary from secondary education, then, and only for those few who completed secondary school, by vestibular, an examination required for admission to university and other higher education schools (Cunha 1985; de Menezes 2001). This school model would become increasingly obsolete due to economic and social transformations that have taken place since the end of World War II. Growing industrialization, urban development, and new economic relations in the rural areas generated diverse pressures to opening the school to larger portions of the population. The communicative paradigm emerges within this troubled historical context, absorbing much of its ambiguities and contradictions. The shift in the shaping of Portuguese schooling was felt from the 1960s on (Soares 2002; Bunzen 2011). By then, the number of students attending secondary education in Brazil had tripled. Not only were their learning demands quite different from those of the restricted élite previously educated at schools, but also the demand for school teachers led to a rapid change in the profile of those who were responsible for Portuguese teaching. This entirely different social profile of school agents was the context within which paradigm changes can be noticed in Brazilian L1 education in this period. The name for the school subject pertaining to language education was changed to “Communication and Expression” and, in lower secondary education, to “Communication in Portuguese”. A highly mechanistic approach to Communication

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Theory inspired the new conceptual framework dominant in Brazilian schooling. Under this theory, the assumptions of the traditional paradigm, based on language as system and language as aesthetic expression, were altered for a perspective linked to communication and the use of language within the basic sender-message-receiver model. Language use and communication became the cornerstones of language education, but within a markedly utilitarian paradigm, for the military government explicitly endorsed an ideology of language as an instrument, and a commitment to the mass training of more qualified workers became foremost in official discourses and policies. As for the Portuguese language school-subject, these differences can be felt in the sharp changes to be noticed in the organization of school manuals. Portuguese didactic manuals now included the texts to be read and the topics for grammar study in the same volume. Also, contrary to the tradition of letting classroom activity be planned by teachers, these manuals start to contain language and grammar classification exercises, as well as questions for the decoding and comprehension of texts. Such exercises reveal articulations between the study of the language, and the study about the grammar of the language, with texts and grammar viewed as mutually related. A drastic change in the contents identified as pertaining to L1 education is made evident by text selection. Canonical literary texts give way to a variety of texts belonging to everyday social practice: journalistic texts, texts related to advertising, along with texts pertaining to various work domains, appear in textbooks, along with fewer literary excerpts. Another noticeable difference is the presence of exercises for the development of oral skills, and of abundant visual materials, in the form of illustrations and colourful reproductions of photographs, and various iconographic texts. The text of the Law itself suggests such a definition of the “communication and expression” component of the school curriculum. It explicitly mentions mass communications media as resources for school education, and defines the mother tongue as the main instrument for social communication, comprising reading, writing, and oral expression. Nevertheless, all of these changes do not affect the very strongly rooted ideology that schools are agencies for the correction of both the students’ spoken and written language. This ideology guarantees the maintenance in the textbooks of grammar sections based on fragments of well-known school grammar books, as established in the traditional paradigm. The difference now is that the model for such good use of language becomes rather abstract in the school context: accurate language, as dictated by grammar rules, is not actually embodied in any given set of texts to be imitated. In a sense, this ideal of good usage starts to slowly shift from literature to officially accepted journalistic and even transactional texts. These texts, however, are not to be imitated, since the genres to be written are abstractly defined, with narratives and argumentative texts as the only genres written at school, and even so quite rarely. Testing for higher education admissions is an arena in which it is possible to observe how fast these changes were, and how transitory but paradoxically lasting this particular paradigm was for shaping contemporary Portuguese language

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education. In the early 1960s, the demand for higher education in Brazil was such that, within the most prestigious universities, the vestibular examination not only was carried out by each of the schools independently, but differed from one course degree to the next. In such a model, students would take fully written tests on a set of mandatory subjects that depended on the area of admission – Humanities for Law Schools, Sciences and Maths for Engineering Schools, and so on. Some of these examinations would even include oral tests. In the 1970s, as the higher education system expanded, and an increasing number of people finished secondary schools, the federal government decided to centralize and standardize these tests. In their first editions, examinations shifted from written to multiple-choice tests, with no writing and reading requirements whatsoever. Language skills were tested through very narrow questions based on grammar rules and the correction of decontextualized sentences. In 1978, writing comes back as a separate and additional test, called redaction. This exam would require students to write a text in response to a theme conveyed by a very brief prompt, gesturing to a model that would become long-lasting in Brazilian language education. This model sees argumentative texts as the epitome of good writing. Argumentative text, however, is reduced to a school model called dissertation (the common designation in Brazil for our version of the school essay) that hardly resembles any functionally circulating text at all (Guedes et al. 2000). Inevitably, the backwash of this testing model was strong in secondary education, emphasizing the role of grammar and prescription, and downgrading the role of texts in the Portuguese language classroom. Regarding Literature teaching, in elementary and lower secondary school the communicative paradigm has a dual and contradictory effect. In line with the dominant theory of communication in language education, school is more opened to a variety of texts seen as closer to students’ daily lives, especially those uniting word and images, such as comics and cartoons. Such openness has the merit of recognizing other forms of circulation of literature. Genres going beyond the tradition are seen as relevant for reading in the school sphere, although not identified as valuable. However, this same openness generates a narrowing of the space of literature in the teaching of reading, as literary texts have to compete with journalistic and advertising texts, and this relationship becomes progressively more intense in language schooling in Brazil. The narrowing of the literature space is even more serious, because the actual reading of literary works is not done in school, but through homework assignments (Cosson 2006). While these assignments should offer the advantage of using the whole book rather than only a fraction of it, this intention is backfired by the lack of structure in the schools, where libraries are rare. Besides, the usual classroom activity that follows these reading assignments is a questionnaire seeking merely to prove that the text was read, through questions requiring just its literal understanding, if not the mere description of its structural elements. The literary texts that remain in the textbook are fragments that continue, for the most part, being pedagogized for the teaching of language study, both in terms of grammar and structural exercises, thus limiting the teacher’s work and the opportunities for autonomous reading by students (Soares 1999). It is not surprising,

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therefore, that topics of poetics and rhetoric, as figures of speech, were included as contents to be learned in the last grades of elementary education, moreover in a decontextualized way, and dissociated from the literary text. In secondary education, there is no significant change in literature teaching, and the history of Literature as a school subject remains practically untouched, because the nationalism that constitutes its historical basis was aligned with the dictatorial regime ideology. The difference in relation to the previous traditional paradigm is the dominant presence of the textbook, which, by merging the two previous materials – the anthology and the manual of literary history – makes the presence of literary texts in the literature class even smaller. The characteristics of literary-artistic styles and their historical contexts make up the syllabus. The textbook also offers questionnaires and reading comprehension exercises that are considered the best way to teach, and evaluate, the literature subject. This syllabus, strongly based on tradition, has very little dialogue with the cultural manifestations experienced by the majority of students, making literature taught in the school an erudite knowledge, necessary only for the vestibular examination. In summary, Portuguese language classes were conceptualized as classes in communication and expression. The framework for understanding communication, however, was strongly utilitarian, and language was constructed as an instrument. Everyday life written and oral texts were accepted, and their proficient reading was aimed at school. Grammar, however, kept its privileged role as a set of inherited rules through which unacceptable language varieties of spoken language should be corrected at all costs, and both exercises and testing contents were more concentrated on that process of language control than on meaning-making through texts. Writing and the reading of literary texts were strongly downgraded, as language schooling was understood as preparation for work, or for a highly impoverished model of standardized testing.

4  T  he Research-Based Approach: Socio-interactionism and Beyond Strictly speaking, the traditional paradigm had never been completely surpassed by the communicative paradigm in schools. In fact, there was more of a process of accommodation than of substitution in the historical relationship between the two paradigms. This situation began to change in the 1980s, as political democracy was reinstated in Brazil. The demand for more effective training for work, which becomes increasingly specialized, and the demands of life in big cities, as well as an intense perception of failure in the language education of the people, were foremost in the educational debate as a new paradigm begins to emerge: socio-interactionism. As we will discuss here, socio-interactionism comprises a set of tenets on language and language education deriving from research-based academic proposals. These proposals had considerable impact in public policies regarding curriculum

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orientation in Brazil, following re-democratization in the 1980s, and have become the foundation for the contemporary hegemonic discourse on how L1 school education should be shaped; although, as we will claim, its principles face considerable resistance from two main important sources: historical stability of the traditional paradigm, and neoliberal international demands for accountability, as represented by high-stakes standardized testing. Given the historical proximity of this new paradigm in L1 education, we will divide its functioning into three stages for a better understanding. The first stage occurs in the 1980s and can be defined as a heroic stage, because it is the moment in which the failure of the previous paradigms is pointed out and alternatives sought after. In this stage L1 education is strongly influenced by academic research, and there is a social demand for language education to be politically committed to an anti-élitist project. The documentary milestone for that stage is the publication in 1984 of a collection of articles entitled The Text in the Classroom (Geraldi 1984). This book would have a huge impact on Portuguese language education in Brazil (Silva et al. 2014). It marks the beginning of a growing engagement on the part of influential academic researchers in the field of language studies to counteract the traditional, and more recently utilitarian, project of language education in the country. This academic turn produced not only a very influential body of principles, registered in books, papers, school textbooks, and governmental documents, but also a widespread appropriation of a certain discourse on what was valid in the language classroom (Soares 1986; Franchi 1988; Possenti; 1996; Batista 1997; Geraldi 1991). This discourse comprises different theoretical and methodological linguistic currents – text linguistics, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistic – and is generally known in Brazil as socio-interactionism. The second stage of the socio-interactionist paradigm is the consolidation stage, with the country experiencing political and economic stabilization and a new LDB (Law 9.394/96). This new law, passed as a result of recent democratic debates, favours the formalization of new teaching proposals in all disciplines (Brazil 1998, 2002). The reference document is the National Curricular Parameters for basic education. In these two official, federal guidelines for language education, textual genres theories stand out as the most significant conceptual framework to be taken as an organizing rationale for Portuguese teaching. From the beginning of this first decade of the twenty-first century until present times, the third stage of interactionist-based paradigms constitutes an expansion. This expansion takes place in an environment of political crisis and the alignment of L1 education to a wave of international changes in the field, without erasing the contributions of the previous stages. The document that signals this stage is the National Common Curricular Base – BNCC (Brazil 2017). This governmental document is no longer, as previously, a broad parameter that does not spell out lists of contents. It contains several lists of learning objectives for each level of schooling; these are ‘competencies’ or abilities to be reached by students, and some of them include the spelling out of contents. Therefore, a more centralized curriculum design is at play here, although the general concepts that supposedly give the lists a foundation are in line with the socio-interactionist perspective. This apparent

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paradigm coherence, nevertheless, is underpinned by a number of contradictions in what concerns the content lists. They show a clearly utilitarian and pragmatic concern with international tests and measures, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), as well as the need to place language teaching in a larger context of literacy (or ‘multiliteracy’) and citizenship. As for language education, these three stages of the socio-interactionist paradigm have moved towards the view that the role of language education is to provide students with resources to participate in ever-expanding social practices, for which discourse genres are an integral part. Under these ideas, several proposals were put forward for the organization of the Portuguese classroom, and language education more broadly conceptualized, most of them somewhat concerned with the central role of genres and (multi)literacy practices. These genre-based proposals come from the social-semiotic approach, in which various authors belonging to systemic-­ functional approaches to language-inspired discourse analysis are active, within frameworks such as those proposed by Fairclough; the social-rhetorical approach, in which authors such as Swales, Miller and Bazerman figure as central references; and finally, the social-discursive approaches, in which authors such as Bakhtin, along with more francophone traditions, are often cited (Meurer et al. 2005). As for L1 language education, among these approaches, one of the strongest influences in our schools is that of the so-called genre-based didactic sequences for the teaching of writing, as proposed within Bronckardt’s socio-interactionism (Schneuwly and Dolz 2004). Also, as the importance of digital communications technologies rises in broad areas of social life, proposals linked to multi-semiotic and Web genres become prominent in language education debate. These proposals revolve around the notion of multiliteracies (Rojo and Barbosa 2015), and are very strongly felt in the transition from the National Curricular Parameters to the more recent National Common Curricular Base. As discussed elsewhere (Cosson 2007), in the war that the socio-interactionist paradigm waged against the traditional teaching in the ‘heroic’ stage, Literature occupies a secondary, almost ignored role. In a front formed mostly by linguists, there seemed to be no room for further consideration about the role of literature in L1 education. In fact, following the communicative paradigm, literature is seen as simply a part of the reading area, and only a small part of it – that is, that which deals with reading fruition or, more simply, ‘reading for reading’s sake’, alongside other practices, such as reading to seek information or to read critically, which are considered much more relevant for L1 education. Because of that position, there is much criticism of didactic activities of excessive control or improper reading, like the questionnaires and the selection of inappropriate texts, either because they are literary works of the past, or because their themes say little to the student and to contemporary life; in short, everything that could threat the fruition of the literary text. In this same period, the field of reading, with particular emphasis on the history and sociology of reading, began its explicit development in Brazil, incorporating contributions from several disciplines. At the time, the role of the reader was a major concern of most Portuguese teachers and several works were published about

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the relationship between the child and youth literature, reader training, printed circulation, teaching reading and literature teaching, in both historical and contemporary perspectives (Zilberman 1981; Lajolo 1982; Leite 1983; Lajolo and Zilberman 1984; Aguiar and Bordini 1988). These works helped to make children’s and youth literature legitimate as an effective literary corpus beyond its connection with and intense use in education. It also demanded that literature teaching should consider students’ interests in the reading selection and preserve in the classroom activities the aesthetic or playful character of the literary text. Most importantly, they claim a proper space for the reading of literature in school. Thanks to these works, the practice of literary reading, which had lost space in the school during the communicative paradigm, is again demanded, although now on new methodological bases, far from those used in the traditional paradigm. In the consolidation stage of the socio-interactionist paradigm, the dissociation between the teaching of language and the teaching of literature, or the submission of literature to the teaching of reading, reaches its climax with the edition of the National Curricular Parameters (Brazil 2002). In this document of official curricular orientation for L1 education, a correct diagnosis of the current literature teaching in secondary schools in Brazil points to the durability of the traditional paradigm, and leads to disastrous conclusions and directions. Ignoring all literary knowledge, the authors of the Parameters consider that literature is just another discourse among others, thus not deserving the space that tradition held for it at school. The argument goes on, saying that the presence of literature at school is only maintained by force of this tradition, and hence students did not see any meaning in this subject that alienated them and delegitimized their cultural preferences. These and other misconceptions of the document are denounced by several scholars and even in the following documents issued by the Ministry of Education (Frederico and Osakabe 2004; Brasil 2006; Vieira 2008), in which the specificity of literature is defended on the basis of the notion of defamiliarization (à la Russian formalism), and on the tenets of access to the literary canon as a student right and school duty, and also the distinctive language experience provided by literary reading. In these new guidelines, literature is discussed as a curricular component in itself; in line with the Portuguese language guidelines, criticisms of the previous documents are summarized, and methodological proposals seek to respond to academic studies in the area. The greatest changes are in its emphasis on literary reading as a sine qua non condition for any literature teaching project; the access to the literary text as a student right; and guidelines that seek to reconcile literary tradition with contemporary production, as well as with the demands of school organization, within aesthetics reception and literary literacy frameworks. In the expansion stage, finally, although the general characteristics of previous stages are maintained, literature begins to regain its territory in L1 education, reversing on some fronts the deletion to which it was being submitted. In theory, the principle of literary reading is consolidated as the main subject of literature teaching, and follows four major models. The first is the aesthetic-textual model, which takes literature as cultural capital and has as its reference-point the reading of classical and/or canonical texts. The second is the socio-identitary model, which adopts

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the multiculturalist and postcolonial perspectives, seeking to associate literary reading with identity issues. This is also part of a legal order that determines the compulsory teaching of African and indigenous culture in Brazilian schools (Law 11.645/2008). The third is the reader formation model that links historical and sociological studies of reading with pedagogical principles derived from Vygotsky and cultural studies in defence of the enjoyment of literary texts. The fourth is the literary literacy model, which takes literature as a language present both in texts and in the social practices of reading, with these texts identified as literary produced by a community of readers, and the role of the school seen as strengthening and expanding the competence for using this language (Cosson 2018). Such models, separated, combined, and not always well articulated, feed a huge variety of projects and literary reading programs in Brazilian schools. Finally, the BNCC seems to take a step forward in securing a place for Literature as a curricular component in Brazilian schooling. It explicitly recognizes literary reading as one of the components of the L1 education as well as an aspect of Portuguese language competence, and, accordingly, reserves one of the five fields3 of discursive practices for the teaching of literature, calling it the artistic-literary field. In spite of recommending only reading, implying that reading is the place of literature in school, the BNCC places literary reading among the linguistic practices associated with the artistic-literary field activities of speaking, writing and linguistic-­ semiotic analysis. In other words, there are signs of a restoration of Literature as a subject in L1 education, a role that had been lost or at least diminished considerably in the hegemony of the communicative paradigm and the first two phases of the socio-interactionist paradigm. A more detailed reading of BNCC, however, shows that such advances can be also illusory. The curriculum space of literature is much less expressive than could be supposed. It was reduced to a field within the Portuguese Language competence when, for example, Art and English as a foreign language are competences at the same level. The role given to literature is clearly ancillary to language teaching, subordinating and limiting its position in student formation to the development of language skills. Following this linguistic orientation, the knowledge objects listed for the artistic-literary field are predominantly formal, recovering a classificatory perspective that goes back to the poetic and rhetorical subjects present in L1 education in the traditional paradigm. Even the organization of texts within the artistic-­ literary field repeats the classification of genres inherited from the Greek-Roman tradition, with no reference to modern knowledge about the subject, as well as a total absence of contemporary literary production. The most fundamental and pernicious question of the BNCC is the very conception of literature itself, as only “art of the word”, because it not only leaves aside current knowledge of the subject, but also it ties literature to the past, notwithstanding a review long overdue in the studies of the field. In short, far from being a breakthrough in literature teaching, the

3  These are: field of everyday life, field of public life, field of study and research practices, journalistic-mediatic field, and literary-artistic field.

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BNCC  - Elementary School looks like a small step forward and two gigantic steps back.

5  C  onclusion: Paradigm Clashes in Everyday School Practice The challenges that these diverse and often appositive paradigms’ orientations posit to L1 education in Brazil are multiple, and none of them are easy to solve. One of them is the decision about what really constitutes the subject to be taught in Portuguese language and literature classes. The formal written language usually taught at school as the Portuguese language falls very far from the language spoken by the students in communicating daily. This split originated in the proto-history of L1 education and was consolidated in the traditional paradigm, when the European Portuguese variety was adopted as the standard language to be taught as the mother-­ tongue at school, following what was recorded in the literary writings of ancient authors. Already at that time, this temporal and spatial distance had imposed many difficulties to L1 education, since this Portuguese language variety was almost another dialect for Brazilian students. This situation became more complex with the communicative paradigm that broke the unity that was maintained in the school field between linguistic norm and teaching materials, due to the incorporation of journalistic and advertising texts into the L1 education. It became explosive with the socio-interactionist paradigm, especially in the heroic stage, when the varieties of the Portuguese language spoken and written in Brazil were highlighted, and academic, as well as politically hegemonic, discourses demanded a political position on the part of teachers in relation to linguistic diversity. The call for cultural sensitivity, and respect for language varieties, represented a final disruption of long-­ lasting certainties that school teachers held about how to approach the linguistic norm. The situation of literature teaching is equally difficult. This is because literary history, traditionally its main subject, is contested by the socio-interactionist paradigm. Instead of literary movements’ historical context and characteristics, the subject of literature teaching now is literary reading, which is hardly a content as defined by the school environment, but rather a practice, with its outlines far from clearly established. It is not enough that the teacher has to position himself between teaching literature and teaching about literature, in a complex opposition between content and practice – there is still the aporia of the definition of literature. Without the support of literary history, the teacher should define the status of the literary within a plethora of texts, the borders of which have become increasingly tenuous. They are books, songs, graphic novels, films, series, and a myriad of genres and possibilities offered by the internet, converging in an apparently unlimited translatability inside contemporary cultural manifestations. There is also the challenge of deciding what materials should be used to support Portuguese language and literature classes. The textbook, the teacher’s preferred

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object since the communicative paradigm, and indeed for several scholars a dispensable crutch, assumes in the contemporary school ethos the functions of anthology of texts, curriculum guide, and collection of language tasks. This configuration jeopardizes the pedagogical autonomy of the teacher and turns the textbook into a heavy and cumbersome matter, either because it restricts the teaching work to a fixed and excessively detailed sequence that disturbs the planning of classes and the distribution of school time; or because, produced as it is for mass consumption, it hardly dialogues with students’ social and cultural singularities. Although the modern textbook is in general aligned with the theoretical presuppositions of socio-­ interactionism, it also brings, in a more or less implicit way, typical elements of previous paradigms, such as structural exercises from the communicative paradigm and normative prescriptions from the traditional paradigm (Rojo and Batista 2003). In literature teaching, the basic material  – the literary text  – has become an ambiguous and, moreover, considerably broad object, generating difficulties for approaching it in a consistent and systematic way. In order to select the texts that they will work with in literature classes, school teachers must first decide between canonical and non-canonical literary works, researching and incorporating texts from social and cultural minorities (including here, by legal determination, the cultural production of Afro-Brazilians and other indigenous people). They also have to decide between genres traditionally considered literary and those belonging to multiple cultural manifestations, involving images, movements and sounds, which are widely consumed by students out of school. This expansion of literature’s ambit contrasts sharply with the school tradition of literary reading, which is restricted to the written text, and also the marginal place given to literature teaching in the socio-­ interactionist paradigm. In this way, teachers have to select and work with a small fraction of texts, practically in the dark, because the criteria of the past have become irrelevant while those of the present do not satisfactorily fulfil the reality that they face in the classroom. There is also the challenge of general curricular guidelines that follow each other at a faster pace than would be appropriate to fulfil the school cycle of basic education, and to sediment a consistent teaching of mother tongue within the socio-­ interactionist paradigm. In the last two decades, several official documents have emerged, reforming, retreating and advancing, composing and recomposing various aspects of Portuguese language and literature teaching, as evidenced by the various editions of the national curricular parameters and the recent BNCC. These guidelines are not easily translated into teaching programs within schools, which continue to follow the determinations of previous paradigms, principally because they are more familiar and more systematized by temporal accumulation. The same happens with classroom practices, where information-oriented and prescriptive teaching predominates. If genres and multiliteracies are conceptualized as practices in academic discourses, in textbooks, and even in the discourse of curriculum guidelines, they are turned into descriptive contents, and are often taught in a highly formalized way, allowing for a pedagogy of modelling, imitation, and control. Last, but not least, there is the question of the relationship between school and society, which puts teachers and families in different sides or even at collision

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course. This is because families press for the return of the grammatical and historiographic teaching model, with which they are more familiar, and which they believe to be more efficient than the multiple contemporary orientations coming from diverse and not always harmonically integrated knowledge fields in the socio-­ interactionist paradigm. The situation is even more conflicting when national and international tests show poor performance by students in reading and writing, leading to a widespread condemnation of new teaching methods in the media and fuelling the demands for the return of traditional teaching. The result of all this is that, despite the apparent hegemony of the socio-­ interactionist paradigm in recent times, as evidenced by legislation, the two other paradigms that preceded it continue to be very present, inside and outside school, and also in curricular guidelines and classroom practices. This is very confusing for teachers, who have to deal with all these paradigms intermingled in the everyday routine of school classes  – that is, they have to go from grammar to socio-­ interactionism at the same time and within the same space, in order to manage and meet the conflicting social demands imposed upon their work. In this way, understanding of how these paradigms are distributed historically and the discussion of their strengths and fragilities can, more than new curricular precepts as elaborated in federal government offices, contribute to overcoming the challenges of Portuguese language and literature teaching today. Perhaps this discussion can be the first step in achieving a coherent, consistent and successful performance of Portuguese language and literature teaching, and point to ways that may more effectively allow us to reach the desired strengthening of L1 education in Brazil.

References Aguiar, V.  T. de & Bordini, M. da G. (1988). Literatura: a formação do leitor  - alternativas metodológicas. Porto Alegre: Mercado Aberto. Applebee, A. (1974). Tradition and reform in the teaching of English: A history. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English. Bagno, M. (2002). Língua, história & sociedade. Breve retrospecto da norma-padrão brasileira. In M. Bagno (Ed.), Linguística da Norma (pp. 179–200). Edições Loyola: São Paulo. Batista, A. A. (1997). Aula de Português: discurso e saberes escolares. São Paulo: Martins Fontes. Batista, A.  A., Galvão, A.  M. de O., & Klinke, K. (2002). Livros Escolares de leitura: uma morfologia (1866–1956). Revista Brasileira de Educação. Rio de Janeiro: ANPEd, 20, 27–47, maio/jun./jul./ago. Available: http://www.scielo.br/scielo. php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1413-24782002000200003&lng=en&nrm=iso Bonset, H., & Rijlaarsdam, G. (2004). Mother-tongue education (L1) in the learning-to-learn paradigm: Creative redevelopment of learning materials. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 4(1), 35–62, Jan. Available: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:ESLL.0000033848.96679.e6 Brazil. Secretaria da Educação Básica. (1998). Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais. Ensino Fundamental. Brasília: MEC/SEB. Brazil. Secretaria da Educação Básica. (2017). Base Nacional Comum Curricular. Brasília: MEC/ SEB.  Available: http://basenacionalcomum.mec.gov.br/images/BNCC_EI_EF_110518_versaofinal_site.pdf.

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Brazil. Secretaria de Educação Básica. (2006). Orientações curriculares para o ensino médio – Linguagens, códigos e suas tecnologias. Brasília: Ministério da Educação, Secretaria de Educação Básica. Brazil. Secretaria de Educação Média e Tecnológica (2002). Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais. Ensino Médio. Linguagens, Códigos e suas Tecnologias. Brasília: MEC; SEMTEC. Bueno, E. P. (1995). Resisting boundaries: The subject of naturalism in Brazil. New York/London: Garland Publishing. Bunzen, C. (2011). A fabricação da disciplina escolar Português. Revista Diálogos Educacionais, Curitiba, 11(34), 885–911. Cosson, R. (2006). Letramento literário: teoria e prática. São Paulo: Contexto. Cosson, R. (2007). Mother tongue education in Brazil: A battle of two worlds. L1-Education Studies in Language and Literature, 7(1), 37–52. Cosson, R. (2018). Nós que ensinamos literatura. In D. Navas, E. Cardoso, & V. Bastazin (Eds.), Literatura e ensino: territórios em diálogo. São Paulo: Educa; Capes. Cunha, L. A. (1985). A universidade temporã - o ensino superior da Colônia à era de Vargas. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves. de Menezes, L. C. (2001). O novo público e a nova natureza do ensino médio. Estudos Avançados, 15(42), 201–208. Available: https://doi.org/10.1590/S0103-40142001000200008. Dixon, J. (1975). Growth through English: Set in the perspective of the seventies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1st Edition 1967). Faraco, C. A. (2006). Ensinar x não ensinar gramática: ainda cabe esta questão? Calidoscópio, 4(1), 15–26. Faraco, C. A. (2008). Norma culta brasileira: desatando alguns nós. São Paulo: Parábola Editorial. Faraco, C. A. (2016). História Sociopolítica da Língua Portuguesa. São Paulo: Parábola Editorial. França, L. (1952). O método pedagógico dos jesuítas: o “ratio studiorum”. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria AGIR Editora. Avaliable: https://portalconservador.com/livros/Pe-Leonel%20FrancaO-Metodo-Pedagogico-dos-Jesuitas.pdf Franchi, C. (1988). Criatividade e gramática. São Paulo: CENP/Secretaria de Educação. Frederico, E. Y., Osakabe, H. (2004). Literatura. In Brasil. Orientações Curriculares do Ensino Médio. Brasília: MEC/SEB/DPPEM.  Available: http://portal.mec.gov.br/seb/arquivos/ pdf/03Literatura.pdf Geraldi, J. W. (1984). O texto na sala de aula: leitura e produção. São Paulo: Assoeste. Geraldi, J. W. (1991). Portos de passagem. São Paulo: Martins Fontes. Green, B., & Erixon, P.-O. (2020). Understanding the (post-)national L1 subjects: Three problematics. In B. Green & P.-O. Erixon (Eds.), Rethinking L1 education in a global era: Understanding the (post-)national L1 subjects in new and difficult times. Dordrecht: Springer. Guedes, P. (2012). Por que, de 1500 para cá, ainda não nos ensinamos nem a ensinar nem a aprender português? In P. Guedes (Ed.), Educação linguística e cidadania (pp. 7–39). Editora da UFRGS: Porto Alegre. Guedes, P.  C., Fischer, L.  A., & Simões, L. (2000). O paradigma de avaliação da redação na UFRGS. In M. d. G. Paiva & M. Brugalli (Eds.), Avaliação: novas tendências, novos paradigmas (pp. 79–103). Porto Alegre: Mercado Aberto. Guimarães, E. (2005). Multilinguismo: divisões da língua e ensino no Brasil. Campinas: CEFIEL/IEL. Lajolo, M. (1982). Usos e Abusos da Literatura na Escola. Olavo Bilac e a Educação na República Velha. Rio de Janeiro/Porto Alegre: Globo. Lajolo, M., & Zilberman, R. (1984). Literatura Infantil Brasileira. História & Histórias. São Paulo: Ática. Leite, L.  C. M. (1983). Invasão da catedral: literatura e ensino em debate. Porto Alegre: Mercado Aberto. Maciel, L. S. B., & Shigunov Neto, A. (2006). Brazilian education in the Pombaline period: A historical analysis of the Pombaline teaching reforms. Educação e Pesquisa, 32(3), 465–476. Available: https://doi.org/10.1590/S1517-97022006000300003.

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Medeiros, R. R. A. (2015). Gramática e texto literário na gênese da disciplina escolar Português. Domínios da lingu@gem, 9(4), 14–42. Available:. https://doi.org/10.14393/DL20-v9n4a2015-2. Mendonça, A. W. P. C. (2013). A língua portuguesa como uma nova língua clássica. História da Educação, 17(39), 173–187. Available: https://doi.org/10.1590/S2236-34592013000100010. Meurer, J. L., Bonini, A., & Motta-Roth, D. (Eds.). (2005). Gêneros: teoria, métodos, debates. São Paulo: Parábola. Nagle, J. (2001). Educação e sociedade na primeira república. Rio de Janeiro: DPA. Oliveira, L. L. (1990). A questão nacional na Primeira República. Brasiliense: São Paulo. Pagotto, E. (1998). Norma e condescendência: ciência e pureza. Língua e Instrumentos Linguísticos, 2, 49–68. Possenti, S. (1996). Por que (não) ensinar gramática na escola. Campinas: Mercado de Letras/ALB. Razzini, M. P. G. (2000). O espelho da nação: a antologia nacional e o ensino de português e de literatura (1838–1971). Tese de doutorado. São Paulo, UNICAMP. Disponível em: http:// repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/270144 Razzini, M. P. G. (2010). História da Disciplina Português na Escola Secundária Brasileira. Revista Tempos e Espaços em Educação, 4, 43–58 jan./jun. Available: https://seer.ufs.br/index.php/ revtee/article/download/2218/1889 Rojo, R., & Barbosa, J. (2015). Hipermodernidade, multiletramentos e gêneros discursivos. São Paulo: Parábola Editorial. Rojo, R., & Batista, A. (2003). Livro didático de língua portuguesa, letramento e cultura da escrita. Campinas: Mercado de Letras. Sawyer, W., & Van de Ven, P.-H. (Eds.). (2007, May). Special issue: Paradigms in mother tongue education. L1  – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 7(1), 1–3. https://doi. org/10.17239/L1ESLL-2007.07.01.07. Sawyer, W., & Watson, K. (2001). Mother-tongue teaching in Australia: The case of New South Wales L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 1(1), 87–104. Available: https://doi. org/10.1023/A:1011536027121 Schelbauer, A. R. (1998). Idéias que não se realizam: o debate sobre a educação do povo no Brasil de 1870 a 1914. Maringá, EdUEM.  Available: http://www.histedbr.fe.unicamp.br/acer_histedbr/seminario/seminario4/trabalhos/trab008.rtf Schneuwly, B., & Dolz, J. (2004). Gêneros orais e escritos na escola. Campinas: Mercado de Letras. Silva, R.  V. M. (2004). Ensaios para uma sócio-história do Português Brasileiro. São Paulo: Parábola Editorial. Silva, L. M. S., Ferreira, N. S. A., & Mortatti, M. d. R. L. (Eds.). (2014). O Texto na Sala de Aula: um clássico sobre o ensino de língua portuguesa. Campinas: Autores Associados. Soares, M. (1986). Linguagem e escola: uma perspectiva social. São Paulo: Ática. Soares, M. A. (1999). Escolarização da literatura infantil e juvenil. In Evangelista, A., Brina, H., Machado, M. Z. (Orgs). A escolarização da leitura literária: o jogo do livro infantil e juvenil. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica. Soares, M. (2002). Português na escola: história de uma disciplina curricular. In M. Bagno (Ed.), Linguística da Norma (pp. 155–177). Edições Loyola: São Paulo. Souza, E.  H. P.  M. (2015). Manuais de ensino de língua portuguesa na Província da Bahia no século XIX. Domínios da Lingu@gem, 9(4), 43–63. Available: https://doi.org/10.14393/ DL20-v9n4a2015-3 Vieira A. (2008). A formação de leitores de literatura na escola brasileira: caminhadas e labirintos. Cadernos de pesquisa, 38(134), 441–458, maio/ago. Available: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/cp/ v38n134/a0938134.pdf Zilberman, R. (1981). A literatura infantil na escola. São Paulo: Global Editora.

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Luciene Simões  is a professor in the Letters Graduate program at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil. She has a PhD in Applied Linguistics, and her research interests are Portuguese learning, both in the early ages and throughout schooling. She also carries out research on Portuguese school teaching in Brazil’s public system, and for some decades has taught classes related to Portuguese teacher education in Brazil at the undergraduate level. She has also been involved in governmental committees for curriculum policy elaboration in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Rildo Cosson  is visiting professor in the Postgraduate Program at the Federal University of Paraiba (UFPB), Brazil. He has PhDs in Comparative Literature (1989) and Education (2015). His main research interests are language teaching, literary literacy, and literature education. His most recent book is Reading Circles and Literary Literacy (Contexto 2014).

English Teaching as L1 Education and the Ambivalent Project of National Schooling: Subject English in Comparative-Historical Perspective Jory Brass and Bill Green

Abstract  This chapter represents a comparative-historical study of the emergence of English teaching in Australia and the United States. The school subject ‘English’ rose to prominence in England, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is, at the very least, a remarkable instance of transnational concurrence. Why ‘English’? Why then? What informed and shaped its emergence at this particular moment in history, across these different countries? Our chapter compares and contrasts the early history of English teaching in both Australia and the United States—two countries that occupy different positions within the ‘English Empire’—in order to trace different historical trajectories of nation-building in which English language and literature played important, but often overlooked, roles. This historical-comparative work draws out hidden histories of race, religion and nationalism in the larger theatre of English’s (post-)imperial history and provokes questions about the history of L1 education more broadly. Keywords  English teaching · English curriculum · Curriculum history · Comparative education · History of English teaching · Race

1  Introduction As a school subject, English has long been located at the centre of Anglophone curriculum and schooling. From its earliest formal manifestations in the late nineteenth century to new twenty-first century national curriculum initiatives, the teaching of

J. Brass Independent Scholar, Bellefonte, PA, USA B. Green (*) Faculty of Arts & Education, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Green, P.-O. Erixon (eds.), Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era, Educational Linguistics 48, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7_4

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English has been a necessary and even inescapable feature of curriculum and schooling across the ex-British imperial countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA, as well as in the UK, and England itself. Yet this is rarely problematized – all too often it is viewed as more or less a natural expression of vernacular education, with the common focus in each case being on ‘English’ as the national standard language. A close and organic relationship is presumed to exist between English as a school-subject and English as the language. In this chapter we shall argue that this relationship – arguably crucial to L1 education more generally – is to be seen as mythic and indeed ideological, inextricable from questions of culture and history, discourse and power, nation and empire. This argument will be explored through a comparative-historical study of the emergence of English teaching in Australia and the United States, with a particular focus on the formative period of the 1890s to the 1920s, and more generally the early twentieth century.

2  Situating and Problematising the ‘English’ Project A fundamental ambiguity is at work in referring to ‘English’ in educational contexts – a semantic tension, at times spilling over into sharp debate: [English] is a complex signifier, in the sense that it refers both implicitly and explicitly to at least three matters: ‘English’ as the school subject; ‘English’ as the language, and hence as both the principal medium of instruction and learning and a central mode of communication and semiotic practice; and ‘English’ as a national(ist) quality [‘Englishness’] implicated in issues of colonialism and imperialism. (Green and Beavis 1996, p. 7)

Often conflated in ordinary usage, or simply glossed over, these different senses of the term need to be disentangled, especially in comparative-historical work. For many scholars and teachers, English the school subject is largely equated with the ‘English language’ or with ‘English studies’ in colleges and universities. Among other problems, however, conflating these different senses of English has bracketed questions of race in English’s genealogy and evaded acknowledgement of how the teaching of English language and literature has been – and remains – constitutively linked to distinctive politics of nation and empire across Anglophone countries (Brass 2013; Morgan 1990; Green and Cormack 2008). In the present context of globalization, global refugee crises, and a resurgent white nationalism in England, Australia, and the United States, it is timely and imperative to consider how the teaching of English was both spawned by, and implicated in, larger struggles of cultural and symbolic authority, moral panics, biopolitics, and exclusionary practices (Green 1998; Luke 2004; Sperling and DiPardo 2008). It is widely assumed that geography accounts for the boundaries of a language and boundaries between languages. After centuries of colonialism and imperialism, however, English is not only spoken as a first language in England and the UK, but

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also in Australia, New Zealand and the United States (Clark 2013).1 Modern states have adopted a common language in the interest of nation-building and colonization, and education has been (and remains) a principal means of doing this. Throughout the British Empire and beyond, schooling placed a particular onus on the teaching of English as a privileged form of expression of the ‘native speaker’ and, hence, a Model for others seeking to learn the (English) language (Luke 2004). Yet, as Clark and others (e.g. Kravchenko 2010; Rampton 1990) make very clear, constructs such as ‘native speaker’, ‘standard language’ and the like, are fictions, even though they continue to be influential. In spite of attempts to standardise national languages, English itself is by no means a ‘unitary language’ – a term used by Bakhtin (1981) in relation to what he calls the ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ forces in language and society. “The nature of language is that it is constituted by centrifugal forces which operate in a ceaseless flow of becoming and which are in constant dialectical tension with each other to produce new languages and forms of heteroglossia” (Crowley 2003, p. 7 – see also Clark 2013, p. 154). These forces are opposed to, and set against, ‘centripetal forces’, seeking to standardise and discipline, to domesticate, and functioning as repressive rather than expressive. Hence, as Bakhtin (1981, p.  270) puts it: “Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of linguistic unification and centralization, an expression of the centripetal force of language”. In these terms, ‘standard’ English can be considered just such a unitary language across the so-called ‘Inner Circle’ of (post-)imperial Anglophone countries (Clark 2013), such as the USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Clarke’s account addressed English in the United States and Britain, where ‘standard American English’ and ‘standard British English’ respectively have been normalized as the national models of L1 education and teaching English as a foreign language (Clark 2013). However, this analysis is also relevant for Standard Australian English. In Australia, the recently installed national curriculum (aka ‘The Australian Curriculum’) makes it clear that ‘Standard Australian English’ is its reference-point and organizing principle, with its stated aim being to “support students’ growing understanding and use of Standard Australian English (English)”. The English in question thus has two key distinguishing qualities: it is ‘standard’, and it is ‘Australian’ – both of which, as we have seen, are homogenising and essentialising, as concepts. Indeed, a complicated relationship must be seen as existing historically between English as the language, as a social and political construction (Crowley 2003), and ‘Englishness’. In this regard, Robert Morgan’s historical work has brought into relief how notions of ‘Englishness’ inscribed in the Canadian curriculum of the late nineteenth century referenced ‘England’ as a particular nexus of English language, nation and empire that has left its traces in the subject up to the present (Morgan 1990, p. 199). Rather than “a settled or unitary notion”, Morgan writes, ‘Englishness’

1  This is by no means to deny that English operates as, either officially or effectively, a first language in other countries as well (e.g. Singapore).

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signifies “the unstable relationship of a dominant cosmopolitan centre to the periphery, of us Anglo-Saxons against them, ‘natives’, ‘foreigners’, ‘aliens’” (Morgan 1990, pp.  206–207). It is telling here that English studies did not originate in England, but in British colonies – ‘English’ was taught in Africa, India, Scotland and Ontario well before England introduced the teaching of English language and literature into its own schools (Viswanathan 1988; Morgan 1990). Between the early 1880s and World War 1, the teaching of English emerged in several Anglophone nations, establishing a “transnational union of the ‘Mother Country’ and its settler Dominions peopled by those of common British ‘stock’” (Mycock and Wellings 2017, p. 42). What is at issue here, then, is a distinctive ideological formation, a matter of political and cultural identity, whereby nation and empire come together with race and language.

3  T  he Emergence of English in Comparative-Historical Perspective The school-subject ‘English’ rose to prominence in England, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Applebee 1974; Ball 1985; Brass 2011; Green and Beavis 1996; Morgan 1990; Peel et al. 2000). This is, at the very least, a remarkable instance of transnational concurrence. Why English, then? – that is, why English? and why then? What informed and shaped its emergence at that particular moment in history, across these various countries? The following sections provide a revisionary account of the early history of English teaching in Australia and the United States—two countries that occupy quite different positions within the ‘English Empire’ (Green and Cormack 2008; Peel et al. 2000, p. 17). Our aim here is to draw out hidden histories of race and religion in the larger theatre of English’s (post-)imperial history and to trace different historical trajectories of nation-building in which English language and literature played important, but often overlooked, roles.

4  Installing ‘English’ in Australia Subject English emerged on the Australian educational scene only in the first decade of the twentieth century. This coincided with, and indeed was integrally part of, the post-Federation consolidation of state-sponsored elementary schooling in Australia, within what has been described as a general educational and social renaissance (Campbell and Sherington 2006). Public schooling was widely seen as central to the growth and progress of a newly established nation – somewhat ironically so, since responsibility for education in the Constitution was allocated to the States, rather than becoming an official matter of federal (i.e. national) concern. It is, however,

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difficult to consider the early history of English teaching in Australia without reference to Federation and, overall, the project of nation-building. The establishment of subject English in the school curriculum goes hand-in-hand with the formation of the Australian nation. Elsewhere it has been argued that the history of subject English in Australia must be understood with specific reference to the New Education (Green and Cormack 2008, 2011), and indeed as a significant manifestation of it (Meadmore 2003). An international reform movement, the New Education was linked in various ways with Progressivism (e.g. Campbell and Sherington 2006; Cremin 1989; Reece 2003), and has been described as “a broad-based educational reform movement that emerged as a more or less coherent ideological-discursive formation in the UK and elsewhere in the latter part of the nineteenth century” (Green and Cormack 2008, pp. 254–255). Its influence, along with that of Romanticism (Reid 2004), can be traced in the emergence of English as a distinctive curriculum identity. Notwithstanding the New Education’s “complex and contradictory” character (Green and Cormack 2008, p. 255), Meadmore, among others, notes its importance in Australian educational history, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the leading figures in the so-called ‘educational renaissance’ around Federation, as key agents of reform, were committed to, and influenced by, what was indeed a transnational phenomenon. A particularly important although perhaps under-appreciated aspect of ‘Progressivism’ was its racial character, implicated with all forms of northern European colonialism (see McLeod and Paisley 2016; also, notably, Fallace 2015).2 This is something rarely acknowledged. Yet it is arguably crucial to the matter at hand here – the history of subject English. In that regard, one historical personage stands out. The single most significant administrative-intellectual figure in the installation of subject English at the heart of the Australian school curriculum was Peter Board, inaugural Director of Education in New South Wales from 1905 to 1922.3 He was responsible for the Primary School Syllabus released in 1905, and 6  years later, for the Secondary School Syllabus, largely writing both documents. Board wasn’t alone in effecting such momentous curriculum change (Crane and Walker 1957), but he was instrumental in establishing ‘English’ as the central organising principle for the curriculum (Patterson 2000). In fact, he appears to have been the first to name this particular curriculum space officially as ‘English’, at least in the Australian context. Board himself is an intriguing figure, historically. Undoubtedly a ‘Progressivist’, socially as well as educationally (Roe 1984; Lake 2019), and with little if anything written about him with specific reference to race, he was nonetheless clearly a man 2  This matter has rarely been considered, at least explicitly, in the Australian historiography – Julie McLeod’s work being an obvious and major exception (e.g. McLeod and Paisley 2016). 3  Notwithstanding the problems associated with writing (curriculum) history from the viewpoint of the subject, nonetheless in certain circumstances it may be both unavoidable and to some extent even warranted, as we suggest in what follows. Biographical account of parallel figures in other countries might well be a fruitful matter to investigate in the larger transnational context of L1 education.

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of his times. In this regard, Peter Cochrane has recently identified the naturalised racism among many of the key figures associated with the early history of the Australian nation (Cochrane 2018). As he writes of Alfred Deakin, for instance, a key figure in Federation politics and subsequently an early Prime Minister, his racial anxieties were inseparable from his social thought and his commitment to nation-­ hood. Similar observations can be made of many of his contemporaries. It is likely that the same applies to Board, then, whose lifetime spanned the period from 1858 to 1945. It remains an open question as to whether this manifests itself in any way in his educational thinking, and more specifically his views on language and the ‘English’ question – something to bear in mind in reading through what follows. As a School Inspector, in 1903 Board published a brief report of his survey of various educational systems overseas, with a view to contributing to debate in New South Wales. It opened thus: “During my recent holiday trip to Europe, I availed myself of the opportunity to visit schools and to observe the trend of educational movements in a few of the countries of Europe. My observations were confined mainly to England and Scotland, but embraced in a minor degree the schools systems of Switzerland, Germany and France” (Board 1903, p. 1). His initial focus was on primary (i.e. elementary) education. A central assertion was the importance of the notion of correlation and, relatedly, the re-organisation of the school curriculum. Rather than being treated in “water-tight compartments”, school-subjects were to be “group[ed] … according to their related characteristics” in and across the curriculum, and thereby rationalised.4 Six such “groups” emerged: “English, Mathematics, Nature-[K]nowledge, Civics and Morals, Manual [W]ork and Music” (p. 4). Further: By this arrangement, constantly under the eye of the teacher in his official standard, the character of the group would colour the treatment of all the subdivisions of it. Writing would cease to be merely the work of the copy book. Reading would cease to be merely the oral expression of the words and sentiment of a book. Spelling would cease to be merely the orthography of a reading lesson. The oral answer would cease to be merely a patchy expression of a half-formed thought. The ‘subject’ would be English, and these, various phases of it. (p. 4; our added emphasis)5

Moreover: “English would become the basis of the fabric of instruction, the root from which the whole course must grow” (p. 4). ‘English’ is subsequently described as “the centre of gravity of the syllabus”, and the means whereby “a rational 4  This would seem to be a pattern observable in other L1 subjects, viewed historically. For example, with reference to subject Norwegian but also, by implication, the Nordic L1 subjects more generally, Ongstad (2015) observes that “the monolithic-like notion” of the ‘mother tongue “confused and still confuses the fact that this seemingly holistic L1 originally was a compound” (p. 19), with hitherto disparate components being brought together. 5  Regarding English in America, Applebee (1993, p. 32) writes: “The secondary school English curriculum is a hybrid that arose out of a sometimes uncomfortable union of such disparate studies as reading, spelling, grammar, oratory, literary history, and rhetoric during the nineteenth century […].” He locates this movement towards “union” in that century’s last decade. Again, it is helpful to link this point to Ongstad’s account of Norwegian and the Nordic L1 subjects, as an earlier initiative of this kind: “During the nineteenth century[,] curricular L1, Norwegian … became a separate school subject in its own right […]” (Ongstad 2015, p. 21 – see also Ongstad, this volume).

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foundation would be formed for classification, and a new and wider significance would be attached to the subjects of instruction” (p. 4). Explicit reference is made to “the German system of elementary education”, in which “the German language is its foundation”, and the point made “that from the earliest period of school life, facility in the use of the mother tongue as a vehicle of thought is the essential aim of school work” (p. 4). While Board was clear that not everything in the German education system was to be emulated, nonetheless “with regard to the intelligent and correct use of the mother tongue inculcated from the earliest years, England, Scotland and Australia may well follow Germany by making English the chief corner-stone of the educational edifice” (p. 4).6 Here it is appropriate simply to note that, alongside the principle of ‘correlation’ in Board’s summary of the “renaissance” he discerned in his Continental travels, was his “assertion of the cultural aim in education as against a purely utilitarian aim” (p. 3). This reconceptualised view of subject English and the primary school curriculum is further developed and consolidated in the new Primary Syllabus (1904), re-­ issued a year later, “adding forty-two pages of explanatory notes” (Crane and Walker 1957, p. 38). The subject repertoire is identical to that outlined in Board’s earlier Report. English is presented as central: English is the basis of the curriculum. The teaching of English aims not merely at enabling a pupil to acquire the mechanical arts of reading and writing but mainly at giving a command of the use of the mother-tongue as a means by which he gains access to the printed and written thoughts of others, and by which his own thoughts are expressed orally and in writing. It, therefore, covers what has been embraced by the terms reading, writing, spelling, and composition, and this Syllabus requires that such a scope should be given to the treatment of these sections as to secure the aim abovementioned. (iv)

In addition, English is stressed as “enter[ing] into the entire course of instruction” (iv). In this fashion, a particular conjoining of the curriculum as text and the figure of the teacher is generated, since it is clearly the teaching body at large to whom these prefatory notes are addressed, in the context of an undoubtedly major curriculum innovation. Moreover, the English course is viewed as extending the pupil’s engagement beyond the ‘mechanical’ and the utilitarian: “from the first the pupils will learn to look to books as a source of pleasure, thus laying the foundation of an appreciation of literature” (iv). Subject English thus has a literary frame right from the outset. Attention later turned to secondary education, once again under Board’s shaping influence, and the release of the 1911 secondary school syllabus for New South Wales constituted a further consolidation of the emergent English curriculum, in a form that remained recognizable and distinctive over much of the ensuing century. This built significantly upon the initiatives of the primary curriculum, although the growing influence of a new formulation of English studies in higher education and the university sector, notably in Britain, cannot be overlooked or underestimated.

6  It would be interesting to explore in greater depth what it was in German as a ‘mother tongue’ that was so influential in this way.

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The 1911 syllabus for secondary education has been described as “the first official ‘lighthouse’ on the landscape of English curriculum history in NSW” (Manuel and Carter 2017, p. 75). The English course was expressly conceived as bringing together culture and utility in its vision of the subject, “succinctly meld[ing] the ‘cultural ideal’ of subject English with the more utilitarian purpose of preparing young people for the world of work” (Manuel and Carter 2017, p. 75). Moreover, subject English was again centrally located in the new high school curriculum, with ‘literature’ (as “a civilizing force”) at the heart of the subject: To deliberately differentiate it from classics, subject English was positioned at the centre of the curriculum: the subject that would equip students with the linguistic, cognitive, aesthetic and critical capacities deemed necessary for maturity […], for success across all other subjects and in the adult world […] and [to] initiate and socialise them into the dominant culture through reading great works of English literature. (Manuel and Carter 2017, p.78)

What is less clear, however, is the degree to which this focus on literature was balanced, to some extent, with a persistent concern with grammar, as the formal study of language  – an enduring feature in the history of English teaching in Australia (Green and Hodgens 1996). The subject was indeed presented as “compris[ing] two main divisions: Literature and Language” (18). Three decades later, Board was to describe English as “the cornerstone of the curriculum”, seeing it as “the subject the treatment of which contributes the largest quota towards the ultimate equipment of the pupil for life” (Board 1932, p. 86). His biographers suggest that he was influenced in this view of subject English by the Scottish educationalist Simon Laurie, who had earlier proposed that “[i]n the Department of the Humanistic (for example) the central subject is manifestly Language, i.e. the vernacular as grammar and as literature, including historical literature” (cited Crane and Walker 1957, p. 37; our added emphasis). As it was, the 1911 secondary English Syllabus was somewhat restrained in its treatment of grammar, and language study more generally, observing in the section on “Grammar and History of Language” that “[t]he aim of this course is to develop an intelligent interest in the mother tongue and not to acquaint pupils with a body of details” (p. 21). That said, the idea of a distinctive school subject (‘English’) addressed to language and literature was now clearly established. This remained the definitive version of the subject right up to the latter part of the century, and it is fair to say that it has lingered on since then, to various degrees (Manuel and Carter 2017, 2019). The installation of an officially endorsed national curriculum in English in 2011 is testament enough to its enduring influence. There are three matters to consider in this account of English in Australia. The first is that this early version of subject English brings together a particular vision of liberal education, within which literature is especially valued, with a bureaucratic-­ administrative framing of public schooling. This “conceptualisation of subject English” has since been since “largely reproduced – often uncritically and unproblematically – over the span of a century” (Manuel and Carter 2017, p. 88). It brings together a strong emphasis on the importance of literature as both “a civilising, moralising and nation-building force and as a potential source of pleasure and

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personal edification” (p. 88) with a highly structured system of assessment and prescription, organised hierarchically. What emerges is a characteristic sense of this particular subject-area as profoundly governmentalized – to be understood as a distinctive cultural-hegemonic project. Secondly, Board’s program for (English) curriculum reform was consistent with recommendations of a contemporaneous report subsequently known as the Knibbs-­ Turner Report. Also based on an extensive tour of Europe and North America, the Knibbs-Turner Report was issued in two volumes, one on primary education (New South Wales Legislative Assembly 1903) and the other on secondary education (New South Wales Legislative Assembly 1904). Although subject English is not discussed, explicit reference is made to a marked shift overseas from study of the ‘classical’ languages (Greek, Latin), as a key component of formal school curriculum, to ‘modern’ languages (‘e.g. ‘English’, ‘French’, ‘German’, etc.). Reference is made to “substituting modern languages for ancient”, something which is "practically world-wide”; relatedly, “[t]here is increasing recognition of the cultural value of modern literature” (New South Wales Legislative Assembly 1904, p. 42). In this context, the Kaiser is quoted as saying, in an influential speech, that “[w]e must take the mother-tongue as basis for the Gymnasium [the German high school] … The vernacular element must be the centre about which all else revolves” (New South Wales Legislative Assembly 1904, p. 42). Sentiments such as these are clearly relevant, by analogy, to grasping why subject English becomes framed and positioned as it was in early twentieth-century Australia. But it is equally important to take account of the fact that Australia was at this time very much a new nation – newly established from 1901 – but also emphatically a ‘British’ nation, as part of the British Empire. National identity was very much on the agenda, with complicated (even at times somewhat conflicted) identity-work persisting well into the new century, with reference still being made three decades later to “this great British nation in the south” (Browne 1927, p. xxi). Notwithstanding that Board himself advises pointedly, apropos of “selection of subject matter”, that this was “to be made for the Australian boy and girl, living and thinking in Australian conditions” (New South Wales Department of Public Instruction 1911, p. 8), it is clear that the designated English curriculum is largely drawn from Britain and (to some limited extent) the USA, with Shakespeare and Dickens figuring prominently, and enduringly so. This is partly because, perhaps understandably, there was as yet little in the way of a recognizably Australian literature, as a field. More was possible therefore, in this regard, in the other ‘English subjects’ – History and Geography – than in English itself.7 Yet it was the English language that underpinned and informed the school curriculum more generally – “the basis of the fabric of instruction” (Board 1903, p. 4), overall. Moreover, and thirdly, “this great British nation in the south”, this ‘new’ nation, was also, and emphatically, a white nation. Consider the following: 7  It should be noted that this was always understood as ‘Literature’ (i.e. ‘English Literature’). Moreover, this is best understood in terms of a traditional ‘canon’ of literary works, of established value and status.

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J. Brass and B. Green It should be remembered that Australia’s educational problem is unlike that of any other nation. Here is a whole continent as large as the United States and nearly as large as Europe. As yet it contains only six million people, but these people are almost entirely of British stock. There is no native problem owing to the fact that the aboriginal inhabitants have nearly disappeared. There is practically no foreign element in the population. Yet the northern shores of Australia are only a few days’ sail away from overwhelming millions of coloured people. Can she keep her continent white? (Browne 1927, p. xviii – our added emphasis)

This was hardly an uncommon attitude in early twentieth-century Australia – and even beyond that period. Cochrane (2018) has written about the prevalence of a deeply ingrained, thoroughly naturalized racism in Australian life, not simply in the period between Federation and World War 1 but more generally. As he writes, there was a wide consensus on “keeping race and nation entirely white and thus perfectly pure” (Cochran 2018, p. 13). Interestingly, this was motivated more by a general perception, as Cochrane argues, of the looming threat posed by Asia, especially Japan, than by concern about Australia’s own indigenous population. What became known, notoriously, as the White Australia Policy8 was no accident, nor simply a glitch, in the national story. Australia’s racial anxieties are crucial to its identity project. Education could not help but be implicated in this often overlooked, if not ‘forgotten’, aspect of nation-building. English in Australia was part of this, from the very outset – again, something rarely acknowledged in the available curriculum history. This is then another side, all too often suppressed, to relating the history of English teaching to nation and empire (Green and Cormack 2008), as deeply invested in a racial triumphalism, in all its attendant ambivalence. Crucial to any revisionary account is the need to highlight and clarify the interplay between race and language, in the construction, consolidation and confirmation of (subject) English. This is indeed the case for English teaching in Australia.

4.1  The Emergence of ‘English’ in the United States In the United States, the emergence of ‘English’ as L1 subject coincided with Progressive Era reforms of the 1880s–1920s. Prior to the 1880s, the term ‘English’ rarely appeared in U.S. curriculum documents (Hays 1936). By 1920, however, subject English occupied a central place in the school curriculum (Hosic 1917). As Popkewitz (2008) has noted, the Progressive Era reforms increasingly turned to elementary (primary) and secondary schools to solve a series of ‘social problems’ and to reverse notions of moral, religious, cultural, and racial ‘decline’ brought about by industrialisation, urbanisation, racial reconstruction, and increasing immigration from southern and eastern Europe. However, these ‘social’ problematics and underlying logics of White Christian nationalism have been obscured in histories of subject English published by the major professional association of English teachers  Officially, the Immigration Restriction Action (1901). It was rescinded as policy only in 1965.

8

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in the United States, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) (Brass 2013, 2016a, b). The NCTE has long attributed the ‘birth’ of subject English to an influential report on the American high school published by the National Education Association in 1894, the Committee of Ten report (e.g. Applebee 1974; Nelms 2004).9 Between 1892 and 1894, the Committee of Ten (National Education Association [NEA] 1894) convened leaders from élite colleges and universities and highly selective secondary schools to address a limited problem  – establishing uniform college entrance requirements for American high schools. Led by Harvard University President Charles Eliot, the Committee recommended four programmes of study that would provide the mental training necessary for higher education, including a four-year course in ‘English’. Partially underpinned by a nineteenth-century doctrine of “mental discipline”, it was reasoned that the “thorough and continuous study” of the English language and its literature could “train the pupil’s powers of observation, expression, and reasoning” in ways that approached the disciplinary effects of studying Latin or Greek (p. 17). English did not supplant Latin and Greek in schools; however, for the first time, the “modern languages” – English, German, French, and Spanish – were placed alongside the “classical languages” as legitimate sources of mental discipline and (thus) college preparation (NEA 1894). Further, the study of words should be so pursued as to illustrate the political, social, intellectual, and religious development of the English race, and college and university admission “should be made to depend largely on [pupils’] ability to write English”. (NEA 1894, p.  21, italics added)

Even as they were tasked with drafting college and university entrance requirements, however, the Committee of Ten contended that “secondary schools of the United States, taken as a whole, do not exist for the purpose of preparing boys and girls for colleges” (NEA 1894, p. 52). Here the Committee explicitly rejected British traditions of education that still lingered in the United States more than a century after the Declaration of Independence (1776). First, instead of providing different courses of study “for pupils of supposed different destinations”, every subject was to be taught in the same way for every pupil (p. 17). Second, the secondary school curriculum would not be focused on senior secondary examinations that determined college and university admission. Whereas British high schools prepared upper-­ class students for university entrance exams, the American high school would serve the ‘national interest’ with a single course of study that prepared students “for college” and “for life”: Their main function is to prepare for the duties of life that small proportion of all the children in the country [who may be] small in number, but very important to the welfare of the nation who show themselves able to profit by an education prolonged to the eighteenth year, and whose parents are able to support them while they remain so long at school. (p. 52)

9  In this regard, this Report can be seen as analogous, at least in some respects, to the KnibbsTurner Report, discussed earlier: “Knibbs and Turner provide an Australian equivalent to Elliot’s Report of the Committee of Ten […].” (Campbell and Sherington 2006, p. 199).

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It is widely assumed that the Committee of Ten caused the proliferation of English courses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to legitimating modern languages as viable sources of mental discipline, Applebee (1974) argues, the Committee more or less invented ‘English’ by consolidating a series of minor school subjects that were previously distinct, including English Language, English Grammar, Composition, Rhetoric, and English Literature. With a broader range than English in Australia, the American course in ‘English’ would be governed by two educational aims that are, in fact, remarkably similar in both countries: The main direct objects of the teaching of English in schools seem to be two: (1) to enable the pupil to understand the expressed thoughts of others and to give expression to thoughts of his own; and (2) to cultivate a taste for reading, to give the pupil some acquaintance with good literature, and to furnish him with the means of extending that acquaintance. (NEA 1894, p. 86)

The NCTE has credited the Committee of Ten for inventing ‘English’ and framing how English teachers have understood the subject for more than a century: “The extent to which the subject they invented still stands, in virtually the same form … is dramatic testimony to the success of their efforts” (Nelms 2000, p.49). However, this view has ignored how the rapid rise of subject English began a decade prior to the Committee of Ten (Hays 1936). Nor does it consider how subject English also emerged in England and Australia at the turn of the twentieth century – countries that were clearly not subject to the Committee of Ten’s recommendations. Finally, NCTE’s historiography relied heavily upon a series of influential books on English teaching that were reprinted regularly across the subject’s formative decades: Hinsdale’s (1898) Teaching the Language-Arts and Chubb’s (1902) The Teaching of English in the Elementary School and the Secondary School and Carpenter et al. (1903) identically titled The Teaching of English in the Elementary School and the Secondary School. Ironically, however, Hindale (1898), Chubb (1902), and Carpenter et al. (1903) each positioned themselves against the Committee of Ten report, on the grounds that it fundamentally misunderstood the aims of English teaching and the ways that English language and literature could improve the moral, social, and cultural condition of a nation and a race thought to be in decline. Revisiting this explicit opposition to the Committee of Ten in the formative decades of modern English teaching can draw out ‘social’ problematics and hidden histories of race and religion in a nation-building project in which English language and literature were linked to White Christian nationalism in the United States. There are several matters worth noting here. First, it was reasoned that the intellectual, social, and economic demands of modern society were too complex and heterogeneous for a single course to prepare students for college and life. The effect of the Committee of Ten’s uniform course in English was to “impair schools’ efficiency in both spheres”, producing high school graduates who were neither prepared ‘for life’ nor for college and careers. Instead, it was argued that the English curriculum needed to be attuned to the governing patterns of twentieth-century social and economic life to provide a “double preparation” – to prepare youth for ‘life’ and for higher education or a vocation (Chubb 1902, p. 240).

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Second, those within the English teaching profession countered the 1894 Report of the Committee of Ten with a “broader and more fundamental view” of the subject – one which looked beyond the “practical” and “mechanical” uses of English to ascertain the “higher uses” of vernacular language and literature “for guidance, culture, and discipline” (Hinsdale 1898). It was reasoned that the fundamental objects of English teaching were not language, writing, reading, and literature – but, rather, the moral, spiritual, cultural, and economic health of the individual and the nation (e.g. Hinsdale 1898; Chubb 1902; Carpenter et al. 1903). In this view, the Committee of Ten represented an “admirable” yet “confused” attempt to frame the teaching of English (Carpenter et al. 1903) – its philosophy was “not only inadequate but misleading”, because it failed to take the larger “social view” of English as an educational instrument to foster personal and social welfare (Chubb 1902). This “social view” of subject English followed from the “educationalization of social problems” (Smeyers and Depaepe 2008)  – a transnational phenomenon in which ‘social’ responsibilities were increasingly transferred to schools from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century (Brass 2016a, b). As the comprehensive high school was conceived as a solution to perceived social, economic, and political problems, the teaching of English was thought to foster individual and national welfare by inculcating knowledge and self-steering techniques through which individuals’ thoughts, souls, and conduct could be attuned to norms and ideals of health, enlightenment, personal responsibility, economic productivity, and democratic citizenship (see Brass 2011, 2013, 2016a, b). At the turn of the twentieth century, the English ‘mother tongue’ was considered superior to Latin and Greek in disciplining individuals to internalise social, cultural, economic, and civic norms as personal desire. It was reasoned that “language conditioned all other discipline and culture” since language and thought were “practically inseparable” (Hinsdale 1898, p.  17); thus, it was vernacular language and literature which enabled and shaped how people could “understand and interpret the world”, constituting the “knowledge that shapes, or at least influences, our conduct” (Hinsdale 1898, p. 71). In this view, developing students’ command of English was also a means to develop individuals’ powers of self-command, and to steer their conduct towards norms of personal and national welfare (Carpenter et al. 1903, p. 54). At the same time, notions of individual development were tied to eugenic notions of racial and national development. With increasing immigration, the USA was a nation whose population had a far more diverse cultural and linguistic heritage than Australia, and it was considered crucial to build a national sign community, a shared language, and establish vernacular English as the ‘common tongue’: “It is obviously for the welfare of the nation that all communities which form it should realise their mutual relations. Nations in which the component communities speak and read no common tongue are nations only in name” (Carpenter et al. 1903, p. 53). In addition, English language and literature were understood as educational instruments that would enable teachers to inculcate national and racial ideals as norms of individual comportment:

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J. Brass and B. Green It is important that the student should have a clear realisation of the elements of his native literature that are most characteristically national or racial, in order that his individual ideals of conduct may become consonant with the more permanent and noble aims of humanity and of the special division of humanity to which he belongs by inheritance or by education. (Carpenter et al. 1903, p. 62)

This nation-building project universalised Euro-American notions of whiteness and western-ness as norms of personal and national development. The United States was aligned with England, France and Germany as ‘modern’ nations and ‘advanced races’ whose ideals, tastes and values were represented as elevated, civilised, permanent and universal principles of the human condition. English language and literature thus could be thought to ‘humanise’ individuals and reform society by subjecting them to the language, art and rationality of the most advanced nations and races, and by constituting racial and national imaginaries as dominant forms of belonging. At the same time, other nations, races, and languages were located outside of rationality, progress and the imagined community of ‘America’ – including native Americans, African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and descendants of Mexico and Spain who had inhabited the nation’s geographical borders for generations. From the 1890s to the 1920s, the field’s first influential texts deconstructed traditional distinctions between ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ education, aligned English education with ‘social’ problematics, and subordinated ‘practical’ and ‘utilitarian’ concerns about reading, writing, and language to ‘social’, ‘ethical’ and ‘cultural’ concerns about personal and national development. This “complex and contradictory” project (Green and Cormack 2008) was exemplified by the 1918 successor to the Committee of Ten Report  – the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education (Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education 1918) – and its commissioned sub-report on English teaching, The Reorganization of English in Secondary Schools (Hosic 1917). Published in conjunction with the Cardinal Principles, Hosic’s (1917) Reorganization of English acknowledged the value of studying English language, grammar, rhetoric, and literature. Echoing the debates above, however, it was reasoned that these objects of study were only “subsidiary” to subject English – the “fundamental aims” (or “cardinal principles”) of English teaching were not primarily linguistic or literary, but (a) Cultural. To open to the pupil new and higher forms of pleasure. (b) Vocational. To fit the student for the highest success in his [sic] chosen calling. (c) Social and ethical. To present to the student noble ideals, and aid in the formation of his character, and make him more efficient and actively interested in his relations with and service to others in the community and in the Nation. (Hosic 1917, p. 32)

As the Cardinal Principles supplanted the Committee of Ten Report as national framework for secondary education, the American high school continued its transition from a “fitting school” – which prepared a privileged minority for college and university examinations – to a “finishing school” which equipped individuals for life and, incidentally, for college (Hosic 1917). The English curriculum would be “organized primarily with reference to basic personal and social needs” (p.  2,

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italics in original) and would “adjust the forces of the school to the changed conditions of society surrounding it” (Hosic 1917, p. 5). English educators largely take for granted that the aims and boundaries of high school English were handed “down” from college and universities (e.g. Applebee 1974). However, as in Australia, the early twentieth-century “re-organization of English” constituted “a continuation of common-school education” (Hosic 1917) – that is, it was the common school (i.e. the elementary/primary school) which established a model of vernacular language education that migrated “up” to secondary schools in educational reforms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Chubb 1902; Carpenter et al. 1903). At the same time, as Hunter (1988) notes, it was the Protestant Christian Sunday School that made English thinkable and practicable in the common school and (later) the secondary school. As nation-states improvised school systems across what has been described as the long nineteenth century (Trohler et al. 2011), they ‘borrowed’ disciplinary regimes of pastoral Christianity and adapted them to social administrative concerns related to “the child’s attributes as a member of a population and future citizen of the state – to his health, criminal propensity, sentiments, and regularity of habits” (Hunter 1988, p. 46). Nineteenth-century Sunday Schools were important precursors to modern literary education, therefore, in the sense that they initiated vernacular literacy campaigns and developed a pedagogical milieu of literary self-disciplines that was later adapted to religious and secular ends in the modern English classroom (Green et al. 2013; Hunter 1988; Peel et al. 2000; Brass 2011, 2012, 2016a, b). As American Sunday Schools dissolved or morphed into denominational institutions in the late nineteenth century, the modern English teacher re-appropriated Christian literary pedagogies and assumed moral, spiritual, and social responsibilities previously associated with Christian churches and Sunday Schools: We are no longer a Bible-reading people; the church and the Sunday school are fast losing their hold; family life is less intimate and watchful; respect for law and authority is decreasing, while forces of evil are steadily multiplying in our midst. The moving pictures and vaudevilles … the trashy magazine, the daily paper … and vulgar comic[s] are but a few agencies at work which have already helped to bring about a cheapening of ideals, a lowering of standards, and a blunting of fine sensibilities and distinctions … in our American people … It is time that we English teachers, recognising ourselves as awakeners of the spirit, should ask ourselves what we are doing to reverse this downward tendency. (Breck 1912, pp. 68–69)

Thus, the subject can also be viewed as a modern descendant of Christian missions and pastoral care (Hunter 1988; Morgan 1998; Patterson 2000; Brass 2011). Paradoxically, the modern English classroom both supplanted Christian institutions and enabled exercises of pastoral power to proliferate well beyond institutionalized Christianity. Further, the emergence of English also went hand-in-hand with the project of white Christian nationalism (see Brass 2013). Christian themes of saving souls were reworked into sacred and secular redemption narratives in which English teachers saw themselves combatting the “deteriorating standard” of American culture

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brought about by immigration, commercialization, urbanization, and industrialization. The rise of ‘English’ was constitutively linked to ‘the rise of a new type of national culture’  – a culture thought to be ‘modern in spirit’ and distinctly ‘American’, yet ancestrally linked to the British and the ‘Teutonic’ races of northern Europe (Chubb 1902). This narrative of American progress was predicated on national, religious, and racial hierarchies which differentiated ‘America’ and ‘Americans’ from uncivilised, irrational and barbaric ‘others’ who needed to be saved (Popkewitz 2008). English teachers would ‘humanize’ children and ‘elevate’ the condition of the nation and the race through studies of English language and literature that could equip American youth to consider their duty as citizens in the Kingdom of God … to appreciate the present justly, with its fruits of the struggle from pagan to Christian, from mediaeval to modern … and bring them into their heritage, the riches bequeathed the race by the ancestors … to all that Europe has produced … and secure among ourselves … the widest sympathies with all the sister nations. (Hulst 1912, pp. 74–76)

This ‘American’ nation-building project was also influenced by mother-tongue education in Europe, particularly German schools.10 “German schools”, it was reasoned, taught the mother tongue “to breed German citizens and soldiers, with an understanding of the national language and a love and appreciation of the national literature” (Carpenter et al. 1903). In similar fashion, English teachers could foster a “linguistic conscience and linguistic pride” in America by “using our unsurpassed English literature, as it has never been used before, toward the formation of character, the enrichment of life, and the refinement of manners” (Chubb 1902, p. 5–6). American youth would be “nourished upon Shakespeare and Milton; upon the Bible and the “Pilgrim’s Progress” … upon Browning and Emerson, and Whitman and Thoreau much more than upon the masters of antiquity” (Chubb 1902, p. 6). The English ‘mother tongue’ would be used to mould youths’ lives around the “higher sentiments and ideals of the race expressed by its poets and seers” – not the “commercialized ambitions and soiled ideals … barbarisms … retarding forces … and illiteracy of the playground, street, and home” (Chubb 1902, p. 8). Thus, all students, including immigrants, could develop an emotional attachment to “America” and be led by teachers to take up “the point of view of the race … the age … and the outlook of civilization and its needs” (Chubb 1902, p. 318–9). Hence, in the USA – as in Australia – the teaching of English was inextricably linked to larger struggles over cultural and symbolic authority, subjectivity, nation, and empire (e.g. Green 1990; Green and Cormack 2008). The subject’s historical commitments and effects have been obscured over time by the field’s limited, and largely self-serving, historiography (Morgan 1990; Brass 2013). However,  In contrast to Australia, the comprehensive American high school was not comparable to the German Gymnasium (the highest tier of secondary schooling), but compared explicitly to the Realschule (the middle tier). It was reasoned that the United States lacked the higher culture of Europe – and that the comparably heterogeneous population of students attending U.S. schools was intellectually, culturally, and racially inferior to the class of Europeans who were streamed into high school and university studies. This rationale is especially pronounced in Hinsdale (1898).

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revisiting the invention of modern English teaching in these two post-imperial countries draws attention to ways in which the subject has been – and remains – implicated in the social dynamics of governmentality, bio-politics and pastoral power, and white Christian nationalism.

5  Conclusion What emerges from this comparative-historical account of Australia and the USA, as two key sites in the construction of subject English as L1 education? In this chapter we have focused our attention on the crucial cusp period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is widely regarded as a critical moment in the history of the English subjects, when they first came together as a distinctive curriculum ensemble, or rather an assemblage. There is indeed marked consistency in how and when this happened, across the ex-imperial settler nations in the Anglo world. Our focus has been on Australia and the USA, respectively  – on the one hand, a newly formed nation, and on the other, an established nation entering into a new phase, with the two nonetheless linked within complex dynamics of nation and empire, past and future, culture and economy, language and identity. We have shone some light on why these particular school-subjects came together in the way they did, at this particular moment in history. We have suggested the ‘problems’ to which they were seen as an acceptable, intelligible response, and how we might understand the productivity of these particular ‘solutions’, as well as their historical-­ symbolic resonance. After all, they have endured in this particular configuration for well over a century, although there may well be some indications of strain now emerging in this regard. In particular, we have highlighted a particular line of interest in issues of language, race and nation. This has been underappreciated in the historiography to date – perhaps especially so in the Australian case, where it exists as a silence more than anything else, an absence, to be discerned largely from adjacent and overlapping fields, or elsewhere in the historical record. Race has always been more visibly and emphatically an issue in the United States, however, although not always explicitly or systematically related to the question of language, or to ‘English’. We also suggest that this analysis brings a new perspective on a widely-­ acknowledged key event in English curriculum history, the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar (Goodwyn et al. 2018). The Dartmouth Seminar was a key meeting in which leading English educators from England and the United States sought to develop an international consensus on the teaching of English as L1. Dartmouth can be seen as re-­ opening up this particular focus on questions of identity and difference, race and language, as a fundamental matter of (revisionary) concern (Trimbur 2008). And this, in turn, is usefully traced back to the English teaching field’s originary moment, in the two decades or so of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nations are predicated on what Luke (2017, p. 162) has called “a simple formula that has long been an empirical fiction: one nation=one race=one language”. That was

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always a fantasy, but it is also deeply resonant, with considerable and enduring effect. At a time when there is a resurgent (neo-conservative) interest in what has been called the Anglosphere – an English language-based imaginary of a (re)constituted global order (Mycock and Wellings 2017) – it is both timely and salutary to recall how complicated subject English really is, not only in in its own Anglophone space but also representatively and more broadly, with implications arguably for the L1 subjects as a distinctive transnational curriculum phenomenon. One last point needs to be made, briefly. This concerns the significance of the distinctive national-geographic contexts at issue here, with specific regard to their respective forms of English teaching. In this chapter, we have sought to demonstrate both connections and discontinuities in English curriculum history, across these countries. Both need to be acknowledged – the connections and commonalities, on the one hand, and on the other, the discontinuities and the differences. As Pinar (2010, p. 14) has observed, “[u]nderstanding the national distinctiveness of curriculum studies enables us to underscore how national history and culture influence our own research”. This is clearly pertinent to thinking comparatively about English teaching and about subject English, as here. Yet, while there may be no single, common identity, this is not to deny, either, that there may well be, and perhaps in varying degrees, a family resemblance in this regard. It is salutary, then, to take such matters into account in seeking to re-assess the broader curriculum project of the L1 subjects.

References Applebee, A. N. (1974). Tradition and reform in the teaching of English: A history. Urbana: NCTE. Applebee, A. N. (1993). Literature in the secondary school: Studies of curriculum and instruction in the United States. Urbana Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ball, S. J. (1985). English for the English since 1906. In I. F. Goodson (Ed.), Social histories of the secondary curriculum: Subjects for study (pp. 53–88). London/Philadelphia: The Falmer Press. Board, P. (1903). Primary education: Report by P.  Board, Esq., M.A., Inspector of Schools, upon observations and inquiries made with regard to primary education in other countries. Department of Public Instruction, New South Wales, pp. 1–12. Board, P. (1932). Curriculum making. In P. R. Cole (Ed.), The primary curriculum in Australia (pp. 74–91). Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Brass, J. (2011). Historicizing English pedagogy: The extension and transformation of ‘The cure of souls’. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 19(1), 93–112. Brass, J. (2013). Constituting a sense of ‘American’ identity and place through language and literary study: A curriculum history, 1898–1912. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 12(2), 41–57. Brass, J. (2016a). English teaching and the educationalisation of social problems in the United States, 1894–1918. Paedagogica Historica, 52(3), 221–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/0030923 0.2016.1151056. Brass, J. (2016b). Re-reading Dartmouth: An American perspective. English in Australia, 15(3), 52–57. Breck, E. (1912). A new task for the English teacher. English Journal, 1(2), 65–71.

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Browne, G. S. (1927). Introduction. In G. S. Browne (Ed.), Education in Australia: A comparative study of the educational systems of the six Australian States (pp. xvii–xxi). London: Macmillan & Co, Ltd. Campbell, C., & Sherington, G. (2006). A genealogy of an Australian system of comprehensive high schools: The contribution of educational progressivism to the one best form of universal secondary education (1900-1940). Paedagogica Historica, 42(1 & 2), 191–210. Carpenter, G., Baker, F., & Scott, F. (1903). The teaching of English in the elementary and the secondary school. New York/London/Bombay/Calcutta: Longmans, Green, & Co. Chubb, P. (1902). The teaching of English in the elementary school and the secondary school. New York: Macmillan. Clark, U. (2013). Language and identity in Englishes. London/New York: Routledge. Cochrane, P. (2018). Best we forget: The war for white Australia, 1914–18. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Crane, A. R., & Walker, W. G. (1957). Peter Board: His contribution to the development of education in New South Wales. Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research. Cremin, L. (1989). Transformation of the school: Progressivism in American education. New York: McGraw-Hill. Crowley, T. (2003). Standard English and the politics of language (2nd ed.). London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fallace, T.  D. (2015). Race and the origins of progressive education, 1880–1929. New  York: Teachers College Press. Goodwyn, A., Durrant, C., Sawyer, W., Scherff, L., & Zancanella, D. (Eds.). (2018). The future of English worldwide: Celebrating 50 years from the Dartmouth conference. London/New York: Routledge. Green, B. (1990). A dividing practice: ‘Literature’, English teaching and cultural politics. In I. Goodson & P. Medway (Eds.), Bringing English to order: The history and politics of a school subject (pp. 135–161). East Sussex: The Falmer Press. Green, B. (1998). Born again teaching? Governmentality, ‘grammar’ and public schooling. In T. S. Popkewitz & M. Brennan (Eds.), Foucault’s challenge: Discourse, knowledge, and power in education (pp. 173–204). New York: Teachers College Press. Green, B., & Beavis, C. (1996). Teaching the English subjects: English curriculum history and Australian schooling. Geelong: Deakin University Press. Green, B., & Cormack, P. (2008). Curriculum history, English’ and the new education; or installing the empire of English. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 16(3), 253–267. Green, B., & Cormack, P. (2011). Literacy, nation, schooling: Reading (in) Australia. In D. Tröhler, T. S. Popkewitz, & D. F. Labaree (Eds.), Schooling and the making of citizens in the long nineteenth century: Comparative visions (pp. 240–291). New York/London: Routledge. Green, B., & Hodgens, J. (1996). Manners, morals, meanings: English teaching, language education and the subject of ‘grammar’. In B. Green & C. Beavis (Eds.), Teaching the English subjects: English curriculum history and Australian schooling (pp. 204–228). Geelong: Deakin University Press. Green, B., Cormack, P., & Patterson, A. (2013). Re-reading the reading lesson: Episodes in the history of reading pedagogy. Oxford Review of Education, 39(3), 329–344. Hays, E. (1936). College entrance requirements in English: Their effects on the high schools. An American survey. New York: Teachers College. Hinsdale, B.  A. (1898). Teaching the language-arts: Speech, reading, composition. New  York: D. Appleton and Company. Hosic, J. (1917). In Department of the Interior Bureau of Education (Ed.), Reorganization of English in secondary schools. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Hulst, C. (1912). The organization of the course in literature in secondary schools. English Journal, 1, 72–83. Hunter, I. (1988). Culture and government: The emergence of literary education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Kravchenko, A. V. (2010). Native speakers, mother tongues and other objects of wonder. Language Sciences, 32, 677–685. Lake, M. (2019). Progressive new world: How settler colonialism and transpacific exchange shaped American reform. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Luke, A. (2004). The trouble with English. Research in the Teaching of English, 39(1), 85–95. Luke, A. (2017). No grand narrative in sight: On double consciousness and critical literacy. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 66, 157–182. Manuel, J., & Carter, D. (2017). Continuities of influence: A critical analysis of subject English in the New South Wales’ secondary school curriculum of 1911. History of Education Review, 46(1), 72–94. https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-09-2015-0017. Manuel, J., & Carter, D. (2019). Resonant continuities: The influence of the Newbolt report on the formation of English curriculum in New South Wales, Australia. English in Education, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2019.1625709. McLeod, J., & Paisley, F. (2016). The modernization of colonialism and the educability of the ‘native’: Transpacific knowledge networks and education in the interwar years. History of Education Quarterly, 56(3), 473–502. Meadmore, P. (2003). The introduction of the ‘new education’ in Queensland, Australia. History of Education Quarterly, 43(3), 1–16. http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/printpage.cgi. Morgan, R. (1990). The ‘Englishness’ of English teaching. In I. Goodson & P. Medway (Eds.), Bringing English to order: The history and politics of a school subject (pp. 197–241). London/ New York/Philadelphia: The Falmer Press. Mycock, A., & Wellings, B. (2017). The Anglosphere: Past, present and future. British Academy Review, Autumn, pp. 42–45. National Education Association. (1894). Report of the committee of ten on secondary school studies. New York/Cincinnati: NEA. National Education Association [NEA]. (1918). Cardinal principles of secondary education. Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education. Nelms, B. (2000). Reconstructing English: From the 1990s to the 1990s and beyond. The English Journal, 89(3), 49–58. Nelms, B. (2004). Reinventing English: The English curriculum (at one hundred). English Journal, 8(3), 1–110. New South Wales Department of Public Instruction. (1905). Course of instruction for primary schools. Sydney: New South Wales Department of Public Instruction. New South Wales Department of Public Instruction. (1911). Courses of study for [public] high schools, 1911 Edition (119pp.). NSW Government Printer. New South Wales Legislative Assembly. (1903). Interim report of the commissioners on certain parts of primary education. Sydney: Government Printer. (Knibbs-Turner Report 1). New South Wales Legislative Assembly. (1904). Report of the commissioners, mainly on secondary education: Commission on primary, secondary, technical, and other branches of education. Sydney: Government Printer. (Knibbs-Turner Report 2). Onstad, S. (2015). Competing disciplinarities in curricular L1: A Norwegian case. L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 15, 1–28. Patterson, A. (2000). English in Australia: Its emergence and transformations. In R.  Peel, A. Patterson, & J. Gerlach (Eds.), Questions of English: Ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric and the formation of the subject in England, Australia and the United States (pp. 235–253). London & New York: London. Peel, R., Patterson, A., & Gerlach, J. (2000). Questions of English: Ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric and the formation of the subject in England, Australia and the United States. London/New York: Routledge. Pinar, W.  F. (2010). Introduction. In W.  F. Pinar (Ed.), Curriculum studies in South Africa: Intellectual histories and present circumstances (pp. 1–18). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Popkewitz, T. (2008). Cosmopolitanism and the age of school reform: Science, education, and making society by making the child. New York/London: Routledge.

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Rampton, M. B. H. (1990). Displacing the ‘native speaker’: Expertise, affiliation, and inheritance. ELTJ, 44(2), 97–101. Reece, W. (2003). American education in the twentieth century: Progressive legacies. Paedagogica Historica, 39(4), 415–416. Reid, I. (2004). Wordsworth and the formation of English studies. Burlington/Vermont: Ashgate. Roe, M. (1984). Nine Australian progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois social thought, 1890–1960. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Smeyers, P., & Depaepe, M. (2008). Educational research: The educationalization of social problems. New York: Springer. Sperling, M., & DiPardo, A. (2008). English education research and classroom practice: New directions for new times. Review of Research in Education, 32, 62–108. Trimbur, J. (2008). The Dartmouth conference and the geohistory of the native speaker. College English, 71(2), 142–169. Trohler, D., Popkewitz, T., & Labaree, D. (Eds.). (2011). Schooling and the making of citizens in the long nineteenth century. New York/London: Routledge. Viswanathan, G. (1988). Currying favor: The politics of British educational and cultural policy in India, 1813–1854. Social Text, No. 19/20, Autumn, pp. 85–104. Jory Brass  is an independent scholar with a PhD in Curriculum, Teaching, and Education Policy from Michigan State University (USA). He was previously an education academic at the University of Cincinnati and Arizona State University, USA, and The University of Melbourne, Australia. Most of his research has drawn from the work of Foucault and post-structural theorists to examine the history and cultural politics of English teaching. His publications span leading national and international journals in the fields of English education, curriculum studies, history of education, and education policy studies. Bill Green  is Emeritus Professor of Education at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Originally a secondary English teacher, he has worked in a range of Australian universities in a career focused on educational research and teacher education. His scholarship has ranged across literacy studies and curriculum inquiry, English curriculum history, doctoral research education, and professional practice education. His most recent publications are the books Engaging Curriculum: Bridging the Curriculum Theory and English Education Divide (Routledge, 2018) and The Insistence of the Letter: Literacy Studies and Curriculum Theorizing (Routledge, 2019 – an edited volume originally published in 1993).

Curricular L1 Disciplinarities: Between Norwegianness and Internationality Sigmund Ongstad

Abstract The chapter explores how international impulses may have affected national L1 curricula in Norway from 1939 to 2020. It compares the descriptions of aims and content in seven curricula chronologically, using content analysis. One eye is on changes within these elements of the subject: the other is on disciplinarity. The hypothesis that the disciplinarity of this L1 subject is at risk, based on the assumption of a clash between national and international forces, termed Norwegianness and internationality. From the 1930s to the 1980s, L1 curricula are dominated, in different periods, by formalism, semanticism, and functionalism. In the 1990s, L1 opened up as communication in general, rather than focusing on ‘language and literature’. Later trends are less clear. Two kinds of international forces are traced, disciplinary and political. While disciplinary ones were strong in the first 50 years, political forces have had more impact since. Further, the chapter draws on other researchers’ critical studies of the impact of international policies, discussing whether political regimes are in conflict with disciplinary paradigms. It is concluded that politics has taken control of curricula as an educational genre, while L1 disciplinarities have had to adjust to a strongly homogenised design. This creates polarised tensions between competence-oriented verbs and disciplinary-oriented nouns in the curricula, hence side-lining the question of students’ Bildung. A further conclusion is that curricular L1 disciplinarities in Norway have moved from Norwegianness toward internationality. Keywords  Disciplinarities · Internationality · Norwegianness · L1-curricula · Bildung · L1 education

1  Introduction The history of nations’ prime school subject, L1, has been frequently studied, both in English-speaking countries (Applebee 1974; Michael 1987; Doyle 1989; Elbow 1990; Goodson and Marsh 1996; Scholes 1998; Sawyer 2007) and in Scandinavia S. Ongstad (*) Centre for Senior Citizen Staff, Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Green, P.-O. Erixon (eds.), Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era, Educational Linguistics 48, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7_5

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(Thavenius 1981; Madssen 1999; Krogh 2005; Sjöstedt 2013). These studies have all problematised nationalism, such as Englishness (Doyle 1989) and norskhet (Eng. Norwegianness). However, few have been concerned with external or foreign impact, at least regarding L1 curricula. The chapter therefore aims at investigating Norwegian L1 curricula in a historical perspective, with a specific focus on how disciplinarity may shift over time, caused by internationality. Disciplinarity in relation to national curricula has recently been studied and problematised, in curriculum studies (Short 1990; Pinar 2007; Deng and Luke 2007; Kelly et al. 2008) and in communication theory and literacy studies (COE 2009; Christie and Maton 2011; Langer 2011; Muller 2011; Osborne 2015). Further, there exists a theoretical interest in searching overarching regimes, patterns, and paradigms to explain curricular shifts, both in general (Karseth and Sivesind 2010; Slagstad 2018; Aasen 2007) and in terms of major L1 changes (Yates et al. 2019; Sawyer and van de Ven 2006; van de Ven 2007; Green 2018; Nystrand et al. 1993; Ongstad 2002). What will be studied here is shifting disciplinarities (Scholes 1998; van de Ven 2005; Ongstad 2015). The disciplinary focus is on tensions of inner and external L1 forces, and of Norwegianness as a constitutional element of Norwegian L1’s disciplinarity in contrast to a dynamic force, here termed internationality. Further, new policies stressing skills, competences, and comparative, national and international testing seem to increasingly influence general curricular thinking and design in many countries (COE 2009; OECD 2005; UF 2006; Sjöstedt 2013). In Norway, general impact has been studied as political educational regime shifts, and more specifically as knowledge regimes and their impact on curricula (Aasen 2007, Slagstad 2018.) The chapter thus aims at tracing possible international sources for particular changes in L1 curricula. A key hypothesis is that main theories of language, text, and communication, with a certain delay, may occur as paradigmatic patterns in L1 curricula, and that such new ideas may challenge more homely, established ones (Ongstad 2002, 2014a).

2  On Structure, Data, and Method Implications of the hypotheses have consequences for how the chapter is organised. In this part, the introduction, I start out clarifying concepts, focusing on terms that might differ in Norwegian and English, as languages. I mainly stick to compulsory education, inspecting all seven national L1 curricula in Norway from 1939 onwards, in doing simple semantic analyses and interpretations. Data consists thus of 116 pages made up by the seven L1 curricula (see Table 1). I describe shifts in main L1 elements in these texts over time, and end by summarising key aspects of L1’s curricular ‘disciplinarity’. In part two, I focus on the impact on the seven curricula, over time, from the perspective of theories of language, text, and communication. I end this part with a micro-study of the use of verbs and nouns in competence objectives, so-called bullet

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Table 1  Main text elements in seven national L1 curricula between 1939 and 2020. Translations are mainly based on the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training’s dictionary at www. udir.no/verktøy/ordbok Main L1 curriculum headings from 1939 to 2020 From School Text when years length Main curriculum textual headings 1939 1–7 18 Aim, minimum requirement, guidence, annual work plans. 1974 1–9 20 Aim, subject matter, guiding annual plans, working methods, teaching aids, evaluation. 1987 1–9 19 Aim, subject matter and progression, working methods, main topics and sub-topics. 1997 1–10 20 Introduction with the subject and educational aims, approaches to the study of Norwegian, the structure of the subject. Objectives and main elements with subject-related objectives and main subject elements for the years 1–4, 5–7, and 8–10. 2006 1–13 15 Objective for the subject, main subject areas, teaching hours, basic skills in the subject, competence objectives for the subject, evaluation in the subject. 2013 1–13 14 Objective, main subject areas, teaching hours, competence objectives, assessment. 2020 1-13 10 (1) About the subject: The subject’s relevance and central values, Core elements, Cross-disciplinary topic topics, Basic skills, Competence objectives and assessment, Assessment scheme (Norw. vurderingsordning)

points, in the L1 2020 curriculum, since their relationship seems crucial for the question of the disciplinarity of school subjects in general. In part three, I focus on two Norwegian studies of different knowledge regimes in curricula, and contrast the concepts regime and paradigm. In part four, I reflect on patterns I have found relevant for my research questions: Which forces seem to have influenced disciplinarity in L1 curricula over the years, and what are the consequences for Norwegianness? I conclude by asking what will happen with future L1 disciplinarity, squeezed between an enforced competence orientation in school-subject curricula and a vague, distanced idea of Bildung in the general curriculum.

2.1  N  orwegianness as Imported; or, Nationality as Internationality Norwegianness tends to be perceived as a stable and well-defined phenomenon (Seland 2011). However, just by checking ‘Norway’ in Wikipedia (2019a), readers are left with a picture of Norwegianness rather as a kind of imported otherness: once ‘Norway’ just meant the way north. For thousands of years there was no state Norway, there was no ‘Norwegian’ language, there was no Norwegian school. People arrived from elsewhere. Over 2000  years’ impact from foreign sources

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formed the spoken language. This only slowly went from a version of Indo-­ European, through Germanic, to old Norse, to medieval Norwegian, to different Norwegian dialects. Still there is not a Norwegian spoken language. Written old Norse was, rather, old Islandic. A significant transformation of spoken and written language from 1200 to 1500 was mostly due to Germanic/German and Danish influence. Even as late as the turn of the nineteenth century, the official written language was Danish. Etc. As a contrast, a general impression emerging by a quick surface-reading of Norwegian L1 curricula between 1939 to 2020 is that Norwegianness seems monolithic, with few traces of otherness. A main intention behind this present study, then, is to search under the surface to trace foreign and global impact on the L1 curriculum, as possible cracks in this seemingly monolithic entity.

3  Norwegianness and Internationality L1 in Norway can be seen as one of the State’s most important tools for balancing conservation and development with regard to its language, literature, culture, and history. To consider which elements in L1 curricula are ‘foreign’, though, is a risky enterprise. Whatever they are, they will be characterised as international. While national may concern what is characteristic for a country, such as Norwegianness or Englishness, international tries to catch what is typical for what is between countries or above a country. Internationality may therefore refer to values, trends, forces, and ideologies that are non-national. Ree (1992, p. 9) has made the point that “[…] individual texts can function only within a field of general intertextuality, so individual nations arise only within a field of general internationality; or, in other words, that the logic of internationality precedes the formation of nations” (my added emphasis). Internationality, then, is coined to work as an analytical concept, meaning what concerns any international, global, and over-national phenomena and issues relative to a specific country. Internationality concerns over- or non-national phenomena caused by processes such as Anglification, migration, standardisation, international cooperation, etc. More concretely, this study focuses impact sources, such as theories of language, text, and communication, and also of teaching and learning, as well as international educational policies, formed by agencies such as UNESCO, OECD, EU, and COE. I have left out processes, such as immigration and multiculturalism, Anglification of scientific languages, ‘literacyfication’ of disciplinarity, and digitalisation, as they seem to have less direct impact on these L1 curricula, but also partly due to space. The dilemma of defining nationhood leads to the core of the scope for this chapter. Searching for imported elements in a country’s national curricula faces us with the fuzzy logic of two phenomena, A and B, as partly coinciding and, at the same time, being concepts defined or seen as opposites. Hence, in this study, curricular Norwegianness and internationality are seen as interrelated. In a synchronic

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perspective, they are contrasted phenomena, opposed. In a diachronic perspective, they might share aspects. Both are necessary for defining what is what.

4  On L1: A Note1 L1 is short for a person’s first language. For a state, it is its prime school subject. There are more than 200 sovereign states in the world, some of them federated states. According to Wikipedia, there are in all 440 such states (variously referred to as a state, a province, a canton, a Land, etc.), that is, territorial and constitutional communities forming part of a federation (Wikipedia 2019b). Further, there are nation-states, cultural and linguistic homogeneous countries such as Iceland and Albania, with a strong concurrence between the term for the country, the name for the main spoken (native) language, and the name for the L1 curriculum area. In Norway these are respectively: Norway, Norwegian, and (subject) Norwegian. In a global perspective, such a high degree of homogeneity is the exception rather than the rule. In times of globalisation, internationalisation, and immigration, such national homogeneity is at risk. Few other school-subjects seem more affected than L1s, not the least in Norway. The idea that there should exist a homogeneous, worldwide, definable phenomenon named L1 is problematic. Seen in an ethnocentric perspective, the concurrence of norsk (Eng. Norwegian), denoting a language, a school subject, and the nationality of a person from Norway, may seem ‘natural’. Historically, though, that has not always been the case. Johnsen (no date) found a flora of more than 20 different terms in the nineteenth century for spoken and written versions of the different varieties of the main languages used in Norway. The international L1 research group IMEN tried to describe mother tongue education (L1) as a field: The field deals with the teaching and/or learning within an educational system of the so-called mother tongue, be it a standard language of a nation state that statutorily accepts it as such, the language of education or the language of primary socialisation (a child’s first own and/or home language) (Ongstad 2003, p.  77). L1, or in Norway norsk (Eng. Norwegian), is therefore a skolefag (Eng. a school subject) in primary, secondary, and upper secondary education, or in teacher education, norsk and/or norskdidaktikk (Eng. didactics of Norwegian). At universities, norsk is a universitetsfag (Eng. university discipline) and is often termed nordisk språk og litteratur or nordistikk (Eng. Nordic language and literature, or Scandinavian Studies).

1  See chapters “Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era: The Subject in Focus” and “Understanding the (Post-)National L1 Subjects: Three Problematics” (this volume) for further elaboration.

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4.1  ‘Fag’ Versus ‘Subject’ and ‘Discipline’: On Disciplinarity In Norwegian and Danish, fag (in German, fach) is a body of conceptualised knowledge and/or skills both in schools (Norw. skolefag) and in higher education (Norw. utdanningsfag), as well as a term for branches in business (Norw. yrkesfag). To translate it as discipline may restrict its epistemological implications. Consequently faglig (Eng. disciplinary) is an expected norm for knowledge for all forms of formal education. Faglighet, translated as disciplinarity, includes the disciplinarity of school-subjects. Hence, fag in Norway is a broad concept, since it is associated with concepts such as field, profession, academic disciplines, and school subjects (NFR 2004). Still, a school subject is a relatively precise phenomenon, regulated by law. The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training (Norw. Utdanningsdirektoratet) has responsibility for the disciplinarity of school curricula, while curricula in higher education are surveyed by the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education, (NOKUT). Over time, a body of knowledge splits up, grows, changes, consolidates, amalgamates, dissolves, drifts (NFR 2004; Ongstad 2012b). Establishing, specialising, extending, and merging of subjects and disciplines are basic features of a competitive and competence-oriented society. In the long run, changes may threaten not only subjects and disciplines, but even disciplinarity as such, symptomatically visible in frequent notions such as modules, sub-subjects, disciplinary elements, subject-­groups and in prefixes, such as cross-, inter-, multi-, trans-, de-, anti-, in-, meta- and post- (Osborne 2015).

4.2  Plan Versus Curriculum Scandinavian terms such as normalplan, rammeplan, mønsterplan, læreplan, læseplan, and fagplan have over time been used for the official text genre and the legal documents regulating official schooling. From a Norwegian perspective, curriculum is problematic, but has nevertheless become a norm (Utdanningsdirektoratet 2019b). Curriculum is a far richer concept than plan (Gundem 1998), moreover. In this chapter, curriculum refers, simplified, to officially (curricular) documents issued by the State.

4.3  O  ther ‘Norwegian’ Curricular Concepts and Their Translation into English Some special words used in L1 are hard to translate into English (Utdanningsdirektoratet 2019b). As seen, two of the key concepts used in the title, disciplinarity (for Norw. faglig) and curriculum (for Norw. plan), are problematic. These and other important terms will be explained when necessary. Occasionally I

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deliberately mention Norwegian notions first to highlight that the actual concept may have a touch of Norwegianness, not easy to translate. Translations of terms for the main concepts are mostly my own, but I often stick to translations used by Utdanningsdirektoratet (2019b).

5  N  orway’s National L1 Curricula (for Compulsory Education): Overview The formal structure and the key concepts and content of the curricula are presented in Tables 1 and 2. The curricula have at each time been part of a larger unit or entity – in Norway now called læreplanverk (Eng. National Curriculum) – which is mostly different after each reform. There are normally three textual levels, a law, a general curriculum, and curricula for each school subject. For the 2020 reform, all levels are reformed more or less at once, which even implies the making of a new national object clause (Norw. formålsparagraf) defining the value base from which both the general curriculum and the specific-subject curricula shall depart. I have omitted most of these texts, because they seem to have minor direct influence on the interpretation of the given texts’ disciplinarity.

6  Clarifying Domains and Aspects of L1 Disciplinarities Simplified, L1 disciplinarity can be related to three domains, to teacher education (Norw. lærerfaglighet), to pupils (Norw. elevfaglighet), and to written curricula, respectively. There is not yet a (Norwegian) term for what I have formulated in Table 2  C L1’s main content elements 1939–2020 Subject elements in L1 from 1939 to 2020 1939 Reading, essay writing, grammar, delimiters, grammar terms 1974 Listening and looking, oral use of language, reading, written use of language, language knowledge, sidemål (compulsory second-choice of written Norwegian) 1987 Basic education in reading and writing, oral use of (the) language, literature, written use of (the) language, hand writing, knowledge og language, sidemål, media and electronic data processing 1997 Listening and speaking, reading and writing, knowledge of language and culture 2006 Oral texts, written texts, composite texts, language and culture 2013 Oral communication, written communication, language, literature, and culture 2020 Core elements: Text in context, Critical approach to text, Oral communication, Generating written texts (Norw. tekstskaping), Language as system and possibility, Linguistic diversity. Cross-disciplinary themes: Public health and coping with life, Democracy and citizenship, Sustainable development. Basic skills: Oral skills, Be able to write, Be able to read, Digital skills)

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English as curricular disciplinarity. In a historical perspective, a set of curricular key elements – what I have tagged as ‘doing/s’, describing L1 activities – have been mixed, shifted, focused, left out, and turned around. Sawyer (2007, p. 77) has sampled some activities or doings for English as L1. Based on his overview, which departed from the concept language, I have added “text, communication and literature” at the top in the table. These are the three historical key L1 elements we find in Table 2 above. In addition, I have added ‘doings and activities’ to the left. Tables 1 and 2 contain all these six doings, and in addition there are what I have termed knowings, with regard to language, literature, media, IT, and culture. My careful interpretation of the balancing or shifts of elements of doings and knowings is that, up to 2013, the former seemingly had precedence over the latter. The latter seems in a way added. Also, the elements in the ‘added’ part shift over time. However, with the introduction of the 2020 reform, this pattern is broken. There are now 13 content elements, six under what is called core elements, three under what is called cross-disciplinary themes, and four under what is called basic skills. The last four were introduced with the 2006 reform. The other nine are in a sense ‘new’, and so are the two main categories they are part of.

7  L  1 Curricula and Impact from Theories of Linguistics and Communication Both Nystrand et  al. (1993) and Ongstad (2002) found epistemological systemic connections between the development of paradigmatic linguistic theories on the nature of language and communication during the twentieth century, on the one hand, and on the other hand, writing practices in schools (in the US and Norway, respectively). The inspection of the seven L1 curricula draws on these findings, searching for key concepts or ‘paradigms’ that can throw light over particular major shifts in L1’s curricular disciplinarity.

7.1  1939: Formalism? The general 1939 curriculum (KU 1940) is partly inspired by reform pedagogues, such as Dewey and Kerschensteiner. The L1 curriculum is thus practice-oriented, but has a simple formal and, to some extent, functional view on language and language learning. It stresses explicitly students’ ability to speak, read, retell, and write, mirroring dominating ideologies of linguistic theories developed between the two world wars (Nystrand et al. 1993; Ongstad 2002). Regarding disciplinarity, the curriculum is from a didactic perspective child-oriented. Students are in focus and teachers shall teach. Another striking pattern is its use of adjectives underlining form as value: The goal is to teach children to speak their mother tongue naturally,

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straightforward, and clearly, without major phonetic or grammatical mistakes, to read with distinct pronunciation and fairly correct accent, and to write straightforward, naturally, and fairly correct (KU 1940, p. 48). In short – a national aesthetics. In the 1930s, schools, teacher education, and university studies were under influence of national philologist perceptions of language. Language was taken for granted, as simply Norwegian. Important L1 sub-disciplines in teacher education and at universities were grammar, language history, Old Norse, Norwegian dialects, and Norwegian literature. Students’ language should, as seen, be aesthetically well-­ formed. Form was seemingly more important than content. Such a paradigm can be termed formalism, prioritising structure, correctness, and aesthetics (Nystrand et al. 1993, Ongstad 2002). The 1939 curriculum is not explicitly nationalistic, but at least implicitly ‘national’. The guidance chapter for instance holds that: “The mother tongue is a living expression for a people’s culture. Through introduction to spoken Norwegian and Norwegian literature (Norw. bokheim) the students get to know Norwegian spirit and art and our culture at large” (KU 1940, p. 51). Seen from a didactic (that is, a teaching/learning) perspective, disciplinarity concerns the triad of student, content, and teacher (Gundem 1998). In this L1 curriculum, students and teachers are given an explicit role. Later we shall see that, from 2006 onwards, these two cornerstones are removed.

7.2  1974: Semanticism? Regarding literature and reading, the words fond of (Norw. glad i) is mentioned several times: fond of their mother tongue, fond of reading, fond of literature (KUD 1974, p.  96). Antagonists found this twist somewhat romantic (Moslet 1981). A thought behind the ambition was probably a disciplinary-didactic priority – to learn, based on the learner’s interests, rather than being taught. Regarding language, things are different. It is underlined that it is important to “[…] extend the student’s knowledge of words and vocabulary, […] use oral and written language objectively and correct. One should therefore aim at training students’ ability to logical thinking, enabling them to shape their thoughts clearly and simply” (KUD 1974, p. 109). In the 1950s and 1960s, semanticism silently challenged formalism (Stenning 1989). The commercial world expanded rapidly. Industry and mass media produced and spread new commodities, and hence new words. Quizzes and tests of encyclopedic knowledge were commonplace, within and outside schools. Semantic preciseness, inspired by the Tarski/Carnap tradition, became influential in Norwegian university studies (Næss 1961), and also in teacher education and schools (Svortdal 1964). An ideological basis was rationality, and for many teachers of Norwegian, Svortdal’s book probably worked as a kind of writing methodology. In addition, the semantic ideology silently smuggled in a non-national idea – that thinking, using the child’s own language, is more universal than ‘national’. This tendency was backed up by the introduction of New Criticism in literary studies, focusing on “the meaning of meaning” (Ogden and Richards 1923). In Norway,

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New Criticism opposed a strong historical-biographical, quite national tradition. The first signs in schools appeared in the early 1960s, where upper-secondary students in exams were supposed to analyse poetry (Norw. diktanalyse) (Johnsen 1994). Although poems were by Norwegian poets, a seed to a general, non-national, textual understanding of language was planted. Traditional Norwegian philology was about to lose a double stronghold, regarding preferred theories of language and also of literary studies. The 1960s and early 1970s could be seen as a time of modern enlightenment, searching for encyclopedic knowledge – to know much was important. Rhetorically, to be educated was to be knowledgeable. Danning (Eng. Bildung) was symptomatically exchanged with allmenndanning (Eng. General education). Hence, pedagogical views on writing in this period were less oriented toward aesthetics and more toward epistemology and essentialism – in short, content (Johnsen 1994; Ongstad 2002). Academic disciplines, such as pedagogy and psychology, took a significant cognitive turn, inspired by the work of Piaget, and linguistics (grammar) became more semantically oriented (Nerlich and Clarke 2000). Focus should be on preciseness of meaning, explicitness, logic, understanding, knowledge, logic of sentences, content in writing and literature; in other words, the paradigmatic perspective was essentialist (Sawyer and van de Ven 2007). In terms of disciplinarity, the students now seem less important than their language, and formalities less important than meaning. In spite of phrases about being ‘fond’ of literature, the development tends to move towards analysis and understanding, rather than experience and involvement. In my own investigation of M74, published in 1981, I found that L1 goals were directed towards liberal education (Norw. allmenndanning) and study skills (Norw. studieteknikk) (Ongstad 1981, p. 34). These patterns point toward a curricular L1 as a set of tools, rather than as an independent school-subject in its own right.

7.3  1987: Functionalism – From Language to Communication The most extensive L1 project in the 1960s and 1970s, Norwegian in non-­segregated classes (NISK), developed new material, texts and approaches for secondary schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s. More than 30,000 pupils participated (FR 1976). Research recommendations came too late to affect M74. Yet, it eventually contributed to a broader, more open L1, as project ideas influenced teachers, consultants and, not the least, the 1987 curriculum, M87 (Madssen 1999). New features were a stronger child- and text-orientation and new media. Most significantly, the L1 curriculum in M87 took a long step from language towards communication by prioritising a functional perspective. The very first words are: “Language is a means to orient oneself in the world, to take contact with others, and for personal development” (KUD 1987, p. 129). Further down, it says: “Norwegian is a communicational school subject, an aesthetic subject, and a central subject for carrying culture and traditions” (KUD 1987, p. 129). A key topic is knowledge of

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language, underlining that “[…] development of language has a functional purpose” (KUD 1987, p. 131). In addition to more traditional topics, such as oral use of language, grammar, and language history, we now find Text, Language situations and Media and data language (KUD 1987, pp. 142–143). Besides, genres (and not only literary ones) are given a central place. In general, Norwegian and language no longer seem to be adequate terms for L1 and its content. ‘Norwegianness’ had become secondary, and language becomes an aspect subordinated to communication. Functionalism is a perspective that considers, as the prime aspects of language and communication, action, use, function, doing, and process. Philosophically and linguistically, the concept has several sources, such as American pragmatism and ideas in Europe stemming from scholars such as Wittgenstein, Austin, Searle, Habermas, and Halliday. Functional approaches in linguistics and education tend to downsize semantics and form (Ongstad 2002). The functional orientation arrived early to Norwegian schools and curricula. Teachers and textbook writers picked up ideas from books like Language in Use (Doughty 1971) and Sproget i funktion (Eng. ‘Language in function’) (Schiødt 1970). Funksjonsanalyse (Eng. ‘functional analysis’) was commonplace in upper-secondary education in the mid 1970s, and partly at the secondary level. Scandinavian studies had only just started to discover pragmatics. Functionalism was of course crucial for many new perceptions of language, but even the literary L1 field was hit by the pragmatic wave, both in the sense that much literature turned political and that even literary texts now were seen as speech acts. Norwegianness was threatened, but not many seemed aware of this challenge, at least at this stage. As with philology elsewhere, disciplinarity associated with national values gave in gradually for the non-national, the general, the universal (Scholes 1998), or in my term, internationality. While ‘Norwegianness’ more easily could be pointed out in form and content, use, and thus pragmatics, opened for ‘over-national’, generalised perspectives on language. Simplified, one could say that this development implied a weaker national philology and a stronger general pragmatism. Implicitly, this increased L1’s potential to become a kind of meta-discipline, a theoretical means for other subjects, especially if language aspects became skills in other school subjects, as happened with the introduction of the 2006 reform. Traditional disciplinarity was on the move (Ongstad 2006, 2007).

7.4  1997 (L97): Interaction and Communication Paradigmatic changes of curricular L1 did not end in 1987. M87’s list of key topics in L1 is the longest of all Norwegian L1 curricula. The dramatic extension of L1’s content led to search for wholeness in the L97 reform. The extended text-concept seemed promising as common ground for language, literature, and new media. However, from a literary perspective, communicational aspects now got the upper hand, both regarding volume and curricular importance. Gudmund Hernes, minister

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of education responsible for the 1997-reform, argued for the restoration of fading national values (Trippestad 2009; Koritzinsky 2000). In an international perspective, the general 1997 Curriculum is quite unique, and in several ways. It was published as a hardback (in Norwegian in 1996 and in English in 1999), in a picture-book format (KUF 1996; TRMERCA 1999), and given an extraordinary aesthetic finish, with glossy paper, richly illustrated with photos of famous paintings. The overall curriculum for L97, written already in 1993, was actually valid till June 2020 (KUF 1993). All political parties signed off on it, and for more than 25 years it has survived a long row of governments of different political colours, three major educational reforms, and 11 ministers. Even the L1 curriculum is special. Two features concern disciplinarity, in particular. The introduction (The subject and educational aims) describes the disciplinary nature of L1  in six parts, each defining a crucial disciplinary aspect of ‘Norwegian’ (TRMERCA 1999, p. 111). The two first are termed identity and experience, which I interpret as focusing on the learning person, a self. The third and fourth are Bildung (“becoming educated”) and culture, focusing on the outside world, while the last two, skills and communication, are implicitly focused on relations to other (Ongstad 2004). It was probably not realised that this triadic pattern partly resonated with two European classical traditions. One was the conceptualisation of lifeworld as interplay between person, world, and society, developed by German scholars (Habermas 1988; Luckmann 2009). The other was a striking compatibility with a tradition more than a century long of classical education in the nineteenth century as striving for beauty, truth, and goodness (Hertzberg 1898). The L1 introduction thus resembles Bildung in a classical sense. This disciplinary consciousness did not survive, though. The 2006 curriculum changed the order, cut out aims, and dropped much of the text substantiating the choice of these six particular disciplinary aspects. A second, more radical feature was the aim: [...] to make pupils conscious participants in their own learning processes, provide them with insight into their own linguistic development, and enable them to use language as an instrument for increasing their insight and knowledge (RMERCA 1999, p. 126). This aim represented a didactisation, and perhaps even an auto-didactisation, of L1 knowledge, since it aimed at transferring more responsibility for learning to students, by which L1 achieved an explicit meta-epistemological purpose (Ongstad 1999). Even this passage disappeared from L1 with the next curriculum. Its ambition nevertheless hinted at a coming paradigmatic shift, the strong position that basic skills achieved in all school subjects in the 2006 Curriculum. What role is literature given in L97? We meet ‘literature’ as a term connected to ‘experience’. The word in the Norwegian version is ‘opplevelse’ (not ‘erfaring’), although they both translate as ‘experience’. While erfaring in Norwegian is more related to the exterior, opplevelse relates more to the inner. A critical interpretation here could be that the disciplinary role for literature is to create inner experience, and that this motivation for literature seems somewhat similar to an ambition that I noted in the 1974 Curriculum, i.e. to become “fond of literature”.

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Table 3  Wayne Sawyer’s overview over systemic relationships between three modes of language and positions as receivers and senders of forms of language (Sawyer 2007, p. 77. Additions by SO) L1 elements and curricular disciplinarity L1 hisorical key elements: Language, text, communication, and literature as Written Spoken Visual Doings and Responding Reading Listening Viewing activities composing writing speaking representing

Besides, returning to Tables 1, 2, and 3, we find that the main elements now are “listening and speaking, reading and writing, and knowledge of language and culture”. It is mainly under “reading” that we may find ‘literature’. Compared to, for instance, the 1939 Curriculum, ‘literature’ has lost a curricular stronghold, since the very term has disappeared as a key concept in terms of disciplinary elements. It seems clear that the extended text-concept is the cuckoo in the nest, diminishing literature’s traditionally central disciplinary position.

8  K  unnskapsløftet (LK06): From Disciplinarity to Disciplinarities The general curriculum, LK06, called Kunnskapsløftet (Eng. ‘Knowledge Promotion’), covered for the first time primary, lower, and upper secondary education (Years 1–13, ages 6–19) (UF 2006). This meant that the main school subjects could, or should, be organised with a 13-year perspective, whereby cohesion across levels became disciplinarily important. To specify each year, as in L97, was now considered too detailed. Aims were therefore given for five stages, after Year 2, 4, 7, 10 and 13. Competence (Weinert 2001) was designated the key curricular concept for all school subjects. Utdanningsdirektoratet describes competence as being able to acquire and apply knowledge and skills to cope with challenges and solve tasks in known and unknown contexts and situations. Competence involves understanding and ability for reflection and critical thinking (Utdanningsdirektoratet 2019d). The lists for the specific five control-years were packed with almost 200 aims, making the L1 2006 curriculum more aim-dominated than any other L1 curriculum in Norwegian curriculum history (Utdanningsdirektoratet 2006). At first glance, the aims’ structure seems similar to structures in former curricula. However, they are now more ‘trimmed’ semantically, so as to be more easily testable. I will return to this important development, in discussing the ‘bullet-point’ design. The text that described L1 as a subject in L97 was now subtracted, shortened, concentrated, reduced, and rearranged: Norwegian is a central subject for cultural understanding, communication, Bildung and development of identity (UF 2006, p.  37). Experience and skills are out. Students’ experience is less visible. Skills, however, were lifted to a general level, above but also for all school subjects. In a radical innovation, five skills were introduced that all school subjects had to

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integrate and take responsibility for: being able to express oneself orally and in writing, to read, to do mathematics (calculate), and to use digital tools. This meant that three traditional ‘L1’ topics – orality, writing, and reading – in a sense were exported to all other school subjects. By the same token, L1 had to incorporate calculating and digital skills. L1 in 2006 consisted of four content areas, which in Table 2 are called elements: oral texts, written texts, composite texts, and finally language and culture. Semiotics, although never used as a term, therefore challenged language, as students were expected to work with and analyse composite texts (Norw. sammensatte tekster). Form, content, function, and communication had, respectively, been disciplinary or paradigmatic stages in the four L1 curricula from 1939 and 1997, mirroring disciplinary developments in language and communication theories in the same period. The 2006 Curriculum tried to bridge gaps between language and literature indirectly, by making ‘text’ explicitly the overarching concept. Text linguistics had improved its position since 1997, and seemed to be a curricular winner. Still, the use of terms such as oral texts and composite texts indicated that relationships between language and communication were still unclear. Regarding the question of disciplinarity, the development had so far led to increased complexity. Several simplifying elements were now installed. Text was given an overall position, each bullet-point became slimmer, and content elements were organised less hierarchically. Further, focus was on content and outcome, not students or teachers. The curricular L1 disciplinarity in the 2006 reform therefore in a sense gave the upper hand to basisfaget (Eng. the basic discipline[s] taught at universities), disregarding the didactic dimension. It should be said that this priority was not the situation in schools, teacher education, and research, where norskdidaktikk had become increasingly important. Although text-theory was imported, some changes could be related to domestic processes and Norwegian scholarship. The outcome-orientation and bullet-point design were nevertheless international, not to say global, phenomena (Ongstad 2015).

9  2013: Back to Communication The 2006 introduction describing L1 was kept when changes were made in 2013 (Utdanningsdirektoratet 2013). L1 was thus still a central subject for cultural understanding, communication, Bildung, and development of identity. As shown in Table 2, L1 now consisted of three main elements: Oral communication, Written communication, and Language, literature, and culture. Text was no longer adequate as the over-arching key concept. Communication again became the covering umbrella, under which language and literature were mentioned separately. The two key elements from 1939 could therefore now be seen as reduced parts. The changes in the 2013 Curriculum were called a revision. Still, it implied a clear shift in disciplinarity. As mentioned, the absent concept here is semiotics. Social semiotics had been successful in introducing communicational thinking in

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L1 in Norway. L1 is now an amalgamation of communication, language, literature, and culture. The epistemological nature of this blurring seems only partly conceptualised and understood by gatekeepers of the curricula. Semiotics is probably also in a sense alien, since it threatens the hegemony of the written word. Semiotics is in principle sign-based, but no theories of sign has yet been taken up and generally spread in the L1 community. It also opens Pandora’s Box, inviting in the huge world of new media, whereby (‘old’) literature’ and even ‘language’ could risk losing positions.

10  Curriculum 2020 The overall Curriculum has several new patterns (Utdanningsdirektoratet 2019a). Here I mention just one, which has a direct impact on L1’s disciplinarity. In Table 2 three new cross-curricular themes are outlined, which all school subjects must integrate and take responsibility for: Public health and life mastery, Sustainable development, and Democracy and citizenship. Four of the five basic skills from Kunnskapsløftet (UF 2006) are kept, as to calculate is left out for language subjects. This means that, in principle, seven (three plus four elements) are to be integrated in L1. What we see here is a new emphasis on ‘cross-disciplinarity’, since core elements in some subjects are implanted in another school subject. L1 itself has six elements, now termed subject core-elements: Text in context, Critical approach to text, Oral communication, To generate written texts, Language as system and potential, and Linguistic diversity (Utdanningsdirektoratet 2019c). Although communication is still used, text is the dominating overarching concept. Text in context marks a possible new level of theoretical consciousness, with the adjective critical signalling distance and awareness. The verb generate and the noun potentially mirror a will to move from just knowing to doing (applying). The term diversity provokes a monolingual perception and opens for contrastive learning, and it can work as a stepping-stone toward multiculturalism within L1. Norwegian literature has now a much weaker position, since the text concept allows for many text-types other than literary ones. Further, Om faget (Eng. about the subject) is now a main headline for several elements. The first of these is The subject’s relevance (Norw. fagets relevans). In this very short text of just five lines, the consistent use of norskfaget from 2013 has gone. The notion is used just once and is worth quoting: “The subject Norwegian prepares students for a modern work-life that requires varied competence in reading, writing and oral communication” (Utdanningsdirektoratet 2019c, p. 1). As it stands, this seems to be the main function that L1 is supposed to have. It is reduced to competence for something, as promoted by OECD and EU, and as proposed by the Norwegian government and accepted by the Parliament. In 2012, I problematised L1’s and other school subjects’ knowledge borders (Ongstad 2012c). I noted that the overload of topics in L1 had been a constant discussion the last 40–50  years. The subject had for a long time been criticised for

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having unclear borders. Eventually, in the 2020 Curriculum the problem was tackled, by introducing a core. Border and core are of course intimately connected. By using core, and defining it as certain key elements, one indirectly might allow borders to remain fluffy. What will matter in the future is what will be tested, and that is likely to be the core, as realised in the fixed, reduced set of bullet-points. The turn to core and work-life can be contrasted with the idea of Bildung (Aase 2005). Above the general curriculum, we find the level of law. As part of the 2020 reform, a new national object clause (Norw. formålsparagraf) was developed. Since it contained more than 30 ideals, it was necessary to make a more restricted set of values that could guide the development of both a general curriculum and subject curricula. These are: Human dignity, Identity and cultural diversity, Critical thinking and ethical awareness, Creator joy, dedication and explorer-urge, Respect for nature and environmental awareness, and Democracy and participation. In a sense, these values could be seen as ideals for Bildung. It is hard to find solid anchorage for these in L1’s core, though. The introduction in the L1 curriculum seemingly hints at some ideals. Yet, generally these do not seem sufficiently backed up in the bullet-point sections. I return to this design in the next section. Skills, competence, and knowledge about are highlighted, and hence winners. Bildung is backgrounded, and hence a loser.

11  80 Years of Changing Disciplinarities 11.1  Growing Awareness of L1 as a Disciplinary Phenomenon The 1939 Curriculum did not mention L1’s function as a fag, while L1 in the M74 did not really address the issue either. (KUD 1974: 96). In M87, L1 has become aware of its role as a school subject, with its own disciplinarity. The first section has no headline. Yet, it consciously outlines what kind of fag Norwegian is. It is for communication, aesthetics, and culture and traditions. Moreover, it is both an instrumental subject and an attitudinal subject. This characterisation anticipates the well-­ structured set of six disciplinary elements described in L97. In L97, the descriptions have got the following headline, under Introduction. In the Norwegian edition, the headline is “The subject’s place in school”. In the official English version, the headline is “The subject and educational aims”. In 2006 the corresponding headline is changed to Formål med faget (Eng. purpose for the subject), which in 2013 again is reduced to just Purpose (Utdanningsdirektoratet 2006 and 2013), by which its dependency, its role as a means is underlined. The 2013 curriculum uses the notion norskfaget (Eng. The Norwegian-subject) consistently and repeatedly. It is no doubt that we here meet a self-conscious disciplinarity. In 2020 the concept is gone again. I think these shifts rather stem from unawareness.

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11.2  Bullet-Point Design: Disciplinarity as Verb Versus Noun Already in the 1990s, Norwegian schools were “managed by objectives”. Curricula had been pinpointed and specified by use of bullet-points. Ever since, there existed silent tensions between knowings and doings, and accordingly between verbs for skills and nouns for content. In the new millennium, this bullet-point regime has been sharpened. Valverde (2002) criticised national curricula  – among them, Norwegian ones – for not being focused enough: Focused curricula are the motor of a dynamic definition of curricular objectives. In most of the highest achieving countries, each new grade sees a new set of curricular goals receiving concentrated attention to prepare for and build toward mastering more challenging goals yet to come (Valverde 2002, no page).

OECD, with help from EU, successfully imposed the focused curricula ideology in many Western countries, including Norway (OECD 2005; EQF 2005; Arbeidsgruppen 2007; EU 2008; Sjöstedt 2013; Ongstad 2014a). Shorter curricular texts are supposed to be ‘clearer’. Objectives should be one-liners, ideally each with just one verb and one or two nouns, for the sake of simplification and clarity. Simplification and so-called precise concepts, describing outcomes, are in turn thought to increase and enhance measurability (Ongstad 2014b). OECD and the State, through the Ministry of Education (Norw. Kunnskapsdepartementet) and Utdanningsdirektoratet, thus standardised the semantic nature of the applied verbs (Sivesind 2013; Ongstad 2014a): The verbs were thought to be general and context-­ free, and hence universal. Nouns or content are left to the different professional fields and representatives in curriculum committees. These one-liners are, in consequence, hidden speech acts. They establish a regime for assessment of student disciplinarity (Norw. elevfaglighet). The structure of each point is dominated by the verb-noun connection. The verbs shall have performative character. They shall be doings. The nouns will of course be disciplinary content sub-elements or knowings. Together they form competences. Within the set of competences or bullet-point lists, there lurks a potential tug of war between different forms or aspects of disciplinarities. To be concrete: what follows is a rough semantic grouping of all terms used to describe expected L1 competences after Year 10 in the Curriculum for 2020 (Utdanningsdirektoratet 2019c): Curricular, competence verbs: Read, reflect, compare, interpret, explore, discuss, recognise, use, mark, show, consider, express, inform, tell, argue, write, master, experiment, make, justify. Directly language-related nouns: Nonfiction, translation, content, genre patterns, means (linguistic), texts (other), appeals (rhetorical), citations, texts (own), media (digital), language, communication, language (for specific purposes), themes (disciplinary and cross-­ disciplinary, texts, orthography, inflection, meta-language, sentence-structure, text-structure, recrafting (own and other students’ texts), genres, texts (composite), forms of expression, status (for Norwegian languages), variation (linguistic), diversity.

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Other nouns: Context (historical), time (contemporary), life situation (the young’s), sources, discussions, conversations, presentations (oral), experiences, ways (creative), conversation (on writing), background (historical). Languages in Norway/kinds of Norwegian (nouns): Hovedmål, sidemål, bokmål, nynorsk, Sami, languages (other), orality [as discipline or skill across school subjects], ‘written’ [as discipline or skill across school subjects]. Nouns related to literature: Literature (belles-lettres), novels, interpretations.

Competences have here been ‘de-textualized’ and split into two parts of speech, verbs (what to do) and nouns (what to know). The above sampled vocabulary makes up the total curricular content of what learners of Norwegian (L1) are expected to demonstrate after 10 years of compulsory schooling. From a disciplinary perspective, it seems clear that linguistic elements dominate content-wise. Language is described more in structural than in functional terms. Knowledge of text, genre, and rhetoric are seen as important. The performative verbs take students’ increased maturity into consideration (compared to other stages) but follow rather a strict (expected) taxonomy. This L1 curriculum therefore comprises a possible dilemma for assessing disciplinarity: If doings (verbs) are seen as most important, then L1 is function- and competence-oriented. If knowings (nouns) are seen as most important, then it is content- and L1-oriented (Ongstad 2014a). Further, since verbs are less subject-­ specific and nouns more, to stress function and process will make L1 more of a means. To stress disciplinary content will make L1 knowledge more a goal in itself, an end. When learning outcome is what counts, the floor is open for a possible tug of war between curricular verbs and specific L1 nouns. The challenge, both when making a curriculum, and put it into life in classrooms, is to balance the weight of the verbs and nouns over 13 years, based on the dilemma whether L1 is a skyscraper or a chained house (Bernstein 1990; Ongstad 2004). Nouns can simply be added, but verbs are, over the years of schooling, supposed to reach epistemologically deeper or higher. It is about disciplinary maturation. And what are students growing, maturing toward? The short official, empowered answer is competence, but the right answer should be the national object clause (Norw. formålsparagraf). Norway no longer strives toward former national object clause related to beauty, truth and goodness, or to gagns menneske (Eng. a ‘beneficial’ [for self and others] human being), but towards the mentioned six values  – in other words, growth toward Bildung. Competence has bypassed Bildung, which is parked outside the core. Bildung, as a curricular ambition, will have to find a place in the non-prioritised land between the core and L1’s borders.

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12  I nternational and National Influence on Curricular Knowledge Regimes 12.1  O  n Knowledge Regimes in Norwegian Educational Politics To try to catch overarching patterns in a field of knowledge, different concepts such as disciplinarity, epistemology, knowledge regime, and paradigm have been coined. Slagstad (2018) defines a knowledge regime (Norw. kunnskapsregime) as an ideology or a school of thought (Norw. tankeretning) that defines power, authority, values, and knowledge in a particular way. Aasen (2007) holds that one can trace four different regimes that have had influence over the nation’s education policy: social democratic (SD), societal criticism (SC), cultural conservative (CC), and market liberal (ML). The degree of influence for each particular regime may vary between countries and from time to time. Although all these have been in play during the periods I have covered, I need for the sake of space to concentrate on the last two, since they have been particularly influential on the new curricular design I have problematised more in detail above. In brief, Aasen (2007, p. 29) claims that SD was dominant between World War I and II, when the comprehensive school was founded, pushed by the Norwegian Labour Party. Values were collectiveness, solidarity, and equal rights. The 1939 plan for L1 was in use during the heydays of this regime. The SD-regime was influential till the 1970s, when it was challenged by a SC bringing to the fore new buzzwords, such as ecology, conflict, consciousness, reflection, well-being, the local community, and self-development (Aasen 2007, pp. 32–35). The general 1987 Curriculum was marked by SCs critique as it opened for less detailed plans and central governing and wanted students to be more active and to participate. Relating the SC regime to L1, the 1974 L1 curriculum was criticised heavily from the new ‘left’ (Moslet 1981). Critics were in turn influential in the making of the new L1-curriculum in 1987, in which the individual learner became more visible. The third orientation that influenced Norwegian educational politics was CC, prioritising high achievement, common content, national culture, collective consciousness, and “the national heritage” (Aasen 2007:35–7). These goals resulted in more weight on detailed curricula and quality content. CC believed that common content could strengthen national community, and criticised student-oriented activity pedagogy. Teachers should have factual knowledge and one should refute epistemological relativism. CC wanted local autonomy, decentralisation combined with central goals, and control through thorough national evaluation. A shift from teachers’ input to students’ final output was seen as crucial. CC had influence on L97, although ironically it was implemented by a social democratic government. In L97’s L1, cultural heritage and nationalism got a short Indian summer. The fourth regime (ML) focused, according to Aasen (2007, pp. 37–39), on the individual’s choice as well as society’s competitiveness. Schools should help strengthening economic growth. Its discourse was characterised by concepts such as

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market, customer, user, incentive, learning outcome, and production. ML was partly influential on L97, but it was with Kunnskapsløftet (2006) that this policy had its major breakthrough. Aasen argues that aspects of the three latter regimes, SC, CC, and ML, can be found in KL 06, but that the ML dominates. Students’ participation (SC) and competence-based goals (CC) are important. However, ML has, by turning the curricular vocabulary, strengthened central control over the final outcome, by which ML has given the key premises and frames for L1’s curricular disciplinarity.

12.2  School Policies and Regimes in Light of State Ideologies Aasen published his article in 2007. It is not clear how he would have characterised the policies that influenced education in the following years. Slagstad, who has applied Aasen’s regime concept, combines Aasen’s four regimes with what he claims are historical types of schools or educational ideologies, based on three key characteristics of the Norwegian State over the last 150 years, namely the school-­ state, the welfare-state, and the competitive state (Slagstad 2018). Here I will just focus on the competitive state (Norw. konkurransestaten). Slagstad sees Minister Hernes’ role during most of the 1990s as underestimated. He sees the social democrat Hernes as an ambiguous, transitional character, installing a post-social-­ democratic regime with increasingly more visible neo-liberal patterns, whereby three patterns came to surface: nation building, knowledge as competence, and management by objectives. Regarding L1 in the L97 Curriculum, these three patterns fit well with traits I have pointed to earlier. Even more important, the L1 text is said to be written by Hernes personally.

12.3  Political Regimes Versus Disciplinary Paradigms? According to Slagstad (2018, p.  9), the Directorate for Education and Skills in OECD and its director, Andreas Schleicher, have been extremely influential. Slagstad even sees the Norwegian Directorate of Education (Norw. Utdanningsdirektoratet) more or less as a Norwegian OECD filial. National directorates work downward in a system. An inherent premise in the concept knowledge regime, described above, is a top-down perspective. With Bourdieu (1989), one could say that a regime will be imposed by power on hierarchical educational systems. A paradigm is in a sense a more ‘neutral’ concept, mainly describing what at a certain time is epistemologically dominant in a field of knowledge. Van de Ven defines paradigm as “[…] a basis set of beliefs that guides action, whether of the everyday garden variety or action taken in connection with a disciplined inquiry” (van de Ven 2007, p. 236). Van de Ven further holds that MTE paradigms (in my terms, L1 paradigms) have their own basic beliefs concerning language and

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literature, linguistics and literature studies, education, teaching, and learning. A L1 paradigm is hence a set of “[…] principles of language learning, concepts of standards language learning, principles and concepts which of course also cover the domain of literature teaching (van de Ven 2007, p. 11)”. He outlines four historical MTE paradigms: the literary-grammatical (dominant before World War I), the developmental (strong up to 1960s), the communicative (influencing the 1970s), and the utilitarian (from the 1980s onwards). Paradigm (as Ven uses it) and regime (as Aasen and Slagstad apply it) overlap as conceptual categories, but only partly. Mainly Ven’s concept of paradigm is seen as a working ideology within L1 (MTE), while Aasen’s knowledge regime could be perceived more as an overall, strategic policy aiming at direct impact on education and reforms at large. However, they might meet, sometimes coincide, sometimes clash. The new 2020 Curriculum could hence be seen as an encounter of top-down and bottom-up forces. In the case of van de Ven’s utilitarian paradigm, it could be said to coincide with Aasen’s neo-liberal knowledge regime (Slagstad 2018). A new paradigm is not necessarily a direct result of a particular regime. A regime may not be able to persuade local agents and curricular committees. A regime may have to battle with an established disciplinary paradigm. An illustrating example occurred in 2015. Two reports from the so-called Ludvigsen committee, NOU (2014, p. 7) and NOU (201, p. 8) make up the main basis for the 2020 reform. The committee’s mandate was mainly to renew the school disciplines (Norw. fagfornyelsen). As part of the committee’s strategy, it proposed a radical re-grouping of school subjects. When the committee placed Norwegian (L1) in the cluster ‘languages’, it met strong disciplinary opposition (Nergård and Penne 2016). It was as if the L1 teachers and scholars eventually discovered their own paradigm, when its epistemological base was politically challenged (Fodstad 2015, p. 1): In the worst case, the group-thinking can destroy a subject Norwegian that is finally beginning to take the shape of a literacy and competence subject in the broad sense. Ironically, such a development runs counter to the overall thoughts of the Ludvigsen Committee, which indicates that one simply has not fully understood Norwegian as a subject.

13  Disciplinarities Summarised 13.1  D  isciplinarities as L1 Disciplinarity – or ‘Norwegian’ as Forever Amalgamated? L1 disciplinarity should be seen as disciplinarities. There are several crucial delineating lines, originally (in 1739) between reading and writing (Madssen 1999), in academia for more than hundred years between language and literature (Bull 1991), and in the seven inspected curricula between elements of knowing and activities of doings (skills and competences). There are others, less visible, but important

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divisions in curricula, such as between composing/producing and responding/reproducing (Sawyer 2007), and between Nordic studies (at universities) and norskdidaktikk (in teacher education) (Ongstad 2004). The line I have researched is of course between Norwegianness and internationality, or in a more general perspective, between nationalism and internationalism. I have tried to put most of these differentiations into Table 4, further down. The one that is least visible in these curricula is a divide between knowledge of basic disciplines such as language, literature, culture, and media, on the one hand, and educational, pedagogical, and didactic knowledge and skills as implemented in L1 bachelor and master studies in teacher education, on the other hand. In Norwegian terms, this is ‘norsk’ versus ‘norskdidaktikk’ as the name for L1 teacher students’ study. Didactisation of L1 has been a significant, major disciplinary transition over the last 40 years (Ongstad 2012a, 2017). To claim that a curriculum should be more faglig (Eng. disciplinary) is hence highly ambiguous. While what one could call explicit didactic awareness was traceable in bits in different curricula up till 1997, as indicated, the introduction of ‘The Knowledge Promotion’ in 2006 wiped out disciplinary didactics, simply by removing the student and the teacher as terms in the text. Hence, processes of learning and teaching were banned. Disciplinary didactics has traditional links to Bildung, not the least in L1 (Aase 2005). Being left out in the curriculum process and in the text, Bildung has therefore become secondary and even a non-issue. The strive for so-called curricular clarity and focus on outcome as competence were probably rooted in a deep political distrust. Bildung was hardly measurable, too far-fetched, and too difficult to control politically. The freedom of the past gave teachers the upper hand over the curriculum (Goodlad et  al. 1979). Now teachers have control over means and Table 4  Main knowledge elements (knowing/s) used in L1 curricula between 1939 and 2019 and their ditto main skills (doing/s) seen as expected progress and growth toward competence, literacy or Bildung in the light of elements of Norwegiannness as opposed to internationality found in seven Norwegian L1 curricula. Note that the columns in lower part of the table deliberately are moved somewhat to the right to prevent indentity-categories to be confused with the modalities written, spoken and visual. The lower part is nevertheless still seen as expected stages (marked by the length of the arrow.) Note also that the table builds on Sawyer (2007). See Table 3

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methods when forming students, but this freedom is reduced to the shaping of their competences. Bildung as aim is for teachers who dare to search off the beaten track. Hence, in this study, several disciplinary tensions and divisions of curricular L1 are brought to the surface. They can be formulated as dilemmas and questions, to which there can be answers or new questions: –– Language versus literature? (Attempted bridge both by communication and ‘text’.) –– Writing versus reading? (Attempted bridge by ‘text’.) –– Language versus communication? (Extending L1 toward semiotics without using the term.) –– Language as system versus language in use? (Adding functionalism.) –– Text as system versus text in context? (Combining text linguistics with sociolinguistics.) –– Knowledge versus application for teachers? (Applying means communication and didactics.) –– Knowings versus doings for pupils? (Tension is removed by shifting focus to competence.) –– Core versus rest? (Will core sharpen L1’s disciplinarity or enhance L1-teachers’ leeway?) –– L1 versus cross-disciplinary topics? (Will topics be added or integrated or rejected?) –– L1 versus literacy? (Should literacy be integrated in L1 or be kept separate?) –– Literacy and competence versus Bildung? (Are the three compatible?)

13.2  Norwegianness Versus Internationality? A main conclusion is that, over the years, Norwegianness and internationality have been in a tacit tug of war within most parts of the inspected curricula. Several external forces have increased international influence. Classical philology and the element literature have lost a solid foothold. The cuckoo eggs in the L1 nest as alternative to the concept ‘language’ are text, communication, and new media. Further, a powerful international curricular knowledge regime has been able to convince new Norwegian governments and ministers of education that management-­ by-­objectives and competence-based curricula are the best medicine for the future. The new design has polarised L1. I started out with the headline Curricular L1 Disciplinarities between Norwegianness and Internationality. The inspection has given enough credit to the following conclusion: disciplinarities in L1 curricula have moved from Norwegianness to internationality. However, under the surface of this rather simple claim, there are nuances. After all, much historical Norwegianness appear to be a former import, and thus international. Awareness of this ambiguous and blurred disciplinary history tends to vanish, however. Confronted with new reforms,

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teachers of Norwegian will probably consider the L1 they are used to as homely, and hence ‘Norwegian’. With the reduction of space for literature and philologically based knowledge of Norwegian, a new national consciousness has come to surface (Gaare 2019). Such dissatisfaction runs together with a more general scepticism toward imported, imposed curricular design.

14  Summarising – Overview and Final Comments Departing from Table 4, one could conclude that shifting disciplinarity connected to knowing of L1 main elements started from language. I pointed out three paradigms: formalism, semanticism, and functionalism. I further argued that this development led both to a shift to communication and later to text, and back again. The stage by 2020 seems to be text in context. The other main elements, literature, media and culture, have been secondary, and defined in and out of the curriculum as key elements seemingly randomly. Regarding literature, two traits should be mentioned: firstly, that this element seemingly has suffered most by the drift away from the philology paradigm; secondly, only twice has literature over 80 years been mentioned as a main element of knowing. (I stress, however, that I have studied curricula for compulsory and not upper-secondary education, where the situation might be different.) Moving down from knowing to doing, one should keep in mind that the first two of the six activities and skills, reading and writing, were the core elements in 1739 that later fused into ‘Norwegian’. Both were the backbones ever after. Over time, reading and writing have been rather even in importance, while the other four, listening, speaking, viewing, and representing, have been highlighted more recently, probably due to increased importance of other media and to new weight on oral rhetoric (to learn to present). It is likely that the long-lasting focus on reading has kept literature in the game, after all. I have followed a rather over-simplified logic by moving from learning/knowing to doing/applying, as if these were different phenomena and opposed categories, which of course they are not. Nevertheless, this has been the order that the Ministry forced upon all levels of formal learning in all subjects in Norway. This divide is still the rule for all curricula in higher education. All syllabi have to be spelled out in kunnskaper (Eng. knowledge/s) and ferdigheter (Eng. skills), which in turn should make up generell kompetanse (Eng. general competence). Astonishingly, this differentiation between knowledge and skills has silently disappeared in school curricula. The significance of competence has been strengthened, though. The reason why I have focused critically on verbs versus nouns, above, is of course that the three sets of concepts  – knowledge/skills, knowing/doing, and verbs/nouns  – are closely related. In other words, the strong opposition is still there, as well as its disciplinary implications and consequences. Commenting normatively, the verb for competence should be to have. Internationally, literacy has followed competence and skills as a shadow over the

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last 20 years. Policies from OECD, UN, COE, and EU have deliberately blurred them, leading to the general impression that what one is talking about at the end of the day are by and large skills. However, can you have literacy? In Table 4 I have used the verb to achieve. As can be seen, I have arranged a set of verbs from knowing, via doing, having, achieving, down to becoming. Following that logic, I end with the question of identity, which in turn leads back to one of my research questions – the tensions between Norwegianness and internationality. What I have found, as indicated, is a loss of Norwegianness and an increase of internationality. Whether or not, or to what degree, these tendencies effect L1 students’ identity in the long run is not an issue for this chapter. However, Odd Gaare has recently written a short, critical article in Norsklæreren (a Norwegian-teachers’ membership journal), where he argues roughly as follows. Ibsen’s Peer Gynt ‘deconstructs’ himself as an onion, just to find that there is no core. A new established L1 curriculum core may end up in the same situation: Common for all the international frameworks The Knowledge Promotion builds on, is that they are chemically cleansed for affiliation to a people, a nation, or a chosen cultural context. In return they are glued to the global and the economical-technological worldview from Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Paris (OECD) and Brussel (Gaare 2019, p. 67, SO’s translation).

Gaare connects what he sees as a conscious removal of national culture with the intention of making students to individualistic cosmopolitans who can master a globalised world. My findings, i.e. increased imbalances, support his premise. My last point, however, is to bring in the question of students’ identity as a final stage for L1 disciplinarity. It is beyond doubt that the new value set for Norwegian education explicitly dwells with identity. Making formation of identity a main goal for L1 puts its traditional disciplinarity in a squeeze. The slogans for the 2020 reform were increased disciplinarity and prioritising work-life. The ideals behind making a set of new values were, in my view, rather a step toward Bildung, and less directed to specific disciplinarities and economy-technical future goals. Ironically, neither nationalism nor internationalism are among mentioned key values. Besides, L1’s core curriculum for the last year in the compulsory school, Year 10, has put more weight on the school subject as such, and less on its relation to life and identity. There are, as far as I can see, no arguments given for how the 2020 curriculum’s L1 core is supposed to danne (Eng. form) students toward the set of given values. Table 4 therefore ends symbolically with a question mark.

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Ongstad, S. (2002). Positioning early Norwegian research on writing. Written Communication, 19(3), 345–381. Ongstad, S. (2003). Standard language education in transition. In J.  Bourne & E.  Reid (Eds.), World Yearbook of Education 2003 (Language education). London: Kogan Page. Ongstad, S. (2004). Språk, kommunikasjon og didaktikk [Language, communication and didactics]. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Ongstad, S. (2006). Fag i endring: Om didaktisering av kunnskap [Subjects in transformation: On the di-dactization of knowledge]. In S. Ongstad (Ed.), Fag og didaktikk i lærerutdanning [Disciplines and didactics in teacher education]. (pp. 19–60). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Ongstad, S. (2007). The concepts of ‘language’ and ‘discipline’ in transgression. In W. Martyniuk (Ed.), Towards a common European framework of reference for language(s) of school education? (pp. 117–130). Krakow: Universitas. Ongstad, S. (2012a). Morsmålsdidaktikk som fag og forskningsfelt i overnasjonalt perspektiv [Mother tongue didactics as subject and research field in a supranational perspective]. In S. Ongstad (Ed.), Nordisk morsmålsdidaktikk. Forskning, felt og fag [Nordic mother tongue didactics. Research, field, and subject] (pp. 21–46). Oslo: Novus. Ongstad, S. (2012b). Før en sammenligner. Metaforer som amorf, sentripetal og sentrifugal for dynamikk i fag og fagdidaktisk forskning [Before comparing. Metaphors as amorphous, centripetal and centrifugal for dynamics in subjects and subject didactic research]. In S. Ongstad (Ed.), Nordisk morsmålsdidaktikk. Forskning, felt og fag [Nordic mother tongue didactics. Research, field, and subject]. (pp. 311–329). Oslo: Novus. Ongstad, S. (2012c). Fra kunnskap, via kontekst, kjerne og komparasjon til kommunikasjon. En fagdidaktisk utviklingslinje? Nordidactica-Journal Of Humanities And Social Science Education, 2012:1, 1–25. Ongstad, S. (2014a). Om faglighet og språklighet i Nasjonalt kvalifikasjonsrammeverk [On disciplinarity and discursivity in NQR]. In B. Kleve, S. Penne, & H. Skaar (Eds.), Literacy og didaktikk i skole og lærerutdanning [Literacy and didactics in school and teacher education] (pp 174–196). Oslo: Novus. Ongstad, S. (2014b). Driften i literacy-begrepet  – en utfordring for lærerutdanningers fagdidaktikk? [A drifting literacy-concept – A challenge for disciplinary didactics in teacher education?]. In B. Kleve, S. Penne, & H. Skaar (Eds.), Literacy og didaktikk i skole og lærerutdanning [Literacy and didactics in school and teacher education]. (pp 197–225). Oslo: Novus. Ongstad, S. (2015). Competing disciplinarities in curricular L1: A Norwegian case. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 15, 1–28. Ongstad, S. (2017). Pedagogisk + fagdidaktisk forskning = utdanningsforskning? [Pedagogical + disciplinary didactic research = educational research?]. Norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift, 101(01), 68–79. Osborne, P. (2015). Problematizing disciplinarity, transdisciplinary problematics. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(5–6), 3–35. Pinar, W. F. (2007). Intellectual advancement through disciplinarity: Verticality and horizontality in curriculum studies. Rotterdam: Sense. Ree, J. (1992). Internationality. Radical Philosophy, 60 (Spring). https://www.radicalphilosophy. com/article/internationality Sawyer, W. (2007). English as mother tongue in Australia. L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 7(1), 17–90. Sawyer, W., & van de Ven, P. H. (2006). Starting points: Paradigms in mother tongue education. L1 Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 7(1), 5–20. Schiødt, H.  J. (1970). Sproget i funktion. [Language in function.] (Vol. 46). Copenhagen: Berlingske forlag. Scholes, R. E. (1998). The rise and fall of English: Reconstructing English as a discipline. New Haven: Yale University Press. Seland, I. (2011). Tilhørighet, rettighet, likhet. Nasjonal identitet og integrasjon i velferdsstaten gjennom grunnskolen 1970–2008. [Belonging, right, equity. National identity and integration

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in the welfare state through primary and secondary education 1970–2008.] PhD-thesis in sociology University of Oslo. Short, E. C. (1990). Challenging the trivialization of curriculum. In J. T. Sears & D. J. Marshall (Eds.), Teaching and thinking about the curriculum. Critical inquiries (pp.  197–210). New York/London: Teacher College Press. Sivesind, K. (2013). Mixed images and merging semantics in European curricula. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 45(1), 52–66. Sjöstedt, B. (2013). Ämneskonstruktioner i ekonomismens tid [Constructions of school subject in the time of economism]. Malmö: Malmö högskola, Fakulteten för lärande och samhälle. Phd.-thesis. Slagstad, R. (2018). Når OECD tar makten. [When OECD grabs the power.] Bedre skole. https:// www.utdanningsntt.no/bedre-skole. Visited 01.11.2019. Stenning, K. (1989). Methodical semanticism considered as a history of progress in cognitive science. In B. Hirst (Ed.), The making of cognitive science: Essays in honor of George A. Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Svortdal, K. (1964). Stilskriving og logikk [Stil-writing and logic]. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Thavenius, J. (1981). Modersmål och fadersarv. Svenskämnets traditioner i historien och i nuet [Mother tongue and patrimony. Traditions of the subject Swedish historically and in presence]. Stockholm: Symposion. Trippestad, T. A. (2009). Kommandohumanismen. En kritisk analyse av Gudmund Hernes’ retorikk, sosiale ingeniørkunst og utdanningspolitikk [Command-humanism. A critical analysis of Gudmund Hernes’ rhetoric, social engineering and education politics]. PhD. thesis at Bergen University. TRMERCA. (1999). The curriculum for the 10-year compulsory school in Norway. Oslo: The Royal Ministry of Education, Research and Church Affairs. odin.dep.no/odinarkiv/norsk/dep/ nedlagt/kuf/1999/eng/014005-990128/dok-bn.html. UF. (2006). Kunnskapsløftet [The knowledge promotion]. Oslo: Utdannings- og forskningsdepartementet. Utdanningsdirektoratet. (2006). Læreplanverket for Kunnskapsløftet. Midlertidig utgave [Curriculum framework for The knowledge promotion. Temporary edition]. Oslo: Utdanningsdirektoratet. Utdanningsdirektoratet. (2013). Reviderte læreplaner. Læreplan i norsk [Revised curricula. Curriculum for Norwegian]. Oslo: Utdanningsdirektoratet. https://www.udir.no/kl06/NOR1-05 Utdanningsdirektoratet. (2019a). Læreplanverket – overordnet del. Oslo: Utdanningsdirektoratet. [The curriculum  – The overall part.] https://www.udir.no/laring-og-trivsel/lareplanverket/ overordnet-del/ Utdanningsdirektoratet. (2019b). Fagfornyelsen [The renewing of school subjects]. Oslo: The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training https://www.udir.no/laring-og-trivsel/ lareplanverket/fagfornyelsen/ Utdanningsdirektoratet. (2019c). Nye læreplaner [New curricula]. https://www.udir.no/ laring-og-trivsel/lareplanverket/fagfornyelsen/hva-skjer-nar-i-fornyelsen-av-fagene/ Utdanningsdirektoratet (2019d) Kompetanse [Competence]. https://www.udir.no/laringog-trivsel/lareplanverket/overordnet-del/prinsipper-for-laring-utvikling-og-danning/ kompetanse-i-fagene/ Valverde, G. A. (2002). International curriculum – Authority and function, curriculum and globalization, curriculum and learning. http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/1897/CurriculumInternational.html Van de Ven, P.  H. (2005). Stabilities and changes in (mother tongue) education. In S.  Kiefer & K.  Salamaa (Eds.), European identities in mother tongue education (pp.  74–94). Linz: Universitätsverlag Rudolf Trauner. Van de Ven, P. H. (2007). Understanding mother tongue education from a historical (−comparative) perspective. In W. Herrlitz, S. Ongstad, & P. H. van de Ven (Eds.), Research on mother

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tongue education in a comparative international perspective: Theoretical and methodological issues (Vol. 20). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Weinert, F.  E. (2001). Concept of competence: A conceptual clarification. In D.  Rychen & L. H. Salganik (Eds.), Defining and selecting key competencies (pp. 45–65). Hogrefe & Huber: Seattle/Göttingen. Wikipedia. (2019a). Norway. Visited 31.10.2019. Wikipedia. (2019b). Federated state. Visited 10.03.2019. Yates, L., Davies, L. M., Buzacott, L., Doecke, B., Mead, P., & Sawyer, W. (2019). School English, literature and the knowledge-base question. The Curriculum Journal, 30(1), 51–68. Sigmund Ongstad  is Professor Emeritus at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway, where previously he was a teacher educator and professor in educational sciences. He is a former leader of International Association of Research in Mother Tongue Education (MTE), International MTE Network (IMEN) and Nordic Network for Research (NNFM), a former board-member of Writing Across Borders (WRAB), and a member of Council of Europe’s project Language and/in Education. His current research foci are L1, disciplinary didactics, and biosemiotics. He is widely published in L1 education. Email: [email protected].

Part II

Teaching the L1 Subjects

L1 Education and the Place of Literature Irene Pieper

Abstract  This chapter focusses on the specific challenges connected to literature education within the subject L1. In order to clarify the position and shape of literature education today, it refers to the distinctive paradigms which have been discussed in curriculum research since the late twentieth century. The paradigms are reconsidered both diachronically and synchronically, drawing on the most elaborated model of paradigms currently available (Witte and Samihaian, L1-Educ Stud Lang Literat 13:1–22, 2013). Particular attention is paid to frictions on the level of aims and orientations which are related to developments in society and education as well as in academic discourse. It is argued that orientations and aims which stress the learners’ interests and focus on their personal development may be at odds with aims related to disciplinary knowledge of the subject. The tensions traced are then followed up via reference to two recent empirical studies from the author’s own context. Here the role of professionals is particularly focused on. The chapter concludes with some reflections on current challenges in the literature classroom. Keywords  Literature education · Curriculum · Paradigms · Disciplinary knowledge · Practices

1  Introduction Despite considerable changes within L1 education particularly over the last twenty years, literature remains a central part of what used to be called mother-tongue education. The chapter first sketches specifics of literature education in the curriculum and points to high expectations connected to literature and the development of self – despite the fact that, nowadays, the formal curriculum is often structured along domains of competences. To further develop the present shape of literature as a subject or discipline, I will then present the model of four paradigms of teaching literature that has been developed in international research over the last twenty I. Pieper (*) Institute of German and Dutch Languages and Literatures, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Green, P.-O. Erixon (eds.), Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era, Educational Linguistics 48, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7_6

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years. This model is presented along a diachronic view of the evolution of literature education in its current conceptual shape. The reconstructed paradigmatic shifts are linked to shifts in perceptions of literature – to some degree, represented in literary theory – shifts in perceptions of the student as a person and his/her learning, and shifts regarding expectations towards institutional education in society. I then reconsider the descriptive frame and ask how the potentially polyparadigmatic structure of the enacted curriculum can be traced. Therefore, I will change perspectives and try to trace ways in which teachers approach literature as subject, focussing on tensions between a strong will on the part of teachers to support reading experiences related to the paradigm of personal growth and aims that are closer to disciplinary knowledge. To elaborate on these frictions, I refer to two recent empirical studies from my own context that focus on potential challenges of literature education today. Both are situated in German-speaking environments, but studies in curriculum and curriculum inquiry give evidence that traces found here may not be exclusive for this particular environment (see below, paragraph 2). In a final section I reflect on current challenges.

2  Aesthetics in the L1 Classroom When reconsidering the subject L1 and its current shape, the role and place of literature certainly deserves particular attention. Traditionally, literature has had a strong place within the subject, especially in secondary education from the late nineteenth century onwards. Next to language or grammar, it has had a core position in many systems long before notions of literacy entered L1 education (Sawyer and van de Ven 2007), and for a long time it has even been at the centre of mother-tongue education, particularly in the higher grades of formal education in countries like Germany, France, Britain, Spain or Switzerland.1 In a way, literature might nowadays be considered as a particularly stimulating, even provocative part of the L1 curriculum. Certainly, literature education is no longer linked to the exclusive education of a cultural élite in the so-called Western World – as in much of the late nineteenth century in Europe (e.g. Dufays 2007). Rather, it has been part of general curriculum developments that have brought about a strong focus on learners and their entitlement to knowledge-building and acquisition of competences in a broad sense. Still, one can certainly argue that 1  My focus in this chapter is on literature as part of the subject L1, since it is more common to place literature within this subject than to have a separate place in the curriculum (as in the Netherlands, in Singapore or the Ukraine). Despite its place within the subject L1 – in my case, in the Schulfach Deutsch – literature can be considered a subject in itself, since it has developed disciplinary traits such as genres and distinctive aims or methods related to treating literary texts and media. Thus, textbooks for literature could be designed and paradigms of literature education be distinguished (see Sect. 2). The term ‘subject’ in this chapter mainly refers to literature in this sense (and does not indicate that literature is treated as a distinctive subject on the level of the formal curriculum or in the timetable).

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literature has a specific place within L1. There are strong links to the communicative skills of speaking and listening, writing and reading, since encounters with literature usually rely on such capacities to a large extent: after all, a text needs to be read, an essay needs to be written, an interpretive argument developed. There are also strong links to the language curriculum, e. g. to the notion of language awareness, that can well be applied to reflections on literature, to linguistic knowledge that helps describe what is going on in a text and may lead reception or to a broad notion of language and meaning. After all, texts are based on language. However, there is a certain resistance connected to the literary that brings about frictions between the aims of literature education and formal schooling. These frictions may be even more apparent in recent years where outcome expectations in the disciplines are often stressed, e.g. via national and international assessments like PIRLS and PISA. What is often considered to be at the heart of literature education nowadays is much at odds with concerns about a defined learning content and its assessment: namely, to provide students with the experience that literature can be meaningful to them, may enhance their views of themselves and others, and of societal, cultural and political issues, and enrich their conceptions of the world – not the least by providing readers with a world of its own.2 Such experiences are based on active encounters of the individual with the work of art. Thus, it may be held that literature education should enable students to be participants in literature as a field of practices that contributes to the development of the individual, its socialisation and enculturation (Abraham and Kepser 2016, p. 26; Pieper 2015). Such participation involves an engagement of the individual with the work of art that is shaped by imagination, emotional response and evaluative processes, an engagement that does not come about automatically, moreover, but needs to be supported in education (Zabka 2016). One could argue that aiming at such a form of engagement is asking a lot of subject L1, in particular, and of formal schooling in general, since it reaches out towards personal development in a strong sense. And yet it can be considered a great capital of school systems that they assign a place to aesthetics, as they do for literature and music, drama and the visual arts. It is noticeable that the language policy unit of the Council of Europe insisted rather strongly on the contribution of literature to any L1-curriculum that strives for plurilingual and intercultural education, thus stressing the potential of literature education to support personal development in a participative and socially as well as culturally conscious frame, which also contributes to the corresponding orientation of and for subject L1 (Beacco and Coste 2017; Pieper 2011; https://www.coe.int/en/web/platform-plurilingual-intercultural-language-education/home). 2  Despite the fact that the tension between narrow literacy approaches and broad notions of literary learning are particularly prominent today – given the prominence of the international surveys – it should be noted that the argument that literature education is at odds with aspects of formal schooling was already present much before recent developments in measurement-policies, e.g. in The Teaching of English in England (the Newbolt Report, 1921), as Brenton Doecke (2019) has pointed out.

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Such a view on literature education is strongly value-driven. In privileging personal development as a core aim, the classic notion of literature contributing to the education of self is resonating – just that this notion of Bildung nowadays is neither reserved to an élite of students in higher education nor linked solely to a body of canonical texts. Rather, it is shaped by insights into literary reception that stress the involvement of the individual in constructing meaning; in other words, established notions of what goes on in the literary reading process and what makes such processes both fruitful and rewarding fit concepts of personal development rather well, particularly if a notion of acquisition and learning is integrated. However, it is to be expected that in actual teaching and learning situations and practices, as well as on the level of teachers’ attitudes and objectives, a certain multitude or even diversity of aims becomes apparent, pointing to tensions in the subject literature and in the specifics of the institutional context of learning. Also, with regard to the larger frame of education and disciplines, what has just been claimed as the core of literature education may be challenged: Aren’t these notions rather naive, given poststructuralist and deconstructive perspectives on text, literature and education? Shouldn’t these make us aware of discursive contexts and power-relations that challenge not only the idea of text and meaningfulness but also the idea of the person as subject (‘Subjekt’ in German), its education and its autonomy altogether? Both the notion of the content ‘literature’ and that of the learner are central when looking at the development of literature education.

3  Paradigm Shifts in the Literature Curriculum International curriculum research in the L1 field and literature education has frequently pointed to paradigm shifts in the curriculum, reconstructed in retrospect. Besides, different approaches were distinguished on a synchronic level. Diachronic shifts and synchronic distinctions show strong parallels. This feeds the observation of Schneuwly, Thévenaz-Christen and others that the actual curriculum can somehow be described as a “sedimentation of practices” (Schneuwly et al. 2017, p. 3). In a comparative study of formal curricula in Europe, carried out on the initiative of the Language Policy Division of the Council of Europe (Aase et al. 2007), a common focus was confirmed: The learner is much at the centre of current curricular design. The anchor-position not only fits today’s general perceptions of learning and teaching, but also insights into literary reading that stress the fundamental involvement of the person, as mentioned above. The most recent systematisation of the curricular aspects of literature education in an international perspective has been offered by Witte and Sâmihăian (2013), who take up the work of various other researchers in the field (Table 1; see Witte and Sâmihăian 2013, p. 6). The studies integrated in the model are based on a broad notion of curriculum, and on international comparison: mainly works that consider discourse in teacher education in different countries, textbooks, interview studies,

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Table 1  Curricular aspects of four paradigms of teaching literature (Witte and Sâmihăian 2013) Paradigms Aspects Aim of literature teaching Content

Cultural Linguistic Cultural literacy Aesthetic awareness

Social Personal growth Social awareness Personal development

Ethical, social, political issues, reader response, student perceptions Approach to Literary context Formal aspects of Non-literary texts context, reader texts (biography, responses epochs) Text selection National canon Acknowledged Topics relevant criteria aesthetic values for age group Class Listening to Whole-class Whole-class management lecture discussion, writing discussion, peer discussion Teacher role Expert, Expert, modelling Discussion transmitter literary analysis leader Knowledge of Evaluation Reproduction of Skills in literary knowledge analysis social context of literature, formulating response Literary history, literary movements, (other arts)

Content-oriented

Literary theory, style, text structure and meaning (other arts)

Personal experience, student perceptions, reader responses (other arts) Reader responses

Student preferences and interests Peer discussion

Guide, facilitator, stimulator Formulating response, evaluate literary texts and express their judgements, literary competence development

Student-oriented

formal curricula. The authors briefly contextualise the different paradigms in the history of literature education, which helps understanding of the shape of the subject from a diachronic perspective. Besides, the model allows shifts within the curriculum over the school years to be addressed. Four paradigms are distinguished along the aspects of aims, content, approach to texts, text selection criteria, class management, teacher role and evaluation; two are considered content-oriented – the cultural and the linguistic paradigms – and two are considered student-oriented – the social and the personal growth paradigms. Taking into account further studies on literature education, the development of the literature curriculum as it is presented in the model can be described as follows: 1. The cultural paradigm goes back to the tradition of the Latin School and was particularly prominent in the late nineteenth century, when literature as a subject domain in L1 first found its place in the schools of Europe and the Western world. The notion of canon is strong, as are concepts like literary history, epochs and (author’s) biography. Choice of text is indicative for what is highly valued in

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the field of literature, with the frame being national literature.3 This paradigm is closest to a traditional orientation towards the education of a cultural élite. 2. The linguistic paradigm developed after World War II and is strongly influenced by New Criticism and Structuralism. The approach to literature stresses formal aspects and shows a scientific approach to the field of understanding literature, stressing exact procedures. Literature is still chosen according to acknowledged aesthetic values. 3 . The social paradigm is linked to the socio-political movements of the late 1960s and shaped curricula from the 1970s on. During this period, sociological approaches to literature became strong and relations between literature or text and readers in different places of society became reflected in the L1 curriculum. The notion of aesthetic value since then may be subject to debate. Further, reception theory starts to influence literature education, and reader response from now on shapes approaches to texts. It is particularly this strand of literary theory that has had considerable impact on literature education since then (Kammler 2019; Schneuwly et al. 2017). Student-orientation from now on also means that literature education – as with all education – is to reach out to students from various backgrounds and should no longer be conceived of as something exceptional for what used to be called the upper class. Similarly, higher education opens up to larger groups of society, a process that is generally characterised as the expansion of education, and which is still going on. It is only now that the notion of literature is no longer restricted to the national canon and highly valued texts. Youth literature can now gain ground in the literature classroom. The role that literature may have in the socialisation of younger readers becomes a criterion for text selection. Also, non-literary texts are considered, reflecting a stronger orientation towards reading practices outside school. 4 . The personal growth paradigm has been particularly prominent since the late twentieth century. Now the reader is focussed upon as an experiencing learner and the notion of personal development becomes more explicit than before. It should be added that, at this stage, insights from cognitive psychology gain considerable influence in the L1 curriculum, leading to new nuances in the perception of learners as readers and writers (Sieber 2003). In this broader frame, the focus shifts from products of learning to processes of learning, particularly with regard to reading and writing. This also means that considerable attention is given to the reading curriculum, and to a broader notion of reading comprehension that encompasses reading literature.4

3  A specific case of the notion of canon is alluded to in Brass and Green (this volume) – as that chapter shows, English literature (from various origins) has an important place in the formation of subject English in the USA and Australia. 4  See the traditions of interdisciplinary handbooks on reading-and-writing research, e.g. Handbook of Reading Research (Pearson et  al. [eds]), published in four volumes by Erlbaum, beginning in 2002.

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The brief sketch shows how a shift from content-orientation to student-­orientation is linked to a shift in the understanding of literature. Content-orientation is related to the canon and to highly valued texts representing aesthetic quality. Student-­ orientation brings about a liberalisation of the notion of text. Students’ interests now become key and a more extensive body of text and media can enter the classroom: children’s and youth literature, pragmatic texts, films and other multi-modal texts. Anchoring the curriculum with the position of the learner and the diversity of the learners of course also indicates a different view of students. Their learning is focused upon, particularly in the personal growth paradigm, while they appear as object of teaching in the content-oriented paradigms (see the key words in the table on the teacher’s role as expert, transmitter, model). This indicates a strong change in the perception of learning, too: The cultural literacy view assumed education via literature – Bildung – in quite a different way than how education via literature is perceived in the student-oriented paradigms. However, the assumption that literature contributes to forming the self has always been present and research in the history of literature education has frequently shown traces of this, some being stronger than others (for the German context: Abraham 1996; Reh 2017). Thus, the distinctions between the four dominant orientations as presented in Table 1 are certainly rather sharp. Witte and Sâmihăian rightly stress that the paradigms do not exclude each other, and that they nowadays coexist. In a developmental perspective, the authors argue that such a coexistence should be shaped by cumulation across school years. On the level of aims, this means starting with personal growth and social awareness with younger students, and moving on to aesthetic awareness and cultural literacy with older students (Witte and Sâmihăian 2013, p.  8). They worry about a potentially strong presence of the linguistic-­ awareness-­paradigm. This fits the generally critical stance towards textual analysis in the discourse on literature education that is often perceived of as apart from understanding and experiencing the literary text (Zabka 2012). However, Witte and Sâmihăian refer to an analysis of the formal curricula of six European countries and to a study on the professional knowledge of teachers of these same countries. This confirms that a developmental approach as outlined in the article would fit the formal curricula rather well (Witte and Sâmihăian 2013). Following this line of thought, the literary framework LIFT-2 was established by a group of experts from the same European countries, relying on the professional knowledge of experienced teachers. The framework is to assist teachers in designing the development of literary competences of their students in secondary education (http://www.literaryframework.eu; Witte and Sâmihăian 2013; Pieper and Sâmihăian 2016). LiFT-2 distinguishes four to six levels of literary development. It also illustrates what is not obvious in Table 1: Approaches to aesthetic awareness and cultural literacy are integrated in a didactical design that is still focusing on students’ learning.5 In other words, the distinction of content- and student-­orientation 5  See the explications in “how to lift” and the descriptions of the students that characterise the levels of literary development  – see: http://www.literaryframework.eu/Matrix/show/lower.html and http://www.literaryframework.eu/Matrix/show/upper.html for lower and upper secondary.

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does not point to a strict gap. Rather, the learning process and the notion of progress is anchored in the way that readers, listeners, performers, spectators construct meaning from cultural artefacts. Thus, the view on content is ideally shaped by the perspective of learning. The two central orientations  – towards content and toward learning – are intertwined. All in all, paradigm shifts are indicative for major cultural developments where changes in the perception of literature and learning merge. Of course, this includes a change of the respective cultural and educational norms. Most obviously these concern a far broader notion of literature in both textual and multimodal forms, moving beyond the traditional notion of canon. Formal curricula now frequently hint at culture as not being homogeneous, and at literature as a source that can help in approaching cultural diversity. Besides, students are seen as learners whose (again diverse) motivations, experiences and abilities are to be taken into account.

4  P  otential Tensions in the Literature Classroom: Teachers’ Perspectives The model of paradigms as discussed above has an ideal shape: The four different orientations do not exclude each other but exist in parallel, although present to different degrees, and all are related to current perceptions of learners and learning. The developmental line according to Witte and Sâmihăian also indicates a program: In order to ensure literary development for students in secondary education, it is to be expected that a focus on personal growth is central with younger learners, while a focus on textual aspects and cultural literacy is more apt with older students. Disciplinary aims regarding approaches to literary texts thus should be stronger, the older the students, particularly from late lower secondary on. This program fits the pedagogical content knowledge of teachers and the formal curriculum. However, one may wonder how teachers balance the different orientations, and how a coexistence of the paradigms is demonstrated in teachers’ perceptions and their actual teaching. In two recent empirical studies, we traced current challenges in the lower secondary literature classroom from the perspective of teachers. According to these studies, the learner is much at the centre of teachers’ thinking. It appears to be particularly demanding for teachers to focus on the students and their interests and, at the same time, follow aims that are closer to the disciplinary practices of the literature classroom, e.g. established routines of textual analysis or of establishing a knowledge-base around genre, stylistics and rhetorics, literary movements, etc.

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5  T  eachers’ Priorities and Aims According to the TAMoLi-Study In a survey we carried out in our study TAMoLi,6 we asked teachers about their priorities within the different traditional parts of the L1 curriculum for Grade 8 or 9, thus covering not just literature education but what used to be mother-tongue. The answers clearly show that reading and dealing with literary texts are a strong priority, together with writing and text production (almost on the same level, but slightly stronger than reading in Germany; vice versa in Switzerland), followed by speaking and presenting (3), grammar (4), orthography (5), listening and oral comprehension (6). The L1 curriculum at this stage of lower secondary thus should have – from teachers’ perspective – a strong focus on the written language, both in text reception and text production (Bertschi-Kaufmann et al. 2018, 138–139). Given the growing importance of reading literacy as an educational aim in German-speaking countries since PISA 2000,7 we also asked the teachers whether they would rather aim at reading comprehension (1), at providing students with an access to literature (2) or at both reading comprehension and access to literature (3). Option (3) here is most prominent. For 65 classrooms this is clearly the priority, for 45 classrooms it is reading comprehension, and only for 12 it is access to literature. Thus, for more than half the teachers in our study it can be expected that they aim at providing room for both the more general reading education and for literature education. We also distinguished between different forms of secondary schooling.8 It is noticeable that reading comprehension is particularly strong with classrooms of the most basic track (80% in Switzerland, 52% in Germany, Bertschi-Kaufmann et al.

6  The acronym refers to “Texts, activities and motivations in literature education in lower secondary education”. TAMoLi was carried out in Switzerland and the German federal state Lower Saxony between 2016 and 2019, lead by Andrea Bertschi-Kaufmann and Katrin Böhme (the Swiss study) and Irene Pieper (the German study), mainly assisted by Simone Depner, Dominik Fässler, Nora Kernen and Steffen Siebenhüner, see: www.literaturunterricht-tamoli.de or www.literaturunterricht.ch also for information on the larger team. The study was funded by the Swiss National Fund and by Nidersächsisches Vorab, a program by the ministry of research and culture in Lower Saxony. TAMoLi consists of a survey carried out in 64 classrooms in Switzerland and 62 classrooms in Lower Saxony with their 116 teachers and 2173 students (grade 8 and 9). All central forms of secondary schooling are included. TAMoLi also asked for the literary texts that were planned or read in a school year and carried out a video- and interviewstudy with selected classes (9 and 12 classes with one lesson at the centre). In a mixed-methods design we combine quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection and analysis. See Bertschi-Kaufmann et al. 2018; Böhme et al. 2018; Fässler et al. 2019. 7  The same can be observed in many other countries; see Erixon and Löfgren (this volume) for Sweden. 8  Generally, both Switzerland and Germany have three tracks in secondary education, the highest level leading to university (“Gymnasium“or “progymnasialer Typ“). In Germany, a fourth type is the so-called integrated comprehensive school, where students with various abilites are learning together.

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2018, 140–141). Here, in German-speaking countries the focus is often more on literacies than on content matter related to culture and aesthetics, and which is particularly prominent with the higher academic track, the ‘Gymnasium’ (for Germany, see Klieme 2008). This is particularly noticeable, since the formal curriculum in both German-speaking Switzerland and Germany gives literature a prominent place, although stronger with the higher academic track. Besides this, we asked teachers to what extent they follow particular aims rather than others in their teaching of German. We designed the respective items to fit the four leading orientations according to the paradigms presented in paragraph 1, and also asked about aims in reading comprehension.9 The results show that agreement for supporting reading comprehension is strongest (3.39 on a four-point-Likert scale).10 Agreement for personal growth (3.29) is also very strong, and social awareness is not much weaker (3.13). The strongest agreement is on the item that the respective teacher would like to foster pleasure in reading (3.56). What struck us as remarkable is that aims in the content-related paradigms of cultural literacy and linguistic awareness do not receive high support, with linguistic awareness being slightly stronger than cultural literacy, and only just reaching agreement (2.66 vs. 2.3), with the strongest agreement on the item “getting to know stylistic means” (2.73) and the item “have aesthetic experiences with texts” also being above 2.5 (2.67). One might conclude that textual analysis (with particular attention to stylistic means) is considered as an important part of the curriculum, but that teachers’ enthusiasm is not with these aims for Grade 8 and 9. For the cultural literacy paradigm, only the item “take part in cultural life” (one out of four) receives agreement in mean (2.53). Thus, the teachers of these Grade 8 and 9 classrooms apparently have a clear preference for aims centred on students, while the aims that are particularly close to the classroom’s disciplinary routines in working with literature are backgrounded. Even items that refer to students’ experiences and to cultural participation (rather than a technical approach to literary texts and literary knowledge) do not get strong support. It seems that teachers do not conceive of such issues as being related to experiences of pleasure in reading, but rather as a quite different matter. The preference for aims related to personal growth and social awareness also shows in what teachers consider as relevant criteria for text-selection. Here, students’ interests are most important (together with the teacher’s own enthusiasm about a text). The books chosen cover themes related to social and political issues and to themes relevant for the age group, which also fits the focus on social awareness (Bertschi-Kaufmann et al. 2018, 142–143; Siebenhüner et al. 2019, 56). It is noticeable that the scope of texts covers a considerable variety, with a lot of recent texts (including translations) hinting at shifts from the traditional canon to a de-­ facto canon (Fleming 2007), and moreover to individual practices of text choice.

9  See Böhme et al. 2018, 14, figure 4. The design of the instrument and the scales are discussed in Pieper/Böhme/Bertschi-Kaufmann, 2020/submitted. The scales consist of three to five items. 10  The four-point-Likert-scale implies that a value of 2.5 or higher indicates agreement.

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The interviews we did with the teachers who took part in the video-study so far seem to fit the focus on personal development and students’ interest that we found in the questionnaire. This focus may be at odds with curricular demands, as the two quotes below illustrate. A young female teacher in Grade 9 of the German higher academic track (‘Gymnasium’) is reflecting on her choice of text and method. At the time of the interview, the class discussed the recent novel 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher, well known to the students because of a popular film series. Before reading the novel, they had worked on Friedrich Schiller’s canonical play Wilhelm Tell: I think it is important that students read plays like Wilhelm Tell because, well, because we do not only, well of course we have the classic humanist educational mandate, that’s where we come from as a gymnasium and this is what we have to teach the children, but of course we are not utopian that we think, yes, this is, eh, the children all only want to read Faust… (classroom 49, 42)

The teacher accepts the canonical orientation of the high school curriculum, as part of the educational tradition. However, she marks a clear discrepancy between the respective texts and potential students’ interests, assuming that reading Goethe’s Faust or Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell as what student would want to do is “utopian“. Thus, it is external obligations to read the canon and as such accepted, but in the perception of the teacher, literature education clearly should meet what is in the scope of the students and their potential motivations. Here, the teacher neither insists on established aesthetic values of the text chosen. Nor on it being German literature, but reads a translation. In the interview this is not worth mentioning, which may illustrate the liberalisation of the concept of literature in education. Rather, the theme of suicide and the popularity of the series are important for her choice. and she sees a lot of potential for discussions with students.11 Another teacher, a very experienced male colleague, criticises curricular demands of upper secondary education, which are traditionally closer to disciplinary routines linked to the cultural literacy or linguistic awareness approaches: In general I would criticise the formal curriculum particularly for upper secondary. I think a piece of literature needs to be experienced in its educational potential (“bildende Funktion“ in German) … and, well, given the time restrictions, only the introduction is read, just a few pages, and one cannot appreciate and perceive of the work as a whole; literature is like a quarry, it is really abused and this disturbs me a lot, but as I said this is because of the structural demands particularly in upper secondary that I disapprove of. (classroom 40, 84)

Both teachers put a lot of effort into designing conversations on literature where students’ perceptions are prominent. And both teachers apparently manage to create room for prioritising what they find central in their current situation.12  For a comparable approach, see the case of the Dutch teacher Ramon in the international reflections presented in Literary Praxis: A Conversational Inquiry into the Teaching of Literature (Van de Ven et al. 2011). 12  The analysis of the lessons and the interviews (N = 21) is in progress, carried out by Nora Kernen, Simone Depner and the team. The references in brackets refer to our system of assigning a number to each classroom and teacher and the number of the turn in the digital file of the transcript. All quotations are presented in my translation. 11

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These insights into teachers’ perceptions, though still illustrative, may confirm the focus on students as learners who should have opportunities for experiences with literature that they may appreciate. Through another analysis within TAMoLi, the relation between teachers’ and students’ perspectives was followed up and evidence was gained that students’ perceptions of the teachers’ intentions is crucial (Fässler et al. 2019).

6  T  eachers’ Priorities and Beliefs According to the LiMet-Study In another study, we focussed on literary learning with regard to poetic metaphor, and assessed both teachers’ perspectives and learners’ processes of understanding.13 A central interest of the so called LiMet-study was to find out how teachers would conceptualise poetic metaphor, given that it is a demanding feature that has some prominence in literature education, and may require a focus on literary structures in the view of learning. We carried out problem-centred expert-interviews with 16 teachers from lower secondary, Grade 6 and 9, and did a think-aloud-study with 69 students from their classrooms, dealing with three metaphorical poems that have some prominence in German literature classrooms of the respective grades. The same poems were presented to the teachers, who were asked to decide which of these poems would be most fruitful for their students, and how they would model a teaching session on the particular text. For the purpose of this chapter, the interview-­ study seems particularly enlightening: The theme of the study brought about a focus on literary structures. However, teachers were looking at poetic metaphor in a student-­oriented frame since they were reflecting on whether and how to teach the respective texts to their students. Thus, they took a didactic perspective. Through qualitative analysis of 13 of these interviews following the documentary method, Lessing-Sattari reconstructed teachers’ beliefs and constellations of these beliefs (Lessing-Sattari 2018). Three dimensions appeared crucial: How would teachers imagine their students? How would they perceive of themselves as professionals? What are their conceptions and beliefs with regard to reading literature? The reconstructed constellations showed significant differences regarding all three dimensions (Lessing-Sattari 2018, table 6, p.  17). With regard to the learners, teachers would either conceive of the students as being potentially capable to understand poetic metaphor, bringing in a spontaneity that helps interpreting, and can benefit from exercises in class. Or teachers would consider students as being hardly able to

 The study “Literary Understanding and Metaphor: A Study of the Processes used by Learners to Understand Poetic Metaphor and of the Ways in which Teachers Model such Understanding and How It Comes About (LiMet)” was carried out by Irene Pieper, Dorothee Wieser, Marie LessingSattari and Bianca Strutz; s. https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/283241218?language=en; Lessing-Sattari et al. 2017.

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tackle such a demanding feature as poetic metaphor, since poetry were perceived of as difficult anyway, and the openness of literary texts too challenging. Apparently, the fact that the focus was on poetry and metaphor, and not on literature in general, is important for this view of students, but teachers clearly saw the place of the issue in the curriculum. However, it is noticeable that the teachers who see deficits with their students may not perceive of themselves as capable of arranging a fruitful learning process, when it comes to the mental activities that students need to perform with these poems. Only some of these teachers would still consider themselves as effective in teaching, but they would rather focus on a technical approach, referring to activities like drawing pictures, or finding the metaphors without linking these activities to understanding. All teachers articulated a rather general view of the students, imagining a collective learner. With regard to teachers’ beliefs on what literary reading is about, the teachers who perceive of the learners as capable show a more differentiated view of literature. They would draw on links between text and experiences, and also on exploring texts with the gratification of finding a key to their understanding. Further, they hinted at a continuity between their own engagement with the poems and that of the students. Others would stress the notion of developing mental images, but be uncertain that students would gain access to the text. Though in a qualitative analysis numbers are not to be stressed, it strikes us as remarkable that only five out of thirteen teachers had a view of students as being capable, with all of these teaching at the higher academic track. Obviously, for some teachers in our study, it is a severe challenge to design encounters with the texts that they perceive of as fruitful for the learners. One solution is to choose approaches that do not insist on thorough encounters with the text, but are very open to general notions of experience; in other words, close to the students, but not to the text. As becomes obvious in elaborations on potential tasks within the interviews, this is at odds with the curriculum. Teachers may indicate a tension between aesthetic experiences with literary texts and textual analysis, a curricular demand that comes in increasingly in late lower secondary. Hence, one teacher‘s answers to the question about what she finds particularly important in teaching literature in Grade 9 is worth noting: Well, for one thing, what can literature do with me, with my self in the sense of what did I, eh, well what does it cause in me? what worlds, what pictures does it perhaps evoke? that’s for one thing, (1.0) eh, and unfortunately, eh, well, I think in Grade 9 there is also, one has to admit analysis is an important aspect that sadly enough we refine all the time till the final exams (Abitur), that means, eh, literature is not only ‘I talk about something’ but I really do work on the text, I look into the text, what does it actually say, how do I treat it, how can I decompose and differentiate in order to find indicators for my opinion; when I say’this resonates with me so and so’ and I find it in the text, I can prove it, that one has to say literature does have a somehow analytical character, too; and still I have the opportunity to interpret it differently for myself (Ms Dorn, l. 647–661).

The regret that analysis is also part of literature teaching is quite obvious (“unfortunately“, “sadly enough“), though the teacher later links the analytical search to the learners’ reading experiences (“I can prove it“). Another teacher distinguishes

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between a toolbox that one needs so that one can decipher meaning, on the one hand, and the experience of playfulness, open for individual perceptions, on the other hand. These two approaches remain separate in her elaborations; apparently there is no bridge between the technics of analysis and the imaginative play (Wieser et al. accepted).

7  Challenges in the Literature Classroom The studies referred to above provide insights into teachers’ perspectives on the literature curriculum, its place in the subject L1, and the challenges they experience. In particular, the TAMoLi-study demonstrates that literature has a rather strong place within the L1 classrooms of the sample. This is more true for the higher academic track than for basic secondary schooling. Similar observations have been made before (Klieme 2008). It seems that the concept of literature education and Bildung still carries a notion of being more important for students who go for higher education, while a preference for a literacy focus is particularly important where formal schooling is considered as mainly preparatory for the next steps in professional life, and where the general level of abilities around the written language is stressed. The expansion of higher education over the last 50 years of course still means that more students benefit from literature education nowadays, but there is evidence that aesthetic education may not be as generally present as the formal curriculum would have it. How to ensure aesthetic education and participation in cultural life for all learners thus remains a challenge. Although the data are not taken from actual teaching situations but consist in questionnaires and interviews, I would argue that they point to tensions in contemporary literature teaching. Both studies indicate a strong orientation of the teachers towards the students and their interests. Thus, the learner is much at focus. The common disciplinary practices of the literature classroom in secondary education, particularly the practices of the linguistic-awareness approach, are accepted as part of the curriculum and of assessment. However, there is evidence that teachers struggle with what is connected to the linguistic-awareness paradigm in the model. Apparently, there is a tension between text-related practices of that kind and the experience-based approach to literature that they prioritise. Thus, aims within the linguistic paradigm seem particularly at odds with those of the other paradigms. The choice of text according to the TAMoLi-study fits the broadening of the concept of literature since the 1970s. The classic notion of the canon, which used to be prominent in many European countries until then, apparently has been succeeded by a larger variety of literary texts, also from recent years, including translations. This is strongly supported by teacher education in and beyond university and its current discourse. In our studies, we did not focus on the question whether a more inter- and trans-­ cultural approach to literature can be traced in the choice of text. The texts that the teachers mention in our survey do not indicate that this is a central dimension of

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their choice of text. Certainly, there is growing awareness in the discourse on literature education that a choice of text allowing for insights into a multitude of cultures, and also a broadening of perspectives on literature regarding the cultural multitude in our classrooms, would be beneficial. The question remains to be explored as to whether the diversity that teachers experience with their students, with regard to linguistic and cultural background, is also reflected when it comes to the cultural potential of literature. With regard to actual teaching in writing, Schneuwly et al. (2017) observed a “sedimentation of practices” rather than a replacement of former practices by new ones, a metaphor that in my perception fits the stability of practices in teaching (despite changes) quite well: “weaving together continuity and change” is what the authors found in their analysis of writing in the L1-classroom (Schneuwly et  al. 2017, p. 21). The reflections of the teachers we interviewed are somehow less neutral, on the one hand pointing to the necessity to balance different educational aims (Wilhelm Tell for the humanist ideal and 13 Reasons Why to connect to students’ interests and experiences), and on the other hand showing a critical stance towards affordances of the curriculum that they consider at odds with students’ potential reading experiences and interests. From a research and development perspective, it remains to be assessed how teachers and learners deal with potential tensions in the classroom. It is well possible that there is a certain consensus to cooperate despite potential frictions in an institutional frame so that tensions on the level of aims and normative concepts do not lead to tensions in classroom interactions (Pieper and Scherf 2019). Changes in L1 education have brought about a broader notion of reading and a stronger focus on general literate abilities: writing, speaking and listening, and dealing with media. In the German-speaking context, it has been appreciated that the reading curriculum is now more differentiated, thus filling a blind spot – particularly in secondary education – which had become apparent through PISA and other studies: Curricula, both formal and actual, now insist that reading comprehension still needs to be focused upon in secondary education. The strong place that the curriculum and the teachers assign to students, their interests and experience with regard to literature education, indicates that this aspect of the subject L1 also has a particular potential with regard to education that is appreciated. Reaching out to the students as persons apparently is very important within the professional reflections of teachers, and the potential of literature as a source for intensive encounters around experiential and social issues is highly valued. Poststructuralist concepts that challenge the concept of person do not seem to feature in these reflections; rather, it seems that a strong perception of the learner as a person is part of teachers‘ professional beliefs. It remains an ongoing challenge for research to explore in more detail how students as learners and experiencing readers are addressed in the classroom, and what ways teachers find in practice when facing the potential gap between affordances they face and the aims they prioritise. Rather than considering this tension as a problem to be solved, it can be seen as a task and an opportunity for teacher education to assist teachers and teachers-to-be in realising the potential of literature education.

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Pieper, I. (2011). Items for a description of linguistic competence in the language of schooling necessary for teaching/learning literature (at the end of compulsory education). An approach with reference points. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2011 (Language Policy Division). http:// www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/langeduc/BoxD2-OtherSub_en.asp#s4. Accessed 9 Feb 2020. Pieper, I. (2015). Literature and the curriculum. In M. Fleming, L. Bresler, & J. O’Toole (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of the arts and education (pp. 194–202). London/New York: Routledge. Pieper, I., & Sâmihăian, F. (2016). International research cooperation in what used to be called mother tongue education. The example of LiFt-2. In I. Winkler & F. Schmidt (Eds.), Interdisziplinäre Forschung in der Deutschdidaktik. “Fremde Schwestern” im Dialog (pp. 153–180). Frankfurt: Lang. Pieper, I., & Scherf, D. (2019). Was ‘ist’ der Text? Beobachtungen zu Bronskys Scherbenpark in einer neunten Gymnasialklasse. In C. Bräuer & N. Kernen (Eds.), Aufgaben- und Lernkultur im Deutschunterricht. Theoretische Anfragen und empirische Ergebnisse der Deutschdidaktik (pp. 137–154). Frankfurt: Lang. Pieper, I., Böhme, K., & Bertschi-Kaufmann, A. (2020/accepted). Professionelle Orientierungen im Literaturunterricht: Welche Ziele verfolgen Lehrkräfte in der Sekundarstufe I?. In K. Schindler & F. Schmidt (Eds.), Wissen und Überzeugungen von Deutschlehrkräften. Frankfurt: Lang. Reh, S. (2017). Statt einer pädagogischen Theorie der Schule: eine Geschichte des modernen Fachunterrichts als Geschichte subjektivierender Wissenspraktiken. In R. Reichenbach & P. Bühler (Eds.), Fragmente zu einer pädagogischen Theorie der Schule. Erziehungswissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf eine Leerstelle (pp. 152–173). Weinheim/Basel: Juventa. Sawyer, W., & van de Ven, P.-H. (Eds.). (2007). Paradigms of mother tongue education. In L1-educational studies in language and literature, 7(1). Schneuwly, B., Thévenaz-Christen, T., Trevisi, S. C., & Daghé, S. A. (2017). Writing and teaching literature. The role of hypertextual and metatextual writing activities at three school levels. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.17239/ L1ESLL-2017.17.02.02. Sieber, P. (2003). Sprachförderung – mit PISA in anderem Licht? Didaktik Deutsch, 15, 4–17. Siebenhüner, S., Depner, S., Fässler, D., Kernen, N., Bertschi-Kaufmann, A., Böhme, K., & Pieper, I. (2019). Unterrichtstextauswahl und schülerseitige Leseinteressen in der Sekundarstufe I: Ergebnisse aus der binationalen Studie TAMoLi. Didaktik Deutsch 24 (47), 44–64. https:// www.didaktik-deutsch.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Forschungsbeitrag_Siebenhüner.pdf Van de Ven, Hein, P., & Doecke, B. (2011). Literary praxis. A conversational inquiry into the teaching of literature. Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei: Sense. Wieser, D., Pieper, I., & Lessing-Sattari, M. (accepted). Was ist und wie entwickelt sich “angemessenes” literarisches Verstehen? Perspektive von Lehrenden auf Verstehensprozesse von Lernenden. In T. Pflugmacher & L. Brenz (Eds.), Normativität und Interpretation. Witte, T., & Sâmihăian, F. (2013). Is Europe open to a student-oriented framework for literature? A comparative analysis of the formal literature curriculum in six European countries. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 13, 1–22. Zabka, T. (2012). Analyserituale und Lehrerüberzeugungen. Theoretische Untersuchung vermuteter Zusammenhänge. In I. Pieper & D. Wieser (Eds.), Fachliches Wissen und Literarisches Verstehen. Studien zu einer brisanten Relation (pp. 35–52). Frankfurt: Lang. Zabka, T. (2016). “Literary studies. A preparation for tertiary education (and life beyond)”. Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ful l/10.1080/1358684X.2016.1203618. 227–240 (English translation of the German article: Was ist Hochschulreife im Umgang mit Literatur? In: Didaktik Deutsch 38, 136–150 (http:// www.didaktik-deutsch.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Zabka_Vortrag_DD-38_online.pdf). Literary Framework LiFT-2: http://www.literaryframework.eu. Accessed 9 Feb 2020.

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Irene Pieper  holds a position as full professor for Literature Education at the Freie Universität Berlin/Germany. She studied German, English and Theology, and holds a PhD from the University of Heidelberg. She was also trained to be a teacher at the ‘Gymnasium’. Between 2007 and 2020, she held a full professorship at the University of Hildesheim. Irene is founding member of the International Association for Research in L1 Education (ARLE), and served as Chair of ARLE between 2014 and 2019.

The Marginalisation of Literature in Swedish L1: A Victim of Socio-Political Forces and Paradigmatic Changes Per-Olof Erixon and Maria Löfgren

Abstract  Reading fiction has been an important basic content in mother-tongue education and the school subject Swedish (L1) since the nineteenth century. Declining results in reading skills identified in large-scale international surveys such as PISA are seen as a critical issue for education in general, but also for democracy, social justice and economic competitiveness. Closely related to this is the fact that school has become a battleground in the political debate. This ratio has led to an intensification of reading-promotion programmes in Swedish schools, organised by the National Agency for Education under the name ‘Läslyftet’ (Heightened Reading). Notable here is the effective downplaying of literature, with fiction marginalized in the reading programme in favour of non-fiction. Also, under the motto that all teachers are language teachers, the school-subject Swedish has been marginalized to the benefit of other school-subjects, such as natural sciences, in which, for example, the importance of reading for the development of democratic society is emphasized. What are the implications of such developments for LI education in Sweden, and what are the underlying ideas, interests and values behind identified discourses? Keywords  Reading promotion · Fiction · Teaching literature · Reading strategies · Sweden

1  Introduction In recent years, various reports showing a decline in Swedish students’ reading skills have been published, and especially amongst them the world-renowned international PISA surveys (see OECD 2004, 2007, 2010, the National Agency for P.-O. Erixon (*) Department of Creative Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] M. Löfgren The Department of Culture and Media Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Green, P.-O. Erixon (eds.), Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era, Educational Linguistics 48, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7_7

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Education 2014; Jakobsson 2013). Similar to Drotner’s (1999) concept of ‘media panic’, and like many other countries, Sweden has in the face of its declining results been hit by a ‘PISA panic’. Politically, it is acknowledged that the ability to read is critical not only in education, but also for democracy, social justice, and economic competitiveness (Alexander 2012). Therefore, much is at stake for a country when the general ability to read and write is considered to be in decline. This situation has inspired the Swedish Government to engage in different activities, some of them directly affecting L1 subject and L1 teachers. In this chapter, we are specifically interested in the reading-promotion programme called The Reading Lift, a further education programme for teachers aimed at strengthening students’ reading skills and the literature competence of L 1 teachers, emphasising an important role for the L1 teacher. However, when the programme was implemented by the Swedish National Agency for Education (NAE), the space reserved for reading fiction was markedly reduced, leading to a downplaying of both literature and the L1 teacher’s role in the program. Our study aims to examine to what extent and in which ways literature is dealt with, along with its roles, in The Reading Lift in the modules intended for primary and secondary school year 4–9. Along the line of our aim in this chapter, our research questions are: What role is literature given in the reading-promotion program The Reading Lift for primary and secondary school, and which views on literature are expressed?

2  From a Report to the Assignment of The Lift of Reading In 2011, the Swedish Conservative Government appointed a committee to analyse the position held by literature in Sweden, in the light of societal changes that have taken place in terms of reading habits and technological development. The purpose was to identify trends expected to affect literature’s future position. The Committee was also requested to submit proposals on how the position of literature could be strengthened and, inter alia, assess and propose what governmental efforts should be made to meet the challenges posed by technological development, in order to increase reading of literature and especially “quality literature” (Dir.2011: 24). Although the school’s literary teaching largely was in focus, it can be noted that no teachers or researcher in the literary didactic field were included in the group. The final report The Culture of Reading [Läsandets kultur] (SOU 2012a; b) was presented in March 2012. The report stressed a “humanistic” (i.e. Bildung) and “educational” perspective on reading comprehension, and the value of the “aesthetic experience of the literary work and the specific experiences” that the work conveys (p. 31), as well as the ability to “interpret, critically review and evaluate texts” (p.  89). These perspectives are in line with school-subject Swedish L1’s twentieth-­century tradition (Malmgren 1988). The report also emphasised the firm link between the reading of literature and democracy, also central to traditional L1  in Sweden (Molloy 2007). It was stated that the proposed further education

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programme should focus on strengthening teachers’ knowledge of “children’s and youth literature, as well as literary didactic methods” (p. 13). In the next step (i.e. Government Bill 2013/14: 3), the Conservative Government stressed reading as the basis for democratic participation in society. The original focus on literature, however, was replaced by the promotion of both literature and non-fiction. Finally, in a formal decision (I:9; U2013/7215/S) the Government gave the National Agency for Education (NAE) the responsibility for implementing The Reading Lift program. The aim, according to the Government, was to provide teachers with scientifically well-substantiated methods and proven practices to develop students’ reading and writing skills, and the target group was chiefly L1 teachers, although other teacher categories “might also be relevant” (p. 1). The content of the support material, modules available on a web platform, should according to the same decision be research-based and concentrate on teacher skills, for which there is “good evidence of having positive effects on the students’ reading and writing ability” (p. 2). Also, NAE should consider, together with the results for reading and writing comprehension in the national tests, Sweden’s results in the international studies PIRLS (Progress in Reading Literacy Study) and PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment). Moreover, the content should be based on curricula and course and subject plans in Swedish L1 and other relevant subjects. The principal goal was proficiency training for both education and working life, in order for the student to be “an active citizen of the community” (4). Our first study about The Reading Lift, entitled “A Lift for Democracy? About the Relationship between Literacy, Literature and Democracy” (Erixon and Löfgren 2018), focuses on how reading and democracy was regarded in the modules for primary and secondary school years 4–9. In our study we identify a crooked line between the Literature Study’s initial proposal, the Government Bill, the Government’s instruction given to the National Agency for Education, and finally the constructed educational modules. For each phase, the space for reading literature was constantly decreasing. The result was effectively a downplaying of literature, and thereby of the importance of reading literature for the development of a democratic society. We concluded that The Culture of Reading, which existed prior to the Government Bill, reflected an older concept of the school-subject Swedish L1 as an exclusive reserve for questions about language, reading and writing, along with the importance of literature for both education and for democracy. Concerning its implementation, we argued that the “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 1980; Winter and Nielsen 2008) at the National Agency for Education (NAE), who were in control of it in practice, had the opportunity to choose among two different L1 subjects present in the curriculum, depending on which part of it was stressed. On the one hand, there was the L1 subject in the introductory sections and aim, with quite a wide scope including the importance of both language and literature for the development of identity and society. On the other hand, in the syllabus section, which more directly guides the management of teaching and development of students’ knowledge under headings such as “core content” and “knowledge requirements”, there was another L1 subject (Liberg et al. 2012). Here, the emphasis is on the formal aspects of language and the development of skills, speaking, reading and

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writing. We found that the “street-level bureaucrats” at the NAE solely choose to focus on the more formalistic goals presented in the syllabus section.

3  Promoting Reading Extensive reading will lead to language acquisition, provided that certain conditions are met, according to Krashen (1982). But he stresses the importance of “Free Voluntary Reading” (FVR) for developing not simply literacy (reading/writing skills, reading comprehension, vocabulary and grammar) but also general knowledge and thinking. Reading for pleasure and meaning is endorsed, in order to get children “hooked on books”. For best effect, training in reading should occur without any interruptions in the form of questioning exercises or looking up of words (pp. 149–150). Similarly, Grabe (1991) and Paran (1996) stress the importance of automatic reading for developing the ability to decode symbols on a printed page, or so-called ‘bottom-up’ processing (30). Literature is inscribed in the realm of the imagination (Peer 1995). Close to ‘imagination’ is what Ricoeur (1991) defines as ‘poetic language’. Dart (2001) claims that when literature is downplayed in L1, “creativity” and “imagination” (67) is also undermined. A distinctive repertoire of literacies that L1 teachers should engage in should also include imagining and the practice of creativity – “literary literacy” (Green 2002). Reading-promotion programmes and activities are not new. They have existed in various countries, with different starting points and purposes, both within and beyond the school context. Internationally, many organisations are engaged with reading-promotion activities. For example, the South African organisation PRAESA (Project for the Study of Alternative Education) was recently given the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for its work to promote reading among children. Other examples include the activities of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with a reading-promotion framework that relies on libraries (Sangkeo 1999); while similar projects are found in countries like South Korea (Lee 2011), where a strategy to increase the number of libraries has been in place for many years (Lee 2011). When considering Indian conditions, Kanade and Chudamani (2006) highlight the important need for long-term reading-promotion activities. A Swedish study by Dolatkhah (2013) pointed to the paradox that reading-promotion activities must often deal with, namely that good reading ability is connected with a desire to read, as well as with the freedom and possibility of choosing one’s own texts. However, freedom for the individual to select his or her own reading material is not always possible in an educational system limited by resources and governed by strict goals focused on the development of measurable skills. Another Swedish study by Hedemark (2011) believes, in line with Krashen, that it is relevant to strengthen the connection between reading and pleasure when it comes to developing reading-stimulation methods in public library contexts, and that children’s interest in reading, based on their own interests, should be more strongly supported.

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On top of these nationally-oriented reading programmes, reading programmes designed from other perspectives can also be mentioned. Atkinson et  al. (2002) claim for example that literacy should form an integral part of children’s health-­ promotion activities, and that the successful literacy programme in the United States called “Reach Out and Read” might also be used by nurses in child healthcare. Reading-promotion activities also exist for social reasons. Several studies and research findings show how effective reading and writing promotion activities are in rehabilitating and including disadvantaged groups in society, such as ex-prisoners (Pérez Pulido 2010). In this way, reading-promotion campaigns also represent different views on reading, reflecting cognitive, social and medical reading discourses. Moreover, for several years the international research community has been discussing the scientific value of large-scale measurements of pupils’ reading ability. Several researchers are critical of the validity and reliability of such tests, especially in relation to national rankings (Sjøberg 2007; Bautier and Rayou 2007), their cultural bias (Olsen 2005), and the problems that appear when the tests are translated into different languages (Puchhammer 2007).

4  The Swedish School In Sweden and other Nordic1 countries such as Finland and Norway, the State has traditionally played a central role in educational policies. Comprehensive education is firmly supported. First taking shape in the initial decades after the Second World War, the model – often called the Scandinavian social democratic project – is considered both distinctive and unique (Oftedal Telhaug et al. 2006). Kivinen and Rinne (1998) identify it as “the social-democratic super-ideology” (p.  45), based on increasing welfare, democratic education, and educational expansion. A shared element of the Scandinavian or Nordic model during the “golden years of social democracy” (1945–1970) was that every Nordic country was exceptionally homogenous in its particular ethnic, linguistic and cultural circumstances. A communal structure was developed for all children and young people, extending as far up the education system as possible. During the ‘radical’ left turn of the 1970s, marked by a swing to the Left in politics generally, the comprehensive school system was further extended, despite the fact that conservative or coalition governments from time to time came into power. During the era of globalisation and neo-liberalism at the end of the millennium, powers on the right of the political spectrum – partly in association with the Social Democrats – began to formulate a new order characterised as both neo-liberal and neo-conservative, which undermined and challenged the monopoly status of the Ministry of Education in decisions concerning educational policies. The stated priorities were now based on an

1  The so-called Nordic countries include five countries, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland, while Scandinavian countries include only Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

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ideology that saw human beings primarily as clients or consumers, and not as citizens, using words such as ‘profit’, ‘efficiency’, ‘standards’, ‘quality’, ‘skills’ and ‘product’. Equality and solidarity have since partly given way to values focusing on individual skills, theoretical achievements, and hard work (Kivinen and Rinne 1998). The central state has therefore changed its focus on governing to a more evaluation-­based discourse of governance, with a stronger emphasis on assessment, monitoring and inspection, at both individual and system levels. The curriculum and the assessment system were brought more in line, in order to give international comparative tests a much more prominent position in national assessment and evaluation systems (Pettersson et al. 2017; Carlgren and Klette 2008).

4.1  School-Subject Swedish The school subject of Swedish L1 was historically part of the national project. In that subject, fiction and hence literature was seen as a manifestation of a language that, with its specific values, created the conditions for national identity, and therefore could teach the younger generation to love the Swedish language and thereby their motherland. The importance of literature is shown by the fact that, as far back as the 1980s, secondary school students received two grades in the subject, one for language and the other for literature. Further, these grades were inscribed at the top of the grading document (Thavenius 1981, 1991; Elmfeldt 2014). Nordic school systems and the Nordic L1 subjects have long been protected discourses, with proud educational traditions, and expressly justified by democratic values. It is within these frames that language and literature have formed the basis for L1 education in Sweden since the early nineteenth century (Thavenius 1991). However, today they are faced with challenging paradoxes and contradictions, and the traditional ‘Bildung’ goals of schooling – and of the L1 subjects in particular – are now being contested and are in flux. With the traditional, homogeneous Nordic societies becoming replaced by a previously unknown cultural (and media) heterogeneity, ethnic and linguistic diversity has raised issues regarding both literature and language instruction. Therefore, in the last 10–15 years we have seen dramatic shifts in goals, general tasks, and the conceptualisation of subject contents in Sweden and other Nordic countries (Krogh and Penne 2015). This has brought on a pragmatic turn to skills and literacy in the L1 subjects (Ongstad 2015; Krogh 2012; Sjöstedt 2013), with literature losing not just its former status but also the distinctive historical and cultural perspective traditionally seen as cultivated in it. When the Swedish Conservative Government appointed the committee to analyse the position held by literature in Sweden, the relationship between reading and technological development was mentioned as a factor in need of analysing (Dir.2011, p. 24). Historically and symbiotically, Swedish education is connected not only with church and literacy, but also with the technologies of book, paper and pencil (Erixon 2010, 2014; Johansson 1977; Tyner 1998). These technologies have set the

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framework for both the form and content of school and education. When new digital technology and access to the Internet are brought into teaching contexts, the recontextualisation becomes weaker, in the sense that the flow of facts and information directly enters into the school. This opens up for information and knowledge representing a multitude of perspectives, thereby also weakening the boundaries between what is considered knowledge and central values. This development challenges the knowledge monopoly of both the teacher and the textbook, as well as the teacher’s authority as a conveyor of knowledge (Bernstein 2000; Erixon 2014). There has been a long-existing utilitarian perspective on education, supported by complaints about declining language abilities, already by the 1980s and thereafter reconstructed (Sawyer and van den Ven 2006). Arising against a backdrop of neoliberal ‘reform’, this utilitarian paradigm combines a skills-based approach with a more general ‘whole-language’ approach, so that an emphasis on training skills leads into reading and writing whole texts. This development is contrary to earlier literacy approaches represented by, for example, Krashen (1982), where reading – primarily of literature – for interest and pleasure leads to the development of skills and linguistic awareness. The new pedagogical/didactic approach is also more normative and more monologic than before. Grammatical standards and standards derived from transactional communication dominate. In the most recent Swedish syllabus (Lgr11) for secondary school, the area of literature is, according to Lundström et al. (2011), reduced to something measurable in terms of knowledge requirements, with the focus now on knowledge about literature, rather than what one can experience and learn through literature. This shift is in line with the increased focus on assessment in Sweden, as in many other countries, through national and international tests. As Lundström et al. (2011) notes, the full potential of literature reading is not utilised. It is easier to measure what students can know about literature, i.e. formal aspects, than what they have learned through literature (Lundström et al. 2011). Also, Ewald (2015) and Graeske (2015) notice how a focus on skills development has displaced the issues of democracy, values, multiculturalism, and aesthetics, which had previously been fundamental in the Swedish L1 subject. Reading in a way that can be measured thus dominates at the expense of the critical and aesthetic, which is not given as much space in the knowledge requirements. The content changes in L1’s curricula and syllabuses are due not only to political changes, however, but also to paradigmatic changes or lack of changes in the disciplines – what Ongstad (2015, p. 1) calls “disciplinarity”, which has formed a kind of scientific base for the Swedish L1, i.e. the language component in Nordic languages and literature in Comparative Literature. The balance between the two has been disrupted, in favour of language. The status of the Humanities, Comparative Literature, and other aesthetic areas has also weakened, both in the academic world and in society at large (Hjort 2011). Concerning Comparative Literature, the relationship with school and teaching has historically been more problematic. Questions about teaching and literary reception have long had a low status in Sweden, and accordingly few researchers in the field have been interested in developing research and exerting influence on

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curricula and syllabuses. Today, though, within the expanding field of literature didactics, the potential of literature is highlighted not only for its importance in skill training and understanding of literary form, but also for the insights that reading and discussion of literary texts can provide concerning social, cultural and existential issues, as well as for the development of critical and empathetic ability (Lundström et  al. 2011). In recent years, claims have been made that literature should be respected in its own right (Jönsson and Öhman 2015), and that analytical and critical reading should be preceded by immersive reading (Felski 2008; Öhman 2015); otherwise, according to Persson (2015), the reading of literature is reduced to a writing practice associated with underlining and comments in a notepad. Within the fields of Nordic languages, linguistic discourse and language didactics, fictional texts seem to hold no privileged position from a knowledge, education or democracy perspective, but rather are seen as one form of text that, among others, can primarily be used for skill training for the lower ages. We call this discourse, as we see it, a “fictitious turn” (Erixon and Löfgren 2018). In our era of literacy this view has gained acceptance, to the detriment of Comparative Literature. The reasoning is built from the language researcher’s interpretation of the ideological view of literacy (Street and Street 1984, p. 95ff), where literacy is seen as a social practice that must be understood and practised in its context. An autonomous view of literacy (Street and Street 1984: 95ff), on the other hand, considers literacy as a set of abilities that can be learned independently of context or individual cognitive skills.

5  A Theoretical Framework When analysing the reading modules available on the Swedish NAE’s website relevant to our study, and as described above, we relate to the research direction called critical text analysis, which comes from an Anglo-Saxon tradition (e.g. Fowler 1991; Fairclough 1992). In this tradition, attention is often paid to ideological texts such as political texts, advertising, and mass media texts, for the purpose of showing how texts form part of a hidden or open power exercise (see Karlsson 2010). We conduct our analysis based on Green’s (1988) three interrelated dimensions of literacy: the ‘operational’, ‘cultural’ and ‘critical’. The operational is a question of individuals being able to read and write in a range of contexts in an appropriate and adequate manner. This is to focus on the language aspect of literacy. The cultural dimension involves what may be called the meaning aspect of literacy. The third dimension of literacy, the critical, similarly has to do with the social construction of knowledge and the notion of schooling as socialisation. A socially critical perspective on literacy, culture and schooling recognises that these are not and cannot be neutral concepts. The literate individual is someone who knows that there is more than one version available, and that what one is reading, or given to read, represents both a selection and an abstraction from a larger context. The extent to which the learning modules promote this awareness is a key issue of the analysis. All concepts with their theoretical background are presented in more detail under

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Method. Green (2002, p. 6) speaks of these dimensions in terms of three “strata”. In terms of written texts, literacy so understood involves a particular articulation of language, meaning and power. From this, Green (2002, p. 7) claims that the “most worthwhile, robust understanding of literacy” is one that brings together these three dimensions. In order to contextualise The Reading Lift’s implementation and understand the choices available and made, we located the programme in the Swedish school system, which has for a long time been influenced by neoliberal ideas and new public management (NPM) (Almqvist 2006), with a stronger focus on evaluation and review, i.e. what Michael Power (1999) has called the “audit society” and Peter Dahler-Larsen (2012) the “evaluation society”. Due to this impact, grading systems have been altered and more and extended national tests introduced, along with clearer and more specified curricula and curricula (Rönnberg 2012; Carlbaum 2014). Pasi Sahlberg (2018) named this the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), and identifies five interrelated and distinctive features of this development, which we relate to in our analysis: 1/standardisation of education; 2/a focus on core subjects; 3/applicants for low-risk routes to achieve the goals; 4/the use of business management models; and 5/test-based accountability (Sahlberg 2018).

6  Method A critical text analysis usually entails three steps. In the first reading, a kind of spontaneous understanding of the text’s content is obtained; in the second, the structure and content of the text is categorised; step three, the text is analysed and critically examined (Hultén 2000, pp. 96–97). We read all the 15 training modules for teachers in school years 4–9 in The Reading Lift, with a focus on the role given to literature and on which views on literature are expressed. Supported by theory, we designed analysis categories for ways of viewing literature in a didactical context (see below). Finally, a further reading of the modules occurred in order to more thoroughly map perceptions of literature in the Reading Lift program, according to the following criteria: 1. Our first category, literature as ‘skills and metacognition’, represents a primary linguistic discourse of the literacy concept, in which literature holds no privileged position. Instead, literature is regarded as a text among other texts suitable for skill training of reading ability and reading comprehension, but also for developing metacognition concerning the ability to read, analyse and understand different texts. This category is synonymous with Green’s first level of literacy, ‘the operational’, that is mainly focused on developing literacy skills, i.e. to read and write adequately (Green 1988). 2. Our second category is literature as ‘an art form’. Within this category, fictional texts are regarded as an art form either in their own right, according to modernism’s art pour l’art concept, and/or within the framework of an education tradi-

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tion where aesthetic style, theme and messages can be culturally and historically understood and analysed. This category is synonymous with Green’s second level, the “cultural”, which combines language learning with a cultural understanding of literacy (Green 1988, 2002). 3. In our third category – literature as ‘a form of knowledge’ – literature is seen as a potential form of knowledge, either because it is considered to promote empathy for others (Nussbaum 2010) or as contributing to self-insight (Rosenblatt 1938/1995), enhancing imagination and creativity (Abbs 1981; Dart 2001) and/ or knowledge of life, society and the world (Felski 2008). This category also includes perspectives on reading developed within the framework of the Critical Literacy focus by representatives such as Paulo Freire and Hilary Janks. The purpose of Critical Literacy is to promote through various literacy activities students’ ability to question power, inequality and injustice, but also the ability to influence these conditions by formulating their own texts (Janks 2010), and to develop a democratic identity (Freire 1993). Critical literacy accords with Green’s third level of literacy, the “critical”, where the central understanding is that texts are never neutral but always products of social and political power structures (Green 1988).

7  L  iterature in Primary and Secondary School: Years 4–9 in The Reading Lift The study consists of an analysis of Reading Lift modules for primary and secondary school years 4–9 (Swedish National Agency for Education 2019). In our study, we attribute the NAE for the entirety of The Reading Lift, as presented on the Agency’s website. The participating researchers were invited to participate by the NAE, but it is the Agency that is responsible for the texts, meaning also that it is their view that is the subject of our module analyses. The Reading Lift contains a total of 15 continuing education modules for teachers in school years 4–9. Each module is divided into 8 sub-modules, with each comprising about 10–12 pages of text, including different forms of examples, and discussion and exercise tasks for teacher teams. Some modules are compulsory for teachers undergoing further education with state grants, while others are voluntary. It is easy to notice that literature has a very limited scope in the modules, in contrast to the literature report. Only one of the 15 modules deals with literature. The proportion of modules intended for L1 teachers in Swedish is also limited: 4 out of 15 modules – despite the claim made in the Government’s assignment to the Swedish NAE that the programme should primarily include “teachers who teach in the subject Swedish in compulsory school and in the first year of upper secondary school” (p.  3). Further, in contrast to the literature report, there are few elements whose explicit purpose is to increase and deepen teachers’ knowledge of children’s and youth literature as a cultural and artistic form, in line with The Culture of Reading

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(2012). There is no specific focus on this form of literature, in the sense of genre discussions, historical overviews or theoretical perspectives, in any of the sub-modules. One exception is sub-module 5 of the primary school module, whose subobjective is to introduce a popular genre for children and young people: dystopias. Most significantly, we also found that the module developed specifically for reading literature, “Strategies for Fiction”, is not compulsory. Teachers may thus undertake the programme without engaging with any content that specifically concerns reading literature. Other modules are either wide-ranging or intended for teachers in other school subjects, or for specific groups – for instance, teachers in the Natural sciences and Social sciences. Literature is sometimes included as examples in these, but always as one of several others. With the exception of a sub-­ module in one of the modules in Science Studies, “Natural Science Learning through In-depth Reading of Fiction”, none of the sub-modules has fiction as a separate theme.

7.1  Fiction – Something Alien The purpose of sub-module (1) (“Reading Strategies for Fiction”) is to develop teachers’ teaching in order to “deepen the students’ ability to read and analyse fiction” (p. 1). Yet, the reading of literature does not appear to be a simple or natural task, partly because of the very fictitiousness of the fictionality! In the first introductory sub-module, “Stepping into an Constructed and Shaped Worlds of Imagination”, literature is presented as something partly alien and different. The fictional world “can remind of the reality that the reader has left/but/it is governed by a completely different logic than the real world.” (p.  2) In other words, literature may give an impression of reality (sic!), but in fact everything in literature works differently from the real world. In our further analysis, we identified three notions of literature expressed in the modules: low epistemological values, gaps and unfamiliar elements, which require certain reading strategies like predictions and constantly pausing to summarize the plot, all ending up in an ideal approach that we call skills training and metacognition.

8  Low Epistemological Value What is a fictitious text, and what status and value does it possess? The following definition is found in sub-module 6: The fictitious text is characterised by the fact that the content is fictitious, the author has no intention of separating what comes from reality, but it is a story in which the world and the characters are linguistically constructed. The factual text claims to depict reality, even though the representation is similar to the fictitious text. (p. 1)

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Literature is thus characterised as fictitious text without any connection to reality, while factual texts claim to depict reality. Moreover, literature is stated to be “linguistically constructed”, implying that factual texts (biographies, documentary accounts etc.) are not linguistic constructions. In this strict division between fictitious and factual, fictitious and real, the view of what constitutes a text differs widely from the view characterizing the epistemological shift called the ‘linguistic turn’ that, since the twentieth century, has dominated the theoretical discussion within the humanities and social sciences. The ‘linguistic turn’ (Rorty 1967) involves an epistemological shift from representational knowledge to knowledge viewed as constructed and contextual. Language is not seen as separated from reality, but as constituting the concrete world and social actions. Further, literature appears in sub-model 6 to be less relevant from an epistemological perspective than factual texts. It is stated that if a fictitious text is read in a factual mode, the reader might obtain the idea “that the text tries to say something about the world and how it is” (p. 4). This implies a view that veracity and connection to reality is stronger in fact-based texts than in literature. Especially, literature from former centuries is described as problematic, and should therefore be read as completely fictitious, without any reference to a social, cultural or existential context, since: /…/ a hundred years ago, a writer could not imagine a reader a hundred years later, and because of that, the issue of what the author wanted to say in his time is not relevant to study in our time. (p. 2).

The reasoning continues: Therefore, fictitious reading is more relevant for older texts since they cannot be understood from our contemporary perspective and the structure of contemporary society. (p. 2)

This argument rejects the possibility of understanding older literary texts in relation to their historical and cultural contexts, which paradoxically is a form of knowledge which Swedish L1 teachers are largely familiar with through their academic studies. Traditionally the field of Comparative Literature in Sweden, heavily laden with Bildung ideals, has given extensive emphasis to the study of the history of literature, comprising cultural understanding of literary works in their time. This type of cultural/historical knowledge  – Green’s (1988) second level, i.e. analysing literary works with respect to their historical context – is in other words dismissed as “not relevant”. Fictitious reading is not really defined in the module for elementary school, but is seen as involving an awareness that the representation is merely imaginary, and therefore cannot claim to be a reality. This means a refusal and denial of literary works as a kind of knowledge of (for example) ethics, society and culture, in line with our third analysis category. A warning is also issued for realistic aesthetics and first-person narratives, which may lead the reader to believe the representation is true when in fact it is fictitious. Overall, literature-didactic approaches that promote students’ ability to understand the relationship between literature and historical, social and existential contexts, or to develop critical reflection on power structures, i.e. Green’s (1988) second

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and third levels, are not referred to in the module, despite the fact that the presented literature sometimes holds such potential.

9  Gaps Imagination or the reader’s ability to emphasise with and understand a story also appears in many ways as a problem, or at least as a complicated process in need of extensive support from a teacher in order to function. In the initial sub-module, and with the support of Wolfgang Iser (1991), fictive texts are characterised by “an extensive occurrence of gaps (Lehrstellen), in which the reader must fill in with his imagination, his knowledge and experiences and interact with the text” (p.  1). Identifying the gaps is described as a challenging process that requires active teacher support. In contrast to written fiction, the sub-module continues, both visual and text-based genre comics are seen as easier to deal with because here: “The gaps are clearly marked in series with white lines between the two boxes. This void is not graphically visible in plain fiction” (p. 7). It is a truism that all types of texts omit certain parts and leave room for interpretation. This is not a unique feature of fictitious texts, however, but applies to all forms of humanly constructed representations and forms of expression (Erixon 2011). The module suggests that a large part of the reading and analysis process should be directed towards what is left out in fictitious texts, in relation to what actually appears. This reflects not only a strong lack of confidence in students’ imagination and ability to understand literature, but also questions the author’s competence in the field. It is worth noting that in the Reading Lift module developed for pre-­ school teachers, even very young children are acknowledged to have a basic ability and competence to follow a fictional story. Although the teacher must continue in dialogue to assist the children with interpretation and analysis, still, compared to the module for primary and secondary school, there is basically and clearly a confidence in children’s ability to use their imagination and experience when reading literature, what Louise Rosenblatt calls aesthetic reading, i.e. being able to interpret and fill in the spaces themselves, or to assess whether they are even relevant (Rosenblatt 1938/1995).

10  Unfamiliar Elements In addition to gaps, unfamiliar elements appear to be obstacles while reading literary texts. In order to deal with these elements, sub-module 7 states that reading fiction should be supplemented with teaching of vocabulary and about cultural and social issues of relevance to the current story. That unfamiliar words and elements in texts should be clarified and explained is relevant to teaching in all subjects, which makes it seem strange that a whole sub-module on literature didactics should

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be devoted to this basic teaching strategy. Just as with the gaps, the examples given reveal a lack of confidence in pupils’ ability to imagine and empathetically understand when reading fictional texts. For example, when reading Gonzalo Moures Caramel’s Words (Gonzalo 2010), about a deaf boy in a refugee camp, it is suggested that teachers should teach “how it is for a child to live in a refugee camp” (p. 2), because it “may be unfamiliar for a student who did not grow up in a refugee camp” (p. 2). According to Nussbaum (2010), reading literature promotes understanding of experiences, even partly unknown ones such as living in a refugee camp or the experience of not hearing. No teaching beyond the actual story is usually needed for the reader to understand more about this. Thus, in the literary module for elementary school there is a kind of failure of the epistemological status or artistic representation of literature. To ensure adequate empathy and understanding, literature constantly needs support from other, more real-world sources and genres.

11  Predictions In the programme for L1 teachers for primary and secondary school, the importance of making predictions is very much endorsed, comprising a central reading strategy (see below) that according to the module ought to make it easier to read, understand, and analyse literature. The strategy implies that the student should regularly stop while reading, and try to predict the coming events of the story. In line with these strategies, fictional texts are denoted as mainly predictable. It is however emphasised that unexpected things may happen even in fictitious texts, but not in the same way as in “our more unpredictable world where most things can happen according to other logic than in the fictional world” (p.  1). This view is somewhat surprising, at least considering children’s and youth literature, where for example in the more fantasy or saga-based versions of the genre the potential for the unexpected almost always exists: a hole in the ground that leads down to a wonderland or a wardrobe leading out into another world. How, then, can this view of literature as something alien, i.e. with low epistemological value, and with gaps and other obstacles, and with requirements for extensive support from more real-world sources and prediction, be understood, and what kind of reading is recommended?

12  Strategies – Skill Training and Metacognition Strengthening the ability to read and to understand what is read (reading comprehension) is central in the elementary school module, and the main method presented for this is to develop and apply reading strategies. Examples of reading strategies

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are to regularly stop reading in order to summarise the plot, to continuously (try to) predict the action, to stop while reading and ask questions about the text, and to search for ‘gaps’ in the narrative etc. Learning-to-read strategies require, according to the module, an active teacher who, by modelling for the whole class, shows how these reading strategies can be used. Teaching reading through reading strategies was developed in the 1980s by Palincsar and Brown (1984), among others. Reading strategies are also emphasised in research relied on by the designers of the PISA tests (PISA 2018 Reading Literacy Framework p. 7). In Sweden, similar ways of working with reading have been introduced by Reichenberg (2014), Lundberg (2006) and Tengberg (2011). Teaching reading strategies are also stressed in the current Syllabus (Lgr 11), with the working method having a great impact in Sweden, through Martin Widmark’s widespread tutorial for teachers A Reading Class (2014). Research shows that application of such strategies can enhance the reading ability especially of low-performing children and young people, yet they have no or very little effect on more qualified readers (Olin-Scheller & Tengberg 2016a, b, p. 107). Developing reading strategies also seem to be an end in itself in The Reading Lift. The main purpose of the sub-module on formative assessment, “Assessment of Literary Reading”, that is presented is to strengthen students’ understanding of and meta-language for the strategies that the pupils have learnt, and for those yet to be learned, i.e. a literacy focus. The very ability to master reading strategies is thus primary, and appears to be the main goal of knowledge, i.e. not to develop reading ability or reading comprehension. This is characteristic of the focus on the value of conscious reading strategies and meta-cognition which has increasingly come to denote the course of literacy in the wake of PISA (Jönsson and Borsgård 2020, unpublished, Alt. PISA 2018 Draft Frameworks p. 7, p. 10 f. and s. 35). In the module for elementary school, emphasis is also given to identifying formal aspects of literary texts, so-called literary devices or key elements, such as character, narrative perspective, style and genre. However, perspectives on the relationship between literary devices and cultural and historical context, or the overall theme of a literary work are rarely discussed. One exception, however, is the sub-module on dystopian fiction, which in part concentrates on analysing messages and themes. The purpose of the sub-module is to develop the students’ ability to “read critically, and to learn how to interpret different messages in a text and by this procedure develop their reading strategies” (p. 1). However, in this sub-module, focus is primarily on surface-level understanding of themes in the form of general categories such as “love” and “power”, with little or no emphasis given to the implications of the dystopic representations in a broader cultural, social or existential perspective, or how issues of power, values and society can be analysed and understood through the reading of fiction. Despite a focus on theme and message in literary texts, the overall focus for this sub-module, which is also clearly implied in the cited purpose, is on skills training and the development of reading strategies, while the educational and democratic potential is absent.

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13  Discussion and Analysis The position held by literature in The Reading Lift is, as shown, very limited. This is despite the state report and Government Bill highlighting the importance of promoting literature in order to improve students’ reading skills. In The Reading Lift it seems as though literature is no longer important for the subject Swedish, effectively downplaying its significance. Symbolically, this is stressed by labelling the only module about literature “not mandatory”. Concerning research question (1) regarding the role that literature is given in The Reading Lift in primary and secondary school years 4–9, we find that, at best, it is treated as one of several other genres that may be used to develop students’ literacy. It holds no special value or importance. Literature is, instead, considered to be a genre that in many ways creates problems in teaching literacy, emptied as it is of its aesthetic features. Literature is something complicated, hard to access, and difficult to understand, with other logics at play, compared to the ‘real world’. In addition to pure decoding, special strategies are required when reading literature that must be trained individually and with the guidance and support of a teacher. The student should stop regularly whilst reading and apply technical reading strategies; an approach that fragments the reading process and leaves the literary work open for dissection, almost like an object in a laboratory. Concerning research question (2), i.e. which views on literature are expressed in The Reading Lift, we find that what legitimises literature and reading literature is not really addressed in the module. However, indirectly, the answer seems to be that reading literature is mainly about skills training and reading comprehension (i.e. skills and metacognition). Further, literature holds a low epistemological value in the modules, since it is not based on fact. In its turn, the expressed view of what facts are, and can be, is based on a simplistic epistemology that precedes the linguistic turn, although it is still found within the natural sciences domains (Erixon 2011). Literature is seen as something that is alien and challenging to approach. Gaps and unfamiliar elements are obstacles to be mastered and controlled with tools and strategies, and complemented with non-fiction material and teaching in order to ensure understanding. There is also a lack of confidence in students’ own ability to comprehend literary texts through imagination, experience and empathy. Reading comprehension and analytical ability focus on literary devices such as narrative perspective and style analysis, but without connecting these with the deeper meaning or theme of the literary work and how it can be understood in a cultural or social context. Reading literary texts for the development of imagination and creativity is never addressed (Abbs 1981; Dart 2001) (i. e. a form of knowledge). Reading literature is in other words reduced to something that distinguishes and examines predetermined aspects of the text, like messages, topics and subjects, i.e. the formal characteristics of text, while an analysis involving shifting intentions, cultural renegotiation and critical dialogue is absent (Lundström et  al. 2011). Overall, perspectives on literature as works of art are missing in the module, and terms like ‘art’ or ‘aesthetics’ never used (i.e. an art form).

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Further, The Reading Lift reflects a view of literature as something that is once and for all possible to interpret and define, but also something that must be heavily controlled, actuated and mastered, perhaps due to its differentness. Particularly, the reading strategy prediction is used almost as a kind of incantation for something perceived to be complex, unmanageable and partly indelible – i.e. art, creativity, and the human imagination (Lundström et al. 2011). This approach is in stark contrast with large parts of both modern literature didactics and reception theory, which stresses that there are several more or less adequate ways of understanding and interpreting a text, and that each reading event is unique. Reading literature is not a once-off act; there are always new perspectives to be uncovered (Rosenblatt 1938/ 1995). According to Gert Biesta (2014), a truly meaningful education always includes an element of risk and uncertainty. The learning process cannot and should not be completely controlled by the teacher, nor can it be completely predicted or steered by pre-set goals. Applying Biesta’s thinking, reading literature could be an emancipatory process (Jönsson and Borsgård 2020, unpublished). In The Reading Lift for Elementary School, in contrast to Biesta’s recommendations, it seems as if there is no longer any room for the “beautiful risk of education”.

14  Conclusion This study shows that literature and L1 teachers’ role have been downplayed in the reading promotion program The Reading Lift. Literature tends to be seen more as a problem and not as text holding any special value and meaning beyond being used for the practice of reading abilities, reading comprehension, and the development of metacognitive tools and awareness. By depriving literature of its aesthetic value, its deeper meaning and potential for knowledge, L1 teachers are deprived of key aspects of their professional identity, i.e. what differentiates them from teachers in other school subjects. By also depriving the L1 teachers of their special task as a language teacher and appointing all teachers as language teachers, this development is further reinforced. The question that arises is: How can this shift be explained? One socio-political explanation is the focus on testing and measurability that has come to dominate political educational discourses in Sweden since the late twentieth century. From a wider perspective, the NAE’s decisions are governed by ideas that have long permeated the Swedish school system, as well as school systems in many other countries, i.e. new public management (Almqvist 2006), with increased focus on assessment (Power 1999) and evaluation (Dahler-Larsen 2012), leading in turn to more national tests, altered grading systems, and more specified syllabi (Rönnberg 2012; Carlbaum 2014). Ensuring good results in the standardised tests, reading strategies are emphasised that, at least in their construction, give the impression of assurance (that there is one ‘correct’ way to read). Reading strategies and metacognition are also heavily stressed in the groundwork for PISA (PISA 2018 Draft Frameworks p. 7, p. 10 f. and s. 35). In line with this, reading strategies are

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also enhanced in the mother-tongue curriculum subject plan for Years 7–9, in the form of a separate goal (Lgr 11, p. 250) along with the ability to analyse basic literary devices (something that also can also easily be measured). The features that Sahlberg (2018) considers as characterising the development described above (i.e. GERM) can also be distinguished in The Reading Lift – for example, the focus on core subjects (features 1) can also include content changes or reduction and movements between different school subjects. Content previously regarded as the main task of Swedish L1, such as democracy issues, literature and language (Rothermel 1996) and aesthetic features, can, under the motto that all teachers are language teachers, be taken over by one or more other school subjects, or simply disappear, as we have shown. Also, a shared element of the Nordic model during the ‘golden years of social democracy’ (1945–1970) was that every Nordic country was seen as exceptionally homogenous in its particular ethnic, linguistic and cultural circumstances. Today, like other Nordic countries, Sweden is ethnically, linguistically, and culturally very heterogenous. One visible sign of these changes is that ‘mother tongue’ in the Swedish curriculum is no longer connected with L1, but instead with all the languages that immigrants bring with them from their former homelands. There is thus no longer a single mother-tongue, but many – or to put it in another way: L1 is one among other mother-tongue subjects in today’s Swedish school. Another, although a paradigmatic, explanation is that the scientific (i.e. disciplinary-­didactic) basis of L1 has been undermined. The school subject used to be grounded in two academic disciplines, i.e. Nordic Languages (language) and Comparative Literature (literature). The balance regarding the influence that has prevailed between the two disciplines has been disturbed in favour of Nordic Languages. This has led to what we call a “fictitious turn” in the school subject of Swedish (Erixon and Löfgren 2018), i.e. that literature is associated with an autonomous view of literacy (Street and Street 1984) and is therefore seen as undesirable, with a further outcome being that literacy teaching should not only be performed in subject Swedish but rather in all school subjects. When all teachers are designated literacy teachers, literacy is reduced to the development of reading and writing skills in different school subjects. It seems paradoxical to us that, while the linguistic discourse that dominates the curriculum and this view in today’s school subject of Swedish degrades literature, it builds on an ideological approach (Street and Street 1984) that emphasises power, inequality, injustice and context, i.e. exactly what literature can offer. Language, aesthetics and culture are intimately linked, and this represents an area that is difficult to control. In general, the aesthetic school subjects have been dismantled in the Swedish school and in teacher education ever since the early 1990s (Hjort 2011). Arising against the backdrop of neoliberal ‘reform’, the utilitarian paradigm, as mentioned above (Sawyer and van den Ven 2006), combines a skills-based approach with a more ‘whole-language’ approach, so that training skills leads into reading and writing whole texts. The goals’ stated priorities are now based on an ideology that chiefly regards human beings as clients or consumers, and not as citizens or intellectuals, as expressed in words like “profit”, “efficiency”,

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“standards”, “quality”, “skills” and “product”, and which focuses on individual skills, employability, theoretical achievements and hard work (Kivinen and Rinne 1998). Art and the aesthetic subjects, including the reading of literature, challenge and in some parts oppose these values. Art and literature are connected with “imagination” (Dart 2001) and “poetic language” (Ricoeur 1991), and are therefore also dangerous and uncontrollable. Reading literature, with the constant filling in of gaps, encourages interpretations of various kinds, which may lead to an undesirable questioning of what is taken for granted. The act of reading literature holds critical and subversive potential, and cannot be subordinated to the hysteria over measurements and tests that has erupted. As Sahlberg (2018) notes, literature is a high-risk route to literacy. But the school’s frameworks also create problems for the critical potential of literature to be developed. Since school is compulsory, there are also two requirements that are important for a reading promotion program to succeed which are difficult to fulfil: the opportunities to read the literature that one likes (Dolatkhah 2013), and reading literature for the sake of pleasure (Hedemark 2011). We partly conclude, with Beverton (2002, p. 12), that, compared with other curricular subjects, L1 has for long been a victim of “socio-political forces”, and therefore probably undergoes changes faster than other school subjects. But we also want to indicate another challenge that has come from within, in the sense that the literary has increasingly been questioned and weakened, while linguistic discourses have gained an increasing influence over the scientific base of L1, the literacy discourse, and over those who are to implement the reading promotion programme, i.e. the NAE’s ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky 1980). A new and particularly disappointing example is The Reading Lift.

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Rothermel, B. A. (1996). Pedagogies of the multicultural: Diversity and discourse education in Sweden and the United States. AnnArbor: The University of Texas at Austin. Sahlberg, P. (2018). https://pasisahlberg.com/global-educational-reform-movement-is-here/. Accessed 18 July 2018. Sangkeo, S. (1999). Reading Habit Promotion in ASEAN Libraries. In IFLA Council and General Conference. Conference Programme and Proceedings. Sawyer, W., & van den Ven, P.-H. (2006). Starting points: Paradigms in mother tongue education. L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 7(1), 5–20. Sjøberg, S. (2007). PISA and ‘real life challenges’: Mission impossible. In Stefan Hopmann, Gertrude Brinek & Michael Retzl, red: PISA according to PISA: Does PISA keep what it promises? (pp. 203–224). Wien: LIT. Sjöstedt, B. (2013). Ämneskonstruktioner i ekonomismens tid. Om undervisning och styrmedel i modersmålsämnet i svenska och danska gymnasier [Subject-construction in the age of economism. About teaching and means of control in L1  in Swedish and Danish upper secondary school]. Malmö Studies in Educational Studies No. 70. SOU. (2012a). Läsarnas marknad. Marknadens läsare [Readers’ market, market’s reader]. Stockholm: Fritzes. SOU. (2012b: 65). Läsandets kultur–slutbetänkande av Litteraturutredningen [The culture of reading – The final report of the Literature Survey]. Stockholm: Fritzes. SOU. Street, B.  V., & Street, B.  B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swedish National Agency for Education (2019). Lärportalen. Moduler för Språk-, läs och skrivutveckling (Läslyftet) [Learning portal. Modules for Language, Reading and Writing Development (The Reading Lift)]. https://larportalen.skolverket.se/#/moduler/5-las-skriv/ alla/alla. Tengberg, M. (2011). Samtalets möjligheter. Om litteratursamtal och litteraturreception i skolan [The possibilities of conversation. About book talk and the reception of literature in school]. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion. Thavenius, J. (1981). Modersmål och fadersarv: Svenskämnets traditioner i historien och nuet [Native language and father’s heritage: Traditions in Swedish traditions in history and the present]. Stockholm: Symposium. Thavenius, J. (1991). Klassbildning och folkuppfostran: om litteraturundervisningens traditioner [Class-formation and the upbringing of people: About the traditions of literary education]. Stockholm: Symposion. Tyner, K. (1998). Literacy in a digital world. Teaching and learning in the age of information. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,, Publishers. Winter, S. C., & Nielsen, V. L. (2008). Implementering af politik. Århus: Academica. Per-Olof Erixon  is Professor of Educational Work at Umeå University, Sweden. Formerly an upper secondary teacher, he took his PhD in Comparative Literature, and has subsequently worked within the field of Teacher Education. He has held different leadership positions as Head of Department, Head of National Postgraduate School, and most recently Dean for the Faculty of Arts at Umeå University. His research has ranged across academic literacies, new media studies in L1-education, and national and international issues connected to teacher education. Maria Löfgren  has a PhD in Comparative Literature. She has worked within the field of literature and teacher education, combining teaching, administrative work and leadership. For eight years, she has been the Head of the School of Education at Umeå University, Sweden. Her research is in the field of literature didactics. She has previously been focused on the nineteenth-century novel.

Bildung and Literacy in Subject Danish: Changing L1 Education Ellen Krogh

Abstract  The chapter contributes a case-study of the L1 subject Danish in the light of respectively Bildung and literacy, concluding in a discussion of these as perspectives of L1 education. Departing from an introduction to the core notion of Bildung, a disciplinary-didactic conceptualization of school subjects is presented and applied to subject Danish at the turn of the millennium. The study develops an argument for the relevance of the dyadic construction of the subject as an interpretative and meaning-making Bildung project connected to notions of perspective and voice. Finally, the contemporary and wider relevance of these findings are discussed. The contemporary curricular representation of subject Danish appears to confirm the findings. It may also be regarded as a bold project of didactization of subject Danish under pressure by globalizing trends of media culture and literacy demands. The discussion of these readings is related to the more general discussion of the import of the category of literacy, next to language and literature, in Nordic and wider international L1 curricula. The issue at stake is whether literacy could be regarded as a Bildung concept, possibly replacing Bildung as a general aim of L1 subjects. In conclusion, the chapter argues that the conceptualization of Bildung developed in the present analysis of subject Danish may contribute to a fruitful integration of literacy in L1 subjects since it provides arguments for the advancement of specific L1 disciplinary-didactic aims of students’ literacy development. Keywords  Bildung · Literacy · Disciplinary-didactics · Perspective · Voice

1  Introduction In the present chapter, I discuss what constitutes the disciplinarity of the L1 school subject. My point of departure and main contribution to the discussion is a previous study of subject Danish around the turn of the millennium (Krogh 2003). The basic dyadic subject construction of Danish language and literature has survived in subject Danish for centuries, and to a certain degree still holds strong, albeit in a version E. Krogh (*) Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Green, P.-O. Erixon (eds.), Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era, Educational Linguistics 48, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7_8

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similar to the one coined by Robert Scholes (1998), of text production and text consumption. The main research interest of my original study of subject Danish was to find (tentative) answers to questions of disciplinarity, relevance, and meaning: How was it that subject Danish – dethroned as a proud nation-building subject in the 1970s, and since then suffering from identity struggles – still appeared to be productive in young people’s projects of competence and Bildung? In this chapter, I revisit that earlier study and discuss the current relevance of analyses and findings, with regard to both subject Danish and L1 education more widely. Whereas the quest of my original research project was to understand decades of strong personal teaching experience through the lenses of research and theory, the quest of this present project is to test the findings of that earlier study against contemporary globalizing issues, especially as incarnated in the strengthened and complicated position of literacy. My approach in the previous study as well as in this chapter is embedded in the continental European Didaktik tradition and, hence, is deeply culturally bound. To meet this project’s call for global relevance, in the Background section, Didaktik is introduced and the implications of this embedment are considered (see also Green and Krogh, this volume). The chapter focuses further on the research field of disciplinary didactics. During recent decades, this field has attained a strong position within (continental European) educational research, teacher education, and school practice (Gundem 1998; Hopmann and Riquarts 2000; Ongstad 2006; Seel and Zierer 2012; Vollmer 2014). Recent calls within curriculum studies for ‘bringing knowledge back in’ (Young 2013; Deng 2018; Friesen Forthcoming) show that this interest is widely shared within the educational research community. Here, the term ‘disciplinary didactics’ will be used instead of the traditional term ‘subject-matter didactics’, to distinguish between subject-matter didactics as the specialized teaching practice of specific school subjects, and disciplinary didactics as a meta-­ reflective, discursive practice, realized both at the level of single school subjects and at the general level of the research field. The chapter introduces a disciplinary-­ didactic conceptualization of school subjects brought to bear on subject Danish. The history of subject Danish constitutes an important background, but since the general historical patterns of development have parallels in L1 subjects around the world (Van de Ven 2007; Sawyer and van den Ven 2006; Scholes 1998; Green 2018) the main contribution of this chapter lies rather in the conceptualization of the subject as a disciplinary-didactic construction, as well as in the applied methodology that renders it possible to study a school subject in all its complexity. A key claim is that the didactics of subject Danish constitutes the coherence and meaning of the dyadic subject construction of language and literature. The chapter initially provides general background and context, including an introduction to the core notion of Bildung. The following, main section presents the disciplinary-didactic conceptualization of school subjects and applies this on subject Danish at the turn of the millennium. The study develops an argument for the relevance of the dyadic construction of the subject as an interpretative and meaning-­ making Bildung project connected to notions of perspective and voice. In the chapter’s final sections, the contemporary and wider relevance of these findings are

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discussed. The contemporary curricular representation of subject Danish appears to confirm the findings. It may also be regarded as a bold project of didactization of subject Danish under pressure by globalizing trends of media culture and literacy demands. The discussion of these readings is related to the more general discussion of the import of the category of literacy, next to language and literature, in Nordic and wider international L1 curricula. The issue at stake is whether literacy could be regarded as a Bildung concept, possibly replacing Bildung as a general aim of L1 subjects. In conclusion, the chapter argues that the conceptualization of Bildung developed in the present analysis of subject Danish may contribute to a fruitful integration of literacy in L1 subjects, since it provides arguments for the advancement of specific L1 disciplinary-didactic aims of students’ literacy development.

2  Background and Context – The Didaktik Tradition The field of Didaktik can be identified as three concurrent levels: a theoretical or research level, where Didaktik denotes a field of study; a practical, exercised level, where Didaktik mainly comprises the fields of teaching, curriculum-making, and schooling; and a discursive level, where Didaktik denotes the frame of reference for professional dialogues among teachers discussing school matters or other issues of teaching and learning (Hopmann and Gundem 1998, p.  334). This study, thus, departs from Didaktik as a field of study, and takes as its object the didactics of subject Danish at the practical and discursive level. Danish and Nordic education is historically embedded in the Didaktik tradition. Identifying “the constitutional mindset” that frames Nordic educational thinking and practice, Stefan Hopmann (2008, p. 432) states that, until the 1990s, the school curriculum was governed by curriculum guidelines, developed by the state administration by way of committees consisting of experienced teachers and subject-matter specialists. Within this frame, schools could develop locally adapted teaching programs, and teachers had a high degree of professional responsibility and pedagogical freedom to transform curricular content into teaching. There was no regular state-run evaluation of teaching outcomes since schools were seen as places run by highly educated and esteemed teachers trusted to do a qualified job. Curriculum changes were seen as a matter of dialogue between local experience and national needs, and typically involved all levels of schooling and administration in more or less contentious processes. Generally, school systems enjoyed support at all levels of society. Since the 1990s, however, global trends of neo-liberal management and evidence-­ based educational policies increasingly have influenced Danish educational policies and curricula, carried by organizations like the OECD and the EU, and promoted by international competitive assessment programs such as PISA and TIMMS. Still, as Hopmann (2008) has observed, the influence of these trends is shaped by the Nordic “constitutional mindset”. Kirsten Sivesind (2013) adds to this observation in her cross-national study of Nordic curricula during a period when these were

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re-­designed to adapt to the international evidence-oriented discourse. While the Nordic professional semantics for schooling builds on theory and focuses on the purpose, aims, and content that frame teachers’ professional-practical deliberation in planning and preparation for teaching, the evidence-oriented discourse builds on a scientific methodology, aiming at providing evidence of students’ levels of achievement, in terms of knowledge, skills and general competencies (Sivesind 2013, p.  62). Sivesind finds that the transitions towards an evidence-oriented approach are not linear processes, and that the formal curriculum documents are characterized by merging semantics, notably at intermediate curricular levels of planning. At the overriding levels of purposes and aims, the curricula move from detailing purposes and content in the 1990s to specifying aims and skills in the 2000s, but without excluding content from being represented within curriculum aims (Sivesind 2013, p. 64). In this study, the ‘constitutional mindset’ of the Didaktik tradition is reflected in the overall approach: the research interest in the didactic purpose and aims of the school subject Danish; the theoretical and philosophical approach to the study; and the conceptualization of the school subject from a schooling perspective.

3  Bildung Rooted in the Enlightenment, Bildung relates to the transformative potential of education, the assumption that individuals can shape themselves and, in the process, contribute to wider social progress (Hamilton 1998, p. 80). In the long history of German Didaktik, Bildung serves as a cipher or a code that synthesizes into a consistently coherent whole everything happening within instruction (Künzli 2000). Elaborating on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s theory, Hopmann (2007, p. 115) states: “In Bildung, whatever is done or learned is done or learned to develop one’s own individuality, to unfold the capabilities of the I (cf. Humboldt, [1792] 2000). The purpose of teaching and schooling is in this perspective neither to transport knowledge from society to a learner (curriculum), nor a transpositioning of knowledge from science or other domains to the classroom, but rather the use of knowledge as a transformative tool of unfolding the learner’s individuality and sociability, in short: the Bildung of the learners by teaching”. Since Danish educational culture is basically inspired by the German tradition, Bildung (Danish: ‘dannelse’) has been an integrated and organizing key concept for centuries (Haue 2008), representing the basic idea that the purpose of schooling is to educate and form students who are able to rise above personal interests and take responsibility for the social whole. The Bildung tradition is, however, not a unified school of thought. There are many versions and interpretations of Bildung in the German and wider continental context, and even outside Europe (Autio 2017; Hopmann 2007). In the light of globalization and the reduced educational authority of state and school, Bildung has been a recurrent issue of discussion and re-interpretation among Danish educational scholars. In curricular documents, Bildung is still stated as a general aim of upper

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secondary educational programs, and in subject curricula, the specific Bildung contributions of the school subjects are thematized. The content and meaning of the concept have shifted historically, however, and competing notions such as competence and literacy have been suggested in the educational community. An early advance of the evidence-oriented, individualizing approach to education came to Denmark in the late 1990s with ideas of life-long learning and the notion of competence as an aim of disciplinarity, stressing students’ abilities to apply knowledge in a wider context than schooling. An ambitious upper-secondary reform in 2005 introduced competence goals in subject curricula, challenging the traditional, content-based conception of disciplinarity. The new curricula are, however, a case of merging semantics (cf. Sivesind above), since Bildung is sustained as a general purpose and lists of course matter are still a substantial part of curricula. These negotiations of semantics are, naturally, also ideological and cultural. For good or bad, they represent a globalizing force in Danish and Nordic educational development. They provide an opening for dialogue, but also a pressure for ‘anglification’ – that is, for translating and transforming local, national culture and language into what may be communicated into and culturally understood in English and the anglophone world. Globalization further changes the status of the nation-state, which has experienced a radical shift from a relatively hegemonic political actor to a local economic arena in an interdependent global economy (Autio 2006, p. 7). In the Danish context, according to philosopher Lars Henrik Schmidt (1999a), the welfare state has delegated its power to civil society (individual self-management) and the market (privatization), and hence no longer secures educational authority to the school. From protected, independent educational agents, representing a state-mandated Bildung project, schools have become providers of human capital for the economic competition of nation-states. Schmidt argues that to sustain the welfare society, schools need to focus on creating frames for individuals’ concurrent production of individuality and sociality, and, consequently, that the current conditions for Bildung practices are to shape frames for students’ self-Bildung towards the forming of communities. Schmidt’s so-called “un-traditional” contemporary conception of Bildung – an important reference-point for my study of subject Danish – is founded on the New-­ Humanistic Bildung project originated by Kant. According to Schmidt’s interpretation, Bildung is the forming of taste, uniting taste and science in the transgression of raw naturalness, as well as disciplinary narrow-mindedness (Schmidt 1999b I, p. 120). The Bildung of taste is the formation of judgement; viewed not as good taste, but rather, as the art of rejecting what is unacceptable, which includes the Bildung snobbery hiding in ‘good taste’ (Schmidt 1999a, p. 10f). Taste as metaphor ties Bildung to experience and aesthetics, i.e. sensory knowledge, and hence stresses that Bildung deals with the art of imagining, of creating images that constitute virtual realities (Schmidt 1999a, p. 11). Schmidt emphasizes the difference between the open and inquiring ‘un-traditional’ Bildung project and three current contemporary positions: the traditional way of life-Bildung, symbolized in the Danish expression ‘a home with a piano’; the ‘canon Bildung’, which is the school’s generalization

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of traditional Bildung, represented in the national literary canon;1 and, eventually, the market- and competition-oriented Bildung, which is Bildung turned into syllabus and education, as captured in the notion of ‘competence’. Schmidt, however, stresses that Bildung is best understood as opportunities of development and the forming of experience. Basically, it is the experience of powerlessness and of having to deal with this by looking for ‘otherness’ beyond oneself. Thus, the task of schooling is to ensure that students don’t experience an antithesis between the collective and the individual in their everyday experience.

4  Subject Danish Around the Turn of the Millennium The three-year upper secondary school (students aged 16–19) that provides the institutional frame of this study is an exam program completed by a combination of oral and written exams. The mandatory school-subject Danish runs through all three years. At the turn of the millennium, the 1990s had witnessed a surge of disciplinary-­ didactic creativity within the subject, mainly borne by the integration of process-­ oriented writing as a medium for students’ experiences with both language and literature. Although not directly invited in the curriculum, this integrative approach had developed within existing frames. The two general categories of the 1999 subject Danish curriculum were literature and language, and the predominant activities were text analysis and writing. The sections on literature included comprehensive historical requirements, covering literary periods from the Nordic sagas to modern times. The sections on language included grammar and functional aspects, but, particularly regarding writing, also elaborated on rhetorical, epistemological, and existential aspects. “Mass communication” figured in the curriculum, but as a sub-heading under Language. Thus, the curriculum generally maintained a traditionally established configuration of subject Danish. Although media texts had become part of the subject repertoire and language had gained more weight in the curriculum, literature had maintained its position as the predominant content.

5  A  Disciplinary-Didactic Conceptualization of School Subjects The conceptualization of school subjects developed here, and applied in the analysis of subject Danish, is inspired by Sigmund Ongstad’s theory of disciplinary didactics (Ongstad 2004, 2006). According to this theory, disciplinary didactics is the field for

1  A mandatory canon of fifteen authorships were introduced in upper secondary curricula in 2005. A parallel, but guiding, canon was introduced in lower secondary school.

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reflection and communication on subjects and other established fields of knowledge, linking didactics with subject theory and converting them into communicative practice. It activates the epistemological interests of didactics (Bildung) and the epistemological interest of the subjects (knowledge), and is driven by an independent epistemological interest (didactization). Didactization is a processual and contextualized scientific approach that covers processes of communication and reflection on subjects and fields of knowledge, rather than the subjects as such: “didactization becomes a discursive, semiotic or textual process, weaving a subject or a field of knowledge closer together with the meta-knowledge about the subject knowledge in new contexts under pressure from a changing society” (Ongstad 2006, p. 35 f., transl. EK). A consequence of the recontextualizing and communicative character of the disciplinary-didactic field is its historicity, i.e. its sensitivity to scientific and cultural changes. Therefore, readiness for development and change is an integrated aspect of disciplinary didactics (Krogh 2006; Ongstad 2004). Furthermore, the disciplinary-­didactic field is constituted theoretically by an ensemble of didactics, subject theory, and functional theories of language (communication theory, discourse theory, semiotics). This triadic construction mirrors the basic aspects of communication and meaning-making: the subject’s theoretical content and the didactic expression is interpreted and communicated in language practice. As conditions of change are an essential aspect of disciplinary didactics, investigation of school subjects needs to address respectively theoretical, cultural, and rhetorical practices; further, it needs to be sensitive to both the general complexity of school subjects and their powers to manage changeability. Figure 1 presents a disciplinary-didactic conceptualization of school subjects and key analytical concepts for their investigation. Three analytical concepts are brought to bear on the three practices: form of knowledge, genre, and discourse. There is no hierarchical relation between the three forms of practice; they are mutually related and can be conceived as aspects of a communicative triad. Researching as well as practising school subjects are processes of didactization, and, as argued above, these are discursive, semiotic or textual processes (Ongstad 2006). All three forms of practice will be inherent in disciplinary communication, even though one of them may be dominant. When a specific analytical interest puts one form of practice in focus, the other dimensions will be visible, but formed by the dominant perspective. The three forms of practice relate to different fields of knowledge, and also represent different conditions of change. As indicated in Fig. 1, the three practices call for different methodological approaches which need, however, to adhere to the overall disciplinary-didactic framework. In the following, they are presented in the contexts of the three practices. Viewed as a theoretical practice, the school subject relates to the scientific (‘academic’) knowledge fields that constitute the subject. The theoretical practice is a relatively stable dimension, and the rate of change is slow. The theoretical practice can be conceptualized as a form of knowledge. The form of knowledge of a subject will regulate the way of producing knowledge within the subject. Referring to Foucault’s (1972) notion of discourse as knowledge regimes, Lars Henrik Schmidt

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Theoretical practice Form of knowledge

Cultural practice Genre

Rhetorical practice Discourse

Fig. 1  A disciplinary-didactic model for the investigation of school subjects

(1999b I, p. 37 f.) identifies form of knowledge as a ritualized disciplinary practice referring to a specific field of knowledge. Departing from this definition, in the disciplinary-didactic model of school subjects, a form of knowledge is conceived as a theoretical practice that relates to a disciplinary field and is constitutive for the disciplinarity of this. It represents the inner set of rules of the subject and is put into practice in genres of teaching as well as in curricula. On these levels it will, however, be governed by shifting interpretations. Regarding the case of subject Danish around the millennium, the methodological approach and the findings of this part of the study are elaborated in a separate section, below. At this point, it suffices to mention a main finding, namely that the Bildung concept of subject Danish turned out to be an incoherent puzzle-picture. Viewed as a cultural practice, the school subject relates to cultural currents that influence students, teachers and classroom cultures. The rate of change of this dimension is faster than is the case for the theoretical practice, even though classroom practice has its strong traditions. The cultural practice is analysed as a system of didactic genres. The genre concept reaches beyond the focus on language and seizes on the multimodal communication in classrooms. Studying the cultural practice is studying the communicative pattern of didactic classroom genres which makes the subject recognizable for students (cf. Ongstad 2002b). Studying the didactic genres of subject Danish as a cultural practice invites ethnographic research. Since for time reasons, I had to refrain from empirical data collection when studying subject Danish at that time, I chose to conduct a comparative analysis of two recent reports on R&D projects in subject Danish. As mentioned above, the 1990s was a period of rich disciplinary-didactic activity inspired by writing research, and these two projects appeared representative of typical directions of developmental work. The analysis of the cultural practice in the two reports confirmed the puzzle-­ picture of the theoretical practice, showing two didactic genre patterns in which

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students’ writing was positioned quite differently. In the first project, writing was integrated with literature studies. The basic idea was the didactic project of ‘balancing voice and genre’. Students were to learn to position themselves in terms of both text interpretation and text writing. In a general perspective, students’ positioning themselves in relation to school genres was seen as the model of learning in Danish, and as the core of the Bildung project. In the second project, the aim of writing was genre competence. The project was to teach the students to write better and more functional texts, and several new didactic tools were developed, such as new types of tasks and a map of evaluation criteria. The context of the teaching of writing was seen not as the subject, but as preparation for the exam, as well as for future literacy challenges. Whereas this latter project did not challenge the curriculum puzzle-­ picture, the former project aimed at developing more integrative didactic genre patterns, and at connecting aesthetic and democratic Bildung ideals in the idea of cultural participation and production. This observation, it can be argued, documents that the cultural practice has a more rapid rate of change than the theoretical practice. Viewed as a rhetorical practice, the school subject relates to the level of educational and curricular policies. This is realized as the rhetoric of the subject in the professional discourse community of its teachers and, connected to this, in the direct political negotiations of curriculum change. This is the fastest changing aspect of subjects and educational programs, reflecting pressure for global competitiveness.2 The analytical concept brought to bear on the rhetorical practice was discourse, referring to Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992). In this approach, discourse is language understood as social practice, i.e. as socially and historically situated action, in dialogue with other facets of the social. As a rhetorical practice, subject Danish around the millennium was analyzed as an order of discourse in which contending discourses fought for the power to define the subject and influence curricular reforms. Studies of the journal published by the organization of teachers in Danish disclosed two contending discourses. The first tended to blame current didactic problems on students and politicians, activating a discourse of decline. The other discourse accepted these as didactic challenges, to be addressed professionally.

6  The Form of Knowledge of Subject Danish In Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) Michel Foucault developed two analytical strategies, an archaeological and a genealogical strategy. The archaeological strategy aims at bringing to light the acceptance-rules that regulate statements on the field of study – in this case, subject Danish around the millennium. To locate a relevant set of statements for analysis, I chose the curriculum in force at the time

2  Actually, since the original study we have witnessed two reforms of Danish upper-secondary education.

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(1999), which had recently been slightly adjusted but otherwise had been operating more than ten years. Since the adjustments mostly consisted in providing a preamble, stating purpose and aims which had until then not been made explicit in curricula, I found that this curriculum housed updated regulating statements on Danish. Statements bring four categories of phenomena to existence: domains of objects, possible subject positions, conceptual networks, and strategic contexts. The archaeological analysis is systematic and oriented towards disclosing dominating patterns of knowledge. As indicated above, this analysis brought to light a ‘puzzle-picture’ of Danish. The curricular subject was constructed as two parallel images and Bildung concepts which were invisible for each other. One image was dominated by receptive practices of literature studies and an aesthetic Bildung ideal, viewing students’ meeting with literary art as the Bildung aim of subject Danish, while the other was dominated by productive practices of language use and a democratic Bildung ideal where students’ active participation in deliberative language practices constitutes the overall aim. In the preamble, the language image appeared to dominate, but curricular regulations of content demanding substantial time spent on historical literature appeared to undermine this impression. The conceptions of Bildung based on, respectively, language and literature represent two ideals for the Bildung program of schooling: an Apollonian conception, where Bildung is enacted as a striving for form through becoming part of a cultural community shaped by the school and the subjects; and a Dionysian, more operative conception of Bildung, disruptive of form, where Bildung is enacted as the self-­ realization of the individual within shifting, intermediate communities (Krogh 2003). In the 1999 curriculum, a third, semiotic position can be glimpsed, where the basic activity of subject Danish is identified as “the interpretation of signs” (cp. Krogh 2003, p. 134 f.). This position indicates a potential which is not further elaborated in this curriculum, namely to integrate language and literature in an overall anthropological conception of culture connecting them on the level of interpretation and meaning-making. This glimpse of a cultural studies conception of the subject is the first step towards the inclusion of media as a perspective on the disciplinary practices of the subject. The genealogical analysis takes its point of departure in the archaeological findings and aims at deconstructing the traditional history of continuity, cutting it into pieces, and trying to find other patterns in these. For this analysis, I constructed an archive of historical and current curricula and programmatic articles on Danish. In pursuing the historical traditions of the puzzle-picture, I cut up the history of Danish as the century-old national Bildung subject, and found another, more or less forgotten rhetorical tradition dating back to the late 1700s. The earliest, rhetorical version of subject Danish focused on training students’ taste and style through the reading and imitation of contemporary and classical literature. The subject that still figures as the main historical reference for teachers and researchers of upper secondary Danish, is, however, the much more glorious construction initiated in 1903, when Latin and Greek were replaced by subject Danish as the most prominent Bildung agent of upper-secondary education. In the 1903 national, literary Bildung program, the core of subject Danish was the national language, which found its most eminent

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expression in canonical early eighteenth-century literature. Besides this, students were taught language history and grammar, and writing skills were trained through essays on general knowledge and moral issues. The 1903 nation-building ideal was unchallenged until the late 1960s. This was when the number of students attending upper and higher education exploded, and the thrust of mass education led to challenging these more élitist conceptions of subject Danish. In 1971, a radical new curriculum brought a long-term revival of the never realized ideals of the early rhetorical subject, transforming it into a new focus on students’ language, and especially on writing, in the wake of the breakdown of the nation-building conception. While writing was previously conceived as a disciplinarily peripheral training in language skills and grammar, after 1970 writing was developed as a disciplinary-­ didactic activity and a medium for Bildung processes, positioning students as disciplinary agents and writers of consequential texts. Genealogically, the L1 construction of language and literature has a humanistic didactic perspective, associating the subject with basic features in the project of human science. The two images of subject Danish found in the 1999 curriculum are related to a basic difference of meaning in the humanistic tradition, reaching back to the Enlightenment. In the humanistic tradition, the will to generalize human nature and the will to understand the exceptional character of human expression can be conceptualized as, respectively, a natural science and an artistic aspiration. While these were not separated in the humanistic project of the Renaissance, they were later cultivated separately in, respectively, the Enlightenment and Romanticism (Hastrup 1999, p. 7). According to anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup, the Renaissance double-view is maintained in the hermeneutic project since the core of humanistic sciences is an interpretation of something that makes sense, and this endeavour can be pursued on a general as well as specific level (Hastrup 1999, p.  25  f.). In Hermeneutics, the Renaissance discovery of perspective and its pursuit of the human meaning of phenomena are also maintained in studies of the nature of the phenomena. The two subject images of Danish take example from the humanism of, respectively, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and the scientific traditions that have grown out of these. In current university studies, where intending upper-secondary teachers of Danish study their discipline, the division of humanism appears in structuralist linguistic and hermeneutic literary scientific traditions, respectively, that have grown still more apart (Krogh 2003, p. 1673). How come, then, that these two hermeneutic traditions were kept together in the school subject? A possible explanation is that the hermeneutic project is maintained by the disciplinary-didactic project of the school subject Danish. The disciplinary-didactic Bildung notion integrates disciplinarity and didactics. From this perspective, it is acknowledged that there is always more going on in teaching than learning activities informed by academic knowledge, and that students’ Bildung projects will be both disciplinary and personal.

 This is still the case in 2020.

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Thus, reflection on perspective is a disciplinary-didactic interest in subject Danish. How to establish a perspective, how to express the perspective in language, and how to manifest it textually, are questions posed both when texts are studied in the classroom and when students produce texts themselves. When students pose them to their own texts, they are simultaneously disciplinary and Bildung questions. They concern students’ positionings in relation to genre and subject (cf. Ongstad 2002a) and involve production of identity, knowledge, and culture (Krogh 2003).

7  A Ritualized Disciplinarity: ‘Voice’ as Bildung Metaphor Is it possible to identify a disciplinary form of knowledge, a recognizable “ritualized disciplinarity”, that may explain the historical cohesion of the dyadic disciplinary construction of subject Danish? I hypothesize that the Bildung notion tied to the perspective can be captured as practices of dynamic tension between perspective and text, voice and genre. These tensions are enacted within the two general fields of disciplinary activities, namely literature engagement and language production. ‘Literature engagement’ is identical neither with literature reading – which is not necessarily a disciplinary activity  – nor with text analysis, which refers to the methodical dimension of literary studies. I do not intend to discuss what counts as text in subject Danish, since my argument here is to do with literature as producer of a certain form of activity. In upper-secondary subject Danish, literature engagement involves complex processes of analysis and interpretation. This makes literature engagement the model and point of orientation for other text practices. Thus, text practices in subject Danish are always potentially qualified as an interpretative activity at a literary level of complexity, involving critical meta-level reflections and discussions on texts and reading, as well as on perspectives of texts and perspectives of readers. Following the same logic, ‘language production’ primarily refers to students’ writing in subject Danish, even though oral and body language is clearly important in the classroom. Here, too, the argument is to do with writing as producer of a certain form of activity: textualization, or text production. In subject Danish, text production as a meaning-making activity is connected to writing since writing and written student texts are subjected to systematic teaching and, in that sense, also contribute to qualifying students’ oral language production. Thus, the capacity of writing to provide textual permanence to students’ language production makes writing a point of orientation for other productive activities. Writing practices in subject Danish potentially involve the kind of dynamic tensions between students’ striving to develop ‘owned voices’ (Ivanič 1998), in dynamic struggles with genre requirements and subject discourse. Naturally, interpretation is a disciplinary activity in other subject areas than Danish. A distinctive feature of subject Danish is, however, that there is a focus on interpretation as language processes. Positioning involves establishing a position to speak or write from, but also being positioned by the genre

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and the discourse that provides meaning and acceptability to the utterance (Bakhtin 1986; Ongstad 2002a). Following this argument, voice is an appropriate metaphor for the personal, disciplinary Bildung project in subject Danish and, as such, can be viewed as a concretization of the hermeneutic and disciplinary-didactic perspective. Voice is the recognizable personal medium providing sound and linguistic form to its communicational project in a particular social and referential context which poses the conditions for the utterance, but not for its personal form. A voice can be trained, it may be an inner or an outer voice, it is always carried by an intention, whether one of communicating or just one of expressing oneself, and it always talks into a social and textual world. Voice as a metaphor can be directed outwards, in democratic action. In the Danish language, there is a particular point here, since the Danish term for ‘vote’ is ‘stemme’, i.e. voice. Voice is realized and developed in classroom conversation as well as in more formally staged cultural productions of disciplinary presentations, creative experiments, and written work. ‘Voice’ may also capture inner action. Foucault (1983) describes the formation of inner voices in his studies of Greek stoics’ self-technological processes of reading and writing. The voices were formed as instruments for self-control and self-formation (Krogh 2003, 2012). A similar idea may be developed in literature-didactic practices, if literature is brought to function as productive inspiration (cf. Smidt 2018). In this case, the project would not be forming a voice to control passions but to experiment with form and, through this, with identity. Experimenting with form and style is a way of insisting on voicing a personal perspective. Lev Vygotsky and Gunther Kress provide theories of language and design that illustrate the space for Bildung within which subject Danish may act. Vygotsky conceived of language as a tool that represents culture and the social, but is also the individual’s tool for expressing perceptions, impulses, and experience. In language, we form and control both our own behaviour and the social contexts we are involved in. We appropriate culture but we also produce culture (Vygotsky 1986). In his social-semiotic theory of learning, Gunther Kress (1997) supplemented Vygotsky’s theory. Production of signs, he claims, are motivated by the interest that leads it. When talking and writing, we choose among the resources for expression at hand, and combine them to communicate what we intend to express. In this process, we transform and re-create the cultural resources of expression and make new meaning.

8  Bildung in Today’s Subject Danish The analysis of subject Danish presents an argument for the continued relevance of the dyadic subject construction (i.e. language/literature) as an interpretative and meaning-making disciplinary-didactic project. The Bildung concept that provides the relevance is tied to the notion of perspective, concretized in the metaphor of voice. At the core of students’ Bildung processes in subject Danish are demanding

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challenges of voicing and positioning in the field of tension between adolescent students’ need to develop an owned voice while adhering to and appropriating the cultural genres and discourses of the subject. Bildung struggles of this kind involve identity work as well as construction of knowledge and culture (cf. Jakobsen and Krogh 2019). Moving the gaze from subject Danish around the millennium to today’s upper secondary subject Danish, the recently reformed curriculum (2017) appears to confirm the explanatory force of these findings, taking an even further step towards an integrative, anthropological conception of the subject. The opening statement of the curriculum insists on the dyadic construction, and the integrative relation between the receptive and the productive aspects of the subject are stressed: “The core of the subject is Danish language and literature. Subject Danish deals with knowledge of and studies of Danish language texts in a national and global reality […] A distinctive feature is that the text analytical activities enter into close interaction with both the receptive and the productive dimensions of the subject” (UVM.dk, transl. EK). The growing categorial uncertainties of literature and language related to the advance of digital technology and new media is handled in the curriculum by way of creating a distinction between core and perspective. ‘Core’ addresses curricular matter and is found in the opening statement on language and literature, and later related to “texts”. ‘Perspective’ addresses overall didactic approaches to the matter. This innovation enables the introduction of ‘media’, next to language and literature, as perspectives: “The combination of literary, language, and media perspectives contribute to expanding students’ Bildung horizon, developing their creative and innovative abilities, and strengthening their ability to handle and relate critically to information” (UVM.dk 2018). And in a later, more concrete section on “Core matter”: “The core matter consists in Danish language texts, supplemented with Norwegian and Swedish language texts.4 The core matter is addressed in a literary, a language, and a media perspective, the estimated weighting of which is 2:1:1. The three perspectives on the core matter interact closely in teaching sessions” (UVM. dk, transl. EK). In the 2017 curriculum, however, the former puzzle-picture of different Bildung aims has been replaced with a figure of ‘merging semantics’ (Sivesind 2013) of, respectively, notions of Bildung and notions of competence or skills. The overall purpose of Bildung is stressed, at the same level, as the competence aim of study preparation: “Subject Danish simultaneously serves a Bildung and study preparation purpose”. ‘Voice’ is even, in a later section on didactic principles, explicitly established as an objective: “When working with students’ skills of expression, importance is attached partly to developing students’ personal voice through creative writing exercises, partly to students’ study preparatory competences, focusing on disciplinary skills of expression, orally, in writing, and in other forms”. Here we find a noteworthy integrative ambition connected to “skills of expression” which are 4  The Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) share a degree of vocabulary and grammar that makes it possible to communicate in our own languages. L1 curricula in all three countries ensure that (a modest amount of) time is spent on texts in the other two languages.

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associated with both verbal practices and “other forms”. Concerning ‘voice’, the figure of merging semantics reappears in the shape of “creative writing exercises” viz. “disciplinary skills of expression” where ‘voice’ is attached to “creative exercises” but not to disciplinary practices. Viewed as an act of didactization, the 2017 curriculum may be characterized as a venture at sustaining and advancing the established field of subject knowledge and practice by weaving this together with the meta-knowledge about this knowledge in new contexts under pressure from a changing society (cf. Ongstad 2006, p. 36). The meta-knowledge drawn upon derives from growing Danish and Nordic research on L1 subjects (Holmberg et al. 2019), reflecting pressures of change brought about by globalizing trends of digitalized media communication and knowledge competition within the field of literacy.

9  The Challenge of Global Import: Literacy and Bildung More recently, student literacy in a wide sense, including reading, writing, oral skills etc., has been strongly promoted in Nordic school systems. In the case of Denmark, in 2005 a comprehensive upper secondary program for the teaching of writing was introduced, describing written work as a common task across all subjects and a central element in students’ study competence (Krogh and Jakobsen 2019, p.  3  f.). The program reflects the double overall objective of Bildung and study competence of the reformed 2005 curricula and, not least, the distinctive updated Bildung ideals of this reform. Through interdisciplinary activities and courses, students are challenged to create connections between subjects while also understanding basic epistemological differences of subject knowledge constructions. Ideals of independent thinking are tied to students’ reflective engagement in the world as well as in their own learning and development. For subject Danish, however, the upper secondary writing program raised identity challenges. From the status of taking overall responsibility for students’ learning to write, the number of lessons allocated for teaching writing in Danish was significantly cut down in 2005, and subject Danish has had to re-invent itself to become one of a whole range of subjects contributing equally to students’ development of writing competence. Faced with the need to legitimate the relevance of this contribution to students as well as with the reduced time allocated for student writing, the practices of subject writing changed towards narrower and more formally restricted assignment genres, less integration with other disciplinary practices, and less creative experimenting. Hence, the Bildung potentials of writing became less accentuated as compared with the training of writing as a skill or a competence. In the global competition of knowledge societies, L1 subjects are faced with demands to document and defend their usefulness, and the history about the reduction of time and responsibility for the teaching of writing that hit subject Danish is just an example, however significant, that these demands currently compel educational communities to discuss and legitimate not only humanistic didactics, but also

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their disciplinary existence. Subject Danish’s engagement with the literacy agenda of the new writing program is highly ambivalent. It is a history about writing as a core disciplinary field that was lifted out of the L1 subject and re-constituted as a comprehensive and ambitious writing program across the subjects. Since the curricular aims of this program were primarily connected to study competence, the Bildung potentials which were developed in the integrated writing project in subject Danish, now represents a challenge for the didactics of Danish – and probably for the teaching of writing across subjects too (cf. Krogh 2012). The merging semantics of the 2017 curriculum may be viewed in this light. At the level of terminology, literacy represents a challenge in the Nordic context since the term does not have an equivalent in Danish and other Nordic languages. During the past decade, however, the English term (‘literacy’) has been widely adopted by the Nordic educational community, concurrent with globalization and the salience of the concept in global agents like UN and the OECD, but also inspired by critical anglophone research such as New Literacy Studies. Whereas the term has not yet become part of subject Danish curricula, literacy has become a new paradigmatic concept in research and education in Danish, as well as in the wider Nordic context, offering a position capable of integrating writing, text, and wider semiotic practices, and also being viewed as potentially a new Bildung concept for the L1 subject that may replace traditional literary concepts of Bildung (cf. Berge 2006; Penne 2012; Smidt 2018) by stressing language and communication as the dimension of consequence of the L1 subject. Viewed as an example of anglification, there is, however, a need to discuss issues at stake when importing an apparently fresh, new concept and adopting it as a Bildung concept. There is a need to take into account the controversies of the cultural history of literacy as reflected in critical anglophone literacy research (e.g. Gee 2012; Street 2003; Janks 2009), as well as the differences between OECD’s human capital approach (Rychen and Salganik 2000) and UNESCO’s human rights approach (UNESCO 2003). Further, the calls to conceptualize literacy as a new Bildung notion for the L1 subject may be disputed in the light of the particular conception of Bildung suggested by Schmidt (1999b), who argues that Bildung processes derive from an experience of powerlessness, creating a need for ‘what is not me’, i.e. the social in the shape of other people, the cultural and intellectual in the shape of the textual world, and the existential in the shape of the unknown parts of ourselves. Literacy, on the other hand, is associated with the opposite movement of empowerment through developing the meta-language of schooling (cf. Penne 2012). Further, while literacy indicates individual powers, Bildung indicates the double process of cultural socialization and individuation towards taking responsibility for social progress. From a Bildung perspective, literacy as a rich and diverse textual, linguistic, and semiotic empowerment is a core educational aim of L1 subjects  – and a prerequisite of Bildung processes.

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10  Concluding Remarks This chapter’s main claim is that subject Danish as L1 education holds specific potential for students’ educational, cultural, and personal development, and that this may be best captured by the notion of Bildung. This claim is substantiated by a study of the upper-secondary subject Danish, conceptualized as mutually connected theoretical, cultural, and rhetorical practices. The study concludes that the dyadic, disciplinary-didactic construction of subject Danish (language/literature) actualizes Bildung as a hermeneutic project, at the core of which is perspective-taking, metaphorically voice. The quest of the chapter was further to test these findings against contemporary global issues as incarnated in the strengthened position of literacy. Curricular developments of subject Danish document that study competence has been added to Bildung in statements of overall purpose and aim, hence merging the semantics of didactics and the global educational discourse that highlights competence. In curricula, the writing (literacy) program is connected to study competence. While the term ‘literacy’ has not yet gained curricular status in Denmark, the notion is widely used in the Danish and Nordic educational community, and it is even suggested that literacy is a Bildung aim of the L1 subject (Penne 2012; Smidt 2018). I argue, however, that literacy – while being an important aim of L1 education – must be conceived in terms of empowerment and, as such, is a prerequisite of Bildung. There is obviously a need to discuss the conceptual position of literacy, not only in the Danish and Nordic context, but also internationally. In the Australian context, the national curriculum from 2011 organized the English curriculum into the strands of language, literature, and literacy. As Green (2018) indicates, the policy documents provide little rationale for this conceptualization of English, and hence Green sets out to develop an integrated framework of the disciplinary knowledge of subject English. When the international network of L1 scholars, ARLE (Association for Research in L1 Education) states as its subfields “Languages, Literatures, and Literacies”, it is notable that these subfields are presented in the plural. While the three categories indicate awareness of literacy as a new figure in the global disciplinary field, the plural categories signify the range of national and cultural diversity concerning both single fields and their interrelations. The concluding argument of this chapter, then, is that the conceptualization of Bildung developed here may contribute to the challenges of integrating literacy in L1 subjects by providing an argument for the advancement of specific L1 disciplinary-didactic aims and practices of students’ literacy development.

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Kress, G. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. London/New York: Routledge. Krogh, E. (2003). Et fag i moderniteten. Danskfagets didaktiske diskurser [Subject Danish in modernity. The didactic discourses of Danish]. Odense: The Faculty of the Humanities. University of Southern Denmark. Krogh, E. (2006). Danskfaget i moderniteten [Subject Danish in modernity]. In S. Ongstad (Ed.), Fag og didaktikk i lærerutdanning: Kunnskap i grenseland [Subjects and didactics in teacher education: Knowledge in borderland] (pp. 125–145). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Krogh, E. (2012). Literacy og stemme [Literacy and voice]. In S. Ongstad (Ed.), Nordisk morsmålsdidaktikk. Forskning, felt og fag [Nordic mother tongue didactics. Research, field, and subject] (pp. 260–289). Oslo: Novus. Krogh, E., & Jakobsen, K.  S. (2019). Introduction. In E.  Krogh & K.  S. Jakobsen (Eds.), Understanding young people’s writing development: Identity, disciplinarity, and education (pp. 1–10). London/New York: Routledge. Künzli, R. (2000). German Didaktik: Models of re-presentation, of intercourse, and of experience. In I. Westbury, S. Hopmann, & K. Riquarts (Eds.), Teaching as a reflective practice. The German didaktik tradition (pp. 41–54). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Ongstad, S. (2002a). Positioning early Norwegian research on writing. Written Communication, 19/3, 345–381. https://doi.org/10.1177/074108802237749. Ongstad, S. (2002b). Genres – From static, closed, extrinsic, verbal dyads to dynamic, open, intrinsic semiotic triads. In R. Coe (Ed.), The rhetoric and ideology of genre: Strategies for stability and change (pp. 297–320). Cresskill: Hampton Press. Ongstad, S. (2004). Språk, kommunikasjon og didaktikk: Norsk som flerfaglig og fagdidaktisk ressurs [Language, communication, and didactics: Norwegian as an interdisciplinary and disciplinary-­didactic resource]. Oslo: Fagbokforlaget. Ongstad, S. (2006). Fag i endring. Om didaktisering af kunnskap. [Subjects in change. On didactization of knowledge]. In S. Ongstad (Ed.), Fag og didaktikk i lærerutdanning: Kunnskap i grenseland [Subjects and didactics in teacher education: Knowledge in borderland] (pp. 19–57). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Penne, S. (2012). Elevorientering i et literacy-perspektiv. Morsmålsdidaktiske refleksjoner med utgangspunkt i den nordiske skolen [Student orientation in a literacy-perspective. Mother tongue didactic reflections departing in the Nordic school]. In S.  Ongstad (Ed.), Nordisk morsmålsdidaktikk. Forskning, felt og fag [Nordic mother tongue didactics. Research, field, and subject] (pp. 21–46). Oslo: Novus. Rychen, D. S., & Salganik, L. H. (2000). Definition and selection of key competencies. Fourth General Assembly of the OECD Education Indicators Programme. In The INESCompendium. http://www.edu.u-szeged.hu/~csapo/publ/OECD_GA4.pdf#page=69. Accessed 15 June 2019. Sawyer, W., & van de Ven, P.-H. (2006). Starting points: Paradigms in mother tongue education. L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 7(1), 5–20. Schmidt, L. -H. (1999a). Dannelse på ny – om det socialanalytiske perspektiv på velfærdssamfundets dannelsesnormer [Bildung anew – About the social-analytical perspective on the Bildung norms of the welfare society]. Dansk Pædagogisk Tidsskrift, 1, 32–45. Schmidt, L.-H. (1999b). Diagnosis I–III. København: Danmarks Pædagogiske Institut. Scholes, R. (1998). The rise and fall of English: Reconstructing English as a discipline. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Seel, N.  M., & Zierer, K. (2012). General didactics and instructional design. In Jahrbuch für Allgemeine Didaktik 2012. Thementeil: International perspectives on the German didactics tradition (pp. 77–107). Hohengehren: Schneider Verlag. Sivesind, K. (2013). Mixed images and merging semantics in European curricula. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 45(1), 52–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2012.757807. Smidt, J. (2018). Norskfaget mellom fortid og framtid: Scene og offentlighed [Subject Norwegian between past and future: Scene and public]. Oslo: Fagbokforlaget. Street, B. (2003). What’s “new” in new literacy studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5(2), 77–91.

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UNESCO. (2003). Literacy. A UNESCO perspective. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/ pf0000131817. Accessed 15 June 2019. UVM.dk. (2018). Four national upper secondary programmes. https://eng.uvm.dk/upper-secondary-education/national-upper-secondary-education-programmes. Accessed 12 Jan 2020. Van de Ven, P.-H. (2007). Understanding mother tongue education from a historical(−comparative) perspective. In W. Herrlitz, S. Ongstad, & P.-H. Van de Ven (Eds.), Research on mother tongue education in a comparative international perspective (pp. 227–250). Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi. Vollmer, H.  J. (2014). Fachdidaktik and the development of a generalised subject didactics in Germany. Éducation et Didactique, 8(7), 24–34. https://doi.org/10.4000/ educationdidactique.1861. Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and language. Translation and revision A.  Kozulin. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Young, M. (2013). Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: A knowledge-based approach. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 45(2), 101–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2013.764505. Ellen Krogh  is Emeritus Professor in subject Danish at the University of Southern Denmark. Her publication record is within L1 education, writing in school subjects, and disciplinary didactics, with a methodological focus on longitudinal ethnography. Her most recent publications are Understanding Young People’s Writing Development (Krogh & Jakobsen, 2019), and Didaktik and Curriculum in Ongoing Dialogue (Krogh, Qvortrup & Graf, 2021).

Between Grammar and Communication: Teaching L1 in the Czech Republic and England Stanislav Štěpáník

Abstract  Like others in this book, this chapter deals with the basic question of What is the role of L1 teaching in the global era? In many parts of the world, L1 teaching has evolved from Classics, i.e. from a common base. Even though the divergent and turbulent development of society in the twentieth and twenty-first century has brought various paradigms for looking at L1 instruction, and despite the fact that the various national L1 teaching models have come up with various solutions, they all have certain problems in common. The chapter elaborates on the topic of the main aims of teaching L1 (in a narrower sense, grammar or knowledge about language) in the era of globalisation, extremely fast technological development and altering communication patterns. Using examples, a traditionally grammar-based approach to teaching Czech (and to a large extent also Slovak, Polish and Hungarian) is compared with a skills-based approach to teaching English (in England and other English-speaking countries). The comparison presents the historical (political, linguistic, didactic, etc.) milestones on the path to the current situation where the grammar-based systems are looking for functionality and communicatively-­oriented solutions, and the skills-based systems have, to a smaller or larger extent, decided to implement more grammar teaching. What are the underlying reasons and policies? As these cases show, and as is obvious from other chapters in this book, this problem is highly topical not only in Central Europe and the English-speaking world, but also elsewhere. Keywords  Grammar · Communication · Czech · English · Literacy

S. Štěpáník (*) Faculty of Education, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Green, P.-O. Erixon (eds.), Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era, Educational Linguistics 48, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7_9

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1  Introduction The socio-cultural reality we live in is altering dynamically, which means that L1 education in the twenty-first-century school finds itself in a new and rather turbulent context and is facing quite a number of challenges, which have been unfamiliar to it so far. In this respect, the content of L1 education calls for reflection, and it is necessary to consider what the character of L1 education for life in the new times should be. In this chapter, I will focus on the issue of the position and character of teaching knowledge about language (or, in a narrower sense, grammar),1 and, as such, of L1 education in general. I approach this topic, which has been thoroughly discussed in many countries around the world, from a Central European perspective. My views are rooted in Czech language didactics,2 but comprise also the picture in Slovak or Polish didactics, as the L1 didactics in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland have a lot in common (Pieniążek and Štěpáník 2016; Štěpáník et al. 2019b). I have chosen teaching English in England and its development for a contrastive viewpoint.

2  The Fundaments of the Czech Context Regarding the account which follows, three factors about the Czech context need to be understood: 1. The single subject Czech Language and Literature has traditionally been divided into three parts: mluvnice (grammar; which comprises learning about the language system), sloh (literally translates as composition; which comprises the development of communication skills), and literatura (literature). These components traditionally appear in school timetables as separate classes and also have separate textbooks (or parts in the textbooks), and despite theoretical efforts to

1  In linguistics, grammar is usually defined as the study of syntax and morphology (comp. Quirk et al. 1972, p. 11). In the Czech context, the term mluvnice (grammar) can comprise not only syntax and morphology, but also spelling, lexicology or phonetics (Havránek and Jedlička 1981). In school, the term is understood even wider and might include also e.g. semantics, stylistics, historical linguistics or pragmatics. That is also what teaching L1 (grammar – mluvnice) comprises in Czech school and why the terms grammar and knowledge about language  – as far as teaching Czech is concerned – can actually be used synonymously (for the English context, comp. Myhill 2005). This means that if, for school purposes, we accept the term knowledge about language as a synonym of grammar, grammar (in the sense of its use in school) covers both langue and parole disciplines, both competence and performance. With respect to tradition and for clarity, I mostly remain with the traditional label grammar throughout the chapter, which for the purpose of this study I consider neutral. 2  The term didactics (didaktika) is used in European continental English. I use it as an equivalent to the terms theory of instruction/instructional science or curriculum theory or studies; for more on the notion of didactics, see Green & Kroghʼs chapter in this book.

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implement the communicative paradigm (Čechová 1985, 1998; Čechová and Styblík 1998; Svobodová 2003; Štěpáník 2016, 2020; in complex Šmejkalová 2010; Štěpáník et  al. 2019b), they are not intertwined, even though they fall under one name. Also in theory, language didactics and literature didactics represent two separate scientific disciplines (comp. Stuchlíková et al. 2015). In contrast, English has always been understood as an integrated subject (English Language Arts). 2. The main source of L1 teaching in the Czech Republic has been linguistics (or language/linguistic sciences).3 Throughout the development of Czech didactics, linguistics played a vital role. Leading linguists were involved in educational topics, and published textbooks and didactic monographs. We can call linguistics (or language sciences) the mother discipline of Czech language instruction (Čechová 1982; Šmejkalová 2010). On the contrary, in English, many other academic disciplines serve as sources for its teaching (e.g. media studies, theatre studies, cultural studies etc.). 3. Czech teachers at all school levels need to possess a Master’s degree in teaching, which is obtained only at university. The courses that future teachers of Czech language and literature take focus on the different layers of the language system (phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicology, pragmatics, etc.), the history and the theory of Czech and foreign literature, and language and literature didactics. Conversely, to become an English teacher, a bachelor’s degree is sufficient. One can take various undergraduate paths – not only English Language or English Literature, but also such as Media Studies or even Theatre Studies, etc. In this chapter, I am focusing exclusively on what falls into the category of language or communication education (see above); I do not analyse literature education and whatever could be associated with the subject-area. Generally, I am focusing on a certain aspect of teaching both Czech and English (that is – teaching grammar and communication), rather than on the whole picture of the subjects.

3  How to Understand Grammar in School? Historically, in L1 teaching models of various languages all around the world, we have seen periods which favoured grammar (teaching about the language system) in L1 teaching, but also periods which rejected grammar altogether. The movement between these two poles has been given by several factors:

3  By linguistics, I mean the scientific study of language (also called linguistic or language science(s); comp. Crystal 2008, p. 283; Denham and Lobeck 2013, p. 18).

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(a) the relation between language and literature as the components of the school subject (in this study I focus only on the language and communication component), (b) the relation between language (langue) and communication (parole), which is also reflected in linguistic research, (c) the relation between linguistics (or other mother disciplines) and the school subject, (d) the relation between linguistics (or other mother disciplines) and educational sciences, (e) and, most importantly, the relation between knowledge and skill (competency /literacy)4 and the designation of teaching aims accordingly. Czech is an inflective language with very rich morphology and relatively flexible word order. Czech declension and conjugation are very complex (there are seven nominal cases, nouns express gender, and verbs carry specific grammatical categories like aspect; e.g. a single Czech noun can have 14 different forms depending on the case and number). English, on the other hand, lost its inflectional morphology and relative free word order during its development, and represents an example of a mostly analytic language, with little inflection and fairly fixed SVO5 word order. Grammatical categories are mostly expressed by auxiliary verbs and changes in the word order. This necessarily impacts the way that the languages are taught. The primary issue in both cases is the same, however: the selection of the subject matter and the manner of conveying it to the pupils – i.e. what to teach, how to teach it, and what for (Štěpáník et al. 2020). Traditionally, Czech language didactics recognizes three aims of L1 teaching: (a) the communication aim (developing pupilsʼ ability to use language effectively), (b) the cognitive aim (developing pupilsʼ cognition and their knowledge about language), and (c) the formative aim (developing pupilsʼ positive attitudes towards language; Čechová and Styblík 1998, p. 10). In compliance with the communicative orientation in L1 didactics, one of the crucial roles of L1 instruction in school – among several others  – is forming a communicatively competent individual, i.e. somebody who is able to choose from the language system such language means that best serve his/her communication intention and are adequate to the communication situation, and at the same time somebody who understands the communication intentions hidden in the words of others (comp. Štěpáník 2020). Such knowledge allows the speaker not only to use language choices effectively, consciously, deliberately, but also allows him/her to reflect upon his/her use and explain his/her choices (comp. Štěpáník and Slavík 2017), and understand the use of language of others. As such, teaching grammar might be defined as the systematic discussion of language in use (DES 1989, p. 78). This includes: the changes in language to suit form, audience and purpose; the different effects which can be achieved in speech 4  By all these terms I mean communication competency/developed communication skills/functional literacy in language. Throughout the text, I mostly stay with the term communication skills. 5  subject – verb – object

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and writing; the reasons why some language structures are ambiguous or misleading; the study of elements larger than sentences; or the introduction of specialist terminology (metalanguage – note S. Š.) in context, for a purpose (Lodge and Evans 1995, p. 106). One of the causes of problems in L1 teaching as far as grammar is concerned is understanding L1 field didactics only as an applied linguistic discipline. Such thinking about L1 didactics ties up its potential to deal with problems of creating the learning environment and the content of teaching with its own specific approaches, for such L1 didactics handles the creation of the learning environment with the methodology of linguistics (Štěpáník 2019a, see also Milian 2014, s. 49f.); the school subject is then “authorised and ratified by (academic) disciplines” (Green 2018, p.  243). As a consequence, that creates tension between the needs of the pupils and those of the scientific field, i.e. linguistics (language sciences). When grammar is brought to school, it attracts different notions and aims than it has in modern linguistics (comp. Myhill 2005; Smith et al. 2006, p. 263; Bernsteinʼs principle of recontextualisation  – comp. Clark 2001, p.  14f.). Under the influence of linguistic methodology, it is often reduced into the form of ‘small linguistics’, which follows knowledge aims rather than developing communication competency. As far as L1 teaching aims are concerned, linguistics has a “blind spot” (Štěpáník 2019a). If this blind spot is not overcome by L1 didactics, it enables the separation of teaching grammar and developing pupils’ communication skills. From the character of the relation between the pupilsʼ and scientific perspective in transdisciplinary didactics (Slavík et al. 2017), this tension cannot be solved by one of the perspectives outweighing the other (comp. Štěpáník 2019b) – which is happening in teaching grammar in both the Czech Republic and England.6 This is the source of the conflict between the focus on mastering grammar (which might take on the form of traditional school grammar) or developing communication skills (which might result in eliminating grammar). For L1 instruction, language and linguistics represents the cultural environment and the content of teaching comes into existence from the mutual interaction of pupils and teachers in the context of this environment (comp. Slavík et al. 2017, p. 131). Knowledge of grammar – if used properly – gives teachers, and consequently their pupils, a more elaborated insight into how language works and what possibilities it provides for its users (comp. e.g. Denham and Lobeck 2009, or Giovanelli and Clayton 2016). As a result, teachers understanding the value of such knowledge can form a richer and more cognitively challenging environment for their pupils. Only

6  Giovanelli (2015, pp. 1–2) captures it fittingly: “Traditionally in English schools, grammar teaching has been dominated by either formalist approaches […], or by functional ones […]. These have brought their own theoretical and, at times, political agendas with them: formal approaches tend to concentrate on language as a system of rules, and notions of correctness and standards; functional approaches have emphasised the importance of language as a social event, and associated notions of appropriateness and diversity. In most cases, each approach has largely ignored the concerns of the other; in the few cases where they have been brought together, it has been without any real coherence.”

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pedagogical knowledge without substance rooted in content knowledge does not offer such an operational field. Deep knowledge in the field is one of the qualities of an expert teacher (comp. Carter 1982; Giovanelli 2016; Goodwyn 2011; Myhill et al. 2012; Vašutová 2007). The problem is that – as various studies of school practices show – in school, grammar is often seen as something abstract, formally descriptive, or even prescriptive and theoretical, and is presented to pupils accordingly, carrying purely knowledge aims. Such grammar teaching becomes a mechanical formal training in labelling, identifying, underlining, naming, classifying, etc. This formal-­grammatical description of language phenomena and grammar rules can be labelled as traditional school grammar (TSG – comp. Weaver 1996, or Myhill 2005).7 The reaction to this might be weakening the knowledge component. In both Czech and English instruction there have been periods when grammar was supposed to disappear from school (in English it was overwhelmed by other elements – comp. e.g. Giovanelli 2015, p. 9–24, while in Czech it was believed that communication skills could be developed without any knowledge about language whatsoever  – the so-called a-grammatical movement). A good deal of the latest research has shown positive effects of explicit grammar teaching on the development of pupils’ communication skills (e.g. Boivin 2018; Derewianka and Jones 2010; Fearn and Farnan 2007; Fogel and Ehri 2000; Fontich and García-Folgado 2018; Jones et al. 2013; Myhill 2005, 2016, 2018; Myhill et al. 2011, 2012; Štěpáník and Chvál 2016). This can be interpreted as indicating that, in order to gain cultivated language awareness (and use language more effectively both in reception and production), one needs to master some special skills and knowledge. In school, this is done through explicit grammar teaching. However, the effect of teaching grammar depends on how grammatical subject matter is didactically transformed (comp. e.g. Andrews et  al. 2006; Locke 2010; Myhill 2018; Štěpáník et al. 2019a; Weaver 1996; Wyse 2001, etc.). Effective and research-verified teaching strategies are based on constructivist principles, and as such they put great emphasis on pupils’ activity and their communication needs. They are highly text-centred and embed grammar knowledge into a communicative-­ functional framework. The strategies are rooted in pupils’ preconceptions and not focused solely on analysis, but rather, on production as well (for evidence see the sources above). This is in compliance with developments in linguistics and the pragmatic-­communicative shift at the turn of the 1960s and 70s, which meant that

7  Not only has no study so far shown any positive effect of such approaches to grammar teaching (Andrews et al. 2006; Graham and Perin 2007; Hillocks and Smith 1991; Locke 2010; Wyse 2001); some experts even consider it harmful – Braddock et al. (1963, s. 37–38). TSG is not only an inadequate description of the way how language works (comp. e.g. Battistella 1999), but more importantly is torn from the pupils’ communication needs, their understanding of language and their thinking about language (comp. Hájková 2015), and as such its purpose remains unclear both to the pupils (e.g. Hillocks and Smith 2003; Macauley 1947; Pavelková 2013; Rysová 2005/2006), and also – sometimes, and somewhat paradoxically – to the teachers (Štěpáník and Šmejkalová 2017).

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L1 didactics around the world have absorbed the communicative-semantic-­functional paradigm as the basic principle of all further progress in language education. Nevertheless, also in L1 instruction we witness a chronic division between educational research and theory and educational practice in schools: e.g. in Poland (e.g. Szymańska 2014, 2016; Nocoń 2018), in Slovakia (e.g. Pokrivčáková and Pokrivčák 2016), in Hungary (e.g. Sólyom et al. 2016), in the Netherlands (e.g. Van Rijt and Coppen 2017), in the English-speaking countries (e.g. Goodwyn 2011; Locke 2010; Myhill 2005), in Quebec or the French part of Switzerland (Boivin 2018); for the wider Central European context comp. Pieniążek and Štěpáník (2016) or Štěpáník et al. (2019a). The gap is observable also in L1 teaching in the Czech Republic and England.

4  The Story of Czech and English8 In this chapter, I use teaching Czech in the Czech Republic9 and teaching English in England, respectively, as representatives of the grammar wars10 and the oscillation between the poles outlined above. The models of their teaching within the educational systems in their countries represent two rather different approaches, even though they have the same roots, and lately – as we will see – their positions are slightly converging. The aim of this analysis is to compare and contrast the paths of teaching Czech and English, and to clarify the position of teaching grammar in relation to developing pupils’ communication skills, from both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective and in relation to the English and Czech systems. In the history of teaching both languages, the place of grammar has always been a central concern. In my analysis, I focus mainly on the modern history of teaching Czech and 8  My ambition is not to  give a  comprehensive elaboration of  the  history of  teaching Czech and English (one can find a complex scrutiny in, for example, Jelínek 1972; Šmejkalová 2010, 2015; Štěpáník et al. 2019b; Clark 2005; Mathieson 1975; Michael 1987; Palmer 1965; Shayer 1972, etc.). I  want to  focus on  those milestones which are somehow interesting or important for teaching Czech and English grammar, respectively, and in this respect which connect or divide the paths of teaching these two languages. 9  What today is the Czech Republic used to be part of the Austrian (Austro-Hungarian) Empire (until 1918), and later Czechoslovakia (with an interruption from 1939 to 1945 until 1993). In this chapter, I always refer to the historical Czech lands within these states with the country’s current name, and elaborate only on Czech (despite sharing a lot in common with Slovak, teaching Slovak is not completely identical with teaching Czech – comp. Pieniążek and Štěpáník 2016; Štěpáník et al. 2019a). Unlike in England, the continuity of the development of teaching at Czech schools was interrupted several times as the historical epochs in Central Europe shifted its development significantly – from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a republic (Czechoslovakia founded on 28th October 1918), over a Nazi and later Communist dictatorship, to the postmodern liberal society of today. The development of England was more fluent, and unlike the Czechs, who spent more than a half of the twentieth century under some kind of dictatorship, England’s twentieth century grew in democracy. 10  By this metaphor, I refer to Locke et al.ʼs book Beyond the Grammar Wars (Locke 2010).

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English (i.e. twentieth and twenty-first centuries), recognizing that their teaching has much deeper roots.11

5  The Roots: Classics Grammar was traditionally present as part of the trivium; “language teaching and the study of grammar were virtually synonymous” (Rutherford and Smith 1988, p. 9). Based on ancient origins, the study of grammar did not differentiate it from philosophy and logic. The spoken word was assigned to rhetoric, a separate discipline. Here we can find the roots of the tradition of prescriptive grammar which dominated both English and Czech language study until the distinction between prescription and description was recognised. Moreover, the roots of what later became the school subjects Czech and English can be found in Classics, i.e. the study of classical languages of Latin and Greek (Šmejkalová 2010; Palmer 1965). These were taught at both Czech and English schools as a major subject until around World War II or shortly after. With the decrease of their teaching in what was then Czechoslovakia, a claim to transfer the formal aspects of language education from Classics into L1 teaching occurred. Even though there were arguments against the formal-grammatical aim of teaching Czech (as in Classics), the claim was gradually accepted and implemented (Šmejkalová 2010, p. 73). The reason behind this was not only tradition, but also the earlier assumption that progress in speaking and writing can be reached through learning Latin and/or Greek, especially through translations of Latin and Greek texts (Šmejkalová 2010, p. 73). As such, language education was seen as the centre of all education. Consequently, the amount of traditional grammar teaching in Czech classes increased. This was in accordance with the fundamentals of teaching Czech that we find further back in history: the theories of traditional grammarians who based their opinions on Humboldt’s theory of the relationship between speech and language (comp. Schneuwly and Vollmer 2018). One of the most influential figures was Karl Ferdinand Becker (1775–1849), who advocated the logic-grammatical approach to language teaching, stressing parsing and grammar analyses (Jelínek 1972, p. 62). As the foundation for his theory, he took the relation between cognition and language and combined the language and logical categories together – as a result, according to Becker, grammar teaching serves as the basis of teaching logic, and vice versa; language elements should be taught according to the rules of logic. In Becker’s view, grammar was supposed to be taught as “popular logic” (ibid., 102).12 In this  The beginnings of teaching Czech as L1 in the Czech lands go back into the thirteenth century (Svobodová 2003, p. 13), while English as a subject has been taught since at least medieval times (Michael 1987). 12  The first reaction to this approach came in the early nineteenth century with the Natural Method and the Direct Method, which later, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, resulted 11

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respect, adopting Latinate grammar into teaching Czech made perfect sense. Even though from today’s perspective the described theories are groundless, Becker and his followers established a long-lasting tradition of language instruction that still prevails, and indeed it has been so influential that schools have been working in it for decades (comp. Šmejkalová and Štěpáník 2016; Štěpáník, 2020). In England, the role of Classics was understood similarly as in Czech schools (comp. Palmer 1965). However, the first major official report on teaching English (The Teaching of English in Secondary Schools; Board of Education 1910) defined the basic principles of curricular policy for English such that English should be studied as a living language without too much attention to grammar, with surface errors in writing seen as less important than failings of style and structure (Protherough and King 1995, p. 7–8).13 Drawing on methods used in teaching Latin and Greek, at the beginning of the 1920s, Newbolt’s committee contemplated that “formal grammar and philology should be recognised as scientific studies, and kept apart (so far as that is possible) from the lessons in which English is treated as an art, a means of creative expression, a record of human experience” (Newbolt Report; Board of Education 1921, p.  11). While Newbolt acknowledges the value of Classics, at the same time the Report argues that English is the language with which every Englishman “must necessarily be familiar” (ibid., p.  13). The committee rejected lessons in Latinate grammar, accordingly, and advocated for some kind of functional grammar related to children’s speech. As a result, English becomes an emancipated autonomous subject, gradually with a very wide sphere of interest. As Mittins (1959, cited in Hudson and Walmsley 2005, p. 605) points out, by the 1960s there was scarcely a subject in the curriculum with a broader range of activities going on under its name than English. The view of grammar as being variously redundant, too difficult, useless, or unpopular, was gradually getting stronger; instead, literature was taking over (comp. Halliday 1967/2007). The comprehensivization of schools in the UK during the 1960s and 70s made English teachers re-assess the subject content and subject aims. Decontextualized grammar and comprehension exercises, along with certain kind of formal and highly artificial essay-writing, disappeared for good (Davies 1996, p. 3). However, the process went so far that grammar was gradually abandoned and, by the end of the 1960s, English grammar had almost disappeared from school altogether (comp. Hudson and Walmsley 2005; Jeffcoate 1992, p. 41). To sum up: already in its beginnings, we can see the different approach to modelling the subject of L1 in Czechoslovakia and in England. While Czech is established

into the so-called a-grammatical movement (Jelínek 1972, p. 153f.), which rejected teaching grammar. Its biggest proponent was Antonín Janů (1852–1899) who advocated against grammar and promoted language teaching based on speaking exercises (mluvní cviky) that, through drill and mechanical conditioning, were supposed to develop the sense for speaking (mluvní cit). Later, Janů’s theories were rejected as unsystematic and unsubstantiated because he decided to dispose of grammar altogether, without asking if perhaps a different kind of teaching grammar (at least sufficient to the pupils’ age) would be useful. 13  Except for other aspects such as that literature and composition are “organically interrelated”.

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as a more academic discipline focusing on knowledge aims, English is driven towards use in various modes  – to functional as opposed to formal categories (Hudson and Walmsley 2005, p. 601).14

5.1  The Role of Linguistics in Czech A crucial factor in forming the overall L1 teaching and learning environment is its connection to the mother field, which, in the case of Czech, is linguistics. Unlike in England, where until WWII not much linguistic research was being conducted and grammars were published predominantly for school usage (Hudson and Walmsley 2005, p. 597), the 1920s and 30s were a period when Czech linguistics thrived: the Prague Linguistic Circle (founded in 1926; sometimes referred to as the Prague School) was one of three main structuralist schools of pre-war linguistics. This group of linguists, philologists and literary critics promulgated their theses in a paper submitted to the First Congress of Slavists in 1929, which included a section on teaching Czech as well. In the Theses (Vachek 1970, p. 60–63), they stressed that it is necessary to lead the pupils towards practical use of the language in accordance with communication purpose and communication situation, and they rejected burdening language teaching with too much linguistic theory  – “the purpose of L1 teaching is not acquiring a certain amount of linguistic knowledge” (ibid., p. 61). They also stressed the necessity to develop “language volubility” (ibid.) which pupils bring from their every-day lives, and they warned against the danger of the school undermining the pupil’s confidence in their own knowledge of their mother tongue – “it mustn’t be negated by the school, quite opposite, the school must rely on it” (ibid., p. 62). Bearing these statements in mind, Havránek, Kopecký, Starý and Získal came with textbooks (Cvičebnice jazyka českého pro I.–IV. třídu, published in 1933–1936) that adopted the inductive approach; from today’s perspective, we could view certain parts as constructivist.15 However, these were not accepted by the educational reality, for the teachers were not prepared for such huge changes in the teaching strategies they were using. Moreover, the Theses were not a political document like the Newbolt Report, and so they did not have such impact. As a result, the grammatical tradition prevailed, teachers stayed with earlier textbooks which were of historical-grammatical character, and TSG persisted, especially in Czech upper-secondary schools. The connection becomes even more strongly evident when linguistics is politicized, and political, scientific and educational aims blend. This became reality after the communist coup in 1948, which lead to extreme political pressure on the whole educational system in what was then Czechoslovakia. The regime entailed building  I do recognize that English originally drew more on the discipline of English literary study (e.g. Eagleton 1983, or Mathieson 1975). In this paper, however, I am scrutinizing only the language and communication part of the subject (see above). 15  That does not necessarily mean ‘communicative’. 14

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a centralized, ideologized and political school: “Never before  – and that also includes the WWII period [under the Nazi occupation – note S. Š.] – and never after had the Czech school system been under such pressure of massive ideologization” (Šmejkalová 2010, p. 249). “The main criterion of the ideo-educational aspect was the sense for building socialism and the cultural and political orientation towards the Soviet Union” (Šmejkalová and Štěpáník 2016). Stalin’s Essays on Language (published in Pravda in 1950) meant major changes not only in the course of linguistics, but also in the course of Czech language teaching. The up-to-then linguistic development was completely revoked as heritage of old bourgeoisie, and linguistic contemplations were related to communist politics and ideology (comp. Šmejkalová 2010, p.  260f.). The pre-war functionalist school was rejected16 and what was stressed (under the influence of politics and Soviet linguistics) was the importance of formal grammar (in school TSG). Stalin’s Essays accentuated that language is the reflection of reason, a social phenomenon dependent on social development (in these circumstances, language is understood in communist terms), and that most important is formal grammar. Czech linguists fully adopted this approach, and it was strongly enforced in school (comp. ibid.). The results of this approach to teaching Czech proved unsatisfactory, both cognitively and communicationally, which at the end of the 1950s led to criticism. Its main voice was the major pedagogical figure Otokar Chlup (1875–1965), who disapproved of the huge amount of subject matter, especially grammatical theory, which he regarded as too difficult and mechanical. However, his attempts to reduce TSG and modernize the system of Czech language teaching led to tensions between linguists (who advocated for TSG) and pedagogues (who advocated for less or ‘different’ grammar), and ended unsuccessfully (ibid., p. 306f.).17

5.2  R  eal Needs vs. Formal Authorities’ Expectations – England In England – as in Czechoslovakia – the 1920s and 30s witnessed a debate between the proponents of child-centred and communicative approaches (esp. school practice), and of the utilitarian knowledge-based direction of language teaching (public examinations; Jeffcoate 1992, p. 36). We see the tension between teaching practice and formal authorities’ expectations.18  The Prague Linguistic Circle was disbanded in 1952.  To a certain degree, this kind of tension has prevailed even until today. 18  The discrepancy between the taught and the tested – or educational reality and the expectations of the testing authorities – remain common not only in the Czech Republic and England until up to now. Standardized testing appears to be the problem not only in L1 teaching in the Czech Republic and in England, but also elsewhere in the world. Standardized tests are often used as a tool of language and educational policy. In many cases they seem to have lost their original primary diagnostic function, and serve more as an element of control, centralization and political objectives. 16 17

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The advocacy for child-centred and creative approaches in English teaching remained also after WW II. We can see very close connection of writing and reading with literature teaching, and a stress on creativity and “free spontaneous expression” (Jeffcoate 1992, p. 38; Clark 2001, 2005). Language teaching was viewed as a means of developing art – the art of language – and teaching grammar gradually declined in favour or literature (for an account of this development, see Hudson and Walmsley 2005, p.  602–604). Consequently, the majority of university students chose English Literature rather than English Philology, leading to a situation when graduate English teachers did not know much about language and therefore, perhaps understandably, were reluctant to teach it.19

5.3  N  ew Impulses: The Pragmatic-Communicative Turn in Linguistics The end of the 1950s and the whole period of the 1960s constituted a time when both linguistics and didactics thrived. New impulses from linguistic research brought alternative grammar streams20 and many other directions of linguistic research.21 This all also influenced school and thinking about L1 teaching. The scientific development gradually headed towards the so-called communicative-­ pragmatic turn, or even reverse (Černý 1997, p. 361), at the break of the 1960s and 70s. The attention turned from langue to parole, which lead to researching speech and communication.22 In England, one of the first enterprises was Halliday’s Schools Council project at University College London (UCL) on linguistics and English teaching (1964–1971). Its main idea was that “grammar is a resource, not a limitation, and that the aim of teaching should be to expand that resource rather than to teach children to avoid errors” (Hudson and Walmsley 2005, p. 610). This idea of grammar teaching being descriptive rather than prescriptive has been generally accepted. Many of the Especially problematic is the fact that assessment methods for standardized tests focus on surfacelevel features, and so put high emphasis on the standard of correctness (Smith et al. 2006, p. 264). And it is TSG that is designed to provide correctness (ibid.). Obviously, communicative skills (or competency) – which modern language teaching should aim at – can be hardly measured through standardized criteria. As a result, the tested curriculum overpowers the designed curriculum and shifts teaching aims more towards mechanic drill and/or test-preparation procedures. It has been possible to observe this clash not only in the Czech Republic (e.g. Čechová 2013/2014; Štěpáník 2018) or England (e.g. Goodwyn and Branson 2005; Peim 1993), but also elsewhere. 19  The lack of subject knowledge in grammar among English teachers might be observed even today (comp. Giovanelli 2015, p. 21f.). 20   e.g. transformational-generative grammar (Chomsky) or systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday) 21  e.g. sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, semiotics or ethnolinguistics 22  e.g. Searle’s speech act theory

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official documents on English teaching that followed (like the Bullock or Cox Reports) adhered to this notion. Moreover, various new paradigms of teaching English appeared – the personal-growth model (Dixon 1967/1975); along with the existing skills and cultural-heritage models. Dixon was sceptical about the idea of objective knowledge, which meant the downturn of explicit teaching of grammar or knowledge about language (“it would be folly for teachers of English to impose linguistic bodies of knowledge on pupils” – Dixon 1967/1975, p. 81). English was to become synonymous with language use and development (Jeffcoate 1992, p. 40). In 1975 the Bullock Report (A Language for Life) was published (DES, 1975). Based on the philosophy of Education for All, it accented the use of English and pupil-centredness. Unlike previously, the Report recognized language diversity and acknowledged non-standard varieties in English teaching. As such, the Bullock Report stressed the value of children’s natural speech. Moreover, it introduced the concept of language across the curriculum. These changes are connected with developments in scientific linguistics, and specifically with the pragmatic-linguistic turn in linguistics. On the basis of developments in applied linguistics, the Bullock Report formulates the aim for English teaching: communicative competency. “The aim […] is to start from children’s natural speech and encourage them to build up a repertoire of use, so that in adult life they can match the social contexts they find themselves in with the appropriate language” (Jeffcoate 1992, p. 43). Instead of correctness, the emphasis was now on appropriateness (ibid.). The 1960s also brought a certain degree of political liberalization and social changes to Czechoslovakia. The school was seen as distant from life and so the transformations that came affected the whole school system. In Czech language teaching, wide criticism of the organisation, the content and the methods appeared. What was seen as necessary was practical mastery of the language along with appreciation of its aesthetic values. This led to a focus on syntax and communication, composition and style, and diversion from formal morphology, spelling and parsing (Šmejkalová 2010, p. 317–321). The effect of new trends in linguistics on school was obvious. However, political conditions intervened again, and these promising modifications were stopped by the Soviet invasion of 1968 and the period of ‘normalization’ that came after it. Normalization meant a return to the strong socialist character of the school system and rigid teaching, including formal grammar. Nevertheless, the communicative-pragmatic turn in Czech linguistics also influenced thinking in Czech language didactics and at the end of the 1970s new ideas and research topics appeared. In 1977, Jan Průcha, a major Czech educationalist, published several studies in which he proposed traces of a new teaching model for the subject, and a discussion on what Czech language teaching should look like opened up. The emphasis was on aligning education with the needs of real life and replacing the traditional teaching model focused on traditional school grammar with a new conception whose centre would be the development of pupils’ activity and creativity (Průcha 1978). The new conception was supposed to be based on ‘parole disciplines’. However, Průcha did not finish his big research project at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and later moved away from language education

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to general education. Still, this was the first time that the major role of linguistics in forming the learning environment was diminished (comp. Šmejkalová 2010, p. 381); instead, the role of didactic aims, educational sciences, and didactics was stressed. However, again it was politics and the doubts of linguists that blocked such modernising efforts. Yet, since the mid 1980s, Czech didactics started to elaborate the conceptions based on communication and composition (Čechová 1982, 1985; Šebesta 1999). “The pupil shall not only study and understand the language system and the language phenomena in their mutual relations, but also be aware of their stylistic characteristics, and should learn how to use them. From identifying language phenomena we move to their application. In contrast with the tradition, we suggest greater attention to language practice” (Čechová 1982, p.  7). The outcome was blending the knowledge about grammar and functioning of the language as a system with communication. This did not mean turning away from teaching grammar but, rather, stressing the communication and composition part of the subject and the communicative approach to language phenomena taught  – putting the semantic-functional principle forward, presenting the language phenomena in communication situations, and direct teaching to express meanings and pragmatic functions (Čechová 1993/1994). So far, in theory, the development towards communication in Czech education could be aligned to global changes in L1 education. However, as I have suggested earlier, the educational reality in schools has largely remained in the old schemata.

5.4  P  olitical Interventions in England: The National Curriculum Until the 1980s, there was no centralized curriculum that all schools in England were obliged to follow.23 This came to an end in that decade, with the Conservative Party taking power. The first half of the 1980s in England was characterised by social unrest and racial tension (Clark 2005, p. 33). And here comes the political order for a reverse in the up-to-now policies in education and language teaching: for the introduction of grammar and standard English. The importance and high value of teaching standard English was stressed already in the Newbolt Report (e.g. Newbolt mentions the “evil habits of speech contracted in home and street”, p. 59). This mostly had political reasons: standard English served for “civilising” and unifying the society not only within England, but within the British Empire, which is in compliance with the role of the education system as a transmitter of dominant ideologies of society (Clark 2005, p. 32). Standard English is associated with such notions like social class and national identity (ibid.), therefore, the government’s

 Unlike in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, where the curriculum has always been stated by the authorities.

23

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philosophy was to use it as a tool of social cohesion, order and standard.24 Moreover, Cabinet felt that teachers should be divested of the extensive autonomy they had, and that the system should be more centralized (comp. Clark 2001). English from 5 to 16 (HMI 1984) was the first indication in the direction of a National Curriculum for English, and represents a template for all subsequent attempts at a National Curriculum. The document focused on the overall aims of English teaching, i.e. English as the subject area, and defined them in terms of “achieving competence in the many and varied uses of our language” (p. 1). It introduced the division of the communication skills into speaking, reading, listening and writing (presented as “modes of language”) and established the concept of “knowledge about language”, which can be viewed as the introduction of linguistic theory to English classes. The concept showed to be a highly controversial one (DES 1986, p. 39; see also Myhill 2005; Davies 1996), for several reasons. Besides other things, not only did teachers not believe in teaching (traditional) grammar, but even if they wanted to teach grammar, they were not (being) prepared to do so (DES 1986, p. 39). The Kingman Report of 1987 (Inquiry into the Teaching of English Language, DES 1988) was based on the hypothesis that knowledge about language leads directly to increased literacy (DES 1988, p. 4). Even though the Kingman Report did not counter existing practices in grammar/knowledge about language teaching, and proved to be a generally liberal document, it stated that “it is just as important to teach […] about the structure of English as about the structure of the atom” (p. 4), and brought back the notion of Standard English, the acquisition of which the Report considered “one of the schools’ duties” and “the children’s right” (p. 14). Nevertheless, Kingman encouraged teaching about language through reflection, rather than prescription, and this was not received positively in political circles, as it was seen as too mild. In 1989, the Cox Report was published, asserting that teaching grammar should focus on language in use, i.e. working with text in both written and spoken English, and should raise the pupils’ “language awareness” (as Cox puts it). Cox recognized local English varieties, but also advocated “that there should be explicit teaching about the nature and functions of Standard English in the top years of the primary school”, and that “all pupils should be in a position to choose to use Standard English in speech when appropriate by the age of 16” (p. 67). This implies that some kind of explicit teaching about language should have been present, but concrete terms and concepts were not specified. Another aim of the Report was to acknowledge the different ideologies of English teaching: ‘personal growth’, ‘cross-­ curricular’, ‘adult needs’, ‘cultural heritage’, and ‘cultural analysis’ (DES 1989, para. 2.20). The document was generally well received, as it held to the didactic and pedagogic base more than to the political pressures of the time. Still, the implementation even of the very little knowledge about language that the document required showed

 Comp. Francis’ (1954) definition of grammar, in which he distinguishes grammar as a form of behaviour, as a field of study, and as a branch of etiquette.

24

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to be problematic, as it introduced topics which teachers knew little about, and were not prepared to teach.25 The National Curriculum (NC) came into existence in 1990. It redefined the traditional balance between autonomy, power and accountability, and the relation between the teachers and the official requirements (similar moves could also be observed in the United States or Australia; comp. Locke 2010). The acceptance of the English NC turned out to be rather positive, as it was based on the framework outlined in the Cox Report. However, the Government was not satisfied with the outcome, as its political pressures had seemingly remained unheard. This resulted into rewriting the Curriculum not even 2 years later (NCC 1992). The new document rejected the liberal positions of language and language diversity and stressed formal teaching of grammar and of correctness. Goodwyn (2011, p.  62) puts it bluntly: “No other subject has received such relentless political attention and interference as English has”. Later revisions of the Curriculum can be labelled as a fight for or against grammar (knowledge about language).

5.5  The State We Are In In 1997, the Conservative government was replaced by New Labour. Goodwyn (2008, cited in Goodwyn 2011, p.  62) remarks that the period 1997–2008 was “especially marked by prescription and interference”. The Labour Party continued what the Conservatives had started, later introducing the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) and the NLS Framework for Teaching, which also included teaching explicit grammar. The grammatical subject matter was standardised into the form of a list of grammatical terms, which were expected to be taught. The main aim of this was to “promote a clearer focus on literacy instruction to make it more uniformed so that all pupils will receive the same opportunities for learning, and parents, teachers and pupils know what to expect” (Goodwyn and Branson 2005, p. 26). Unlike the NC, the NLS was not a statutory document. Nevertheless, it influenced English teaching significantly (comp. Clark 2005, p. 43). Later, the list of grammatical terms was revised, but it remains part of the English curriculum until today (DfE 2013b, c). The current Curriculum regards explicit knowledge of grammar as “very important, as it gives us more conscious control and choice in our language” (DfE 2013b, p.  1). The document also encourages teachers to “focus on grammar within the teaching of reading, writing and speaking” (ibid.) and to encourage pupils “to apply and explore this concept in the grammar of their own speech and writing” (ibid.). One of the requirements given by the Curriculum is also the knowledge of Standard English and the ability to use it “when the context and audience require it” (Key Stage 3 and 4; DfE 2013a, p. 6, 2014, p. 7). Yet, other varieties of English should be reflected too (ibid., p. 6).  The in-service teacher education programme called LINC (Language in the National Curriculum; 1989–1992) was stopped by the Government, as the authorities did not agree with the materials produced.

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In Czech didactics, the communication principle has never been supposed to displace systematic language (grammar) education (Čechová and Styblík 1998). As a result, the main aim has been to intertwine the communication and cognitive elements, which are connected through formative influence on the pupil, i.e. the support of the cognitive, moral, emotional, aesthetic and other attributes (ibid.). Even though Czech educational theory continued to develop the communicative notion, and this was reflected even in the unified curriculum (syllabi – osnovy), educational reality was getting behind. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 brought the abandonment of the political aims in teaching Czech; however, as far as the overall conception of mother-tongue teaching in practice is concerned, the Revolution does not represent any significant change. The school reality has been driven by the strong tradition of the logic-grammatical approach (see above), which is – to a high extent – also fixed in the textbooks (for most complex elaboration on the current school practice of Czech teaching, see Štěpáník 2020). Therefore, the position of grammar in educational reality has remained rather unaffected. At the beginning of the new millennium, the Ministry of Education set up a revolutionary curricular reform. The School Act of 2004 (No. 561/2004 Coll.) eradicated the centralized syllabi and introduced the Framework Educational Programmes (FEP; Rámcový vzdělávací program) which have served as the basic curricular documents since then. According to the binding scope of education for its individual stages (preschool, primary and secondary education), schools are required to create their own School Educational Programmes. For subject Czech, the expected outcomes are mostly formulated communicatively (FEP EE 2007, p. 21). However, at the same time, the curriculum demands thorough knowledge of grammar  – for the lower-secondary level (pupils of 12–16 years of age), for instance: “The pupil shall classify word classes correctly”; “The pupil shall distinguish the semantic relations between clause elements in a clause and a sentence” or “The pupil shall differentiate between and exemplify in a text the most important Czech word-formation processes” (FEP EE 2007, p. 22). Besides the communicative subject matter, the FEP also prescribes morphology (word classes, grammatical meanings of words and their forms), syntax (utterance and sentence, sentence structure, word order in a sentence, modifiers, sentences, direct and indirect speech, text structure), vocabulary and word formation (vocabulary and its units, registers, semantics, homonyms, synonyms, processes of word formation; FEP EE 2007, p. 22). Even though it may seem rather theoretical, the Curriculum is quite clear about the communicative orientation of the language matter, as mostly all the expected outcomes in the language area are formulated communicatively: e.g. “The pupil shall classify word classes correctly, create standard word forms and use them consciously in a suitable communication situation”; “The pupil shall apply his/her knowledge of the language norm when creating language expression adequate to the communication situation” etc. (FEP EE 2007, p. 22). From the tone of the document, it is obvious that its authors did follow the development of language didactics and did realize that teaching traditional school grammar is not the adequate approach to teaching language. However, as already indicated, the tradition of teaching Czech is a strong one, and it is always the teacher

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who makes the reform, not the politicians or official declarations or documents. Therefore, the implementation of this intention has been problematic, not only because of a lack of adequate teacher training, but also because of the solid tradition and many other social, economic or educational circumstances. From many sources (e.g. Dvořák et al. 2010, 2015; Janík et al. 2018; Rysová 2006/2007, etc.) we know that the reform has not brought the expected results. Comparing the Czech Framework Educational Programmes and the English National Curriculum, we see that both documents are skills-oriented, focusing on the development of communication competency.26 However, grammar is approached differently. Both of them stress that knowledge of the language system should be useful for pupils’ communication, and that learning about language should be meaningful. Both aim at mastering standard language communicatively. The Czech curriculum separates communication and composition (in other words, the development of reading, listening, speaking and writing), language (grammar) and literature.27 Furthermore, in the language part, Czech pupils are expected to master knowledge about language (see above). As the extent of grammar to master is not clear, teachers usually take textbooks as the transformation of the curriculum (Knecht 2007; Červenková 2010; Sikorová 2010). This leads to petrification of the grammatical tradition because most textbooks approach grammar formally and separately from communication.

6  Discussion 6.1  Grammar, or Communication? – Knowledge, or Skills? As we can see, the topic of the relation between teaching grammar and developing communication skills, and the function of grammatical content, has been a topic of major debate throughout the history of teaching both Czech and English. It is interesting to observe the different paths that teaching Czech and English took, even though they came out from the same foundation: the Classics. The impact of this on modelling Czech and English teaching as far as the amount of (traditional) grammar is concerned is clear. Throughout the twentieth century in England, there has been a constant re-­ examination of the content and processes of English teaching, and many of the national projects focus on skills development: the sequence of the official documents on English teaching (Newbolt, Bullock, Kingman and Cox) gradually moved English towards pupil-centredness and literacy development. Especially in the  Again, in the language part; I am aware of the heavy emphasis on literary heritage and the lists of authors to be covered in the English NC as part of the literature component. 27  This will hopefully change with the revisions of the FEP under Strategy 2030+ (Strategie 2030+), a long-term strategic document for education and the development of the education system in the Czech Republic, which is now in preparation. 26

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1960s, teaching grammar (or any kind of knowledge about language) completely disappeared and English adopted a purely competency (experiential) approach – but without well-defined subject content (comp. above). In relation to that, I would stress Reyʼs assertion (1996 in Štech 2013, p. 629) that it is never possible to separate the two  – skill (or competency) cannot be detached from its content. In other words, it is not possible to separate communication from grammar (knowledge about language) and vice versa, if integrity of L1 education is to be reached.28 As such, developing communication skills should be anchored in knowledge about language, i.e. in educated language awareness, if the choices about language are to be made consciously, not intuitively and incidentally. “There is an urgent need to reassess the nature and status of knowledge” in L1 (Green 2018. p. 240). This means that we need to shift the view on what is knowledge in L1 instruction: instead of declarative knowledge, it is procedural knowledge that pupils need to master – but this still is knowledge. Educated language awareness allows the language user to make connections between grammar and its function in communication, i.e. to understand how form can affect meaning (comp. Myhill 2005, p. 87). Thus, it seems not possible to develop communication skills non-grammatically. If literacy is being developed without any relation to language (the substance), we face the problem of shedding the content (Janík et  al. 2019) because it is done unconsciously, without being anchored in the knowledge of how language works. I would argue that, to a certain extent, in the English case – as described above – it had become real, which illustrates what the overstated focus on “skills” or “competency development” might lead to (comp. e.g. Štech 2013; Young 2010). “If the curriculum is too driven by content (as in the old elitist model), or skills and competence (as in the new generic model) some important educational goals (such as opportunities for progression) will get lost” (Young 2010, p.  10). Like TSG, an exclusively competency-driven approach to L1 teaching is another form of formalism. Since the end of the 1980s there is a gradual increase in grammatical subject matter in subject English. The main problem appears to be how it is didactically transformed, the greatest obstacles being teachers’ insufficient content knowledge and/or pedagogical content knowledge. In subject Czech, educational theory has always been rooted in grammar, but since the 1980s it has taken the communicative approach as the fundamental paradigm. This has been later reflected in curricular documents. However, teaching practice seems very reluctant to accept this, especially as most textbooks used in schools petrify the old system, i.e. TSG. Even though there is no rationale that would subsidize teaching traditional grammar in school, there is a lot of evidence that grammar takes up the form of TSG when transformed into school content (not only in England and the Czech Republic – see above). TSG is then present more (in Czech schooling) or less (in English

 Integrity is understood as “the degree to which there is an accord between instructional aims, curricular content, and students’ activity and communication” (Slavík et al. 2016, p. 680).

28

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schooling). In the Czech Republic, the prevailing justification is that grammar deserves to be studied because Czech is the mother tongue and every speaker should know ‘good grammar’, and the assumption is that the study of grammar helps to enhance cognition and, through that, speakers use the language “better”. In England, it is the (political) idea that learning grammar might promote mental and social discipline and master “the socially prestigious conventions of spoken written language, i.e. standard language” (based on Weaver 1996, p. 8).

6.2  L1 Instruction and Politics Despite representing two different language systems and having different historical, social and economic backgrounds, teaching Czech and English have much in common. Most importantly, both subjects have often been used as a tool for fulfilling political objectives. In the period from 1918 to 1939, the subject of Czech was used to promote the strong democratic ethos of the newly established country and the artificial political idea of Czechoslovakism (comp. Šmejkalová 2010).29 Later, the subject was used to promote the correct “world-opinion”, i.e. the up-to-date ideology – either Nazi or Communist. It was only as recently as 1989 that the subject stopped being used as a tool of political indoctrination. Since then, teaching Czech has stood aside of any kind of political debate, and political interventions usually affect the whole school system rather than a single subject. In England, the primary role of teaching English has been to unify society, decrease class division, and several times the argument for increasing the amount of teaching grammar was that it is closely connected to standards of behaviour.30 In general, language teaching has historically been used as an instrument of controlling society (comp. Protherough and King 1995, p.  4). “[…] What becomes the content of a school subject is not something unique or logical, but is defined by what those who regulate and control the curriculum believe to be the most useful and desirable to benefit society” (Clark 2005, p. 36). Davies (1996, p. 31) goes as far as to call teaching English an “ideological weapon”, arguing that political tensions and prejudices resulted in various political interventions in what should have been entirely educational debates.

 The concept went so far as to declare “Czechoslovak language”, which in fact never existed, as Czech and Slovak – even though mutually understandable – are two separate languages. 30  Certain circles of English society felt that the behaviour of young people was worsening, and connected this with the decrease or complete lack of teaching grammar (Clark 2001, p. 122–123). 29

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6.3  What Is L1 Instruction Anyway? There might also be a certain confusion about what actually L1 teaching should comprise nowadays.31 The problem of L1 being a ‘knowledge’ or ‘competency’ subject (comp. Green 2018, p. 233 f.) is an intriguing one. But there are also other aspects to the issue: because of its openness and responsiveness to various social influences and its shifting educational goals, Protherough and King (1995, p.  5) label English teaching as “contentious”. This is also reflected in the confusion about the subject itself, i.e. how the subject and its aims are understood: Protherough and King (1995, p. 4) note that it is not clear what the subject of English really is, and Jeffcoate (1992) speaks about “English’s identity problem”, with L1 being both the subject and the medium of instruction. Bullock’s committee goes as far as to say that “it is a characteristic of English that it does not hold together as a body of knowledge which can be identified, quantified, then transmitted” (p. 5). As such, from a certain point of view, knowledge of/about grammar – as the ‘hard’ skill – might be seen as the element that forms the subject and “holds it together” (comp. Green 2018). Policies for both Czech and English teaching change in accordance with local, national and global contexts, and the subject is sometimes loaded with content directly unrelated to language or communication development. The borders of ideologization are difficult and often subjective to specify (Štěpáník et al. 2019b). The authorities – in a democratic state representing a certain society – do have the right to influence how its citizens are being educated. The question is about where the pupil’s personal development ends and their formation according to a certain pattern starts (ibid.). All in all, policy makers and teachers alike should always bear in mind that L1 instruction must primarily relate to language and language communication.

6.4  Standard, or Non-standard? In Czech, teaching standard language and developing the mastery of standard Czech has always been taken as a granted aim of L1 teaching. Standard language is generally recognized as the representative form of language. Therefore, in Czech didactics, the notion of error, correctness, accuracy or appropriateness can be regarded as traditional. Latest complex research has shown that the relation of Czech speakers to Standard Czech (spisovná čeština) remains strong (comp. Svobodová et al. 2011). In contrast, the diversity of the English language is enormous and it might even be a problem to define what standard English is (comp. McArthur 1992, or Crystal  “There is probably no subject in the curriculum whose aims are so often formulated as are those of English language, yet they remain by and large ill-defined, controversial and obscure” (Halliday 1967/2007, p. 25).

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2010). The rise in immigration to the UK has brought not only social changes, but also the growth of immigrant language use and sociolinguistic controversy, which necessarily affects teaching English in school. It might lead to a situation when school, on the one hand, resigns on accuracy and adequate language use (which implies teaching grammar) and says that communication and fluency is most important, or, on the other hand, school serves as the ‘protector’ of the language by insisting on proper use of language, in other words, on grammatical correctness. It is the latter that the general public expect (comp. Svobodová et al. 2011). In L1 instruction, this might get reflected in the disparity between educational practices and educational policies. Even though there might be teachers who are more liberal in their attitudes towards standard language, who recognize the social and cultural diversity that language variations offer, and, most importantly, who understand that the only possibility of linguistically empowering their pupils is developing the ability of code-switching, the formal requirements of standardized examinations and other forms of official assessment force them to suppress or completely abandon such views (note 18; comp. e.g. Peim 1993, p.  31; Čechová 2013/2014; Štěpáník 2016/2017, 2018, etc.). This is the case for both the Czech Republic and England.

6.5  The School Subject and Its Mother Scientific Field Another aspect that subjects Czech and English have in common is that, to a high degree, the models of their teaching have been shaped by the development of Czech or English linguistics.32 Šmejkalová (2010, 2015) argues that Czech didactics has always been a direct correlate of Czech linguistics. Except the a-grammatical movement and several attempts to reduce the amount of grammar and strengthen communication teaching, grammar always stayed a stable part of teaching Czech. This is not only due to the certain periods of political development that I analysed before, but also due to the Austro-Hungarian tradition, which is deeply rooted in certain aspects of life of the Czech nation, the historical conditions of life in the Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia) and, most importantly, the language-type that Czech represents, which makes it very complex, especially in morphology. There are two effects of this: on the one hand, the methodology suggested for teaching grammatical content has been linguistically/professionally accurate/truthful to the field, while on the other hand, the subject has faced criticism that education is distant from pupils’ thinking and real-life needs, and that teaching mainly follows linguistic aims instead of educational ones. As I said at the beginning, the main problem of implementing grammar into L1 education is that the educational environment of L1 is formed by the demands of linguistics, i.e. a scientific  Of course linguistics is not the only “mother discipline” for the subject L1. However, as I am focusing here on the language and communication component, I consider linguistics the most prominent.

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discipline with its own methodology. In that case, “the only relevant criterion is truth rather than (say) usefulness for language teaching. It is paradoxical that this assumption discourages practical applications, given that teaching is an attempt to change competence” (Hudson and Walmsley 2005, p. 608). The consequence to this is clear: Even if teachers know grammar well, they might not see the potential and usefulness of grammar knowledge in L1 teaching (comp. e.g. Watson 2015a, b). This means they might not be able to transform the linguistic topics into functional teaching procedures that would help to develop pupils’ communication skill. Teachers’ lack of content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge is the reason why they either teach TSG and think that this is the way grammar should/must be taught, or they avoid teaching grammar or omit it altogether (comp. e.g. Cajkler and Hislam 2002; Borg 2003). As teachers’ beliefs are an absolutely vital factor in creating the teaching and learning environment (Phipps and Borg 2009), the connotations of grammar in teachers’ thinking have a major impact on how grammar is taught (comp. Watson 2015b).

7  Conclusion The problem of teaching grammar is a problem of the relation between ontho-­ didactic and psycho-didactic perspective. While teaching grammar is informed mainly by the scientific field, i.e. linguistics, this knowledge needs to be reconstructed in order to serve the pupils’ needs, i.e. developing their communication skills. The methodology of creating the learning and teaching environment must differ from the methodology of linguistics, because education follows educational aims. In this sense, the aim of education in L1 is a communicatively competent individual who is able to use the language in such a way that best serves his or her communication aims. Teaching grammar (or knowledge about language in general) is a means of enhancing the pupils’ communicative abilities, raising their language awareness (comp. Locke 2010, p. viii). Knowledge about/of grammar must be translated into practical use – in other words, it must be functionalized. Otherwise it becomes only knowledge for knowledge’ sake, and as such is effectively dead. Again: linguistics represents the cultural environment (comp. Slavík et al. 2017, p.  131) of language education, its intersubjective reality for communicating and understanding (Janík and Slavík 2009; Slavík and Janík 2005). It serves as the source for language teaching. But what becomes more important is its role in supporting the realization of certain educational tasks, i.e. as a source of knowledge about what is to be taught (comp. Nocoń 2018, p. 27; Giovanelli 2015, p. 1; English and Marr 2015). Grammar in this sense is not the aim but the tool of teaching; the tool for developing communicative competency. Instead of being understood as an abstraction of how language works (as it is in TSG), grammar must be transformed into knowledge in use, i.e. of a more procedural rather than declarative character. If teaching grammar is not recognized in this manner, it becomes disintegrated (comp. Slavík et al. 2017, p. 341–348) and, as such, cannot fulfil its aims.

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The aim of this study has been to compare the paths of teaching L1 in the Czech Republic and in England, and to clarify the position of grammar from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. In this respect, teaching Czech and English represent and instantiate two different models – they are different paradigms (comp. Sawyer and Van de Ven 2006). This does not imply that one is better than the other – they both have their foundations, advantages and problems. However, it seems that the ideal of L1 teaching lies somewhere between the two: a meaningful, contextualized teaching of grammar, which empowers pupils to become better communicators who utilize the full range of possibilities that language gives them. In other words, the ideal is the development of communication skills secured by good knowledge of how language works, i.e. of grammar. In the Czech Republic, this would mean reassessing the grammatical subject matter and altering the way that grammar is taught (the most recent attempt to do so is the new conception by Štěpáník et al. 2020); while in England it implies the need to realize the benefits of teaching grammar, establishing a functional grammatical paradigm in English teaching, and adopting a functional methodology for this. This might prevent the situation where English pupils operate in their language without really knowing the ‘why’, and when learners of English as a foreign language know more about English grammar than native speakers (my own experience from observations in English schools and talks with English teachers). Similarly, it would address the situation where Czech pupils have a certain amount of theoretical linguistic knowledge but do not know the ‘what for’, and their communication skills are gradually worsening. The benefits of learning from each other in this case seem obvious.

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Slavík, J., & Janík, T. (2005). Významová struktura faktu v oborových didaktikách. Pedagogika, 55, 336–354. Slavík, J., Janík, T., & Najvar, P. (2016). Producing knowledge for improvement: The 3A procedure as a tool for content-focused research on teaching and learning. Pedagogika, 66, 672–688. Slavík, J., Janík, T., Najvar, P., & Knecht, P. (2017). Transdisciplinární didaktika: o učitelském sdílení znalostí a zvyšování kvality výuky napříč obory. Brno: Masarykova univerzita. Šmejkalová, M. (2010). Čeština a škola – úryvky skrytých dějin. Praha: Karolinum. Šmejkalová, M. (2015). Didaktika českého jazyka. In I. Stuchlíková, T. Janík, et al. (Eds.), Oborové didaktiky: vývoj – stav – perspektivy (pp. 17–40). Brno: Masarykova univerzita. Šmejkalová, M., & Štěpáník, S. (2016). Teaching Czech language and literature in the Czech Republic. In M.  Pieniążek & S. Štěpáník (Eds.), Teaching of national languages in the V4 countries (pp. 31–63). Praha: Pedagogická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy. Smith, M.  W., Cheville, J., & Hillocks, G.  Jr. (2006). “I guess Iʼd better watch my English”: Grammars and the teaching of the English language arts. In C. A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 263–274). New York: Guilford Press. Sólyom, R., Heltai, J. I., & Pintér, T. M. (2016). Teaching Hungarian language and literature in Hungary. In M. Pieniążek & S. Štěpáník (Eds.), Teaching of national languages in the V4 countries (pp. 65–101). Praha: Pedagogická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy. Štech, S. (2013). Když je kurikulární reforma evidence-less. Pedagogická orientace, 23, 615–633. Štěpáník, S. (2016). Výuková situace: transformace větného členu na větu a naopak v kontextu větného rozboru. Komenský, 140, 30–39. Štěpáník, S. (2016/2017). Co přinesou centrálně zadávané přijímací zkoušky? Český jazyk a literatura, 67, 105–111. Štěpáník, S. (2018). Vliv nové podoby maturitní zkoušky z českého jazyka a literatury na vyučování ve výpovědích učitelů. Pedagogická orientace, 28, 435–471. Štěpáník, S. (2019a). Výuka mluvnice ve vztahu k rozvoji komunikačních dovedností – úvod do problému. In S. Štěpáník et al. (Eds.), Vztah jazyka a komunikace v česko-slovensko-polské didaktické reflexi (pp. 7–22). Praha: Karolinum. Štěpáník, S. (2019b). Pupil preconception as a source of solutions to lingering problems of grammar teaching? L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 19, 1–24. Štěpáník, S. (2020). Výuka češtiny mezi tradicí a inovací. Praha: Academia. Štěpáník, S., & Chvál, M. (2016). Konstruktivismus jako cesta ke zlepšování výsledků vzdělávání v českém jazyce? Studia paedagogica, 21, 35–56. Štěpáník, S., & Slavík, J. (2017). Žákovské prekoncepty jako konstitutivní prvek výuky mateřského jazyka. Pedagogická orientace, 27, 58–80. Štěpáník, S., & Šmejkalová, M. (2017). Průvodce začínajícího češtináře. Praha: Pedagogická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy. Štěpáník, S., et al. (2019a). Vztah jazyka a komunikace v česko-slovensko-polské didaktické reflexi. Praha: Karolinum. Štěpáník, S., Liptáková, Ľ., & Szymańska, M. (2019b). Cesty ke komunikačně-funkčnímu pojetí v české, slovenské a polské didaktice mateřského jazyka. In S. Štěpáník et al. (Eds.), Vztah jazyka a komunikace v česko-slovensko-polské didaktické reflexi (pp. 23–71). Praha: Karolinum. Štěpáník, S., Hájková, E., Eliášková, K., Liptáková, Ľ., & Szymańska, M. (2020). Školní výpravy do krajiny češtiny: Didaktika českého jazyka pro základní školy. Plzeň: Fraus. Stuchlíková, I., Janík, T., et  al. (2015). Oborové didaktiky: vývoj  – stav  – perspektivy. Brno: Masarykova univerzita. Svobodová, J. (2003). Jazyková specifika školské komunikace a výuka mateřštiny. Ostrava: Pedagogická fakulta Ostravské univerzity. Svobodová, J., Adámková, I., Bogoczová, I., Jandová, E., Svobodová Metelková, R., & Svobodová, D. (2011). Fenomén spisovnosti v současné české jazykové situaci. Ostrava: Ostravská univerzita v Ostravě.

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Szymańska, M. (2014). Kształcenie językowe w dyskursie edukacyjnym po 1990. In J.  Nocoń & A.  Tabisz (Eds.), Język a Edukacja 3: Świadomość językowa (pp.  143–159). Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego. Szymańska, M. (2016). Między nauką o języku a rozwijaniem języka. Koncepcje kształcenia językowego na przełomie XX i XXI wieku. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UP. Vachek, J. (Ed.). (1970). Teze předložené prvému sjezdu slovanských filologů v Praze 1929. U základů pražské jazykovědné školy (pp. 35–65). Praha: Academia. van Rijt, J., & Coppen, P.-A. (2017). Bridging the gap between linguistic theory and L1 grammar education – Experts’ views on essential linguistic concepts. Language Awareness, 26, 360–380. Vašutová, J. (2007). Být učitelem: co by měl učitel vědět o své profesi. Praha: Pedagogická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy. Watson, A. (2015a). Conceptualisations of “grammar teaching”: L1 English teachersʼ beliefs about teaching grammar for writing. Language Awareness, 4, 1–14. Watson, A. (2015b). The problem of grammar teaching: A case study of the relationship between a teacher’s beliefs and pedagogical practice. Language and Education, 29, 332–346. Weaver, C. (1996). Teaching grammar in context. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook Publishers. Wyse, D. (2001). Grammar. For writing? A critical review of empirical evidence. British Journal of Educational Studies, 49, 411–427. Young, M. (2010). Alternative educational futures for a knowledge society. European Educational Research Journal, 9, 1–12. Stanislav Štěpáník  holds a PhD in Education with a specialisation on Czech language didactics. He works as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. He is the author of the latest monograph on the current state of teaching Czech (Výuka češtiny mezi tradicí a inovací – Teaching Czech between Tradition and Innovation) and the leading author of the complex didactic conception of teaching Czech that integrates teaching language and communication (Školní výpravy do krajiny češtiny: didaktika českého jazyka pro základní školy  – School Journeys into the Landscape of Czech: Czech Language Didactics for Primary and Lower-Secondary Schools).

Part III

The Future, Now

The Ongoing Technocultural Production of L1: Current Practices and Future Prospects Nikolaj Elf, Scott Bulfin, and Dimitrios Koutsogiannis

Abstract  From a cultural perspective, it should not be surprising that technology has always played a key role in co-shaping the development of the L1 subject. However, the technocultural nature of L1 is often forgotten due to the naturalization of the dominant technologies of literacy in each historical period, such as paper and pen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and digital communication technologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In this chapter, we argue that technology is inseparable from L1 as a set of utterances, practices, and discourses, which together construct L1 subject cultures around the globe. The chapter has three main aims. First, to describe the technocultural nature of L1 as a subject domain, connecting the past with the present, and arguing that the spirit of globalization, or even universalism, tends to frame the content, context and justification of L1 language teaching in the twenty-first century. Second, from a spatial perspective, to focus on how and why globally circulating terms, discourses and heuristics, related to digital media in teaching L1, are used as available global resources and repertoires to design local initiatives in three different educational ecologies: Australia, Denmark and Greece. Emphasis is given to highlighting how globally circulating discourses are not clear-cut scientific inventions but flexible resources that are recontextualized locally in different ways. Indicative examples are drawn from local teaching practices in each country. Finally, we move beyond a historical and spatial discourse analysis to ask questions about the ontologies and epistemologies of a technocultural rationale and/or reality in L1 education. Keywords  Digital technology · Globalisation · History · New literacies · Critical literacy · Classrooms · Twitter · Youtube · Internet · Identity N. Elf (*) Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] S. Bulfin Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] D. Koutsogiannis Department of Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Green, P.-O. Erixon (eds.), Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era, Educational Linguistics 48, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7_10

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1  Introduction The question: “What is technology teaching in L1?” is not an easy one to answer. One could start by trying to answer the first part: What is technology in the frame of language and literacy? The starting point for this chapter is the claim that any instrument or environment for mediating/materializing semiosis is a technology, and that such instruments or environments vary in time and place (e.g. papyrus, pen and paper, print, digital media). This is a broad sociomaterialist claim, which de-­ essentialises any simple tool-oriented understanding of technology. But how is technology understood in relation to teaching in L1 then? No study has been made to offer a global answer to that question. From a more limited, regional perspective, a recently published review on technology studies within a Nordic L1 context found that teaching technology could refer to at least four metaphors  – tools, media, socialization, and writing practices (Elf et  al. 2015). More broadly, the review argues that a reconfiguration of the L1 subject’s rationale is taking place, at least in some regions, due to alterations in mediating semiosis. Drawing on a sociocultural vocabulary, findings suggested that: The communicative forms and utterances are becoming less stable and more amorphous due to technology, and that technology is clearly not a simple matter of value-free ‘tools’ made accessible by schools and offering information to students with the teacher as neutral mediator. Instead, technology is embedded in historical, political, cultural, economic, and philosophical developments in society, which are co-shaping the use and understanding of technology in L1 in practice and research. (Elf et al. 2015, p. 36)

From a historical perspective, it should not be surprising that technology has always played a key role in co-shaping the development of the L1 subject. As Nordkvelle (2007) has pointed out in his historical account of technology in education – from Comenius’ Didactica Magna (published in 1657), focusing on ‘proper technologies’ of mother-tongue education to twenty-first-century learning sciences  – technology has always played an important role in the development of school subjects’ rationales and practices. In this sense, technology has no singular or stable ontological or epistemological core meaning. Rather, technology is referred to, theoretically and practically, through the development of and transactions between technologies in relation to goals and means in specific contexts of time and space, including the L1 subjects taught in school in different times and in different localities. Specifically, what might be a commonplace term for technology education in local L1 curricula, such as ‘media’ in a Nordic context, might not be a commonplace term in other contemporary contexts – and is probably not a commonplace term in other historical times. Current public discussions on technology in education, however, seem to suffer from historical amnesia (Elf et al. 2015; Freebody 2007; Green and Cormack 2015). In particular, policy discussions of technology in L1, and in education more broadly, focus almost exclusively on the ‘new’, or more specifically, on new digital technologies, assuming that digitalisation is either intimately linked to societal progress or at least to more effective individual learning, or contrarily, to the degradation and loss of L1 and of the L1 subject as it has always been known. From the ‘loss position’,

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digital technology is most often seen as a more or less contemporary ‘add-on’ to the L1 subject – a relatively new feature, arrived just in time to technologise the word and the book. In such formulations, it is forgotten that L1 has been constructed and continues to be reconstructed through time and place under specific geopolitical and historical circumstances. In this chapter, we argue that technology is inseparable from L1 as a set of utterances, practices, and discourses, which together construct L1 subject cultures around the globe. This is what is meant by the notion of ‘technocultural production’ in our chapter title. This notion is based on a sociocultural view of teaching and learning, which understands the L1 subject, like any other school subject, as a dynamic interplay between its utterances related to knowledge, form and use, which on a more abstract level of contextualisation are related to disciplinary discourses on, and paradigmatic understandings of, the subject locally, supernationally and globally (Herrlitz et al. 2007; Sawyer and van de Ven 2006). Technology is embedded in and co-shapes all these aspects of the L1 subject, and so we understand it as a technocultural production. Considering current debates, we argue that there is a need to reemphasise and illuminate the co-existence of technology within L1  in a way that involves both historical and spatial dimensions. Following this argument, the chapter has three main aims, which inform its three main sections: First, from an historical perspective focusing on the last four decades, we briefly outline discourses which link technology and L1 as a subject domain, connecting the past with the present. Here, we argue that the spirit of globalisation, and of global capitalism, strongly frames the changing knowledge, form and justification of L1 teaching in the twenty-first century. Second, from a spatial perspective, we focus on how and why globally circulating discourses and heuristics, related to digital media in teaching L1, are used as available global resources (Blommaert 2010; Koutsogiannis et al. 2014; Kress 2010) to design local practices, Here, we focus on three different educational ecologies: Australia, Denmark, and Greece. We argue that the spatial perspective also allows for a localised positioning, in which we are able to explore whether other discourses on technology, not only digital technology, co-shapes local practices (see also Ongstad this volume). Emphasis is given to highlighting how global circulating discourses, rather than being clear-cut scientific inventions, are flexible resources that are recontextualised (Bernstein 1996) locally in different ways. Third, we consider what the examples might indicate about more recent preoccupations and directions within L1 teaching and learning. In particular, we consider what current and typical technocultural constructions of L1 suggest about the ontological and epistemological orientation of the subject and of the formation of subjectivities (‘Bildung’, in the European context; see also Krogh, this volume) imagined by L1 research, curriculum and practice. The crucial question is what it might mean to continue to ‘reimagine L1’ from a technological ­perspective, and more specifically from a digital perspective, within a context of globalisation.

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2  L1 and (Digital) Technologies in Recent History The current attempt in the research literature to re-imagine L1 related to digital technology has been more or less a focus within the field for at least three decades – and has been a growing concern from researchers, educators, policy makers, and curriculum writers from the mid 1980s. Such an interest has been evident and realised through a number of key directions and common enough arguments. First amongst these have been various attempts since the 1980s to digitise schools and their teaching practices, supported mainly by governments and education systems, and strongly encouraged by global technology companies (Cuban 2001; Picciano and Spring 2013). In this frame, millions of devices have been introduced into school systems worldwide, hundreds of thousands of pages have been written about the potentials of digital media to change or even ‘revolutionise’ the existing educational landscape, and tens of thousands of hours have been spent (or ‘invested’) in preparing teachers and school leaders to use these devices, and a wider public to accept the presence and use of new technologies as more or less ‘naturally’ connected to educational contexts, at least in the Western world. In many instances, these attempts have been across policy, systems, schools, classrooms and homes, and have been directed at helping educators, students and parents to “learn to love the micro” (Selwyn 2002; see also Beale 2014). Second, this growing interest and concern amongst researchers, educators and others has been aided through a wide program of research in many contexts, much of it using ethnographic and case-study approaches, exploring young people’s ‘new’ and digital literacy practices, both in and out of schools, though with a tendency to the latter (e.g. Coiro et al. 2008; Drotner and Erstad 2014; Mills 2010; Pahl and Rowsell 2006). The dominant argument developed in much of this research emphasises the apparent spectacular and innovative changes in children’s everyday literacy practices when using digital technologies and media, in contrast to what is regularly portrayed as a dreary and traditional everyday teaching reality within schools (Bulfin and Koutsogiannis 2012). This program of research, at least since the early 1990s, has emphasised the idea that contemporary digital practices more generally, and those related somehow to L1 use, are something completely new, and naturally the role of research is to explore these new practices and the accompanying new realities. In this formulation, the role of educators then is to apply insights from the research into their work in classrooms, recognising that not to do so would be to ignore the new contemporary reality of young people’s lives, as well as their future needs as citizens and workers in the new economies of the future. Third, in addition to attempts to digitise schools and teaching, and on the basis of a program of research related to young people’s new and digital literacies, emphasis and interest has been generated focused on certain specific characteristics of digital media. Some discussions, for example, have focused on the pedagogic potentials of various new technologies (e.g. word-processing, social media, laptops, video games, etc.). In other cases, the emphasis on the ‘new’ is concentrated on digital literacies or on multimodality. These and other discussions have over time fed into processes

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of educational policy and curriculum making, questions and concerns about educators’ agency, as well as local initiatives for the redesign of the educational landscape or for researching the so-called new digital school reality. From this short review of the last four decades, it would seem as though the L1 subject had already been thoroughly reimagined across the last 40  years or so. Indeed, we would agree that much important research has showed how significant changes have occurred in the understanding of L1, even if these have not always had much influence on the L1 teaching reality. However, in the context of a longer historical view of the intermingling of L1 and ‘new’ technologies, elaborating an argument that L1 has been re-imagined only, or mainly, in its contemporary interactions with new digital technologies, is unsustainable, as already evidenced in the introduction. The current reimaging, then, characterised by the elements briefly sketched above, is one iteration of what has tended to be a historic feature of the field of L1 research and practice. Such ‘reimaginings’ have been necessary at different historical junctures as social, cultural and technological conditions raise questions about the adequacy of current formulations of L1, as diverse as these always are at any historical moment. The current reimagining of L1 then raises several critical problems. The first is that the account typically offered constructs a linear story of historical progress, from seemingly non-technological versions of L1, to where new technologies appear relatively late in the story, part of larger, socially progressive, technocentric developments (the idea of ‘the information age’, for example). This ahistoric (Green and Cormack 2015) and deterministic narrative, as we have suggested, suffers from a kind of historical amnesia about the ongoing relationship between L1 and technologies. A second problem is that this contemporary reimagining tends to de-­ emphasise the importance of different localities, traditions, and how past and present coexist in actual classroom practices (see also Matthewman, this volume). The specificities of local contexts and individual actors tend to go missing in favor of a more ‘globalised’ view. A third problem is that the tendency to focus on the present and to de-emphasise history – a problem of presentism – results in less focus on teachers, students and researchers as agents in an historical frame, both engaging and producing history in their meaning-making practices.

3  P  roducing L1 as a Technocultural Subject: Examining ‘Local’ Indicative Examples Given such criticisms, below we present local examples of classroom practice and curriculum. The aim is to highlight examples of how the contemporary subject of L1 has been reconstituted and reconfigured as a technocultural subject. With these local examples, we explore how technologies, including but not limited to digital technologies, have been understood in relation to the L1 subject in three different contexts over time  – Australia, Greece, and Denmark. One obvious reason for

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choosing these localities is that we, as authors, are from these countries, and have done extensive research on L1 in them. The examples are drawn from local teaching practices in each of the three national contexts, incorporating short strategically selected case-accounts (Flyvbjerg 2006; Stake 1995) for each locality. Analysing and comparing ‘indicative’ examples allows for validation, albeit in small scale, through saturation (Small 2009). Further analyses of indicative examples from other national contexts could follow from this study and thus strengthen or, indeed, indicate alternative perspectives from the ones developed here. Our theoretical-methodological departure point is that every teaching practice, whether in physical classroom space or online, is understood as a nexus point (Scollon and Scollon 2004) where various elements of local, global, past and present discourses intersect, mix and are crossed. In this sense, each example – rather than broadly ‘representative’ – is indicative of the mixes in each different educational milieu in order to illustrate the complexity of the issues in focus. This methodological strategy is widely used in sociolinguistics and social semiotics (e.g. Blommaert 2010; Bezemer and Kress 2016). Ethnographically speaking, this gives us an emic perspective, that is, an insider’s point of view on each national context. Another important reason for this approach, informed by our sociocultural framework, is the relative distance between the three countries and claims by educational researchers that they are embedded in different teaching traditions ranging from a Didaktik approach, presumably dominating a Nordic context, to an Anglophone curriculum tradition influencing the southern hemisphere (Hopmann and Riquarts 2000; see also Krogh and Green, this volume). Methodologically speaking, the cases are ‘deviant’ (Small 2009) and thus offer a chance to explore variety and diversity across these different traditions – and in particular, to examine how dominant global discourses on technology and education are mediated in each context. The cases are comparable in the sense that all three are drawn from secondary school L1 classrooms. In the Australian case, students examine current social issues via Twitter, and explore how identities can be constructed in online texts. In the Greek example, students work with Greek tourism advertisements on YouTube and then create their own advertising materials. The Danish example contrasts students working individually to analyse media advertising in the early 1980s, with a more recent case, where students work as teams building websites to promote a regional city. The examples have been written to illustrate some of the indicative features, characteristics and preoccupations of L1 classrooms in each country. In the three examples, we acknowledge the particularities of each context and explore the different realisation of L1 and digital technology and the parameters that play an important role (e.g. the spirit of globalisation). In each example, we also point to how L1 as a subject is reconstructed under both older and newer circumstances. Clearly the examples are not representative of all classrooms, but they do provide an opportunity to bring together examples from different national contexts and affirm the importance of engaging in research from an international perspective. We have deliberately not selected ‘high-tech’ or ‘state of the art’ examples, but instead focus on typical and ‘state of the actual’ examples (Selwyn 2010). Bringing

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these examples together from across our three contexts has the effect of sensitising us to both the important differences and the similarities in how local educational L1 technocultures develop within classrooms. Subtle differences, as well as similarities, become clearer when examples are juxtaposed  – the influence of particular histories, as well as cultural and political traditions, are rendered less ‘natural’ so that it is possible to see them more readily as particular constructions and outcomes based on a particular set of historical conditions. After presenting the examples, in the final section we consider what they might have to tell us about current preoccupations and directions within L1 teaching and learning.

4  A  n Australian Example: Persuasive Language, #metoo and Twitter L1/English teachers in Australia first grappled with computers in the early 1980s. In these early days there were a range of responses to the arrival of computers into English classrooms, including skepticism about their usefulness to concerns about the kinds of social and economic changes that computerisation promised (Durrant 2001; Bigum 1990; Tickell 1983). By the late 1980s, the main L1 professional conferences and journals regularly featured material on computers and English. Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, the professional conversations and writing of English teachers and researchers were often preoccupied with ongoing developments related to computers in English/L1, and increasingly with multimedia, hypertext and eventually the internet, mobile phones, computer games and social media (e.g. Bulfin and McGraw 2011, 2015; Beavis et  al. 2017; Lankshear et  al. 2000; Snyder 1997, 2002). The story has been much the same for educational policy and curriculum over this same period, with notions like digital literacy, multimodality and online texts now commonplace in Australian policy and curriculum documents (ACARA 2019; Cumming et al. 2011). As in many parts of the world, Australian classrooms have responded to these system-level drivers in a range of ways. The example below is taken from a lesson sequence on persuasive language, where students in their third year of secondary school (14–15 year olds) explored the representation of a range of contemporary social issues through a range of media texts – in this case, speeches, tweets, newspaper opinion pieces, photographs and political cartoons. The example draws on data from a longer-term project investigating the digitialisation of subject English in Australia. In this particular current-day classroom, over the course of several weeks students worked with a variety of texts, learning to identify persuasive techniques and to understand how different authors use language to persuade. Learning about persuasive language in media texts is something of a rite of passage for students in English classrooms in Australia. Students analyse media and popular culture texts and then write critical analysis pieces on these texts. They also write their own persuasive texts, employing the techniques they have learned about.

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Fig. 1  Student worksheet on twitter and #metoo (Australia)

In the particular exercise depicted below, students have read some background material on the contemporary #metoo issue, discussed the issue as a class, and are then asked to read through the tweets (two of five are presented) (Fig. 1). After reading through the tweets and discussing them with their colleagues, students choose a tweet they want to focus on and attempt the questions prepared by the teacher. Most students type their responses on iPads and submit their writing via email or Google Classroom. In this case, after students have written notes, the class shares responses together in an open discussion. Such ‘language analysis’ activities, where students explore contemporary social issues through media and popular culture texts, are common in Australian secondary English classrooms. They represent a longstanding interest in English curriculum for young people to develop critical understandings of the contemporary media environment through engagement with a wide variety of print and, since the late 1990s, increasingly digital texts (Cumming et al. 2012; Jetnikoff 2009; Russell and Beavis 2012). In Australia, this curricular goal is based on the widely acknowledged principle that “students interact with a wide range of individuals, groups and communities in face-to-face and online/virtual environments” (ACARA 2019). With respect to the current national Australian curriculum, the activity above fits

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comfortably within a ‘literacy’ or ‘language’ framing, where students are working with ‘everyday’ texts rather than more ‘literary’ texts. This literacy framing within the Curriculum encourages a focus on exploring “combinations of language and visual choices that authors make to present information, opinions and perspectives”, and also to create texts that “present a point of view and advance or illustrate arguments, including texts that integrate visual, print and/or audio features” (ACARA 2019). In addition, the activity draws on critical literacy traditions, and there are elements of a broad media and critical media pedagogy (Mclaughlin and DeVoogd 2004; Morgan 1997) in operation, alongside a recognisable ‘read and respond’ classroom genre, where students are provided with some broader context, presented with a text, and then posed questions by the teacher which require responses. What appears to be most new in this example is the Twitter text being used to explore persuasive language and techniques – concepts and terms such as ‘author’, ‘contention’, ‘text production’ and ‘target audience’ – ideas that no doubt have wide currency across many L1 teaching contexts. Attention is drawn to the representational characteristics of Twitter text itself by questions about text production (when was the text produced? Where was it produced?). Other than this, though, the Twitter text is treated in an unremarkable way  – presented alongside the other texts that students are given, including a Golden Globe speech by Oprah Winfrey. The Twitter texts are not singled out for special treatment, but are presented as another space where the #metoo debate has played out. Some of the questions focus on the ‘medium’ of the text (1, 2 and 3) but do not explicity draw attention to its digital nature or its production and dissemination – and so the questions could easily be used with any text. Here in this sequence the medium is treated as unproblematic, even naturalised, and no difference between it or the other texts is signaled through its treatment in questions or otherwise. While such an emphasis on the text would seem acceptable to many L1 educators, the broader contexts shaping its creation, algorithmic dissemination, meaning and use seem to require something more than a ‘business-as-usual’ approach. In a related activity, students investigate how Twitter enables social media users to construct particular identities through language. Students begin by examining the Twitter feeds of two well-known personalities: Kim Kardashian and Kanye West (not shown). They look closely at the language features particular to Twitter, including visual language, identifying those they are familiar and unfamiliar with (e.g. tweet length, hastags, profile pictures and descriptions, retweets, links, memes etc.). They then think about how these language features are employed by users to craft particular identities through the Twitter accounts and feeds they are examining. After considering the feeds of well-known public figures, they speculate more generally about how identities might be understood as produced through language on a digital platform, and, importantly, how their own use of language as social media users constructs particular identities, and how these might be similar to or different from their use of language in other domains of life – school, home and community. Finally, students are asked to create a twitter feed to demonstrate their understanding of how digital platforms shape identity. They can do this by creating the persona of someone involved in the media debates they have been examining or by taking on

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the role of a character in a novel they are reading. They are required to include in their feed many of the language features they have explored in the feeds of other users, and to recreate the identities of their chosen characters accurately through language choices within tweets, profile texts, retweets, replies, links, and so on. This related sequence asks students more complex questions than the activity shown above, emphasising aspects of the particular digital platform, its uses and consequences, as well as its particular characteristics, affordances, underpinning logics and aims. It also engages students in critically exploring their own uses of the text in a productive and creative-analytical mode. Here there is an attempt to treat the text on its own terms, and not simply as a neutral carrier of representations and meanings. Such activities involving digital texts like Twitter do not enjoy universal acceptance among L1 teachers or the wider Australian community (Beavis 1998; Donnelly 1998; Snyder 2008). There have been some infamous examples of community interest (and horror!) where examples of English teachers asking young people to analyse movie posters or text messages have been used to whip up moral panic about declining standards in L1 teaching (e.g. Donnelly 2007). The ‘culture wars’ remain an ever-present tension in the cultural politics of L1/English education in Australia (e.g. Freesmith 2006; George and Huynh 2009; Green et al. 1997; Howie 2008). Another significant factor shaping L1 education in recent years has been the rapid uptake of standards-based reforms across all areas of school education, including a national high-stakes testing regime for literacy (see NAPLAN) (Lingard et  al. 2016). In the context of heightened public sensitivity to educational standards and measurable achievement in schools, and increased accountability through mechanisms such as national high-stakes literacy testing, L1 educators in Australia are regularly called upon to justify the use or study of digital texts and practices, even though the study of these same texts and practices has long been enshrined as legitimate in state and national curriculums. Given the history of digital media in schools in Australia, the examples above can be seen as evidence of both the normalisation of the digital within the curriculum and also an attempt at a more critical approach to digital media in L1. In the #metoo sequence, the common curriculum practice of analysing media texts is brought together with Twitter in a way that treats the platform as a more or less neutral space where an important social debate is playing out. The focus is not Twitter-as-algorithmic-text-mediator, for example, but on the social issues under discussion and how language is used to persuade – often a safer focus for L1 teachers whose knowledge or confidence with digital texts might be low. In the related sequence (described but not shown), the focus moves towards a more nuanced understanding of how Twitter-as-platform shapes and is used to shape representation and action in the world. There is evidence of critical literacy and critical media studies traditions here, as well as clear multiliteracies logics at play. In the Australian context, then, the tension between the normalising of digital media within existing L1 traditions, and the possibility of a more critical reimagining of the relationship of digital media to L1, play out against a backdrop shaped by both conservative politico-media discourses and a long antipodean history of progressive L1 research, theorizing and practice.

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5  A  Greek Example: From Grammar Multimedia to the Grammar of Teaching The first attempt at using computers in Modern Greek language teaching as L1 took place in the early 1990s, when the ‘Institute of Language and Speech Processing’ developed software called Logomathia. As noted by the developers, the software was “for teaching the Modern Greek Language”, which actually meant teaching grammar (grades 6–8). In this attempt, the dominant ideologies of the time had been encapsulated. First, the software was an up-to-date product from a technological perspective, since it was developed through the cutting-edge technology of the time, multimedia, although the pedagogical notion of drill-and-practice, the core instructional logic of most multimedia of the 90s, was already outdated. Logomathia realised the logic of the computer as a tutor (Koutsogiannis et al. 2014). Second, the emphasis on teaching grammar was not accidental, since it reflected a strong tradition in the Greek school, mostly related to the fact that teachers of Ancient Greek, a dead but still very important language for the construction of the modern Greek identity, also teach Modern Greek. In this frame, language teaching as a subject area is mostly identified with the teaching of grammar. Third, in this particular software teaching takes place against a digital backdrop of the famous Acropolis of Athens, and the figure representing the teacher is called Homer. Such choices indicated, at a semiotic level, the importance of ancient Greek culture for Modern Greek education. Finally, this software was well-suited to the school textbooks of the time, in which the teaching of grammar had an important place. Both the technological and scientific milieu was quite different in the late 1990s, when it was decided to develop a centralised teacher training system at a national level so that digital media could be used in all school subjects. The approach adopted then was the well-known ‘train the trainer’ model; this meant, in the Greek case, that a central institution selected a few teachers to be intensively trained in some universities in order to become teacher-trainers in their region. For this reason, a scientific committee was formed to develop the theoretical frame as well as the material for the training of teacher trainers. Being responsible for Modern Greek on this committee, my (DK) main aims were for teachers: to become familiar with contemporary scientific explorations in order to be able to make different choices depending on their educational contexts; to have the possibility to use textbooks, the dominant medium of teaching, not as the sole teaching medium but as one of many resources available for designing their lessons; and to use digital media as literacy practice environments. To fulfil these aims, we introduced, in collaboration with colleagues responsible for other school subjects, the notion of the ‘scenario’, a project-based entity suitable for training teachers as designers (and not as textbook servants). An important accompaniment of every scenario was the worksheet, a guideline to help students work independently in different subgroups. It is crucial to underline here that, while we were trying to influence teaching in this direction, Greek schools at the time were dominated by the logic of one textbook, the same, for every child across the country, which is still the case today.

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Research on this effort (e.g. Koutsogiannis 2007) revealed two important problems. The first was related to the fact that most teachers found it difficult to move from a book-based teaching practice to becoming designers of scenarios. The second problem was that scenarios were not used in daily teaching, but only occasionally throughout the year, in-between the dominant textbook-based teaching practices. This meant that the initiatives taken by the committee amounted not so much to a totally different pedagogic reality but, rather, to a ‘parallel curriculum’ – the official book-based curriculum and the unofficial scenarios-based curriculum. Since this time, in order to provide the Greek L1 educational community with useful scenarios promoting effective teaching practices, we have created an online community of qualified teachers to jointly plan, implement and upload into a database a large number of scenarios, to be made available to other teachers at a national level. The example below (see Fig. 2) is a worksheet from a scenario designed by a member of this online community for the eighth grade, and addressed to a group of students working independently. In this short example, a multilayered and multivocal reality is encapsulated (Scollon and Scollon 2004), designed by the teacher’s agentive effort to create an innovative teaching opportunity. It seems that the teacher is able to incorporate in her scenario elements from different international discourses related to language teaching. In the beginning, she draws from a genre-based pedagogy, since children are asked to watch a genre example of an ‘advertising spot’ in order to create their own. Then, a shift is made to use elements of multiliteracies (see lexical choices, such as semiotic modes, multimodal texts) intermingled with a version of critical literacy traditions (see b, c). It is also interesting that these critical elements are supported by a tendency to use a multisemiotic metalanguage, focusing both on ‘semiotic modes’ as well as ‘verbal arguments’ (see c). Worksheet 3 Our mission We will study the genre of the advertising spot so that we can then create our own spot. The process 1. We are watching attentively the first version of the advertising spot, produced by the National Greek Tourism Organisation, entitled "Greek tourism, an eternal journey", to identify: a) the semiotic modes used by this multimodal text b) the central message of the spot and the specific verbal arguments invoked in order to convince the viewer to visit Greece c) how the other semiotic modes support these verbal arguments

Fig. 2  Student tourism advertising worksheet (Greece)

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Finally, something not obvious at first glance is that all these elements of easily recognisable international discourses on language teaching are framed within a longstanding Greek textbook tradition related to how text-based writing (Wang and Matsumura 2019) is conceptualised. The worksheet is based on a recognisable ‘comprehension’-style exercise, where a given text for ‘reading’ is followed by questions posed by the teacher – this was something common in most scenarios and teaching practices analysed as part of the related research project. The difference between the scenario and the Greek textbook-based tradition is that, in the scenario, the text is not selected by textbook authors but by the teacher from the internet (in this case, from YouTube). Moreover, the questions assigned by the teacher do not “guide students to recall isolated facts … or engage with surface level features of a text only” (Wang and Matsumura 2019, p.  406), but in this case they are open-­ ended, with a multisemiotic and critical orientation. From this short example, some interesting insights can be drawn. In an open world, international discourses about teaching circulate globally in real time and they are intermingled with local discourses and practices in a unique way, depending on local traditions, educational policy initiatives, and teachers’ agency. In this sense, it is important to underline the teacher’s important initiatives, namely that she was able to incorporate in such a short worksheet elements from a number of contemporary theories on teaching L1. However, it is also important to indicate how long-standing existing textbook-based teaching schemas on text-based writing shape and even constrain the possibilities for recontextualising global discourses within local traditions. As in all educational work, history is omnipresent in this example. It is difficult to understand the scenario and worksheet out of the context of international developments in teaching L1 during the last three decades, but also out of longstanding local traditions of teaching L1, and how these initiatives have translocalised, and on local initiatives to incorporate digital media in teaching. In short, based on the Greek experience, we are reminded that re-imagining L1 is a complex process that goes beyond the school subject, beyond exclusive emphasis on digital technologies and ways with using them pedagogically, and requires good educational planning and policy incorporating structural changes.

6  A  Danish Example: From Coca-Cola Advertising to Website Mockups In the Danish context, one can go back to the early 1970s to start telling the story of teaching technological perspectives in L1. At that time there was no discourse on digital technology. Instead, the 1971 curriculum for upper-secondary education Danish introduced the notion of ‘extended text offer’ and the teaching of ‘mass communication’ as a new knowledge domain. This was a result of a linguistic/communicative turn that had taken place in the humanities at Danish universities, inspired by post-second world war theoretical movements such as the Frankfurt

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School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Enzensberger, others) and European semiotics (Saussure, Jakobson, Barthes, others). The Danish change in L1 curriculum was followed up by a multitude of new textbooks aimed at assisting teaching at the primary and secondary levels. For example, one book entitled Mass Communication: Introduction to a New Domain of Teaching (Olivarius et al. 1976, our translation) had wide impact in practice, as it was distributed by the Danish Association of Danish Teachers. It included an introduction to Roland Barthes’ (1964) essay ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’, explaining analytic tools such as denotation and connotation that could be used for image analysis, and text analysis more broadly. Together, these developments had huge impact on classroom practices and assessment. Consider, for example, Fig.  3, an assignment found in the Danish upper-­secondary national examination for 1980, a 5-hour individual writing event: It is easy to observe the influences from the 1960s and 1970s in this examination question. Students have been taught aspects of semiotics and are positioned as active independent analysts of the meaning-making practices of popular mass media, encouraging them to take a critical stance. The broader Bildung purpose, as the learning outcome goal would be termed in a Nordic-German context, was to enable young people to “travel” (Svendsen 2011) from superficial consumption of texts to conscious identification of ideologies ‘hidden’ in the text. Later in the history of Danish L1 research and practice, such an assignment would be interpreted in more critical ways. From a cultural studies point of view – an influence on L1 teaching from the late 1970s on – one would characterise the assignment as a prototypical example of “inoculation pedagogy” (Buckingham 2003; Elf 2009), as it objectifies and limits the meaning-making potential of media and technology. An alternative cultural studies position, which developed into an action-oriented approach in late twentieth and early twenty-first century L1 teaching, would argue in alternative ways. Instead of teaching students how to ‘protect’ themselves against popular media through the acquisition of mass media analysis, one should rather focus on how children and young people engage and develop Coca-cola-advertisment The advertisement is from the magazine Vi unge [’We are Young’] Oct 1978. The advertisement is found on the back of the magazine. The reproduction is a 1:1 reproduction of the original. Make an analysis of the Coca-cola-advertisement. The analysis should contain a description of the picture, and an account of the means used for meaning making, including angle, composition, colour, text. In addition, offer an account of the values that the advertisement presupposes amongst recipients, and evaluate them from your own point of view. Title: Coca-cola

Fig. 3  Coca-cola examination question from 1980 (Denmark)

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identity and agency in and through local media cultures, digital as well as analogue, market-driven as well as initiated in informal civil life. Such a “cultural-semiotic” position (Burn and Durran 2007) has informed more recent Danish teaching practices both at the programmatic and enacted classroom curriculum levels. It is inscribed as a knowledge domain and a learning goal in curriculum for both lowerand upper-secondary education (Elf et al. 2015). As a second indicative example from a Danish context, consider the following example of a task in Danish L1 teaching at the lower-secondary level: You are the creative team at an advertising bureau, and you have been given the task to prepare a website that presents (something in) Aalborg [the fourth largest city in Denmark] or your own part of the town to people of the same age. Up to 10 slides are at your disposal. If you need more, you’ll have to make an agreement with the customer [a role represented by the teacher].

The example is taken from an intervention study that explored the relationship between students’ multimodal production, feedback and development of text competence (Christensen 2015). In the specific task, students were asked to produce both a dummy and, after receiving and orally discussing feedback from teachers and peers, a mockup. The mockups of two groups from the same class are found in Figs. 4 and 5 and offer a glimpse of the diversity to be found amongst students. The website task addresses a group (team), not an individual. The groups themselves should address another group, or rather, an imagined public addressee, and

Fig. 4  Esther, Mia and David’s student product. (Reproduced with permission)

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Fig. 5  Morten and Flemming’s student product. (Reproduced with permission)

not an isolated individual, such as the teacher. The teacher is, of course, present, facilitating the teaching and learning process, but also simulating the role of a customer. The rationale of the module’s design, as a whole, is informed not only by a cultural-semiotic position, but also by other global pedagogic trends and discourses, such as the connected learning pedagogy (Ito et  al. 2014), integrated with well-­ known L1 practices and goals, including the development of students’ oracy. From a programmatic curricular viewpoint, there is nothing controversial about the example; it addresses one of the newer learning goals in the Danish L1 curriculum: Multimodal Production (Jeffery et al. 2018). On the other hand, public debates in the aftermath of the new curriculum revealed that there is, in fact, a great divide in research and practice between those who would like to emphasise literacy development in the monomodal and linguistic sense and those who promote an extended notion of multimodal and networked-oriented meaning-making in both out-of-­ school and in-school practices, as reflected in the website example. In that sense, the 2015 example is on the boundary of what is a well-established practice within the subject and what is a potentially emerging and acknowledged rationale for the subject. If we compare the two tasks from 1980 and 2015, several similarities and differences can be identified. Focusing on the what-question, it may seem that the same topic is taught in both cases: advertising. Since the mid 1970s, phenomena referring to advertising, and more broadly, commercialised mass culture, have been dominant

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technocultural aspects of ‘content’ in Danish L1 teaching. Considering how- and why-questions, however, we see that the content is configured in different ways. On a superficial level, a shared goal is to develop students’ critical literacy, linked to advertising and commercial mass culture resources. However, In the 1980s example, advertising is represented as a popular mass object, prompting critical individual analysis and personal receptive work; while in the 2015 example, teaching commercial mass culture also includes a productive and more creative dimension, which acknowledges children’s and adolescents’ daily engagement in digital networks in particular. One could argue that the 2015 example reflects a reduced emphasis on teaching students a critical stance. Alternatively, one could also argue that the productive and connected learning-oriented approach allows students becoming critical in the digital age, as Buckingham has argued (2003, 2007), by positioning them as meaning-making subjects with agency and the ability to consider the environment they are supposed to act in. The internet becomes a space for simulating and training collaborative networked meaning-making, ultimately allowing them to develop their digital media literacies (Buckingham 2007). The 2015 example also suggests a potentially changing role for the teacher. Multiple studies of teaching digital technology and multimodality in L1 have found that the teacher is positioned in new, less explicitly authoritative ways (Elf et al. 2015). The changing role is linked to a reconceptualisation of assessment. Roughly, formative feedback processes from both teachers and peers are foregrounded much more now than in earlier days in all kinds of teaching, including L1. The 2015 example is indicative for this development, even from a research perspective. Inspired by Hattie and Timperley (2007), the researcher focuses, in her intervention, on students’ uptake of processual feedback offered by teachers and peers. She finds that some categories characteristic of earlier varieties of semiotic analysis are present and used for feedback: content, genre, intended and actual recipients. However, additional categories inspired by social semiotic theory and network theory are also found in the intervention: affordance, modality, multimodality, navigation. So, new terms and practices linked to technology may have entered the L1 curriculum from a programmatic and teacher perspective, but not necessarily from a student perspective. The Nordic review cited earlier suggests that teachers continue to struggle to grasp and integrate emerging technological vocabulary, and that this leads to a sense of “teacher uncertainty on how and why to integrate technology within the subject” (Elf et al. 2015, p. 35). To summarise, examples from the Danish context reflect an ongoing ambition in Danish L1 teaching to integrate technology, including digital technology, into classroom practices. To some extent, the examples reflect well-known communicative vis-a-vis literacy-oriented rationales drawn from global discourse and reinterpreted in light of local disciplinary traditions. Additional practices associated with digital, multimodal and networked text cultures, as well as students’ experiences and ways of identifying with such resources, are also found, albeit with significant diversity in uptake and engagement both amongst students and teachers. In some aspects of contemporary Danish L1 tech-teaching, it appears that the notion of competence development is becoming a ‘collectivised’ practice. One could argue that the

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website example indicates a shift in the rationale of L1, and education more broadly, as the modern history of education has privileged the development of the individual’s competence/Bildung (Rychen and Salganik 2003). Is technology taught within L1 catalysing an emerging collective understanding of development? In any case, the two Danish L1 examples provided here, backed by other Nordic research, indicate a rather complex and ambiguous development in the rationales for teaching and learning technology.

7  Discussion and Conclusions What might these examples, drawn from three different national educational systems, with different traditions and experiences in using digital media in teaching L1, have to tell us about current and typical technocultural constructions of L1  in research, curriculum and practice? Across the three examples, there are some commonalities; indeed, a sameness is evident. Although the local traditions in teaching L1 differ, there are clear centripetal forces in each example towards L1 becoming a more digitally responsive subject; digital technology is not seen as something altogether ‘new’, but as an increasingly important aspect in the teaching of L1 – even if there is no clear settlement or agreement about how the L1 subject, as it is expressed in these local examples, as well as in the research, might go about engaging with the digital. These centripetal forces are in part due to the dramatic expansion in the use of digital technologies, which has aided the circulation of contemporary discourses about L1 teaching. It is impressive, for example, how the Greek teacher, socialised in an educational system with a traditional focus for teaching L1 (an emphasis on teaching grammar, textbook-based teaching etc., also dominating in many national contexts – see e.g. Štěpáník this volume for an example in the Eastern European region), adapts and remixes elements of contemporary global discourses related to language teaching within a digital context. It is also notable how the Australian teacher incorporates into the L1 classroom a contemporary global social issue significant to many young people (#metoo), drawing teaching material from Twitter. The Danish case is also indicative of the wide use of technology for writing digital multimodal texts in teaching Danish. Each example suggests a sense of creative appropriation in drawing from contemporary global resources (material and immaterial) and designing L1 curriculum. This synchronisation of L1 teaching with global dominant technologies and circulating discourses, and in quite different educational systems and geographies, in such a short period of a few decades, is likely to be rather unique in history. This conclusion accords with numerous recent publications and conferences that indicate that discussions on literacy education and especially on teaching L1 are characterised by two main emphases. The first emphasis is on digital media as a feature of communication environments in which new forms of representation and meaning-making are possible, and consequently on expanding the focus of L1

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teaching to embrace the new or digital literacies as core, or at least part of the core, of the L1 subject. This emphasis points to a paradigmatic focus on ‘literacy’, understood as a focus on ‘working with texts’ and increasingly multimodal texts (e.g. Avila and Zacher Pandya 2013; Miller and McVee 2013). The second related emphasis is on the active use of digital media within purposeful pedagogical activities, recognising the active engagements of students and their teachers with digital media beyond classrooms and schools. It is now difficult to find an L1 curriculum anywhere in the world without such emphases, at least formally, in policy and vision. From this point of view, then, it seems that teaching L1 is already effectively reimagined, and that this reimagining is indicated in each of the examples earlier. But behind this sense of harmonious sychronisation with and around the digital, there are other elements, not visible from a first glance, that reveal the complexity of the issues, and that can interrogate a neutral perspective of fast and homogenous technocultural change in L1 teaching. Here we briefly comment on three. The first is related to the importance of regional, national and local context, and of the histories of different localities. As the three examples indicate, different local traditions shape the technocultural flavour and recontextualisation of the digital in L1 teaching. For example, we have seen that in Australia, long-running debates on literacy polarise around calls for ‘back to basics’ (see Snyder 2008), at the same time as cultural studies perspectives have been extended to digital literacy. In Denmark, the passing from the critical perspectives of the 1970s to current cultural studies and multimodal approaches may seem smooth at first sight; however, strong countertrends towards a monomodal and back-to-basics literacy teaching is also found. The Greek case is very different, since cultural studies’ perspectives have remained mainly in the academy, without a real influence on school education. In Greece, this facilitates the continuation of a long tradition emphasising the central role of top-down perspectives – evident in the design of in-service teacher training related to scenarios, and also in the structure of Greek student activity. Based on these observations about the importance of various contexts for shaping the production of L1, it is not difficult to speak about a clear ‘glocal’ (Koutsogiannis and Mitsikopoulou 2004) or translocal tension (Koutsogiannis 2015) as a key dimension to understanding the ongoing technocultural production of L1 in policy, curriculum and practice. The second issue is related to how the notion of critical (digital) literacy, dominant in all examples, is not a clear-cut, well defined international term but, rather, a local constructed perspective. The Danish Coca-Cola example, about four decades old, has many common elements with the contemporary cases of Australia and Greece. In each example, one or more texts is chosen as stimulus reading material, and students are positioned as readers and viewers having to answer given or concrete questions. Although in all cases the questions are open, exploratory and critical, the “ways with words”, to recall Heath’s (1983) famous phrase, are all very similar. In particular, it seems that the dominant teaching genre in each context can readily be described as enacting a communicative practice that Halliday and Hasan (1989) have called “offer and demand”. In a teaching context, the teacher ‘offers’

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the texts for reading – or in the examples here, chooses texts from the internet – and then ‘demands’ what is to be written about the texts. In other words, students’ sanctioned opportunities for engaging or acting are delimited by the teachers’ framing of the ways of acting. This form of text-based teaching is crucial, because it largely determines how students will act with and around texts, and consequently, how they are formed and positioned as literate subjects. This means that it is impossible to understand the pedagogical use of technology outside of, or separate from, well-­ established pedagogic traditions with their recognizable teaching genres and patterns of educational interaction. The use of technology does not automatically erase the pedagogic past which is, as the indicative examples indicate, part of teachers’ professional habitus. The third and perhaps most important insight from the three examples is related to history and the role of L1 over time in the production of particular kinds of literate subjectivities. In all of the examples discussed here, there is a clear shift in the concept of the ideal paideia,1 or ideal citizen-subject, in relation to the past, and how this subject is to be cultivated and realised through education. It is well accepted that the teaching of L1 in the past was dedicated to rearing the ideal citizen-subject of the nation-state (Collins and Blot 2003; Peel et al. 2000). The medium of print was the favoured technology serving this main aim, with the literature of the canon, along with the dominant genres of teaching – the essay, argumentative and persuasive texts – all playing an important role. When placed next to such historical understandings, the present shift in the aims of the teaching of L1 is clear: from a subject dedicated on cultivating the values of a citizen belonging to the nation-state, to a subject focusing on immersing students in, or attempting to equip them for navigating, the new everyday reality of the literacy contexts and values of globalization vis-à-vis internationalization (see also Green & Erixon and Ongstad, this volume). Put simply, the reorientation of the student subject from national citizen to global citizen. Digital media, accompanied with recent theoretical explorations about its place in L1 curriculum and practice, are the dominant technologies for realising this clear paradigmatic shift. This discussion so far indicates that the subject of L1 is indeed being reimagined in technical-digital aspects, since in many cases digital media have been productively incorporated into many everyday teaching practices, and the emphasis on digital literacies is now clear in policy and formal curricula in many parts of the world. But in approaching the issue from a technocultural perspective, critical questions are raised which further complicate the dominant linear attempts at ‘rethinking’ L1 and technology that we have called into question in this chapter. As our analysis shows, the role of different local educational ideologies and traditions play an important role in the way that global scientific and cultural discourses are recontextualised, and indicate that the past is always intermingled with the present. While these are important dimensions, we want to underline the significance of the  “In the culture of ancient Greece, the term paideia (also spelled ‘paedeia’) (/paɪˈdeɪə/;Greek: παιδεία, paideía) referred to the rearing and education of the ideal member of the polis.” https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paideia (17/5/2019)

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historical shift in the focus of L1 – a shift from a print-based orientation dedicated to the making of citizens for the nation-state, to an increasingly digitally responsive subject, necessarily perhaps, engaging young people, but not necessarily trained teachers with long experience, with the new global realities along with the dominant values and priorities of that global reality. With this view in mind, how might the changes, opportunities and challenges for L1 be understood in ontological and epistemological terms? Clearly, we must think beyond the digitalisation of L1 as a school subject, but also towards the arguably more important, but less obvious shift from ‘print-capitalism’, to recall Anderson’s (1991) phrase, to emerging forms of digital capitalism (Fuchs and Mosco 2016), such as those now associated with platform capitalism, datafication, machine learning, and digital algorithmic forms of governance and practice, within and beyond education (Beer 2018; Bucher 2018; Srnicek 2017; Williamson 2017). In both directions, towards a clearer perspective on L1 as a subject, but also beyond, we argue that there is room for a more thorough reimagining. If such reimagining is toward the digitalisation of L1 in a more contained way, as has been argued against in this chapter, additional parameters must be taken into account, such as the shaping hand of geography, local histories, and the remixing of past and present. If the task of reimagining is to be broader and to account for deeper ontological and epistemological shifts in the technocultural make-up of L1, a different direction in theory and research is likely needed. In this second case, it is not simply about managing a process of productive alignment between L1 as a school subject with the broader technological demands of the time, as these continue to change, but a process of being incorporated more fully and recognisably (albeit critically?) into a new era of digital capitalism. In this second case, digital literacies are not only the new media of representation and meaning-making, and new environments for productive pedagogies, but part of a new historical configuration and emerging forms of capitalism. In this case, the re-imagination of the subject is only in its first steps, and a new direction is urgently needed. To conclude, from the teaching practices in the three different localities it seems that the teaching of L1  in relation to digital technology is already reimagined in methodology, in the way of understanding semiosis and text, as well as in incorporating contemporary global issues and values. From this perspective, it is in clear alignment with the spirit of the dominant literature in relation to literacy and the digital. We have tried to suggest here other issues (relating to locality, to history, to subjectivities) that are often underestimated as pressing and relevant issues for L1 educators and researchers. Many of these issues indicate that a paradigmatic shift is needed in conceptualizing digital media in L1 and language teaching – a shift that has at the centre the spirit of the economic, social and cultural reality of the new capitalism, broadly understood.

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Dimitrios Koutsogiannis  is Professor of Educational Linguistics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He has been a research associate in the ‘Centre for the Greek Language’ since 1997, responsible for the development of digital resources for the Greek language, and currently director of the ‘Division for the support and promotion of the Greek language’ (Center for the Greek Language); he is also member of the scientific community in the ‘Computer Technology Institute – Diofantos’, responsible for in-service teacher training (at a national level) on using New Media in Greek language teaching. His special interest and his publications are related to language education, educational discourse analysis, and digital literacies. His last book, in Greek: ‘Language Education, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: A Political Perspective’ (2017).

Nation and Nature in L1 Education: Changing the Mission of Subject English Sasha Matthewman

Abstract  English, and L1 education more generally, has traditionally been concerned to describe and construct aspects of the nation. However, the global human impact on planetary systems and nature has game-changing effects on every national space with profound, and as yet unrealised, implications for education. Drawing upon recent ecocritical research on English teaching in schools, this chapter argues that L1 educators must change their curriculum mission in the Anthropocene – an epoch of intensifying climate anxiety. I offer ecocritical re-evaluations of the curriculum histories of English from opposite sides of the world: in the UK (specifically England) and in Aotearoa New Zealand, emphasising the interdependence of nation and nature. I show how the rise of the “carbon curriculum” has promoted a narrow focus on individual achievement, competition in a growing global economy, and preparation for an increasingly digital future with an unrealistic expectation of ‘business as usual’. In opposition, I show that ecocriticism offers resources of hope for a revised understanding of English as an environmental subject capable of shaping a collective critical response to the planetary crisis at national and global geographical scales. I outline a theoretical framework of how that response might be organised, and illustrate it with classroom examples. I conclude that the teaching of English has the potential to shape the understanding of environmental change as a process in which humans have responsibility, agency and power. Keywords  English teaching · English curriculum history · Ecocriticism · Anthropocene · Literacy pedagogy

1  Introduction: The Climate Crisis and Educational Responsibility As a growing number of nations declare a climate emergency recognising the looming global threat, surely teaching the curriculum should aim beyond national boundaries and economies? Consider for example the school strikes for the climate that S. Matthewman (*) Michael Park Steiner School, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Green, P.-O. Erixon (eds.), Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era, Educational Linguistics 48, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7_11

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have sprung up across the globe in 150 countries, following the original example of Swedish school girl Greta Thunberg. The school strikes are at once about nation, nature, and the plight of the planet. These children are asking for climate action from their politicians, but their protests also call educators to account for the value of education in the current moment. After all, what is the point of going to school if the planet is in peril? This is a confronting question for all educators, but particularly for those concerned with teaching L1, when L1 is defined as the central, core or lynchpin subject in the curriculum map, as is nearly always the case for subject English. Teaching English as L1 is laced with claims by both educators and politicians about its pre-eminence in the school curriculum. These claims concern the national language, the national culture, and the role of the mother tongue in accessing all the other subjects in the curriculum. Loftily, English teachers have been cast as “preachers of culture” (Mathieson 1975), with a unique mission of “national renewal through literary education” (Doyle 2003, p.13). Politicians have sought to control this cultural power through national curriculum documentation and initiatives (Goodson and Medway 1990), with a good deal of educational kickback (Cox 1995). Indeed many histories of subject English in England recount a passionate and bitter battle of beliefs amongst different intellectual and political positions about what makes English worth teaching. These fraught ideological battles belie the bland statements of positions in curriculum documents. Now, in the context of climate change, a new battle is emerging about the role of English – although up until now this has been fought in field of English tertiary studies, rather than in the school classroom. This is an environmental turn for English, a new “mission of English” that draws on the work of environmental literary criticism or ecocriticism (Kerridge 2012). Mobilising recent ecocritical work on English teaching in schools, this chapter will argue that L1 educators must now re-evaluate their curriculum missions in the context of an epoch of intensifying climate anxiety that has come to be called the Anthropocene. I will discuss the curriculum case of English from opposite sides of the world: in the UK (specifically England) and in Aotearoa New Zealand. Both nations retain strong curriculum connections, as the New Zealand nation arose out of the then dominant colonial British culture and the Crown’s settlement with indigenous Maori iwi (tribes) (Bell 1994). Of course, the legacy of empire infuses the project of teaching L1 English wherever one stands in the world. Ideas of nature, place, landscape and environment are deeply embedded in the cultural imagination that emerges out of this colonial past. English plays a part in the process of recognising and valuing both national culture and national nature – although the environmental potential of English as part of a national project tends to be muted within the curriculum. The onset of the Anthropocene signals that both the national and global dependence on nature will, in the future, need to be more explicitly articulated.

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2  Nation and Nature So how can the mission of English recognise nature and culture in terms of curriculum guidance? How do past missions linger on, helping or hindering the emergence of a more environmental English? How do concepts of nation impact on values placed on nature? The first mission of English was unashamedly defined as a project of civilising and colonising populations. Not only was teaching the English language, literature and culture as central to the project of colonising ‘other’ minds within a range of territories, it was also conceived as a treasury of the past glory of Empire for the English people. The Newbolt Report of 1921 articulated the idea that the English language was the conduit through which all English people could have access not just to “one of the great literatures of the world” but to the worlds contained in English, the colonial richness that English literature had somehow sourced and subdued: Moreover, if we explore the course of English literature, if we consider from what sources its stream has sprung, by what tributaries it has been fed, and with how rich and full a current it has come down to us, we shall see that it has other advantages not to be found elsewhere. There are mingled in it, as only in the greatest of rivers there could be mingled, the fertilising influences flowing down from many countries and from many ages of history. Yet all these have been subdued to form a stream native to our own soil. (Newbolt 1921, p.13)

It is worth remarking here on the use of the extended metaphor of the river. Henry Newbolt was a published poet and his feeling for English demonstrates not just a colonial pride but an embodied sense of culture and nature as entwined in the study of literature. Teaching English in England is still conceived as a project of nation-­building but in much more practical and instrumental terms, as set out in a more recent school inspection report: There can be no more important subject than English in the school curriculum. English is a pre-eminent world language, it is at the heart of our culture and it is the language medium in which most of our pupils think and communicate. (Ofsted 2012, p.4)

The continuity is deceptive. The idea of nation is under extreme pressure in the UK, as the increasingly unstable union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland faces departure from the European Union. Brexit, the term for Britain’s protracted exit from the Europe, will have unknowable effects on the concept of nation in England. Most obviously there are two radically different imaginaries of the future: a rapidly receding vision of Britain as open, tolerant, modern, mobile and collaborative, versus a vision of Britain that re-aspires to an imagined past supremacy and sovereignty. A recent Ladybird publication1 satirises the new zeitgeist:

1  Ladybird was a famous publisher of a series of children’s books that used a simple vocabulary and cheerful illustrations. The children’s series has been discontinued but Ladybird books have become iconic national momentos of a British childhood as illustrated by the recent publication of a series of satirical Ladybird books for adults, using the same format, style, font and trademark images.

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Britain is a proud island. For centuries we stood alone. Now we stand alone again. Other countries like Croatia and Spain need to be part of Europe because they are clearly cowards. But our country is special and other countries are queuing up to get what we have to offer, whether it is the music of Sting, or any of our several mild cheeses. This is the future. (Hazeley and Morris 2018, p.6)

In whatever form Brexit emerges, the split both within the nation and with Europe has already taken place in the national imagination. This division will have curriculum effects in terms of the emphasis placed on a particular version of Englishness and national culture. New Zealand is also in the midst of rapid national change. Since 2012, New Zealand has had one of the biggest influxes of population of any OECD country, with inadequate planning for infrastructure and environmental protection (Broatch et al. 2019). Major national upheaval also took place in the 1990s as New Zealand Aotearoa faced up to colonial injustices and embraced the post-colonial concept of biculturalism – at least in government-led contexts such as education. Biculturalism rests on recognising the origin of the nation in the Treaty of Waitangi made between the British crown and a number of influential Maori chiefs. Biculturalism may seem problematic in relation to the current contemporary diversity of the New Zealand nation, as it recognises only two cultures as legitimate influences: Maori and European. However, the potential advantage of New Zealand’s bicultural stance is that these cultures offer contrasting values and a move towards bilingualism. All teachers are required to have some knowledge of Maori culture and language, and to take the terms of the Treaty into account within their curriculum planning. In practice, as many Maori commentators point out, in a bicultural curriculum the dominance of the European partner remains, with little space for teachers to embrace the full diversity of cultures within the classroom. Aside from these different national trajectories debating the particularities of place, nation and culture, England and New Zealand, in common with other countries, have both embraced the idea of the nation as a global economic player. Indeed, place, nature and culture are represented as serving this global economic role. As the New Zealand Tourist Board once pointed out, “New Zealand is the product that we are selling”. New Zealand, as a ‘product’ or ‘brand’, is defined as a vast unspoilt “100% Pure” natural adventure playground. In contrast, it is history and culture that are the major selling points for the UK’s share of international tourism, as well as being an export “product”. In this formulation, the idea of nation in both countries is defined against the claims of other nations, and they share similar international goals of competing against the world, rather than collaboration for the world (Eppley 2019; Sahlberg 2016; Said 1983). And here lies the problem in the context of the global challenge of climate change, which requires both international cooperation and national commitment to nature beyond an economic mindset. It is well established that the teaching of English contributes significantly to developing a sense of national identity (and could contribute to values of cooperation with other nations), but much less articulated is the essential role of English in forming environmental identities and engaging with representations of the natural world (Matthewman

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2017a). The nation is formed from culture and society, but it is grounded in real-­ and-­imagined forms of nature and built places and environments. I want to pause here, as place, environment and nature are all slippery terms which require some definition in order to move on. By ‘place’, I draw on the geographical understanding of worked-upon space, worked on by humans and by non-­ humans to shape it with living and built features. By ‘environment’, I mean everything that surrounds us, but in this particular context I particularly evoke the collocation of environment with environmental concern and care for the natural world. I note up-front that even the most concreted city draws on this natural world (the air, water, food sources, energy, minerals and metals) for the sustenance of life itself. The notoriously complex term ‘nature’ has a multitude of meanings, but here I use it to refer specifically to the fauna and flora of a place, and the ‘natural’ features and forces that pertain to places. Natural landscapes are ‘storied’ and inhabited, rather than separate from culture and curriculum (Morgan 2014). Cultures create landscapes and particular versions of nature  – for England, this process has deep historical layering, whereas the impact of settlement in New Zealand was rapid and radical, with only 1% of the original kauri forest left standing, in the rush to create a ‘pastoral paradise’. New landscapes and relationships with the land were forged in a generation. In subject English classrooms, our history of dependence on (and exploitation of) nature tends to be implicit and taken for granted, while the culture is more explicitly examined as a focus of the teaching. But to read texts is to learn not just about one’s culture and society (often in relationship to representations of different cultures and societies), but also to learn about one’s identity in relation to particular representations of place, environment and nature. Cultural texts are important representations of both the idiom of the national language in use and the discourses and stories about nature and environment that are in cultural circulation. The evidence is that the cultural “stories we live by” need to change to accommodate emerging environmental imperatives (Stibbe 2015). Historically, the relationship between nation and nature is complicated in New Zealand. The original colonial mission of English teaching was to create a version of pastoral England and to correct emergent New Zealand idiom (Snook 1989; Soler 2000). Planting a pastoral imagination of the land accompanied the work of clearing the bush for agriculture. Author Margaret Mahy, someone who has done much to capture the natural and cultural contexts of childhood in New Zealand, writes about having to resist the early colonisation of her imagination through the nearly exclusive exposure to English literary texts (Jackson 2011). A New Zealand literary identity began to emerge from the 1920s, but it took much longer for these texts to be taught in the classroom (Stoop 1998; Matthewman 2014), and in 1932 F.R. Leavis raised the question with E.H. McCormick about why New Zealand had “no distinctive literature” (Leavis, cited in Hilliard 2012, p.244). These colonial beginnings, in which both culture and nature were imposed from England, impeded the development of a tradition of learning about the representation of native nature through the teaching of English in New Zealand. In contrast, in England a tradition of literary

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study took for granted the connection to the nation’s landscape, fauna and flora as an ‘organic’ experience of Englishness. This ‘great tradition’ was articulated through the work of Leavis with an educational zeal and influence that was promulgated through the Cambridge journal Scrutiny. A Cambridge scholar, Leavis was committed to English in education. With his school-based collaborator Denys Thompson, he argued for the centrality of English in developing discernment not only of literature and culture but also of the aesthetics of environment. Culture and Environment (1933) reflects contemporary anxieties about the state of the nation and the disappearing relationship of its people to the landscape and the natural world through a rural, ‘organic’ society. At the beginning of Culture and Environment, Leavis and Thompson wrote, The very conditions that make literary education look so desperate are those which make it more important than ever before; for in a world of this kind – and a world that changes so rapidly – it is on literary tradition that the office of maintaining continuity must rest. (p.1)

Leavis and Thompson saw nature as a stable signifier, the dependable backdrop to the disturbing contemporary cultural upheavals of mass media, mass entertainment and advertising. In response to cultural change, they looked to foster “responsive adjustment, growing out of immemorial experience, to the natural environment and the rhythms of the year” (Leavis and Thompson 1933, pp.1–2) and to train awareness of “the general process of civilisation” and also “the immediate environment”. This mainly involved inoculating students ‘against the environment’, by which they largely meant the rise of mass media, while conserving some aspects of the organic link between society and nature through reading a canon of valued literary texts that captured an essence of Englishness. Such aims now appear disturbingly anachronistic  – not just because of the mounting pressures of digital culture, but also because the concept of a stable nature has already vanished. We know that we can no longer depend on the natural rhythms of the year, nor a steady process of civilisation. Instead, we currently experience, and must expect, rapid and dramatic shifts in both culture and nature, as temperatures, rainfall, the seasons, the vast oceans and the glaciers alter faster than Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions, accompanied by more frequent and more intense radical ‘natural’ events such as floods, fires, storms, landslides  and new viruses. We have entered uncharted territory in terms of the global climate and culture. From this discussion of nation and nature in the contexts of England and New Zealand, I suggest that English as simply nation-building is a problematic mission. Firstly, because nation-building tends to be inward looking and competitive, and secondly because building a nation has been (and continues to be) about the exploitation of natural resources as well as human populations, and this has been particularly brutal in the colonial context. An environmental English (and by extension, L1) must be one that reaches beyond national boundaries to understand the global and planetary effects of climate change on how we read, represent, and act in and on the world. In this new normal, we need to foster “responsive adjustment” (Leavis and Thompson 1933) not to a stable culture and nature but to new social

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developments and the radical uncertainty of the natural world, developing what ecocritic Greg Garrard has called a ‘Pedagogy of the Unprecedented’ (Garrard 2013). This aspiration contrasts with the current curriculum situation of a conservative carbon-­based English.

3  The Rise of Carbon English Curriculum subjects, with English situated as a core player, have been co-opted into the global capitalist system, effectively sustaining a carbon-based society through what can be called a carbon curriculum. The term ‘carbon curriculum’ has been used to draw attention to the way in which school systems arose out of the twin processes of industrialisation and urbanisation attended by a massive acceleration in the use of carbon energy and the exploitation of natural resources (Matthewman and Morgan 2013). Curriculum subjects were shaped by that carbon worldview and were designed to educate children in the efficient mapping, management and extraction of the resources of the natural world  – either explicitly through science or through narratives and accounts that validated the right of man (gender bias was taken for granted) to dominate the Earth. The making of carbon English is not a linear or obvious case, as the subject followed a radical and progressive trajectory through to the mid 1990s, with elements of resistance to the dominant story of carbon-based capitalism – particularly within the romantic literary tradition of protest (Veldman 1994). Leavis, the founding figure in the development of subject English, displayed an energetic mission to civilise, educate and challenge society through English, and he expressed deep concern for the environment, defined as both cultural context and physical landscape. While Leavis’s critical work was acknowledged, his literary methods and rural nostalgia were challenged as élitist during the 1960s. Influential teacher educators such as James Britton and Harold Rosen drew on linguistics and psychology for a more urban and inclusive approach to English, beyond the literary tradition and more appropriate to the expansion of comprehensive education. This approach explicitly set out to value the experience and language of the working-class urban child. This led to thematic planning in English, to engage with issues and topics such as race, gender, work, nuclear war, and the environment. The Dartmouth conference in the mid-1960s centred on these developments and is seen as a landmark moment for English which, together with the publication of Dixon’s Growth through English (1975), established the ‘personal growth’ of the child as the primary focus of the English teacher. New Zealand, which had also founded English on a Leavisite model, was heavily influenced by this re-evaluation of the subject (Hilliard 2012). However, in England, the Cox Report which ushered in the first national curriculum in 1990 claimed to be able to identify five ‘models’ of English co-existing in the national practice of English. These were English as ‘personal growth’, English as ‘cultural heritage’, English as an ‘adult needs’ preparation for the literacy of work, English as media and ‘cultural analysis’, and English as a kind of ‘cross-curricular’

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glue (DES 1989). While the first national curriculum for England and Wales purported to represent all these models, subsequent curriculum statements leaned heavily on a traditional literary-heritage model, due to the burden of delivering on a compulsory list of authors and texts (DfE 1995). This emphasis on a list of texts pushed out the social studies version of English that had developed from the work of the London Institute of Education and the London Association of Teachers of English (LATE). Coverage, and the language of levels and attainment targets, began to structure and constrain the work of English teachers, and this was the focus of considerable opposition when the same curriculum structure was imported to the new NZ curriculum (Locke 2000, 2002, 2007). Nevertheless, both Leavisite and Dartmouth versions of English and even the constraints of assessment-led curriculum structures still included the potential for English teachers to resist an exploitative and uncritical mindset towards society and the environment. It was the transformation of English into a set of “literacy objectives” that dampened the radical fire of the subject. The Literacy Strategy and the secondary Framework for Teaching English (DfEE 2001) changed English in England from a subversive and socially and environmentally-conscious subject, at least potentially, to one that served the instrumental needs of the state (Stevens and McGuinn 2004). Within a few years, English became about teaching children the ‘rules’: the rules of grammar, the rules of genre, and how to pass exams. The Literacy Strategy diverted discussion away from the social and environmental issues raised by texts to focus on the linguistic and literacy features that could be ‘spotted’. The content of texts became almost irrelevant, as can be seen in the type of questions asked in school textbooks for English, or the focus of annotation activity in classrooms (Jewitt et al. 2005). Tighter curriculum constraints and formal assessment promoted a technical subject focussed on developing instrumental literacy with a focus on adult needs. Despite this shift to instrumental rationality, both in the formal curriculum and in classroom practice, regular teacher opinion surveys repeat the mantra that the main ‘mission’ for English is still “personal growth” (Goodwyn 2016). However, personal growth may mean something different to a generation of teachers intensively trained in the Literacy Strategy, and may also be more evident in aspiration than practice. This disjunct between aspiration and practice is also true of the NZ national curriculum. The history of English in New Zealand is scattered across articles and chapters. In this history can be traced the influences of Leavis, the importance of the Dartmouth conference, and a developing sense of a responsibility to build a bicultural nation through both literature and language: Literacy in English gives students access to the understanding, knowledge, and skills they need to participate fully in the social, cultural, political, and economic life of New Zealand and the wider world. To be successful participants, they need to be effective oral, written, and visual communicators who are able to think critically and in depth … The study of New Zealand and world literature contributes to students’ developing sense of identity, their awareness of New Zealand’s bicultural heritage, and their understanding of the world. (MoE 2007, p.18 & 2014 n.p.)

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However, specific guidance is lacking. In the NZ national curriculum, there are no stipulations as to texts, authors or even genres, but only outline-requirements to cover writing, reading and viewing as a set of process skills. This renders the NZ national curriculum weak, in terms of clarity about how to deliver on its confident and aspirational rhetoric of national and global understanding underpinned by this hinted commitment to critical literacy (although there is no development of the concept of critical literacy in the one-page account of work in English in the printed version [MoE 2007]). In fact, rather than a confident discourse of developing expertise, a discourse of anxiety about literacy underachievement dominates the rhetoric of the New Zealand Ministry of Education. and educational responses are focussed on digital ‘fixes’ (Wilson et  al. 2017). New Zealand is certainly set on future-­ focussed skills, but these skills are narrowly defined as primarily being about functional literacy, technology, and enterprise (Snook 2007). Thus the wide and loose aspirations in the NZ English curriculum statement contrast starkly with the effects and implications of a narrow and haphazard competency curriculum. For instance, the NCEA assessment scheme is a reflection of a monetary system whereby you gather credits from each unit for your personal portfolio. In one Auckland school, the departmental mission for English was expressed without irony as “no credit left behind”. This suggests a cynically economic mission for English. It fits with an English curriculum that focusses on individual achievement in projects and grades to meet adult needs for future study and work. Where there is whole-class instruction, it is based on the efficient study of extracts, rather than whole texts, and the purpose is to identify literacy features and to promote functional literacy skills. Competence rather than critical engagement is valued, and political debate is seen as potentially biased and inappropriate (see the nervous account of critical literacy by New Zealand educator Susan Sandretto [Sandretto and Klenner 2011]). At the same time, the digital curriculum and a ‘bring your own device’ policy works against the shared experience of the classroom. The sense of a collective and social mission for English has become diminished within a fragmented and heavily personalised curriculum which is increasingly delivered through pick-and-mix from an online curriculum menu of activities. In New Zealand, ‘personal growth’ in English has come to mean the collation of personalised skills and an uncritical acceptance of student opinion – as long as those opinions do not stray into racist, sexist or violent territory (Sandretto and Klenner 2011). In the UK, the current curriculum is similarly focussed on raising literacy standards: The overarching aim for English in the national curriculum is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written word, and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment. (DfE 2014, p.13)

However, the devil is in the detail, with precise guidance for the range, time periods, and types of texts to be taught drawn from ‘our national heritage’: The English curriculum in England is therefore much more direct than New Zealand about the contents and remit of building a national heritage, and this literary confidence has

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implications and potential for response to environmental developments in the wider disciplines of English studies and the environmental humanities, as I explain later in this chapter. At the same time that anxiety about literacy skills and standards has been dominant in both England and New Zealand, there has been a rising emphasis on the integration of technology. A digital and entrepreneurial future dominates the rhetoric for a future-oriented English curriculum. Rather than a holistic understanding of the linguistic and cultural diversity that will be required in a fragile global situation, government and research reports emphasise responsiveness to the proliferation of practices, forms and representations linked to digital participation. In short, both national curriculums have ended up (for now) focusing on individual achievement, competition in a growing global economy, and preparation for an increasingly digital future. The curriculum for English assumes ‘business as usual’. Business as usual as a political position, however, fails to challenge the rising outputs of carbon into the atmosphere. This scenario is confidently predicted to lead inexorably to increasing resource breakdowns and civil unrest (Newell and Patterson 2010; Urry 2011; White et al. 2015). Business as usual in terms of an English curriculum that fails to challenge dependence on carbon and depletion of the natural resilience of the planet is not an ethical or sustainable position for a subject that has always been the mainstay of the curriculum and a lead player in terms of shaping national values. It is a fossilised position for English in a carbon-based society (Morgan 2018, p.147). In the next sections, I will outline how new “resources of hope” for an environmentally-conscious English may be gathered and structured (Williams 1989).

4  Changing Climate/Changing English Green social theory suggests that radical environmental change will affect all competent digital citizens of the future in more or less catastrophic ways, according to different future scenarios. Each place, each nation, faces particular threats to the stability of their environment, culture and society. Indeed, the IPCC has detailed the particular threats of climate change for each geographical area, while particular environmental agencies in local places have carried out their own analyses of threats and challenges. In this context of crisis and threat, then, it makes sense to think about culture and environment together. It makes sense to understand the nation as grounded in a particular ecology of nature and, moreover, an ecology that is uniquely threatened as the climate changes due to destructive cultural practices of development and consumption. The English curriculum has always conveyed messages about places and values in relation to the natural world. This is not new. However, it is important that this role is now highlighted in relation to thinking about alternative ways to understand culture and society, as dependent upon a desperately fragile Earth. A new understanding of the human relationship to the Earth emerges out of Anthropocene thinking. In this view, humans have become powerful shapers of the

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planet, geological engineers laying down a fossil record of carbon and plastic to mark a new epoch written in the very layers of the Earth itself, the stratigraphic record. This power is also an ultimate impotence, unleashing uncontrollable climatic forces that have never before been encountered by humans in the history of the Earth (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013). Governments, corporations and the ‘super rich’ are the influential players in this process, while the poor, particularly those in the Southern hemisphere, are the initial victims. The other victims are, of course, the biodiversity of flora and fauna on land and in the sea, which are vanishing at a truly alarming rate. The Anthropocene threatens all national relationships to nature and to landscape. Climate change does not evoke the idea of nature as beneficent recreation or untouched wilderness, it signifies carbon and methane levels rising and the consequences of sea level rise, temperature rise, flooding, fires and storms on human sites of habitation. This is communicated in official contexts in maps, graphs and statistics, and the legal measured language of risk and mitigation. This kind of nature awareness might seem to have little to do at the macro level with, say, appreciating nature poetry, but instead raises the need for changes to human processes of energy use, consumption and waste. But crucially, the knowledge of climate change requires all nations not to waste the natural world, not to deplete it, pollute it, or cut it down. Nature at every scale is crucial to our survival, even as unleashed huge natural forces threaten our safety. The plants and the trees and the seas mitigate carbon, the unbuilt land mitigates flooding, biodiversity mitigates the stress of changes of temperature and waterfall, the safety of bees is crucial to our food security. It in this regard that engagement with nature at every scale is crucial to a curriculum for the Anthropocene, and each subject has a part to play in offering a lens on the crisis. Full awareness of climate change disrupts the way that we read and write texts that reference nature – which should matter very much to the teaching of English. No natural thing can now be taken for granted. We are out of nature, post-natural but fragile, in the face of the forces that we have unleashed. This sounds dramatic. Extreme, even. Indeed, these are unprecedented developments for the planet. But what does this mean for teaching English in different national contexts? Firstly, we need to get rid of the Leavisite notion of nature as a stable and reliable backdrop for cultural activities. Nature is now uncertain and unpredictable. As stated in the UN Paris agreement, in this dangerous context of planetary threat we need collective cross-cultural and transnational cooperation, not competition. Nearly all contemporary cultural and literary texts at least acknowledge climate anxiety, while past nature texts are fast becoming anachronistic as species die out and landscapes alter. Awareness is rising rapidly on a cultural level, with movements such as Extinction Rebellion and School Strikes for Climate. It is significant that subject English has not caught up. English is not explicitly described in either the New Zealand or the English national curriculum in England as a school-subject with the power to express and develop a deep and responsive relationship to nature or to shape environmental identities, values, feelings, and critiques. Although of course there are many examples of writers and texts who

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grapple with nature and the environment as the most atavistic and fundamental aspect of their work. Think about the terror of the child in Ted Hughes’ ‘Pike’ as he encounters the immense ancient pike in a pond “as deep as England” (Hughes 1967), or New Zealand poet Tuwhare’s sensory mixes of myth, memory, place and his flights of barbed environmental fury (see Tuwhare 1993a, b). Ecological imaginations are formed around memories of reading, as well as real-world experiences (Thomashow 1996). Most importantly, cultural production is at the forefront of contesting the inaction on climate change through imagining how different futures may play out. In this regard, the English curriculum can draw on ecocritical developments in the English discipline that theorise and examine texts from a variety of environmental perspectives. This work is a powerful force within literary studies (Buell 2011; Clarke 2019; Garrard 2004), linguistics (Stibbe 2015) and is beginning to be developed within literacy approaches (Comber 2015). From this follows a new and necessary ecological mission for English. After all, “changing English is changing schooling”; however, now what is at stake (this time) is not just “a new order of things” but a new order of nature (Goodson and Medway 1990, p.1).

5  Ecocritical English The English curriculums for schools in New Zealand and England have, thus far, ignored the rise of ecocriticism. This is surprising, given that ecocriticism is the major recent development in English studies, advocating an environmental mission for the study of literature, linguistics, drama, media, and artistic production. This influential literary approach reaches across all national boundaries, commenting on all cultural forms and embracing different theoretical perspectives, from materialism, feminism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism to new materialism (Clarke 2019). Just as the climate crisis begins to reach into every aspect of life, so ecocriticism now influences mainstream tertiary English and is no longer viewed as an under-theorised niche interest. In fact, as Cambridge English professor Timothy Clark (2019) points out, any literacy criticism that does not take account of these new developments is looking increasingly anachronistic. Of course, when ecocriticism is applied to the curriculum for English, there is a necessary transformation from esoteric theoretical debates to try to understand and transform the approach to a set of recognisable core principles and pedagogical practices (see Matthewman 2011, 2017a). The research groundwork for this transformation has been tried out in three funded collaborations between teachers and researchers in which ecocritical reading was a central focus (Matthewman 2011, 2014, 2016). Primarily, ecocriticism requires a shift of attention to foreground the natural world and environmental issues in reading all kinds of texts. This is a logical first step. More radical approaches begin to deal more directly with the economic and political system that exploits the environment, analysing and challenging the attitudes to nature that are taken for granted. These attitudes include the assumption that progress, development and profit are inevitable, necessary and beneficial, that nature is a

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resource to be consumed, and that this resource is limitless, at least in the local and short-term context of each act of use. Hence literary and cultural ecocriticism meshes with politically-driven work on social justice in education, such as critical literacy and ecopedagogy. Ecocriticism’s advantage for English, as part of moves towards education for sustainability, is that it is located and originated in the subject culture, rather than being imposed as yet another imperative for English teachers to deliver. It offers strategies for selecting and re-reading texts from an ecological perspective. However, engaging with ecocriticism may seem to be rather a specialist departure for the non-literary English teacher, especially in a context where the demands are primarily based around achievement in literacy. A positive response to this challenge is that ecocriticism has a very diverse and broad-based profile, linking with movements in linguistics and the humanities to recognise and engage the environment. Indeed, the most recent developments in ecocriticism have emphasised engagement with language and culture as part of the environmental humanities (Bergthaller et al. 2014). In the next section, I seek to outline how ecocriticism can inform the practice of teaching a more holistic version of literacy in English.

6  A 3D Ecoliteracy Model In a recent research project funded by the New Zealand Teaching Learning and Research Initiative (TLRI), I developed a “3D ecoliteracy model”, which drew on the structure of Bill Green’s holistic “3D literacy” model (Green 1988; Green and Beavis 2012). This curriculum work with teachers was informed by prior research into ecocriticism and subject English, and was developed in the course of the project to include Social Sciences and the Arts (Matthewman 2011, 2014, 2016). The research team started from the premise that literacy is multimodal and involves working in three dimensions: the eco-operational, the enviro-cultural, and the eco-­ critical. The following account of the model shows how the ecocritical teaching of L1 English intersects with ecocritical teaching in the Arts and Social Sciences: 1. The eco-operational dimension focuses on technical competence. This might mean learning the conventions of grammar in English, understanding how to read a map in Social Sciences, or learning a range of basic patterns in Visual Art. This dimension connects with ideas about basic literacy skills and functional literacy. However, work within the project drew attention to the sensual and environmental knowledge aspects of such competence. This might mean using the precise names of trees and plants as examples of teaching nouns, or working on precise adjectives to describe sensual responses to the environment. It might mean learning the ingredients of particular genres or language particular to culture and region. One available environmental genre in New Zealand is the pepeha. In this, the speaker names (with local variations) themselves, their family, their community, their place, their river, and their mountain, in a ritual format using te reo Maori (Maori language).

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2. The enviro-cultural dimension demands a wider understanding of environmental and cultural knowledge in relation to imagined and real contexts. This dimension connects with ideas about ‘cultural literacy’ (Hirsch 1987) and ‘the canon’, although with an emphasis on collaborative and postcolonial thinking about the knowledge and texts that we value. In the project, we discussed a range of textual examples in each learning area that could develop national and international enviro-cultural knowledge. For instance, in English a knowledge of particular ecopoets such as Hone Tuwhare, who make strong use of cultural and environmental themes; in Art, there are a range of artists (for example, Chris Jordan) who make strong representations of the environment; while in Social Sciences, there is a body of knowledge about place and environment that can be thought about in relation to sustainability. With teachers, we discussed and compiled lists of authors and texts that carry national importance in relation to their depiction of culture and environment. 3. The eco-critical dimension involves understanding how literacy forms and practices arise out of powerful environmental and cultural interests. This dimension connects with ecocritical work and the concept of critical literacy, which originates from critical pedagogy and the work of Paulo Freire on education for social justice (Freire 1995). The relationship of critical literacy to valuing places and recognising environmental justice is an emerging literacy agenda (see Comber 2015; Green and Beavis 2012; Nixon et al. 2007). Students might write poems of environmental protest or create environmental art to draw attention to an issue. They might analyse how particular texts have implications for how people feel and act in relation to an environmental issue. The 3D Ecoliteracy model was used to help think about the planning of individual units of work so that they addressed environmental and cultural issues together, in and across each of the three dimensions. The model was also used to evaluate each curriculum planning innovation and also to consider how far each dimension actually appeared to be evidenced in practice. Predictably, given the lack of critical literacy as an established practice in New Zealand, the ecocritical dimension proved to be the most challenging for teachers, but in the second year of the project this dimension was more evident. In the second year, we emphasised the benefits in terms of ecological thinking of awareness of different scales – both in terms of time (past, present and future) and geography (comparing environmental challenges in different places). For instance, an analysis of Andrew Motion’s poem ‘Sparrow’ (2004) raised the issue of the disappearance of native sparrows over a short timescale in the UK, contrasted with the abundance of sparrows as an introduced pest species in New Zealand. This would be a pedagogical example of the development of what ecocritic Timothy Clarke (2019, p.38) has called “scalar literacy”. This means the ability to think, read and write at different environmental scales. Clark sees this as essential in relation to evaluating the impacts of environmental actions, which always have consequences beyond the immediate and local. In the next section, some examples of practical classroom work are explored in relation to these ideas, focusing on nation and nature at different scales.

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7  Nations and Nature in the Curriculum A developed and sustained response to the work on 3D Ecoliteracy was shown in the work on ‘Treasure Boxes’ at Hobsonville Point, a curriculum collaboration between Visual Arts and English. Students created treasure boxes by upcycling old food boxes. The curriculum unit is described below by the art teacher: The treasure box contains a background landscape work based on a ‘pepeha’2 of student’s connection to place. The landscape contains a map reference to the rohe/area, representation of kainga/place, maunga or land feature, awa/body of water, ngahere/element of flora and other landmark. Some have included their food connection artwork, inspired by cultural food stories and Glenn Jones’ stylised kiwiana food art. There is a postcard illustrating their chosen cultural myth or legend, all based in the connection to place. Students chose an animal or plant to represent their chosen culture – they thought about the specific features of that animal. Students looked at cultural patterns, most of which are based on motifs from the natural world, flora and fauna and developed their own repeat pattern blocks using block (wood or lino) print method. Students studied a range of ecopoetry including Hone Tuwhare’s poem “Rain” and “Norfolk Pines at Pakiri Beach” and wrote poems about their experiences of natural features or weather in their place. (Art teacher Di Cavallo’s,3 written account of the Treasure Box Unit, 2017)

Significantly, students wrote an artist statement modelled by their English teacher, Ros Britton, which prompted them to reflect on the cultural and environmental links in their work: My artwork represents Auckland the way that I see it. I have the pohutukawa fantail bird to represent the native birds and the native bush. The koru in my stamp art represents the love I have for Auckland and it represents all of the native bush. (Extract from student’s artist statement, 2017)

In the final lesson, students displayed their treasure boxes and the artist statements around the classroom, and students and teachers from other classes were invited to view them and to talk to the students about their work. These were very beautiful creations and the effect of seeing them all together was extremely powerful. In particular, the reality of the multicultural heritage of this New Zealand classroom was made highly visible. Even where students were born in New Zealand, many had very deep attachments to the country that their parents had come from, and the range of nations represented included China, the Netherlands, Germany, Taiwan, Thailand, England, India, Samoa, Tonga and the United States. For those who identified as New Zealanders, their current or ancestral roots in Maori and Pasifika culture were recognised, while some showed a confident affiliation to being Pakeha but connected to a bicultural context. There were a number of factors that made this unit very successful, both as a unit in which students took pride in their work and as an example of 3D Ecoliteracy. The unit could have been completely focussed on culture and indeed had originated in 2  A pepeha is a ritual Maori introduction in which (with local variations) a person names their river, their mountain, their harbour and their family and tribal affiliations. 3  Teachers in the project are named as co-researchers. Students’ names have been changed.

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an art history study without an explicit ecological dimension. However, the structure of the pepeha and the attention to how each element in the treasure box mattered ecologically changed the way that the unit developed and was understood. Each student celebrated the way that their nation had unique natural features. Some also recognised and wrote about the way that the natural world was being threatened. Interestingly, this critique only took place within the English side of the work, whereas the art documented and celebrated the beauty of place and nature. The work drew on memories of place and nation – many chose to write about the places that they had left behind when coming to New Zealand, and this was a way of treasuring that memory. Many of the students chose to represent the nation they had left with symbolic animals and flowers, such as cornflowers from Germany or roses from England. Even the memory of moving from another part of Auckland was deeply felt. Keta for instance wrote about her Indian heritage but also the place in Auckland where they lived first, after emigrating to New Zealand. When describing her artwork, Keta discussed symbols of her environmental identity, including an acorn symbolising her favourite tree near her primary school, a map of where she used to live, and henna designs reflecting her Indian heritage. In the interview after the unit, she linked her attachment to the oak tree with her environmental concerns about deforestation. The oak tree is central to Keta’s memories of place; as she said, “people can have a special relationship with trees”.4 A more developed example of transnational ecocritical work was developed in the case of Lysa. Lysa’s family had arrived from China 2 years previously, and she was beginning to develop a multicultural identity as a New Zealander. Lysa felt connected to her Chinese heritage through her mother and father. However, she differentiated between her parents’ culture and her culture: “culture is a changing thing … I see myself as like I belong to many cultures … I’ve lived in the US [too] so I have many other things rather than just Chinese culture”. There is a deep sense of Lysa having witnessed environmental and social change. In her description of a special place, she was prompted by the teacher’s framing to think across different time-­ scales. Lysa used this scale framing to comment on the environmental changes to her home village “of the nine hidden mountains” in South China, reflecting on past and present. She writes about the new dams, the roads, the houses made of concrete rather than wood, the loss of a working relationship with the land, and the slow dwindling of a rural community. Most poignant was her description of the visit to the butterfly springs: It still retained a little of its beauty in my father’s stories, but the butterfly springs I saw was only an ordinary spring, beautiful but not wonderful. Quiet, and even a little sad. I looked

4  The tension between a national attitude to nature and a global attitude is starkly illustrated by the mass felling of ‘exotic’ mature trees on Auckland’s volcanic mounts, including several 100-yearold oak trees. The governing Maori iwi who own the land wish to restore these areas to their precolonial state with native planting. It would be uncomfortable, if not impossible, to discuss this issue in a New Zealand school given the acute cultural and political sensitivities raised by the case. However, the bitter public protests against the planned removal of 345 trees on one of the volcanic mounts have lasted over a month to date.

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for the butterflies my father told me about, there were a few black ones, resting beside the water. The rest are gone forever, disappeared in the wind time.

In another piece in her treasure box, she responded to Hone Tuware’s poem ‘Rain’ (1993b). Rather than simply writing a poem about the weather, she took up the offer in the teacher’s worksheet to write an environmental poem. Hone Tuware’s poem uses the convention of a love poem to express a sensual ‘natural’ response to rain: I can hear you making small holes in the silence rain

In Lydia’s pastiche of this poem, titled Smog and set in Beijing, the speaker’s relationship with weather has become unnatural and bitter: I can hear you through the coughing of the unfortunate souls under your torture smog

Lysa borrows Tuwhare’s phrasing and adapts his measured lines with ironic force when describing the “thick grains of dust stuffed full with PM 2.5” that could penetrate her “tender” lungs. The delicate ‘natural’ merging of matter in ‘Rain’ is sinister and insistent in Smog. The irony is that, in the context of the Anthropocene, we can no longer assume that falling rain is either natural or safe. Lysa’s work is exceptional, not only because of her ability to write ecocritically but also because of her felt awareness and expression of the environmental crisis as a global issue, with different impacts in particular places. Other students also showed this awareness, although with less sophistication – Keta for instance talked in interview about the visibility of plastic pollution in her hometown in India. The collective expression of environmental identities as located across a range of nations is a powerful environmental lesson  – while the personal reflection is valuable in itself, it has the potential to generate a collective social and ecocritical awareness. Students began to have insight into both place and planet (Heise 2008; Matthewman 2017b). To reach full potential, however, this learning needs to be directed by a skilled teacher, able to guide students and to lead the sharing and analysis of the work. Even if some students were more narrowly focused, the resources generated by the class as a whole were extraordinarily rich, with the potential to build environmental awareness, not just in that class, but beyond, as artefacts that could be shared, talked about and displayed. In terms of the 3D Ecoliteracy model, students developed technical competence across a range of artistic, poetic and narrative genres and techniques; they broadened their envirocultural range in learning how different artists and poets have represented place and environment; and finally, many students took the opportunity to ecocritically evaluate the environmental value of their place and to understand this in the context of a national nature, alongside a range of other places and nations.

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The teachers commented that working with the 3D model had pushed them towards an understanding of the environmental connections in teaching English: I have thought more deeply about engaging students in the teaching of texts which feature the environment, that feature the natural world. (Ros Britton, Interview, March 7, 2018)

8  C  onclusion: Towards Ecocritical Literacy – Changing the Subject? In these classrooms, students were working on personal memories and response to a particular local place and researching how people claim symbols from the natural world to represent the nation. Through engaging with the work of others from different nations, or through their own knowledge of different nations through the process of immigration, students began to think at a more global level and to gain a comparative sense of environmental issues in a variety of national contexts. This is work that both encourages and resists an easy or insular romanticisation of the local and indigenous, and evokes a sense of comparison and connection across cultures and environments. There are different levels of challenge for L1 educators, in working with an awareness of the changing dynamics of nation and nature in the context of the Anthropocene. The first step is to notice the presence of nature in the reading, writing, viewing and talk that already happens within the L1 classroom. This leads to the second step, which is to actively promote environmental knowledge in the course of this work, understanding and using precise and appropriate language to describe the nation’s fauna and flora, and developing new language and thinking to describe the changing state of nature and culture that pertains to the Anthropocene – as in Lysa’s transformation of Tuwhare’s ‘Rain’, or in Robert MacFarlane’s Desecration Phrasebook project to crowdsource a glossary of terms to describe the derangement of nature in the Anthropocene (MacFarlane 2015). The ecocritical level of the 3D ecoliteracy model involves a stronger awareness of the nation in a global planetary context. This is one way of resisting the bland and conservative development of a more corporate global identity for L1 education in relation to the dominance of digital contexts (see Elf et al., this volume). Instead I would argue L1 educators must build understanding of culture and nature at different scales, taking account of place, nation and planet. A sense of hope, here, is crucially important (Hicks 2014). Students suggested in interviews that the collective sense of realisation, protest and action helped them to feel that positive environmental change and action are possible. The teaching of English can encourage an awareness of environmental change as a process in which we have responsibility, agency and power. In this context, personal growth can be reframed as ‘living Identities’ for diverse contexts, cultures and environments. This ecocritical mission for English teaching is surely appropriate, and widely applicable to L1 education in and for the twenty-first century.

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Acknowledgement  Grateful thanks to Bill Green for his invaluable guidance in the preparation of this chapter.

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Sasha Matthewman  started her career as an English teacher in Bristol, UK. She went on to lead the English course for initial teacher education at the University of Bristol (2005–2012). After moving to New Zealand, she worked as a Senior Lecturer in education at the University of Auckland and led a TLRI research project investigating literacy and environmental identities (2016–2018). Her book Teaching Secondary English as if the Planet Matters (2011) was the first in the Planet Matters series for Routledge. Currently an independent scholar, Sasha teaches English at Michael Park Steiner School in Auckland.

Part IV

Conclusion

Understanding the (Post-)National L1 Subjects: Three Problematics Bill Green and Per-Olof Erixon

Abstract  This chapter seeks to develop some of the conceptual work in the field, drawing selectively on the body of scholarship addressed to L1 education and the L1 subjects over the past four decades. It is principally concerned with what are identified as three key issues, or ‘problematics’, namely: the idea of ‘nation’, and relatedly, of nation-hood and nation-building; the question of ‘literacy’, as arguably a third term, strategically, with regard to the established ‘language and literature’ dyad; and the problem of ‘paradigm’, as a conceptual and methodological principle organising research in the field to date. The chapter explores what it means to consider a shift from contexualising the L1 subject in the age of nation-building to an era marked by globalisation and its associated features, notably digitalisation, international curriculum and assessment reform, new forms of population flow, ‘Anglification’, and multilingualism. In this regard, it is proposed that nations do matter, but differently now. The chapter asks: what does it mean to re-think the nexus of language, education and nation today? More specifically: what are the implications and challenges for L1 education and the L1 subjects, and accordingly for L1 curriculum change and renewal? Keywords  L1 education · Nation · Paradigm · Literacy · Curriculum structure · Standard national language · Post(mono)lingualism · Gramsci · Modernity

1  Introduction What is happening with the L1 subjects today? These are those subjects historically charged with teaching the national language in different countries, previously known as the mother-tongue subjects. As noted elsewhere, L1 education pertains to

B. Green (*) Faculty of Arts & Education, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] P.-O. Erixon Department of Creative Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Green, P.-O. Erixon (eds.), Rethinking L1 Education in a Global Era, Educational Linguistics 48, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7_12

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“education in the national language – the official standard language of particular national states”, with “[m]ost countries appear[ing] have a subject in their school curriculum dedicated to teaching the national language – for example, Swedish, or German, Spanish or Russian, Indonesian or Japanese, and so on” (Green 2018, p.  252). Moreover, this has always been a matter of teaching national culture as well – that is, of teaching national language and culture, in the same subject-area. Subject English is a good example of this: ‘English’ refers at once to the subject, the language and also (broadly speaking) the nationality (‘Englishness’, or perhaps ‘Britishness’…) – although this is always complicated by the relational dynamics of nation and empire.1 Indeed, there is often an in-built ambiguity in how these L1 subjects are named; hence, “‘Danish’, ‘German’, and ‘Swedish’, are examples of terms that simultaneously denote both a national language and a national school subject” (Ongstad 2015, p. 3), often leading to some confusion and misrecognition accordingly. The point to emphasise is that these subjects need to be seen not simply or exclusively in educational terms but rather as thoroughly and ineluctably infused by culture and power, and as deeply invested with history. They are never, and indeed cannot be, viewed or treated as neutral phenomena. While our own reference-­ points are, respectively, subject English in the Anglophone world and subject Swedish in the Nordic world, our concern is equally with the full range of corresponding school-subjects (i.e. ‘French’, ‘German’, ‘Italian’, etc.) in countries such as France, Germany and Italy, and other distinctive ‘nations’, elsewhere in the world. We want to think about the role and significance of the L1 subject-area, historically, culturally and ideologically, and in the context of this book. The focus here is specifically on these L1 subjects, within the larger domain of L1 education. This is a crucial distinction: the L1 subjects are not synonymous with L1 education.2 L1 education is a much larger, more comprehensive and diffuse category. At this point it is worth bringing in a recent statement from the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA): The field deals with the teaching and/or learning within an educational system of the so-­ called mother tongue, be it a standard language of a nation state that statutorily accepts it as such, the language of education[,] or the language of primary socialisation (a child’s first own and/or home language). It is concerned with learners’ curricular enculturation to language, literature and culture, and focuses on the disciplinary teaching and/or learning of signs, texts, utterances and their contexts, in particular reading, speaking, writing and listening. (AILA, 2006; cited Ongstad 2015, p. 4)3

Setting this statement alongside the mission statement of the International Association for Research in L1 Education (ARLE) is useful: “Within the Association, improvement of teaching and learning processes in languages (first, second and third language), literatures and literacies is the main focus”. That is, the L1 territory  Hence the historical problem of ‘Australianness’, etc.  What is commonly understood as ‘English teaching’ in national contexts such as Australia or New Zealand is often referred to in the United States as ‘English education’ (McComiskey 2006). That usage is not commensurate, however, with the distinction being made here. 3  See Gagné et al. (1987, pp. 5–6) for an earlier outline of the territory of ‘mother tongue education’. 1 2

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is seen as embracing languages, literatures and literacies in education, across all levels, as well as both formally and informally. It is wider than the L1 subjects as such, as these are, generally speaking, realized in secondary education.4 Moreover, they are often understood as central features of the high school curriculum, being either mandated or highly recommended for all students, tacitly if not always explicitly. Why this is the case is a matter of continuing interest. It is important to bear in mind that these particular subjects, as already indicated, are more often than not deeply implicated in national culture and, relatedly, “the teaching of the so-­called standard languages” highlights “common issues of the teaching of French in France and Belgium to Francophones, English in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong to Anglophones[,] and Spanish in Spain and Argentina to ‘Hispanophones’” (ARLE website). But how essential or stable are these commonalities? Or rather, what do these subjects really have in common – over and beyond their surface and technical identities and functions? Do we often assume too much in this regard, and all too readily? We suspect so. At the very least there is a need to proceed carefully here, as we seek to understand the L1 subjects comparatively, but also historically, as geopolitically situated social constructions in the present critical time of major change and uncertainty. Indeed, a widespread sense exists that the L1 subjects are under significant challenge at this moment in history. Writing of the Scandinavian situation, Krogh and Penne (2015, p. 13) describe L1 as “an exposed subject in a time of change”, proposing moreover that it is now “particularly vulnerable” (p. 3). Goodwyn (2018) concurs, with regard to his own (‘Anglo’) sphere: “The state of English is in ‘a bit of a state’”. He is referring to subject English in England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, under the seemingly successful auspices of the International Federation for the Teaching of English (IFTE). Crisis and change, associated with anxiety and confusion, seem the order of the day. Why might the L1 subjects be seen as ‘exposed’ or at risk? Why now? How are we to understand what is happening here, and how are we to respond? This has been in part the mission of ARLE and its predecessors, over the past four decades or so (Herrlitz and van de Ven 2007); which suggests that there have been signs for quite some time now that the field, both locally and worldwide, requires critical attention to its own identity and authority. In other words, recognition has been growing that the L1 subjects need to be problematised and thematised, rather than simply ‘taken for granted’, as familiar and long-established features of the educational landscape. Hence there has been new interest and considerable investment in comparative and historical inquiry, linked in various ways with empirical-ethnographic research. But conceptual work is also required. We need ‘theorising’, or “conceptual clarification” (Herrlitz and van de Ven 2007, p 19), yes, but alongside and beyond that, we need conceptual inquiry, drawing on philosophy and curriculum theory to assist the generation of appropriate and productive concepts. In what follows, we explore these issues and

4  Nonetheless, in what follows, and for convenience, we sometimes refer to the L1 subjects and L1 education interchangeably, in this more restricted sense.

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challenges. We do so by focusing on what we see as three key problematics – the notions of ‘nation’, ‘literacy’ and ‘paradigm’. We argue that these are particularly significant in terms of (re)considering the history and future of the L1 subjects, in the larger context of a changing and increasingly complex world.

2  ‘Nation’ – Unfinished Business… (Re)conceptualising L1 education is increasingly important and even urgent in a global era very different from the field’s foundational period, now well over a hundred years ago. The task of reconceptualisation requires due regard for both theory and history, as resources for curriculum inquiry. Above all else, it means looking closely at the question of language, in the context of culture and power, nation and empire, place and planet. Our broad concern here is with rethinking L1 education, and more specifically the L1 subjects, in and for a ‘global era’. This involves a marked shift away from thinking of L1 education as centrally implicated in the age of nation-building, at least as traditionally understood, to what L1 education means in a global era, or in the context of globalization. Given that we have already indicated something of the nature and significance of the latter concept (i.e. as a meta-­ theme – see Erixon and Green, 2020), the focus here is on the idea of nation, as a key reference-point in L1 curriculum theory and history. What is the relationship, historically, between education, language and nation? The following is a good place to start: “[T]he project of the modern European nation state and colonialism was predicated on a simple formula that has long been an empirical fiction: one nation = one race = one language” (Luke 2017, p. 162). An “empirical fiction” – and yet, this formulation would seem to be foundational to the historical project of L1 education and the L1 subjects. Some see this as something now superseded, and as safely in the past, a trace simply of where we have been, and a reminder, at best, of how far we have come. However, it can be argued that language, race and nation continue to be caught up in educational practice and politics. In Australia, for instance, there can be little doubt that the role and significance of Aboriginal knowledge, culture and history continues to challenge and unsettle mainstream (‘White’) forms of curriculum policy and social debate (Grant 2016), and questions of language, race and nation are central to this, on many levels. ‘English’ is deeply and profoundly implicated here. Something similar can be said for other countries. For some, the answer lies in moving away from the constraints of methodological nationalism. Elf (2007) for instance refers to the need to move beyond seeing L1 education traditionally, as “serv[ing] the function of nation-building”, observing that now “we construct our identities in an increasingly globalised and media-­ saturated world” (p. 1; cf. Elf 2009 – e.g. p. 246). As he writes, we need “new disciplinary optics” that can “grasp, albeit in rough ways, the complexity of contemporary, global, semiotic culture  – while at the same time acknowledging local nation-bound history and identity, including language” (p. 1). How to manage

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the balancing-act this entails remains, however, an open question. Similarly, apropos the United States: Although nation building may have sat at the core of English education historically, as unfolding years and the broadening contexts of our research have pushed us to rethink the nature of nationhood in a globalizing world, new questions emerge concerning the implications for English as a secondary subject. (Sperling and Dipardo 2008, p. 96)

The point here is that these and other like statements are not advocating that the question of the nation is simply bypassed, rather they suggest that it needs to be re-­ articulated. This is the position which we take up here, in seeking to think (again) about the L1 subjects in, and for, new conditions of possibility and intelligibility. Nevertheless, in considering just what is involved in what has been called here the question of the nation’, several matters are worth some discussion. To begin with, just what is meant when we mobilise the term and the concept of ‘nation’? Key concepts such as this are always caught up with others, thereby forming a conceptual network. In this case, any consideration of ‘nation’ links readily to others, most notably perhaps ‘modernity’, ‘state’, and ‘empire’. Although we cannot fully elaborate this network here, a recent account of English teaching, L1 education and national curriculum makes the following observation: What characterises and distinguishes L1 education, generally speaking, is its focus on language and literature – moreover, the formalised expression of vernacular language and literature, as institutions and forms of practice, and the crucial relationship between them. Whether it be Russian or Spanish or Chinese language and literature that is studied in schools, or ‘English’ language and literature, depends on the country in question and its national (‘native’) system of schooling. (Green 2018, pp. 253-4)

In one sense this point is straightforward enough. But nonetheless we think it useful to take the opportunity to unpack it a little, as there is much that seems to go without saying here, much that is ‘taken-for-granted’. At issue is the deep historical intrication of modernity, mass-popular schooling, language – especially written language and its associated print-publishing complex  – and nationhood (Hobsbawm 1990; Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991). As written elsewhere: “Nations are an invention of modernity, and so too are national languages” (Green 2018, p. 253). It is an important task for research and scholarship in this field, therefore, to investigate how this has played out, in different ways and in accordance with different temporalities. The situation in Europe differs considerably from that in the Americas, or the Antipodes, and certainly from that in Asia, and there are differences within these geo-political entities, of course, too. There are also particular configurations of ‘empire’ to be accounted for. “In the formation and homogenising of nations, in e.g. the nineteenth century in Europe, mother tongue education became … ‘an especially powerful weapon in the fight for standardization and homogeneity’” (Liberg et al. 2012, p. 478).5 This is highly relevant here, indicating how significant mother-tongue education has been 5  See also, e.g., Boser and Brühwiler (2017). As they write: ““In the emerging nation-states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the ideology of ‘one nation–one language’ was emphasised by

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to the historical intrication of language, nation and popular-public education, in the emergence of mass schooling systems across Europe and subsequently in its erstwhile colonies. The relationship between Portugal and Brazil, for instance, and hence Portuguese as mother-tongue and L1 subject, might be considered in this light. Nation and empire are indeed productively thought together in this context, and relatedly, modernity and colonialism. But it also indicates that the ideological association of language, nation and race – what we have already described, following Luke (2017), as an “empirical fiction”– has been, in fact, foundational to the L1 subjects. This can be linked, further, to what Yildiz (2012) calls the “monolingual paradigm”: the power-full idea that a single language and identity is at the heart of national cultures.6 “According to this paradigm, individuals and cultural formations are imagined to possess one ‘true’ language only, their ‘mother tongue’, and through this possession to be organically linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture, and nation” (Yildiz 2012, p. 2). Moreover, as Yildiz stresses, the role that this ‘paradigm’ plays in the construction of nations and nation-hood points to “… the significance of the modern nation-state for the monolingual paradigm, or rather, of the monolingual paradigm for the modern nation-state, with which it emerged at the same time” (p. 3). Is there a line to be traced, then, from the assertion of ‘monolingualism’ to the formation of the L1 subjects? We think so. Why such a focus, educationally, on the ‘mother tongue’? Why did mother-tongue education, in particular, come to play such an important, and even central, role in national school systems as they were consolidated in the emerging nation-states of the eighteenth century, and into and across the nineteenth century, and beyond? The history of empire makes the ideological work of ‘L1’ education clear, but what must also be grasped here is that this designated ‘mother tongue’ was, in itself, an invention, a construction. ‘English’ is a good example of this, as Crowley (2003) shows. It emerged as a recognisable identity only after a long struggle, within which other versions or other possibilities – other dialects, or other ‘Englishes’ – were suppressed or assimilated. Other national languages might similarly bear the traces of difference, hybridity and power, notwithstanding “the presumed identity, uniformity, and homogeneity of separate languages” (Trimbur 2008, p. 161). This phenomenon is consistent with Yildiz’s argument: “According to the monolingual paradigm, there is one privileged language, the mother tongue” (Yildiz 2012, p. 203). Perhaps underplayed in such a statement is the manner in which that ‘privileging’ was achieved, all too often conflictually. To present some of this story, we want to turn briefly to the case of Italy. In doing so, we consider the significance of the early twentieth-century political philosopher most European countries” (p. 308). However, their own focus is on Switzerland, “a historically multilingual state” (p. 322), where a ‘tri-lingual’ state of affairs has long been the norm. 6  Trimbur (2008, p. 148) refers to “the monolingual fallacy”, which he links to “[t]he native speaker fallacy”, in his account of English in America. As he notes: “Monolingualism and homogeneity are two different things, and the United States, which is a predominantly English monolingual country, has never been – and is not now – a linguistically or cultural homogeneous nation” (p. 165). See Brass and Green 2020 – this volume.

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Antonio Gramsci. While Gramsci is little referenced in the literature of L1 education, it is generative to draw more systematically on his work in seeking to rethink L1 education in current circumstances. Gramsci’s lifelong concern with language and education is of particular interest here, and indeed, as we indicate, of marked and continuing relevance. This is especially with regard to his views on language and translation7  – arguably key concepts and problematics also for the L1 field, understood expressly in terms of transnational curriculum inquiry. Matters such as language, Gramsci believed, must always be considered in relation to power and politics, culture and history. He also saw education, both as practice and as institution, as a crucial consideration in this regard.8 As a case, Italy is intriguing in this present context. It has been described as a ‘failed’ state (Salvio 2014, p. 243), although there seems no doubt that it does constitute a distinctive nation, at least in the current-traditional sense, within “… a distinctive European nationalism” (Lo Bianco 2005, p  112). But its nationhood would also appear far from settled, or seamless. On the contrary, it is clearly a nation sharply divided, between ‘North’ and ‘South’ – and this has long been the case, as we indicate below. Moreover, moves towards a national curriculum for Italy are always working against a longstanding pervasive heterogeneity, registered linguistically or perhaps dialectally as much as anything else (Pavan-De Gregorio 1987, p. 72). This is notwithstanding efforts since the mid-eighteenth century and even earlier to realise a national language, a common tongue – ‘modern Italian’. As Lo Bianco (2005, p. 112) writes: “Italy is only one of the many national states in Europe that deployed the discourse of a distinctive and exclusive national tongue to mobilise and make congruent a self-conscious nation aspiring to autonomous statehood”. This raises the question of whether, and to what extent, the language and the school-­ subject came together in Italy, as they did with other countries. While there is little available (in English) in the L1 literature on ‘subject Italian’, as far as we know, accounts such as that Pavan-De Gregorio (1987) suggest that similar patterns can be discerned in Italian curriculum history. That history would undoubtedly feature due account of figures such as Gramsci and also Giovanni Gentile, in the first half of the twentieth century, whose intellectual and political relationship reads now like a symptomatic ‘moment’ in the larger context of L1 education (Clayton 2009; Espositio 2012).9

 We focus on ‘language’ on this occasion, leaving ‘translation’ for consideration elsewhere.  Although he was certainly interested in schooling, Gramsci’s interest extended beyond the school to other educational agencies, as he saw them: newspapers, unions, popular culture, etc. 9  Gentile was Mussolini’s minister of education, initiating a number of reforms in education and schooling that can be seen as consistent with the early twentieth-century ‘developmental’ paradigm (Sawyer and van de Ven 2007), and wider reform movements like the New Education and ‘Progressivism’ (Clayton 2009). This included doing away with the explicit teaching of grammar in schools, as an unnecessary constraint on children’s expressivity. Gramsci (1985) was fiercely opposed to this, describing Gentile’s initiative as “‘liberalism’ of the most bizarre and eccentric stripe” (p. 186). 7 8

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Gramsci is especially useful for bringing together issues of nation, language, education and power. This is because, although he was writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, a constant reference-point for him was the emergence and development of Italy as a distinctive nation-state much earlier, in the mid-nineteenth century. This was the period of the Risorgimento, “national unification and … the formation of the Italian state” (Gramsci 1985, p.  246). Central to this was the attempt to establish a national standard language: ‘modern Italian’. The privileged form was originally a Tuscan dialect, derived historically as “a written language by educated minorities” (Forgacs 1985, p. 165). This meant however the suppression of other minority languages, other dialects. Moreover, the privileged, ‘chosen’ language was a literary, written language. Promoting a new national standard (i.e. ‘common’) language was, to a significant extent, a task for national-popular education. Hence: “Political unification brought a demand for linguistic standardisation by the liberal ruling class and language instruction was introduced into the new state school curriculum under the provisions of the 1859 Education Act” (Forgacs 1985, p. 165). The key point here is that there are organic links to be observed between constructing the nation and establishing a standard language. Gramsci’s thinking with regard to language and linguistics – how he sees language itself – is acknowledged as an integral aspect of his political philosophy (Ives and Lacorte 2010). His distinction between language as a system and language in use, as a practice, is important, because, as Gramsci himself put it: “Language… means (even though at the level of common sense) culture and philosophy” (Gramsci 1971, p. 349). One can observe within particular languages the existence of a rich field of social reality, which must be understood at the level of cultural specificity and “only in relation to concrete and differentiated communicative situations on the ground of the real sociocultural conditions” (Rosiello 2010, p. 40). Gramsci viewed the idea of a national language, a common tongue, as something to be wary of, and indeed understood critically, and historically.10 He highlighted the political nature of any settlement on a ‘national language’, always shot through with power and conflict, as the dark other side of their productivity. Hence: Any national language in its current form was historically imposed upon the people (with the formation of nationalism in Europe in the 19th century), and its content is of an ideological character, meaning that it functions to efface and mystify existing social contradictions. (Suceska 2018, p. 190)

While explicitly and avowedly Marxist, this perspective should be neither forgotten nor underestimated. It applies not simply to Italy, but to other nation-states as well. This is because language and nation, history and power, are complexly interwoven, with clear implications for education and schooling. A final point in this section, then. The ‘lessons’ that Gramsci has for us include his complex view of nation  – linked dialectically to notions of ‘territory’ and ‘state’  – a view that is at once sceptical and informed, and open-ended. Nation  As Suceska (2018, p. 182) writes: “For Gramsci, understanding language is … a way of retracing history and better understanding contemporaneity in a living, changing phenomenon”.

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“remained at the centre of Gramsci’s focus” (Espositio 2012, p. 195), however, even as his political philosophy and his activism challenged the Italian state. Moreover, he was deeply concerned about the fate of Italy itself, as a distinctive nation, with its rich culture and long history. Hence, in searching for a new politics, beyond “the limits of state sovereignty, from both inside and outside it” (Espositio 2012, p. 195), he was insistent that “[t]his did not mean losing sight of the question of the nation … But only if the nation were to be introduced into an international context that would dramatically restructure it” (p. 195). This is something that L1 education might well bear in mind, even now.

3  ‘Literacy’ – Intruder or Supplement? Central to the L1 field, transnationally, has been what has been described as the ‘dyad’ of language and literature – that is, the formal teaching of language and literature, within a single national space. As noted above, language and literature come together in this distinctive school-subject, more often than not located at the very heart of the public school, within a national education system. What does it mean, however, to refer to the language and literature of a nation – a ‘national’ language, a ‘national’ literature? It is impossible to get away from the crucial relationship between language and power in this regard, and from due consideration of what it means to have a singular, standardised, official language – a dominant and dominating language, at the level of the nation-state. Here it is usual to point to the work of Anderson (1991) and his concept of the ‘imagined community’ with respect to the formation of national identity, and indeed to the ‘nation’ itself as a geo-political identity (cf. Green and Cormack 2011). But it is equally appropriate and perhaps more telling to point instead to Gramsci and his cultural-political reflections on language and nation, in the case of Italy. As Ives (2004, p. 33) has put it, “[l]inguistic differences and the ‘standardization’ of Italian was a practical concern” for Gramsci, “resonat[ing] with political overtones”. This reminds us (again) that the nation-state and indeed the very idea of the ‘nation’ cannot be thought about without reference to the project of modernity. “The truly modern political entity, emerging through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was the nation state” (Collins and Blot 2003, p. 96). Hence Gramsci’s concern for “a national ‘standard’ Italian” (Ives 2004, p. 33) goes hand-in-hand with his interests in education, and more specifically in language education and questions of grammar and style, discipline and rhetoric, pedagogic authority and cultural power. What should also be recognised however is that these are all, ultimately, matters to do with written language, or ‘writing’, and what has been elsewhere called the print-publishing complex: the convergence of the cultures, industries and technologies of print and publishing (Green and Cormack 2011). Anderson (1991) refers in this regard to ‘print-capitalism’, and points to the particular significance of literature and journalism, the novel and the newspaper, in producing the nation as, in his terms, an “imagined community”, to which we can add education (or rather,

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schooling) and the textbook. “Nations are imagined things”, as Atkinson (2002, p. 22) writes; “[t]hey are real and yet intangible”, and “[t]hey have to be read about – and, once read, spoken about – in order to take on substantial life”. In this regard, it is literacy that emerges as a key cultural technology, mediating as it does between language and literature, as well as (re)producing them. Concomitantly, and rather ironically, it is ‘illiteracy’ that now becomes an enduring problem for the nation, and for national education. This operates in curious tandem however with a programmatic focus on “… literary heritage and national standard language” (Collins and Blot 2003, p. 73), as an exemplary expression of symbolic power. This is the traditional territory of L1 education, then, and more specifically of school subjects like ‘English’ or ‘Swedish’, and other such L1 subjects. It should be recalled that our earlier reference to the traditional dyadic focus of the L1 subjects emphasised the notion of the ‘vernacular’, with regard to national languages and literatures. That might also be expressed as the national-vernacular, acknowledging the significance of the shift from the ‘classical’ languages to the ‘modern’ languages in schooling. This occurred roughly from the mid-nineteenth century on, with the emergence and consolidation of national standardised languages. It was a feature and perhaps even a requirement of nation-building, and, although not always acknowledged as such, it is moreover a matter of their “formalised expression” (i.e. language and literature), as institutions and as practices, understood dialectically. It is also an expression and realisation of social power: language and power are always complexly interrelated. So it is a particular kind of the (national-)vernacular that emerged at that time, already riven with difference and even division, and with differential (and differentiating) effects in speech and writing. But we still need to ask why it is that language and literature as key terms of reference are so significant. Moreover: Where do these categories come from? What is their history, their genealogy? They can seem so straightforward, so much taken-­ for-­granted, as given. But that isn’t at all the case. There is a complex process of discursive construction at work here, which is in fact foundational for much of what goes on under the label of ‘L1 education. It is clear from work such as that of Raymond Williams and Tony Crowley, with regard to subject English and English studies more generally, that ‘language’ and ‘literature’ must be understood as concepts, and as distinctive historical categories.11 As such, they are clearly discernible as organising principles in the disciplinary discourse of English teaching (e.g. Green 1990, 2018). But we want to claim that they are also relevant, albeit in nationally distinctive ways, to other L1 subjects, in the larger context of transnational curriculum inquiry. And this history cannot simply be wished away, or glossed over, in contemplating a future for the field at large. Language and literature remain important reference-points for the L1 subjects, then  – but they need to be understood historically, and always problematised.  Regarding ‘literature’, see Williams (1977). As he (p. 21) writes, more generally: “… all categories, including the category ‘language’, are themselves categories in language, and can thus only with an effort, and within a particular system of thought, be separated from language for relational inquiry” (our added emphasis).

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Counter-arguments exist, nonetheless, regarding the persistence and continuing value of the ‘dyad’. Elf (2007), for instance, has proposed that, given new multimodal conditions, it would be better to move away from this particular formulation: “For almost two centuries we have talked of language and literature as the main object of language as subject (LS)”: Reflecting cultural change, … we should rethink this object. In general, the language curriculum should rephrase its terminology, moving from ‘language’ to ‘making meaning’, and rethink its rationale[,] moving from literacy to semiocy. (Elf 2007, p. 155)

Elsewhere he writes that “[c]learly, L1 is not only about teaching the traditional dyad of language and literature”: Instead, the dyad has developed in ‘centrifugal’ ways […] into a multitude of converging technological uses which involve both analogue and digital learning materials, e.g. pen and paper drawings, websites, computer games, and text books. (Elf et al. 2015, p. 30)12

Elf’s proposal emerges in response to the arrival on the scene of a potentially new organising principle for the field, a new concept – literacy. We fully agree that literacy must be accounted for, as concept and practice – it is very clear that literacy studies has emerged as yet another of the available disciplines shaping and informing the L1 field. Yet it is all the more important to understand literacy in historical (and also comparative) terms, as a construction, a category, a discursive object, and not simply a descriptor. With regard to the framework itself, it is also effectively a third term, strategically, interrupting and disrupting the tendency to fall back into a binary logic. As it happens, Gramsci provides further insight into the reciprocating relationship between language and literature, as historical categories. This is because he was very much aware of the enduring significance of written language and print culture, which he associated with intellectual practice and social power. For him, as we have seen, the question of language was thoroughly entangled with the national question, of ‘nation’, and indeed the very notion of ‘national language’ was a “compromised concept” (Rosiello 2010, p. 41).13 In this respect, although Gramsci has much to say about literature and theatre, popular and canonic or classical, as well as journalism, he is particularly interesting with regard to grammar. He distinguishes between “the grammar ‘immanent’ in language itself” and what he calls “a ‘normative’ grammar (or more than one)”, linked to a tendency to “grammatical  “Language-and-literature is the structural, binary formula within which we reflect on the actual and potential practice of a mother tongue subject in a specific country” (Elf 2009, p. 426). It should be noted that Elf’s suggestion here is to move to another, arguably more generative binary: ‘modes-and-media’. 13  Both ‘language’ and ‘literature’, moreover, as they have come to be understood, are profoundly shaped by writing, and by print culture more specifically. Something worth noting here is the important Church tradition in Protestant countries in Europe. Strong connections existed for a long time between church and the emerging public schools, especially in countries like Sweden, with an interdependent relationship developed between church, school and script culture (i.e. literacy) in the nineteenth century (Erixon 2010; Johansson 1977; Tyner 1998). See also Luke (1989) on the links between Protestantism, pedagogy and print culture. 12

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conformism”, as a form of social propriety (Gramsci 1971, p.  180). Moreover: “Written ‘normative grammars’ tend to embrace the entire territory of a nation and its total ‘linguistic volume’, to create a unitary national linguistic conformism” (p.  181). This is emphatically political: “Written normative grammar … always presupposes a ‘choice’, a cultural tendency, and thus always an act of national-cultural politics” (p. 182). Hence it involves language planning and education policy, “stepping up the struggle against illiteracy” (p. 182) and developing adequate systems of public schooling and teacher education.14 “One of the ways to realize an organized intervention is the accomplishment of the ‘political act’ consisting in the school system’s adoption of a written normative grammar” (Rosiello 2010, p. 45). The links to L1 education historically are patently clear. Returning to our casestudy, Forgacs (1985, p. 166) notes, for instance: Italian was generally taught prescriptively in ‘grammar lessons’ and teachers tended to favour over-literary and affected Tuscan forms and a use of the language which abstracted from a personalized point of view. At the same time dialect was stigmatized as substandard.

This could easily be transposable to English teaching and Australian schooling in the same period, appropriately recontextualised to take account of local context, British imperialism and standard English15. Similar observations can be made about Sweden (Liberg et al. 2012). The point is, ‘Grammar’ and ‘Literature’ thus understood16 can be seen as two sides of the same ideological coin. As such, they are clearly manifest in what has been described as the ‘literary-grammatical’ paradigm (van de Ven 2007; Sawyer and van de Ven 2007). The focus to this point has been on ‘language-and-literature’, as the dyadic structure of the L1 subject, transnationally.17 Such a formulation becomes harder to work with, however, as countries like Australia and Sweden becomes more and more patently multicultural or ‘pluri-cultural’ and arguments arise for the L1 subject in question to be understood as, necessarily, a “multilingual subject” (Brutt-Griffler and Collins 2007). The formulation itself becomes increasingly problematical. As Krogh and Penne (2015, p. 5) observe of the Scandinavian L1 subjects: “The traditional L1 dyad of ‘language and literature’ now calls for quotation marks and  More recently, in the global era, this extends to ‘testing’ and measurement more generally, and new alignments between curriculum and assessment. Gramsci can be seen as prescient in this regard too, noting the role of the corrective manner of the educated (‘ruling’) class, “which traditionally speaks standard Italian, passes it on from generation to generation, through a slow process that begins with the first stuttering of the child under the guidance of its parents, and continues through conversation (with its ‘this is how one says it’, ‘it must be said like this’, etc.) for the rest of one’s life” (Gramsci 1985, p. 187). There are links here to national testing, surely? 15  Or indeed to the United Kingdom (Crowley 2003) – and perhaps beyond? 16  The use of capital letters here is quite deliberate. Among other things, it marks the distinction between this (politicised) understanding and a more ‘scientific’, formal usage (as in, for instance, in Štěpáník’s chapter, this volume). 17  Although it is important to note here that in some countries (e.g. Estonia, the Czech Republic), a sharper disjunction can be observed between the two, regarding the school curriculum, with ‘language’ and ‘literature’ each realised effectively as separate subjects. 14

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appears more convincingly represented in the plural forms of languages, literatures, and literacies”. And yet: How is this to be managed, practically, programmatically, pedagogically? What holds the subject together? This is why, for some, the solution is to look to seemingly simpler and more neutral labels like ‘Communication’ or ‘Literacy’, instead of (for example) ‘English, or ‘Swedish’, etc. With regard to ‘Literacy’, this re-badging can be, in itself, due recognition of changing social and educational realities. Hence Krogh and Penne (2015, p. 4) point to “… a pragmatic turn towards skills and literacy in the L1 subjects of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish”, especially in the light of global migration. Or, perhaps more positively, it can be seen as a matter of acknowledging the increasing influence and explanatory value of the New Literacy Studies, as a subject-disciplinary frame. Whatever the case, it seems important to re-assess the project and rationale of L1 education, and timely. What might better represent the curriculum structure of the L1 subject? In this regard, it can be postulated that adding ‘literacy’ as a third term, properly and fully theorised, is generative in rethinking the field in changing times and conditions. In this regard, a ‘triadic’ structure is proposed as contributing to, if not constituting, a new conceptual framework. In what follows, we introduce the beginnings of an argument along such lines. That work has already been initiated elsewhere, as it happens. Green (2018) writes of his work specifically along such lines, using the recent installation of a national curriculum for Australia as a stepping-off point. That policy initiative makes explicit reference to a particular version of the formulation at issue here, with ‘language’, ‘literacy’ and ‘literature’ presented as three interconnected but distinct “strands”. This formulation has been much debated, and rightly so. Yet its basic terms are clearly warranted by curriculum-historical inquiry, even though they need to be understood appropriately and in an informed way. There is more general agreement that these categories, as discursive constructions, are deeply imbedded in the formation and constitution of subject English. Moreover, as curriculum concepts, they are to be understood within a coherent conceptual field, wherein they are integrally and intimately interrelated. As such, they are to be understood as marking a specific curriculum structure. We argue, moreover, that this formulation applies to the L1 subjects more generally – that is, within a certain measure of flexibility, these historico-discursive categories and their systematic interrelation are to be discerned in the L1 subject transnationally, as a distinctive curriculum identity. At this point, account needs to be made of the meta-paradigmatic shift from ‘print’ to ‘digital-electronics’, and hence the digital transmutation of these particular categories and concepts as terms of reference; but that can be done readily and easily enough, or so we would contend. As Elf et al. (2015, p. 30) write: “Clearly, L1 is not only about teaching the traditional dyad of language and literature (Elf 2009). Instead, the dyad has developed in ‘centrifugal’ ways […] into a multitude of converging technological uses which involve both analogue and digital learning materials” – and beyond. But this argument extends readily to embrace literacy as well, as a third term. The base reference here and elsewhere is to “the traditional dyad of language and literature”, although, as we have seen, there have been proposals to move away from that particular ‘dyad’ altogether – albeit on to another one

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(i.e. mode/media). This would be to move towards working fully within a supposedly new frame of reference altogether: in effect, a digital-technological reframing. History is thereby effectively jettisoned, which seems quite unsatisfactory. Is there, however, another way of thinking about the issue? Addressing the issue in another way, we ask: How is ‘literacy’ understood here? Firstly, it is important to acknowledge that in this regard literacy is itself a symptom of globalization, as well as being indicative of what has been called ‘Anglification’ – the rise into prominence of English as an international language. Not all languages have a term for ‘literacy’, as it happens, which means that the English term is often simply exported into different national language contexts. Moreover, literacy tends to be associated with global educational reform and the international testing movement exemplified in OECD programs such as PISA and TIMMS. The result is that what counts as literacy is more often than not determined by policy, and tends to a more or less technical view, attuned to measurement requirements. From the point of view of progressive literacy scholarship, it is a highly constrained and limited view, and indeed an impoverished one. Notwithstanding attempts to associate it with a twenty-first century neoliberal competency frame, there is little to sustain it as an educational phenomenon, at least outside its own policy-and-assessment regime, which is itself increasingly self-referential, or hyperreal. Secondly, taking a properly historical view of the L1 subjects, and indeed of mass-compulsory modernist schooling, it is clear that both have emerged out of a context in which illiteracy was a major social problem, and a significant nation-­ building and modernizing constraint. Gramsci was very much aware of this in Italy, with his own Sardinian background and the continuing challenge of the ‘Southern Question’ always in mind. In the context of writing about ‘grammar’, he stressed the need to understand it within, and as an aspect of, “national-cultural politics’, arguing the importance of some form of ‘centralisation’ or ‘standardisation, in language as much as in the formation of the nation-state per se. As he writes, “[i]If one starts from the assumption of centralizing what already exists in a diffused, scattered but inorganic and incoherent state, it seems obvious that that an opposition on principle is not rational” (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). Rather, it is a matter of strategy. He continues thus: On the contrary, it is rational to collaborate practically and willingly to welcome everything that may serve to create a common national language, the non-existence of which creates friction particularly in the popular classes among whom local particularisms and phenomena of a narrow and provincial mentality are more tenacious than is believed. (p. 182)

And he concludes: “In other words, it is a question of stepping up the struggle against illiteracy” (p. 182 – our added emphasis). It is the need to move into literacy, as itself a standardising technology, that is important (Collins and Blot 2003), followed by its elaboration and differentiation into disciplinary knowledges and diverse textualities. Gramsci’s particular understanding of ‘grammar’ is relevant here, especially in its written, ‘normative’ forms. The point to emphasise however is that what might be called ‘(il)literacy’ is deeply inscribed in the discourse of

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modern(ist) schooling, including L1 education and the L1 subjects. The importance of this point is further acknowledged in Pavan-De Gregorio’s (1987) reference to “the appallingly low rate of literacy in 1861” (p. 72) in Italy, and indeed what she described as “the plague of illiteracy” (p. 72) at that time.18 Education in the ‘mother tongue’ was seen, therefore, as crucially part of the solution for the problem that ‘illiteracy’ represented, at that time.19 It is surely something that still haunts more recent so-called literacy debates, albeit transformed in various ways. Thirdly, literacy needs to be seen as a concept that is complex and contradictory, with both positive and negative aspects.20 This means that, as well as the limitations and constraints of literacy as inscribed in neoliberal policy, it has an expansive, generative dimension, potentially opening up opportunities and possibilities. This is the territory of the New Literacy Studies (NLS), as a general reference for the relatively recent explosion of research and scholarship in literacy studies, from the early first-generation work of Brian Street and Shirley Brice Heath onwards. New Literacy Studies tends to be associated more with sociology and the social sciences, rather than the traditional humanities on which L1 subjects like English and Swedish are based. Indeed, it has emerged partly as a consequence of the destabilization of ‘literature’ as an organizing category, and of literary ideology. The more positive, productive aspect of literacy is perhaps best exemplified in the work such as that of Luke (2004), Kress (2003) and Collins and Blot (2003), as well as Rowsell (2013) and others.21 A further matter to consider here is the manner in which literacy studies is one of the key areas in the take-up of digital technologies, in and out of school (Green and Beavis 2013; Erixon et al. 2012; Elf et al. 2015). Hence there are clearly opportunities in the emergence of literacy as a reference-­ point for the continued viability of the L1 subjects, and this should be not be overlooked or dismissed, especially by seeking simply to return to language and literature as curriculum principles, at least in an unreconstructed understanding of their participation in the traditional dyad. From another point of view, though, literacy (or a particular version of it) could be seen as emptying literature and language alike of

18  In this regard, see also Tröhler (2016a, b): “[I]n 1861 only 25% of Italy’s inhabitants were literate” (p. 291). As he notes, further: “[T]he fight against the dialects was a major driving force of the fight for literacy, with the aim of imposing a standardized Italian language for the sake of Italian unity” (p. 291). He makes this observation in explicit comparison to ‘Prussia’, with its very different national-cultural framework. 19  An important qualification must be noted here: Sweden, for example, with its distinctive Protestant history has a rich literacy tradition extending back further than various other European nations. Thanks to ample access to church archives, a Swedish researcher, Egil Johansson (1977), former priest and later professor of literacy, has been able to show that the majority of the Swedish peasant population was literate as early as the 1600s. They could read  – mostly, of course, the Bible – but they could not write, as recorded in the so-called house interrogations that were regularly conducted by church representatives. 20   As indeed are both ‘literature’ and ‘language’. Regarding ‘literature’ as a concept, see Green (1990). 21  See also Green (2018 – Ch7) for a comprehensive account of this argument.

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their ‘content’, their fullest, richest meaning.22 This literacy perspective also tends to limit language education, in that issues of language history and other aspects of what was formerly a language education tend to disappear. Instead of either ‘dyad’ or ‘triad’, then, we could end up in something monolithic that is seen as enough in itself. Yet it is also clear that different national and regional contexts are struggling with this issue at present, as indeed chapters in this book attest. A general agreement exists that the field is entering into what has been called “the literacy era” (Krogh 2012), something which is often viewed skeptically or critically, and perhaps rightly so. Our view nonetheless is that there may be value at this time in taking on board a larger frame of reference than to date, in looking to understand and re-energise the L1 subjects. It can be seen a form of ‘paradigm shift’ in itself, perhaps, and involves looking back as well as forward, to the past and to the future, with due regard for changing technologies of culture and communication.

4  ‘Paradigm’ – The Concept in Question In this section we focus attention on the existing body of scholarship on L1 education, with a particular concern for the key concepts and arguments to date informing and organising that work to date. As already noted, this comprises historical, comparative and empirical lines of inquiry, with the latter divided further into the ethnographic and the (quasi-)experimental. As a scholarly literature, it can be traced back to the early 1980s, when it became increasingly apparent that the L1 subjects, worldwide, could no longer simply assume their own authority and security, manifesting (in some circumstances at least) effectively as a curriculum hegemony. The field accordingly had to become more reflexive, and more explicit in its claims to curriculum identity. There is now a considerable body of work available in this regard, as well as much still to investigate and explore. Here we look specifically at what has become a key and enduring feature of that literature, and evident also in this book, namely the notion of ‘paradigm’. Thinking in terms of ‘paradigm’ has a long history within the field. While the book edited in 2007 by Herrlitz, Ongstad and van de Ven provides an important synthesis of the most relevant research and scholarship and is an invaluable resource, the paradigms formulation emerged earlier, at the very outset of focused, systematic work in the L1 area. Kroon and Sturm (1987, pp.  13–18) provide a fascinating

22  In this regard, Erixon and Löfgren (2020) have recently argued for a particular version of ‘literary literacy’ as one way of responding to, and countering, recent Swedish education policy developments promoting ‘literacy’ as a new organising principle. They advocate reading based on desire and imagination for understanding of literary texts. As their chapter in this volume shows, when literary education is subject to a literacy perspective, literature as experience and aesthetics disappears.

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account of some of this work,23 indicating how important this formulation (i.e. paradigm) has been to understanding L1 curriculum history, particularly in relation to notions of continuity and change. That is, it is a historical concept, a way of ­engaging with and opening up to history, as well as one that thematises difference, innovation and rupture. Moreover, it has undeniably been a useful and generative concept, and indeed it clearly continues to be so, as various chapters here attest. That does not mean, however, that it should not be questioned, or criticized, and in what follows we seek to explore such a line of enquiry. In discussing the historical transformations that L1 education has undergone, then, it has been deemed appropriate to work with Kuhn’s (1962) concept of “paradigm”, as “a basic set of belief that guides action, whether of the everyday garden variety or action taken in connection with a disciplined inquiry” (Masterman 1970, p. 17). All paradigms can be characterized by the way that their proponents respond to three basic questions, characterized as ontological (what is the nature of the ‘knowledge’?), epistemological (what is the nature of the relationship between the knower/inquirer and the known  – or the knowable?), and methodological (how should the inquirer go around finding out knowledge?). The answers given to these questions may be termed as “sets”, basic belief-systems or paradigms that may be adopted in practice (Guba 1990). In terms of Kuhn’s concept of paradigm, the presumption is that, in a school-subject such as L1, there is, at any one point, a relatively stable condition where certain content and certain methods and technologies are given precedence, and accepted as legitimate. However, over time and via new technology and content, or perhaps political and social initiatives and ambitions, the subject is exposed to pressure. Crowding of subject matter, content shifts, and other conflicts arise, which Kuhn calls “anomalies”, which may lead subsequently to “paradigmatic” changes. From this, much research in the field takes as its point of departure the notion of four distinctive paradigms in L1 education, seen as emerging from the mid-­ nineteenth century on. According to Sawyer and van de Ven (2007), these systems of values, prescriptions, theories and competing coalitions in L1 education are: (1) the academic (alternatively, the literary-grammatical), in which L1 over the course of the nineteenth century is defined as in university studies, i.e. ‘written language’, particularly in terms of grammar, and literature as canonised culture (i.e. ‘High Literature’), (2) the developmental paradigm in the first decade of the twentieth century, supported by Reform Pedagogy, and in which reading serves personal development and literature is a model of how individual expression gains form, (3) the communicative, in the 1960s and 1970s, which is society-centred and highlighting language as communication, and (4) the utilitarian, emerging in the 1980s, in which communication is mainly defined as ‘transactional’ use of language and

 Particularly interesting here is the extent to which it drew on, and was influenced by, British initiatives in the late 70s and early 80s, especially those associated with Stephen Ball and Ivor Goodson. That work in turn has been directly influential in the Anglo-Australian curriculum history of the English subjects (Green and Beavis 1996).

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pupils are to be educated for their future contribution to the development of society, and especially for economic progress. It needs to be noted here that this particular line of argument and inquiry needs itself to be contextualised, and indeed problematized. Arising in the social and political context of the late 1970s and 1980s, with a recent downturn in the international economy and a subsequent shift to the Right, research attention at this time was moving to problems of legitimation and coherence, and associated reform. In the L1 context, this meant seeking out historical and cultural justification, as well as looking outside national parameters and boundaries. What was the role and significance of the L1 subjects, comparatively and in themselves? The paradigms perspective proved useful in this regard. But it was also relatively arbitrary, as an organising principle for research, and its limitations quickly became apparent (Herrlitz and van de Ven 2007, pp. 25–26). Indeed, it is rather sobering to be reminded that “the concept of paradigm and its application in comparative analysis of standard language education was critically evaluated” (p. 26) – in the early to mid 1980s! It has persisted, all the same. Yet there is real value in developing such concepts and arguments, as well as frameworks, as these can provide insight into educational phenomena such as L1 education over time and space. Hence, it is worth asking what alternatives there are to the notion of ‘paradigms’. Or perhaps it is more of a question about the limits of such a formulation. Here, and bearing in mind the structuralist cast of that argument (Gough 2016, p. 53), it might be useful to work with the poststructuralist notion of discourse here, to refer to the material-discursive constraints on meaning and action. This enables a somewhat different sense of coherence with regard to what happens within the compass of particular ‘moments’ or ‘phases’ in L1 curriculum history. It would explain why and how, as van de Ven (2007, p. 247) writes, “… each paradigm creates its own definition of central concepts”  – for example, “‘literature’ in the literary-grammatical paradigm is not the same ‘literature’ [as] in the communicative paradigm”. A Foucaultian perspective would present this more in terms of discourse constructing its own objects of study. The advantage of such a poststructuralist formulation is that it avoids reifying such mechanisms and manifestations of change, while allowing a more fluid and dynamic sense of historical and cultural practice. In an earlier formulation, Englund (1996) proposed the notion of ‘metadiscourse’, identifying three such ‘metadiscourses’, as historically situated “styles of thought relating world-view to cultural products” (p.  16). This construct might usefully be re-­ activated here, with a view to seeing such historical moments or phases as (meta-) discursive matrices – significant or marked turning-points in L1 curriculum history. They might also be described from a Foucaultian perspective as interdiscursive blocs, or dispositifs, existing at once internally and externally. As such, they are necessarily heterogeneous, and hybrid. Once again what emerges is a sense of dynamic complexity, of historicity. This would seem compatible with the notion of ‘polyparadigmatic’ curriculum identity, without risking incoherence. Whatever the formulation used, it does seem useful to think of L1 curriculum history in such terms, at least broadly.

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Two further points can be made. Firstly, it is important that this paradigmatic character is registered both historically, in the curriculum-historical record (i.e. over time), and subjectively, within personal-professional identity. It is understandable that change goes hand-in-hand here with conflict, contradiction and complexity (cf. Ball and Goodson 1984, pp. 3–4; cited Kroon and Sturm 1987, p. 1221). Secondly, we must consider what it means from this perspective to describe the field as ‘polyparadigmatic’? (Sawyer and van de Ven 2007, p. 8). Sawyer and Van de Ven present “four different paradigms of mother tongue education”, indicating how these paradigms are grounded in “different meta-discourses/rationalities” (p.  7). These are seen as co-existing at any one moment, while also being discernible over time and across generations. Sawyer and van de Ven (2007), draw on the latter’s earlier work (e.g. van de Ven 2005), to show how the four paradigms “arose in the 19th and 20th centuries and are competing with each other, whether openly or covertly” (p. 9). Further, while “[t]hey are labelled differently by different authors, … there are striking similarities in what they stand for: a certain value orientation on education, with strong implications for content, teaching-learning activities and the legitimacy of mother tongue education” (p. 9). They outline the paradigms and their respective periodisations as noted already, i.e. an ‘academic’ paradigm (mid nineteenth century),24 a ‘developmental’ paradigm (early twentieth century), a ‘communicative’ paradigm (1970s/1980s), and a ‘utilitarian’ paradigm (1980s on). Importantly this is to indicate when they become recognisable as such. How sharp the disjuncture is between them chronologically, however, is debateable. Recent work in English curriculum history for instance demonstrates how the so-called ‘New English’, often identified with the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar, was preceded by a range of post-1945 initiatives, particularly at the classroom level (Medway et  al. 2014).25 Certainly these labels and time frames cannot be taken as definitive descriptors, therefore – rather, they are indicative of regularities in the record, discernible across national cultures and contexts. Again the ‘New English’ is illustrative. It is best seen as connecting back organically to what is presented here as the ‘developmental’ paradigm – elsewhere discussed in terms of the New Education (e.g. Green and Cormack 2008) – and also to the ‘communicative’ paradigm, thus effectively pertaining to much of the twentieth century, albeit in ebbs and flows of varying intensity. We present the following (Fig. 1) as a representative synthesis of these various formulations and arguments: What can be asked at this point, then, is how illuminating such formulations are for describing and understanding historical continuity and change in the L1 subjects, transnationally? There seems little doubt that what has been described as the  Also known as the ‘literary-grammatical’ paradigm. The value of this formulation is that it highlights the foundational and indeed symbolic role of ‘literature’ and ‘grammar’ as normative categories in the discourse of L1 education and public schooling. 25  Medway et al. (2014) are particularly sceptical about the use of ‘schools’ or ‘models’, analogous terms for ‘paradigms’ (perhaps ironically, these can be traced back to Stephen Ball’s work, in the early 1980s, which we noted earlier), advocating for the richer, more grounded complexity of the ‘concrete’, as opposed to what they see as the ‘abstractions’ of theory. 24

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PARADIGMS

PERIODS

CONTEXT a

‘literary-grammatical’b

19th century

nation-building, etc.

‘developmental’

early 20th century

New Education

(‘child-centred’)

Reformpedagogik

‘communicative’

1960/70s

counter-culture, etc.

‘utilitarian’

1980s

neoliberalism

(‘skills’)

(‘New Right’)

Fig 1  Paradigms in L1 Curriculum History a Cf. ‘conditions of change’? b See Kroon and Sturm (1987) regarding the persistence of the ‘literary-grammatical’ paradigm to around 1965 – see also Herrlitz and van de Ven (2007, p. 27).

‘literary-grammatical’ paradigm is indeed discernible in the historical record, readily apparent in the emergence and consolidation of the field, and now constituting a powerful and enduring background for subsequent developments and debates. In a sense it has become a kind of curriculum unconscious, haunting all later initiatives, thus attesting to the power of the Norm. It (re-)emerges at different times, however, depending on the history of the country or region in question. A further consideration is that work on the ‘(poly-)paradigmatic’ character of L1 education seems to have stalled, at least conceptually. What is presented as the ‘utilitarian’ paradigm, seen as a re-emphasis on the functional requirements of the economy and/or aligned with the new imperatives of global neoliberalism – that is, either a resurgence of ‘basic skills’ or a renewed call for ‘Back to Basics’  – appears as effectively the endpoint of such thinking, or the end of History. Of course, it was not to be, and since the 1990s there has been a whole range of developments and initiatives, including within various L1 subjects if not all of them, equally. In particular, these include new challenges of politics, technology, and even theory. The rise and consolidation over the 70s and 80s of what was then known as the New Right, which later modulated into neoliberalism, is one such crucial matter (Green 1999). So too is the extraordinary growth in ‘new’ technology and digital culture  – a veritable explosion, and something that is still to be fully realised as provoking deep-structural or perhaps meta-paradigmatic change in the L1 subjects. While there have been various attempts to extend and refine how this latest period is to be understood, including the rise and fall of Cultural Studies (Green 1995, 2018) and the associated shift from ‘literary culture’ to ‘popular culture’, or Elf’s

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proposed new ‘techno-semiotic’ paradigm, building on media education and multimodal theory (Elf 2009, p. 415), much work is still needed to really develop the argument.26 It may be that, as well as prompting further empirical work, especially ethnographically, more needs to be made of the possibilities in discourse theory, especially with regard to historical inquiry (Tröhler 2016a, b). What are the systems of reason informing and underlying L1 curriculum theory and practice? How are they manifested? What makes them recognisable as such? In this way, the insights and advances associated with ‘paradigm’ to date might well be extended. Whether or not that effort is justified is, again, debateable. What is the use of developing elaborate schemata of this kind, when they are confounded by the historical reality, by what is happening empirically, in the dynamic interplay of everyday (classroom) life? Perhaps the two need to be better aligned, or worked off each other, or co-­ operated, conceived in more complementary, dialogical terms. This remains an urgent task for the field. Meanwhile, it is salutary to conclude this section with this statement, in indicating something of the ongoing significance and specificity, the distinctiveness, of the L1 subject: The rationalities, meta-discourses and paradigms which manifest around the issue of mother-tongue education gain a degree of urgency largely absent from debates about other school subjects because of the perceived role of the subject in the formation of much more than competent writers or readers – its role in citizen-formation, in creating national ‘identity’ through literature, or even its dangers when generations of critical citizens are possible. (Sawyer and van de Ven 2007, p. 19)

The question remains, then: Why do the L1 subjects matter? Do they still matter in the same way? Or is this something that is changing, and this needs to be fully and properly acknowledged, as we move further into a new century, and a new world order?

5  Conclusion In this chapter we have sought to provide an account which draws on and re-­ articulates existing research and scholarship in the L1 field, thereby (re)framing the individual and collective work of the book overall. In doing so, we have highlighted three problematics, namely ‘nation’, ‘literacy’ and ‘paradigm’. These are at once key concepts and distinctive problems evident in the work to date, recurring ideas but also possible blocks, such that the field might be seen at this present moment as in an arrested state, at least conceptually. Although the issues themselves may remain unresolved, we hope nonetheless that our discussion here has opened the  Something else to consider here is whether Krogh’s argument about moving into what she calls “the literacy era” (Krogh 2012) might be understood paradigmatically. If so, it is not so much literacy in and of itself that is at issue, but also its imbrication with policy. How might this ‘apparatus’ be described and analysed?

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way to further explorations and interrogations, along such lines of inquiry. We want to make, perhaps rather schematically, some concluding comments in this regard, on digitalisation, nation-(re)building, and ‘post(mono)lingualism’, respectively. Firstly, a crucial aspect of the challenge that faces the L1 subjects is digitalisation, and the impact of global technocultural change, in a new world of flows and networks. (We identified this issue earlier, as one of our meta-themes – see Erixon and Green, 2020.) It goes beyond drawing in, and naturalizing, digital technologies more comprehensively into the curriculum ambit of L1 education (Erixon 2014). It means recognizing the extent to which the L1 subjects are themselves always-­ already technologized, given their historical formation in accordance with print culture and the print apparatus. If it is indeed the case that what now increasingly shapes social and educational life is what has been called the digital-electronic apparatus and a distinctively new media ecology, the challenge is profound, and for the L1 subjects, in particular. How is this school subject to be reinvented in and for a global era, in a way that draws on its history but also goes beyond it? We have already suggested that this requires a different, more dynamic understanding of language. That includes taking into account new imperatives of multimodality and techno-semiosis. Literature can be similarly questioned, so as to embrace film and moving-image cultural practice more generally, within a new understanding and affirmation of art-work. What about literacy? We have suggested that the current conjuncture is marked by a major tension associated with the double-sided emergence of literacy as a new organising principle for the L1 subject, and a complex ambivalence. Is literacy simply a trojan horse for globalisation and even ‘Anglification’, and linked necessarily with new neoliberal policy initiatives and imperatives, or is it (also) a way of opening up the subject-area to a broader field of textuality? Clearly there are dangers in such developments, but there are also possibilities and opportunities. At this point, then, it is important to bear in mind that what is ultimately at issue, in rethinking the L1 subjects along such lines as we have sought to draw here, is the rich interplay of these categories and concepts, such that they inform and energise each other, in looking to the past, in the present, toward the future. Secondly, it is important to recognise that shifting from nation-building as a frame of reference to due consideration of what it means to understand the L1 subjects in a global era does not imply, let alone claim, that nations now no longer matter, nor that such subjects should move away from issues and challenges of national culture. Quite the contrary – what needs to be increasingly undertaken is the task of nation-(re)building. It matters greatly that, in the emerging new world order, nation-­ states27 and their different cultures and languages maintain and renew their specificity, their accent, at the same time as new and ongoing negotiations need to be made between the local and the global. In some cases, this might be a matter of cultural  Something worth acknowledging here is Trohler’s (2016b, p.  3) observation that these terms, ‘nation’ and ‘state’, are not necessarily yoked together, although this is often assumed to be the case. It would be interesting, therefore, to bring this matter into consideration in seeking to ‘rethink’ the L1 subjects today.

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and/or language ‘protection’, of preserving particular national languages that might otherwise be at risk (in this regard, see Pieniążek and Štěpáník [2016] on teaching the national languages in the V4 countries, i.e. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). Given that one impulse in globalization is homogenization, ensuring and indeed promoting such differences, such heterogeneity, is clearly imperative. At the same, the dark side of nation-hood, of nationalism, must be acknowledged – another lesson that history has to teach us. Nations still matter, yes, but differently, reflexively.28 Hence we think that it is appropriate to refer to the L1 subjects as ‘(post-)national’, and to see them as occupying a critical symbolic space between their located politico-cultural identity, their situatedness, and their participation in a post-modern, globalizing context, and a world of difference. From this viewpoint, the L1 subjects might well be seen as important players in the struggle to re-affirm and re-articulate (post-)national identities and their role in local cultural and environmental praxis, in the larger context of a global world order. Finally, and directly related, is the value of drawing in the notion of “the postmonolingual condition”, a formulation that Yildiz (2012) introduces in her concern to problematise modernist articulations of monolingualism, identity and nation. As she writes, “[s]chooling has been one of the primary means” in the “social engineering of monolingual populations” (p. 3). ‘Mother tongue’ education, and more specifically the various ‘mother-tongue’ subjects, have been centrally implicated in this, as institutionalised practices of monolingualism. “With the gendered and affectively charged kinship concept of the unique ‘mother tongue’ at its cent[re], … monolingualism established the idea that having one language was the natural norm, and that multiple languages constituted a threat to the cohesion of individuals and societies” (p. 6). That was always a fiction, as we have noted, but a powerful one, with historically demonstrable effects. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the challenge is “to manage multilingualism” (p. 3). English or Swedish, as school subjects – the L1 subjects more generally – need to become more avowedly, organically ‘multilingual’ if they are to survive and prosper, which among other things means working with a more dynamic, flexible notion of language itself. Putatively national languages are always less monolithic than official ideology would have it, and opening them up to multiplicity and difference, within as well as without, is likely to be useful, as well as strategic. Notions such as heteroglossia and ‘translanguaging’ need to be drawn in more systematically. The implications for L1 education today are clear – including the value of taking a more critical view of the transition from ‘mother tongue’ to ‘L1’, and asking the question of what this might obscure, or gloss over. “The conception of language, origin, and identity that ‘mother tongue’ marks is very much in effect today, even when the term itself is not explicitly invoked” (Yildiz 2012, p. 13). This opening up to difference and multilingualism is consistent with the changing ‘ethnoscapes’ (Appadurai 2010) of the contemporary global world, in which population flows and pluricultures are a marked feature.  For one thing, as Matthewman’s chapter shows (this volume), each country’s environmental viability is partly linked to its local care and its integrity – a powerful instance of the imperative to ‘think globally, act locally’.

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Rethinking the L1 subjects in and for a global era is clearly a challenge, and in so many ways. At the same time, it matters greatly that this particular subject-area, renewed, continues to feature in the school curriculum, worldwide. Hopefully this book contributes to that end, even though, in itself, it can only be just a beginning.

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