All too often lost in the pressure and intensity of the current practice of English teachers and literacy educators is due acknowledgement of the continuing importance of history. This paper brings together two concerns: the work of Margaret Meek Spencer as a key figure in the history of English teaching, reading pedagogy and literacy education,…

The role and significance of schooling in maintaining and renewing social disadvantage is particularly evident in upper secondary education, and especially so in the high-stakes final examination at the end of Year 12. This paper focusses on Senior English in this context, with specific regard to the Australian state of New South Wales. Building…

The installation of the new Australian Curriculum offers rich possibilities for rethinking English in Australia, and beyond. This paper proposes that rhetoric is usefully drawn into this work of reconceptualisation, as strategically an organising principle for English curriculum theory and practice. It reviews existing work on rhetoric and…

The Dartmouth Seminar is rightly understood as a key event in English curriculum history--indeed, "a pivotal moment," as one commentator put it. Nonetheless questions can still be asked about the nature of its significance, both "discursively," with regard to the discourse (and rhetoric) of post-Dartmouth English teaching, and…

The move currently underway to construct a formalised national curriculum presents us, as educators and as citizens, with both opportunities and challenges. This is perhaps especially the case with English teaching, clearly the most contentious of the four subject areas in the front line of such initiatives and agendas. Why this is so needs to be…

The paper takes as its starting point the relationship between the "New English", a curriculum movement commonly associated with the 1960s and 1970s, and the New Education, an influential general educational reform movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. It inquires into the…

Explores the largely unexamined years of English teaching between the 1910s and 1960s in Australia in order to supplement available forms of English curriculum history. Contends that an examination of teacher training curriculum and materials for this period would provide a useful way of further investigating the kind of English…

Describes the experience and implications of the Kewdale Project for English teacher education, particularly inservice, and for learning theory in practice. (HOD)