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MAKING PEOPLE “PEOPLE": A GENEALOGY
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MAKING PEOPLE “PEOPLE A GENEALOGY
OF ENGLISH TEACHING IN US. SECONDARY SCHOOLS

BY

Jory Jay Brass

A DISSERT A T ION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
In partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Teacher Education

2006

ABSTRACT

MAKING PEOPLE “PEOPLE A GENEALOGY
OF ENGLISH TEACHING IN US. SECONDARY SCHOOLS

BY

Jory Jay Brass

The purpose of this study is to examine definitions of secondary English teaching
through history and to account for the social relations that made them possible. Through
genealogy, I highlight some of the various power/knowledge relations that have
coalesced in English since the late 19th century and draw attention to some aspects of its
emergence and transformations that may not be treated in other accounts. My analysis
demonstrates how ways of defining English teaching came to be governed not only
through knowledges of literary disciplines, but also through the human sciences, pastoral
pedagogies, and relations of govemmentality. I highlight the emergence and
transformations of these relations through my own analysis of definitions of English
teaching in contemporary interviews and archival texts, and I supplement this analysis
with other historical inquiries that have examined power-knowledge relations in other
spheres of education and social welfare. This genealogy attempts to denaturalize
common ways of reasoning about English teaching and to draw attention to power-
knowledge relations that have been reproduced, adapted, and transformed through
history. By making these (dis)continuous relations visible, 1 hope they can be taken into
account in ongoing efforts to debate, invent, and critique possible approaches to English

education in secondary schools, educational research, and teacher education.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One (Introduction)... ....1

Chapter Two... 12

Chapter Three... ....35

Chapter Four... ....69

Chapter Five (Conclusion)... ...100

End Notes... 113

References... 114

iii

CHAPTER ONE

The aim of such genealogies is a kind of destabilization or de-fatalization of our
present. In describing its contingency, in therefore opening the possibility that
things have been different. could have been diflerent, they try to make it easier to
assess the present in order to make judgments about how to act upon it. If the
history of our present is more accidental than we may like to believe, thefuture of

our present is also more open than it sometimes appears. (Rose. 1999a, x)

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study is to denaturalize common ways of reasoning about
secondary English teaching through the use of genealogy (Foucault, 1984). Genealogy,
described in Chapter Two, may be glossed as the use of historical investigations that
draw attention to the multiple social processes that have made possible present ways of
approaching English teaching in classrooms, research, and teacher education. In this
study, I examine constructions of “English” and “English teaching” through history. That
is, I identify key continuities and discontinuities in the ways in which “English” and
“teaching” have been formulated, accepted, and circulated in contemporary interview
data and in pedagogical texts in English education. I then account for the changing

relations that made those constructions possible. A common goal of genealogy is not to

make the past familiar but to make the present strange; thus, genealogy might also be
called a “history of the present” (Foucault, 1979; Tyler & Johnson, 1991). In this study, I
try to provoke an “untimely attitude” towards present concepts, distinctions, or practices
that appear self-evident (Rose, 1999b) by accounting for the emergence and
transformations of definitions of English teaching through history. In doing so, I hope to
open new spaces for debate, invention, and critique whereby we might rethink the
boundaries of possible approaches to English in secondary schools, educational research,

and teacher education in the context of complex change.

Dissertation Organization

This study adopts a nontraditional organization that has grown more common
over the last decade. 1 have not included a traditional methodology chapter or literature
review chapter, for example. Instead, this dissertation is conceived as three articles to be
submitted to peer reviewed journals in English education. I intend to submit Chapters
Two, Three, and Four for publication as journal articles. Thus, these three chapters can
be read as self-contained arguments; each includes a “methodology” and “literature
review” appropriate for the particular chapter. [Chapter One serves as a brief
introduction to the project that is not intended for publication. Chapter Five serves as a
brief conclusion to the project that will not be published] The main rationale for
organizing this dissertation around three articles is that dissertations themselves rarely get
read. I hope that the three article format better prepares me to submit dissertation
chapters to peer-reviewed journals and to circulate its ideas more widely than a lonely

shelf in Michigan State University’s library.

Here is a brief introduction to the three primary chapters in this dissertation.
Chapter Two makes the case for potential uses of genealogy in English education in our
current context of change. I provide a brief introduction to genealogy as history and
identify some possible ways in which genealogical approaches might bring a different
perspective to current questions in the field. I then illustrate how other scholars have
approached contemporary concerns through genealogical studies of English, literacy, and
literary education in Australia, Canada, and England. (I am not aware of any other
genealogical studies of secondary English in the United States.) This chapter also serves
as a brief literature review of genealogical studies in English education globally. Chapter
Three examines the common assumption that the teaching of English in secondary
schools is derived primarily from university disciplines of English, especially literature. I
do not take that assumption for granted and make a different case by asking how the
beginning teachers in my study could think of secondary English less as an academic
field than as a site for forming people who govern their own thoughts, emotions, conduct,
and interactions with others. This genealogy suggests that several discourses outside of
“literature” scaffold how secondary English teaching has been understood and practiced
through history. I argue that one might usefully appraise English differently by
decentering “literature” in approaching secondary English class as a teacher, researcher,
or teacher educator. Chapter Four explores the common assumption that didactic
approaches to English teaching are more controlling than non-didactic approaches, such
as pedagogies based on student interest, workshops, response to literature, and so on. My
goal in this chapter is not to offer a defense or critique of didactic instruction, nor do I

defend or critique various alternatives to didactic approaches. However, I do raise

questions about how alternatives to didactic pedagogies have been written and spoken
about in English education by examining how such reasoning has been constructed
historically. In doing so, I highlight how power relations of govemmentality (Foucault,
1979) circulate through non-didactic approaches to English teaching in ways that

generally are not scrutinized in English education.

Center of Gravity of the Studies

These chapters may address different research problems, but they cohere both
methodologically and conceptually. Methodologically, each chapter uses an approach to
history that seeks to interrupt the common terms by which we have come to debate,
critique, and reform English. Each adopts modes of analysis and argument designed to
denaturalize the present boundaries of English education in order to provide a different
purchase on the social relations that have rendered certain kinds of experience intelligible
and practicable. Conceptually, the chapters frequently address how secondary English
has been implicated in the formation of self—regulating citizens. The title of this
dissertation, for example, stems from a pervasive idea in the study that participant Scott
Applecroft’s described succinctly in defining “English” at the end of his (student

teaching) internship:

English class is about how I taught people how to be people . . . Everything that
we did regarding writing, books, whatever, was ancillary t o. . . whatever we were

trying to work on socially (Focal Group Interview, May, 2004).

Statements such as this point to a relation of power that Foucault (1979) analyzed
as “govemmentality.” Govemmentality is a mode of power in which the self exercises
power over the self by being subject of, and subject to, various forms of knowledge and
expertise. Relations of govemmentality have been prominent ways of governing people
in liberal democracies (Rose, 1999a, 1999b; Burchell, Gordon, & Miller, 1991). These
relations do not work by acts of domination; instead, they work through techniques that
align people’s choices, desires, and understandings of themselves to various kinds of
authority and expertise. In English class, relations of govemmentality have been fostered
through different ways of writing and talking about the self and through response-based
pedagogies, for example. My interview data remind us how these kinds of practices may
produce certain kinds of subjectivity, or “make people people.” I do not evaluate such
practices as good or bad; rather, I draw attention to the ways in which relations of power
may circulate through those approaches by examining the historical relations that
established such practices in secondary English class. In particular, I examine an
ensemble of practices that Rose (1999a) might call “governing the soul” because they
entail expert-mediated ways of understanding and acting upon aspects of the self
previously understood to be private and sacred, such as one’s beliefs, emotions,
dispositions, motivations, and souls. The importance of forming self-regulating subjects

that I explore here resonates with historical studies of English teaching in other countries:

We explore the possibility that the practices of English and the specific strategies
which English specialists employ are as much to do with the process of

contributing to the formation of a particular kind of person as they are with the

more obvious and more frequently articulated concerns with literacy, freedom,
literature, and imagination. That person, our findings would suggest, is self-
reflecting, self-regulating, and more comfortable when enabling and supervising
than when instructing and being didactic. Such strategies have been developed
not because they produce more literate and knowledgeable students, but because
they encourage aspects of the subject which prove valuable to society. The
emphasis on the person, the affective response, on the experience and insights of
the individual help to validate and monitor qualities which are not given free play
elsewhere. This may be a very desirable process: that it is normative is rarely

acknowledged” (Peel, Patterson, & Gerlach, 2000, p. x).

Genealogy begins to account for how this kind of reasoning about English
teaching was produced historically. In many ways, my inquiry attends genealogically to a
question that beginning teacher Celia Brett suspects that most adolescents would like to
ask of their English teachers: “Why are you trying to turn me into this self-reflective
person who always needs to be examining myself?” (Focal Group Interview, May,
2004). My study suggests that one cannot begin to answer that question without
considering a number of historical transformations, including shifting relations among
English teaching, Protestant Christianity, and the human sciences, especially psychology.
My goal is to draw attention to several effects of power that are not made apparent in
prominent accounts of secondary English teaching. By taking into account the relations
by which English class could be understood as a site for making people into “people,” my

research demonstrates how secondary English teaching may be more useful and more

dangerous than is assumed in contemporary scholarship. Thus, my chapters offer
different ways of thinking about teacher knowledge in English, the history of English
teaching, the effects of English education research, and the power relations embodied in

presumably democratic English pedagogies.

Data Sources

Each genealogy starts with present definitions of English taken primarily from
two sources. First, I examine definitions of English teaching taken from three years of
case study data collected in 2003-2005. Across this time, I followed five former students
from their university methods courses through a year-long student teaching internship
and through their first year of secondary English teaching. These beginning English
teachers—Scott Applecrofi, Erica Bolton, Celia Brett, Mindy O’Malley, and Holly
Robison (pseudonyms)——provided me with numerous teaching artifacts and also joined
me for personal interviews and for five focal group interviews from Fall, 2003- Spring,
2005. My current writing from this data set considers the focal group interviews. By
focal group interviews, I refer to unstructured and semi-structured conversations with
participants that proceeded dinner parties at my house. Averaging two hours in length,
each focal group interview began with casual, unstructured conversation about teaching
English in secondary schools. Each interview ended with me asking the group to define
five terms: English, teaching, adolescents, schooling, and literacy; I focus primarily here
on participants’ definitions of “English” and “teaching” and their discussions surrounding
those terms. These discussions were fully transcribed in 2005 by one of the research

participants.

My second source of contemporary statements is taken from a recent survey of
NCTE members’ conceptions of “successful” or “highly qualified” English teachers
(Dudley-Marling, Abt-Perkins, Sato, & Selfe, 2006). While I do not make positivist
claims in my studies, I opted to triangulate definitions of English teaching from my case
study data with responses from a random sample of 649 members of NCTE.

Genealogy also requires archival documents through which one can identify
continuities and discontinuities among ways of writing and speaking about English
teaching through history. I focused my archival analysis primarily on the 18903-191 Os,
which was understood as a formative time in the history of English teaching. Hays’s
(1936) examination of curricular documents of the 19"1 century noted that prior to 1870,
the subject English was of “little or no importance, irregularly scheduled, spasmodically
and incidentally taught. No consensus of opinion existed regarding the content of the
course, the length of time the study should be pursued, nor how it should be taught”
(p.14). However, by the 18903, “English” (or “English Literature”) was recognized by
the Committee of Ten as a viable secondary school subject and by the 19108 was widely
taught and generally required for high school graduation. Following Morgan (1995), I
assume that inquiry into so-called foundational moments of a field of study can draw
attention to the controversies, compromises, and multiple social relations that became
tacit at a later time.

I focus on two sets of texts from this time period. First, I examine constructions of
English teaching across three influential pedagogical texts that Applebee (1974)
characterizes as among the first attempts from within the profession to define English for

the secondary teacher and teacher educator: The Aim of Literary Study (Corson, 1895)

and two separate books entitled The Teaching of English in the Elementary and
Secondary School (Chubb, 1912; Carpenter, Baker, & Scott, 1913). The prominence of
these texts in English education at the turn of the 20th century is evident because they
were reprinted regularly over two or three decades, cross-referenced each other, and were
cited across early English education literature. I culled the second group of texts from the
first volume of the English Journal, which was first published in the winter of 191 1-
1912. I examined articles associated with defining secondary English teaching. For
example, I chose titles like “A New Task for the English Teacher” (Breck, 1912), “The
Organization of the Course in Literature in Secondary Schools” (Hulst, 1912), and “The

Aim of the English Course” (Lewis, 1991).

Data Analysis

Chapter Two provides a more elaborate account of genealogy, including examples
of other genealogical inquiries and discussions of its assumptions, procedures, and goals.
(Chapters Three and Four also provide descriptions of analyses particular to those
chapters.) Briefl y, genealogical studies generally start with a question posed in the
present, examine the terms by which the question is currently understood, and then seek
to excavate through historical analysis the multiple lines (“genealogy”) of convergence
that have comprised present conditions. My overarching strategy across the dissertation
is to examine texts to identify continuities and discontinuities in the ways in which
English teaching has been defined and justified. This kind of analysis draws attention to
the historical relations through which English teaching was made thinkable and

practicable. By identifying continuities and discontinuities in the discourse on English

teaching, I sensitize readers to the historical contingency and constructedness of the
terms, categories, and distinctions used to debate, invent, and critique English education

in the present.

Significance of the Study

My approach is to demonstrate how English is premised on truth claims that are
historically specific. By demonstrating how particular discourses, knowledge, and power
relations have made possible both what can be said and what can be done, I hope to
provide different ways of reasoning about English teaching that might provoke different
kinds of work in teacher education and English education research. These chapters will
add to the growing methodological diversity in English education and will provide a
different perspective towards English education in the context of change (e. g. Smith &
Stock, 2002). They will also afford some points of comparison and contrast to
genealogical studies of English in other countries (e. g. Hunter, 1998) and to traditional
histories of English education (e. g. Applebee, 1974). These studies might also make a
small contribution to literature on govemmentality (e. g. Burchell, Gordon, & Miller,
1991). However, the primary significance of this study is its transgressive validity
(Lather, 1998), or its capacity to open new lines of discussion, debate, invention, and
critique that take into account how discourse has delimited how and what we can know
and do as teachers, researchers, and teacher educators in English education: “It is not a
matter of looking harder or more closely, but of seeing what frames our seeing—spaces

of constructed visibility and incitements to see what constitute power/knowledge” (p.38).

10

In the chapters that follow, 1 will demonstrate how ways of seeing in English
teaching came to be governed not only through knowledges of literary disciplines but
also through the human sciences, pedagogical reasoning adapted and transformed from
elementary schools, and also discursive practices of govemmentality. I highlight the
emergence and transformations of these relations through my own analysis of definitions
of English teaching in contemporary interviews and archival texts, and I supplement this
analysis with other historical inquiries that have examined power-knowledge relations in
other spheres of education and social welfare. In doing so, I hope to provide not only a
different perspective towards my interview data, but also to highlight the relations that
have delimited how English teaching has been made understandable and practicable

through history.

11

CHAPTER TWO

Introduction

Research in the area of English education has expanded significantly over recent
decades. While the US. federal government has narrowed what counts as fundable
research, inquiry in English education has adapted a range of methodological tools and
assumptions drawn from different disciplines and cross-disciplinary hybrids (DiPardo &
Sperling, 2006). The prospectus for English education research during our current
decade includes post—modern, narrative, critical, and sociocultural perspectives that
provide ways of grappling with rapid changes manifest in and out of schools, locally,
nationally, and globally (Smith & Stock, 2002). This methodological diversity is
manifest across professional conferences and journals in the field (Yagelski & Leonard,
2002). However, genealogy (Foucault, 1984) is one mode of inquiry that has not yet
found a place even along the margins of English education research in the United States.

My goal in this paper is to explain genealogy in a way that makes a case for its
relevance in our current context of change. I begin by distinguishing genealogy from
more familiar conceptions of history and identifying a few of its key assumptions. 1 then
provide brief reviews of studies conducted by Bill Green, Ian Hunter, and others to
illustrate how scholars from other countries have approached present issues in the English
education by using genealogy. I then summarize key domains of analysis from the

studies reviewed that might inform approaches to current issues in US. English

12

education. 1 must stress again that my goal is modest: it will become more apparent later
that it would be ironic for me to suggest that genealogy should be more than marginal in
our field or to assert its relevance as universal or timeless. My argument is simply that
genealogy involves conceptual and rhetorical tools that can denaturalize particular ways
of reasoning about English education and also bring into play accounts of English
through history that might be of tactical use in approaching our present. In a context
characterized as contentious and rapidly changing, such an approach may be particularly
timely in providing different ways of talking about how we might approach English in

secondary schools, research, and teacher education.

Introduction to Genealogy

Genealogy is a term used to describe critical history inquiries conducted by Michel
Foucault in studies such as Discipline and Punish (1977) and the History of Sexuality
(1978). However, the term “history” may be misleading for some readers because
Foucault’s historicism contrasts with more familiar approaches to history. A
genealogical approach to history is different from more familiar historical approaches in
at least two respects.

First, genealogy does not search for origins, essences, or underlying continuities
that explain why things developed in a certain way. Genealogy does not assume that the
present is an inevitable outcome of the past. Prado (2000) suggests that genealogical
approaches invert the significance of the marginal over the supposedly central, the
constructed over the supposedly natural, and the accidental over the allegedly inevitable.

The key assumption behind these inversions is that history can account for particulars and

13

not so easily assimilate disparate historical events into unified accounts:
Genealogy does not operate on a murky field of elusive but objective events,
trying to sift out the continuities that reveal the causes of a sequence of pasts and
of the present. Genealogy does not claim to mine a continuous vein in which
determinants of later events can be found if research is good enough. . . Rather
than history being a searching through the past’s myriad details for future-
determining continuities, it is only a tireless sifting out of disparate components
that our interests and priorities turn into episodes in an imposed progression”

(Prado, 2000, p. 34).

A second key distinction is that genealogy does not use historical analysis to make
the past familiar so much as to make the present strange. One condition of an “effective”
(see Dean, 1994) historical project, for Foucault, was the destabilizing effect that it could
bring to conditions generally not questioned in the present. Contrasting genealogy to
other critical approaches, Foucault (1991) summarized some possible uses of his studies:

To give some assistance in wearing away certain self-evidences and
commonplaces about madness, normality, illness, crime and punishment; to bring
it about, together with many others, that certain phrases can no longer be spoken
so lightly, certain acts no longer, or at least no longer so unhesitatingly,
performed; to contribute to changing certain things in people’s ways of perceiving
and doing things; to participate in this difficult displacement of forms of
sensibility and thresholds of tolerance—I hardly feel capable of attempting much

more than that (p.83).

14

It may be useful to describe genealogy as a “history of the present” (Foucault,
1979; Tyler & Johnson, 1991). The crux of genealogy is to construct historical accounts
that make the present strange and therefore catalyze alternative ways of engaging present
problems. Genealogy does not critique the present by debunking it empirically, nor does
it seek to reinterpret the present by imposing on it a new conceptual framework or theory.
Instead, genealogical research attends to the particular historical changes that gave the
present its shape in order to illustrate how the present has been, and could be, understood
and practiced differently. This kind of analysis calls into question the self-evidence of
the present by confronting it with its own historical specificity, which can be a
disconcerting but generative strategy of criticism (Rose, 1999).

Genealogy offers an account of the constitution of knowledge through analytical
strategies that seek to locate the changing rules by which statements come to be formed,
accepted, and circulated as true. In other words, genealogy examines the conditions that
allow certain statements to be sanctioned as true. By illustrating how these rules have
varied across time and space, genealogy highlights how historically contingent relations
have constituted the present in certain ways and not others. In other words, a
genealogical perspective does not regard the rules of truth as self-evident, timeless, or
outside of human interest or social convention; rather, it regards truth as a product of
historically specific power relations as exercised in discourse. This provides the starting
point for genealogical research: investigations that seek to understand how the
development of discursive practices produces truth and knowledge and so shapes and

defines subjects and subjectivity (Prado, 2000).

15

Discourse and Power. A key concern of genealogy is to examine the conditions that
establish certain claims to truth. Claims to truth are understood as constituted in and
constitutive of discourse. Foucault’s notion of discourse does not distinguish between
language and practice. Therefore, genealogical analysis attempts to reconstruct the
discursive processes, including technical, nonlinguistic, and institutional factors that
allow for the formulation, acceptance, and circulation of true statements. Rose (1999)
summarizes some questions that might facilitate such an analysis: Where do object
emerge (in discourse)? Which are the authorities who are able to pronounce upon them?
Through what concepts and explanatory regimes are the specified? How do certain
constructions acquire the status of truth? (pp. x-xi). Discourse is important because it
makes possible and constrains what is, and is not, knowable at any particular historical
moment.

Genealogy therefore approaches knowledge as a product of power: power and
knowledge are distinct but reciprocally related to each other. In other words, it is
impossible “for power to be exercised without knowledge and impossible for knowledge
not to engender power” (Foucault, 1980, p.52). The Foucaultian view of power is
relational, not sovereign. This means that power is not possessed by anyone or anything;
instead, power is a complex set of relations in which actions act on actions. While power
is not reducible to a person or social structure, it does produce the field of possibilities for
thought and action:

power constrains actions by providing a ‘field of possibilities’ regarding

behavior. Power enables a range of options, of electable courses of action.

16

Conversely, power inhibits other options. Differently put, the complex web of
past and current actions incline individuals to do some things and disincline them
to do other things. A simple example is how someone acts in an institutional

context acts in certain ways because of how others act. (Prado, 2000, p.71 -72)

This conception of power/knowledge enables inquiry into the environments within
which we come to reason and act and to map the relations that made such reasoning and
action possible. This methodology is not just a preference for minor details; rather, Rose
(1999b) notes that historical events and movements often occur at the level of minor
relational shifts that make possible new knowledge:

Things happen through the lines of force that form when a multitude of small
shifts, ofien contingent and independent from one another, get connected up:
hence it is these configurations of the minor that seem to me to form the most

appropriate object for the work of a historian of the present (p.1 1).

Genealogy therefore analyzes a collection of texts to locate the small modifications
of rules for forming statements as true and then examines what these formations make
possible. A common strategy is to identify continuities and discontinuities in texts
through history. The shifts and transformations suggest how power has been exercised.
This analysis requires extensive source materials in order to understand the
(re)constitution of knowledges that came to have value for us: "Genealogy is gray,
meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused

parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times"

17

(Foucault, 1984, p. 76). Thus, the events that comprise history for the genealogist are the
particular relational changes that made possible different constructions of truth,

knowledge, or rationality.

In summary, a central aim of genealogy is to use historical accounts to provoke a
critical attitude towards things in our present experience that may appear timeless,
natural, and self-evident. The genealogist’s tool is redescription, not a particular theory
or a formalized method. Genealogical accounts draw attention to how the boundaries for
thought and action have been redrawn or rewritten through history by examining
transformations in statements across a corpus of texts. They call into question how
certain concepts, narratives, and categories were instituted as authoritative by examining
the discursive processes that produced them. In doing so, genealogy seeks to
(re)introduce the local, popular, and disqualified knowledges displaced or wrongly
assimilated by conventional analytics and to make tactical use of them in the present
(Foucault, 1980a). This tactical use of history for rethinking the present is a defining trait
of genealogy:

a genealogy should be seen as a kind of attempt to emancipate historical

knowledges from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and

struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal, and scientific
discourse . . . ‘genealogy’ would be the tactic whereby, on the basis of the
description of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus

released would be brought into play. (Foucault, 1980b, p.85)

18

Genealogies of English from England, Canada, and Australia

Genealogical research is particularly timely given the current unease surrounding
English in secondary schools, teacher education, and university scholarship. Research
and advocacy in the field is now engaging a wide array of problems and possibilities
constituted by changes associated with globalization, cultural diversity, educational
policy, social and economic inequalities, and the proliferation of information and
communications technology (Smith & Stock, 2003). Addressing “the trouble with
English,” Luke (2004) argues that English education needs to rethink the construction of
the field, or it risks “peddling old wine in recycled bottles” if not being intellectually and
textually irrelevant to students’ lives in the changing social, economic, and technological
contexts of the 21" century. Luke also notes the risk of descending into politically driven
and historically naive arguments over the field and its pedagogy without attending to the
complex and contradictory relations that comprised English’s history and its present.
This is the province of genealogy:

One way of answering the question, ‘What is English?’ is to ask, ‘What was

English?’ That is, in exploring how the past has left its marks in subtle or blatant

ways upon the present, we often reveal what is taken for granted within a subject

area. It is particularly useful, I think, to inquire about the foundational moments

of a discipline since here we see magnified conceptual settlements or curricular

arrangements that have become tacit at a later stage. (Morgan, 1995, p.1 1)

Research in the teaching of English has expanded significantly across recent

decades. However, our field generally proceeds with little historical imagination.

19

Applebee’s (1974) history, penned over thirty years ago, is one of few historical
treatments of English; at this time, I am not aware of any genealogical studies of English
teaching in US secondary schools. However, secondary English, literacy, and literary
education have been historicized through genealogical studies outside the US through the
work of scholars like Phil Cormack, Bill Green, Ian Hunter, Robert Morgan, and Annette
Patterson.

In the following sections, I introduce briefly some fragments of their work both to
illustrate genealogical approaches and to demonstrate how genealogy has informed
efforts at rethinking English teaching, educational scholarship, and teacher education. In
the interest of space, I explore two lines of genealogy in English education outside the
United States. First, I explore some of Bill Green’s (2002) genealogies that examine how
various “crises” in English and literacy are constructed discursively. Not only is that
work timely, but it also highlights how genealogy might historicize commonplace terms
(e. g. “English” or “grammar”) by examining how they have been understood and
deployed differently through history. The second line of genealogical work I explore
begins with Ian Hunter (1988; 1995; 1996) and other scholars influenced by his
examinations of literary education and schooling. These studies not only provide
different accounts of the emergence of English and common schooling, but also draw
attention to how English class has produced different subjectivities through history. Both
lines of genealogical studies that I review here are good examples of decentering English

education in order to account for its constitution through history:

One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself,

20

that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the subject within a
historical framework. And this is what I would call a genealogy, that is, a form of
history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains
of objects, etc. without having to make reference to a subject which is either
transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs its empty sameness

throughout the course of history (Foucault, 1980, p.117).

Historicizing “Crisis " in English Education

One way of rethinking responses to current claims of crisis in English education is
to make those claims of crisis the objects of genealogical inquiry. Genealogy does not
critique those claims on empirical grounds (e. g. Mc Quillan, 1998), nor does it interpret
current crises by distinguishing between exaggerated or falsified claims and definitive
truths (e. g. Berliner & Biddle, 1996; Allington, 2002). Those may be very effective
strategies. Genealogy, however, offers a different perspective on accounts of
educational crisis by examining the conditions that enable certain ways of reasoning
about the crisis. 1 demonstrate this by reviewing two of Bill Green’s genealogical studies
of current crises in English and literacy education: the first is an analysis of constructions
of “new” problems across English education through history (Green, 2003); the second is
an analysis of the mobilization of “grammar” in popular accounts of the literacy crisis in
Australia.

In several studies, Bill Green has explored how various panics and crises around
literacy education have been structured in Australia. One study attempted to account for

the historical specificity of current claims in English education to responding to “new

21

times.” His inquiry began with exploring how recent texts have constructed claims about
“new times” and “new literacies” and “new kids” and “new technologies.” His
genealogical analysis then examined how the term “new” was used in English education
through history. That is, he approaches constructions of newness as historical claims
derived from particular interests and alignments with the wider social field: “Something
of the complexity of the historical practice can be discerned here, along with a sharp
emphasis on (dis)continuity, interruption, and uneven development” (Green, 2003).

He notes a historical continuity in English and Australian discourses of English
education whereby each generation constructs students as “new.” For example, he notes
constructions of new times not only across recent texts in literacy but also across textual
advocacy of the “new English” in the 19605 and before that in 19203 formulations of
English. Thus, the construction of new times in English education discourse is
continuous throughout its history. Green accounts for this continuity by the ways in
which English has been linked historically to the state in programs designed at providing
for young people’s morality, productivity, and social and civic well-being. However,
while English has continuously staked a claim to address new social conditions, the
constructions of “new” problems and curricular and pedagogical responses to those
problems have been constructed differently; that is, they are discontinuous. His
genealogy thus draws attention to discontinuities in the constructions of new times in
order to make them available as possible resources for acknowledging the specificity and
contingency of present relations. For example, in some instances, the new was
constructed as textual and technological, while in others new times were constituted by

moral, social, and political problems to which English was positioned as a solution.

22

Another discontinuity that interested Green was how attention to art and especially the
imagination were prominent in earlier formulations of English and its response to new
times. However, mentions of art and the imagination are relatively marginal in current
English education discourse.

Across two studies, Green (2002, 2003) wonders how the various (dis)continuities
of English education discourse through history might provide a different purchase on how
present problems and solutions have been constructed. His studies end by brief
discussions of how his accounts of curriculum history have raised new interests and
questions related to rhetoric, information technology, studies of textuality, and artwork as
ways of reconstructing English around a defensible literacy project of its own.

Green’s second line of genealogical studies explores how “grammar” has been
positioned in popular debates regarding literacy and schooling (6. g. Green, 1998; Green
& Hodgens, 1996). These analyses do not examine grammar according to criteria of
linguistics fields but by mapping how the term ‘grammar’ is used in educational
discourse through history. That is, from the lens of language and linguistics studies,
popular and educational appeals to traditional grammar may suggest an inadequate and
not useful conception of language; however, the genealogical approach is to examine the
conditions in which the positioning of ‘grammar’ in various texts is made useful. This
analysis opens up how grammar has functioned symbolically through links to different
conceptions of cultural authority and politics. These analyses are far-ranging and resist a
short summary. However, an oversimplified summary is that these studies examine
historically how links between explicit teaching of language (commonly called

“grammar”) has been linked to discourses of moral training and rule-based discipline:

23

manners, morals, and meanings thus effectively come together through schooling in the

tight nexus of literacy, ‘grammar’, and power:

The grammar lesson as a key social-symbolic scene of pedagogy and moral
training is not as much about acquiring a certain body of knowledge as it is about
the practiced formation of a body-subject, a social being habituated to certain
automatic forms of response and reactivity, and hence to ‘rule-govemed’ social
behavior on a more general level. Furthermore, ‘grammar’ is a mobile signifier
which always tends to interlink with other elements of moral discourse. These
include a number of connected categories such as discipline, correctness, order,
and social harmony. . . Contemporary struggles over the place and significance of
‘grammar’ in the curriculum need, then, to be understood historically as well as

critically” (Green & Hodgens, 1999, p.223)

The discourse surrounding grammar, historically, has not been constant.
However, while grammar has been a mobile signifier, it has connected up with various
moral panics related to concerns over shifting patterns of authority, whether embodied in
a teacher figure, moral code, social values, or patterns of cultural authority. This suggests
that current literacy crises are not driven so much by conflicts over evidence or linguistic

paradigms but by larger conflicts over social, cultural, and political change.

Ian Hunter: Genealogy of Literacy Education

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Ian Hunter has conducted the most extensive genealogical studies of literary
education, which may have particular importance for the field of English education. His
touchstone study is Culture and Government (1988), which traces the genealogy of
literary education in England and Australia. This study is elaborated in Rethinking the
School (1995), a genealogy of common schooling, and across several chapters (6. g.
Hunter, 1997; Hunter, 1996; Hunter, 1993a, 1997, 1993b). Hunter’s analyses also
circulate through the work of Annette Patterson and reverberate through the work of
Robert Morgan, who have studied the genealogy of English in Australia and Canada,
respectively.

The range of his work and the different problems that his genealogies address
make a succinct summary of Hunter’s studies difficult. However, I will try to sketch
major aspects of his work by first noting the kinds of research problems he constructed
and the (dis)continuities he noted across his examination of documents concerning
literary education. Then, I examine how this work speaks to the politics of subjectivity in
English class, which includes examples taken from Morgan (1990, 1995) and Patterson
(1993, 2000).

Ian Hunter’s work is exemplary of inquiry into the formation of the school
(Hunter, 1995) and of literary education (Hunter, 1988). Hunter’s genealogies
concentrate on the contingent circumstances in which the school system came into being,
and on the available cultural techniques, institutions, and modes of reflection from which
it was assembled. His work resituates the school system as an improvised response to
concerns about governing diverse populations in a way that secured the social welfare of

individuals and the population. Briefly, Hunter argues that the common school became

25

possible when the non-coercive practices of Christian pastoral care were taken over by
emerging state schools systems and adapted bureaucratically to intervene in the formation
of children and families. As a hybrid “pastoral-bureaucracy,” the school not only
assuaged religious sectarian rivalries over public education but also provided strategies
whereby schools could be morally and civically (trans)formative by bringing students’
out of school lives into the corrective spaces of the school. That is, a “bureaucratic”
concern for providing for the social welfare of the population—that is, the view that the
state could or should provide for the welfare of the popular-- merged with Christian
“pastoral” techniques for forming students who would monitor, problematize, and
ultimately regulate their moral, ethical, and civic development. Importantly, the
emergence of English was linked to the historical processes whereby programs for
governing young people’s welfare, health, productivity, and morals were thinkable as
problems of the state and govemmentality, or relations in which young people would
govern themselves in relation to knowledge and expertise.

Another aspect of Hunter’s work is his genealogy of the pastoral teacher. In
present educational discourse, the English teacher is often constructed as a sympathetic
figure that cultivates close relations with students, crafts curricula in response to young
people’s interests and needs, and does not overtly control students in the classroom.
However, this personage was not an invention of literary education but of Christian
pastoral education in the aftermath of religious wars and rivalry. Pastoral pedagogy relies
upon an intimate knowledge of the child and techniques for helping the child learn to
manage his or her own beliefs and conduct (Hunter, 1988). The pastoral teacher, now

adapted to English, is one crucial link between contemporary English teaching in

26

secondary schools and earlier pedagogical projects in Christian Sunday Schools and later

primary schools.

Built on a combination of sympathy and surveillance, a friendly demeanor on the
part of the teacher joined to a willingness to grant certain freedoms to children in
their conduct, this special relationship offered maximum opportunities for
observing, regulating, and normalizing the behavior of children according to
variable norms. . . It was not until this special relationship between teacher and
student was formalized within the machinery of state bureaucracy that it began to

have widespread and enduring effects” (Patterson, 2000, p. 286-287).

I will revisit Hunter, pastoral pedagogy, and person-forming techniques in the
next section. However, the excerpts of Hunter and Patterson’s work above point to a key
dimension of the construction of “English” and the pastoral “English teacher” that is
generally invisible in the present. The emergence of English was not linked to the rise of
literary culture so much as linked to bureaucratic programs to form a moral, healthy,
productive, and self-governing populace. Hunter fiirther establishes this distinction in
examining Mathew Amold’s role in the formation of common schooling in England.
Provocatively, he demonstrates how Amold’s conceptions of literary culture—often cited
as a justification for literary study-- were not inscribed in Amold’s role as inspector and
advocate of schools; that is, Arnold’s writing about the common school did not assume
that literary study in common schools should revolve around poets and the prophets of

culture emerging in the arts and letters. Instead, Amold’s advocacy about the common

27

school assumed that literary work in the school was governed by the social administration
and welfare of diverse populations.

One other aspect of the genealogy of the English teacher is also interesting. The
sympathetic teacher that is quickly associated with English had existed (in similar forms)
for in common schools and especially in Protestant Christian education. Thus, to
understand the construction of the English teacher, Hunter suggests that we might look
away from the arts and letters and instead towards bureaucratic rationalities of

governance and Christian pastoral techniques of governing young people’s souls.

Discursive Construction of Subjects and Subjectivity

Another key domain of genealogical studies of English—and of the studies cited
above—is how English class has been a key cite for forming certain kinds of persons. A
common goal of genealogical inquiry is to demonstrate how discourse constructs subjects
or subjectivity. Foucault uses the term subject in a double sense to establish that people
are both subject to power relations and subjects of their own experience. Foucault does
not offer any general account of the formation of subjectivity nor any generalized
description of what it means to be a subject; instead, he contends that subjectivity is
historical—different forms of subjectivity are not intelligible apart from the historically
particular forms of knowledge which are invested in them and on which their operation
depends (Dean, 1994). That is, discourse produces subjects by establishing the particular
knowledges and practices by which individuals construct themselves as certain sorts of
people. Genealogy maps the discursive field to explore the construction of subjectivity

within and through discursive practices. Explaining Foucault’s notion of the subject,

28

Prado (2000) contends that the self is not a pre-given entity; rather, the self is emergent
and an effect of discourse:
The individual comes to experience the world in a certain way as a result of
behaving in certain ways, being categorized in certain ways, and being dealt with
in certain ways. A constructed subject then is an experiencing self of a particular
sort in that an individual intemalizes power-assigned attributes and comes to

intend power-imposed actions (p. 80).

Most genealogical studies of English note the historical salience of the pastoral
teacher and non-coercive practices through which English class has produced certain
kinds of subjectivity. Hunter (1988) argues provocatively that contemporary pedagogies
understood as quintessentially “literary”—personal writing, response to literature,
discussion and expression of personal experience—pre-existed the emergence of the
subject English and the category “literature.” Hunter locates precursors to contemporary
English pedagogies in home-based pedagogies, dame schools, and especially in Christian
Sunday Schools of the late 18th and 19th centuries. These long-standing pedagogical
practices sought non-coercive means for drawing children into sympathetic relationships
with their teacher-pastors in order to facilitate their formation as people who would
manage their own beliefs and conduct. These Protestant practices became thinkable in
common schools—and later secondary English class—as the provision for young
people’s welfare became understood as a problem of the state and bureaucratically
administered institutions. Hunter argues that we can begin to think of English then as a

late mutation in an apparatus of moral training:

29

We must learn to treat popular literary education as the contemporary
embodiment of a specific government technology: one which first sought to
transform the moral and physical condition of the proletariat by allowing it to
'leam from experience' in a morally managed environment . . .[T]hese tactics of
correction through self-expression-- which seem to us so typically and essentially
literary-— all these were . . . the outcome of a highly specific governmental
technology and rationality. English is in fact the product of a relatively late

mutation within this technology (Hunter, 1987, p.587, 581).

These studies do not locate pastoral pedagogies as covert forms of control so
much as relations of power/knowledge capable of producing certain dispositions,
perceptions, values, and capacities. These practices may not entail domination, but
power is exercised through the normative criteria through which students identify self and
other and through techniques designed to intensify one’s experience of one’s self as a
“self.” We can see similar analyses across Morgan’s (1990, 1995) studies of English
teaching in Canada and Patterson’s genealogy of “personal response” pedagogy in
Australia.

Morgan’s (1990, 1995) genealogies suggests that the “Englishness” of English
teaching in Canada has been rearranged around different discourses of racial and national
identification. Like Hunter (1988), Morgan notes the centrality of indirect methods of
forming subjectivity via literary transactions and reflection-based approaches. Morgan

(1995) notes how the terms by which students of English are asked to self-identify

30

establish criteria for inclusion/exclusion. This becomes clearer by examining how
students have been asked to relate to a restricted range of artifacts, often organized
around schemes of racial, linguistic, and cultural difference. He notes how the term
“English” itself can function as a term linked to racial and linguistic criteria. Thus,
Morgan (1995) defines English as an order of discourse which has constituted its objects
of knowledge and subjects of knowing in relation to categories established through select
print artifacts. Scholarship might ascertain usefully the power/knowledge relations
enacted in classrooms by attending to the ways in which English has normalized certain

ways of being recognized, and recognizing oneself, as a certain kind of subject:

In a sense, to narrate the history of the teaching of English we require another
type of history of the ‘subject’ altogether than the traditional ones: that is, a
history of the forms of human subjectivity projected by English studies as a site
where particular discourses and practical routines are enacted, others silenced,
still other capacities and connections never envisioned or fostered at all. From
this perspective, English is a training in how to say ‘I” and the establishment of

the social horizons within which this utterance takes place (Morgan, 1990, p.203).

Patterson (1993) makes a similar argument about “personal response pedagogy”
by locating it as a pedagogical invention in which student readers become the subjects of
particular pedagogical discourses. Personal response typically is described as an innate,
spontaneous, and individual expression of a reader’s unique experience of a text;

however, Patterson suggests that personal response pedagogy is an ensemble of

31

discursive practices that authorizes certain response criteria by which students must learn
to self-identify—those of genuinely felt experience, sensitivity, imagination, empathy,
and so on. These criteria are presented to students in terms of personal choice, personal
voice, and freedom to be themselves; however, the personal response is actually a
particular representation of the self that the student must learn to perform. Students
unable to formulate true expressions of their self or experience—in terms of a “personal
response”——are assessed to be insensitive, unimaginative, and not self-aware. This
demonstrates how discourse generates systems of inclusion/exclusion and makes possible
certain ways for subjects to understand themselves as certain kinds of subjects.
Patterson’s (1993, 1997, 2000) has argued that English’s subject-forming techniques are
relatively continuous across its history; however, its relatively unchanging pedagogy has
been flexible and responsive to different normative criteria. In more recent
manifestations, pastoral pedagogy has been linked to conceptions of self and other linked

to critical theories:

The modern English classroom with its emphasis on exploratory talk and writing,
and on group work and techniques developed through reader response strategies
for surveillance and ethical adjustments toward specific sets of personal and
social norms (non-sexist; anti-racist; use of inclusive language, and so on) is an
extension and adaptation of earlier pastoral pedagogical arrangements. (Patterson,

2000,p.299)

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Taken together, genealogical studies by Hunter, Morgan, Patterson, and others
suggest that English class has been a key site for forming certain kinds of persons. In
other words, its boundaries have not been constructed around an identifiable field of
study as much as a range of practices which contribute to the formation of people who
learn to discipline themselves in relation to power/knowledge (Peel, Patterson, &

Gerlach, 2000).

Conclusion: Rethinking English Education

What a historical approach to the teaching of English has to offer the present is
that present returned to it as a pedagogical moment socially organized, regulated,
and historically defined by means of a number of ongoing struggles . . . [B]y
restoring the political historicity of English teaching, we make it possible to grasp
the institutional conditions of a practice, its historical shifis, internal
contradictions, relationships with other antagonistic discourses, and the

norrnalizations implicit in its operation. (Morgan, 1990, p. 230-231)

In this chapter, I have provided a brief introduction to genealogy and reviewed a
few studies that not only illustrate genealogical approaches but also suggests areas of
inquiry not yet elaborated in English education research in the United States. A central
aim of genealogy is to historicize terms, narratives, categories, or relations that have
become stabilized or normalized. Thus, it would be ironic to advocate a prominent role

for genealogy in the US or to claim its relevance outside of a specific field of historical

33

problems. However, the salience and complexity of current problems may suggest the
need for new lines of invention and more nuanced debates over the status of English,
literacy, and schooling in the early 21St century. As Morgan (1990) notes above, studies
that historicize English have a pedagogical value; namely, they put discursive maps into
the hands of those teachers, scholars, and students who are grappling with current
struggles. These maps aren’t prescriptive, but perspectival; that is, they sensitize us to
the contingency of our past in order to make it easier to assess the present: If the history
of our present is more accidental than we may like to believe, the future of our present is

also more open that it sometimes appears” (Rose, 1999, p. xii).

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CHAPTER THREE

Introduction

It would seem self-evident that secondary English class has been, and is still,
centered on the study of literature. The assumed centrality of literature to secondary
English has underpinned historical accounts of our field (Applebee, 1974), key
descriptions and assessments of secondary pedagogies (e. g. Applebee, 1993; Marshall,
Smagorinsky, & Smith, 1995), and standards for the English language arts (e. g.
NCTE/IRA, 1996). In this study, I take that assumption as a staring point from which to
examine current interview data. Using the lens of genealogy (Foucault, 1984) I come to
question what knowledges have delimited possible approaches to English as defined in
contemporary interview data and in archival texts linked to the emergence of English, the
school subject. I explore the possibility that the boundaries of secondary school English
are constituted not only by approaches to literature but also by multiple and shifting
discourses linked to ways of understanding adolescents and guiding their beliefs and
conduct (Foucault, 1979; Burchell, Gordon, & Miller, 1991). The value of a genealogical
approach at this point is to call attention to the ways in which English education
constructs subjects— or what my research participants called teaching people how to be

“people. ”

Teaching People How to be People

35

My inquiry begins with current definitions of English taken from my study of
beginning English teachers. Across 2003-2005, I collected artifacts from, and conducted
individual and group interviews with five beginning English teachers-- Scott Applecrofi,
Celia Brett, Mindy O’Malley, and Holly Robison'u as they moved from their university
methods courses to year-long (student teaching) internships to their first years of teaching
English in middle schools and high schools. In my analysis of more than two years of
interview data transcripts, I was struck by how participants defined English teaching.
Participants seldom spoke of reading, writing, language, and literature, which
traditionally have been assumed to form the boundaries of English study (Lunsford &
Lloyd-Jones, 1988). Instead, with surprising frequency they defined English in terms of
approaches to help adolescents assume the responsibility of managing their own thoughts,
beliefs, choices, and social conduct. Reading and writing generally were talked about as
means towards inculcating self-regulatory practices, not ends in and of themselves; that
is, discussions, reading assignments, and writing tasks were described as important to the
degree to which they encouraged young people to reflect upon, problematize, and manage
their thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and relations with others. The following excerpt from a
group interview is a succinct example of how secondary English class was defined across
study data.

Jory: So, you’ve been teaching English for almost a year now. So, what is

“English”?

Scott: This is an easy one. For me anyway. At that age [middle school], English

is about how I taught people how to be people. I taught them how to be students,

how to have a discussion, how to treat other students and the teacher in the

36

classroom. Everything that we did regarding writing, books, whatever, was

ancillary to . . . whatever we were trying to work on socially when they’re twelve.

Holly: I’m right there with you, Scott. Luckily, the books that we read tied right
into the social lessons I was trying to teach them. . . “English” is about . . . how to
participate in human experience . . . how to be in the world, how to act, how to
react, how to function in the world . . . At some level, I would like to think that
reading this book will benefit their personal development or how to function in

the world. . .

J B: So, the kind of ways of being in the world that English prepares people for

is?

H: To look at your baggage . . . faults, causes, results, what can you do to keep

that from happening, how can you get a new result next time in a similar situation

. . . Literature . . . is the way to look at situations and see how the results play out .

Mindy: Focused on Jr High . . . for the age. . . [English is about asking] who am

I? And who am I as a writer and a reader?

Celia: Going along with what you guys are saying . . . English is really about

ways of being. Being able to identify, reflect on, think about, talk about, express,

37

communicate what we do, why we do it, how we do it, what that does, what the
implications are, the consequences . . . But I think [students] see it as ‘Why are
trying to turn me into this self-reflective person who, like, always needs to be

examining myself?’—— It is almost too much therapy for them!?. . . But, I mean,

English provides tools to understand yourself.

This way of talking about English teaching was not unique to this particular
discussion, nor was it restricted to students’ year-long internship. These issues were
prominent across both years of data, and participants’ definitions of English were
remarkably similar six months and twelve months later. Teaching people how to be
people—which I gloss in this paper as “people-making”-- did not appear to be primarily a
concern about classroom management, nor was it a concept restricted to student teaching.
Instead, this way of reasoning about English teaching seemed rooted in wider social
concerns and was prominent across two+ years of qualitative data.

The widespread assumption that English teaching is predicated on literary study
does not account for the kinds of reasoning inscribed in my current interview data. How
might one account for the possibility that English could be defined around teaching
people how to be (self-regulating) “people”? In this study, I examine this way of
defining and justifying secondary English through the lens of genealogy (Foucault,
1984). Genealogy, sometimes called a “history of the present” (Foucault, 1979; Tyler &
Johnson, 1991), makes sense of ways of reasoning by examining historically the shifting
networks of relations that made them possible. Here, I make English’s people-making

function an object of inquiry and seek to understand the historical relations that made

38

English thinkable and practicable as a site for self-exploration, self-problematization, and
self-regulation: How did it become possible to talk about secondary English teaching as
predicated on forming certain kinds of people? Who are the people to be “made” through
English? How is it that literature, reading, and writing are understood to be means for
exploring “social” issues in current definitions of English in secondary schools? What
social conditions and relations can account for this way of speaking? In this study, I ask
these kinds of questions of the discourse on English teaching through history in order to
highlight several values and relations normalized in current approaches to English
education and to call into question the literary frame of reference for assessing English
teaching. Through genealogy, I highlight how other systems of reasoning related to
understanding adolescents and guiding their conduct also have produced and constrained
possible approaches to English in secondary schools. In doing so, I hope to draw
attention to aspects of English education that go unnoticed in the present in order to
suggest new ways of constructing English in secondary classrooms, educational research,

and teacher education.

Genealogical Methodology

Genealogy (described at length in Chapter Two) makes use of historical resources
in order to call into question the production of truth in discourse by mapping the
changing rules by which statements come to be formed, accepted, and circulated as true.
By illustrating how these rules have varied across time and space, genealogy can begin to
sensitize us to diverse and shifting networks of relations that have made possible our

contemporary ways of thinking, judging, and acting. A goal of genealogical research is

39

to bring into play accounts of the struggles, compromises, accidents, linkages, and
transformations that made possible truth claims. Thus, genealogy works to establish the
cultural and historical specificity of present terms and to sensitize us to the power
relations and normalized assumptions embodied in them. In this study, I explore the
emergence of “people making” in English education discourse. That is, I examine
archival texts in English education to locate earlier instances in which secondary English
teaching was defined in ways that anticipate the kinds of reasoning inscribed in my
current interview data. I then examine continuities and discontinuities in constructions of
English teaching as people making through history. My goal is not only to provide
perspective on my current interview data but also to draw attention to the historical
processes and power relations that have delimited how we have come to understand

English in classrooms, educational research, and teacher education.

Contemporary Data Collection and Sources

My inquiry starts by examining assumptions about English teaching manifest
across two years of focal group interviews with five beginning English teachers. By
focal group interviews, I refer to unstructured and semi-structured conversations with
participants that proceeded dinner parties at my house during participants’ year-long
student teaching internship (2003-2004) and during their first year of contracted
secondary English teaching (2004-2005). Averaging two hours in length, each focal
group interview began with casual, unstructured conversation about teaching English in
secondary schools. Each interview ended with me asking the group to define five terms:

English, teaching, students (or adolescents), schooling, and literacy. I focus my analysis

40

in this paper on a focal group interview (May, 2004) conducted at the end of participants’
year-long (student teaching) internship. I chose this excerpt because it provides very
succinct definitions of English that are representative of key assumptions prominent
across the data set. That is, their ways of defining English subordinate the importance of
literature, reading, and writing to “social” concerns about how young people come to
understand the world, others, and themselves; pedagogical approaches form around a
concept like puberty or adolescence; and practices of expressive talk and reflection
constitute key strategies for forming young people who attend to their own beliefs,

emotionality, social interactions, and conduct.

Archival Data Collection and Sources

Genealogical analysis next requires extensive source materials in order to map
through history how truths are produced, circulated, and transformed in discourse. In this
study, I compare the interview data with initial definitions of English from the 18903 to
19103. I focus on texts entitled The Teaching of English in the Elementary and
Secondary School (Chubb, 1902/1913; Carpenter, Baker, & Scott, 1902/ 1913)2 that
Applebee (1974) characterized as among the first attempts from within the profession to
define secondary English. Both texts were reprinted regularly until the 19203 and were
cross—referenced across early English education literature. 1 supplement these texts with
published definitions of English teaching from volume one of the English Journal,
published in 1911-1912. I restricted my sample of EJ articles to article titles that
appeared closely related to defining English or to principles by which curricula and

instruction might be organized in secondary English. (For example, I selected titles like

41

“A New Task for the English Teacher” (Breck, 1912) or “The Aim of the English
Course” (Lewis, 1911). Taken together, these texts offer accounts of how English could

be defined around the time of its emergence in the late 19‘h and early 20'h centuries.

Data Analysis

Genealogy involves various strategies for mapping multiple lines of discursive
transformations across a corpus of texts. My primary strategy was to identify key phrases
or assumptions in current interview data and to examine earlier texts to note continuities
and discontinuities in the ways in which English was defined and justified. In this way I
can account for modifications in the rules for forming statements as if they were true and
then can examine the shifts in social relations that made these modifications possible.
First, I examined Chubb (1913) and Carpenter, Baker, & Scott (1913) to identify the
conditions of emergence for definitions of English that assumed people making as a key
object of English teaching. This part of my research was archival and involved my own
readings of primary texts. In the second part of my analysis, I drew upon secondary
histories, so I could begin to account for discontinuities between current accounts of
English as people making and earlier accounts of English as people making. Here I
compared contemporary definitions of English in my interview data to definitions of
English across the early twentieth century texts described above. By noting
discontinuities in the discourse on secondary English, genealogical analysis can draw
attention to aspects of the present that are not made apparent in the terms of current

scholarship.

42

In summary, I examine social constructions of “English” through history and
identify earlier formulations of English that assumed English could make people
“people.” My strategy in this chapter is to examine earlier formulations of English (circa
1900) in which today’s commonplace assumptions—Le. those manifest in my interview
data-- were either debated, controversial, or were unthinkable. By highlighting
continuous and discontinuities elements of interview and archival data through history, I
hope to draw attention to the cultural and historical specificity of the terms used to define
and justify English today. This has implications not only for how we understand the
exchange that opens this paper-- and therefore the construction of English in secondary
classrooms; it also draws attention to the relations that govern what it is possible to think
in English education and to note how these relations have changed through history. A
primary goal of my study, then, is to intervene in our current ways of making sense of
English in English education and to use genealogy to unsettle present truths by
identifying their conditions of emergence, their historical variability, and their varied and

multiple effects.

Results: Historicizing People Making in Secondary English

In the first section, I examine conditions of emergence for defining English
teaching as a site for forming certain kinds of subjectivity—what current interview data
identified as making people “people.” I identify earlier formulations of English teaching
as people making in the early 20th century in two touchstone texts titled The Teaching of
English in the Elementary School and the Secondary School (Chubb, 1902/ l 91 3;

Carpenter, Baker, & Scott, 1903/1913). I then examine additional texts published in the

43

early 20‘h century to establish the problems to which English was posed an answer and
then highlight the ensemble of discourse, knowledge, and techniques linked to English as
people making in the early 20’h century, including new, rational ways of reasoning about
governing young people. Echoing Morgan (1990), I assume that inquiry into so-called
foundational moments of a subject can provide insight into controversies, comprises, and
problems that would become tacit at a later time and thus sensitize us to relations and
assumptions naturalized in current ways of reasoning about English in teaching, research,
and teacher education.

In the second section, I identify key continuities and discontinuities between my
current interview data and key pedagogical texts of the early 20th century. These
emerged in secondary English around the context described in the first section and
remain operative in current English education, albeit in different forms. I first highlight
how discourses of business efficiency and (especially) psychology enabled a set of
relations that Popkewitz (2002) has analyzed as the alchemy of school subjects. The
alchemy of school subjects provides one way of explaining how and why academic
disciplines, such as literature, may have little to do with how secondary English is
understood and practiced in contemporary schools. I then historicize pedagogical
reasoning linked to the pastoral teacher—including practices that contemporary
interviews linked to pedagogies of self-reflection and therapy—by mapping accounts of
these techniques across two centuries of'educational literature. I demonstrate through a
reading of turn of the 20th century pedagogical texts that English education adapted and
transformed pedagogical reasoning developed previously in Christian Sunday Schools

and in elementary education. Taken together, these genealogical sketches redescribe

44

some of the discursive processes through which English teaching has been assembled and
therefore draw attention to the contingency of our current ways of understanding English
education. Instead of looking to the English disciplines in universities, I suggest that we
might get a different purchase on present day English education by examining its
relations to new strategies of governing populations in a democracy and to people-

making pedagogies developed in religious and common schools of the 19‘h century.

The Emergence of English as People-Making

Scott: English class is about how I taught people how to be “people”. . .
Everything that we did regarding writing, books, whatever, was ancillary to. . .

whatever we were trying to work on socially.

Holly: I’m right there with you, Scott. The books that we read tied right into . . .
the social lessons I was trying to teach them. . . We teach these kids how to be in

the world, how to act, how to react, how to function in the world. . .

In my current interview data, English was discussed and defined in ways that had
little to do with literature, reading, writing, or literacy. Instead, accounts of English
teaching were oriented around ways of fostering conditions in which adolescents would
understand themselves, and act upon themselves, in particular ways. As Scott and Holly
note above, literature, reading, writing, and so on were understood to contribute to ways

of making “people” who “function” in the world in particular ways. Across several

45

interviews, the “ways of being,” ways of “functioning” “socially” in the world, and “tools
for understanding the self” included various self-steering mechanisms whereby young
people might learn to monitor, problematize, and manage their emotions, thoughts,
interactions, and behavior inside and outside of schools. For example, the discussion that
opened this paper suggested that English might produce young people who learned to
scrutinize their personal experiences and choices, to define themselves, to manage their
emotions, and to examine themselves through various practices of self—reflection. This
was not merely a concern about “classroom management,” nor was it primarily
concerned with English as a field of disciplinary inquiry. Instead, English was defined
around learning certain ways of relating to the world, to other people, and to the “self”
(Peel, Patterson, & Gerlach, 2000). The question remains, however: How did these ways
of reasoning come to be located in secondary English class?

An examination of key pedagogical texts at the subject English’s emergence in
US secondary schools begins to provide some perspective on this question. Similar ways
of defining English were common around the turn of the 20th century in texts that
Applebee (1974) ranked as among the first significant attempts to define English from
within the profession (e. g. Chubb, 1902/1913; Carpenter, Baker, & Scott, 1903/1913).
Consider how Chubb’s (1913) formulation of English and the English teacher—first
published in 1902-- adopted a similar form and substance as the definition that Scott
Applecroft offered in 2004:

The duty and privilege of the teacher of English [is] teaching [English] not only

for its linguistic values, for the making of intelligent readers and capable writers

and speakers; but for its large cultural values-for the spiritual enlargement,

46

clarification, and discipline of young hearts and minds and wills, which are to be

touched to finer issues by its potent ministry" (Chubb, 1913, p. ix.)

Chubb’s definition provides a good point of comparison and contrast to my
current interview data. Broadly speaking, Chubb’s definition is similar to the discussion
that opened this paper. English is defined around a larger “cultural” (versus “social”) goal
of forming certain kinds of people. Reading, writing, and speaking are linked towards a
larger goal of forming certain kinds of persons; that is, developing capable readers,
writers, and speakers is understood as a goal of English teaching, but this goal was
understood as less important than contributing to the formation of students’ hearts, minds,
and wills.

This is not to say that the definitions are the same. Chubb’s text defines English’s
people-making capabilities in a religious register. English is about “spiritual
enlargement” and acting upon not only students’ minds but also their “wills” and “hearts”
in pedagogical regimen described as a “ministry.” These religious terms would be out of
place in current interviews, where English teaching can be defined around questions of
the self, self-reflection, or therapy (to use Holly Robison’s description). Chubb’s
definition therefore provides a good starting point for historicizing people-making in
secondary English. That is, it provides a good starting point for identifying both
continuities and discontinuities in definitions of English by and through history.

On one hand, it seems clear that English could be understood as teaching certain
ways of being people already people-making already by the turn of the 20th century.

However, it is not clear what conditions could account for the emergence of English as

47

people making—that is, as a ministry of minds, hearts, and wills (Chubb, 1913)—at the
beginning of the 20’h century. Why was such reasoning present no later or earlier than
around the turn of the 20‘h century? Nor is it clear how today’s ways of talking about
English as people making are no longer religious but instead exhibit a more

psychological timbre.

Historicizing English and Problematics of Government

One can get a purchase on the historical contingency of definitions of English by
noting the problems to which secondary English was posed an answer in the early 20‘h
century. I begin with another definition of English that is remarkably similar in logic to
Scott Applecrofi’s definition of English—where reading and writing are positioned as

tools to be deployed towards larger social and cultural ends:

The vital point is not merely that we should make readers of our boys and girls,
but that we should make their reading a positive force for good; that by means of
their reading we should help in the formation of right ideals of thought and of

action (1911, p.68).

Again, we see the pattern established across 21St century interviews and
touchstone pedagogical texts from the early 20th century. Reading and writing are 'useful
to the extent that they scaffold certain kinds of thought and action. However, Breck gives
us another clue about the field of problems that secondary English was to address in the

19103 through certain uses of literacy. I quote her at length in order to draw attention to

48

several historical processes that would be normalized in approaches to secondary

English:

We must train not only the mind to think, but the imagination to see, the heart to
feel and desire, the will to determine, to have, and to be that which is noblest and
best. And never before in the history of America have we English teachers had
more need than today to hold clearly before ourselves this great spiritual purpose
of our work . . . for many of the old forces for good that furnished past
generations with a present help in time of trouble have ceased to be operative or
are fast losing their efficiency. 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. . . It is time that we English teachers,
recognizing our responsibility as awakeners of the spirit, should ask ourselves

what we are doing to check this downward tendency (p.68-69).

I would like to highlight a few relations that were assumed in English education
by 191 1. First, the English teacher was identified as a redemptive agent relative to moral
and social concerns in the society. Second, this redemption was a function of public
education—the state——and not of philanthropy, religion, or the family. Third, the
redemption took the form of shaping people’s thoughts, ideals, and actions so that they
might act righteously and autonomously; it was not so much about teachers managing

students as creating conditions in which students learned how to manage themselves.

49

Fourth, these related assumptions were connected to “a new task for the English teacher”
(Breck, 1912). That is, this was described in the 19103 as a relatively new way of
thinking about English teaching and had only been made possible afier a period of intense
changes. What relations made possible the “new task” for the English teacher?

Early 20m century ways of defining English teaching are effects of particular
power relations that formed around the Progressive Era (e. g. 18803-19203). This was a
time period in which several historical processes, with no single point of origin and with
uneven developments, came to redefine the relations among social welfare, expert
knowledges, conceptions of social progress and redemption, and the role of the state in
providing for people’s health, morality, hygiene, productivity, and happiness (Burchell,
Gordon, & Miller, 1991). These changes were rapid and far-reaching in their effects; the
secondary curriculum was one such site of struggle (e. g. Kliebard, 1986). A key aspect
of this period was that the social sciences developed in a parallel fashion to the state
bureaucracy; that, they were mutually constitutive of another and of new approaches for
governing people in a liberal democracy. These relations have been analyzed extensively
elsewhere.3 For example, Rose (1999) examines the rise of human sciences, such as
psychology and psychiatry, and how their claims were linked across institutions to
various means of governing people based upon new knowleges of people’s “natures.”
Similarly, Hacking’s (1986) history of statistics demonstrates how statistics—literally
the “science of the state’——rendered certain problems thinkable and thus was intertwined
in constructing various programs of social administration. These various discourses

would be combined, transformed, and redistributed through the formation of the

secondary school curriculum (e.g. Popkewitz, 1991).

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These changing relations among social welfare policies, the state, and education
in the Progressive Era are important because they coincided with the rapid ascent of
English as a school subject. Hays’s (1936) examination of curricular documents of the
19th century noted that prior to the 18703, the subject English was of “little or no
importance, irregularly scheduled, spasmodically and incidentally taught. No consensus
of opinion existed regarding the content of the course, the length of time the study should
be pursued, nor how it should be taught” (p.14). However, English’s curricular
importance grew exponentially across the 18803-19203. No more than a marginal subject
through the 18703, English was recognized in the 18903 as key subject (e. g. Committee
of Ten) and by the 19103 was recognized as arguably the humanizing center of the
secondary curriculum. It would appear to be more than just coincidence that the rapid
ascent of a school subject claiming personal and national redemptive powers emerged at
the same time that new relations were forged among individuals, the state, and human
sciences in redefining programs of personal and social transformation.

New ways of posing problems opened up new possibilities for government. In the
late 19'h and early 20‘h centuries, concern about the health, welfare, morality, and
productivity of the population was merged with rational decision making, and social
science expertise that rendered young people the objects of various forms of knowledge
and intervention. Hunter (1988, 1995), Donald (1992), and others note how these
interventions, previously understood as religious or philanthropic, were transferred to the
state. These practices did not originate within the “State”; rather, the state emerges in
governmental form as a contingent link within multiple historical processes. The school

was understood as a key site for such governmental practices; and within the school,

51

literary education was an obvious and central site for connecting bureaucratic aspirations
with the personal and subjective capacities of individuals (Hunter, 1988; Donald, 1992).
By at least the early 20‘h century, these changes and linkages made possible a new

problematic of governing young people in English class:

We [English teachers] shall conform to the doctrine that education is the process
of developing the child from what he is to what he ought to be rather than to our
recent practice of leading him from where he isn’t to where he doesn’t want to go.

(Lewis, 1911,p.11)

This “new aim of the English course” (Lewis, 1911) assumed a new knowledge of
who students were and should be and also claimed a new knowledge of guiding young
people’s development. As I demonstrate shortly, these claims were linked to knowledge
and techniques linked to the confluence of discourses of protestant Christianity, science,
and social administration. These discourses worked together to establish rational and
expert-mediated ways for understanding young people and for guiding their thoughts,
ideals, and conduct. These new ways of describing and enumerating people created new
ways for people to be and thus new spheres of intervention through institutions such as
schools; that is, these new knowledges of people were constitutive of new kinds of people
to be made and of new techniques for making people (e. g. Hacking, 1986; Rose, 1999)

In the following sections, I trace possible effects, ruptures, and transformations of
these social relations. Instead of searching for origins, causes, and rational explanation

for current events, I attempt to find patterns in an excavated slice of time across disparate

52

domains. The assumption is that social sectors are interrelated, and if we can find
reinforcing patterns across an array of social domains (education, business, religion,
science, art) at any given time, then we can become aware the rules that govern what it is
possible to think. I concentrate below on patterns I found across education and the psy-
disciplines, which were newly emerging in the Progressive era. Two relations—
established around the turn of the 20’h century but still present (in somewhat modified
form) in the early 21St century—are particularly interesting given the definitions of
English that open this paper.

First, it was claimed in the early 19003 that English teaching for the first time
could be organized around scientific foresight and method (Chubb, 1902/1913). 1
historicize this claim by drawing attention to a process Popkewitz (2002) describes as the
“alchemy” of school subjects. The alchemy provides another perspective on possible
actions within secondary English and also demonstrates how disciplinary practices of the
university may have a negligible role in secondary school subjects. Second, it was
around 1900 that English teaching staked claim to a longstanding pastoral pedagogy
premised on reshaping how young people understood their worlds, others, and
themselves. This pedagogy was derived from religious education and elementary
education-- not university literary studies-- and was assimilated and transformed in
secondary English because it provided techniques of self-reflection and ethical
introspection understood as useful for forming self-regulating persons. In the following
two sections, 1 demonstrate how these two processes, initiated around the turn of the 20th
century, continue to produce effects in present-day English education. That is, they

displace disciplinary knowledge of the universities in secondary classrooms, and they

53

contribute to the boundaries through which people-making is understood and practiced in

present day English.

Alchemy of School Subjects

One effect of the rise of new knowledges of government was the emergence of
new technologies of forming people. One technology that emerged around the turn of the
20th century continues to engender effects today, the alchemy of school subjects
(Popkewitz, 2002). By alchemy, Popkewitz refers to the process of translation whereby
disciplinary knowledge is reconstituted in secondary school subjects. Across the early
20‘h century, this translation was accomplished through administrative discourses and
social science discourses, especially psychology, which provided the concepts and
schemes that organized studies called science, social studies, math, and English. In this
process, the academic discipline is lost, except in name:

An alchemy occurs as the knowledge of an academic field moves into a school.

School subjects are organized in relation to the expectations related to the school

time table, conceptions of childhood, and organizational theories of schooling. . .

The magic of the transformation is to reconfigure the academic fields in schools

30 that only the namesake appears” (Popkewitz, 2002).

Stated simply, approaches to school subjects like English are not constituted
solely by discourses of academic disciplines. Instead, different discourses—school time
tables, conceptions of childhood, school architecture, etc—establish the boundaries

through which school subjects are rendered understandable and practicable. One way of

54

explaining the marginal role afforded literature across English education discourse is to
highlight the alchemy of school subjects: how “disciplines” are reconstituted through
different discourses in settings like secondary schools.

This alchemy of school subjects has had several effects. First, school subjects
came to share similar organizing principles. Popkewitz (2002) notes how current
curricular standards in very different school subjects—math, music, physical education,
science, etc—share a number of goals, such as problem solving, peer collaboration, and
respect for cultural diversity, among others. Mindy O’Malley notes one example of the

alchemy across school subjects in the May, 2004 focal group interview:

Mindy: When you think about teaching, I mean, we are secondary certified, 7th
to 12th grade, 13 to 16 year-olds, what is the major thing you think of when you
hear of that age group?

Holly: Hormones.

Mindy: Puberty! You know, no matter what you’re teaching, whether its

English, Science, whatever, that’s what—you can’t forget that.

Mindy articulates a key dimension of the alchemy in present day English class.
The most obvious example of alchemy is the importance afforded “puberty” or
“adolescence” in organizing curriculum and instruction. The concept adolescence was
invented in the late 18003 through the historical processes described above. In particular,
understandings of adolescence were derived from several empirical studies by the

psychologist, G. Stanley Hall. Hall’s descriptions of the characteristic traits and needs of

55

the adolescent period were cited prominently in texts like Chubb (1903) and Carpenter,
Baker, & Scott (1903). Hall’s studies constituted adolescence as a distinct period of life,
between the ages of 12-20, that manifested certain regularities that might provide
rationales and methods for intervening into young people’s development. For example,
Hall’s (1905) documentation of the characteristics of adolescents were generally
optimistic and assumed that the emotionality of this age was pedagogically useful and
susceptible to art, nature, religious conversion, and adventure.

Early English education channeled Hall’s studies of adolescence into pedagogical
texts for teachers and teacher educators. Conceptions of adolescents suggested that the
English teacher might choose certain kinds of texts (e. g. those themed on nature,
adventure) and address certain issues considered pertinent to adolescence. In many cases,
pedagogical decisions about literature were not thinkable outside of an enabling

knowledge of adolescents:

As a rule these four years of high school life are to count for more in determining
the set of the character than any other four years of life. When at this time the
throng of new interests, tastes, and desires declare themselves; when, one after
another, literature and music and arts-nature, solitude, religion, humanitarian
enterprise, adventure-make appeal to the sensitive nature, it becomes a matter of
chief moment whether what are often mere transiencies of impulse and liking,
mere shy, floating visitants asking food and shelter, are to receive a hearty and
hospitable welcome, or are to be excluded (forever, as it often proves) from a

home in the soul . . . The high school teacher may be a large-sometimes the

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largest-factor in deciding the answers to these vital questions. During such a
gerrninant period Literature may exercise its maximum of humanizing influence

(Chubb, 1913, p.236).

Today, adolescence remains a key idea in secondary English education.
However, present understandings of adolescence mobilized in secondary schools differ
from those informing earlier approaches to English teaching. Lesko (1996) notes how
adolescents are presently constructed through discourses tied to medicine, psychology,
sociology, and law. Conventional medical and social science definitions involve abstract
and universalized concepts of hormone-raging, identity-seeking, and peer-conforming
youth. A second construct, adolescent as social problem, includes young who fail to
follow proper norms of development and are therefore prone to violence, pregnancy,
addiction, and so. Therapeutic discourses of the adolescent, such as those operative in
social work and mental health professions, position teens as victims/patients of
dysfunctional families, addictive patterns, trauma, etc. Legal discursive constructions of
adolescents locate the rights of youths in contrast to conceptions of the family in which
youth are positioned as owned by parents. Such constructions position adolescents in
such a way as to invite certain kinds of policies and also modes of working with youth

across various institutions, including schools:

For example, a conception of youth-as-deviant implies policies that aim on getting

them back on track: disciplined, back in school, saying no to sex and drugs, and

planning for productive futures. Conception of youth as victim highlights their

57

vulnerability and needs for self—esteem, talk therapy, and protection from abusers.
Thus, as even this cursory overview attests, secondary teachers formulate views
amid multiple, conflicted, and highly invested views of youth and their implied

policies (Lesko, 1996, p. 454).

These multiple discourses of adolescence were reflected in my current interview
data. The constructions of “adolescent as social problem” were prominent as participants
relayed concerns about substance abuse, potentially dangerous peer groups, and
(especially) teen pregnancy. Therapeutic discourses were also prominent as participants
often bemoaned dysfunctional families or various traumas of physical, emotional, or
sexual abuse. For example, Holly’s definition of English brought together therapeutic,
medical, social science, and youth-as-problem discourses: “[Students] need to learn how
to deal with all of this emotional baggage . . . I feel that my own English education was
therapy . . . It’s cheap therapy that wasn’t stigmatized” (focal group interview, May,
2004)

Another effect of alchemy is that disciplinary practices are made into secure,
fixed properties of knowledge. In other words, terms and processes undertaken in
secondary classrooms are approached independent of how questions, methods,
arguments, and commentary proceed in academic disciplines. For example, knowledge
making in the disciplines is relative to certain kinds of questions to be addressed through
certain kinds of inquires that circulate through various venues and incur certain kinds of

arguments, conflicts, and debates.4 However, school subjects generally do not revolve

58

around inquiry, standards of truth, or ongoing “conversations” through history (e. g.
Applebee, 1996).

My current participants noted curious effects of this crystallization. First, they
were often asked to teach things that they had not encountered since they were in high
school. Second, the same list of concepts, terms, and writing prompts tended to appear
across curriculum standards; thus, every year, students might be asked to memorize
vocabulary words, define adverbs and participles, identify similes, metaphors, and
appositives, or be asked to write a 5 paragraph essay or a compare/contrast paper. These
concepts, terms, and practices have little, if anything, to do with pertinent modes of
inquiry or arguments across departments of English literature, cultural studies, literary
theory, or rhetoric and writing. (For example, how many MLA journals foreground
Compare/Contrast papers? If a literary scholar speaks of similes, does she define them as
“comparisions using ‘like’ or ‘as’,” or is her attention to similes rooted in a disciplined
reading of a text?)

The alchemy of school subjects is one example of how non-literary discourses—
such as conceptions of adolescence—work to establish possible approaches to English in
classrooms. The alchemy was one manifestation of various historical processes linked to
the emergence of various professional discourses linked to governing young people
around the turn of the 20'h century. The alchemy remains pertinent to current curricular
reasoning; however, the various professional discourses constitutive of possible
approaches to curriculum and instruction have been further elaborated and transformed

across the past century.

59

Pastoral Pedagogy and “Literary " Disciplines

Luke (2004) notes that English education generally has not questioned the
assumption that secondary school pedagogies are organized around university knowledge
that (eventually) trickles down into secondary schools (often in compromised, unpure
forms). However, touchstone pedagogical texts at the turn of the last century assumed
that classroom practices trickled “up,” not down. It was no accident that two key texts in
early education (Chubb, 1902; Carpenter, Baker, & Scott, 1903) were titled The Teaching
of English in the Elementary and the Secondary School—and not The Teaching of
English in the High School and the University. Both texts suggested that approaches to
English with younger children had provided secondary English with justifications,
knowledge, and techniques for approaching English in particular ways in secondary
schools. In other words, we might get a more useful perspective towards English
pedagogies by noting how secondary English is the beneficiary of approaches first
developed in elementary schools.

The elementary school influence was important to secondary English in at least
four ways, according to Carpenter, Baker, & Scott (1913). First, it was the elementary
school—and before that the Sunday schools—that had developed literacy practices
designed to humanize and civilize young people. Second, aligning high school English
with elementary English provided a continuity of experience that would intensify the
moral effects of each. Third, modeling high school English around elementary school
English provided a way to escape the pretension and snobbery of university study in the
arts and letters (see Chubb, 1913). Fourth, the elementary school had rendered literature

teachable. In other words, “teaching literature” was paradoxical in the 19th century

60

university because it was generally assumed that literature could not be taught
(Carpenter, Baker, & Scott, 1913; Applebee, 1974). However, elementary school English
not only demonstrated how literature could be taught, but it also provided methods

understood to address the moral and civic well-being of individuals and the population:

The doubts as to whether [literature] can be taught are also ceasing, for the
sufficient reason that it is taught in many schools with as great measure of success
as are the other subjects, whether judged by opportunities as a means of
discipline, as a subject of information, or as a means of cultivating taste. The
grounds on which its claims rest-as a means of knowing life, as a source of higher
pleasure, as a form of training, and as an ethical force-are the same as obtained in
the elementary school, and have been discussed in the chapter devoted to that

subject (Carpenter, Baker, & Scott, 1913, p.250).

I would like to take Carpenter, Baker, & Scott’s (1913) helpful point a step further
and locate English’s people-making techniques in Sunday Schools. In doing so, I
acknowledge my debt to scholars like Ian Hunter, Annette Patterson, and others, who
have explored the influence of the Sunday School in his genealogy of literary education
in Great Britain. Following their lead, I examined 19‘h century Sunday School literature
to identify possible links between current literary pedagogies and those advocated in
Sunday Schools. Like Hunter (1988), I found several precursors to current pedagogies in
this search. For example, Sunday School primers described the importance of a story in

securing students’ interest, the potential of responses and discussions to literary texts as

61

morally (per)suasive, and the relevance of creative drama as a tool for students to explore
different personas and to stimulate identifications with others.6 Since at least the
Protestant Reformation, literacy has had a close connection to morality, conversion, and
salvation in Christianity; thus, it is no surprise that various sites of Christian education
not only foregrounded the importance of literacy but also linked literacy practices to
morally transforrnative ends.

A quick comparison provides at least a hint of how Sunday School pedagogies of
the 18303-18403 offered pedagogical advice reproduced in early 20‘h century English
education texts. To demonstrate some parallels between Sunday Schools and secondary
English teaching across time, I have set up a couple of comparisons between Joshua
Fitch’s (184-) The Art of Securing Attention in the Sunday School to two touchstone texts
in English education of the 18903-19103. It is not hard to trace lines of influence from
Sunday Schools to turn of the 20th century approaches to secondary English.

With the exception of the word “heart,” the following pedagogical advice from an
18403 Sunday School guide would not seem out of place in English education

publications, a methods course, or pedagogical narratives:

The most effective lessons that enter the human heart are not those that take the
form of lessons. It is when we are least conscious of the process by which we are
impressed that we are impressed most deeply. And it is for this reason, if for no
other, that the indirect teaching which is wrapped up in stories and metaphors
often secures more attention than teaching of a more direct and didactic kind”

(Fitch, 184-, p. 29—30).

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The “first” definitions of English around the turn of the 20th century may have
been articulating a new line of pedagogy for English class, but the techniques encouraged
in Chubb (1902/1913) and Corson (1895) certainly resonate with the earlier statement

above:

Teachers and text-books . . . [fail] to apprehend the true nature of Literature as a
form of art; to recognize that its influence is silent and subtle, reaching the reason
through the emotions; affecting profoundly and unconsciously the child’s moods
and tempers; his way of looking at, and feeling about, things. That is why full

justice must be done to the beauty of literature (Chubb, 1913, p. 381).

Chubb’s quote above could be paired with the following quote for Corson (1895)
to nearly match the argument from Fitch’s (184-) Art of Securing Attention in the Sunday
School Class:

Attempts at direct rectification or adjustment of [students’ characters and conduct]

must be more or less failures . . . [because this] ignores the determining power

back of the intellect (p. 14).

The ensemble of knowledge and techniques that were Sunday School pedagogy
and later elementary English pedagogy included several strategies for securing young
people’s attention, cultivating intimate relations with students to intensify a teacher's

influence, and rendering the self an object of reflection through personal writing, creative

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drama, discussions in small groups, and responses to literary characters. In adapting and
transforming these approaches, secondary English would become the beneficiary of a
humanizing pedagogy that had been developed previously in at least two religious-
educational institutions. This pedagogy linked literacy practices to various modes of
ethical practice whereby young people—with the help of the English teacher—might
manage their inner lives and social conduct (Hunter, 1988).

My current data provide some examples of current transformations of this older
pedagogy. I share three brief examples of present practice that can be read as later
variants of a much older pedagogy designed to inculcate personal inwardness and self-
regulation as effects.

One key strategy is this pedagogical regimen is linking various texts to students’ lived
experiences as a means of rendering their experience into a form that can be worked on.
For my participants, this was perhaps the principal way in which English might be

distinguished fiom other school subjects:

Scott: That’s the beauty of our subject versus others. . . I mean, you’d have to be
so creative and talented to turn like a math problem

Holly: [Word problem!]

Celia: [Story problem!]

Scott: into a life-reflective experience . . . that kind of thing is expected out of us,

daily. English in terms of secondary education—that’s what it is.

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Celia Brett notes that rendering one’s “ways of being” or one’s experiences into
speech and written language renders it available to various kinds of reflection, discussion;
that is, it constructs a certain kind of experience and a certain kind of self that is available
to be monitored, problematized, regulated, and perhaps transformed. For Celia and other
participants, this transformation could be as simple as controlling emotional outbursts,
being honest, and taking conversational turns with others, but it could also be used to
problematize one’s cultural location via critical theory or another perspective. This is not
to say that such practices were easy, effective, or welcomed by students. As Celia noted,
many students were inwardly skeptical if not outwardly asking teachers “Why are you
trying to turn me into this self-reflective person who, like, always needs to be examining
myself?” (Focal Group Interview, May, 2004).

Another key people-making practice involves various projections of the self to
anticipate future decisions or to rethink one’s past decisions. For example, Holly
described English teaching as facilitating talk about the self that can help young people
negotiate past experiences—or anticipate future ones—by learning to relate textual plots
and characters to their own lives. Holly noted how texts can be deployed in order to

look at your emotional baggage . . . understanding faults, causes, results—how to

keep something from happening to you or to get a new result next time in a

similar situation . . . Literature . . . is the only way to look at situations and see

how the results play out (Focal Group Interview, May, 2004).

In early 20m century English education texts, this kind of practice may have been

likened to “ministry.” And in early 19"1 century Sunday Schools, such practices were

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literally techniques of religious ministry. However, as we have come to understand
ourselves as primarily psychological creatures (e. g. Rose, 1999), current ways of
understanding and acting upon the self are more psychological and therapeutic than
religious. Through these genealogical sketches, we can begin to get a different
perspective on knowledges—in addition to literature—that enable certain approaches to
secondary English to be thinkable and practicable. These sketches might begin to situate
current definitions of English teaching as “making people ‘people’” among the

continuous and discontinuous relations that have brought them into being.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I started with the common assumption that secondary English
teaching is derived from university English studies and used genealogy to explore the
possibility that the boundaries of secondary school English are constituted not only by
approaches to literature but also by multiple and shifting discourses linked to ways of
understanding adolescents and guiding their beliefs and conduct (Foucault, 1979;
Burchell, Gordon, & Miller, 1991). In particular, I examined the contention in current
interview data that secondary English teaching was predicated on teaching people how to

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be ‘people —or creating conditions in which young people might come to understand
themselves, and act upon themselves, as self-disciplined persons. I argued that earlier
formulations of English as people-making were accepted and circulating by the turn of
the 20th century. Through these steps, I argued that English not only may be linked to

university literary studies but also is linked to changing relations of governance in liberal

democracies. Noting that English emerged in parallel form to changing rationalities of

66

governance and the rise of the human sciences, I suggested that we might get a different
purchase on the boundaries of secondary English teaching by accounting for changing
knowledge of young people’s natures and expert-mediated techniques for governing their
health, morality, productivity, and happiness.

I then examined current interview data and key archival texts to identify key
continuities and discontinuities in the ways in which secondary English has been
rendered intelligible and practicable. These genealogical sketches pointed me to two
ensembles of discursive practices that are displaced by accounts of secondary English
that assume the dominance of literature in secondary schools. First, I highlighted a set of
relations that Popkewitz (2002) analyzed as the alchemy of school subjects. In alchemy,
various discourses of business and the human sciences organize approaches to school
subjects and in the process translate academic disciplines into psychological constructs,
such as “adolescence.” The alchemy provides one way of rethinking what knowledge
organizes current approaches to English. Next, I highlighted a realm of pedagogical
knowledge in secondary English that is not produced by the “downward” movement of
university disciplines into secondary schools but by the “upward” migration and
transformation of literacy pedagogies developed in elementary schools and (before that)
Christian Sunday Schools. I demonstrate how approaches to secondary English in the
early 20th and 21" centuries have adapted and reconfigured these older practices, which
were developed to inculcate techniques of ethical inwardness and self-regulation among
young people. These practices entail various ways of deploying texts in order to make
visible certain aspects of the self and thus to render them open to various practices of

reflection, problematization, and regulation.

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A common goal of genealogy is to bring into play knowledges displaced by
dominant accounts and to make tactical use of them in the present (Foucault, 1991).
Thus, I offer these sketches not only as a way of making sense of current interview data,
but to highlight social relations not made apparent in scholarly accounts that begin with
the assumption that secondary English teaching is premised on literary study. Thus, I
demonstrate how discourses of science and business have delimited ways in which
English might be understood and practiced, and I have also demonstrated how
pedagogical reasoning derived from 19‘h century Sunday Schools and Elementary
Schools may continue to produce effects in English classrooms. These accounts raise
potential questions about the extent to which the human sciences govern how it is
possible to think about English education, and they also raise ethical questions related to
pedagogical reasoning that was introduced a century ago as a means of intensifying
teachers’ authority to act upon aspects of students’ lives, including their understandings

of themselves, others, and the world.

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CHAPTER FOUR
Introduction

Didactic instruction has been widely critiqued across English education literature
of the past several decades (see, e. g., Applebee, 1974, 1993; Smagorinsky, 2002). While
these critiques vary, they generally share a concern about the danger of imposing upon
students through didactic approaches. English methods course syllabi, for example, have
typically advocated for indirect, constructivist, or student-centered approaches, instead of
direct, or teacher-centered instruction (Smagorinsky & Whiting, 1995). The widespread
concern about imposing upon students is common across narratives of English and
composition teachers (e. g. Trimmer, 1997) and also evident through the uptake of
Freire’s (1972) critique of transmission approaches, or “banking education.”

English education appears much more comfortable with pedagogies that
encourage student choice, social interaction, a sympathetic teacher (facilitator), and
approaches that consider students’ interests, readiness, and motivations for various
curricular experiences. Contemporary alternatives to didactic approaches include those
that promote responses to texts, inquiry, workshops, and cultural studies and critical
theory. One assumption behind such alternatives is that the removal of teacher-imposed
constraints, and the provision for students’ choices, interests, and desires will circumvent
relations of control in the English classroom. Some scholars have encouraged the need

for explicit instruction on political grounds (e. g. Delpit, 1995; Freedman & Medway,

69

1994). However, outside of the explicitness argument, non-didactic approaches to
English generally have generally not been scrutinized across English classrooms,
research, and teacher education literature.

In this chapter, I share our field’s concerns about didactic teaching and power
relations in English education. At the same time, I approach these pedagogical concerns
about power through an alternative perspective offered by genealogy (Foucault, 1984). A
common objective of genealogy is to focus on present concepts, distinctions, or practices
that appear self-evident and denaturalize them by accounting for the social and historical
conditions that made them possible. My goal in this chapter is not to offer a defense or
critique of didactic instruction, nor do I defend or critique various alternatives to didactic
approaches. However, I do raise questions about how alternatives to didactic pedagogies
have been written and spoken about in English education by examining how such
reasoning has been constructed historically. In doing so, I hope to provide a different
perspective on non-didactic pedagogies in order to spark other ways of understanding
and approaching English in secondary classrooms, educational research, and teacher

education.

Genealogy and Critique

My examination of English education’s advocacy of non-didactic pedagogies
adopts a style of critique derived fi'om Foucault’s genealogies. Genealogy is a form of
historical inquiry that draws attention to the construction of present ways of reasoning by
noting the conditions through which those constructions emerged. Genealogical studies

do not seek the origins or essences behind established ideas, nor do they debunk

7O

commonplace assumptions by claiming a privileged point of view outside of power and
history. Instead, genealogy examines historical texts in order to excavate the shifting
relations that established the boundaries for thought and action. This excavation involves
strategies of textual analysis that seek to account for the constitution of knowledge by
tracing shifts in the ways in which statements were formulated, accepted, and circulated
as truth (Foucault, 1980). The genealogical concern with truth tries to understand the
social apparatus— concepts, rules, authorities, procedures, methods, techniques, and so
on—through which claims to truth have been formulated, accepted, and circulated (Rose,
1999). Genealogical studies therefore draw attention to the cultural and historical
specificity of knowledge and also draw attention to the changing networks of relations
that have constituted it.

My approach here calls into question the existing boundaries of English education
and asks how certain concepts, narratives, and distinctions surrounding (non)didactic
pedagogies have been formulated, accepted, and circulated historically in English
education discourse. In the first part of my paper, I analyze earlier formulations of
English teaching (e. g. Corson, 1895; Chubb, 1902/1913; Carpenter, Baker, & Scott,
1903/1913) popular at the turn of the 20th century in order to demonstrate how direct and
non-direct pedagogies were reasoned about in key English education texts. My analysis
of key historical documents in English teaching led me to the surprising finding that in
the early 20"1 century non-didactic pedagogies were understood to be more efficient than
didactic approaches for controlling students.

This first step of analysis will create space for me in my second step to

demonstrate how non-didactic pedagogies have embodied relations of govemmentality

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(Foucault, 1979; Burchell, etc. 1991). Govemmentality is a modality of power in which
the self exercises power over the self by being subject of, and subject to, various forms of
knowledge and expertise. My third strategy is to historicize relations of govemmentality
in English teaching through Nikolas Rose’s (1999) genealogical construct, “governing
the soul.” Governing the soul draws attention to the constitutive role of the human
sciences, especially psychology, in making people amenable to having things done to
them—and doing things to themselves—in order to develop their subjective capacities,
such as the emotions, desires, dispositions, motivations, and understandings of their
“self.” I demonstrate how approaches of governing the soul circulate through a recent
NCTE survey (Dudley-Marling, Abt-Perkins, Sato, & Selfe, 2006) and across interviews
of beginning English teachers from my own research. Through these analytical
strategies, I hope to sensitize the field of English education to modes of power embodied
in non-didactic approaches that generally is not scrutinized in pedagogical literature. By
drawing attention to perhaps surprising ways in which English teaching has been
reasoned about across different times, I hope to spur different ways of approaching

English teaching in classrooms, research, and teacher education.

Historicizing English '3 Didactic Critiques

It is an enduring feature of the discourse on English teaching to critique didactic
instruction and to promote a variety of non-didactic approaches, but the critique has come
from different, sometimes opposing, directions. In this section I examine critiques of
didactic pedagogy fiom the early years of the 20m century. In some accounts of English

education’s history, it is assumed that critiques of non-didactic approaches emerged

72

around the 19603 as a response to authoritative teaching, skills-based approaches, and the
excesses of New Criticism (e.g. Dixon, 1967). However, already in Chubb’s (1902/1913)
The Teaching of English in the Elementary and the Secondary School—one of the earliest
and most influential accounts of secondary English (Applebee, 1974)———we see English
teaching defined in opposition to didactic instruction:
There is one pitfall, however, that awaits those who are eager in the pursuit of this
final aim [of English teaching]—that of forcing the didactic note. A work of art is
not a sermon or a pulpit; and we wrong it when we compel it to argue, or use it to

enforce our own little moralizing text (Chubb, 1902/1913, p.381).

It would seem “natural” that Chubb was concerned in 1895 about imposing
control upon students through didactic approaches. He was. However, Chubb’s concern
reversed present sensibilities. Chubb was concerned that didactic approaches afforded an
English teacher with limited control over students’ lives, especially their emotional,
moral, and ethical formation. This kind of reasoning becomes clearer if we examine the

continuation of Chubb’s (1913) statement:

Art recognizes that the syllogism is less powerful than the parable in its effect
upon character; that a man’s arguments are not so expressive as his personality
and habits. It seems necessary to insist upon this because teachers and text-books
have a noticeable leaning to what is “preachy” in Poetry and Literature; they tend
to treat Literature was they would the Ten Commandments. That is the result of

failure to apprehend the true nature of Literature as a form of art; to recognize that

73

its influence is silent and subtle, reaching the reason through the emotions,
affecting profoundly and unconsciously the child’s moods and temper; his way of
looking at, and feeling about, things. That is why full justice must be done to the
beauty of Literature, even in the interests of its moral effect. We must not neglect

its sensuous appeal. (381 -3 82)

Chubb’s (1913) discussion of secondary English teaching disrupts commonplace
assumptions in present-day English education. In current educational discourse, it is
generally assumed that indirect approaches are less controlling than didactic approaches
to English; however, in English education texts at the turn of the 20th century, indirect
approaches were understood to be more controlling than didactic approaches. The direct
teaching of moral and ethical arguments was understood to be less formative of the
character than exploration of art, stories, and parables. Lectures, sermons, and overtly
“preachy” approaches to texts were assumed to secure less pedagogical influence than
more indirect, silent, and subtle approaches that engaged the affective and aesthetic
domains. Art, sensuality, and beauty were positioned as key tools for securing more
extensive moral effects through English pedagogy. How was it, around the turn of the
20m century that didactic approaches were considered less controlling than indirect
approaches?

In following section, I locate two lines of argument about didactic pedagogies
that were deployed in defining and justifying the teaching of English at the time of its
emergence in secondary schools near the turn of the 20th century. The first critique was

that didactic approaches only educated the mind and thus were less intrusive than indirect

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approaches, which acted upon, and through, what were understood to be the innermost
aspects of the person. For example, Corson’s (1895) The Aims of Literary Study
established that “Attempts at direct rectification or adjustment of [people’s lives], must
be more or less failures . . . [because this] ignores the determining power back of the
intellect” (Corson, 1895, p. 14). A second critique was that didactic approaches secured
limited control because they did not work upon, or through, students’ present thoughts
and actions. English teacher Jesse Davis (1912) states this critique succinctly in volume
one of the English Journal: “Ethical instruction that merely informs the brain does not
necessarily produce better character. It is of most value when it is in some way applied to

the actual thinking and acting of the pupil” (p.458).

English Teaching and the Soul

Perhaps the first attempt to define English teaching from within the profession
(Applebee, 1974), Hiram Corson’s (1895) The Aims of Literary Study assumed that
didactic approaches were pedagogically limited because they sought to educate (only) the
mind. Across much of 19’h century education, it was generally taken for granted that the
key function of education was to provide mental discipline (Kliebard, 1986; for an
influential defense of mental discipline, see the Yale Report of 192 8). The doctrine of
mental discipline assumed that the mind was like a muscle; thus, it was to be disciplined
through the repetition of various “exercises” that would develop the intellect. Other
faculties, such as the memory or will, were also cultivated through habit-forming
exercises. Didactic approaches, such as lecturing, were useful because they afforded

opportunities for concentration; similarly, the repetitive qualities of rote exercises or

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recitations afforded mental discipline. The Aims of Literary Study (Corson, 1895) also
assumed that the didactic approaches could cultivate the intellect. However, Corson
(1895) reasoned that didactic approaches to cultivating the intellect were limited because
they did not penetrate the intellect to reach what was understood as the inner person:
“Attempts at direct rectification or adjustment of [people’s active powers], must be more
or less failures . . . [because this] ignores the determining power back of the intellect”
(Corson, 1895, p. 14). Corson understood that the intellect did not govern a person’s
thoughts and conduct; it was the “soul” that was key to forming the person:
The rectification or adjustment of the ‘what is’, I repeat, should transcend all
other aims of education, however important these may be. The acquisition of
knowledge is a good thing; the emendation and sharpening of the intellect is a
good thing; the cultivation of science and philosophy is a good thing; but there is
something of infinitely more importance than all those—it is, the rectification, the
adjustment, through that mysterious operation we call sympathy, of the
unconscious personality, the hidden soul, which cooperates with the active
powers, with the conscious intellect, and, as this unconscious personality is
rectified or unrectified, determines the active powers, the conscious intellect, for
righteousness or unrighteousness . . . It is only through the ‘what is’ that the ‘what

does’ and the ‘what knows’ can be rectified or adjusted (Corson, 1895, p.13-14).

Corson’s assertion that pedagogy should target the soul was derived from a

Christian critique of didactics. Quoting the Christian apostle Paul and citing the example

of Christian missions, Corson argued that Christianity historically had not secured its

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influence by compelling people to adhere to Biblical precepts or creeds; rather,
Christianity was made viable by “a succession of sanctified spirits” (p.16); that is,
Christianity had transformed individuals and nations by touching (and thus sanctifying, or
purifying) people’s souls. The implications for Corson’s literary education followed a
similar logic. A humanizing study of the arts and letters should not seek to develop
intellectual apprehension of moral principles or precepts. Instead, it should seek to work
upon, and through, the spiritual dimensions of the self. Therefore, the power of a literary
education could be extended to (re)construct, or rectify people’s selves—the ‘what is’--
through pedagogies that penetrated intellectual reason and touched people’s souls.

Key pedagogical texts at the turn of the 20th century assumed that indirect
pedagogies exerted a more powerful influence on people’s souls that was afforded by
didactic approaches. The entry point to the soul was not the intellect; it was through the
sympathies. The sympathies were not engaged through didactics, sermons, or
educational pedantry (Chubb, 1913); they were, however, reachable through indirect
pedagogies that stimulated the aesthetic, imaginative, affective, and relational aspects of
life. This kind of reasoning was prominent in another key pedagogical text in the early
20'h century, Chubb’s (1902) Teaching English in the Elementary and the Secondary
School:

The springs of a man's character are in his loves and hates, his tastes and desires,

his ideals and aspirations; and the life of these depends much upon the light and

the perspective with which they have been invested by the imagination. . . human
longings and ideals. . . art. . . and the animating interest [that control] the aim and

impulse of man's activity (Chubb, 1912, p. 378-379).

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In current English education discourse, it is generally assumed that pedagogy is
less controlling if it builds upon students’ interests, tastes, and desires and if it encourages
art, imagination, and creative expression. However, around the turn of the 20th century,
these approaches were understood to intensify and extend a teacher’s control in the
English classroom in ways that didactic instruction did not allow. It was no longer
enough in 1895 to educate only the mind. English class would function as a “whole
system of training” that not only sought to develop the mind but also to shape young
people’s understandings of themselves and others and to cultivate their passions,
pleasures, and moral reasoning (Carpenter, Baker, & Scott, 1903/1913). This
comprehensive disciplining of the self would be facilitated by acting upon, and through,
young people’s emotions, ideals, imaginations, sympathies, identifications, wills, hearts,
and their souls (e. g. Corson, 1895; Chubb, 1902/1913). It was difficult around the turn of
the 20th century to overstate the moral-social-religious-cultural influence that English

teachers sought by abandoning the didactic role of “purveyors” of knowledge:

We [English teachers] need not fear to set the highest humanitarian standards for
ourselves. Our danger is less that of unduly magnifying our teaching office than
of dropping to the level of a commonplace professionalism. We should come
nearer to being priests than purveyors; and indeed, it is in the growth of the
feeling that is beginning to pervade our ranks of our being a lay priesthood, called
to the cure of young souls, that we have cause for highest hope (Chubb,

1902/1913, p.392).

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In a moment, I will begin to account for the relations that made it possible for
various pedagogical texts to assume the English teacher’s authority and expertise in
(re)forming young people’s souls. Before that, however, I would like to introduce
another, related critique of didactic pedagogies prominent in English education texts at
the time of its emergence: the construction of secondary students as actively thinking,
feeling, and choosing. I earlier cited a passage in which Corson (1895) noted that the
soul cooperated with the active powers in directing a person’s life. Not surprising, then,
earlier constructions of the “active” learner also eschew contemporary ways of

understanding the effects of didactic versus non-didactic approaches to English teaching.

English Teaching and the Active “Powers "

In addition to reforming souls, another (related) thread in tum-of-the-ZO‘h-century
discourse on English teaching was the importance afforded to students’ active powers, or
the assumption that young people were actively thinking, feeling, sensing, enjoying, and
choosing agents. In current educational discourse, pedagogies that construct the “active
learner” are understood to be less controlling than didactic approaches that construct a
“passive learner.” Similarly, “agency” is frequently positioned as a site of resistance
from control. However, at the turn of the 20‘h century, constructions of students as agents
understood agency as a precondition, and resource, for the exercise of power relations in
English classrooms. That is, English class could better secure morally, socially, and
ethically normative ends by working upon, and through, students’ capacities to think, act,

and choose: “Ethical instruction that merely informs the brain does not necessarily

79

produce better character. It is of most value when it is in some way applied to the actual
thinking and acting of the pupil” (Davis, 1912, p.458).

This pedagogical reasoning is clear in an examination of a common pedagogical
construct at the turn of the 20th century called “teaching for power.” Teaching English
for power presupposed young people’s capacities to act and choose without coercion.
Edna Williams’ (1912) defense of English, for example, described a key goal of English
teaching to be “real power,” or developing young citizens’ abilities to weigh, balance,
consider, and work out independently the problems facing them and their world.
Chubb’s (1902/1912) conception of teaching for power recognized that discernment was
also needed in the affective realm; thus, teaching for power was to develop young
people’s capacities to exercise, shape, and manage their imaginative, sympathetic, and
emotional reactions to the world. Stated simply, teaching for power was not predicated
on inculcating knowledge or mastering subject matter: “Power” was a state of “self
mastery,” where a person could learn to identify, monitor, problematize, and regulate his
or her ideals, emotions, beliefs, thoughts, and social conduct (Owen, 1912).

However, it was not “natural” that the young would seek to channel their thoughts
and ideals (and so on) in ways that English teachers understood to be in children’s best
interests. English teacher Emma Breck (1912) noted that students, by nature, were not
likely to choose what appealed to mature minds or to English teachers; in fact, many
teenagers, free to choose, would opt to drop out of English class?! (Breck, 1912). This
was a critical pedagogical issue for the English teacher. In the early 20th century, it had
become generally unacceptable for an English teacher to say to students “Enjoy this or

I’ll box your ears” (Bates, 1911, p.16); instead, the English teacher was to lead young

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people indirectly “to seek [what is best for them] of their own accord” (p. 16; italics in
original). In other words, approaches to English in the early 20th century were to
establish conditions through which young people would assume the “power” to control
how they comported themselves:
Organization of the individual is the end of education viewed as a process of
growth. Between birth and attainment of essential maturity, the instincts,
impulses, capacities, tastes, ideals of the individual must be brought into some
sort of working system. The pupil through his school experience must be got
together. He must be made conscious of his own control over himself . . . This
ability [to hold oneself together while remaking habits to meet new situations] is

the fundamental index of power (Owen, 1912, p. 200-201).

Locating the self as the “fundamental index of power” points to an exercise of
power that is not impositional but productive, or enabling. In other words, such
approaches did not achieve their effects through acts of constraint, the denial of options,
or overt force. Instead, power worked productively through attracting people to various
images of self and other, through persuasions linked to claims to truth about the world,
and through anxieties stimulated by knowledge of social norms (Rose, 1999). These
indirect approaches could be made to contribute to the formation of people who sought to
monitor, problematize, and ultimately regulate themselves. Such approaches are
examples of a power relation that Foucault analyzed as govemmentality (Foucault, 1979;

Burchell, Gordon, & Miller, 1991).

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English Teaching and Governmentality

The preceding sections describe earlier accounts of English teaching in which
non-didactic pedagogies were advocated for purposes of reforming souls and cultivating
active powers. One way to understand the combination of these two purposes for English
education is through a modality of power that Foucault called “govemmentality.”
Governmentality refers to “the government of the self by one’s self in its articulation with
relations with others (such as one finds in pedagogy, behavior counseling, spiritual
direction, the prescription of models for living, and so on)” (Foucault, 1997, p.225). In a
regimen of govemmentality, the self is to expected exercise power to govern the self.

The move to produce people willing to normalize themselves in response to
various forms of knowledge and control signaled a crucial rupture in educational
discourses in the late 19'h and early 20th centuries. In previous educational contexts,
power was conceived as sovereign and outside of the self; thus, the exercise of power was
directed towards governing structures outside of the self, such as the curriculum or social
acts; however, in educational discourse at the end of the 19th century, relations of
govemmentality had become a tacit assumption (Fendler, 1998). That is, there was little
question around the turn of the 20"1 century that the educated subject would be self-
disciplined. Thus, a key pedagogical problematic of the time was enacting pedagogical
practices whereby the young would assume responsibility for governing their own
conduct, minds, and souls.

Central texts in turn of the 20th century English education argued that the self-
regulating subject would not be produced efficiently through didactics or overt physical

control. Rather, non-didactic approaches were understood as securing conditions in

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which individuals would act upon their own bodies, souls, thoughts, and ways of being in
order to (trans)form themselves into certain kinds of moral, ethical, or political subjects.
[Foucault (1988) called such processes “technologies of the self.”] Rose (1999a) noted
that typical schooling practices of the late 19‘h and 20th centuries not only promoted
obedience, but also sought to shape persons through practices that encouraged the child’s
emulation of the teacher, enhanced sympathetic identifications with real and imagined
others, and inculcated self-reflective techniques that linked children’s pleasures, ideals,
thoughts, and actions to various ethical outcomes valued by institutions and cultural
authorities (Rose, 1999a). Chubb’s (1913) classic text described these approaches as

subtly tyrannizing:

[The English teacher] bring[s] the child under the sway of noble ideals of
manhood and womanhood, noble types of life, noble deeds, noble feelings. . . [By
enlisting the] child’s emulative tendencies. . . and identification with the teacher
and great souls we hypnotize ourselves and allow a subtle, sweetly tyrannizing
influence [to] spread through our being, that we are creating our own life and

shaping our destiny. (p. 380)

The “sweet tyranny” that Chubb (1913) describes above is not about covert
domination through non-didactic approaches. Instead, power works through non-didactic
approaches in at least two ways. First, students are being subject to certain kinds of
knowledge about the self. That is, English class provides certain ways of talking about

the self, and provides certain images of lives, by which a student is asked to create their

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own lives and destinies. In the early 20th century, literature was considered usefiil towards

this function:

If we wish to know how men have thought, felt, and aspired, we turn to literature .
. . the truest and most universal method of communicating experience; not all
kinds of experience, but that kind that we need most in youth, in manhood, and in
old age to enable us to identify ourselves with our kind, to detect a particular
likeness of another’s life to ours, to find the revelation of our yet unformed

resolves in the governing ideals of another’s mind. (Owen, 1912, p.199)

Thus, students could learn to relate to literature as an experience that made visible
certain kinds of person-hood to which a young person may (or may) not aspire.
Exploring literature also afforded a certain visibility to various schemes of likeness-
difference that comprised ways in which students of English could talk about themselves
and others. Owen (1912) notes how power was inscribed in the ways in which literature
courses were organized to provide certain “kinds of experience, indirect though it may
be, by which his forming mind and soul may be organized” (p. 202). The imposition here
was not a product of transmission approaches but an indirect control inscribed in the
systems of reasoning by which one was to interpret, organize, and act in the world.

Second, non-didactic approaches intensify students’ experience of having and
being a “self.” That is, subjectivity is not so much shaped by the techniques and
discourses that bear upon it than it is produced by them. In other words, the ways in

which the self is talked about and acted upon (by the self and by others) in English class

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actually produces a certain kind of self. Power here is understood to be productive, or
enabling.

One way to explore relations of power and control in English class, then, is to
examine the disciplinary techniques by which students are govemed—and govern
themselves. Earlier pedagogical texts describe and promote techniques of subjectification
understood to work by inculcating certain ways of responding to texts, techniques of self-
reflection, intimate teacher-student relations, and practices of writing about, and

discussing, one’s own experiences, perspectives, and ambitions.

The individual comes to experience the world in a certain way as a result of
behaving in certain ways, being categorized in certain ways, and being dealt with
in certain ways. A constructed subject then is an experiencing self of a particular
sort in that an individual intemalizes power-assigned attributes and comes to
intend power-defined actions . . . Becomes a subject is coming to hold certain
things as true about oneself, saying certain things about oneself, and intentionally

acting in certain ways. (Prado, 2000, p.80)

In English class, texts were deployed in such a way that students’ came to relate
to the text as a means of knowing life and knowing the “self.” In Carpenter, et al (1913),
knowing life, human nature, and the self was identified as the primary goal of teaching
English in elementary and secondary schools. The student was to explore how his or her
own experiences, values, or ambitions related to those of the text. Such a deployment of

the text—as mirror towards life and the self—established various social comparisons

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whereby students might come to adopt certain ways of understanding, and acting upon,
not only their worlds and others but also the self. It also intensified a kind of personal
inwardness that afforded a certain visibility to students’ values, goals, and understanding
of their self; by making certain aspects of the self visible to the student through
transactions with literary texts, it became possible to not only monitor one’s values,
goals, etc. but also to work upon them. Thus, practices of literary transaction, discussion
of experiences, personal writing, and other practices that remain operative in English
class were made to function as techniques for self-formation, self-reflection, and self-
problematization that made possible certain ways for working on the self in ways
mediated by expert knowledge: “Through self-inspection, self-problematization, self-
monitoring, and confession, we evaluate ourselves according to the criteria provided for
us by others. . . and adjust ourselves by means of the techniques propounded by the
experts of the soul” (Rose, 1999).

Many of the practices listed above—responses to literature, expressive talk and
writing, linking students out of school lives to school, etc—are generally taken for
granted in current literature. It has also become normal to assume that English class is an
appropriate site for developing how students come to understand themselves, others, and
the world. In fact, most current pedagogical approaches, including those on the left, are
variants on a long-standing pedagogy premised on relations of govemmentality, where

students discipline their selves in relation to personal and social norms:

The modern English classroom with its emphasis on exploratory talk and writing,

and on group work and techniques developed through reader response strategies

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for the surveillance and ethical adjustments towards specific sets of personal and
social norms (non-sexist; anti-racist; use of inclusive language, and so on) is an
extension and adaptation of earlier pastoral pedagogical arrangements. (Patterson,

2000, p.299)

In the following section, I do not wish to argue that these and similar approaches
are good or bad. Nor do I insinuate that they are approaches of covert domination.
However, I do draw attention to the conditions in which relations of govemmentality
through English became thinkable in order to provide a different purchase on the
relations and assumptions normalized in non-didactic pedagogies in secondary English. 1
frame my analysis around Nikolas Rose’s construct, “governing the soul.” This allows

9“

me to demonstrate the current approaches to govern students souls” retain a focus on
indirect techniques whereby young people might understand, and act upon, their morals,
emotions, conduct, etc. However, I demonstrate how contemporary ways of

understanding and acting upon others—or oneself—are linked to expert-mediated terms

of psychology.

English and Governing the Soul

In the complex web they have traced out for us, the truths of science and the

powers of experts act as relays that bring the values of authorities and the goals of

business [and other institutions] into contact with the dreams and actions of us all.

These technologies for the government of the soul operate not through the

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crushing of subjectivity in the interests of control and profit but by seeking to
align political, social, and institutional goals with individual pleasures and desires,

and with the happiness and fulfillment of the self (Rose, 1999).

In “governing the soul” (Rose, 1999) draws attention to the constitutive role of the
human sciences, especially psychology, in making people amenable to having things
done to them—and doing things to themselves—in order to develop their subjective
capacities, such as the emotions, desires, dispositions, motivations, and understandings of
their “self.” Following Foucault (1978), Rose (1999) uses the term “soul” to refer to
what previously was understood as the mysterious, spiritual, and deepest constituents of
the self. In the present, these non-intellectual aspects of the self are now constituted as
objects of psychological observation, measurement, and intervention. That is,
psychology has provided expert-mediated language for understanding ourselves derived
from particular claims to truth. Today, for example, a person might talk about his or self-
esteem, self-actualization, intelligence, or personality. These terms, and various
measures associated with them, are derived from various traditions of psychological
inquiry, advocacy, or therapeutics; these ways of reasoning about the self make possible
certain kinds of awareness and certain ways of governing oneself or others that are not
thinkable outside of psychological discourses.

In the following section, I draw attention to how power is inscribed in current
efforts at governing souls through secondary English. To do so, I compare definitions of
English from early 20th century pedagogical texts, analyzed above, with constructions of

English teaching from the survey and interview data I collected with five current research

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participants.7 I highlight three ways in which power is inscribed in current approaches:
through concepts that instantiate expert mediated (psychological) knowledge, through
educating students’ emotions and motivations to align them with institutional goals, and

through techniques of psychological self-discipline.

Expert Mediated Knowledge

In current discourse, it is generally assumed that English class is an appropriate
site for intervening into the ways in which young people understand themselves, others,
and the world. Today, secondary English class is rarely understood as a possible
substitute, or successor, to previous kinds of cultural, religious, and social authority, such
as parents, communities, or religious leaders; however, constructions of English teaching

across the 18903 to 19103 were explicit in claiming this kind of authority:

. . . many of the old forces for good that furnished past generations with a present
help in time of trouble have ceased to be operative or are fast losing their
efficiency. We are no longer a Bible-reading people; the church and 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 multiplying in our
midst . . . It is time that we English teachers, recognizing our responsibility as
awakeners of the spirit, should ask ourselves what we are doing to check this

downward tendency (Breck, 1912, p.69).

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According to Chubb (1913), the English teacher’s qualifications for assuming a
“parental” or “priestly” role were primarily two-fold. In 1913, the most important
warrant for the English teacher to assume this role was that he or she had demonstrated
“adequate culture,” or had embodied the knowledge, taste, sympathies, and linguistic
performances valued in society. This claim was primarily ethical. Chubb (1913) also
noted a relatively new warrant whereby the English teacher might claim authority
traditionally assumed by parents and priests: a psychological knowledge of the needs and
characteristics of students. That is, by the early 20th century, it became thinkable to talk
of students in terms of their normal development. Thus, in touchstone texts such as
Chubb (1913) and Carpenter, Baker, & Scott (1913), it was not only important for a
teacher to embody certain moral and civic norms but to be familiar with the
characteristics of “adolescence,” a category that was newly emerging in educational

discourse.

The shift to a “soul” constituted by and through psychological knowledge is
evident across an examination of English education discourse across the last century. In
Corson (1895), the soul was predominantly a Christian construct derived from Christian
scripture and historical anecdotes about Christianity. However, in present day English
education, it would be unusual to use the term “soul” in a curricular or pedagogical
context; instead, we have come to understand ourselves and to act towards ourselves in

psychological terms:

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Contemporary pedagogy does not use the word [soul]. Instead, pedagogical work
is on individuals’ self-improvement, autonomy, responsible life conduct, and life-
long learning. The language of today’s soul is of modernity, but it is still about
the soul. . . the dispositions, beliefs, and attitudes of prospective teachers [and

teachers and students]” (p.263).

Thus, current English education discourse no longer links together a series of
ambiguous terms linked to our innermost person, such as Corson’s (1895) near conflation
of the heart, will, soul, sympathies, and active powers. Age-linked and developmental
categories such as “adolescence” are no longer new and tentative. Today’s discourse of
the self, in contrast, now has elaborated complex accounts of people’s affective,
cognitive, and self-realizing capacities; psychology has provided a number of emotional,
interpersonal, and organization techniques whereby people can understand, problematize,
and manage various aspects of their lives (Rose, 1998, 1999a, 1999b). Rose highlights at
least two aspects of current regimes of the self that help us rethink how relations of
control might circulate in non-didactic approaches to English education. First, the phrase
“governing the soul” highlights how modern techniques of disciplining the self can be
understood as more intrusive and extensive than earlier approaches. The scientific
mapping of people’s inner lives has rendered more aspects of human life susceptible to
educational management; thus, education now seeks to develop students’ motivations,
wishes, desires, dispositions, and attitudes of the child to secure their “normal”
development (Fendler, 2001). Second, governing the soul has made possible a way of

addressing concerns about shaping, controlling, reforming, steering, or directing people’s

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conduct in ways compatible with governance in a liberal democracy. Our understandings
of how the self may be defined, constructed, and governed have been transposed from an

ethical to a psychological register:

Psychology has thus participated in reshaping the practices of those who exercise
authority over others—social workers, managers, teachers, nurses—such that they
nurture and direct these individual strivings in the most appropriate and
productive fashions . . . [through] practices of inspecting oneself, accounting for
oneself, and working upon oneself in order to realize one’s potential, gain
happiness, and exercise one’s autonomy. And it has given birth to a range of
psychotherapies that aspire to enabling humans to live as free individuals through
subordinating themselves to a form of therapeutic authority: to live as an
autonomous individual, you must learn techniques for understanding and
practicing upon yourself. Freedom, that is to say, is enacted only at the price of

relying upon experts of the soul” (Rose, 1998, p.17).

To demonstrate how psychology has come to function in present day English education, I
now turn to two sets of data that attempt to define present-day English teaching. First, I
examine a current survey in which 649 randomly selected NCTE members assessed the
qualifications of a “highly qualified” English teacher as well as the most important
knowledge, qualities, and skills important to being a “successful” English teacher. Next,
I examine excerpts from a May, 2005 focal group interview in which beginning English

teachers defined “teaching.”

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The NCTE survey (Dudley-Marling, Abt-Perkins, Sato, & Selfe, 2006) constructs
English teaching in terms that Rose would call governing the soul. That is, the English
teacher is constructed as attending to non-intellectual aspects of the self (the soul),
managing students’ subjectivity is considered central to teaching, and the expertise
mobilized in this pedagogy is expert-mediated. This becomes clear if we examine the
four survey items highlighted in the study as constituting the “highly qualified” teacher
and the “successful” teacher of English. The four areas of knowledge/skill indicated by
90%+ of survey respondents as most important considerations of English teaching were

0 “Respect for Students”
0 “Knowledge of strategies for teaching literature/reading/writing”
0 “Knowledge of strategies for promoting active learning”

0 “Knowledge of strategies for motivating students”

I want to note the contingency of this way of thinking about English teaching by
comparing and contrasting these statements (2006) with those from Chubb (1902/1913),
Breck (1912), and others from the early 20th century. Generally speaking, these lists
appear very similar: Ways of defining English teaching in both sets of data link together
strategies for teaching reading, writing, and literature to a variety of non-intellectual
outcomes, such as motivation or respect for others. In addition, the assumption that
teachers should respect students goes without saying across each of the texts. The term
“active” also suggests some sort of continuity between the “active powers” of the early
20th and “active learning” in the early 21St century. This points to the salience of

govemmentality in current English education.

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However, several discontinuities point to how psychology has provided new ways of
thinking about educational governance. In Chubb (1913), Carpenter, Baker, & Scott
(1913), and English Journal articles of the early 20th century, “mental discipline” was no
longer the key object of pedagogy but was still assumed to be a viable approach
alongside the development of the soul through the sympathies. The current conception of
the mind is enwrapped in the concept of “learning,” which suggests curricular and
pedagogical techniques outside of habit-forming discipline. The term “motivation” in
current NCTE surveys was not thinkable until later in the 20th century when it was
formulated through various psychological approaches that would be linked to schooling.
In short, the discontinuities registered between English education discourse a century
apart establish how psychology had constituted a different ground of action than was
possible when the soul was understood as residing beneath the intellect (e. g. Corson,

1895) or among the will, sympathies, subconscious, and so on (Chubb, 1913).
Education of Desire
Mindy O’Malley: I think for me teaching is not so much, you know, “Here. I
have all this knowledge. Take it, and that way you have it.” But more like
making you excited about learning in more of an independent setting. I’m just

trying to get them to do that, to take that step. On their own.

Scott Applecroft: You mean in a motivational kind of role.

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In this constellation of pedagogical knowledge and techniques, it is not enough
that students comply with requests or merely demonstrate intellectual outcomes or
academic achievement. Instead, the student of English now needs to desire to work
independently, control his or her self, and interact with others in particular ways.
Educational discourse now requires that students need to be “motivated” and have a
“positive attitude”; the current target of educational intervention is constituted by
students’ goals, fears, motives, dispositions, and attitudes (F endler, 2001). English
teachers are to create conditions in which students choose to desire to discipline
themselves according to social norms (e. g. “cooperative learning” or “inquiry” or
“problem solving”) or align their motivations with institutional imperatives, such as
working independently. The “motivation” for desiring institutional goals and normative
conduct, however, cannot be imposed through overt relations of control. Instead, the
motivations must be exercised by the self on the self.

Mindy and Scott’s words echo their predecessors at the turn of the 20”1 century.
Like Chubb (1913) and Corson (1895), their descriptions construct approaches where
indirect appeals were preferred to direct instruction. However, earlier appeals to
students’ souls were to work through the sympathies, imagination, and sensual appeals.
In some respects, current constructions of “motivation” are less about working through
the emotions and motives than upon the emotions and motives. For example, in Hulst
(1912), students’ ambitions were understood as a “lever” through which an English
teacher might mold students’ lives. While current approaches might also seek to leverage
students’ motivations, the motivations are also constituted as an object of (self-

)discipline.

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One other discontinuity deserves comment. Earlier English education texts
assumed that art and literature were invitations to desire and beauty. In addition,
the English teacher was to embody cultural, moral, and interpersonal graces that
would draw young people into intimate pedagogical relations and encourage
emulation. Current constructions of motivation as desire, however, do not
constitute secondary literature selections in terms of pleasure, sensuous, or
beautiful. Instead, the current discourse surrounding motivation is oriented
towards institutional goals, such as discussing texts and experiences in a certain
manner, working cooperatively and independently, completing instructional tasks,

and desiring academic achievement.

Autonomy and Psychological SelfiDiscipline
Scott Applecroft: “Teaching” is just trying to provide the best example possible or
counter example possible for students in like basic self control, self respect,
interactions with other people, interaction with superiors, stuff like that. When I
go to school, that’s my number one thing in my head. . . It’s to show these kids

what human beings can do with other human beings.

Erica Bolton: 1 agree with what Holly said. It’s like giving them the opportunity
to figure stuff out on their own but you can’t make them do stuff. It’s kind of
like, I don’t know, you have to invite them and give them all of the support they

need with whatever skills they need.

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The perspective on the present offered through governing the soul does not
maintain that current conceptions of autonomy or freedom are a sham. Rather, this
perspective suggests that autonomy and freedom have been linked in liberal democratic
societies to the exercise of discipline, especially self-discipline. Clear oppositions
between freedom and control, or autonomy and subordination do not take into account
relations of govemmentality, or the norms by which we govern ourselves as free people.
In other words, freedom in liberal societies has taken the form of well-regulated liberty
(Donald, 1992). Since especially the middle of the 20th century, the norms by which we
have come to understand and discipline ourselves have been primarily psychological.
They circulate across numerous institutions (popular media, schools, hospitals, clinics,

etc.) and are grafted upon various ways of understanding and acting upon the self.

Closing T houghts: Rethinking Relations of Power in Contemporary English

In this chapter, I highlighted a few lines of argument central to initial formulations
of English teaching in pedagogical discourse around the turn of the 20th century. I noted
the importance afforded the “soul” in forming not only students’ minds but their
characters. I also examined the assumption that pedagogies might secure “power” by
recognizing, and using, young people’s capacities to think, feel, choose, and desire. I
linked these assumptions to a modality of power called “govemmentality” and then
demonstrated how literature curriculum and instruction embodied indirect relations of
control. My reason for doing so was to make strange the commonplace assumption that
didactic approaches to English are necessarily and definitively more controlling than

indirect approaches. Over the last sections, I examined continuities and discontinuities

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between formulations of English around the turn of the 20‘h and 21St centuries in order to
establish two key issues for English education. First, I illustrated that curricular
statements from the early 20th and 21St centuries can share a remarkably similar
conception of governing young people through indirect approaches that I have analyzed
as govemmentality. These included ways of linking techniques of self-reflection,
responses to literary texts, and talk and writing about personal experience to certain ways
of understanding and acting upon the self. Second, I pointed to the contrast whereby
current practices of governing students’ mentalities and souls became linked to scientific

9“

knowledge of students natures” and techniques for guiding their conduct. I offer a
critical perspective on these historical (dis)continuities across a century of English
education texts by working with Nikolas Rose’s (1999) construct, “governing the soul.”

A primary objective of this genealogical study is to open spaces for debate by
denaturalizing the present. My approach in this chapter has been to consider multiple
elements and relational shifts that made possible present ways of understanding and
practicing non-didactic pedagogies in English education. In historicizing how the field of
possible actions has been structured in English education, I hope to have drawn attention
to some of the conflicts about control and imposition in teaching, inquiry, and teacher
education in the field of English.

Governmentality troubles conventional distinctions between didactic and non-
didactic approaches and the relations of authority embodied in them. For example, non-
didactic approaches such as inquiry, cooperative learning, and literary response (etc.) do

not remove impositions and thus effect new selves; rather, they are productive elements

in the constitution of new selves: “power also acts through practices that ‘make up

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subjects’ as free persons” (Rose, 1999b, p.95). That is, in speaking of ourselves in terms
of a “personal response” or through psychological concept such as possessing
“autonomy” or “self esteem,” we construct ourselves as certain kinds of subjects through
those acts of definition. Especially across the last half century, ways of governing

6‘

people’s mentalities” or “souls” in English have been linked to scientific claims to
assessing normal affect, achievement, sociality (etc.) and have normalized techniques of
governance linked to such expertise. Therefore, the ways in which teachers and students
have come to experience, understand, assess, and conduct themselves have been linked to
the circulation of expert-mediated (psy-entific) knowledge in English education
discourse. These languages and techniques afford a certain visibility to aspects of the
mind and soul; they are also normative, historically contingent, and circumscribe how
one might think about, and act upon, other people or one’s self.

Freedom and control, individuation and socialization, self-authoring and social
norms are not opposites but are linked in relations of govemmentality and circulated
through English teaching practices. This is neither good nor had. However, when
normative aspects of governmental practices are unnoticed, our ways of reasoning about
English education may (re)produce relations that work against good intentions and stated
goals. In this genealogy, I have drawn attention to some of the contingent and variable
norms linked to non-didactic approaches to English teaching so that ongoing approaches

to English in classrooms, scholarship, and teacher education might take them into

account.

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CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION

What 1 have sought to do is introduce a different way of thinking
and a form of speaking diflbrently that might help us
to understand something of what is involved in reformulating

the literacy project of English teaching (Green, 2002).

Review of the Study

In this study, I offered genealogical sketches of English as a discipline in an attempt to
denaturalize common ways of reasoning about English as a subject in secondary
classrooms, education research, and teacher education. In chapter two, I provided an
overview of genealogy and reviewed studies from other countries that could be
suggestive of pertinent genealogical inquires in the United States. In chapters three and
four, I historicized definitions of “English” (as people-making) and “teaching” (English)
in order to excavate the conditions of emergence of English and to highlight key
continuities and discontinuities in the ways in which “English” and “teaching” have been
formulated, accepted, and circulated discursively. I called into question assumed
relations between secondary English and university English and between didactic and
non-didactic approaches to English. In doing so, I tried to provoke an “untimely attitude”
towards present concepts, distinctions, or practices that appear natural (Rose, 1999b) that

might catalyze new ways of talking about English in the early 21St century.

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Key Considerations

I understand genealogy as useful for opening spaces for debate instead of providing
analytical closure. I also understand genealogy as providing local criticism instead of
global, universal, or transcendent claims; thus, I assume that my own approach is bound
to a time and a place, partial, and limited, as are the issues that I raise in this study. I
assume that English education will continue to unfold differently and largely
unpredictably since discourses, programs, and effects do not correspond to another
(Green, 2002). Thus, my approach here has been to highlight some of the various
power/knowledge relations that have coalesced in English over the past century and to
draw attention to some aspects of its emergence and transformations that may not be
treated in other accounts. This allowed me to get perspective on my current interview
data of beginning English teachers. It also has allowed me to raise larger issues related to
current concerns in English education.

One space of debate that this study can encourage is the focus of English class. My
study unearths similar findings to Peel, Patterson, & Gerlach’s (2000) comparative
histories of English in England, Australia, and the United States. They summarized the
links among their studies by claiming that secondary English is less an identifiable field
of study than a curricular site for making self-regulating persons. The self-regulating
subject has been linked to practices of freedom in democratic societies and thus has been
understood as necessary and valuable. However, this freedom is not a space outside of
relations of knowledge and authority; instead, democratic subjects have been asked to
discipline themselves in relation to power/knowledge. This appears to be a key function

of present-day English in the United States. However, the production of the self-

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regulating subject is no longer deployed as a key defense of secondary English, nor is the
self-regulating subject questioned thoroughly in English education.

Second, and related, this dissertation study contributes to a rethinking of what is
involved in approaches to subjectification—or people making—in English class. If
people-making is understood as liberating-- that is, of removing blocks or constraints——
then relations of govemmentality are not debated or scrutinized. By viewing
power/knowledge as productive, or enabling, we can better debate and critique the
normative terms, narratives, and developmental discourses by and through which we ask
students to be constructed as certain kinds of subjects. Again, I am not arguing that
English should (or could) aspire to pedagogies outside of relations of power/knowledge;
instead, I am arguing that we might better debate, invent, and critique English education
by acknowledging the power/knowledge relations operative in various approaches to
classrooms, research, and teacher education.

Third, English’s relationship to the progressive era is worthy of more scrutiny.
English education is often described as “progressive” without really defining what
progressive might mean. It worth investigating further how various discourses—-
religious, scientific, literary, business efficiency, psychological—were marshaled at the
emergence of English and how they have been recombined, dropped, and transformed at
later times and places. In particular, I have argued that combinations of various non-
literary discourses—especially mixtures and transformations of Christian pastoral care
and psychology—may provide different perspectives on how the boundaries to current
approaches came to be constructed in their present shapes. The psy-entific dimensions of

approaches to English may be important to note in age in which science is being

102

marshaled prominently in educational reform and policy. The religious and quasi-
religious dimensions of the fiinctions and techniques of English teaching may also be
quite timely given the increasing attention being given to religious disputes in domestic
and global politics.

Lastly, I have circled back to several questions about classrooms, research, and
teacher education through the course of this study:

0 What might English education look like outside of approaches premised on making
people into “people” (e. g. Patterson, 1997)?

0 This study focused on people-making in secondary classrooms; how might we
rethink the ethical and political reverberations of teacher education programs’
efforts to govern souls—that is, linking (beginning) teachers’ motivations,
dispositions, beliefs, and images of self to expert-mediated knowledges? What
relations of power/knowledge are enacted in English education? In critical
approaches to teacher education?

0 Other histories have draw attention to the “insistence of the letter” (Green, 1993).
How and why are print literacies still understood as central to people-making
when other texts establish relations of pleasure and images of self/other that may
circulate more easily across society?

0 What other knowledges and discourses may be displaced by disciplinary inquiry in
English education? To what extent do critical approaches add to this
displacement or render the discplacement of other knowledges less visible?

0 To what extent does disciplinary inquiry contribute to increased regulation of

teachers’ (and students’) lives (e. g. Popkewitz, 2002)?

103

0 So, where does this study leave me as a teacher educator? Is it generative or

limiting that I no longer ‘know what to do’?

But my project is precisely to bring it about that they ‘no longer know what to
do’, so that the acts, gestures, discourses which up until then had seemed to go
without saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous. The effect is
intentional. . .Critique does not have to be the premise of a deduction that
concludes: this then is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those
who fight. . . the subject of action through which the real is transformed (See

Foucault, 1991, p. 84)

What about Foucault?

I entered genealogy “through the back door.” That is, I did not initially set up this
study as genealogy; in fact, I had read very little Foucault before starting this study and
certainly had no intention or desire to do a Foucaultian dissertation. However, the
apparent matches between my early study data and pieces influenced by Foucault (e. g.
Popkewitz, 1994, 2002; Rose, 1989) led me to genealogy as a way of making sense of my
project. This may be surprising to some readers because Foucault is often characterized
as esoteric and removed from “practical” concerns. However, I came to Foucault
because genealogical descriptions had a very practical salience for me. Throughout my
study, I have been struck repeatedly by the uncanny analyses offered by scholars who
draw upon genealogy, especially Nikolas Rose. Constructs like govemmentality

(Foucault, 1979) and technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988) appear to have a lot to

104

offer English education; likewise, studies by Rose, Popkewitz, Fendler, and others within
these traditions strike me as complicated but eminently useful for rethinking common
experiences in English education.

So, what do I think about Foucaultian approaches now? I’m still deciding,
honestly. I have two initial reactions from the perspective of a researcher. One, I have
learned—and unleamed—a number of things about English education by approaching my
study through genealogy. The process of inquiry for me was very interesting, generative,
and challenging; I feel that I can approach common questions in the field in different
ways because of my work over the past two years. My peers also have that reaction to
my perspectives on English, literacy, and schooling. Two, I recognize that genealogy is
also disciplined. That is, reading and conducting genealogical research involves certain
commitments and beliefs (e. g. to contingency, discontinuity, heterogeneity), and it also
requires very particular strategies as a reader and writer that differ from more familiar
styles of scholarship. For example, reading a genealogy involves identifying a different
kind of research problem and anticipating rhetorical approaches—such as a writer
establishing common approaches to a problem and then setting up a very different
approach to the “same” problem or highlighting discursive transformations; without
anticipating some of these rhetorical moves, these studies can be read in undisruptive
ways or in ways that don’t draw attention to the contingency of the present.

Genealogies are also difficult to read because they cite a wide range of current
and past literatures; when any of these are unfamiliar, it seems to afford a less generative
reading. After two years, I am slowly becoming a stronger reader of these kinds of

studies and am beginning to take certain kinds of perspectives and pleasures from such

105

studies in ways that I was not able to do earlier. (In many cases, this only came after
circling through a particular article or chapter dozens of times; it took persistence.) I
have only begun to cobble together approaches to writing genealogy—it has been an
awkward and frustrating process not only to learn passive voice—which is an epistemic
function of analyses that do not claim causation and de-center actors—but to struggle
with the scale, scope, and less linear arguments characteristic of genealogy. In short, I
am reasonably confident that genealogy can open up a new range of questions, interests,
and analyses for the researcher; I am less confident that genealogy secures similar effects
for readers unless the reader has been disciplined in certain ways. This is ironic (yet
unavoidable and predicted) in accounts of genealogy that describe its anti-disciplinary

goals.

Limits of the Study

The thing that most disappoints me about this dissertation is that I somehow
managed to write five chapters without addressing the part of my inquiry that most
interested me: the religious beginnings of several literacy practices now common (in
somewhat modified form) in secondary English’s people-making practices. A lot of
archival research and analysis does not show up in these chapters. However, I am most
disappointed that I did not integrate most of my examinations of early to mid 19th century
Sunday School texts into my chapters. My future work will explore the histories of very
specific techniques as they were adapted and transformed in their movements from
Sunday Schools to Common Schools to Secondary Schools to the present. Related, I

look forward to exploring further how the emergence of English class can be located

106

among the changing relations between church and state; as Lynn said at several points,
this study could use actually use the word that schools have used to teach prefixes and
suffixes: “antidisestablishmentarianism.” At another time, I may be able to develop an
argument tracing how schools, and English, may be implicated in news of establishing
state-church links.

This study was also limited by my interview data. I relied primarily upon
definitions of several terms: English, teaching, students, schools, and literacy. However,
if I had anticipated an eventual genealogical analysis, I could have collected more useful
data by using more follow-up questions related to key issues in this study, including
asking participants more about the self-regulating subject, how they understand the place
of literature in classrooms, and so on. I did not ask these kinds of questions because my
study was not set up around an interest in subjectivity, the constitutive role of
psychology, and so; it was a very open-ended study. However, to examine these issues
more comprehensively, I might be more intentional in directing a study towards issues
that arose here.

Another limit here is my use of beginning English teachers from a particular
program. I might be able to tackle different kinds of programs by drawing upon other
data sets, such as large-scale survey data. At the same time, I have grown more confident
that this study addresses a certain style of thinking about secondary teaching that is not
restricted to beginning teachers, certain personalities, or to graduates of one teacher
education program. As I began working with concepts like “alchemy” and “governing
the soul” over the past 18 to 24 months, I have often noted a range of teachers talking

very similarly to my five participants.

107

Here are a few examples. Last summer (2005), I taught a cuniculum master’s
course to a mix of elementary and secondary teachers from across school subjects. As we
explored curriculum in its moral, political, economic, and social contexts, participants
identified an absence across readings. That is, the course readings did not recognize or
address the “social stuff ’ (e. g. cooperating with others, respecting others, managing one’s
emotions, being “motivated”) that was central to how they understood teaching and
themselves as teachers. “Social stuff” again was not just classroom management; it
involved what they understood as both personal and social (trans- or re-)formation that
didn’t fit clearly into (for example) the multiple purposes of education or curriculum
varieties we explored in the course. Similarly, in an on-line teacher inquiry course in fall,
2005, not one of twenty-five projects dealt at all with questions of academic disciplines;
instead, projects dealt with “social issues” (motivation, attitudes, self-esteem, personal
goals, etc.), ways of understanding students (ADHD, learning styles, at risk, “emotionally
impaired,” etc.), and techniques for helping students to desire cooperative learning and
self-regulatory behaviors. [They also addressed changing teacher-parent relations, which
is a recent transformation in educational discourses (e. g. see Fendler, 1998) that was not
as prominent in my study as I had assumed it might be.]

Across several meetings with local teachers as part of my association with
Teachers for a New Era, we interviewed and met with many veteran teachers; again, main
topics of concern were about “social stuff” (“They [beginning teachers] need to
understand ‘middle schoolers’.) creating a teacher persona conducive to certain kinds of
activity in the classroom (aka “They don’t how to develop relations with the kids?!”), or

about “content” that had nothing to do with disciplinary majors (aka “They [teacher

108

candidates] don’t know grammar?”; “They haven’t read what we read?!”). These kinds
of responses appeared related to the concepts of alchemy (Popkewitz, 2002) and
governing the soul (Rose, 1991a) that I introduced in my chapters. Veteran teachers were
not concerned with subject specific standards created by collaborations of disciplinary
faculty and college of education faculty; however, they were concerned that teachers
could relate to kids, understood “children” or “adolescents” or “middle schoolers,” and
create conditions in which students would be motivated to meet institutional goals and to
govern themselves inside and outside of school.

During my job interviews this spring, I remember one particularly salient
moment. I had just finished a research talk in which I was criticized aggressively by a
faculty person who claimed that my study was only about beginning teachers, who are
always concerned about classroom management. Immediately following my job talk, I
met for two hours with fifteen veteran English teachers, administrators, and a curriculum
specialist at the local school. As soon as my faculty host left the high school with me, he
tugged at my sleeve and said: “[Expletive]! For two hours, they [the veteran English
teachers] were saying exactly the same things that you talked about in your job talkl?”

Again, my argument in this study was historical; I make no claims that my
interview data were either representative or not representative; instead, I was just tracing
the conditions of possibility for certain ways of reasoning in English education. I was not
analyzing the interview transcripts to find out what they “really” mean. At the same
time, the discussions I historicize here have been the rule, not the exception, in my
interactions with teachers over the past several years. They were also common in my

own experiences as a middle school teacher. Throughout the study, I haven’t been

109

concerned that I was examining an obscure line of reasoning; however, as I’ve heard
elementary teachers and high school math and science teachers echo many thoughts from
my study, I have often wondered: Does English have a literacy project of its own?
(Green, 2002). That is, what is it that English does that is distinctive and different than

other school subjects?

Future Directions

This study has helped plot some of my own future directions. I look forward to
using more of my gigantic data set to make more nuanced arguments about contemporary
English education. I have additional interview data and artifacts that can allow me to
hone in on issues raised in the comparatively broad strokes of this project. My next
writing from this data set will examine a specific classroom practice as instantiating
people making. This will allow me to draw attention to how relations of
power/knowledge function in a common approach to present-day English teaching. This
data set, and a range of relatively new analytical tools, will support additional studies.

I will also write non-genealogical studies from this data. This study affords some
perspective on current fiscal crises in education and on teacher attrition. Each of these
participants was a well regarded graduate of a nationally recognized teacher education
program; each of them was amenable to working in a range of schools. All five
eventually found teaching jobs in the year after their teaching internships; however, only
Celia Brett had a full-time, full-benefits position in secondary English that started at the
beginning of the 2004-2005 school year. Holly taught high school English/joumalism for

an entire year but did not receive health benefits; Erica, Mindy, and Scott combined

110

various substitute teaching and service jobs until receiving long-term substitute positions
in English (Erica, Scott) and a position in a for-profit alternative school (Mindy). The
stories of their job searches and early careers are instructive towards current concerns
about staffing schools with highly qualified teachers in an era of fiscal change, in a state
of demographic flux.

Additionally—but not unrelated—this study can be extended as a study of teacher
attrition. After one year of occupational and financial instability, Erica seems secure in
her secondary English position. Holly left English teaching after one year to go to
graduate school in a field outside of education. Celia left English teaching afier two
years to pursue advanced graduate study in education. Scott and Mindy—who married
during the study—are in tenuous situations. Scott has been pink-slipped due to a budget
crisis in his current school district; his job will likely be eliminated for next year, and he
was already hesitant about continuing in his current position—his second school district
in two years. Mindy found a long-term substitute position in high school English for the
entire 2005—2006 school year; however, she was removed from the position mid-year, so
she would not qualify for full benefits. (She was replaced by a new long-term substitute
in January.) Like Scott, her future plans are muddled. Again, these stories have wider
implications.

Lastly, I am interested in studying other data sets that explore various techniques
of “people making” through literacy practices both inside and outside of schools. These
studies could be approached historically or socio-culturally. I remain interested in how
literacy is used to construct certain kinds of selves, whether that’s in an English

classroom, cultural group, parent-child interactions in a home school setting, etc. I find

111

these practices both important and dangerous, and I hope to have a better sense of the
range of selves understood to be formed through various practices of expressive and

reflective reading and writing practices.

112

END NOTES

 

' All pseudonyms. I met participants in 2002 when I was a teaching assistant in their university methods
courses. In a sociocultural study, it would be crucial to provide more background information on
participants and their teaching contexts; however, genealogy decenters subjects—that is, it investigates the
kinds of reasoning marshaled within definitions of English and accounts for the social relations that govern
such reasoning. In other words, my analyses and claims are not about Scott, Celia, Mindy, Erica, or Holly,
nor is they about their particular teaching assignments—it is about the relations that govern their definitions
of English teaching. Since my focus here is on the reasoning deployed within interviews—and not on the
subjects “themselves”——I do not elaborate upon this background data because it is not relevant to my
project.

‘ I note here multiple dates for Chubb (1902/1913) and for Carpenter, Baker, & Scott (1903/1913) to signal
that the texts first appeared in 1902-1903; however, I quote the 1913 editions across the paper. I assume
that the same edition of the text was reprinted frequently through the 19203, but I was unable to compare
multiple editions to note if pagination was the same across printings or to verify that the texts were changed
little, if at all, across three decades of reprinting. Thus, I would encourage readers to assume that
definitions of English in 1913 were also thinkable in 1902 and 1903.

3 The links between education, social science, and other professional knowledges (e. g. business and
management) in the late 19lh century are well established in standard histories of education, such as
Kliebard (1986), Tyack (1986), and Cremin (1989), among others. My analysis of pedagogical texts of this
time suggest that claims made for English class moved with the larger trend around the turn of the 20'h
century to draw upon scientific expertise in designing curricula and instruction. While other genealogies
have not specifically examined the relations among English teaching and scientific and administrative
discourses, other Foucaultian histories give extensive treatment to the constitutive relations among science,
business efficiency, and schooling around this time. I do not have space here to give this a full treatment.
Thus, readers interested in a comprehensive treatment of this shift should consult Hacking (1986), Rose
(1999a, 1999b) for histories of statistics and the human sciences and their constitutive relations with
governing people. See Popkewitz (1991) for accounts of the formation of school subjects and secondary
curricula during this time.

4 Common accounts of knowledge-making in English and composition include North (1987) and Graff
(1987). See Shumway & Dionne (2002) for a critical-historical account ofthe disciplinarity of English
studies.

5 In my later work, I will take up the relations among Sunday Schools, Elementary Schools, and Secondary
School English. For an account for these transformations in England and Australia, see Hunter (1988).

The link between secondary English and Sunday Schools has not been established in US research.
However. the link between Sunday Schools ( as "precursor to and pioneer of’) was assumed in the 19
century by the educational refomred Henry Barnard. Links between the Sunday School and Common
School have been approached in several texts. including Tyack (1986), MC Clellan (1999). and Kennedy
(1966)

6 See for example, Fitch, Joshua G. (184-). Good secondary sources on the 19'“ century Sunday School
include Lacquer ( 1976) and Kemiedy (1966).

' I met with fixe beginning English teachers" Scott Applecroft. Erica Bolton. Celia Brett. Mindy O’Malley.
and Holly Robison (pseudonyms)—— across 20113-2005 to discuss their experiences as beginning English
teachers. Here I cite excerpts from a discussion in ultich they defined "teaching" at 3 Ma}. 2005 focal
lllIL’I'\ 16“.

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