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ABSTRACT

THE RESPONSE TO LITERATURE:
A NEW CURRICULUM

By

Ronald A. Santora

The teaching of literature in the public schools, as
well as the teaching of English in general, has changed
considerably in the past fifteen years. The more notable
influences on English pedagogy include the demise of pro-
gressive education, the academic curricular reform.move-
ment of the 1960's, and the humanistic free-school
"revolution" of the last several years. This study traces
the changes in and the development of literature curriculum
and theories about teaching literature from the Basic
Issues Conference of 1958 to the present day and concen-
trates specifically on the Response to Literature theory
which emerged from.the joint Anglo-American Seminar on the

teaching and learning of English held at Dartmouth College

in 1966°

Ronald A. Santora

Instead of concentrating on set book lists, the
study of genre, literary form and structure, or constructing
curriculums about universal literary themes, topics and
motifs, the Response to Literature theory posits that the
most central aspect of the study of literature (k - 12) is
the direct relationship which exists between the portrayal
of human experience in fiction and poetry and the personal
real-life experiences of each individual student--the
"That's Me!" response to stories. The Dartmouth Conference
proposed, therefore, that instead of attempting to teach
for specific concepts, themes or ideas, students be given
the opportunity to become personally involved with liter-
ature on an experiential and creative basis, responding to
the emotional and intellectual facets of fiction and poetry
in authentic, activity-centered ways: through dramatic
improvisation, oral discourse, non-verbal improvisation,
art work, film, collage, etc° This aspect of the literature
curriculum is developed and explored in this study under the
rubric, the productive mode of teaching literature, and
focuses on the process of literary response rather than on
the products of literary analysis. But insofar as each
teacher of English has the obligation to introduce stories

and poems into the classroom, a literature curriculum must

Ronald A. Santora

at the same time be receptively-oriented. Thus the new

 

Response to Literature curriculum to emerge from this study
suggests that a literature curriculum.within the English
classroom be centered on doing literature, productively, so
that these activities will generate the need within students
to want to read more literature (the receptive mode) which,
when responded to actively and experientially, creates once
again a productive level of operation with its attendant
desire to explore more fiction receptively, and so forth.
Finally, a Response to Literature curriculum does
not abrogate its responsibility to teach form. But this
too is seen as a personally engaging, activity-centered
process. Throughout, a Response to Literature curriculum
encourages the writing of literature--"storying"--as well
as the reading of literature. Simply, storying means that
students be given the opportunity to create fictions from
the very stuff of their own lives and experiences. Since
language is inevitably about itself, in the process of
creating stories themselves, students will gradually come
to an understanding of the structure of literature in the
very complex and intimate ways that professional authors

themselves do.

THE RESPONSE TO LITERATURE:

A NEW CURRICULUM

By

Ronald A? Santora

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

‘ 1972

For Judy, Increase, Agatha and Farley

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the English Department at Michigan
State University for allowing me the freedom.to pursue my
own interests within the field of English and for all the
Opportunities, advice and direction the department provided
in helping shape my graduate school experience.

I am especially indebted to Professors Stephen Judy
and Alan M. Hollingsworth for introducing me to the fields
of English Education and the teaching of reading, and to
Professors E. F. Carlisle and Jay Ludwig for their innova-
tive ideas about teaching writing and literature.

But perhaps no one is more deserving of my gratitude
than my very good friend, Professor Patrick L. Courts, who

had faith in me when I had very little within myself.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. THE ACADEMIC REFORM MOVEMENT, STRUCTURE-
CENTEREDNESS AND THE LITERATURE CURRICULUM . 1

CHAPTER II. STUDENT-CENTEREDNESS AND THE LITERATURE
CU RRI CU LUM O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 7 8

CHAPTER III. THE DARTMOUTH CONFERENCE AND THE
RESPONSE TO LITERATURE . . . . . . o o . . 146

CHAPTER IV. THE NEW CURRICULUM: LITERATURE
PRODUCED AND RECEIVED O O I O O O O O O O O 195

CHAPTER V. A POSSIBLE STUDENT-CENTERED RESPONSE TO
LITERATURE CURRICULUM . . . . . . . . . . . 211

FOOTNOTES 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 278

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . o . . . . o . . . . . . . . . . 292

iv

Language is learned in operation,
not by dummy runs.

John Dixon
Growth Through English

Men make some things to serve a purpose,

other things simply to please themselves.

Literature is a construct of the latter
kind.

James Britton
The Response to Literature

CHAPTER I

THE ACADEMIC REFORMLMDVEMENT, STRUCTURE-CENTEREDNESS

AND THE LITERATURE CURRICULUM

. . . coming partly through the Symbolist
aesthetic . . . the poem became a set of
relations within itself, a fascinating
clockworks that told no time.

Benjamin DeMott
The Response to Literature

In an article written for the NASSP Bulletin in 1967
James E. Miller, Jr. identified three major stages in the
development of the English curriculum.over the past one
hundred years: the authoritarian, the progressive, and the
academic.1 Miller characterized the first of these stages
by "the arid classicism.and rote learning of the Nineteenth
Century"; the second with the Progressive Mavement of the
1920's and 1930's, indiscriminate permissiveness and social
adjustment; and the third influence on the curriculum
amounted to what Miller referred to as "a revolution in our

1

schools" and dates "for convenience sake" from Russia's
launching of Sputnik in October, 1957. Miller aptly label-
led this stage "the academic" and saw it characterized by a
distinct emphasis on teaching valid subject matter and
curriculum reform:

In this stage we have seen the introduction of the
new math, the new physics, and the new English in our
schools, together with emphasis on intellectual group-
ing or tracking to identify and challenge the intel-
lectually gifted--all rather much under the supervision
of the academic rather than the education establish-
ment, and all somewhat a reaction to the academically
thin curricula of the sc ools awash in back eddies of
extremist progressivism.

It was this academic stage that gave rise to the great
curriculum.reform.movement which produced The New English.
From 1958 to 1968 a series of federally supported Cur-
riculum Development Centers were established at major
universities across the United States. These Centers
created new theories and methodologies for the teaching of
English and provided the schools with a multiplicity of rich
curricular materials. Because this academic stage
influenced English teaching to a significant extent in the
last decade and will, quite clearly, continue to influence

the English curriculum.throughout the 1970's, much of this

chapter will be devoted to a descriptive analysis of this

reform.movement.

Whngeform English?

Even before Sputnik I had focused the attention of
the nation on the need for excellence in education in a
modern society, the English Teaching Profession had for
quite some time felt the need to liberate itself from the
"back eddies of extremist progressivism," for after World
War II the English curriculum had quite clearly dissipated
to a point where it had neither pr0per direction nor valid
substance.3

The literature component of the English curriculum
during the 1950's was perhaps the most unwieldy and
unmanageable. There were two prevailing philosophies about
how literature should function in the schools. In one
respect, literature was frequently taught as a means to
"social adjustment." Teachers attempted to focus squarely
on the individual interests of their students. Through
literature and books, students were to find meaning in
terms of their own lives and gain valuable insights into
the nature of their own personalities and the nature of the

society in which they lived. As a result almost any book

could be included in the curriculum, at any point, and

defended on an individual basis. Consequently reading-
interest-book-lists became papular and "reading ladders"
were created to move students a step at a time through ever
more rewarding experiences.4 ‘But-these were loosely
arranged and provided no real direction for teaching because
there was no coherent theoretical basis underlying these
reading-interest guides. At the same time, literature was
intended to "broaden one's horizens" and "expand percep-
tions" about other subjects. Under this notion, literature
‘was frequently taught as a tool for gaining insight into
some other academic area such as social justice, race
relations, or democracy.S Thus, any humane or liberating
subject in history or the social sciences could be included
in the literature curriculum. In addition English classes
were still expected to teach reading, writing, and speaking,
and these activities, because of the general "life-
adjustment" phiIOSOphy, were often intermixed with many
practical interest matters like "bread and butter" letter
writing, telephoning etiquette, study habits, and job
interviewing.

In order to strengthen the English curriculum in
individual schools and provide a sense of direction within

the classroom, many school systems began to rely heavily on

the English textbook and workbook. But these provided
little more than busy-work activities. The workbooks con-
tained numerous drills and exercises in grammar and usage
and the textbooks in literature contained anthologized
snippets of poetry and prose from.the masters of American
and British Literature. No matter what his ability or
background, the average student at the time could only find
these texts burdensome and boring.6 Michael Shugrue, a
scholar and teacher who has been intimately connected with
the changes in the teaching of English for many years
comments on the textbook problem.of the 1950's from his
excellent volume, English in a Decade of Change:
If textbooks in English had been outstanding, the
plight of the English classroom.would have been less
precarious. Well-intentioned authors, however, had
ignored the linguistic and critical discoveries of
the scholarly community, scrupulously avoided the
dangers of controversy and censorship, and produced
instead, textbooks for the school which were out-
moded, timid, and intellectually unsatisfactory.
To further complicate the matter, there was also at the
time an alarming shortage of qualified English teachers,
and as more and more students entered and stayed in school

after World'War II, many administrators and principals,

‘whether they knew better or not, began to rely on the

concept that "anybody can teach English." Consequently,
gym teachers, history teachers and guidance counselors
found themselves instructing English classes. The result
was catastrophic, for these individuals were even less
knowledgeable than the regular teachers about what the
English curriculum did and did not contain, and to make
matters worse, these people had little, if any, expertise
in the special pedagogical skills necessary to teach
English effectively. Bewildered and confused, these sub-
stitutes relied very heavily on the textbooks and reading
ladders to provide their students with both "content" and
"direction."8

Finally in 1963 the textbook problem peaked. In
that year James J. Lynch and Bertrand Evans published their
influential and devastating study: High School English
Textbooks: A Critical Examination. This volume presented
detailed evidence that English textbooks and literature
anthologies were seriously inadequate. Lynch and Evans
spoke for many in the profeSsion whose objections to the
"textbook syndrome" had been increasing since the late
1950's. They noted that the most popular texts gave a
topic "essentially the same treatment in any volume of any

particular series that is given in the other volumes of

that series"; and they further charged that Progressive
Education had introduced polite speech, social behavior,
and motivational behavior into so many English textbooks
and classrooms, it was readily apparent that "the subject
of English had lost its way in a wilderness of things, has
become intolerably amorphous, unteachable, and undeserving

of anyone's respect as a legitimate and discrete school

subject."9

The frustration at the time was perhaps no better
expressed than by J. N. Hook when he said in 1962 that in

the English teaching profession:

. . . a sequentially planned curriculum is the only
way out of the present disorder, the mess, the chaos,
. . . in some schools essentially the same instruction
in grammar is repeated every year from grade six or
seven through twelve; that other schools present
grammar piecemeal and incoherently; and that some
schools teach principles . . . in grade seven and
others never . . . a few schools have a planned
sequence for improving student's writing, but that
most assign them theme topics at random. And . . .
in literature The Rime of the Ancient Mariner may be
found anywhere from.grade seven to grade twelve, (and
that) literature before grade seven is likely to be a
hodge podge of barely related snippets.

It was obvious that the philosophies, textbooks and reading
designs of the late 1950's and early 1960's were totally

unsatisfactory as curriculum guides, and that neither

English teachers themselves nor the NCTE could put together
a satisfactory curriculum for English. Solid direction was
needed in the profession and the logical place to look for
such help would be to the universities and the research
centers; and although throughout the 1950's college pro-
fessors of English had managed to maintain their aloofness
from the schools, it was very apparent at the time that the
profession's national leaders in universities throughout
the country could no longer ignore the pleas of the public

schools for reform of the English Curriculum.11

The Basic Issues Conference

Throughout 1958--1ess than a year after Sputnikr-a
group of twenty-eight national leaders in the teaching of
English, representing such organizations as The American
Studies Association, The College English Association, The
Modern Language Association, and the National Council of
Teachers of English, held a series of four meetings in
New York City supported by the Ford Foundation in order to
re-examine the whole problem.of teaching English from the
elementary grades through graduate school.12 The partici-
pants attempted to come to a clear formulation of the

"basic issues" confronting the profession by raising such

questions as what the subject matter of English might be,
how it could be articulated, and how the profession should
go about teaching it. In the course of four conferences,
the participants agreed upon thirty-five basic issues
facing English teachers which centered about the problems
of teacher preparation, the role of English in American
society, the need for financial support for basic research,

and curriculum.reform. While few if any solutions to these

 

problems resulted from the meetings, the overall drift of

. the discussions and the issues themselves seemed to point in

one basic direction: look to the structure of English

itself for answers.13*
The problem of "what to do about the curriculum"

particularly shared this attitude. The participants agreed

that whatever the final shape of the English curriculum it

should be (1) centered about the tripod of language,

 

*The notion that English itself--language and liter-
ature-~should serve as the core of instruction became firmly
established over the next several years. The 1965 Freedom
and Discipline Report in English of the Commission on Eng-
lish concluded that "language, primarily the English langu-
age, constitutes the core of the subject" and that "the
study and use of the English langzage is the prOper con-
tent of the English Curriculum.” See discussion of the
Oregon Literature Curriculum in a subsequent section of
this chapter.

10

literature, and composition, (2) "beefed up" and content-
structure-oriented, and (3) both sequential and cumulative
in design. The second of the Thirty-Five Basic Issues
read:
Can basic programs in English be devised that are

sequential and cumulative from kindergarten through

the graduate school? Can agreement be reached upon

a body of knowledge and set of skills as standard at

certain points in the curriculum, making due allow-

ance for flexibility of planning, individual differ-

ences, and patterns of growth?1

The conference, therefore, firmly believed that a

sequential and cumulative curriculum.for English was an
absolute necessity, and that such a curriculum could not
be formulated unless there existed wide agreement on a body
of knowledge and a set of skills which would be standard
and fixed at certain points in the sequence. In short, the
profession sought a solid pedagogical basis about which to
structure its content: language, literature, and composi-
tion. While the problem was ultimately to prove vastly
more complicated than anyone realized at the time, the Basic
Issues Conference had succeeded in paving the way for the
development of a curriculum with clearer goals and fewer of

the peripheral activities that had cluttered the curricu-

lums of the 1950's.16

11

The New Science and the New English

As the spirit for reform of the English curriculum
gained momentum.and attracted widespread support throughout
the profession, Jerome Bruner, an eminent psychologist and
educator, published a small volume in 1960 entitled The
Process of Education. Bruner's book created a tremendous
stir in the ranks of those directly involved with the cur-
riculum reform movement. Bruner's thesis was simple.
Every subject, he asserted, has its own unique structure,
and the easiest and most effective way to learn a subject
was to grasp its structure by coming to understand the
basic, underlying and fundamental principles and concepts
of a particular discipline; intuiting, that is, the.
"relationships" that exist between concepts, facts and
ideas--between the parts of a subject and its conceptual
entirety.17 Learning the structure of a subject, Bruner
maintained, would then allow other things to be related to
it meaningfully, in organized, intellectually powerful
schemas. Thus, teaching structure would in fact promote
-the transfer of learning-~or what Bruner termed "the
ability to learn how to learn"; for once an abstract prin-
ciple was understood, then other like problems could be

solved, on a more complex basis, using the very same

12

principles and strategies:

The teaching and learning of structure, rather than
simply the mastery of facts and techniques, is at the
center of the classic problem of transfer. . . . If

earlier learning is

to render later learning easier,

it must do so by providing a general picture in terms
of which the relations between things encountered
earlier and later are made as clear as possible. . . .
(and) the basic ideas that lie at the heart of all
science and mathematics and the basic themes that
give form to life and literature are as simple as

they are powerful.

To be in command of these basic

ideas, to use them effectively, requires a continual
deepening of one's understanding of them that comes
from learning to use them.in progressively more com-
plex forms. . . . A curriculum as it deve10ps
(therefore) should revisit these basic ideas repeat-
edly, building upon them until the student has
graspfg the full formal apparatus that goes with

them.

Rather than insisting, therefore, on the mastery of facts

and techniques as the best way to make the materials

students are exposed to

instead, advocated what

lenging teaching method:

Drawing on the research
tained that the mastery
not only a knowledge of

the natural cultivation

count in their thinking, Bruner,

was at the time a new and chal-
inductive-discovery learning.

of Piaget and others, Bruner main-k

ofva subject's structure involved

fundamental principles, but also

of an attitude toward learning and

inquiry, toward guessing and hunches, toward the possibility

of solving problems and

discovering knowledge on one's own:

13

Just as a physicist has certain attitudes about the'
ultimate orderliness of nature and a conviction that
order can be discovered, so a young physics student
needs some working version of these attitudes if he is
to organize his learning in such a way as to make what
he learns usable and meaningful in his thinking. To
instill such attitudes by teaching requires something
more than the mere presentation of fundamental ideas.
. . . but it would seem that an important ingredient
is a sense of excitement about discovery--discovery of
regularities about previously unrecognized relations
and similarities between ideas, with a resulting sense
of self-confidence in one's abilities. Various peOple
who have worked on curricula in science and mathe-
matics have urged that it is possible to present the
fundamental structure of a discipline in such a way as
to preserve some of the exciting sequences that lead a
student to discover for himself.1 '

Bruner, therefore, called for the best minds in every dis-
cipline to be put to work to design a curriculum in which
the method of discovery of general principles would lead to
' progressively more difficult problems, in which what is
learned in the early grades has relevance for later learn-
ing, and in which students become more actively alert to
how things affect or are connected with each otherén Bruner
defended teaching the student "initially not a skill but a
,general idea" which could then be used as a basis for
recognizing "subsequent problems as special cases of the
iidea originally mastered."21
The Process of Education was so immensely popular

primarily because it tersely articulated for the entire

l4

academic community ideas and beliefs that had been slowly
developing for some time. Simply, Bruner confirmed what
everyone wanted to hear. He suggested that education be
scientifically based: to impart to young pe0ple "a sense
of the substance and method of science"; that it be
content-centered: the goal of education is "to present
subject matter effectively-~that is with due regard not
only for coverage but also for structure"; and finally that

' While Bruner real-

it cultivate "intellectual excellence.’
ized, of course, that good teaching and proper education
must speak for the less able student as well as for the
more gifted one: "if all students are helped to the full
utilization of their intellectual powers, we will have a
better chance of surviving as a democracy in an age of
enormous technological and social complexity";22 it is
clear nonetheless that The Process of Education considered
the naturally bright student academia's most valued pos-
session: "The top quarter of public school students, from
which we must draw intellectual leadership in the next
generation, is perhaps the group most neglected by our
'schools in the recent past."23 It was quite obvious to

most educators at the time, therefore, that schools were to

provide challenging, problem-solving opportunities for the

15

better than average student to forge ahead in his own intel-
lectual development.

These concepts of "basic structure" and "transfer"
and "discovery" seemed to speak directly to the questions
abOut the shape of the English curriculum raised at the
Basic Issues Conference. Besides being intellectually
exciting and academically solid, Bruner's endorsement of the
inductive "spiral" curriculums-for which his book is best
known--offered a positive framework for the kind of
direction and sequence the English teaching profession had
been seeking.24 In English in a Decade of Change, Michael
Shugrue assesses the impact the Brunerian hypothesis had on
the English curriculum reform.movement:

Bruner touched upon matters which no one designing

an English curriculum.can afford to ignore. Of
obvious importance are Bruner's convictions that what
is taught be worth teaching, that repetition and the
accumulation of facts do not constitute a satisfactory
curriculum.in any subject, that the discovery method
. . . must be fostered in the classroom, that the
child's intuitive powers must be developed in his
school experiences, and that media and technological
advances must be used appropriately in the classroom
to allow the teacher to accomplish more effectively

his task as communicator, model, and identification
figurgsthrough the use of a wide variety of devices.

Using Bruner's thesis, it seemed obvious, then, that English

16

teachers ought first to agree upon what constituted the
structure of English and then develop a sequentially spiral
curriculum based on that structure. In short, by adhering
to the structural tripod advanced at the Basic Issues
Conference, it was believed that students ought to be
taught in a coherent manner the basic structure of the
English language (the various grammars), the basic structure
of literature (genre, form and technique), and the basic
structure of composition (the various rhetorics). As
students mastered these structure, they would then be in a
position to transfer this conceptual knowledge progressively
to other similar but more complex "contents." By studying
the form of a particular short story in grade six, for
example, students ought then to be able to apply this know-
ledge of structure to a more complex story in grade seven,
and so on from grade level to grade level and from literary
experience to literary experience. And in fact, Bruner
himself emphatically asserted that literature as well as
the sciences and social sciences could be taught with an
emphasis upon the intuitive grasp of ideas and upon the use
of basic ideas because "intellectual activity anywhere is
the same, whether at the frontier of knowledge or in a

third grade classroom":

17

If it is granted, for example, that it is desirable
to give children an awareness of the meaning of human
tragedy and a sense of compassion for it, is it not
possible at the earliest appropriate age to teach the
literature of tragedy in a manner that illuminates
but does not threaten? There are many possible ways
to begin: through a retelling of the great myths,
through the use of children's classics, through pre-
sentation of and commentary on selected films that
have proved themselves. Precisely what kinds of
materials should be used at what age with.what effect
is a subject for research--research of several kinds.

The English teaching profession was indeed quick to
endorse the Brunerian hypothesis. Two years after the
publication of The Process of Education (in 1962) J. N.
Hook, then Executive Secretary of the NCTE, published an
article in the English Journal entitled, "If a Curriculum
is to be Sequential" in which he affirmed that Bruner had
at last freed the English curriculum from its past history
of lock-step repetition and confusion. The new English
curriculum, Hook said, ought to pursue not a "brick by
brick" or "step by step" paradigm, but rather ought to be
in the shape of a "spiral cone" to allow for sequential
structuring and to provide, at the same time, for the vary-
ing rates at which different children develop:

The analogy of a spiral cone may be more helpful to
curriculum makers than the more frequent analogy of

an assembly line or that of piling block upon block.
A spiral covers the same ground repetitively but on

18

successively higher levels. A spiral in the shape of
a cone, with the point at the bottom, likewise covers
much of the same ground, again at steadily higher
levels, but it also broadens as it ascends. The image
is a good one to remember, for it helps us to recall
three things: (a) As I have said, much repetition or
review is necessary, but preferably not in the same
words, in the same contexts, or by means of the same
devices. (b) The work of each year should be on a
higher level than that of the preceding year. (c) The
coverage should broaden each year--should include
materials and skills and concepts not previously
taught.

If curriculum.makers accept the spiral cone analogy,
they will select for each ring of the spiral those
skills, concepts, and materials that experience has
shown can be mastered and put to use by children of
average ability at each level. They will provide each
year for reiterative but varied practice of basic
skills. The slower pupils will be thought of as moving
upward along the inner part, the smaller diameter, of
the ring, and the abler ones as moving upward along the
outer edge, the perhaps much larger diameter.

In the following year (1963) James Squire, Hook's
successor to the Executive Secretaryship of the NCTE, com-
mitted the entire profession to the establishment of a
sequential curriculum for English based on Bruner's thesis.
In an address to the annual meeting of the MLA in New York
City that year, Squire pronounced:

I accept Jerome Bruner's assumption that he who
knows a subject most deeply knows best the great and
simple structuring ideas around which a curriculum
may be organized. I believe that basic insights into
the nature of language, literature, and composition

must emerge from.the study of informed scholars. And
I rejoice in the possibility that the new interest of

19

college English deparhments in the teaching of English
may lead to revolutionary changes in thg educational
enterprise as predicted by Mr. Bruner.2
But research was already underway. The English profession
had finally succeeded in persuading the United States Con-

gress to fund the research and development of a new cur-

riculum for English.

Project English

Early in 1961 the NCTE published The National
Interest and the Teaching_of English. This document, a
directoutgrowth of the Basic Issues Conference, made a
forceful argument for the importance of English in the
schools, supported the tripod of language, literature and
composition, and strongly urged the government to support
basic research in English.29 Simultaneous with the pub-
lication of this report J. N. Hook publicly exhorted Con-
gress to supply funds for improvement in the instruction of
English just as Congress had provided funds for the study of
science, math and foreign languages in 1958 under the
National Defense EducationAct.3O Towards the end of the
year Sterling McMurrin, then head of the Office of Education
in the Kennedy Administration, gave into these demands and

threw his support behind both the NCTE and the MLA in their

20

request for federal support: in November Congress gave
English the money to finance fourteen Curriculum Study
Centers. This appropriation was called Project English and
six Curriculum Centers were funded by April, 1962:
Carnegie-Mellon University, Northwestern University, the
University of Nebraska, and the University of Oregon.31 In
1963 additional Curriculum Study Centers were established

at Florida State University, the University of Georgia, the
Teacher's College of Columbia University, and the University
of Wisconsin; and a year later with the addition of Indiana
University and the University of Illinois the number of
Study Centers funded had risen to twelve.32 In general,
work at these Centers was conducted by pe0ple from English,
Speech, and Linguistics rather than from Education depart-
ments; and the basic research problem was to develop an
intellectually respectable content and sequence for teaching
English.33 Thus, there was much reason for jubilation in
the profession in the early 1960's. The Federal Government
had finally recognized its obligation to the Humanities and
had, with significant amounts of money, begun a program to

improve English teaching through basic research.34

21

The Nebraska "Cone" Curriculum

Nebraska was unquestionably the most ambitious of
the Project Centers. Under the direction of Paul A. Olsen
and Frank M. Rice, Nebraska sought to deve10p and test out
in the public schools throughout the state a sequential
spiral curriculum in English from.kindergarten through the
first year of college. The researchers at Nebraska clearly
intended to imitate as perfectly as possible the Brunerian
model. The preface to the curriculum for grades 1 to 6
clearly established the goals and the rationale for the
entire project:

One who plans an elementary curriculum must first
identify the basic generalizations of the discipline;
second, represent these generalizations so that they
can be taught to children; and third, build a spiral
curriculum which covers those basic concepts in ever
greater depth, thus developing a progressively more
sophisticated understanding of them. Once introduced
in a relatively simple fashion, a concept will be
treated somewhat more intensively each time it appears.
A11 in all, the units of the curriculum intend to
expose the student repeatedly to facts and ideas that
he may use in order to proceed inductively to general
conclusions about the conventions of good literature.

In its completed form the Nebraska elementary curriculum.was
divided into seventy specific "units" for the various grade

lewels, plus two packets of ancillary materials: Poetry for

the Elementary Grades and Langpage Explorations for the

22

Elementapy Grades. All the units suggested for the elemen-
tary level attempted to arrange literary pieces in a spiral
sequence to develop concepts that would be re-introduced

into the curriculum at later stages on more complex levels.

The units were divided into nine groups or pseudo-genres:

folk tales fable

fanciful stories other lands and people
animal stories historical fiction
adventure stories biography

myth

The curriculum.designers made it clear that the various
stories and poems selected for each particular classifi-
cation were not chosen because they fit into one of the
nine categories; but rather, the selection committees
primarily sought works of "substantial literary merit," and
then created categories from a consideration of the unique
qualities of each separate poem and story.36 Each unit in
the elementary curriculum.also presented variations of what
the designers considered to be the four basic structural
motifs or plot patterns of children's literature: (1) a
small person's journey from home to isolation away from
home; (2) a small person's or a hero's journey from home to
a confrontation with a monster; (3) a helpless figure's

rescue from a harsh home and the miraculous creation of a

23

secure home; and (4) a conflict between a wise beast and a
foolish beast.37 In theory the Nebraska researchers felt
that repeated exposure to various forms of these four basic
plot patterns would provide children with an intuitive
understanding of "form consciousness"--that is, pupils
would come to recognize various genre distinctions, plot
similarities and differences, as well as basic underlying
themes and motifs.

In order to provide a more complete picture of the
structure of the Nebraska elementary literature curriculum,
the following pages provide an outline of all the units to
be studied at each grade level under the various genre

classifications:

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27

 

 

 

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28

From the first grade through the sixth, each vertical
series of units attempted to provide a definite progression
in the complexity of concepts presented. For instance, the
Fable units in the first two grades supposedly introduced
the child to the common devices and structural patterns of
the simplest fables. Then later in the fourth and fifth
grades, the Fable units on ancient India were intended to
offer a "more intensive, more analytical study of the class-

ical fable form.’ And finally, the series culminated in

 

the sixth grade with a study of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind
in the Willows, characterized by the curriculum staff as
"the epic fable in a humorous, satiric, allegorical repre-
sentation."39 Similarly, as the chart indicates, the
sequence of units on the Folk tale, beginning with the
first grade, presented familiar Folk tales "all sharing
characteristics stemming from.their common origin in the

body of oral folk traditions":

The first grade unit concentrates on the oral and
repetitive features of the folk tale; the second grade
unit exhibits common plot patterns in a series of
stories; and the third grade unit introduces the
student to the magical world of fairy-land and reviews
the common structural motifs of folk literature; the
fourth grade unit and one fifth grade unit examine the
tall tale, the most typical form of American folk
literature.

29

Then in the succeeding grades these folk units attempted to
build upon the knowledge accumulated in all the preceding
lessons. The fifth and sixth grades, therefore, begin with
an investigation of the symbolic and allegorical meanings

"that the devices common to all folk literature tend to

express."41

Not only was the Nebraska curriculum designed to
fuse together internally from.grades one to six, but it was
also intended to connect viably with the junior and senior

high school programs as well:

As the study of form which characteristically uses
the oblique perspective of satire, symbolism, and
allegory, the series on the fable points to many other
units concerned with other levels of meaning and with
simple symbolism (for example, the grade 5 unit, Th2
Door in the Wall). Besides coordinating with other
elementary units in an informal investigation of
literary forms, expressions, and meanings, this fourth
grade "fable" unit helps to form an important found-
ation for more analytical secondary units: units which
take up the satiric use of the fable (ninth and twelfth
grade units on satire); units which take up more soPh-
isticated Greek literature (seventh grade unit on the
classical myth, ninth grade unit on the epic, and tenth
grade unit on tragedy); and units which take up tech-
niques for attacking secondary levels of meaning
(Grade 7 unizs, The Making of Stories and The Meaning
of Stories). 2

 

 

Structurally then, the Nebraska elementary literature units

attempted to move the student from the world of children's

30

stories in two basic directions in the upper grades: first,
in the direction of heroic and mythic literature, and
second, in the direction of realistic literature and the
novel. The curriculum saw the less fully developed char-
acters of children's literature as slowly being replaced by
the subtle and carefully analyzed characters of realistic
fiction: the fairy tale which ends "and so they lived
happily ever after" as developing into mature comedy; the
adventure story replaced by the epic; and the simple fable

by such satiric fables as Animal Farm and Gulliver's

 

 

Travels. In like order, Huckleberpy Finn followed Tom

Sawyer, The Tale of Two Cities followed Children of the

 

Covered Wagon, and The Biography of Samuel Johnson followed
Willa.43
Quite obviously, then, "transfer of learning" was a

basic underlying principle of the Nebraska curriculum and

the program for the elementary grades, at least in theory,

 

did not attempt to place excessively heavy demands on the
overt analytical abilities of children. Though the early
stories were indeed intended to exemplify important prin-
ciples of literary form, the program co-ordinators insisted
that teachers were to instruct by suggestion only, by

allowing the student to gradually intuit for himself basic

31

concepts and structures:

Intellectualizing which is prematurely forced upon
students may degenerate into mere manipulation of
jargon . . . children are never (to be) asked to
interpret a story directly; they are certainly not
invited to become symbol mongers. The interpretation
which they do, they do by picturing sgages in the
action of a story and dramatizing it. 5
Simply, "exposure to" and "exploration of" excellent
children's literature was intended to produce a sufficient
intuitive understanding of basic underlying concepts: the
elements of myth, fable, folk tales, romance and adventure
stories, as well as the basic patterns of poetry--rhyme,
meter, metaphor, etc. But the actual lesson plans developed
by the Nebraska staff for the elementary grades tended to
belie these intentions. Frequently the basic "question-
discussion" format was clearly "leading," and in many
instances "form consciousness" was not only encouraged, but
specifically required, if not in the literature lessons

themselves, then in the compositional activities which

followed each literature unit in sequence.*

*Here is a typical Nebraska elementary lesson plan
for the 5th grade dealing with the mythic story of Baucis
and Philemon:

The Objectives of this unit are (1) further to
«enrich the children's background in mythology; (2) to help

32

The curriculum in the junior and senior high years,
on the other hand, abandoned any pretense about the dangers

of attempting abstract reasoning too early. The Nebraska

 

children understand that our culture is a result of the
'merging of the influences of a number of civilizations that
have preceeded ours; (3) to investigate more attempts of
ancient men to explain their environment through the
creation of myths and legends; and (4) to increase the
children's understanding and appreciation of good liter-
ature.

I. "Baucis and Philemon"

A. As preparation for the stories, explain briefly
that this unit will deal with stories about
Greek gods similar to those that the children
have heard before concerning the Greek gods and
goddesses. If the children indicate any recol-
lection of previous Greek myths, they may wish
to recall together some of the things they
already know about ancient Greece and Greek
mythology. Their discussion might touch on such
subjects as:

1. Early Greece (locate on a map) was composed
of many parts--mainland and islands--and
this explains why there were so many kings
and queens in the stories.

2. The Greeks were a very religious and civil-
ized peOple. They built temples to worship
their gods and goddesses. Some of these
buildings are still in evidence. Good pic-
tures of Greek architecture may be shown and
compared with buildings which the children
have seen.

3. In addition to the gods, there were those who
had one human and one divine parent. These
were demi-gods.

4. When the Romans conquered the Greeks they
adOpted much of the Greek culture. This

33

literature program explicitly stated that in grades 7 - 12

literature study "must be developed in special directions,

if the child is to attain anything more than mere literacy."

 

B.

explains why, in some myths, the same gods
may have different names--one is Greek and
the other Roman.

. Read or tell the story to the class, checking the

proper pronunciation of names in a good diction-
ary.

Discussion

1. What two natural phenomena does this myth
explain? (a lake and an odd formation of two
trees beside a temple)

2. The contrast between the treatment the gods
received from most of the villagers and that
which they received from.Baucis and Philemon
may remind some students of the story of Lot
and the angels in Genesis 19. The teacher
might read this story to the class and then
ask what qualities typical of Greek myth
appear in "Baucis and Philemon" that do not
appear in the story of Lot.

3. What is the first hint that the visitors are
gods? (the magical replenishing of food,
etc.)

4. Discuss the reasons for having poor peOple be
hospitable in the myth. (the greater value
of generosity when there is little to spare,
the effect of transforming a cottage into a
temple, the Greek distrust of pride expressed
through admirable characters who are "humble"
in a very concrete sense, etc.)

5. Why were Baucis and Philemon turned into
trees instead of into animals or some other
thing?

6. In this story, the gods are very generous in
repaying the hospitality of Baucis and

34

In other words, the lesson units in the junior and senior

high school levels specifically required students to read

fairly difficult works of literature, to infer from their

readings and from the unit "discussions" basic themes and

motifs, and to generalize about the basic concepts under-

lying our Western tradition and literary heritage.

48 In

short, the major purpose of the Nebraska literature cur-

riculum in the upper grades was to consciously engender

formulation and "form consciousness":

The junior high student continues the study of poetry
but studies more serious poems, and he begins the
study of drama, particularly of the great comedies
and tragedies of Shakespeare. He should, at this
level, read for a "deeper understanding" of the mean-
ing of the literature he encounters, and he should
be asked to formulate what he finds in the works he
reads in paragraphs and essays of his own.

While the elementary curriculum at least posited the

Philemon, but how does their reward before
they die show that Zeus and Hermes have the
trait that made Venus transform.Atalanta and
Hippomenes? Are Zeus and Hermes unfair to
the other villagers?

Discuss the transformation of the humble
home into a temple. Children will probably
make the inference on their own that "home"
is a happy place when all share willingly.
This is not to moralize, but rather to
recognize that harmony and sharing in the
home is an ancient tradition.

35

enjoyment of literature as one of its chief objectives,

academic demands in the upper grades of the Nebraska cur-

riculum clearly pre-empted reading for sheer pleasure:

. . . junior (and senior) high school students should
be learning to read beyond the "surface" and the plot;
they should be reading for more than just entertain-
‘ment though the delight that goes wgth great liter-
ature should never be denied them.

As in the elementary curriculum, the junior high

program at Nebraska was divided into "units" and the liter-

ature selections for grades 7 - 10 included:

Grade 7:

Grade 8:

Grade 9 :

Grace-Roman myths and related poems

Hebrew narratives and related western poetry
Iroquois, Cherokee, Tachi myths

Schaeffer, Shane

Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Lazarillo de Tormes

Cervantes, Don Qpixote

White, The Once and Future King
Forbes, Johnny Tremain

Tolstoy, War and Peace

Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The Song of Roland

Orwell, Animal Farm

Wibberly, The Mouse That Roared

Aristophanes, Frogs

Beaumont and Fletcher, The Knight of the Burning
Pestle

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Shaw, Arms and the Man

Homer, The Odyssey

36

Grade 10: Crane, "The Open Boat"
Steinbeck, The Pearl
Hardy, Return of the Native
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Kennedy, Profiles in Courage
Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
Synge, Riders to the Sea51

 

 

 

 

In the 11th and 12th grades, however, the unit method
of sequencing was abandoned to a degree in favor of a more
intensive study of the great classical works of American
and English literature. Instead of attempting to unite
several longer works around a controlling theme, teachers
here were expected to teach the longer work "for its own

"52

sake and for its form and idea. The Nebraska curriculum

for grades 11 and 12, therefore, was structured about
developing the following concepts:
1. To recognize and to discriminate among the char-
acteristics of the various genres of literature:

comedy, tragedy, satire, etc.

2. To gain an appreciation of tone, of mood, of
different periods, and of different people.

3. To capture the unique characteristics of a given
author, such as Shakespeare, Swift, Samuel Butler.

4. It should generally teach students to read closely
and analytically for the full implications of the
work they read:3

 

Enui included among its many literature selections:

37

Grade 11: Thoreau, Walden
Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Melville, Billy Budd ‘
Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberpprinn
Faulkner, The Unvanquished
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 

Grade 12: Shakespeare, Hamlet
Milton, Paradise Lost
Spenser, The Faerie Queene
The poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats,
Shelley, and Blake.54
Theoretically then, the literature curriculum devel-
oped at the University of Nebraska under Project English
attempted to structure itself solidly in Brunerian terms.
In its rationale for what it taught and how the program
explicitly stated that it was not concerned with imparting
information and knowledge per se, but rather that it was
most concerned with developing cumulatively and transfer-
ring sequentially general abstract concepts about genre,
form, technique and style which, when intuited in the early
grades, could then be related to and connected with the
structure and form of longer, more complex literary works
in the upper levels. It considered teachers, therefore, to
be guide-figures rather than lecturers or instructors:
The teacher should know all that she can about the

meaning and literary method of the work so that, when-
ever and wherever she can, she may bring to the students

38

those insights that she has and, more importantly, so
that she can encourage her students when they show
evidence of gaining insights themselves. .83; the
teacher should not deliver lectures and ready-made
literary analyses. . . . She should not deliver the
background material in the units to students but lead
them.when and as they can to perceive what a work is
about.55

But while the Nebraska curriculum rightfully protests the

lecture method to teach "content,"

the program is nonethe-
less as clearly and as overwhelmingly devoted to content as
any college lecture course. It adheres to Bruner's

description of the "act of learning" with a vengeance. As

described in The Process of Education, the act of learning

 

involved three simultaneous processes: first, the acquisi-
tion of new information (often information that runs counter
to or is a replacement for what the person has previously

known implicitly or explicitly); then the transformation of

 

that information--the process of manipulating new knowledge
to make it fit new tasks and to "go beyond it"; and lastly,

the evaluation process--checking whether the way we have

 

manipulated information is adequate to the task.56 While
the "discussion" lesson plans deve10ped at Nebraska

attempted to account for both abstract transformation and
evaluation, it is in the acquisition of knowledge that the

curriculum is primarily interested. To begin with, the

39

Nebraska coordinators felt that literature and knowledge
about literature needed no justification for inclusion in
the curriculum. It was, as Bruner intimated, worthy of

study in and for itself, just as science was:

That so many young people are generally ignorant of the
great figures and the great stories of classical and
biblical literature has been deplored widely by the
whole educated community in recent years. When a
student who has been graduated from high school looks
blank at the mention of the names, fails to grasp the
significance of the stories, of Odysseus, Apollo,
Athene, Achilles, and Jason or Job . . . he is suffer-
ing from.acute cultural anemia, if nothing worse.

. . . Students need only to be introduced to the great
stories of our civilization to find them interesting
and exciting . . . That student who approaches high
school and college study with a background of such
reading has placed himself in a distinctly superior
position. . . . The student who is not going on to
college needs ever more to know such works; for this
may be his only chance to become familiar with pieces
of writing which have been of enormous influence on
the development of his own civilization and so on his
own life. . . . Certain things are worth every man's
attention.57

In addition to enormous amounts of reading at all levels,
also worthy of every pupil's attention were enormous
amounts of information about literary analysis, criticism
and history. Some lesson units at the junior and senior
high levels sequenced information about literary genre,

‘technique and style as necessary prerequisites for the

(exploration of a work's meaning, and other lesson plans

40

called for the close literary analysis of the classics
(Milton, Wordsworth, etc.) according to the various critical
theories in vogue in the early 1960's.

When finally viewed in its entirety, the Nebraska
literature curriculum is an enormous accomplishment. It
reflected both the zeal and the optimism.with which the
English teaching profession threw itself into Project
English. But in terms of the "simple structuring ideas of
a subject," this eagerness on the part of the curriculum
planners resulted in course descriptions that would simply
stagger the average student. Most of the Nebraska cur-
riculum attempted to cover far too much material and
seriously neglected to account for student attitude and
response. Some of its high school units would be very dif-
ficult even for bright college students. Shugrue comments:

Nebraska's Spiral leads students from fables and myths
into satire through units prepared for grades three,
six, nine, and twelve. In a formal unit on satire for
grade nine, the student is introduced to such works as
George Orwell's Animal Farm and Leonard Wibberley's

The Mouse That Roared; less realistically, he is asked
to study Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, condescend-
ingly called "On Lousy Writers."fi In its plan for the
twelfth grade, which introduces formal satiric devices,
Menippean satire, and the mock epic through Swift's
Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift and Gulliver's
Travels, Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock, and excerpts

from John Dryden's Essay on Satire, the Nebraska center
requires too much of both the student and of the

 

 

41

average English teacher. The preparation necessary for
the teacher and the impossibility of an adolescent's
having the necessary grasp of the political, social,
cultural, and literary backgrounds of the Augustan
period suggest that a content-centered curriculum can
become quite unrealistic. Even the "Teacher's Packet"
prepared by Nebraska, with its wealth of secondary
material, long lists of suggested readings, and defin-
itions of the technical terms of satire, argues for a
simplification of this unit.
It is obvious that only the most gifted and devoted young-
ster could maSter the material in some of these units in
the course of a year long literature sequence. In the
revision of its original curriculum, therefore, the Nebraska
center staff, aware of the difficulty of some portions of
its program, advised teachers to eliminate some of the more
difficult literature and select from the remaining units
available those most appropriate for a given group of
students. But even so, Shugrue's criticism is still more
than applicable, for while most structure-centered cur-

riculums were very demanding intellectually, none could

match Nebraska for sheer academic enormity.

The Carnegie-Mellon Literature Curriculum
Unlike Nebraska, the Curriculum Development Center at
Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh chose to design a

nmme modest sequential and cumulative program in English:

42

it focused its attention on able college-bound students in

the senior high school, grades 10 - 12. The Study Center

staff completed the revision of its curriculum in the summer

of 1965 and its program stated seven major objectives:

1.

To develop a curriculum in literature for grades

10 - 12 which will teach the student to read with
understanding and sensitivity, and thus provide him
with a skill essential to excellent work in college.

To deve10p a composition program for grades 10 - 12
which, in ordered sequential steps, will lead to a
growing mastery of writing skills.

To develop a sequential language program, consonant
with contemporary studies in linguistics, which
will increase the student's understanding of the
structure, history, and power of the English
language.

To develop syllabi and other teaching materials
which will interrelate the programs in literature,
composition, and language into a cumulative three
year sequence.

To test the effectiveness of the cumulative sequence
by introducing it experimentally into seven high
schools of diverse types and sizes in the Greater
Pittsburgh area.

To evaluate formally the total program by means of
tests given to students in the cooperating schools.

To contribute toward defining a standard for high
school English which colleges may consider in
designing their freshman courses so that 1earn3ng
may continue to be sequential and cumulative.5

The research staff at Carnegie-Mellon, therefore,

43

had also adOpted the tripartite theory of structure which
divided the content of English into three basic areas of
study: language, literature, and composition. And they saw
the interrelation of these areas as fittingly represented

by three inter-locking triangles:

----Literature

 

 

Language---- [Ill \L\\ ----Communication6O

As the diagram.indicates, the Carnegie staff saw only a
small part of each of these studies as unrelated to the
others: the largerportion of each, in fact, over-laps
significantly with one or both of the others. In the tenth
grade course, for example, the time allotted for each of
the three areas was apportioned as follows: 56% for
instruction in literature; 26% for instruction in comp
position; and 18% for instruction in language. And the
percentages for grades 11 and 12 were approximately the
same.61 Thus it was early agreed by the Carnegie staff
that the core of their program should be literature and

that the way to develop a curriculum for each grade level

44

was to build the literary core first and then organize the
study of composition and language around that literary
core. It was also further agreed that the focus of the
literary core ought to be structured in terms of the
"universal human concerns and themes" portrayed through
literature in every age and every culture, for "while the
writer of literature deals with universal concerns, he is
necessarily affected by the particular time in which he
lives and by the particular culture of which he is a mem-
ber."62 Consequently, in the 10th grade program, for
example, the examination of literature concentrated upon
the universal concerns of man, the 11th grade upon the
modification of those universal concerns by particular
culture patterns, and the 12th grade upon literary art
forms, genres, and techniques. Although one of these
emphases figured more importantly than the other two in a

particular year, all three formed part of each year's

 

 

 

 

program:

10th Grade Universal concerns M.... L....
World Literature of man

11th Grade U.... MOdification by L....
‘American Literature Culture pattern

12th Grade U....J M.... Literary art forms6
English Literature _genresy_techniques 3

 

 

 

45

The 10th Grade Literature sequence, primarily emphas-
izing the universal concerns of man, dealt with domestic
literature as well as world literature (in translation) and
focused on the following themes: social concerns, love,
reality and illusion, heroism, human weakness, and the
search for wisdom. The selections under Unit 1, Social
Concerns, included:

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Ivan Turgenev, "Biryuk"

R. Akutagawa, "Rashomon"

Lin Yutang, "Chastity"

Po Chu-i, "Golden Bells"

R. Tagore, "My Lord, The Baby

A. Nicol, "Return: Two Poems"

Peter Abrahams, "Tell Freedom"

H. Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

Po Chu-i, “The Prisoner"

S. Motokiyo, "The Dwarf Trees"

E. M. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales°4
From a detailed exploration and examination of each of
these stories students in the 10th Grade were intended to
intuit and discover for themselves abstract, fundamental
conceptualizations about the meaning and significance of
basic, human social and political problems as they have
plagued mankind throughout history, so that in the 11th and
12th grades these universal formulations might be applied

(modified) to particular works of literature dealing with

46

social values, customs, and problems in both British and
American literature. How this process was to occur speci-
fically can be demonstrated by examining an 11th Grade
modification sequence.

The 11th Grade American literature program attempted
to demonstrate how universal literary themes--in this
instance, social problems--are modified by American cul-
tural patterns: Puritanism, the American desire to get
ahead and win material success, American Optimism,.American
Pessimism, The Quest for Identity, and the American Social
Conscience. Unit II--the desire to get ahead and achieve
material success--inc1uded the following literary works:

B. Franklin, The Autobiography

W. D. Howells, Silas Lapham

The Parables of Jesus

Leo Tolstoy,“What Men Live By"

Plato, The Apology of Socrates

Plato, The Death of Socrates (from Phaedo)

Arthur Miller, All My Sons
F. S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby65

 

Each of these works was intended to establish a uniquely
American focus for the general theme of Universal Social
Problems. One 11th Grade unit, for example, centered about
Benjamin Franklin's influence on the American desire for

success as illustrated in his Autobiography. Controlled

 

47

"question-discussion" lessons attempted to lead the student
through an exploration of Franklin's notions concerning
self-control through reason, careful industry, and a well-
ordered check on self-indulgence: "Students are suddenly

aware, in a significant way, of why 'early to bed and early

to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.'"66

The next several lessons, then, attempted to modify
this theme even further by dealing with W. D. HoWells'
Silas Lapham, a man described by the curriculum designers
as one who in a sense has lived according to some of

Franklin's precepts:

Silas works hard; he has honeStly but diligently
become rich; he is the self-made man. It is only
when Silas attempts to imitate the artificialities
of society-~when he tries to make too much money or
'build an ostentatious house-~that he is criticized.
The implications of Howells' favorable comment on the
rise to wealth and his unfavorable comment on the
snobbishly-contrived rise in society increase student
awareness of the complexities of the theme. They
understand why Howells makes certain that Bartley
Hubbard's condescending attitude toward Silas in the
initial interview is not shared by the reader.

Lapham typifies the self-made American--a tradition
with.roots in the Puritan attitude but with a more
specific impetus for strength coming from.Franklin.

 

An analysis of The Great Gatspy and All My Sons completed

 

this particular modification sequence:

48

Gatsby's dream, in which "the blocks of the sidewalks
really form a ladder" to material success, symbolized
by Daisy, is a false dream. He shows Daisy his many
shirts, his house, and his car; students see the
emptiness, not in the intensity of his vision, but in
the falseness of his values. How pathetic are the
words of his father, "I came across the book by acci-
dent," when he shows Carraway Gatsby's "schedule of
activities" chart, a version of Franklin's! How
tragic that, although Gatsby achieves what he thinks
is success, no one, except his father and Carraway,
attends his funeral.

And in All My Sons, Joe Keller, like Carraway (since
Gatsby never consciously recognizes his false sense of
values) does see that he has been wrong; he commits
suicide, perhaps as an escape, but also as an act of
atonement. . . . Students see his gradual awakening
from this devotion to personal material-success. His
final awareness is of universal significance; ”They
are all my sons." The idea of American materialism,
then, is the organizing principle of the unit, but
specific universal concerns and the litggary art forms
are also involved in class discussions.

According to the Carnegie staff students would come to
apprehend these themes and understand all of the inter-
connecting motifs, on the various levels of abstraction,
through carefully constructed, inductively patterned dis-
cussion lessons "with questions ordered so that the dis-
cussion, like the literature, [would] achieve a meaningful
climax."69 The Carnegie staff sincerely believed that such
a structured and sequenced curriculum could supply students

with the basic abstract tools and knowledges they would

need in order to understand any piece of fiction or poetry

49

in either American, British, or World Literature: "Leaving
the child to discover is not nearly so good as providing
him with a guided sequence to maximize the possibility of
early discovery."7O

Following this general pattern Carnegie's 12th Grade
literature program attempted to deal primarily with British
literature and to give its major attention to the structur-
ing principles of genre and aesthetic form. Units at this
level centered about the Tale, Tragedy, Epic, Satire, Lyric
poetry, the Novel, and the Drama of social dissent.
Selections under Unit IV (the Novel), for example, included:

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth

Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter71
In each of the three years, students were asked not only to
look at different bodies of literature, but to examine
literary works from different points of view. Each year
was clearly intended to build on what went before, and the
various thematic approaches to literature theoretically
demanded ever more perceptive responses at each succeeding

grade level. Moreover, the Carnegie-Mellon staff considered

its overall approach to be basically textual rather than

50

historical and to be vastly different from traditional
survey courses:

We strive for depth rather than breadth. Although we

try to give our students a sense of the historical

flow of the literature they study in the 11th and 12th

grades, our primary concern is to get them to grapple

closely with certain major works of literature. Thus

our teachers do no lecturing. The approach to each

work is inductive. We deal, furthermore, with whole

works, or major seetions of works, not with snippets.
In comparison to the Nebraska curriculum, certainly, the
Carnegie-Mellon staff is to be commended for carefully
choosing literary works at each grade level and for keeping
its reading lists reasonably short, though many of its
selections here--as in the Nebraska curriculume-are far too
difficult and too "pretentious" even for the college bound.

Finally, the actual inductive method of instruction
developed at Carnegie differed in no real way from the
methodologies of the Nebraska curriculum. Its lesson plans
were almost exclusively question-discussion oriented. In
the 11th Grade Unit on American Pessimism, for example,
after having read Faulkner's short story "Wash," the cur-
riculum outlined class procedure as follows:
1. Class discussion

2. Points of major re-emphasis
3. Assignment

51

Class discussion:

1.

Ul-l-‘OO
o o 0

Points

Why does the first scene of "Wash" have such a great
impact on the reader?

What specific incidents provoke Wash's changing
attitude toward Stupen? _

In what way is Wash a sympathetic character?

Discuss the direction of the narrative in "Wash."
What is the final impact of the story? Why is it

so horrible? Is it logical in terms of the
character of Wash? Why?

of major re-emphasis:

Wash as a sympathetic character and as a victim of
society.

Reality in the development of character.

The final impact of horrOr.

Assignment: "Flight" by John Steinbeck.73

Similarly, the lesson plan for an analysis of Julius Caesar,

 

the 10th Grade Unit on-Heroism, called for a discussion to

center about the following questions:

1.

a. Does Cassius have any faults? In spite of these,
what heroic qualities does he possess?

b. Why do most readers of this play like Brutus so
much? In spite of his appeal, does he have
faults? What are they? '

c. How does the sin of pride Operate in Caesar's
character and in Antony's character? Do they have
any other weaknesses? What admirable qualities
do they have?

Who in your opinion is the real hero of the play?

Why do you choose him above the other three?

Is Brutus fit for what he does in Julius Caesar?

Does he make the wrong decisions? Why? Is Brutus

too honest? Is he always honest?

What political problems is Shakespeare criticizing?

 

52

Do these same problems exist today? What does
Shakespeare say about mob psychology?
5. What is evident about Roman culture and about Eliza-
bethan culture? . . . *
6. Why is Julius Caesar a tragedy?74
Thus, while the outline of the entire workings of the
Carnegie-Mellon literature curriculum just reviewed seems to
allow a great deal of room for the exploration of various
types of literature and for the free substitution of dif-
ferent texts (which the planners themselves suggest, when
appropriate), and while the staff describes its method-
ology as clearly inviting students "to make discoveries
and in so doing create a learning situation,"75 these
question-discussion lesson plans, nonetheless, like those
developed at Nebraska, must be seen as severely restricting
and limiting, and as we shall see in Chapter II, a major

point of contention among the critics of structure-

centered "discovery" learning.

The Oregon "Pretzel" Curriculum
The Study Center at the University of Oregon under

the direction of Albert Kitzhaber developed an English

 

#Additional lesson plans for both the Carnegie-
Mellon and Nebraska curriculums are provided in Chapter II.

53

curriculum for grades 7 - 12 which its designers believed
could be adaptable for approximately the upper 85% of a
typical student body. In an attempt to rid itself com-
pletely of any "progressive" trappings, the Oregon staff
specifically rejected structural schemes based on histor-
ical chronology or various theme tOpics such as "Our
Democratic Heritage" or "Understanding One's Neighbor"
because it felt that structures of this sort were neither
sufficiently "well formulated and organized" nor animated
by purely literary considerations.w Similarly, the staff
also rejected plans founded primarily on "someone else's"
notion of a scale of increasing difficulty in the liter-
ature being studied, "though obviously the question of
difficulty must be kept in mind in organizing such a cur-
Hriculum."76 The Oregon staff clearly wanted to keep the
focus of its literature curriculum on "literature as works
of art, to be not only enjoyed but understood," and its
approach was predicated on the axiom that the study of
literature was truly a discipline and that as such had its
own unique structure and vocabulary (critical terminology.)77
The Oregon curriculum, therefore, represented as fully as
the programs developed at Nebraska and Carnegie-Mellon

Professor Miller's "academic" stage in educational reform:

54

its staff adopted as a working principle Robert Heilman's
thesis that "the idea that knowledge follows interest is a
scandalous half-truth" and that "it is a better than half-
truth that interest follows knowledge";78* and subscribed
fully to the statement of the Commission on English in.Thg

Freedom.and Discipline of English (College Entrance Examin-

ation Board, 1965) that:

Knowledge of the formal elements of a literary work
is presumably a large part of every English teacher's
experience, and it is a knowledge that he alone can
transmit to students. Those elements do not consti-
tute the whole of literature, but they are what
distinguish it from other writing, and they must be
taughg if literature is to be seriously taught at
all.

Thus the Oregon curriculum attempted very explicitly to be
both content-centered and very academic, adopting what
might best be described as a critical "formalist" approach,
relying in its lesson plans on the careful critical analy-
ses of different kinds of literature appropriate at the
various grade levels.

Predictably then, the Oregon staff viewed the

"simple structuring ideas" of literature to be basic,

 

*Robert Heilman, "Literature and Growing Up," English
Journal, 45 (1956), pp. 303-13.

55

fundamental principles of literary analysis and structured
its sequential curriculum around three formal conceptual-
izations of literary technique: Subject, Form, and Point-
of-view: a construct that the designers felt was simple
enough to be grasped by young readers and yet broad enough
to embrace many of the complex aspects and relations that
exist in mature works of literature for more sophisticated
readers.80 The notion of Subject was meant to suggest that
every piece of literature is "about something" (perhaps on
several levels at once) and that consideration of subject
matter would naturally invite generalization from the reader
and help make him realize that literature "means as well as
tells."81 In considering subject, Oregon trained teachers
were intended to lead students to perceptions involving
meaning, not only on the surface of a piece, but in terms
of the basic themes and ideas dramatized about human exper-
ience as well.82 The Oregon curriculum referred to £252;
"as the verbal and artistic structuring of ideas . . . as
the thought in a sonnet must somehow be packed into fourteen
lines of iambic pentameter":83 in other words, the various
genres and sub-genres of literature as well as basic ele-
lments of structure-~setting, dialogue, metaphor, symbol,

etc., devices common to more than one genre alone. And

56

finally, Point-of-view, although traditionally taken to
mean the angle of vision of the narrator only, was expanded
in the Oregon program to include the various attitudes
toward the subject of a work: that of the author, the
characters, the reader, and the culture from which the
literary work derived.84 In developing this aspect of
their curriculum.the Oregon staff drew heavily on the
critical work of Northrup Frye (and the New Criticism.in
general) who identified in all Western literature four
major modes or Points-of-view: the Romantic, the Comic,
the Tragic, and the Ironic.

The 7th Grade Program, then, introduced the basic
principles of Subject, Form and Point-ofeview primarily
through a consideration of the narrative form: the ballad,
the myth, the short story, and the fable, though some lyric
poetry was read as well. In the 8th Grade, Oregon intro-
duced--through Subject, Form and Point-of-vieWb-the Drama,
the Novel, the Essay, the Autobiography, as well as con-
tinuing with the forms introduced the previous year. The
Oregon's co-ordinatOrs saw the 9th and 10th Grades as being
"transitional" years wherein the three basic principles
‘might be studied more intensely in and for themselves so as

to»provide students with as much preparation and as wide a

57

reading background as possible for the more mature works of
grades 11 and 12. Thus Huckleberry Finn in the 10th Grade
was studied both as a narrative form with its own individual
structure and organization and as a representative of the
journey motif used as a vehicle for irony and social and
moral criticism. Similarly, the Odyssey, in the 11th Grade,
introduced the concept of epic form, while at the same time
treating on a more saphisticated level the mythical and
legendary material studied earlier in myths (grade 7) and
Arthurian legends (grade 9).85 Finally, the Oregon curri-
culum for grade 11 dealt with a basic generic approach
intended to cut across an essentially thematically organized
sequence introduced in the 12th Grade. One Oregon staff
member wrote: "The one approach (generic) provides the
x-axis of which the other (thematic) is the y-axis."86

The Oregon staff realized, of course, that their
basic structural premises were somewhat vague and ambig-
uous, but they deliberately chose to keep them so in order
that in the 7th and 8th grades students might ferret out
for themselves a basic abstract conceptualization of the
meaning of the terms as well as their usefulness, and then
in the upper grades, begin to refine the basic concepts of

Subject, Form, and Point-of-view through a more concentrated

58

analysis of more sophisticated literary material. More-
over, the Oregon staff felt that their curriculumis three
structural principles were essentially integrated concepts
in that a discussion of any one would naturally have to
involve consideration of the other two as well:
One cannot talk of the subject of a work without
considering the control of the subject imposed by
form. Similarly, the point-of-view can be seen as
the function of both form and subject. A reciprocal
relation exists between all three terms, but at the
same time each can be held up for particular inspec-
tion. As long as we are talking of cones and spirals,
we might consider the Oregon curriculum as a pretzel
with its three pargs, separate but interrelated,
forming the whole.
In theory, these basic concepts were to be introduced
separately in grades 7 and 8 and without an excessive
demand for critical formulation: the Oregon designers
tried to follow Margaret Early's suggestion that literary
appreciation in the elementary and junior high schools
ought to involve an "unconscious" (basically intuitive)
understanding of both meaning and form.* Then, in the

upper grades, students were expected to gradually "see"

(become conscious of) the inter-relationships among the

*Margaret Early, "The Growth of Literary Apprecia-
tion," English Journal, 49 (1960), pp. 161-67.

59
three aspects for themselves:

The Oregon curriculum.begins in grade 7 with a tran-
sition from phase one to phase two--from unconscious
enjoyment to self-conscious appreciation, and ends in
grade 12 with the transition from phase two to phase
three: self-conscious appreciation to conscious
delight. Or . . . we try to move the student from.the
age of romance through ghe age of precision into the
age of generalization.8

A good picture of how the Oregon literature curricu-
lumlwas supposed to function, integratively, on all levels,
is provided by Stoddard Malarkay, Professor of English at
the University of Oregon and member of the Curriculum
Development staff. In an article appearing in the 1967
volume of the English Journal, Professor Malarkay explained
that Subject, Form and Point-of-view were capable of an
infinite number of refinements and extensions:

In the 7th grade under subject, the students learn that
there is more to a work of literature than its narra-
tive line (and) that any work deals with the abstract
as well as the concrete. . . . This idea receives

1 further refinement in later years, until the student
is dealing with the thematic aspect of literary study.
Through a simple beginning with Subject in grade 7,
we can end in grade 12 with a unit which treats the
theme of the conflict of conscience and lag as it
appears from.Antogone to Darkness at Noon. 9

Similar conceptual spiralling was likewise intended for

both Form and Point-of-view:

60

Similarly, the idea of Form is refined and extended.
The 7th grader will explore on the most elementary
level the obvious rhythmical and rhyming distinctions
between prose and verse. . . . Later refinements intro-
duce the idea of basic patterns of literary expres-
sion--such distinctions as that between "storied" and
"non-storied" forms, or those forms whose primary organ-
izational pattern is a narrative line. . . . The Spiral
continues until the student is dealing with such con-
cepts as the tragic form of the comic form. In the
eleventh grade he is introduced to formal genre study,
where he explores the variety and range possible within
each type at the same time as he becomes increasingly
aware of the inescapable limitations that each form
imposes upon the writer . . . the study of form, then,
can lead from the simplest beginnings to the most
abstract considerations.

In the same way . . . Point-of-view is expanded and
refined. The elements of the technical meaning of the
- term are easy to grasp: the first or third person
narrative voice. In the spiral, this meaning of the
term is elaborated and other meanings brought in. The
student is led to see that literature deals with the
point-of-view of the author towards his material, of
theresponse to that material that the author solicits
from the reader, and of the methods he uses to elicit
that response. In later years consideration of the
persona of the speaking voice lead naturally to exams
inatiog of the oblique modes such as satire and
irony. 0

Ultimately, of course, the three basic aspects of structure

were intended to fuse and coalease as students began to

perceive through analysis and conscious formulation that,

in essence, the three concepts are but facets or relations

of the same basic subject-matter, Literature:

In Huckleberry Finn, for instance, the form of the
nove1--the journey-- . . . provides the narrative frame

61

as well as the symbolic pattern which governs our under-
standing of the subject. This subject is clearly more
than just the first person narrative of a trip, but the
first person point of view, considered as Mark Twain's
deliberate adoption of a particular persona, is one of
the things that governs our perception of the subject
and one of the things that determines the form. When
the student arrives at this level of insight, he has
arrived at or beyond the threshold of the age of
generalization. . . . He has learned how to read, and
specialized studies of History, or culture, or va ious
critical approaches, will be far more meaningful.

The Oregon literature curriculum, therefore, was
designed to provide students with the critical and analy-
tical skills necessary to understand any other work of
literature encountered in either college courses or
recreational readings: "The test of success for the cur-
riculum would be the student's ability to apply the tools
of understanding to a work outside the curriculum."92
Moreover, while the Oregon staff developed a full set of
lesson plans built around a complete list of literary
selections with fairly extensive coverage, their emphasis
on theoretical and analytical knowledge allowed for a wide
substitution of many different titles; and although the
Oregon curriculum was academically quite demanding, at no
point did its materials present students with units as far

'beyond their capabilities as did the Nebraska curriculum's

jLnnior and senior high sequences.

62

The literature curriculums deve10ped at the UniVer-
sities of Nebraska, Oregon, and Carnegie-Mellon under Pro-
ject English, then, accomplished exactly what they were
supposed to: each provided the profession with well-
ordered, tightly structured programs that were clearly
content-centered with respect to both coverage of literary
‘works and knowledge about literature; each was thoroughly
academic, sequential and cumulative in design; and each
developed Similar instructional methodologies--the question-
discussion unit.* Apparently each Study Center took to
heart Bruner's comment that inductive-discovery curriculums
in all fields might best be created by expert teachers who
had learned the art of knowing how to ask exactly the right
kinds of questions to promote efficient understanding of
basic principles:

Given particular subject matter or a particular con-
cept, it is easy to ask trivial questions or to lead
the child to ask trivial questions. It is also easy
to ask impossibly difficult questions. The trick is
to find the medium questions that can be answered and

that can take you somewhere. This is the big job of
teachers and of textbooks. One leads the child by

 

*
An exception was the Hunter College Gateway Project
‘dhich will be reviewed in a subsequent section of this
chapter.

63

welldwrought medium questions to move more rapidly

through the stages of intellectual development. . . .93
But, as we have seen, the academic literature curriculums
in English, at any rate, managed, more often than not, to
ask trivial questions rather than difficult or medium ones.
And though the Nebraska curriculum, in some of its elemen-
tary units, did allow for creative activities (drawing,
music, etc.), it was obvious that given the program's basic
academic purpose, these expressive lesson suggestions were
'clearly "concessions" to the child's world and by grade 5
they were completely abandoned.

Andyet, even though the basic approach and philo-
sophy in each of these struCture-centered curriculums was
similar, each did manage, nonetheless, to create curricular
designs for literature that were quite different from one
another in certain respects. Each Operated under different
ideas as to what constituted basic structure and what con-
cepts ought to be transferred from grade level to grade
level.

The Nebraska curriculum, of course, left no stone
unturned. It tried to structure and sequence every con-
ceivable aspect of literature (coverage, genre, theme,

critical theory, technique, etc.) and it attempted to

64

transfer basic understandings of all these knowledges from
year to year. But perhaps its main intent as a curriculum
in English was coverage. It tried to include in its cur-
riculum.as many different literary works of substantial
merit as possible, and although never stated explicitly,
the apex of its curricular design, in all likelihood, was
the B. A. in English: a college graduate knowledgeable
about all phases of literature, widely read, and hopefully
pursuing intensive scholarly research in literary criticism
at a respectable graduate school.

The Carnegie-Mellon curriculum, on the other hand,
though not so concerned with coverage per se, was nonethe-
leSs very much involved with structuring "content" of a
different sort. It sought to make its students knowledge-
able about the universal motifs and ideas common to all
stories and poems, and its interpretation of the fundamental
structure of literature centered about basic thematic
relationships. The Carnegie-Mellon curriculum, therefore,
intended to prepare its students as fully as possible for
the academic rigors of college by supplying them with a
well rounded background, not only in literature, but in the
Arts intimately connected with literature as well: parti-

cularly, history, social studies, and aesthetics.

65

And finally, the Oregon curriculum, as we have seen,
‘was primarily cOncerned with transferring from.year to year
a basic understanding of the main principles of literary
analysis and criticism. And while its college bound stu-
dents might not have been as well rounded, academically, as
graduates of Nebraska and Carnegie, the Oregon staff none-
theless believed that its students-~armed with a basic
knowledge of the structure of literature--would be able to
"catch up" quickly in the other fields of learning and in

time surpass the less disciplined individual.

The Gateway English Program.at Hunter Collega

While structured-centered Brunerianism was the
dominant trend in curriculum reform under Project English,
other ideas and approaches were experimented with, and not
all the new programs deve10ped through educational research
in English in the 1960's were exclusively content-centered
or structure-centered, though academic concerns were no
doubt present in most curriculum projects to one degree or
another. Project English, in fact, when viewed in its
entirety, actually created a wide variety of many different
kinds of programs deve10ped under a number of different

theories and ideas. The Universities of Georgia and

66

Northwestern, for example, developed some very fine cur-
ricular material in writing based on child development
studies and the processes of experiencing and composing;
the University of Illinois concentrated not on developing

a curriculum for pupils, but on a teacher-training cur-
riculum.in English for both in-service teachers and pro-
spective teachers, a project which combined the educational
resources of twenty different colleges and universities
throughout the state, each different institution developing
and evaluating programs to deal with some of the vexing
problems in teacher preparation; the University of Min-
nesota designed curricular "Resource Packets" for lin-
guistic and semantic studies in grades 7 - 12; and the
Teacher's College at Columbia University created materials
in TESOL aimed for the first three years of elementary
school.94 The only literature curriculum deve10ped uhder
Project English that departed to a large extent from the
thoroughly academic and structured approaches typical of the
programs at Nebraska, etc. was the Gateway English program

created at the Hunter College Curriculum Development Center

in New York City under the direction of Marjorie B. Smiley.*

 

*Only one other Curriculum Development Center in
English devoted its chief emphasis to the literature

67

The Hunter Project was unique primarily because of
the nature of the student it was intended to serve. Deeply
committed to the early Civil Rights MOvement of the last
decade, the Hunter Project was solidly urban centered and
its materials were clearly intended to appeal to economic-
ally disadvantaged youngsters in the inner city from.many
different cultural backgrounds; and its co-ordinators,
therefore, were primarily concerned with producing a cur-
riculum to meet the practical needs of their students,
rather than the more abstract needs of a subject-matter
and were much less concerned than were the other projects
with producing scholarly, knowledgeable students.95 Rather
than attempting to devise an abstract, conceptual formu-
lation about which to structure the study of literature,
the Gateway program instead sought to address itself
directly to the values, experiences, and codes of behavior
typical of adolescence and to involve young people in
pleasurable reading experiences that typified those values
for them in creative, realistic ways. Consequently, its

literature selections were "chosen because students have

 

curriculum--Florida State University. This center's program
‘will be reviewed in Chapter V in connection with a discus-
sion of junior high school literature programs.

68

found them interesting and especially relevant to the

H96

problems they themselves have to face. The Gateway pro-

gram saw the adolescent moving into a wider world than he
has ever known before as he entered his teens and becoming
less emotionally dependent on his family, while seeking
deeper friendship among his peers. And at the same time it
was recognized that the junior high student begins to think
seriously about his own identity and personality and to
think about life goals and how he might attain them.97 And
it was these experiences especially that the Gateway pro-
gram sought to tap through the study of personally mean-

ingful literature:

People have always found through literature greater
understanding of themselves and others. For the
thirteen or fourteen year old, such understanding is
basic to achieving increased emotional independence
and maturity. People have always found literature

to be helpful in formulating personal codes and values
which are satisfying to themselves and to society.
Young adolescents particularly need such help in
formulating their individual codes and values. . . .
Gateway English has paid particular attention to

these adolescents and their needs in its selection

of materials, of concepts and skills to be acquired,
and of methods of learning. . . . All youngsters,
whether reading on grade level or one or two years
below it, will respond to good literature which expres-
ses problems and ideas of relevance to them, as well
as to truths (whether set in a realistic framework or
in myth and legend) which they recognize as valid.98

69

A Family is a Way of Feeling, Stories in Song and Verse,
Who Am I? and Coping formed a year long program for an
estimated reading level of fifth through seventh grades, and
the programs for grades eight and nine also sought to
motivate the student to learn and to convince him that
school was about real things of real value to him. These
volumes contained stories that junior high youngsters could
easily identify with and yet while the selections were in
no way academically pretentious, neither were they condesé
cending or intellectually and emotionally immature.

The overall direction and general movement of the
Gateway literature program began with an emphasis on family
experiences: feeling that as students moved toward
increasing independence they would be able to observe and
relate to members of their family more objectively and
thereby recognize their human frailties as well as their
strengths both as individuals and as part of the family
group. From experiences centered about the family, the
Gateway materials then attempted to move the student,
experientially, further outward from the self toward
relations with other individuals and to "coping" with
problems in the world outside one's own immediate surround-

ings. Because of its interest in student experience and

70

attitude, Gateway English was a great deal less content-
centered than most other curriculum projects at the time;
instead of content and knowledge about literature, the Gate-
'way program explicitly attempted to nurture personal involve-
ment in reading, response, and self-expression:

In order for students to achieve facility in thinking

and talking, the teacher must be patient, accepting

the students' answers, realizing that the students'

self-expression may be as important as the correct-

ness of their answers. The teacher must not allow the

pressure of time to force him to cut off a student's

attempt at formulating 3n opinion, or his neighbor's

attempt at a response.9
The Hunter Project, therefore, was one of the first English
programs to suggest that literature and language instruction
center about students' strengths, abilities and experiences,
and the program as a whole placed just as much importance
on the feelings, opinions, and ideas that students bring to
school with them as it did on what the school itself could
provide:

The guidelines discussed above may be summarized in the

following list of Do's and Don't's for the teacher of
Gateway English:

 

Don't tell the students anything that they can discover
for themselves. Do let them find out for themselves

and tell you and the class what they think and know.
Don't talk when you can listen. Do give students

plenty of time to bring out what they have to say . . . .

71

Don't assume that children who are inarticulate or
underachieving are not able to think in mature ways
about things that concern them. Do understand that
outside of school they have been solving problems and
communicating with their fellows. Do make them feel
that what is taken up in school is worth thinking and
talking about.

Do become a partner in the production of Gateway
English . . . by modifying lesson plans accOrding to
the needs of your students, and by adding new and
contemporary materials as you discover them.

Do enjoy the children, the materials, and their inter-
action under your guidance.

But perhaps most Significant of all, the Gateway
program directly attempted to introduce into the English
classroom creative language and literature activities. To
aid involvement and motivation and to change attitudes
about English and success in school for its students, the
Hunter College program made extensive use of the media in
the classroom co-extensive with language and literature
instruction. To enrich the learning experience, its lesson
plans Often included recordings, transparencies, films,
slides, and pictures, in addition to extensive group work,
pantomime, dramatic activity, art work, committee reports,
‘writing dialogues, and cartoon making.

And yet the program as a whole was still very much

committed to the Brunerian thesis. Its materials were

centered about "the unit"; its lesson plans frequently

72

employed inductive-discussion questions; it attempted to
foster conceptual development; it frequently taught for
Specific concepts and attempted in its overall design to be
both inductive and sequential:
The lesson plans are constructed whenever possible
according to an inductive method. Materials are pre-
sented in a manner that will enable students to draw
their own conclusions and to arrive at generalizations
by themselves. Students are encouraged to think pro-
blems through and to become aware of the methods they
have used in solving them. Discovery thus takes the
place of memorization and simple recall.
Though always clearly stated as a secondary and long-term
objective, it is not rare to find in the Gateway Teacher's
Manual directions about what teachers ought to look for,
Specifically, and what particular concepts they ought to

especially encourage. From the preface to Stories in Song

and Verse:

 

In the course of the unit, and as a secondary aim,
students should develop some understanding and enjoy-
ment of a number of poetic devices: rhyme, rhythm,
refrain, stanza. They will also be introduced to other
literary terms: theme, lament, narrator. 'In every
instance, however, it is important that students
develop the meanings of these terms gradually, as they
listen to, read and discuss these Stories in Son and
Verse. . . . Particularly in the case of underachieving
students, the intellectual skills of observing, apply-
ing, comparing, classifying and generalizing need to

be strengthened. . . .1 2

 

73

There was, therefore, in the Gateway program an over-
all conflicting sense of direction and basic purpose between
experimental approaches based on student experience, activ-
ity and response on the one hand, and structure-centered
inductive Brunerianism on the other; and this confusion is
perhaps no better illustrated than in the actual lesson
plans developed by the Hunter project staff. Unit 23, for
example, in the Teacher's Manual for the volume Who AmLI?
presented a three part semi-activity centered lesson based
on the short play, The Trouble With Johnny. In addition to
poster displays and creative writing assignments the unit
also required students to actually dramatize the action of
the play in the classroom using tables and chairs for
prOps. However, similar to the other academic curriculums
reviewed thus far, this particular unit also included
standard, inductive question-answer schemes--specifically
requiring, therefore, that students understand the meaning

of the play in the play's own terms, instead of allowing

 

for the interpretation of meaning and characterization to
evolve freely from both creative and personal improvisation

. *
and involvement.

 

*See Teacher's Manual to Gateway English (New York:
The Macmillan Co., 1966), pp. 173-76.

74

When viewed in its entirety, finally, it is almost
as if the Gateway English program has been arrested in mid-
agony. It was undeniably tied to the academic reform move-
ment, to inductive teaching and concept development, and
yet at the same time, it desperately wished to take off in
new directions: toward activity-directed lessons (rather
than discussion-directed lessons), student-centeredness,
and a more total commitment to response.

1967 marked the end of the initial phase of support
for basic research on the English curriculum. In that year
fourteen of the Study Centers completed their work and sub-
mitted final reports to the U. 8., Office of Education.
Although after 1967 the Office of Education encouraged
institutions to continue to submit proposals for further
investigations, the Office no longer appeared to be deeply
committed to further research in the Humanities.103 At the
same time the War in Vietnam was rapidly expanding and
governmental energies and monies were being diverted to
support military and defense buildups; and anti-war pro-
tests on the campuses from 1966 to 1970 further swayed the
government to withdraw its support for educational research

not directly connected with the national security. This

trend has continued from 1967 to the present time and

75

prospects appear dim for government financed research in
English at least for the immediate future. Neither the
academic establishment nor the federal government has yet
recovered from the political and social scars of the anti-
war years. For all intents and purposes, by 1968 Project
English had run its course.

Although most of the curriculums and materials pro-
duced through Project English have in the last several years
been severely criticized, the entire curriculum reform
effort did manage to draw the English profession together
and it facilitated "dialogue" within the professional
English teaching community: teachers, administrators and
scholars, at all levels, for the first time in many years
communicated with one another about goals, approaches and
methods. Linguists, journalists, professional writers,
educators and psychologists all joined together to talk
about a common subject and establish a common set of
attitudes. As a result, the English profession as a whole
will be soundly committed to curricular reform, change,
innovation and dialogue for many years to come. The Cur-
riculum.Development Centers had uniquely demonstrated that
educational reform could be attained with effort, deter-

mination and adequate funding. And although the money for

 

8:
Ce

di

76

research is no longer available, the desire to create new

materials and establish new programs has not yet abated.
In a speech to the annual meeting of the MLA in

1968, James Squire summarized Project English's unique

contribution to the profession:

If then we stand again at a crossroads, what should
be the profession's response? We might begin by
reminding ourselves of what we have already accom-
plished, for retaining achievements of recent years'
is dependent upon clearly identifying them. Some are
unmistakable: a clearer perception of subject content
in the schools; vastly strengthened curricular guides
for teachers; more textually-centered programs in
literature; the beginnings of genuine programs in
literature at the elementary level; understanding that
study of the English language involves something more
than hep-hazard exercises in usage and parsing; solid
new programs for preservice and continuing education;
awakening awareness that the elementary teacher, above
all, is a teacher of English; changes in college
English and college education programs; the emergence
of college departments to a national voice through the
DEW'ADE association; above all, the shift in the
attitude of the public and profession toward develop-
ments in English today.

The "crossroads" of Squire's speech undeniably referred to
the Dartmouth Seminar which met at Hanover, New Hampshire
in the late summer of 1966, and which, on the one hand,
served to underscore the basic philosophies of structure-

centeredness (and Project English to the extent that it was

discipline-centered), but which at the same time has

77

further inspired the profession to continue to improve
English teaching through innovation and basic research. In
any event, the Dartmouth Conference has influenced the
theory and practice of English teaching in the last decade
to a greater extent than any other single factor, including
Project English. But the revolutionary new ideas and'
theories to emerge from.Dartmouth did not just simply
appear. The Project English experience involved hundreds
of talented professionals in a co-operative and creative
academic endeavor, and any such intellectual involvement=4
especially one of such massive proportions as the entire
curriculum reform movement-awill automatically produce

many new and different ideas not initially planned for.
Since these new ideas--many of which were highly critical
of structure-centeredness in curricular reform--he1ped
shape the direction and the sc0pe of the Dartmouth Seminar;
it will be necessary to examine them in some detail,
therefore, before the Response to Literature may be formally

discussed in Chapter III.

CHAPTER II

STUDENT-CENTEREDNESS AND THE LITERATURE CURRICULUM

It is not subject-matter that makes some
learning more valuable than others, but the
spirit in which the work is done.

John Holt

How Children Fail
From the very start we were too busy being

intellectuals.

James Herndon
The Way It Spozed To Be

From 1965 through 1968 many of the English Curriculum
Development Centers were engaged in the process of evaluat-
ing their work and preparing their curriculums for national
distribution; sometimes the members of a research staff
‘WOuld appraise their own materials, while at other centers
outside evaluators were employed. The over-all reaction of
both the public and the profession during these years--
across a wide spectrum at all educational levels--was

78

79

generally favorable, if not positively enthusiastic. It was
felt that solid curriculums for English had finally been
developed and that English had at last been given both a
content and a structure, as well as sequence and direction:
the average English teacher could feel both proud and con-
fident about the "academic status" of his/her unique dis-
cipline. There was now something definite to teach and
teachers would know both how and when to teach it. All that
was needed, it was felt, was widespread adaption and imple-
mentation by school districts all across America. Shugrue
reports that by 1968 the Nebraska materials had been adOpted
throughoutthe state of Nebraska itself, in school systems
in a great many other states, and in many countries overseas
as well. In Columbus, Nebraska, for example, a community

of only 12,500 citizens some fifty miles from the univer-
sity, the senior high school, junior high, and seven elemen-
tary schools had begun teaching the entire Nebraska Cur-
riculum as early as the fall of 1967.1 The Paul Roberts
English Series published in l966--a sequential and inductive,
content-centered, skills-oriented curriculum for teaching

all aspects of the English tripod*--became instantly popular

 

* . .
This serles, however, was not the product of a
Curriculum Development Center.

80

because of its thoroughly structured and sequential approach
both to the "content" of English (language and literature)
and the skills of English (reading, writing and speaking).
In addition, Holt, Rinehart and Winston purchased the
Oregon curriculum, Barnes and Noble began to publish the
Carnegie materials in 1968, and the Silver Burdett Pub-
lishing Co. sought the various Florida State curriculums.
In short, publishing houses across the country were very
ready to "cash in on" the sequential curriculum craze and
print texts for each year and/or grade level corresponding
to one newly developed curriculum or another. And so, in
one respect, the newly-devised structure-centered cur-
riculums in English and Literature were a huge success in
the mid l960's--and that was the way everything was supposed
to be. 7

Yet, on an entirely different front, agreement,
unanimity and approval in large measure was not forthcoming.
There were serious critics both within and without the
English teaching profession who challenged the educational
value and relevance of both the final results of individual
project center curriculums as well as the entire Brunerian
theory of content-structure-centeredness on which most of

the new English curriculums were based. This criticism Of

81

discipline and structure in education, with respect to
English and Literature, operated on two levels: (1) those
'within the profession itself at the university level who
formally helped evaluate the new curriculums and whose
objections to them.were based both on some new and different
conceptions about the nature and content of English as well
as on Bruner's scientific theory of teaching and learning
when specifically applied to English-as-a-school-subject;
and (2) at the same time there were a group of individuals,
mostly full-time teachers in both public and private
schools at all levels (some English teachers, others not),
who became involved in the education of their students in a
very sensitive and humane way. These teachers, who had to
work daily with both the new and old curriculums, began
early to be suspicious of the entire academic, content,
discipline-centered philosophies of education very popular
in the early 1960's. 'These critics of the educational
establishment were part, in retrospect, of a wholly dif-
ferent and separate trend of educational theory and prac-
tice: rebelling against disciplined and sequential education,
they created during the last decade, Side by side with the
academic reform movement, a philosophy Of education that has

since come to be known as the Student-centered or meanistic

82

approach to teaching and learning. The ideas of these
individuals were both intellectually exciting and "radical"
enough to have become very quickly popular in an age
recently labelled ”America's greening."* The humanistic
philosophies of ‘men such.as John Holt, James Herndon and
Herbert Kohl in the mid '60's instantly attracted many
ardent supporters and the Student-centered movement in
educatiOn that these men helped initiate has continued to
the present day. In recent years, humanistic education has
given rise to the "free-school” movement that has bloSsomed
in the United States of late in small towns and large
cities alike.

This chapter will examine, then, both these reactions
to the academic reform movement of the last decade in an
attempt to provide a framework for a formal discussion of

both the Dartmouth Conference and The Response to Literature.

Criticism of the New Literature Curriculums in English
During the spring and summer of 1966, Robert Shafer,
then member of the English Department at Arizona State

University in Tempe, evaluated the Carnegie-Mellon?

 

*See Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America
(New York: Bantam Books, 1971).

 

83

Curriculum designed for grades ten through twelve. His
review was published in the January issue of the 1967 volume

of the English Journal. Shafer's overall tone in the

 

article was cautious, yet penetrating. The thrust of his
criticism was not aimed directly at the newly-developed
curricular materials themselves nor at Bruner's thesis (the
New Math and the New Science were flourishing in schools
across the country), but rather at Bruner's applicability

to "English." While Shafer commended the Carnegie planners
for successfully and imaginatively presenting a model cur-
riculum which could effectively serve to test the assumption
that English is in fact a cumulative and sequential subject,
he seriously questioned whether Bruner's inductive-discovery

teaching theory as ipplemented by many of the centers was in

 

fact "real discovery" when applied to a structured-sequence
for literature, and whether or not there might not be other
aspects of English (besides language, literature and com-
position) and other methods of instruction (besides induc-
tive learning) which the new content-oriented curriculums,
like Carnegie-Mellon, had totally neglected to consider.2
‘Shafer reported that the Carnegie-Mellon program had

defined teaching as an attempt to create situations where

structures can be discovered and where good pedagogy "must

84

involve presenting the child with situations in which he
himself experiments . . . in the broadest sense of the term
. . . trying things out to see what happens, manipulating.
things, manipulating symbols, posing questions and seeking
his own answers, reconciling what he finds one time with
what he finds on another, and comparing his findings with
those of other children."3 It is clear that Shafer has
examined the new curriculum in depth and in light of the
tightly structured program developed by the Carnegie-Mellon
staff, Shafer in this report was highly suspicious of the
real effectiveness of many of its lesson units. Specific-
ally, Shafer wondered to what extent the lessOneunits of
the Carnegie-Mellon program actually involved students in
"guided sequences which maximized the possibility of early
discovery" and to what extent "massive transfer of learn-
ing" really occurred.

Shafer provided an example of a typical unit lesson
in literature from the Carnegie-Mellon curriculum deSigned
specifically for "discovery"--a unit intended to maximize
brain power and to induce, in Brunerian terms, the creation
of new ideas and relationships:

In the literature lesson, the teacher is given the
following questions to guide the "guided sequence"

85

in four poems, "Out Upon It" by Suckling, "Let Me Not
To The Marriage of True Minds Admit Impediments" by
Shakespeare, "Gather Ye Rosebuds" by Herrick, and "On
His Blindness" by Milton:

1. Who is the Speaker in the poem?

2. To whom is he speaking?

3. What is the incident being discussed by the
speaker?

4. Why is this a poem of dramatic incident?

5. What similarities and techniques do you recog-
nize between this poem and drama?

6. Who are the characters and what is the dramatic
situation in "Out Upon It"?

7. Who is the speaker and what is he discovering
in the poem "On His Blindness"?

8. In the three poems considered today, what is the
relationship of the speaker to the poet? (Note
to the teacher: Place a line on the board to
represent a continuum, placing the word "char-
acter" at one end and "poet" at the other. Have
the students view the speakers of each of the
three poems in this way and place the poems on
the continuum. It will probably look like this:

 

The Poet Himself "Out Upon It!" An Imagined

"On His Blindness" "Edward" Character

 

The point to make here is that the dramatic
situation can make a certain impact regardless
of whether the poet himself is the "speaker" of
the poem.)

9. What is the tone of "Edward"?

The writers stay true to their conception of the appro-
priate role of the teacher, "In such a lesson, obviously,
the teacher is neither preacher nor lecturer, but

guide, discussion leader, and perhaps, occasionally,
resource person." They also propose the list of
questions as a model for a guided sequence, "It (the
sequence Of eight questions) offers a series of ques-
tions designed to help the students analyze the poem

 

Se
En-

th<

86

in an orderly way: starting with the concept, relating
earlier learning to the current lesson, and suggesting
points of major emphasis. The students are required to
summarize the day's lesson in a paragraph of 150 words.
The effect of this activity is to "require them to
rethink the day's discussion, and to discover, once
again, what he and the class had learned about the
poems and about tze particular aspect of poetry dis-
cussed that day."
In this lesson unit there were clearly definite answers to
all the specific questions being asked, and all that was
required of the students--in terms of being given the
Opportunity to do some real "thinking"--was to "discover,"
"guess," or "produce" the kind of answers that such a
lesson plan called for. And to Shafer at least it was
clear that this provided for no real discovery, no real
learning experience. Lessons such as this one did not in

actuality present students with genuine problem.solving

situations: encounters in class, that is, in which stu-

 

dents could make decisions and come to conclusions by
intuiting structures and relations and inventing new ideas
through their own creative efforts. Instead, the entire
Carnegie curriculum, Shafer intimated, while certainly
sequential and cumulative, was basically contrived, inauth-
entic and non-Brunerian in that it apparently hindered real

thought instead of provoking it. It was neither truly

87
inductive nor honest:

The basic question remains: ”DO these curriculum
materials really present the learner with 'situations
where structures can be discovered,‘ or 'situations in
which he himself experiments,’ or 'the exercise of
problem solving and the effort of discovery'?" In
this reviewer's judgment, they do not. Indeed, they
are probably as carefully designed examples as we have
available of guided sequences projecting a proposal of
the cumulative transfer of increasingly complex under-
standings in language, literature, and composition.
Evidence is not yet available as to the extent such
transfers may have taken place. But these learning
sequences are not, in and of themselves, situations
which present problems to the learner which he neces-
sarily sees as worthy of engaging his time and energy
in finding_a solution. They do not seem to provide
what Piaget calls for in his quest for a situation
which "provokes" or what Charles Pierce once described
as the "persistent irritation of doubt."

In other words, although it was clearly not the intent of
the newly created discipline-centered curriculum to "run
students through their paces," Shafer's evaluation strongly
, suggested that such was precisely what the Carnegie-Mellon
curriculum in particular-~and the other structure-centered-
inductive curriculums in general--were doing. (Shafer's
criticism could be applied with equal validity to the

curriculums developed at Oregon, Nebraska, Florida State,

Indiana, etc.)* And when one looks objectively at the

 

*Here is a unit-lesson from the Nebraska Literature
curriculum (6th grade) dealing with the poetry of Robert

88

structure-centered literature curriculums of Project
English, it is indeed difficult to find in them.opportuni-

ties for real intellectual exploration. In short, Shafer

 

Frost.6 The objectives of the unit are (l) to impart to
children some of the simpler tools for the reading and
understanding of poetry and (2) to help prepare for the
treatment of poetry at the junior and senior high school
levels. The lesson plan makes it clear that in this unit
time will be spent in reading for depth of meaning and

that, therefore, a few of the poems will be read and studied
intensively: "It is hoped that in this way the students
‘will discover some of the riches beneath the surface of

good poetry":

Group I

Most of Frost's poems are presented within a rural con-
text. This rural world provides the point of view from
which things, events, and people are seen.

For this first group the teacher may select any of the
less complex poems, since they will be explored only on the
literal level. Let the students enjoy and appreciate some
of the excellent descriptive passages. It would be well
for the teacher to read the poem over a second time to the
students before asking questions. In discussing imagery or
rhyme scheme it is well to move by small units, a short
passage, or a stanza at a time. The following are a few
poems suggested for the first group and some discussion
questions for each:

"The Pasture"

What does the story tell?

Who is telling the story?

Who is invited to come along?

What farm animal is mentioned? What is said about it?
How long does the speaker expect to be gone?

What is the rhyme scheme?

What line is rich in alliteration?

89

believed (I) that the new literature curriculums in English v
had managed not to sequence real discovery activities but

rather to se uence "content" and "knowled e" so that throu h
q 8 8

 

"Departmental"

Do you think the poet has enjoyed watching ants?

Is this poem completely serious or do you think the poet
is trying to be humorous? Is the poem humorous from
the beginning or does it become so later?

Are there any times in the poem when the author tells
you that ants mind their own business?

In the last two lines is the author saying that in one
way he admires the ants but in another way he

doesn't?
Give the meaning of the following words: sepal, ichor,
nettle.
Group II

 

As has been stated previously, Frost's poems have a
superficial simplicity. Because Frost works from a simple
rural incident to philosophical wisdom, most of his poems
are not as simple as they appear. While Frost's early poems
show a harmonious relationship between man and nature, his
more complex poems present a conflict between the two.

Since these poems have greater depth, they should be studied
with greater care. Suggested teaching procedures for
several of these poems may prove helpful.

"StOpping by Woods on 3 Snowy Evening" (p. 24)

What does the title tell us about the time of day?
about the weather?

Is the man riding or driving the horse? How do you know?

Does the man know who owns the woods? Where does the
owner live?

Does the horse Show any impatience? How?

What decision does the man have to make? What does he
decide?

90

carefully contrived discussions and exercises students
would be led to eventually "uncover" in a story or poem, for
example, aspects of theme and technique that the curriculum
planners themselves had already deemed as significant,
important, and worthy of study; and (2) that the new cur-
riculums had concentrated too strongly on academic content

and the accumulation of facts and theories to the exclusion

 

The above questions are about the surface meaning of the
poem. Do you think Frost may have had deeper mean-
ings in mind when he wrote the poem?

Explain the idea of a symbol. Signs are often symbols
(traffic signs, the flag, a cross, an eagle, etc.).

The first symbol in the poem is the owner. What is the
"something else" that he may stand for? (Frost could
have used the owner to symbolize village life where
people are together while the poet is alone in the
woods; or on an even broader scale, he could repre-
sent civilization or society in general.)

The second symbol in the poem is the horse. Remember
that he is impatient. What do you think he could
symbolize? (He could represent the animal world
that does not understand man's desire to meditate; or
he could represent an obstacle to the man's doing
what he would like to do.)

Are there other symbols in the poem, other things that
could stand for something else? (The woods: beauty
or enchantment. Sleep: rest or death. Promises:
obligations or responsibilities.) Students may think
of others, but it is sufficient if they can be led to
discover some of the main ones.

Why do you think Frost repeats the last line?

The teacher must decide whether or not the class' ability
and previous experience is such that a discussion of
rhyme scheme, form, etc. of the poem will be profit-
able and hold the interest of the class. The greater
the understanding of the techniques employed by the
poet, the greater will be the appreciation of his poem.

91

of what he felt to be the essence of education in general:
providing for the personalized involvement in learning and
developing the "processes of thought" and the "growth into
knowledge." Shafer concluded his evaluation with the
query:
. . . Why subscribe to inductive teaching and learning
as a basic rationale without an attempt to develop and
test literary, linguistic and composing models, which
will lead students to inquiry and ultimately to growth
in the processes of thought?

But perhaps it was the criticism of James Moffett,
then of Harvard University (and later to become one of the
most influential participants at the Dartmouth Conference),
that penetrated to the very heart of the matter and really
exposed the inherent conceptual flaws in the structure-
centered, inductive curriculum craze that dominated English
teaching reform in the 1960's. Like Shafer, himself at the
time, Moffett was involved with evaluating the new cur-
riculum for English. In a January, 1966, Harvard Educa-
tional Review article entitled "A Structural Curriculum in
English," Moffett not only accused the new curriculums for
their implicit inauthenticity and misapplication of Bruner's

,thesis with respect to English, but he also asserted that

most of the researchers engaged in creating new curriculums--

92

structuring new academic "contents" and teaching methods for
English--had failed entirely to grasp the nature of what
English-as-a-school subject is all about.*

In "A Structural Curriculum.for English," Moffett
pointed out that English is indeed untidy and amorphous and
therefore a very unattractive candidate for a structural
curriculum."which no doubt is a main reason for its being
the caboose on the train of educational renovation."8 What
accounts for the difficulty, according to MOffett, is that
English can be conceived of in two basic ways: it can some-
times be defined as all vcontent"--language, literature and
composition--and at other times as a series of "arts" or
"skills"--reading, writing, listening, speaking.9 Moffett
claimed that in the profession's absolute zeal to get hold
of a definite academic content for English, the_new struct-
ure-centered curriculum planners (for the most part) had
mapped out the content aspect of English with such a ven-
geance so as to exclude almost entirely the skills or

activity component of English. NOW'MOffett did not mean to

 

*Other early criticism of the new curriculums in Eng-
lish included an article by G. Robert Carlsen and James
Crow: "Project English Curriculum Centers," English Journal,
56 (1967), ppo 986-993.

93

imply that the new curriculums did not include the teaching
of writing, rhetoric, oral discourse, etc., but simply to
assert that the new curriculums did not treat these aspects
of the subject "English" as activities--mental and lin-
guistic operations closely related to the processes of
thinking itself. Instead, Moffett claimed that most of the
new structure-centered curriculums had merely remade these
skills into contents, transformed, that is, a process into
a thing, since a "content" for English was what everyone
wanted.* Thus most of the structure-centered. curriculums
presumed that one must learn certain "contents" before one
could become involved in the act of writing or before one
could respond to and understand literature:
. . . That is--to write one must know, as information,
certain linguistic codifications and facts of composi-
tion; to read literature, one must be told about pro-
sody and "form." But learning "form" this way is

really learning content, and the result is quite dif-
ferent than if the student practices form or feels it

 

*A notable exception to this trend was the composi-
tion curriculum designed at the Northwestern Curriculwm
Development Center. From the very beginning the Northwest-
ern researchers considered writing as an activity--as a
process first--and the materials produced by the Center
encouraged students to experiment with language instead of
studying rhetoric and grammar either as contents or as
necessary preludes to the act of writing itself.

94

invisibly magnetize the whole curriculum. Learning and
learning how to result in very different kinds of know-
ledge. Compare the psychiatrist's telling the patient,
"You have an Oedipus complex," with the deep liberating
reorganization that takes place gradually through the
transference process.

According to Moffett, however, English is done a
great dis-service when it is cast almost exclusively in the
form of contents, when teachers and curriculum planners try
to make it into a subject like history, geography, or
physics. For English, Moffett contended, is not properly
about itself; it is not a subject with a definite content
which everyone must learn (uncover), but instead it is a
contentdmaker. To reiterate in Moffett's own terminology:
there are some things (subjects) that are symbolizers and
other things that are symbolized. Subjects like chemistry
and psychology and history have definite contents for they
contain specific empirical facts and phenomena and people
'gsg other subjects like language and math to talk about--
or symbolize--these contents. Simply, English is primarily
a subject that symbolizes; it is operational and activity-
oriented and people use it to structure other contents.
Therefore, MOffett asserted, English in and of itself ought

not to be thought of primarily as a subject which either

directly imparts knowledge to students or helps them discover

95

some particular kind of knowledge on their own:

At the risk of disparaging what a lot of English
teachers, including myself, have relied on as curriculum
guides, I have emphasized the ways we have unnecessarily
deformed our subject to make it into a content like
other subjects. But English, mathematics, and foreign
languages are not about anything in the same sense that
history, biology, physics, and other primarily empiri-
cal subjects are about something. English, French,
and mathematics are symbol systems, into which the
phenomenal data of empirical subjects are cast and by
‘means of which we think about them. Symbol systems are
not primarily about themselves; they are about other
subjects. When a student "learns" one of these sys-
tems, he learns how to operate it. The main point is
to think and talk about other things by means of this
system.

In insisting on a major division between symbol
systems and what is symbolized in the systems, I am
attempting to break up the bland surface of our tradi-
tional curriculum, whereby the Carthaginian Wars, the
theorems of Euclid, irregular German verbs, the behavior
of amoebas, and the subordination of clauses all come
dead-level across the board as if they were the same
kind of knowledge. The failure to distinguish kinds
and orders of knowledge amounts to a crippling episte-
mological error built into the very heart of the over-
all curriculum. The classification by "subject matters"
into English, history, math, science, French, etc.,
implies that they are all merely contents that differ
only in what they are about. The hidden assumptions of
this classification have taught students to be naive
about both symbols and the nature of information; even
very bright students are apt to leave high school not
understanding the difference between empirical truth
and logical validity. Furthermore, we have fooled
ourselves.

 

*There is one aspect of "content" here which must be
mentioned because it will become integral to a discussion of
the Response to Literature in Chapters III and IV. Although

96

Moffett pointedly asked the question, then, "HQW“much
is teaching English a matter of covering content and how

much a matter of developing skills which are independent of

 

Moffett avered that English did not properly have a special
content all to itself, the problem.is more complex. In
fact, when talking about a "content" for English, a central
and important paradox is involved. Because Moffett is so
eloquently terse in "A Structural Curriculum.for English" I
will quote him directly and extensively on this point:

. . . in trying to separate symbol from.symbolized, one
discovers their inseparability. Ultimately, we cannot
free data from the symbols into which they have been
abstracted, the message from the code. All knowledge

is some codification by man of his phenomenal world.
This is precisely what many incoming college freshmen
and even graduate students have never learned. The fact
is that languages are about themselves, in a greater
measure than we usually suspect; but this is a wholly
different matter from the English teacher's fear that
if he does not keep English self-contained it will slip
through his fingers and become as big as all outdoors.
The ambiguity I am after is that while we speak in Eng-
lish about non-English things, we are using invisible
syntactic relations as well as words like "although"
and "because" that are not about the phenomenal world--
at least not the external one. Every code or language
says something about itself while delivering its message.
"Codification is the substitution of one set of events
which we substitute for outer phenomena when we talk
about them is an inner set of neutral events--activities
we learn When we learn the language and about which we
are normally unaware. The purpose, I take it, of
teaching linguistics and semantics is to make the stu-
dent aware of how much people's words are about people
and words and how much they truly recapitulate outer
phenomena. But this is best done by letting students
try to symbolize raw phenomena of all kinds at all
levels of abstraction, and then by discussing these
efforts under the guidance of a teacher who is

97

agy particular content?"13 It was clear to Moffett, at
least, that the new content-structured curriculums had con-

centrated much too heavily on the substantive components of

 

linguistically and semantically sophisticated. I think
it will be found that what we might tell the student or
have him read about concerning the reflexiveness of
language will be much better learned through his own
writing and discussion. By this method, teachers may
more readily learn what kind of understanding of lan-
guage the student can take at different ages and in
what form they can take it.

Yes, language is about itself, but, in accordance
with something like Russell's theory of types, higher
abstractions, never about themselves. That is, some
English words refer to the outer world, other words
(like relative pronouns) refer to these first words,
and all syntax is about tacit rules for putting
together the concrete words. Some notion of a hier-
archy of abstraction, defined as greater and greater
processing of phenomena by the human mind, is indis-
pensable. Thus, the more abstract language is, the
more meta-language, culminating in mathematics as the
ultimate language about language. So we imagine a
symbolic hierarchy going from the codification of our
world that most nearly reflects the structure of that
world to codification that more and more resembles the
structure of the mind. Basically this is what abstrac-
tion is all about. To enable the student to learn
about this process, we must first separate in the cur-
riculum, and hence in the student's mind, symbolic
systems from empirical subjects, and then help him
discover both the dependence and independence of one
and the other.12

In other words, while realizing on the one hand that English
properly has no content, when we use language to symbolize
"other contents," the nature of the communicative medium
turns in upon itself and we intuitively learn something
about the structure of language anyway (whether we realize
it or not or whether we want to or not). As we talk we

 

98

English. As a result, students would learn all about
literary technique, rhetoric, linguistics and literary
criticism, but would they be able to read and to write
well--to appreciate literature and to express a universe of
knowledge through language? For Moffett, real "discovery"--
the opportunity to think and to use one's intelligence most
fruitfully--lay not in learning facts about English, but
rather in learning how to use language, how to accrue
excellence in thought through self-expression, through dis-
course. By concentrating on English as pure substance, and
by trying to induce students to understand this substance,
the new curriculum.bad ended up merely sequencing or
"juggling about" various kinds of information, instead of
teaching students, as Shafer noted also, how to learn and
explore through language and literature and how to nurture
"growth in the processes of thought."

Moffett suggested, therefore, in "A Structural Cur-

riculum for English"* that new curriculums for English

 

gradually become aware of the nature of discourse and as we
shall see in Chapter III, when we become involved in respond-
ing to literature operationally, in authentic activities, we
automatically learn about the structure of literature at the
same time.

*See also: James Moffett, "I, You, It," College Com-
position and Communication, XVI (1965), pp. 243-48.

 

99

should concentrate not on sequencing contents, but rather on
attempting to articulate the operational possibilities of
language (discourse): giving students the freedom. and
opportunity to use language, experiment with it and manipu-
late it in as many different ways as possible and on what-
ever "contents" and in whatever discourse situations seem
appropriate at the various grade levels commensurate with
the intellectual abilities of individual students. Accord-
ing to Moffett, the nature of English is to know how to and
a curriculum.for English ought to revolve around "someone-
talking-to-somebody-else-about-something."14 In short, to
promote the kind of intellectual excellence everyone wanted
for English, Moffett suggested a functional, rather than a
substantive approach to curricular design by re-establishing
English around a continuum of authentic discourse*:

I have suggested structuring the English curriculum

according to the relatiOns of speaker-listener—subject
as the ultimate context within which all our other

 

*It is obviously beyond the scope of this study to
explicate in full Moffett's thesis here. In addition to "A
Structural Curriculum in English" and "I, You, It," the
reader is also referred to: James Moffett, Teaching_the
Universe of Discourse (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1968), and
James Moffett, A Student-Centered Language Arts Curriculum,
K-13 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1968).

 

 

lOO

concerns may be handled functionally and holistically,
moving the student in his writing and reading from one
kind of actual discourse to the next in a sequence
which permits him to learn style, logic, semantics,
rhetoric, and literary form continuously through prac-
tice as first or second person. Ideally this sequence
would correspond both to his own intellectual and emo-
tional growth and to some significant progression in
"symbolic transformation," as Suzanne Langer has called
the human processing of the world. The structure of the
subject must be meshed with the structure of the stu-
dent. A major failure of education has been to consider
the logic of the one almost to the exclusion of the
psychologic of the other. Atomizing a subject into
analytical categories, inherent only in the subject,
necessarily slights the internal processes of the
student or language-user, who in any given instance of
an authentic discourse is employing all the sub-struc-
tures, working in all the categories, at once. We must
re-conceive the subject in such a way that we can talk
simultaneously about both the operations of the field
and the Operations of the learner. . . .

The connection between structure and skills is that
(1) both are independent of particular matter, and (2)
skills keep structure in action, invisible, so that it
does not become mere data. Thus I associate a struc-
tural curriculum with a functional approach.

Finally, Moffett attacked the actual "content" of the
new Literature Curriculums simply in their own terms. He
questioned both the educational validity and the practical
relevancy of the information the new programs were attempt-
ing to teach through discovery. If the new curriculums were
attempting to get students to discover and analyze literary

themes, critical theories, stylistic techniques and genre

distinctions, is this knowledge, Moffett asked, worth

lOl

knowing to begin with? What is its importance, relevancy,
and for how long will such information remain true? Is it
real knowledge or mere Opinion? And why is it so necessary
for students to learn about what others have thought and

said about literature and literary analysis:

. . . Any English teacher could drum up a grandiose
thesis (such as, "Great literature reflects man's
tragic conflict with himself"), illustrate it with
selections from literature, and say that he had created
a structural curriculum. I have four objections to
this: it is old hat; it encourages a pre-digested,
moralizing approach; it reveals more the structure of
psychology and sociology than of literature; and even
the structure of literature is not the structure of
English. . . .

To the extent the English teacher has an obligation
to familiarize the student with what has been written
in the past, he rightly has a problem of content-
coverage. But any approach that entailed plenty of
reading could accomplish this. We no longer agree very
much on what every gentleman ought to have read, and
the survey of literature seems to have placed us more
in the role of historian than we thought appropriate.
Virtually any curriculum could sample the range of
literature. Genre divisions satisfy a passion for
taxonomy. Though perhaps the best classification of
literature so far, genres are too cavalierly equated
with form and structure. Actually, the structure of a
novel or play is at least as much unique to itself as
it is shared by other novels and plays. And some
stories are poems, some poems stories, some plays
essays, and some essays are stories or poems. Perhaps
more than anything else, genres are marketing direc-
tives. As such, they provide convenient rhetorical
bins. Pedagogically, they constitute a hazard by making
both teachers and students feel that they have to
"define" what a short story or a poem is, i.e., find
something similar in all the examples. Even if this
were not futile, one would be left with only a definition,

102

another substantive reduction that does not help one to
read or write, or even appreciate. Since a definition
would have to be of the form, not content, the very
difficulty of definition suggests that we exaggerate
greatly the formal similarities among members of the
same genre.

Moffett contended that the curriculum planners had simply

and arbitrarily assumed that certain information was neces-

 

sary for all students to know. But how does one establish
priorities about what knowledge is necessary and useful?
MOffett asked, "Why should physics be an elective and liter-
ary history required? Why offer linguistics in high school
rather than psychology or anthropology, which might be
deemed equally 'basic'?"17 Recall for a moment the lesson
unit described by Shafer or refer back to the descriptions
of the Nebraska and Oregon curriculums in Chapter I. In
terms of educating for the future and in terms of developing
the real thought processes necessary to enable students to
learn on their own and inquire on their own, is it necessary
to know, for example, who the speaker is in Milton's poem
"On His Blindness"; and is it necessary in the long run
(even for college bound high school students) to know the
literary techniques and forms of the Tragedy, the Epic, the
Lyric, and the Novel, or to be able to relate a piece of

American fiction to one of the great American literary

103

themes: Puritanism, American Optimism and Romance, the New
Eden, the West, etc.?

Both the analyses of Moffett and Shafer, in retro-
spect, can be seen as pleas for student-centeredness in
education. What contents are to be taken up in school and
what information is to be acquired ought to be determined,
Moffett and Shafer implied, by the students themselves, by
their own unique interests, concerns and natural curiosi-
ties. If curriculums are primarily concerned with sequencing
information and knowledge only, then everything ought truly
to be considered an elective, if educators intend to pay
more than mere lip service to the doctrine "freedom to

' This, of course, is not to deny that "content"

explore.’
and "knowledge” have no validity in and of themselves. But
to state the problem that way, Moffett and Shafer would
insist, would be to skirt the issue. Both believed that
what is really important for true learning and productive
intellectual growth was not content, but thought processes
and language processes: student-centered, activity—directed,

question-oriented learning experiences: somebody-talking-

to-somebody-else-about-something.

104

The Student-centered Movement

The specific criticism levelled against the new
content-structured curriculums in English were, in actual-
ity, part of a much larger, more comprehensive educational
movement that gradually emerged in the last decade in
opposition to academic reform. In the early 1960's, as
this report has indicated, the emphasis in education was
clearly on intellectual excellence. Schools were being
criticized for being too permissive, and to protect the
"national security" public education in America tightened
its standards across the board in an attempt to provide
academic superiority and intellectual leadership. Admini-
strators and teachers alike tried to re-make schools into
high-powered scholastically-oriented institutions where
students worked diligently all the time on their studies
learning those things that were necessary to protect the
future of America. In discussing the exploration of
scientific subjects in The Process of Education, for examr
ple, Bruner believed that both the direction and motivation
for learning would be supplied by the natural lure and
curiosity that each different and unique discipline in and
of itself provided. Finding out about things, discovering

microscopic life for instance, or intuiting the basic

105

premises of plane geometry--these intellectual tasks, Bruner

felt, would supply their own intrinsic rewards:

There is, to begin with, the question of the balance
between extrinsic rewards and intrinsic ones. There has
been much written on the role of reward and punishment
in learning, but very little indeed on the role of
interest and curiosity and the lure of discovery. If
it is our intention as teachers to inure the child to
longer and longer episodes of learning, it may well be
that intrinsic rewards in the form of quickened aware-
ness and understanding will have to be emphasized far
more in the detailed design of curricula. One of the
least discussed ways of carrying a student through a
hard unit of material is to challenge him with a chance
to exercise his full powers, so that he may discover
the pleasure of full and effective functioning. Good
teachers know the power of this lure. Students should
know what it feels like to be completely absorbed in a
problem. They seldom experience this feeling in school.
Given enough absorption in class, some students may be
able to carry over the feeling to work done on their
own.

Experts in all fields would map out what was to be learned
and in what order, and every year, with research progressing
and with more and more knowledge becoming available about
each subject and how it might be structured, the future of
American education was approached with both optimism and
assurance: students would, no doubt, become brighter and
brighter (when so challenged), learn more and learn faster,

and spiral up through the curriculum to become doctors,

lawyers, engineers, scientists, educators--the future

106

leaders of America. At the time it was earnestly believed
that student-interest, subject-interest and teacher-interest
were all fundamentally unified "if teaching is done well and
(if) what we teach is worth teaching." Performance in
science and math were especially emphasized, and Project
English, as we have seen, was created to provide the same
kind of excellence and the same kind of discipline for the
study of English.

But there were a number of individuals actually
teaching in the public schools at the time--a small coterie
in the mid '60's, voices crying in the wilderness mostly--
who gradually began to sense the potentially destructive
directions inherent in education for "academic" ends rather
than for "humane" ends. To these individuals the new dis-
cipline in education, far from producing instant success,
had instead produced instant failure.

There was James Herndon who taught, as he put it, in
a 97%% black junior high school on Chicago's South Side from
1959 to 1960; and there was Jonathan Kozol who substitute
taught in a de facto segregated elementary classroom in the
Boston Public School system during the academic year 1964-
1965. The careers of both these teachers were noticeably

short for each was summarily fired after one year's employ

107

for not adhering to curricular guidelines, for introducing
"outside" literature into their classes, for not providing
enough direct instruction and for not maintaining enough
discipline and order. And finally there was Herbert Kohl
who taught a sixth grade class of Harlem boys and girls in
1962 and 1963, and who showed what kinds of real learning
could be accomplished by having the courage and the humanity
to allow freedom, spontaneity and curiosity to blossom with-
in his classroom.* Each of these gentlemen in his own
unique way described an educational system at work vastly
different from the success story everyone had anticipated--
the public and the professional community alike.

Kozol recorded his experiences in a volume entitled

Death at an Early Age. What is most noticeably absent from

 

Kozol's account are discussions of education, learning

 

*See also:
Nat Hentoff, Our Children Are Dying (1966)
David Holbrook, English for the Rejected (1964)
After the Dartmouth Conference--l967--the list of
student- centered publications on education becomes very long
indeed. Four of the most influential and pertinent are:
George Dennison, The Lives of the Children (1969)
Herbert Kohl, Theggpen Classroom (1969)
N. Postman and C. Weingartner, Teaching as a
Subversive Activity (1969)
John Holt, How Children Learn (1967)

 

 

108

theory and teaching practices, the reason being simply that
.523; education was the least important concern of the parti-
cular school in which he taught. According to KoZol, the
main purpoSe of his school was to keep order, keep silence,
and keep the school system.segregated. He charged that the
Boston Public School System not only failed its students
intellectually, but through racism.and psychological brutal-
ization, had also slowly and individually succeeded in des-
troying each of its children personally and emotionally as
well. All day long, Kozol relates, his students learned
rules and regulations and clung to the curriculum to a point
where whatever was original and creative in them, whatever
might have been theirs by virtue of fantasy or imagination
became steadily discouraged and denied. No real learning
was possible, no real education permitted. Kozol's book
flatly condemned the whole Boston School System for both
spiritual and psychological murder.

Several years after his experiences at George Wash-
ington Junior High School, James Herndon published The Way
It Spozed to Be, and the way it was "Spozed" to be wasn't
the way it actually was at all. There was supposed to be
order, discipline, and content-to-be-covered-in-sequence;

and if these principles were followed, then advancement,

109

learning, and better test scores were supposed to result.
But that isn't what Herndon's book described at all. In.
fact, Herndon, like Kozol, showed that exactly the opposite
happened from what was "spozed" to happen. Instead of real
learning and growth taking place, both discipline and a
clearly defined syllabus retarded and subverted both teach-
ing and learning. Chaos threatened on all sides, every day,
from the frustration, tedium and pentup psychological emo-
tion of each individual student in each of Herndon's six
junior high classes, ranked by 1.0. scores, from A to H.

No one advanced, no one got better scores, no one learned
what he was supposed to. In an age intent on creating
academic excellence, Herndon was teaching in a school where
most of his students had not even learned to read! ‘With the
curriculum set, and with order and silence the great watch-

words, Herndon relates that the only real choices, the only

 

real freedoms the curriculum afforded his students was

either to-do or not-to-do the assigned work:

 

Teachers are always willing to give advice to new (or
old) teachers, and I talked to them all during those
first six or seven weeks. . . . This advice was a
conglomeration of dodges, tricks, gimmicks to get the
kids to do what they were spozed to do, that is, what-
ever the teacher had in mind for them to do. It really
involved a kind of gerry-mandering of the group--
promises, favors, warnings, threats, letting you pass

110

out or not pass out paper, sit in a certain place or
not, A's, plusses, stars, and also various methods for
getting the class working before they knew it. The
purpose of all these methods was to get and keep an
aspect of order, which was reasonable enough, I suppose.
But the purpose of this order was supposed to be so that
"learning could take place." So everyone said--not
wanting to be guilty of the authoritarian predilection
for order for its own sake--while at the same time
admitting that most of the kids weren't learning any-
thing this way. . . . The material which was so impor-
tant, which had to be "covered," was supposed to lead
toward understanding, broader knowledge, scientific
‘method, good citizenship or, more specifically, toward
better writing, speech, figuring, grammar, geography,
whatever it was. But actually what was happening was
that they were presenting the students, every day, with
something for them either to do or not-do, while keep-
ing them through order from.any other alternative. If
a kid couldn't or wouldn't do his assignment, he had
only the choice of not-doing it, of doing nothing.
Almost every teacher admitted that this last was the
choice of half the class on any given day.

The kids who chose to do the assignment seemed rarely
to benefit from it; even if they did the speller con-
scientiously, their written work remained badly spelled.
The A's promised as prize for hard work didn't material-
ize. . . . 7H raised hell with me about the second- and
third-grade spellers. They needed seventh-grade spel-
lers. They'd already had them second- and third-grade
spellers for a number of years, they pointed out with
some justification; they'd already not-done them.a few
times.

Nor were these condemnations confined solely to poor
ghetto schools. The experiences John Holt described in his

1964 publication How Children Fail took place in white,

 

private schools with high standards and good reputations.

His students, with very few exceptions, were well above

111

average in intelligence, "successful," and on their way to
"good" secondary schools and colleges.

How Children Fail was perhaps the most disturbing of

 

all to the academic community at the time, because, for the
most part, Holt focused strictly on solid educational
matters. And his main thesis was downright apocalyptic:
under the pressure for high grades, knowledge-acquisition
and "success" at all costs, and with the emphasis on testing
and evaluation to clearly distinguish the more gifted stu-
dent from the less, most children in school become too tense
and too strung-out to either think intelligently or use
their native capacities to their best advantage. The sort
of constant academic pressure fostered within the classroom,
Holt maintained, made most children in school scared and
fearful and as a result many failed to develop more than

a tiny part of their tremendous capacity for learning,
understanding and creating with which they were born and of
which they make full use during the first two or three

years of their lives.20 The fear of failing and of dis-
pleasing the many anxious adults around them, "whose
limitless hopes and expectations for them hang over their
heads like a cloud,"21 Holt asserted, fostered non-learning

to a far greater extent than real learning:

112

Most children in school fail. . . .
They fail because they are afraid, bored, and confused.

They are afraid, above all else, of failing, of
disappointing or displeasing. . . .

They are bored because the things they are given and
told to do in school are so trivial, so dull, and make
such limited and narrow demands on the wide spectrum of
their intelligence, capabilities, and talents.

They are confused because most of the torrent of
words that pours over them in school makes little or
no sense. It often flatly contradicts other things
they have been told, and hardly ever has any relation
to what they really know--to the rough model of reality
that they carry around in their minds . . . schools
foster bad strategies, raise children's fears, produce
learning which is usually fragmentary, distorted, and
short-lived, and generally fail to meet the real needs
of children.

Holt noticed that under the necessity to succeed in
school, most children become "producer" thinkers and
"answer-grabbers" rather than real learners. With content
clearly defined and with the pressure steadily on, it
becomes vitally important for students to learn to produce
the right answer, rather than to learn how to concentrate

on meaning, relevance, or connectedness:

. . . most children in school are answer-centered. . . .
They see a problem as a kind of announcement that, far
off in some mysterious Answerland, there is an answer,
which they are supposed to go out and find. Some
children begin right away to try to pry this answer out
of the mind of the teacher. Little children are good
at this. They know, especially if they are cute-
1ooking, that if they look baffled or frightened enough,
teacher will usually tell them what they need to know.
This is called ”helping them." Bolder children are

113

ready to sally forth into Answerland in a kind of
treasure hunt for the answer. For them, the problem is
an answer-getting recipe, a set of hints or clues telling
them what to do, like instructions for finding buried
pirate treasure--go to the big oak, walk a hundred paces
in line with the top of the church steeple, etc. These
producers think, "Let's see, what did I do last time I
had a problem like this?" If they remember their
recipes, and don't mix them up, they may be good at the
answer-hunting game, and the answers they bring home
‘may often be right ones.

Good learners, however, Holt maintained, are problemecentered

and inquiry-oriented rather than answer centered:

‘The problem-centered person sees a problem as a
statement about a situation, from.which something has
been left out. In other words, there is in this situ-
ation a relationship or consequence that has not been.
stated and that must be found. He attacks the problem
by thinking about the situation, by trying to create it
whole in his mind. When he sees it whole, he knows
which part has been left out, and the answer comes
almost by itself. The answer to any problem, school
problem, is in the problem, only momentarily hidden
from.view. Finding it is like finding a missing piece
in a jigsaw puzzle. If you look at the empty space in
the puzzle, you know the shape of the piece that must
fill it.2

Furthermore, the answer-centered individual, Holt
asserted, made more or less uncritical use of rules and
formulae to_get his answer, for he would work under great
strain and a basic lack of self-confidence induced by a

curriculum that appeared both insurmountable and of ques-

tionable relevance to his own particular life-style and

114

interests. As a result, the average school child would
quickly jump at a possible right answer, instead of trying
to think, analyze, intuit and infer--intellectual abilities,
Holt avered, all normal children possess and use before they
come to school.*

But perhaps what made the situation even more distres-
sing, Holt noted, was that when answer-centered children
failed to produce the correct response--the one the cur-
riculum demanded, the one the teacher sought--they inevit-
ably fell back into defeatism and self-despair because they
simply didn't know what else to do and had no where else to
turn.26 The school structure--as perceived by Holt, Hern-
don, Kohl, etc.--in most instances simply would not allow

children the freedom and opportunity to deve10p really

 

*Holt himself presents an interesting side-point on
this whole notion of natural aptitude and failure. In the
‘world beyond the school, he asserted, in the real world,
children fail all the time. Most of the explorations of
children, in their efforts to predict and control their
environment, don't work. But this sort of failure doesn't
hinder further learning simply because there are no penal-
ties attached, except nature's own. In fact, failure is a
necessary condition to assure that further learning will
occur. In other words, Holt was convinced it was the
schools themselves that taught that failure was shameful.
In all natural learning, the child is not concerned with
protecting himself against everything that is easy and famil-
iar, but instead reaches out to experience and to embrace
life. In the real world children live "beyond praise or
blame."25

 

115

productive and worthwhile learning strategies. In short,
Holt asserted, that most children in school are not very
good at all at playing the answer-content game, and so
instead of becoming good learners, they become frustrated
and unhappy individuals who develop defensive and evasive
growth strategies and who dissipate their intellectual
energies on routine tasks and limiting curricular object-
ives. Under such circumstances, children, of necessity,
learn to devise elaborate psychological strategies aimed
solely at avoiding embarrassment, punishment, disapproval,
loss of status, and above all else the enigma of stupidity.
Holt lists many of these defensive strategies in §o_w_

Children Fail:27

 

1) First of all, there are the wild-stabbers-and-don't-
look-backers. These children will produce, through
fear, any answer in an attempt to get a right one,
right away.

2) Secondly, there are the pretend-you-really-know-the-
answer-so-you-won't-get-called-on type.

3) Then there are the mumblers: these children will
purposely attempt to mumble and disguise their answer,
hoping that the teacher-~who is anxiously waiting to
hear the "right" answer (as proof that everything is
happening the way it is supposed to)--will presume
the muffled response to be correct.

4) Other children slavishly attempt to imitate and answer
the way the smart kids do. This is one of the
"better" defensive strategies.

5)

6)

7)

116

Then of course, Holt related, there are always the bet-
hedgers and the fence-straddlers.

And the wait-and-it-outers. These children, Holt main-
tained, learn quickly that teachers can't stand not
getting the right answer almost as much as they can't.
So they simply wait until the teacher succumbs to the
pressure and supplies the answer.

And finally, for the most desperate, there is only
silence--no response. These children, usually among
the poorest learners and the least confident, simply
withdraw from the game completely in an attempt to
salvage for themselves at least a measure of self
respect and dignity.

All of these strategies, Holt maintained, may be classified

under what game theorists call "minimax"--the object of

which is to maximize your chances of winning and minimize

your losses if you should lose:

Schools and teachers seem generally to be as blind
to children's strategies as I was. Otherwise, they
would teach their courses and assign their tasks so
that students who really thought about the meaning of
the subject would have the best chance of succeeding,
while those who tried to do the tasks by illegitimate
means, without thinking or understanding, would be
foiled. But the reverse seems to be the case. Schools
give every encouragement to producers, the kids whose
idea is to get "right answers" by any and all means.
In a system that runs on "right answers," they can
hardly help it. And these schggls are often very dis-
couraging places for thinkers.

Holt concluded that most children consciously adopt

the learning strategies of failure, for when pupils fail,

117

he asserted, they are no longer under tension, no longer in

pain and can't be expected to perform: "children to whom

making mistakes is acutely painful are, therefore, under

great tension when doing something correctly . . . only

someone freed from.worrying about success and failure is

ready to use his brains:

And

way

"29

. . . I can read their thoughts on their faces, I can
almost hear them, "Am.I going to get this right? Pro-
bably not; what'll happen to me when I get it wrong?
Will the teacher get mad? Will the other kids laugh
at me? Will my mother and father hear about it? Will
they keep me back this year? Why am.I so dumb?" And
so on. . . .

These self-limiting and self-defeating strategies
are dictated, above all else, by fear. For many years
I have been asking myself why intelligent children act
unintelligently at school. The simple answer is,
"Because they're scared." I used to suspect that
children's defeatism had something to do With their
bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it
away with hearty cries of "Onward! You can do it!"
What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by
which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects
a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and
dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one:
to stop children from being afraid, and then to break
them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears
have driven them. . . . O

at times, Holt was so perceptively accurate about the
it is, we can do nothing but shudder:
. . . most children in school are scared most of the

time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers,
they control their fears, live with them, and adjust

118

themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a
vital difference between school and war, that the
adjustments children make to their fears are almost
wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capac-
ity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but
the scared learner is always a poor learner. . . .
Maybe I thought the students were in my class because
they were eager to learn what I was trying to teach,
but they knew better. They were in school because they
had to be, or because otherwise they would have had to
be in another class, which might be even worse. . . .

So the valiant and resolute band of travelers I
thought I was leading toward a much-hoped-for destin-
ation turned out instead to be more like convicts in a
chain gang, forced under threat of punishment to move
along a rough path leading nobody knew where and down
which they could see hardly more than a few steps
ahead. School feels like this to children: it is a
place where they make you go and where they tell you
to do things and where they try to make your life
unpleasant if you don't do them or don't do them
right.

It is painfully obvious to note at this point that
the descriptions provided by Holt and Herndon, etc. of the
schools-in-operation in the 1960's aligns almost point for
point with both Moffett's and Shafer's criticisms of the
new content-structured curriculums in Literature being
developed at the time under Project English. Real learning,
"growth into thought," Shafer intimated, most likely
required not pre-formulation, but rather positive, authentic
choice and the freedom to explore. And Moffett, it will be

recalled, advocated that what an English Curriculum ought

to provide is not an arbitrary sum of contents and knowledges,

119

but rather "a rich set of options."

Holt, too, was aware of the "new" teaching methods--
induction and discovery--and he criticized them for precis-
ely the same reasons that Moffett and Shafer did: they
failed to provide for authentic learning experiences:

. . . We must not fool ourselves, as for years I fooled
myself, into thinking that guiding children to answers
by carefully chosen leading questions is in any impor-
tant respect different from just telling them the
answers in the first place. Children who have been led
up to answers by teachers' questions are later help-
less unless they can remember the questions, or ask
themselves similar questions, and this is exactly what
they cannot do. The only answer that really sticks in
a child's mind is the answer to a question that he
asked or might ask of himself.32
But perhaps one of the remarks of Holt's students provides
the most insight into the basic inadequacies of the "new"
curriculums and the "new" teaching methods. After a game
of Twenty Questions (Holt frequently played this game with

his pupils to study firsthand their learning strategies)

Holt recorded in How Children Fail that the more sophisti-

 

cated players-~those few who had learned to ask good
questions--tried in vain to tell their answer-grabbing
classmates that ”it is silly to ask a question when you

already know the answer."33

120

Real Learnigg

Real learning and real growth--Holt, Herndon, Kohl,
Kozol, etc. protested-~are not and can never be fully con-
ceived of in terms of subject-matters, contents, curri-
culums or information. Instead, each of these individuals

considered the students themselves to be the single most

 

important school input. True learning-~learning that is
permanent and useful, that leads to intelligent action and
further learning--can arise, each came to believe in his
own way, only out of the experiences, interests, cultures,
strengths, and opinions of the learners themselves and
means providing students with both the freedom and the
opportunities to use their minds in potentially good ways,
rather than unproductive and limiting ways.

Academic reform had assumed that education ought to
primarily concern itself with intellectual pursuits, that
it was through the discovery of subject-matter that good
learners were produced and that, therefore, schools ought to
attempt to plan out, structure and sequence content in the
most logical and rational ways possible commensurate with
both the nature of the material on the one hand and the
cognitive growth patterns of children on the other. It was

earnestly believed that an intense involvement with the

121

structure of knowledge itself would be sufficient to enlarge
and expand a child's mind.

But student-centered education poses that this is not
how children come to learn at all. Children do not £22.
contents, or sequences, or structural relationships in the
‘ways that adults do, and they do not necessarily sgg_the
universe of knowledge as being either rational or logical.
At any moment, a child is attempting to make sense of the
'world in his own terms. Structuring contents and formu-
lating elaborate curriculums are adult passions and adult
biases which hinder growth, because student-centeredness
sees true learning as proceeding from how the student, not

the teacher, perceives the world about him:

Children cannot learn much from cookbooks, even the
best cookbooks. A child learns, at any moment, not by
using the procedure that seems best to us, but the one
that seems best to him; by fitting into his structure
of ideas and relationships, his mental model of reality,
not the piece we think comes next, but the one he thinks
comes next. This is hard for teachers to learn, and
hardest of all for the skillful and articulate, the
kind often called "gifted." The more aware we are of
the structural nature of our own ideas, the more we are
tempted to try to transplant this structure whole into
the minds of children. But it cannot be done. They
must 32 this structuring and building for themselves.
Knowledge, learning, understanding, are not linear.
They are not little bits of facts lined up in rows or
piled up one on t0p of another. A field of knowledge,
whether it be math, English, history, science, music,

122

or whatever, is a territory, and knowing it is not just
a matter of knowing all the items in the territory, but
of knowing how they relate to, compare with, and fit in
with each other. It is the difference between being
able to say a room in your house has so many tables, so
many chairs, so many lamps, and being able to close
your eyes and see that this chair goes here and that
table there. It is the difference between knowing the
names of all the streets in a city and being able to
get from any place, by any desired route, to any other
place.

Simply, student-centeredness views every individual
as already being a well-functioning, very capable learning
model before he enters school and sees every person as
possessing an innate and unquenchable drive to understand
the world in which he lives and to gain freedom.and com-
petence in dealing with that world:
Almost every child, on the first day he sets foot in a
school building, is smarter, more curious, less afraid
of what he doesn't know, better at finding and figuring
things out, more confident, resourceful, persistent and
independent than he will ever again be in his school-
ing, or, unless he is very unusual and lucky, for the
rest of his life. '

The normal individual gets satiated and bored with exper-

iences and delights that he has savored sufficiently and

eagerly goes on to higher more complex intellectual delights

as they become available to him.without danger or threat.

Student-centeredness sees growth and learning as naturally

123

pleasurable, rewarding, and exciting experiences that exist

‘with or without school, with or without curriculums, and

only if frustration, failure, disapproval, and ridicule

await at the next step do peOple then fixate and regress.

In the first six years of life, all children already possess

and have used to great advantage what Postman and Wein-

gartner in Teaching as a Subversive Activity list as the

qualities of good learners:

1)

2)

3)
4)

5)
6)

7)
8)

9)

10)

11)

37

Good learners have confidence in their ability to
learn

They have a profound faith in their problem-
solving ability

They enjoy solving problems -

They seem to know what is relevant to their
survival and what is not

They prefer to rely on their own judgment

They are not afraid to take chances and be wrong and
to learn from their mistakes

They are capable of changing their minds
They are not apt to give quick answers

They are capable of shifting perspectives, and try
to see problems from the point of view of others.

They realize that answers are relative

They know how to ask good questions and they know
how to question their own assumptions

124

12) And finally, they do not need to have an absolute
answer to every problem

But as Holt, Herndon, Kohl, Moffett, etc. demonstrated,
school curriculums, with their emphasis on performance,
content-acquisition and discipline, slowly and steadily
tend to erode the natural learning capabilities of children
and turn these good strategies into defensive ones. In
other words, student-centeredness sees no need to challenge
children to learn by presenting them with fully-articulated
curriculums, for children are already challenged intel-
lectually, every day, in their encounters with the real
world, with real experiences and explorations. In fact,
student-centeredness sees the whole sequential content
curriculum craze as encompassing a grand irony: the new
academic curriculums were intended to open up vast areas of
learning for both students and teachers alike, but instead,
by failing to rely on the natural learning abilities of
pupils pursuing their own intellectual ends in their own
.EEXE: the new curriculums (even those as enormous as
Nebraska's) in actuality were offering an education that was
both limited and stultifying; by forcing children to con-
centrate on specific ”contents” and ”particular" books,

instead of greatly developing the powers of thought, the

125

new curriculums had managed to seriously constrict what
children are really capable of learning under their own
inclinations and left to their own designs.

This later point was dramatically illustrated by

James Herndon in The Way It Spozed to Be. Herndon related

 

that most of his seventh graders couldn't read very well,
some not at all. But one of the "alleged" better readers in
the class, a black girl named Alexandra, alone faced the
reading issue with both defiance and aplomb, instead of
simple defeat like most of Herndon's students: "She read
like hell. Whatever was given to her, she just read right
along, stumbling occasionally, but always recovering and
getting everything right."38 Then Herndon discovered what
was actually happening. Alexandra was listening to Judy
(the only "real" reader in the class) who was sitting right
behind her whispering the words for Alexandra to repeat
aloud. Herndon, therefore, moved the two girls apart to
see what would happen. And then the real shock came.
Alexandra remained non-plussed; she merely paused every so
often to look over at Judy--in order to read her lips! In
short, while George Washington Junior High had failed to
teach many of its students to read, this one student of

Herndon's had learned, on her own, necessitated by the

 

126

instincts of survival and fear, to read lips, an abstract,
intellectual task at least equally complex as learning to
read itself. Imagine what this girl could have accomplished,
Herndon related, "if she'd have spent one tenth of the time
learning to read that she'd spent avoiding it . . . the
other non-readers, or almost non-readers, applied similar
tactics, to the effect that it was more honorable to appear
bad than stupid."39 In terms of what individual students

might come to know, given the opportunity, the sequential

 

curriculums of the 1960's, in retrospect, can be seen to
actually make very few demands on the wide Spectrum of
students' intellectual capabilities and talents and to fail
ultimately in teaching what children so desperately need to
learn: abstraction, self-confidence, inquiry, appreciation,
the ability to think."0 The new curriculums, unwittingly,
had sacrificed a large measure of real learning potential
for a small increase in the amount of information gained.
While educational theory, in general, in America has
traditionally emphasized the Cognitive, rather than the
Affective aspects of learning, and prized reason and intel-
ligence more highly than personal values, imagination and
creativity (even during the height of the progressive move-

ment), Student-centeredness in education, as initiated by

127

Holt, Kohl, Kozol, etc. and since followed by many more, in
education as well as psychology and sociology, sees itself
as departing radically from the cognitive tradition. For,
basically, student-centeredness considers what an individual
learns to be of less importance for intelligent growth than

how that individual feels about what he learns, since it is

 

believed that how children feel in school (how the classroom
is meeting their wishes, fantasies and inner desires) and,
even more importantly, how children feel about themselves,
‘will determine, for the most part, both the amount of moti-
vation and confidence that individual students will bring to
intellectual problems. Simply, a student is more likely to
learn and exceed expectations when he feels good about what
he learns; when he experiences a sense of "inner joy" from
knowing he is making positive choices about what and how he
should learn; and when he feels he is determining his own
existence and fulfilling his own unique sense of freedom and
individuality. By the same token if a pupil has no personal
stake or involvement in the learning process, then he must
be motivated to learn by a way other than his own inner

curiosity. And when schools are forced to motivate extrin-

sically--through grades, discipline, rigid curriculums and/

128

or inauthentic "discovery" methods*--then, as we have seen,
inefficient, non-productive learning results. Student-
centeredness sees education as something a person gets for
himself and not as something someone else gives or does to
him; and it sees knowledge, not as something to be imparted
to students, but instead as something "drawn out" of indi-
viduals by enhancing those qualities in method and attitude
which are most conducive to how each particular student
grows and learns in terms of his own unique and subjective
experiences. While content-learning must center itself
about subject-matters that a student must acquire, like
adding coins to one's pocket, real growth and real change,
in student-centered-humanistic terms, becomes much less an
acquisition of habits or a discovery of associations one by
one, and much more a total change of the total person--"a
new person rather than the same person with some concepts
added like new external possessions.""1
While most of the educational community in the 1960's

'was attempting to structure knowledge and manipulate

children, Kozol, Kohl, Moffett, Holt, etc. were desperately

 

*1 would also list here the current, somewhat popular,
performance contracting.

129

trying to understand them. They realized early that child-

 

ren were not just minds eating through contents, but whole
human beings, all aspects of which are, at any moment,
totally involved in every learning encounter: "Children
live all of a piece. Their bodies, their muscles, their
voices and brains are all hooked together; turn off a part
of them and you turn them off altogether."42 In these
terms, then, a real learning experience is self-justifying:
that is, the experience validates itself in and for itself,
rather than by becoming justified by some outside criterion.
A real learning experience is not defensive and does not
operate from threat and fear; but is rather growth-
oriented, and fully embraces both intellectual independence
and freedom of thought and action. Real learning impels the
individual toward wholeness of self, toward full functioning
of one's capacities, toward spontaneity, delight, creativity,
and confidence in the fact of the external world:
We don't [learn] . . . because it is good for us, or
because . . . [people] approve, or because somebody told
us to, or because it will make us live longer . . . or
because it will bring external rewards, or because it is
logical. We do it for the same reason that we choose
one dessert over another . . . or for choosing one
friend over another. . . .
In this way we learn what we are good at, what we

really like or dislike, what our tastes, and judgments,
and capacities are. In a word, this is the way we

130

discover the Self and answer the ultimate questions:
Who am I? What am.I?

The steps and the choices are taken out of pure.
spontaneity, from within outward. The healthy infant
or child, just Being, as part of his Being, is randomly
and spontaneously curious, exploratory, wondering,
interested . . . he tends to try out his powers, to
reach out, to be absorbed, fascinated . . . to play,
to wonder, to manipulate the world. Exploring, mani-
pulating, experiencing . . . can all be seen as attri-
butes of pure Being, and yet lead to Becoming (change,
growth), though in a serendipitous way, unplanned and
unanticipated.

In the final analysis, then, Student-centeredness sees the
ultimate goal of education, not as knowledge, but as self-
knowledge. Personal, healthy growth and self-discovery
become crucial concepts and student-centered-humanistic
education sees itself as providing the opportunity for (A)
Inner Growth-~the discovery of what kind of a person one is
and what talents and strengths one possesses, and beyond
this to an experiencing of a self-identity that is positive,
worthy and valuable solely in its own terms, and (B) Outer
Growth--coming to know the world outside through a personal
understanding of one's inner self, each individual learning
what he perceives to be most self-enriching for him, and
where school comes to be a place, a resource almost, where

the world and the world's knowledge is approached from the

inside out. What students need more than knowledge is

131

attention, freedom and understanding; and student-centered-
ness sees the primary responsibility of the school as pro-
viding each of its charges with the opportunity to go about
learning in his own unique ways, using the good strategies
he already possesses, discovering those matters he wants to
explore at any particular moment, at his own pace, and in
accord with his own abilities and natural inclinations.
Student-centered education emphatically posits,
therefore, that for efficient learning--and for the attain-
ment of all those highly prized intellectual ends--there can
be no real distinction between the cognitive and affective
aspects of the learning process. In fact, Humanist Educa-
tion would insist that the cognitive can be approached only
through the affective: that one's emotional experiences,
vital personal concerns, unique perceptions, and particular
learning strengths and abilities are the crucial variables
that determine what a person comes to know and how well
equipped one is to meet and solve problems in the future.
Abraham Maslow, whose Third Force Psychology has provided
the student-centered movement with a strong psychological
basis, sums up this particular notion quite well in an

article entitled, "Self-Actualization and Beyond:"

132

If I love Beethoven and I hear something in a Quartet
that you don't, how do I teach you to hear it? The
noises are there obviously, but I hear something very,
very beautiful, and you look blank. You hear the
sounds, how do I get you to hear the beauty? This is
more our problem in teaching than making you learn the
ABC's or demonstrating arithmetic on the board or
pointing to a dissection of a frog. These kinds of
things are external, and this kind of teaching is
easy. The other kind is much harder. . . . 4
Maslow is of course suggesting that cognitively-oriented
teaching which rests purely on analysis, logical implemen-
tation, and dissection is inadequate and insufficient.
Direct instruction is easy because it is external and non-
personal, and represents only one man's way of conceiving a
subject and putting structure to a content. The neW'way of
educating is more difficult. It means letting students
become personally involved in the material, generating
their own meanings and structures; it means communicating
‘with students on a personal level; it means letting an
individual's natural curiosity and motivation stir him.and
build his confidence; and finally, humanistic teaching
tries to let people respond to the beauty first--a beauty
of their own devising and creating, a beauty that is part of
each student's personal identity and experience. Simply the

‘most effective learning results when one's affective needs

and cognitive needs are being satisfied at the same tbme,

133

and the chances for learning to occur will be maximized if
the learner's feelings and concerns are recognized, valid-
ated, and made to direct the cognition that logically
should follow.45

Education for self-knowledge, then, implies that
schools must strive to promote an atmosphere which is basic-
ally non-threatening, self-accepting, and non-competitive.
Carl Rogers, along with Maslow, also feels that there are
three basic essentials for student-centered education:
(1) psychological safety: creativity and learning spring
from people slowly coming to realize that they can be what
they want, learn what they want, and express what they
want, without sham or facade; (2) the absence of external
evaluation: grades are always a threat and always create
a need for defensiveness. (But perhaps even more import-
antly, "evaluation means that some portion of experience
must be denied to awareness."); and (3) empathetic under-
standing: teachers and students must establish trusting
relationships, for, to facilitate the learning of others,
all involved must be prepared to learn and grow theme
selves.46

In addition, here are a number of classroom attitudes

endorsed by student-centered philOSOphies of education--

134

attitudes intended to encourage self-growth and promote

real learning:

1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

6)

7)

8)

9)

10)
11)

12)

13)

Relying minimally on pat answers and solutions in
learning experiences.

Accepting unconditionally each student's language
and experience.

Removing the threat of grades as a mark of failure,
as punishment, or as norms of minimum achievement.

Allowing free self-expression.

Encouraging students to bring their actual life
circumstances to bear upon the problems at hand
in the classroom.

Providing students with democratic power to help
draft school policy and school curriculums.

Providing freedom of self-determination. Students
must feel that their presence in school is influ-

encing their self-chosen life-style in a positive

way.

Making student concerns just as important as
subject-matter.

Letting students know that their opinions and ideas
really count for something.

Opening classrooms to innovation and experimentation.
Providing Opportunities for real, meaningful choice.

Encouraging inter-action and communication that is
genuine and not a bidding for the teacher's approval.

Realizing that more learning and growth can occur
through co-Operation and interaction rather than
through competition.

135
14) Being willing to learn from what one's students
offer.
15) Playing a lot.
16) Subordinating teaching to learning.48
17) Realizing that students know intuitively that inner

meaning is more important than outside authority."9

But while teachers must Offer their students respect
for what they choose to learn, they should at the same time
let their pupils know that there is genuine help and guid-
ance available for when they fail, or attempt something
beyond their capabilities. Teachers ought to have confi-
dence in the power of their students to succeed and ought
to encourage freedom of choice, inquiry, curiosity, and the
‘willingness to guess and to predict theories and solutions
to problems. But while freedom and choice are emphasized
here, student-centered philosophies of education in general
make it quite clear that there is a grave distinction
between purposeless chaos and creative disorder,50 between
simply offering one choices and Offering choiceful, guided
possibilities that all tend toward real learning in various
;gay§,'wherein one can be a daring learner and at the same
time maintain his need for safety, integrity, and self-

respect. Successful teaching lies in the kinds of

136

experiences Offered to students and the attitudes under-

 

lying them. Student-centeredness sees the relationship
between the intellect and the affect as indestructibly
symbiotic, and instead of denying the situation, it attempts
to use the integration to the best advantage, since student-
centeredness sees this as the way people actually do learn:
and there is no reason to suppose that what and how a
learner feels cannot be integrated with what schools believe
one should know.51 Humanistic education sees many children
in school today who do not seem.to learn as well as they
might because they simply are not clear about who they are,
what their lives are for, or what is worth learning and
‘striving for.52 Perhaps Carl Rogers provides the best
insight into the basic inadequacy of structure-centered,
academic philosophies of education. In Freedom to Learn he
tersely states:
Education implies a trust in the human organism and in
its potentialities. If I distrust the human being then
I must cram him full of information of my own choosing,
lest he go on in his mistaken ways. But if I trust the
capacity of the human individual for developing his own
potentialities, then I can provide him with many Oppor-

tunities and permit him to choose his own way, his own
direction, and move to self-discipline in his own way.

137

The Hooked on Books Program

While the Brunerian, academic philosophies of
education represented the dominant trend in English cur-
riculum reform during the 1960's, there was one English
program.which attempted to integrate student-centeredness
'with new curricular designs. The unique and different
approach to teaching English and Literature developed at the
University of Michigan under the direction of Daniel Fader
represented the first (pre-Dartmouth) practical attempt to
implement the new student-centered theories of education
'within a non-structured conceptualization of curricular
design. And in the end, Fader proved that the new idealisms
of student-centered teaching could work given the Oppor-
tunity and the effort necessary for success in any such
endeavor.

In the summer of 1964 Daniel Fader accepted the
challenge to construct an English and reading program for
the "dropouts" at the W. J. Maxey Boys' Training School in
Whitmore Lake, Michigan. As far as Fader and his colleagues
could ascertain no one had ever previously attempted to
devise a workable curriculum specially designed for the
general student; or more specifically, for the inner city

disenchanted individual: the Dropout, the Unteachable and

138

the Unreachable. And the task was even more difficult than
at first anticipated for the students at Maxey were even
less capable than the average "lower-tracked" student.
Fader reported that individual literacy quotients at Maxey
ranged from barely marginal to nonexistent.54

At first, Fader and his associates from.the depart-
ments Of Education and Psychology at the Ann Arbor campus
did not know where to begin. They began traditionally,
investigating materials, exploring current teaching prac-
tices and interviewing teachers. The project's original
assumption was that language training was a matter of dis-
covering techniques and develOping materials to effect
lasting changes in performance.55 In other words, the
‘Michigan Project was originally locked into the Brunerian
content/method bifrucation. After a succession of failures,
however, Fader and his colleagues scrapped the materials/
method phiIOSOphy and began to get personally involved with
the students they were attempting to teach. Gradually the
root of the problems-and possible solutions--emerged. It
'was not materials or methods or sequencing or "transfer" or
"drill" or "exposure" that could reach the students at
Maxey, but rather attitude and motivation. The boys at

Maxey perceived themselves as social failures and the public

139

schools, with their emphases on scholastic attainment,
success, and with the tracking system, had helped to rein-
force that attitude. Education was tO provide the means
for a better life, but to the students at Maxey, school
(and especially English and Literature) had become a
totally irrelevant social institution when compared to the
hopelessness and brutality of their lives. In Hooked on
‘ngkg, the popular paperback detailing Maxey's innovative
program for teaching English, Daniel Fader explained the
concept of teaching for attitude in this manner: Fader
became convinced that general-tracked students are not
themselves entirely responsible for their failure. Per-
formance-oriented middle-class students--for whom all of
the other Project English curriculums were intended--could
reasonably cope with a system unconcerned about attitude
and feeling toward learning; that is, such students could
run through the irrelevancies of content curriculums
because a better life (college and/or a job) waited at the
end of the game. But for society's failures an attitude of
self-worth and a sense of accomplishment had to be developed
first. The students at Maxey would learn only if what they
dig in school related directly to the personal concerns and/

or pleasures of their individual lives. Since Fader's

140

program was aimed at changing student attitude toward read-
ing, writing, and literature, his curriculum.was based on
two very new and different concepts Of teaching English
effectively--Diffusion and Saturation.

Fader explained that Diffusion refers to what good

 

English teachers have done or tried to do or wanted to do in
schools and classrooms everywhere: convince their colleagues
in all subjects that English must be taught by each teacher
in every classroom, and provide materials for teaching
literacy which invite the general student to learn. "English
in Every Classroom" helps change attitude, Fader believed,
because each teacher in the school becomes in effect an
intermediary between the student and functional literacy, so
that from one end of the school day to the other the student
must come to view reading and writing as a necessary means
to all ends.56
Saturation, however, was the real key concept to
Fader's reading and literature program. Simply put, satur-
ation considers the influence of the child's total school
environment, and the attitude of the students to learn to
read, and more importantly, to learn to enjoy reading. It

prOposes radically that curriculums do away with texts and

lists of sequentially arranged literature selections and

141

units designed about the concepts of teaching the approaches
to literature through structures and instead surround the
student in school with neWSpapers, magazines and paperbound
books that invite peeple to read for pleasure first. With
the Maxey student it was Fader's belief that what literature
programs ought to stress is not what students ought to read
and ought to know about, but rather what students;gill
read. Fader explained that publishers, editors and writers
know that commercial survival depends upon producing words
and sentences that people will read.) Financial disaster is
the reward for creating paragraphs that people should read:

Whereas saturation refers to the materials used in

every classroom to induce the child to enter the door-

way Of literacy, diffusion refers to the responsibility

of every teacher in ever classroom.to make the house

of literacy attractive.5¥

In addition, saturation attempts to relate what the

student reads to the world outside the school building.
Fader felt it absolutely necessary, therefore, to import
materials from that world for the teaching of the literacy
that the world required. Fader'believed that English
teachers had for too long ignored such materials as unworthy

of the better world schools and curriculums have tradition-

ally been dedicated to creating. But Fader's program in

142

fact yielded to none in its desire to make a better world,

and to do so he believed that curriculums must attempt to

educate students to deal with the world as it is, and no

literature he felt better represented that world than the

various periodicals and newspapers abounding in the streets

and neighborhoods just outside the classroom doors.

The Hooked on Books program differed from the cur-

riculums of the other project centers in several significant

ways:

1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

6)

Fader's program advanced the radical proposition
that "students are not scholars or machines but

people and should be treated accordingly when being -
induced to learn."5

For effective learning to result, curriculums must
first be concerned with the attitudes and emotions
of the learner. ‘

"Hooked on Books" proposed a radically different
concept of ”materials."

Fader's program was totally non-Brunerian; instead
it was student-centered and pleasure oriented.

The program saw learning and growth as organic
processes.

It focused on the quantity and not necessarily on
the quality of what was read.

 

*It is interesting to note here that Kohl, Kozol and

Herndon all begin to experience "success" in their classes
when they decided to scrap the school curriculum, begin to

143

In addition, the Hooked on Books approach shared the
attitudes on the nature of English-as-a-schOOl-subject
advanced by James Moffett in "A Structural Curriculum for
English." Fader maintained that individuals learn to read
and write and to appreciate literature not by analyzing
structures or transferring concepts from one content to
another, but instead by actually gging language: in short,
one learns to read by reading and to write by writing.
Language, Fader asserted, cannot be taught in isolation, in
the abstractions Of textbooks and learning units. TO prO-
mote literacy, the Whitmore Lake program firmly rOoted
language in the real concerns and experiences of actual
people who communicate daily in a verbally-oriented society.
Fader's program suggested that the language contexts of the
real world become in effect the curriculum Of the English

classroom, where reading and writing "become as natural as

 

teach in Open-ended student-centered ways, and establish a
real dialogue with their pupils in honest, respectful rela-
tionships. Who can forget the real learning just beginning'
to take place in Herndon's class when several of his stu-
dents respond, in a script and pantomime of their own com-
posing, to the fairy tale "Cinderella"; and it is completely
impossible to dismiss the accomplishments of H. Kohl's 36
children, especially Maurice's "Autobiography" and Robert
Jackson's novel, Journey Through Space and Time.

144

eating, talking, and sleeping."59

But while the Hooked on Books approach was highly
successful with respect to showing the importance of student
attitude and self-concept in the learning process in what
was essentially a student-centered approach to English,
Fader's program.failed to provide a coherent philosophy for
the teaching of English or Literature. Fader demonstrated

that the motivation for real learning_and the acquisition

 

of literacy and beyond could result from.a method attempting
to deal with people in human, rather than academic terms.
But when it came to actually working with literature (any
literature-~the literature of the street as well as stories
and poems of higher quality) within an authentic classroom
situation outside the Maxey school, Fader's program fell
back on lesson plans and structures that almost completely
negated the humane philosophies of education upon which his
entire approach to learning was founded. His lesson units
and class objectives for both West Side Story and Ann Frank:
_The Diary of a Younngirl (in the Hooked on Books paperback)
are as detailed, structured, inauthentic, content-oriented
and limiting as any of the lesson units deve10ped at the
more traditional project centers: Nebraska, Carnegie-

Mellon, etc.

145

While firmly believing in student-centeredness, and
while demonstrating its effectiveness for English teaching,
what the Hooked on Books approach lacked, essentially, was
the coherence and "creativeness” that the theory "The

Response to Literature" was to provide several years later

at the Dartmouth Conference.

CHAPTER III

THE DARTMOUTH CONFERENCE
AND

THE RESPONSE TO LITERATURE

Affective responses come from people who are
not necessarily organized and complete, and literary
response, at school and college, is often crazily
expected to come off in the same way in different
peOple responding to literature from widely dif-
ferent periods and cultures. Response is a word
that reminds the teacher that the experience of
art is a thing of our making, an activity in which
we are our own interpretative artist. The dryness
of schematic analysis of imagery, symbols, myth,
structural relations, et al. should be avoided
passionately at school and often at college. ,;5
is literature, not literary criticism, which is the
subject. It is vividly plain that it is much
easier to teach literary criticism than to teach
literature, just as it is easier to teach children
to write according to abstract models of correct-
ness than to use their own voices.

Wallace Douglas
Barbara Hardy
"The Dartmouth Conference"

Our New work is growing up--mere instruction
will not suffice.

Marshall McLuhan
The Medium is the Message

146

147

The Dartmouth Conference

 

The Anglo-American Conference on the teaching and
learning of English met at Dartmouth College in New
Hampshire in the late summer of 1966. For a period of four
weeks there were joined together forty-eight scholars and
specialists in teaching English in the public schools and
colleges: twenty-seven from the United States, twenty from
the United Kingdom, and one from Canada. Since this was the
first large-scale international conference on the teaching
of English, the participants were carefully selected to
assure diversity of experience, interest, and point of view.
Some were teachers in primary and secondary schools, others
teachers in schools of education, and still others univer-
sity professors concerned about what had been going on in
public education. They included specialists in the various
disciplines of English--literature, linguistics, creative
writing, rhetoric, composition and communication skills--and
a dozen or so other specialists, including psychologists,
psycholinguists, and sociologists who visited the Seminar
from.time to time as consultants.1

The participants at Dartmouth were concerned about
precisely the same issues as the Curriculum Project Centers:

attempting to define English and thus establish a coherent

148

methodology for teaching it effectively. Only four years
earlier many in the profession had thought that the problem
would be solved by now for Project English would soon be
completing its work based on the theories and principles of
the New Math and the New Science. But as the preceding
chapter served to illustrate a great deal of change and a
great many new ideas had emerged in the few short years
since the structure-centered Nebraska Project had been
funded early in 1962, and upon re-examination many both
'within and without the profession had found the entire
academic-Brunerian formulation unsuitable as a curricular
guide for English. Despite the fact that the Project
Centers were completing their Curriculums and preparing them
for national distribution, a sense of dissatisfaction and

a new Skepticism had slowly surfaced among the more promin-
ent in the profession: the criticisms of Holt, Herndon,
Fader, Shafer, Kozol and Moffett could not be ignored. When
Dartmouth formally convened, therefore, even those parti-
cipants who had been directly involved with the structure-
centered programs of Project English could be listed among
the doubters: Paul A. Olson of Nebraska, W. W. Douglas of
Northwestern, and Albert Kitzhaber and Wayne O'Neill of

Oregon; all had themselves begun a painful re-evaluation

149

process and their misgivings were publicly voiced at the
Conference. Albert Kitzhaber, in an opening address to the
participants, remarked of the academic-oriented curriculums

for English:

I would like to be able to tell you that they have
all been carefully planned, and that each has been
assigned to work on a predetermined segment or aspect
Of the curriculum tO insure uniform coverage of the
whole. I would like to assure you that the work Of
all two dozen is being carefully coordinated, and that
all are producing uniformly excellent results. None
of these is true. We are all muddling along, working
hard but Often rather aimlessly, sometimes producing
new and exciting materials, sometimes just warmigg up
the old and serving them under a new name. . . .

So although there were some very excellent materials being
produced by the Study Centers, Kitzhaber in this very
speech, nonetheless, pinpointed for both delegations the
familiar root problem:

We have no generally accepted philosophy of our
subject to build upon, one that defines and orders it,
one that has been scrutinized by the best minds that
can be brought to bear upon it and has their endorse-
ment. Many of the most important questions have not
been answered; some may not even have been asked. So
we are back where we started: ”What is English?"3

And so, at the beginning, after much debate and after

various "position papers" were passed back and forth

numerous times for additional comment and response, many

150

were inclined to agree with Kitzhaber: when one attempted
to define the nature of English, even after the prodigious
efforts and accomplishments of Carnegie-Mellon, Florida
State, Oregon, etc., the whole thing once again seemed to
slip through everyone's fingers like so much water. While
structure, sequence, and discipline had created the New
Science, the participants at Dartmouth for the most part
agreed that it simply did not provide the means for effect-
ively teaching students to read, write, talk, listen or
enjoy reading literature.4 Somehow, as the publications of
Holt, Kohl and Fader illustrated, most English curriculums
had neglected to address themselves to the personal and
humane qualities that each individual student is capable Of
bringing to the study of language and literature. In its
quest for excellence, scholarship, and respectability the
structure-centered reform movement of the early 1960's had
lost sight of its original purpose and become trapped by
its own intellectual energies. Defining English, estab-
lishing a curriculum for literature, and learning to teach
both effectively were found to be tasks far more difficult
than many had originally thought. To discern literature's
"great and simple structuring ideas," as Albert Marckwardt

was said to have remarked, "we must look for continuity on

151
more than just a few levels of abstraction."5

English -- "It is what we have chosen to ignore."

Although neither an articulate definition Of English
nor a detailed curriculum.ultimately emerged from.Dartmouth,
the Conference as a whole managed superbly to construct a
whole new and vibrantly-alive philosophy for the teaching of
English and Literature based both on the student-centered,
humanistic education movement occurring in.America in the
1960's and on some fascinating and different ideas about the
nature of language and literary response presented at the
Seminar by the British delegation.*

After examining at great length the kinds Of instruc-
tion traditionally Offered and the curriculums for schools
both in America and England, Dartmouth saw its pedagogical
task as supplying to the study of English a theoretical
basis on which to plan instruction and develop curriculums
that had been almost totally neglected by the English teach-

ing professions both in the United Kingdom and the United

 

*These theories will be taken up in detail later in
this chapter.

152

States. Dixon explains in Growth Through English* that
among the models or images of English widely accepted in
schools on both sides of the Atlantic, all were composed of
or centered about two basic concepts: the development of
skills and the transmission Of a cultural and intellectual
heritage via the classics of literature. English instruc-
tion had concentrated heavily on both these components over
the last several decades, with the result being on the one_
hand that almost universal literacy had been brought to both
countries, and on the other, that this literacy had been
"dissipated, for the most part, on the impoVerished liter-
ature Of the popular press, which grew in answer to it."6
In fact almost everyone at the Conference was willing to
admit that structure-centeredness had brought the concen-
tration of the teaching Of skills, concepts, and literary
heritages to their ultimate achievement in many of the
Project English Curriculums: no grander or more elaborate

a construction or method of operation could ever have been

achieved for the careful articulation, delineation, and

 

*John Dixon and Herbert Muller provide excellent
accounts of the entire Conference proceedings in Growth
Throggh English (London: Oxford University Press, 1967)
and The Uses of English (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1967), respectively.

 

 

153

transmission of knowledge 22225 literature and language than
the programs developed at Nebraska, Carnegie-Mellon, Oregon,
etc. And in this respect, participants on both sides noted
that after years Of drill and exercise, there was little to.
show for the effort: the concentration on knowledge seemed
not to have significantly improved either the communicative
abilities of students or their appreciation Of literature.
Dartmouth was to propose, therefore, that the major limi-
tations of these curricular formulations lie not in the area
of English they choose to sketch (concepts, information,
frames of reference), but rather "in the vast terrain they
choose to ignore."7
And what were those areas that traditiOnal,
structure-centered, skills-oriented curriculums had neg-
lected to consider? Simply the actual human experiences and
the activities of every day life: the talking and the
thinking things over, the gossip and the reading, the diary,
the newspaper and the conversation it evokes, the TV pro-
grams and an evening at the movies, the stories (oral and
'written) which compel retelling and passing along, the
reflections on past experiences and the memories that usher

monologue and dialogue, and the writing about those vivid

happenings, and always the readings and the "stories" we

154

create through language which help us more fully to under-
stand our world and our experiences and which give us
pleasure, conStantly. In short, the participants at Dart-
mouth felt that English instruction in the past had for too
long concentrated on the thinggitself (set lists Of books,
grammar, usage exercises, themes, genre studies, critical
theories, etc.) and had failed to bring into the classroom
the basis from.which all the various language activities
derive--involvement in activity and engagement with life
experiences themselves: that broad range of linguistic
discovery (which prompts the use of language in the first
place) and those very human and personal areas of existence
which "join a man's language to his experiences" and draw

him.naturally into reading and'writing:8

There is, then, a central paradox about language.

It belongs to the public world, and an English class-
room is a place where pupils meet to share experience
of some importance, to talk about people and situations
in the world as they know it, gathering experience into
new wholes and enjoying the satisfaction and power that
this gives. But in so doing each individual takes what
he can from.the shared storg of experience and builds
it into a world of his own.

And in ignoring "culture" as the student knows it, schools
had not helped promote a craving for the pleasures of

literature, for a student's own personal heritage and

155

background is:

. . . a network Of attitudes to experience and personal
evaluations that he develOps in a living response to
his family and neighbourhood. . . . And this personal
culture is what he brings to literature; in the light
of it he reads the linguistic symbols (giving his own
precious lifebloodi). What is vital is the interplay
between his personal world and the world Of the
‘writer: the teacher Of English must acknowledge both
sides of the experience, and know both of them.intims
ately if he is to help bring the two into a fruitful
relationship.
Thus, by emphasizing texts and concepts and tradition, the
average teacher was secure in presenting to students already
formulated literature and fictions, the written word, the
school's strength, instead of attempting to draw on student
experience of reality and self: "their strength, their
fictions."11 Dartmouth suggested, therefore, that only when
we openly encourage students to bring into the classroom
their experiences and their concerns about themselves and
their lives do we produce the need to communicate and the
motivation to learn and expand both language and imagin-
ative potential: to talk, to write, to read, and to create
something of beauty through self-expression, through a
thought, a feeling, a remembrance, a story:

What the child has learned already be has learned under
the pressure of the necessities and pleasures of daily

156

living. If school is to continue the process already
started, it must stir the samg kind of pressure and
kindle the same exc1tements.

A good way to explore the theoretical basis of what
Dartmouth meant by English relating a man's language to his
experiences would be to examine the British pedagogical
contributions to the Seminar, for, as the Americans quickly
discovered, educational reform was not exclusively a Yankee
phenomenon in the 1950's and '60's. During the same period
of time, the British English Teaching Profession initiated
a curriculum reform movement of its own which in many
respects was both similar and different from.the American
experience.

While English teachers in America had been studying
the cognitive psychologies of Jerome Bruner and the behav-
ioral psychologies of B. F. Skinner, the British had for
some time been strongly influenced by the developmental-
growth-oriented psychologies of Suzanne Langer, Jean Piaget,
and L. S. Vygotsky. These psychologies attempt to develop
a whole new theory of communication based not on cognitive
structuring or concept building, but rather on the personal,
imaginative and experiential growth and development of the

individual student. Thus instead of trying to increase

157

language proficiency and literary awareness on a cognitive
and skills-oriented model (as many Project English programs
attempted), the British were more concerned educationally
with the development of personal sensitivity to experience
and the gradual evolution and expansion of linguistic
ability and literary awareness.13
Perhaps the best way to explore these new creative
theories presented by the British contingent at Dartmouth
would be to examine some of the popular English-education
publications in Britain in the early 1960's. In 1965, just
one year prior to the Seminar, J. W. Patrick Creber, then
teacher and lecturer at Churchfields School, West Bromwich,
. published Sense and Sensitivity on the philosophy and prac-
tice of English teaching; and early in 1966, Frank White-
head, then honorary chairman of the National Association of
Teacher's of English and one Of the most influential par-

ticipants at Dartmouth, published a volume entitled, The

DisappearingDias.* Both Whitehead and Creber contended, in

 

*Other important British publications at the time on
’the English teaching reform movement include:

David Holbrook, English For Maturity (Cambridge,
England: The University Press, 1961).

158

general, that traditional British methods of instruction in
both language and literature had been misdirected in England
(as in America) by an overly-academic emphasis on drill,
grade-level attainment, and an examination system that had
managed to considerably erode the humane and imaginative
aspects of English teaching. And the root of the problem,
according to Whitehead, seemed to be that many teachers had
simply failed to take into account some very fundamental
notions about both language growth and basic learning
theory. In the Opening chapter of The Disappearing_Dias,
for example, Whitehead reports that what is most significant,
most fundamental to language development, is not its forms,
structures, or its grammar, but the simple fact that lan-
guage acquisition and growth is an on-going psychological,
social, and linguistic process which begins at birth and

continues throughout one's life. The average child,

 

David Holbrook, English For The Rejected (Cambridge,
England: The University Press, 1964).

Sybil Marshall, An Experiment in Education (Cambridge,
England: The University Press, 1963).

A. B. Clegg, The Excitement of Writing(London:
Chatto and Windus, 1962).

D. Thompson and B. Jackson, English in Education
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1964).

159

Whitehead asserts, enters school with a rich and varied oral
language background and by age five has mastered the basic
structures of English:

This is undeniably true of the spoken language, for the
normal five year Old comes to school already able to
understand and employ almost all the common structures
of his native language, together with a considerable
vocabulary.

What's more, Whitehead notes, most of us do the greatest
part of our language learning outside school, in the give
and take of everyday affairs, in the everyday need to com-
municate to others and to express our own thoughts and

feelings:

It is proper to stress that the child's mother-tongue
is, in fact, acquired rather than deliberately learned.
It is "picked up," for the most part unconsciously, by
an intuitive process of assimilation, imitation, and
adaptation; and it is also "picked up" for the most
part outside school. . . . And even during his school
years, the lessons concerned directly with his read-
ing, writing and speaking form only a tiny fraction Of
his total experience of the language, for this con-
tinues to expand and develop at many other times--
during other kinds of lessons, in the playground, in
the street, in the home. The English child, in fact,
acquires far the greater part of his mastery of the
English language outside English lessons.

 

Whitehead posits, therefore, that English instruction has
been misdirected by believing its lessons, exercises and.

assignments were develOping in children "hitherto non-

160

existent skills." But in fact, just the contrary is true,
for school age children have accomplished much of the work
towards literacy themselves. In a second of talking, for
example, the child obeys five or six highly complex lin-

guistic rules and makes on the average only about one mis-

take every ten seconds. In The Disappgarigg Dias Whitehead

 

implies that the trouble inevitably begins when the child
enters school, for there a teacher may sieze on a small and
infrequent mistake in either speaking or writing and shatter
a pupil's confidence about himself and his communicative
ability without recognizing the enormity of all the oral
language strengths children bring with them to school.16 ’
Creber also believed that the main thrust of British
education had been misguided. And the tragedy of the
situation, as he notes in Sense and Sensibility, is at the
same time its greatest irony: discipline and drill were
intended to produce literacy and inculcate a literary heri-
tage as efficiently as possible, but had instead more
clearly succeeded in "educating” too many individuals
"stultified and cramped" in self-expression and incapable
of responding to the human experiences of literature in a
"fresh and personal way."17 Creber writes that the whole

approach to English teaching in Britain has encouraged

161

pupils to disenfranchise their concerns, personalities, and
experiences from the study Of English. When this occurs,
he explains, linguistic expansion tends to "go bad," for
language becomes isolated and fragmented and individual
words tend to be considered without reference to either an
actual experience or a relevant context:
Unfortunately, from the 11+ examination onwards there
is a marked tendency to give up teaching in favor of
such practice: there are far too many pre-examination
English courses that concentrate attention exclusively
on the "word" and neglect the experience of which it
is an expression. This leads in turn to the abstracting
of language from its proper (i.e. natural) functions,
and also to the canvassing of obscurely alien or exces-
sively mature literature, in the misguided belief that
its perusal is good for the pupils vocabulary.
As a result of many years of teaching English, Creber had
become convinced (as had Fader, Holt, Kozol, etc. in.America
at about the same time) that students become very much
involved in the imaginative processes of language learning
when words and sentences are used in context and related to
actual personal experiences and immediate relevant interests.
Instead of completely relying on drills and concept attain-
ment, Creber would urge teachers to encourage pupils to

explore reality both in and outside the classroom and then

to share these experiences with other pupils both orally

162

and in writing. In this way, real dialogue could be
established and students could resgond to one another with
an experience and a context of their own.19

It was this point in particular--the relation of
language to relevant context and personal experience-~that
seemed to emerge as the dominant theme of The Disappearing
‘Qigg as well. Children come to school, Whitehead affirmed,
not only with the ability to talk, but also with many
things that they want to talk about; in other words, lan-
guage and literature exist for children as they do for
adults: intimately connected and inter-twined widh each
individual's own personal background and specific personal

ideas and experiences about which one wants to communicate:

Nearer to the heart of the matter is George Sampson's
Observation that English "includes and transcends all
subjects" since it is "for English people the whole
means of expression the attainment of which.makes them
articulate human beings, able to inherit the past, to
possess the present and to confront the future.". . .
Certainly, I believe, we shall never reach a full
understanding of what English teaching can and should
be until we have grasped the peculiarly intimate
relationship which exists between the individual

human being and his mother-tongue; more particularly
we need to have brought to clear focus in our minds
the way in which a child's acquisition of his native
language is inseparably intertwined with his deve10p-
ing consciousness of the world in which he is growing
up, with his control of his inner phantasies and feel-
ings they give rise to, and with his possession of the
values by which he will live his life in the civilization

163

he forms a part of . . . our language is a means Of

illuminating and exploring experience, of giving shape

to an institution which can crystallize only as the

words grow together to define its inherent structure

. . . for each of us (and especially for the child on

his journey toward maturity) the old truths have to be

redisdovered afresh if they are to be fully valid.20
For Whitehead, then, the way we respond to the spoken and
written word bears a direct relation to the uniqueness of
the actual experiences we have undergone, the kind of a
person we are, and the nature of the culture fromiwhich we
come. Furthermore, growth in language is seen as a con-
tinuously developing and expanding process (and a highly
complex one), at no time complete, always in the process of
transformation, and always needing to investigate and
explore new experience. Simply, language helps us to know
and to know how to express.

As for the teaching of literature, James Britton, in

this very same vein, delivered a position paper at Dartmouth

entitled "The Response to Literature"21

which was so favor-
ably received by the participants in general that the study
group on the teaching of literature, chaired by D. W.
Harding, accepted the document as the framework for the

group's final report. Following the thinking of Whitehead

and Creber, and the psychologies of Piaget and Langer in

164

particular, Britton noted that as with language growth,
literary involvement and enjoyment does not begin with
formal classroom instruction either: young children,
Britton avered, come to school already having been engaged,
often intensely, in rich literary experiences, spontaneously
responding to and delighting in oral stories, rhymes, folk
songs, fairy tales, fantasies and myths, as well as imagin-
ative TV programs and movies. In short, teachers ought not
to deal with literary awareness and response as though they
were starting from scratch. Moreover, knowledge of human -
experience, feeling, and motivation, is also developed for
the most part, like all language processes, outside school,-
in confrontations at home and with friends, in personal
triumphs as well as in personal reprisals. Loneliness,
anticipation, the celebration of life, and the knowledge of
evil--none of these experiences can be approached directly
and taught as "themes" or "unit-lessons" in class; with
these matters, Britton's essay suggests, one can only
encourage his students to bring their inchoate personal
emotions with them to class for exploration, discourse, dis-
covery, and enlargement. All of one's natural delights and
responses, as well as all of one's ideas, subjective Opinions

and background experiences, will determine how one will

165

react to the literature introduced into the classroom, and
the growth of literary appreciation and awareness, Britton
maintained, ought to be viewed as a gradually developing
process of imaginative response and creative expressivej

ness.* The participants agreed with Britton. Teachers of

 

*Although Dartmouth's zeal for child-centered,
experience-centered programs may seem like a passionate
attempt to revive the values and practices of the outmoded
American "progressive” pedagogy, such a conclusion would be
unwarranted. Beyond a genuine concern in English classes
for the develOpment and "education" of each individual
student, one finds little of the concern with the processes
of thinking characteristic of John Dewey and his followers.
James Squire recently commented on this point: "Despite
the superficial similarities with Progressivism.as it
developed in America, the teaching in British schools is
almost entirely oriented to the classroom situation and to
the imaginative and linguistic development of each child.
Intellectual growth per se is almost entirely neglected, as
is any long term perspective on the results of instruction.
The best preparation for tomorrow'may well be the richest
participation in today, but the present emphasis (in
Britain) is directed toward neither the transformation of
society nor the life-adjustment of the individgal, concepts
close to the core of American Progressivism."2 In fact,
after reviewing both Dartmouth's official publications and
its position papers, it would be difficult to construe the
teaching practices advocated at the Seminar as being con-
cerned with "cultural-intellectual" processes. Much of the
fervor at Dartmouth, in reality, derived from the profes-
sion's desire simply to improve the literacy of English-
speaking youth. As one participant remarked about the
creative teaching methods discussed, "It is strictly Eng-
lish--the fundamentals of reading, writing, talking, and
listening, learning to use language better. It pays suf-
ficient respect to subject-matter as well as to the growing
child."23

166

literature ought not to treat stories and poems as "works of
art" or be overly-concerned with content, interpretation,
criticism, or technique; rather, it was agreed that liter-
ature ought to exist within the classroom.as a presentational
and dramatic enactment of human experience which, when
treated as such, demands affective as well as intellectual
and creative responses. Thus instruction in literature
ought to begin with the naive responses to the "fictions"
and "stories" students bring with them to school. Britton
confirmed that what pupils will Offer are gut reactions, or
perhaps a remembrance, a "that's me" identification, or may-
be just a personal fragment. But it is these fragments
which must be accepted and explored, not rejected, and above
all, Britton warned, our pedantry as teachers of literature
and defenders of the culture must not be allowed to stand in
the way of the imaginative growth Of our students:
Clearly a naive writer and a naive reader may share
a satisfaction in circumstances which would only infur-
iate or at least disappoint a more sophisticated reader.
Is this naive response different in kind from that we
desire for literature, or merely different in intensity
of feeling or complexity or comprehensiveness or veri-
similitude? In other words, are such responses (and
children must make many of them) the bad currency we
seek to drive out, or are they the tender shoots that
must be fostered if there is to be a flower at all?

. . . Again, at quite a different level, teachers using
the "practical criticism" method sometimes introduced

167

passages of literature paired with sentimental or
otherwise second-rate writing, inviting comment leading
to a verdict. Is not this an attempt to drive out bad
currency? If, as I believe, satisfaction with the
second-rate differs in degree but not in kind from.the
higher satisfaction, teachers should surely be con-
cerned to Open doors; as the pupils advance, other
doors will close behind them with no need for the
teacher to intervene.

Our aim, then, should be to refine and develop
responses the children are already making--to fairy
stories, folk songs, pop songs, television serials,
their own game-rhymes, and so on.2

The implications for teaching methodology and cur-

ricular design from.the preceding theoretical discussion are
Obvious: for the language processes Of growth into liter-
acy and growth into literary appreciation, what the student .
brings to school with him.in terms of oral language ability,
literary responses, and experiential background ought to be
considered at least as important as anything the classroom
can directly provide in terms of instructional opportunity.
Moreover, what teachers actually do in the classrooms-the
activities they devise and the opportunities they provide--
should not serve as an all too apparent halt to the natural
language-growth-response-process, but rather should strive
to enhance and expand the way children have developed and

used language and literature all their lives and to extend

into the classroom the experiences, fears, joys, triumphs,

168

and failures, etc. that children have talked about and

wOndered about since birth. In fact, in The Disappearing
‘Qiag, Whitehead flatly rejects the notion that English can
be taught "directly": that is, as a completely structured

model to be handed over to students for imitation, "dis-

covery,’ or emulation.- The true task of English instruction,

he affirms, is:

. . . to help children to refine, polish, raise to a
higher level of sensitivity, effectiveness and precision
a language which they already possess in a highly devel-
oped form. . . . The main business of the English
teacher is not instruction in any direct sense, nor even
teaching in the sense which may be applicable in some
other subjects. It is the provision of abundant Oppor-
tunity for the child to use English under the conditions
which will most conduce to improvement; opportunity,
that is, to use his mother-tongue in each of its four
modes (listening, speaking, reading, writing) and for
all the varied purposes (practical, social, hmaginative,
creative) which make up its totality; opportunity more-
over to use it under expert guidance and in situations
which will develop ultimately big power to be self-
critical about his own efforts.

Thinking of English or Literature, therefore, in terms of
skills to be mastered, contents to be sequenced, and

structures and approaches "to be transferred" (as had the
academic curriculums), maneuvers us into thinking Of lan-

guage and literature as somehow external to the human being

who uses it--a technique which can be mastered by

169

intellectual effort, or a set of responses which can be

learned by processes of conditioning:

Surely (such ideas) completely fail to match the extra-
ordinary delicacy, complexity and manysidedness of the
processes that go on inside us when we acquire our
native language. The fact is that our mother-tongue is
something that is built into us at a very deep level of
the whole personality. It is the medium in which we
have evolved our most deeply-ingrained modes of inter-
preting the universe in which we live; and our capacity
for human relationships, our ways of perceiving, under-
standing and mastering the phenomena of our everyday
existence are shaped and colored by it in countless

ways of which we are seldom consciously aware. The work
of certain Russian psychologists, notably Vygotsky and
Luria, provides interesting indirect confirmation of the
way in which the child's perception of reality takes its
structure and patterning from language, as his acquisi-
tion of this enables him to sort out his impressions
into generalized categories incorporating the accumu-
lated experience of past generations. For a child, it
is claimed, the word not only indicates a corresponding
object in the external world, but also abstracts and
isolates its essential features, thus bringing it into
relation with a systematization of experience which
involves a reorganization of the child's whole mental
activity.

Dartmouth was convinced, therefore, that curriculums
which attempt to emulate several definite cognitive and/or
logical orientations will always remain inadequate, for to
be effective such constructions would have to be as complex
as the workings of the mind itself, and flexible enough to

adjust to the different experiences and uses of language Of

each student. Simply, the deep structure of language--where

170

meaning resides and from where literary response emanates--
is highly individualistic and at the present time it is
impossible to mesh (and would probably be inadvisable anyway)
what we know Of the structure of the English language, the
nature of the imagination, or the "why" of literary res-
ponse, with the structure of each individual mind without
seriously damaging the humane and affective aspects of
English. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) the acquisi-
tion of language and the growth and develOpment of the
imagination in human beings more naturally follows a psycho-
logical-experiential-creative sequence which is, to a great
extent, idiosyncratic for each person. What one selects
from his experiences to explore through language and what
kinds of experiences, language situations and "fictions" one
happens to be part of by accident of birth or otherwise
simply cannot be predicted. And although this is not to
deny that cognitive patterns do not exist in language devel-
opment, Dartmouth recognized--far in advance Of most others
in the profession--that for too long the teaching of English
has considered the logic and rhetoric of its subject-matter
almost to the exclusion of the psycho-logic of individual

language users and story-responders. Dixon reports:

171

To the external Observer, then, the attempt to derive a
rational sequence for the teaching of English from.the
internal structure of the subject as studied at its
highest level seems open to three major Objections. In
the first place, there is no body of agreement as to the
nature of this structure, nor does any such agreement
seem attainable; it is not even clear whether it should
be looked for within the discipline of literary criti-
cism or that of linguistics. Secondly, the search for
this kind of "structure" as a guiding principle leads

to a retrogressive emphasis on "knowledge" (knowledge
about the language, or about literature) as opposed to
"ability to use." And, thirdly, the desire for a step
by step articulation leads (as is made explicit in HoOk,
1962) to a demand that the English teacher's field of
activity be restricted to that which can be made incre-
mental. 7

Thus, with respect to literature, it is not that
Dartmouth assumed a necessarily anti-literary, uncritical
stance, and one totally insensitive to the ideas contained
in literary selections, but rather, following the new
"transactional" psychologies, the writings and the creative
work of men such asDavid Holbrook and J. W. P. Creber, and
the student-centered philosophies Of Holt, Herndon, Kozol,
and Fader, the Seminar felt acutely that courses of study in
literature designed to teach a set number of selections,
uncover major themes, demonstrate literary techniques, or
generally teach for concepts and information about liter-

ature and literary periods, simply violated the true signie

ficance of literature and interfered with the pleasures

172

good writing can afford when approached correctly: as part
of a transactional process that contributes to the imagin-

ative development of individual human beings.

The Problem of Formulation

From the theoretical positions being discussed here,
it may appear that the Dartmouth Conference was adamantly
Opposed to the more formal concerns of literary instructiOn:
the problem of artistic formulation and the importance of
literary criticism and interpretive analysis--in short,
knowledge about technique, style, form, and genre. Let it
be clearly asserted that Dartmouth considered all of these!
"contents" to be valid classroom concerns. In fact, it was
Benjamin DeMott, who from his caustic article, "Reading,
Writing, Reality, and Unreality," can clearly be identified
as no defender of the rank and file, was Said to have
remarked at one of the Seminar's committee meetings that
under any circumstances it should never be considered a sin
"to talk about what literature is about."28 Actually, the
validity of such knowledge was not precisely the issue at
Dartmouth, but rather, the Conference was more concerned
with putting this kind of content in its "proper perspec-

tive"; that is, how should such knowledge be approached, how

173

much is necessary, and homeuch importance should it be
accorded? It is clear from Britton's paper in general that
if a sephisticated literary response-~a verbalized formula-
tion of a work's artistic qualities--is the ultimate goal of
instruction (a goal in faCt that Britton himself and some
others at the Conference were not quite willing to accept),
then such "form consciousness" must also be considered a
developmental process and apprOpriate "artistic" responses
can only emerge, slowly, from unSOphisticated and naive
reactions. The Conference was inclined to believe that
knowledge of structure, form, technique, and genre will
develop automatically if children are allowed to respond to
literature freely and creatively and if they continuously

receive satisfaction from their reading experiences:

"An increasing sense of form” must be taken to mean~
an extension of responses to include these forms, or
perhaps an integration of earlier responses to some Of
them into a total and inclusive response.

Our sense of literary form increases as we find
satisfaction in a greater range and diversity of works,
and particularly as we find satisfaction in works which,
by their complexity or the subtlety of their distinc-
tions, their scope or their unexpectedness, make greater
and greater demands upon us. Our sense of form.increases
as our frame of reference of reality grows with exper-
ience, primary and secondary, Of the world we live in.

A sense of literary form must grow thus, from within;
it is the legacy of past satisfactions. . . . Progress
lies in perceiving gradually more complex patterns of
events, in picking up clues more widely separated and

174

more diverse in character, and in finding satisfaction
in patterns of events less directly related to their
expectations and, more particularly, their desires; at
the same time, it lies in also perceiving the form of
the varying relationships between elements in the story
and reality9 as increasingly they come to know that
commodity.
In other words, Dartmouth believed that formal meanings and
perceptions about structure are not necessarily apprehended
through analysis (as the structure-centered curriculums
believed), but rather, formal understanding and articulation
are most effectively fostered by providing first for a per-
sonally meaningful encounter with literature, and then

interpretation and structural designs can be intuited from

these total experiences.* Thus, although all "formal"

 

*It was James Moffett who attempted to provide the
Seminar with more than just a "sense of faith" about the '
ability of children to become aware of structure and formu-
lation through authentic language-response engagements. In
a 1968 publication entitled Teaching the Universe of Dis-
course (this publication was a direct outgrowth Of both the
Dartmouth Seminar and Moffett's earlier 1965 "I, You,_1t"
article), Moffett talks at length about the cognitive
ability to abstract information from experience and codify
this information into operational mental systems like lan-
guage. One consequence of intellectual maturation, Moffett
explains, is that, with growth, one's powers of symboliza-I
tion become increasingly more abstract, i.e. removed from ‘
direct experience: '

In common and technical parlance, the words "abstrac-
tion" and "to abstract" seem to refer to both the
abstracting and the abstracted and, as the following

175

considerations of stories and poems do relate to the liter-
ature curriculum, and are important, it was generally agreed

at Dartmouth that in the final analysis none of these

 

sentences illustrate, to apply in what appear to be
very different domains. "The individual abstracts
Objects from his environment" (perception). "This
student has chosen to write on a more abstract subject
than that student" (size of referent). "The concept of
bartering is easier than the concept of international
trade because the latter is more abstract" (concept
formation). "Proposition two about proposition one is
of a higher order of abstraction than proposition one"
(logic). This diversity of usage might indicate that
abstraction is an overly loose and unworkable concept,
but I prefer to believe that it indicates a similarity
of process underlying all stages of information-pro-
cessing, from.sensori-motor and perceptual to affective
and intellectual. At each stage, abstraction means
something a little different but it still retains
stable meaning through all stages--which is an excellent
reason for our using "abstraction" to cover so many
different phenomena. . . . Not only do we grow slowly
through the whole abstractive range during our period
of maturation, but at any time of life we are constantly
processing new experience up through the cycle of sen-
sations, memories, generalizations, and theories.

This process of abstraction, this ability to categorize,
relate and structure information into meaningful wholes,
operates throughout one's life--like breathing, it goes on
all the time--"for the chief purpose Of ensuring that we
wdll survive and prevail."31 Not only this, but befett
‘makes it clear that as one develops intellectually he also
gradually becomes aware of the process of abstraction; that'
is, individuals slowly become conscious of their own think--
ing processes: ‘

A child is not an empty vessel when he enters school;
he comes replete with a set of abstractions about the
world and himself, some of which he may have acquired

176

matters ought to become the central concerns of any litera-
ture program; the demand for interpretation and criticism

should arise from resppnse itself.

 

ready-made from others but some of which he generated
himself from his own experience. It is these latter
that are troublesome to others, obscure to himself, and
not very amenable to influence and possible correction.
They are unconscious, private, and essentially non-
verbal (they sound verbal only because we have to
denote them with language). Yet they determine a lot
of his behavior. And control of behavior becomes pos-
sible only as awareness of these abstractions arises.
In short, increased consciousness of abstracting has as
‘much to do with developmental growth as has progression
up the abstraction ladder. I believe that growth along
one dimension fosters growth along the other. This
would square with Piaget's insistence on decreasing'
egocentrism as a dimension of growth. That is, certain
cognitive processes which we associate with higher
abstraction may become possible only as the child becomes
aware that he is abstracting. Because higher abstract-
ing is so much about lower abstractions, it may be
impossible to make inferences of a certain generality
and complexity without becoming aware of prior stages.
Or the effort to make such inferences may of itself
induce this awareness. Also, words seem necessary to
higher abstraction and this necessitates greater con-
sciousness.

Thus, given the Opportunity to produce language over a wide
range of different discourse situations and to experience
literature both receptively (inward responses) and produc-
tively (create one's own fictions), Moffett's thesis is that
the human mind necessarily becomes aware of structure,
forms, categories, and concepts, first within the sphere of
one's own thinking patterns and fictions (how one has codi-
fied and arranged experience for oneself), and then (actu-
ally this is a simultaneous process) about the structures of
thought and the fictions of others:

 

177

This position was idealistic and naturally the prac-
tical question arose, "What if 'form consciousness'--the

desire to know about literature, its techniques, its genres

 

Ideally, a student would spend his time in a language
course of study abstracting a large amount of raw
material into categories of experience and then into
propositions which finally he would combine so as to
arrive at new propositions not evident at any of the
lower stages. By discussing his productions in a work-
shop class, he could profit from other points of view,
discover what part of his abstracting is peculiar to
him.and what he shares with a public, and see how the
worth of his higher abstractions is determined by the
worth of his lower ones. Generally, a student should
learn to play freely the whole symbolic scale, and to
know where he is on it at a given moment. Mbst of our
faulty thinking, and consequently a lot of our inef-
fective behavior, come from.confusing abstraction
levels and assigning to a high-order inference the same
truth value we assign to a lower-order "factual"
abstraction about which public agreement would be high.
The key is the consciousness of abstracting--as general
semanticists have insisted for years. This conscious-
ness is worth more than all the courses in logic because
it is something any logician, amateur or professional,
stands no chance without. It grows slowly over the
years, but different conditions can retard or advance
it.

Although Moffett can offer no direct proof for his conten-
tions in The Universe of Discourse, his essays imply rather
strongly that when children 92 fiction on an operational
level (respond to and create stories in the ways suggested
at Dartmouth), then they gradually and naturally become
aware not only of the "forms" and "structures" and "tech-
niques" of their own fictions (experiences), but also about
the structures and forms of those professional stories and
poems introduced into the classroom for them to reSpond to:

178

and modes--what if these curiosities and satisfactions do
not naturally develop?" It was Britton who spoke to this
question most eloquently. Simply, he was willing to admit
that in many instances "form consciousness" may not develop.
Students are not literary critics, he admonished, and what
they bring to a text may Obstensibly lead far away from.the
text: "(Response) may become articulate, finding expression
in comment and criticism, but equally it may not; and this,
as pedants, we find very_difficult to admit."35 Britton was
aware that his stance did not please everyone at the Con-
ference, but he did feel that his remarks presented a I
"realistic" perspective on the problem of teaching about
literature in the English curriculum. Very few people will
grow up to be critics or teachers, and for most--growing up
to assume responsibilities in widely disparate occupations--
their sense of what their own life is about will naturally
occupy the forefront of their minds, and so they will

derive from literature the pleasures and the illuminations

 

Again, the awesome ability of small children to create
novel sentences modelled on a paradigm they are uncon-
scious of demonstrates a very powerful Operating gener-
alization which they have somehow "inferred" from
instances of others' sentences and which they practice
in their vocal behavior. Why would they not bring this
faculty to bear on the other data of their experience?

179

(and the formulations) that seem most meaningful to their
wants and needs. And it was to these goals, the Conference
felt, that a literature program ought to be directed.

Two problems about formulation remain: (1) when
should teachers introduce these matters, and (2) how“much
information about literature is necessary. In regard to the
first question, Dixon reports that this problem might best
be solved by individual teachers operating within specific

classroom situations:

When we teachers tell ourselves (in syllabuses and
curricular guides) that pupils should be familiar with
this or that literature, should have a working know-
ledge of this or that rhetorical form, should be aware
of varities of English, differences in standard, etc.--
in all these cases we are in effect giving ourselves a
reminder of what to be looking for in pupils' dis-
coveries. These are the things the teacher is bearing
in mind, waiting for the pupils to reach towards,
looking for an Opportunity to develop. So there are
two levels: at the first, the structure the teacher
bears in mind; at the other, his observation of the
individual's development and his sense that at some
point in that development, this is the appropriate
moment--to judge by the pupil's signals-~for the
creation of a particular frame of reference to be mean-
ingful. Thus, a discussion of the attitudes, feelings
and ideas implied by a word, according to its context,
may arise in reading a poem aloud, or in looking at an
advertisement, or when a class that has just been read-
ing, say, Hemingway suddenly turns to Dylan Thomas;
indeed there are so many occasions for awareness of this
‘kind to come to the surface through a hesitation, a
question, or an argument, that it seems quite unneces-
sary for teachers suddenly to impose a set course on
elementary semantics.

180

In other words, knowledge about literature is appropriate
when it would serve to further extend and deepen initial
response. But this solution was found to be inadequate by
some; and with respect to the second question, Whitehead
remarked that there was even more "muddled thinking." This
quote from.James Squire's Response to Literature is perhaps
the most informative piece of evidence available from.the
Dartmouth papers. But it is clear the participants had no
solution to this complex problem either:

On the other hand, to understand a literary work and
to approach the experience that it Offers, a student
may very often need extrinsic information about, for
example, the historical or cultural setting in which a
work was written, or about the life, the thought, the
sensibility of its author. The teacher should be able
to judge how much such information is necessary in any
given case, considering the particular needs of the
students confronting him. It follows, therefore, that
his education should train him to make such judgments
and equip him with the information to frame and support
his teaching.37

The Problem of Continuity and Sequence

Although Dartmouth firmly rejected the notion of
fixed, sequential curriculums for literature (or any other
aspect of English for that matter), the Conference as a

whole cannot be accused of disregarding entirely the problem

of continuity and sequence. In fact, the question of

 

   

 

181

attempting to establish possible "directions" for the study
of literature was one of the most intensely contested issues
at the Seminar. But the kinds of sequencing Dartmouth con-
sidered were vastly different from traditional curricula and
syllabi, precisely because the Seminar was aware that a
curriculum for English and/or Literature must deal with many
different levels of growth and patterns of development

simultaneously.

 

To begin with, Dartmouth recognized that the various
aspects of English-as-a-school-subject (reading, writing,
listening, discourse, literature) cannot be fragmented,
separated from one another, and taught in isolated sequences.
As we have seen, the Seminar tended to view English as
decidedly wholistic and humanistic, consisting Of an inte-
grated body of attitudes, ideas, facts and conclusions that
are all intrinsically interrelated and bound together by a
knowledge of the intimate relation that exists between a
man's language and his experiences; simply, language activ-
ity resists fragmentation because it is essentially imagin-
ative-~"story-creating"--and is part of the very fabric of
individual human beings who are free to develop and transform
themselves by conscious choice.38 Thus, if we seek con-

tinuity, Dartmouth suggested, our curriculums cannot attempt

182

to disunify and teach as separate skills and subject-

matters, language processes that are already inexorably

 

integrated; to do so would be to seriously misrepresent how

 

language actually functions within the human community: as
a meaningful construct of whole human beings who bring all
of their past experiences and present intellectual know-
ledges to bear on each creative and communicative response.
This recognition of the "wholeness" of English was, in fact,
one of the major accomplishments of the Seminar and the
participants were convinced that much of the failure of
teaching English well resulted from language arts programs
that treated the various aspects of English as separate
sequences. Even though integration was always planned for,
it was painfully obvious that cohesiveness rarely eventu?
ated.* So in the first instance, a curriculum for liter-
ature would have to account for the fact that all language
activities are interrelated. Thus the teaching of liter-
ature would have to take its place within (not alongside)
all the other language involvements of the English class-

room, and literature ought not to be considered the hub of

 

*See Shafer's criticism of the Carnegie-Mellon
Curriculum in Chapter II. 1

183

study from which the other language arts would emanate;
instead, creative, integrated language activity was seen as
freqpently including literary experiences and vice-versa.
Dartmouth also looked at developing a sense of con-
tinuity and direction for literary response within the
individual classroom. But growth here was viewed as an
Open-involvement-student-centered learning experience, pro-
ceeding "organically" according to the directions and the
concerns of individual students or individual groups of
students. Thus, in a year's work for example, instead Of
structuring lessons about the analytical demands of an
abstractly defined "content" or "work to be covered," Dart-
mouth suggested that the introduction of literature into
the classroom center about the intellectual and imaginative
exploratory curiosities of individual students responding
creatively to any number of diverse stories, poems and
dramas appropriate for a particular grade level. Activities
and discussions were conceived of as necessarily being
free-form, rather than proceeding through a tightly-knit
and well organized sequence of unit lessons. But this was
not in any sense to reject pre-planning. In fact, Dart-
mouth was well aware that structuring language activities

for openness, freedom and growth possibilities was a far

184
more difficult task than teaching according to a syllabus:

If in the course of reading some poems with a class,
the teacher sees possibilities for acting, or if in the
accompanying talk pupils are so seized with the topic
that they want to write, then a unitary approach per-
mits the flow from a prepared activity to one relatively
unforeseen. Lessons become less preformulated. This is
not to reject pre-planning and system: on the contrary,
a teacher who is planning flexibly needs to consider
beforehand many possible avenues that his pupils may
discover in the course of a lesson, so that whichever
catches their enthusiasm he is aware Of its possibili-
ties. The more active the part pupils are given, the
more difficult to predict all that they will find and
uncover: thus the need for a flexible teaching strategy
rather than rigid lesson plans, and for teachers con-
fidently able to move with a class for instance from
reading My Childhood to discussing old people they know
or to acting encounters of youth and age. . . . What
unifies such varied classroom activities is the theme
or aspect of human experience on which work centers.

Furthermore, it was pretty well agreed that in all instances
and at all levels teachers ought to very carefully attempt
to move as often as possible from simple responses to ever
more creative and complex ones, all the while being very
mindful of the psychological and emotional complexities
involved in developing and refining literary responses.

In addition, sequencing and continuity were discussed
on more global terms as well. The direction of these talks

is perhaps best exemplified by referring once again to the

work of Professor Creber. In Sense and Sensibility, for

185

example, Creber strongly urged the adoption of a whole new
approach to the English curriculum for both primary and
secondary schools, based on imaginative explorations with
language, and sequenced according to the characteristic
interests and enthusiasms of children at succeeding stages
of his/her development. Creber proposed that English
teachers begin in the elementary grades with the child's
world of experience, and experience of the world, and
initiate creative activities centered on sensation, obser-
vation and perceptual awareness. English classes, Creber
posited, should initially offer the child the Opportunity
to give order and form--through language--"to his develop-

ing sense of realnessz"40

The basis of the argument should now be clear. The
child, by keeping his eyes "greatly Open," extends
and improves his knowledge of the world and, further-
‘more, the attainment of this deeper and wider imagin-
atin insight is in itself an enjoyable process for
him. 1

As maturation proceeds, according to Creber, English
instruction ought to attempt to broaden out and involve

other kinds of consciousness: notably social and emotional

awarenes S I

186

Without abandoning the discipline of perception and
Observation one should introduce the human element more
and more into the content of the work. Just as the
children have become progressively more articulate about
sensory experience, so, one hOpes, they will grow to an
articulatenzgs in matters of emotional and social
experience.

To facilitate this widening sense of consciousness, Creber
proposed that enormous amounts of literature be used in the
classroom--literature that directly related to the exper-
iences and concerns of each student's developing sense of

awareness about himself and his world.

As the child moves into his teens a perceptible change
of interest takes place so that, if the experience of
writing and reading is to continue to answer his needs,
there must be a corresponding re-orientation, a change
of emphasis, in the syllabus.

The generalized evidence of such work as Dr. Wall's
The Adolescent Child, the specific testimony of such
novels as Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and of such autobio-
graphical documents as Richard Wright's Black Boy and
A Young Girl's Diapy--all such writings confirm one's
own memory and one's observations: for the adolescent,
life takes on a new intensity, and this intensity is
to be found both in terms of an increase in intro-
spection, on the one hand, and an often obsessive con-
cern with social relationships on the other. . . . The
demands of English should change likewise. . . . My
first concern, however, is not with articulation but
rather with imagination, so that reading is as important
a means of fostering the imagination as writing. At
this stage, we move on to a new definition of imagin-
ation. . . . When we are dealing with boys and girls
in the third and fourth years . . . we need to extend
our definition of the imagination in order to compass
aspects of experience which are at once more subtle and

 

187

complex than sense impressions by themselves. The work
is now seen as having a moral aim, for it is here that
one seeks to encourage that involvement in the life of
others, generally by means of literature. . . . Not
only this, but the imagination has an important part to
play in enabling the less intelligent children to grasp
truths which, if expressed abstractly, would baffle
them.43

Dartmouth was keenly aware of the fact, then, that what

needs to move sequentially is imaginative growth, sensitivity
and responsiveness, all within a humane framework of breadth,
balance and flexibility. But with regard to such long-range
formulations as Creber suggested, there was once again much
uncertainty mixed with the Seminar's Optimism. Muller

reports:

No one tried to define the "natural" sequence of
English studies from the beginning of school to the
end because there is no such thing. We can make out
roughly stages in the child's development, because of
which we can all agree that he should begin with
nursery rhymes and fairy tales before Hamlet, but there
is no way of deciding just when it is best for him to
read Hamlet or how much he should be expected to know
and say about it. Similarly we know that he needs to
enlarge his vocabulary and will do so haphazardly and
unconsciously by himself, but no teacher who wants to
help him systematically can know just what words he
needs to know next. Having dwelt on a number of
troublesome questions, I should finally say simply that
there is not only no possibility but no need Of posi-
tive, conclusive answers. For informed teachers
experience can be a sufficient guide. The seminar con-
tributed chiefly by sharpening awareness of the pro-
blems, making clearer the need of tact and flexibility,

188

and agreeing upon the aim of providing more diverse and
abundant opportunity for development through the uses
of language.

In addition, the participants were well aware that
literary reSponse is both a receptive (inward, moral, pri-
vate) aspect of language growth and development, as well as
a productive one; that is, reading can easily lead to writing
activities, to discourse, to drama, as well as result from
them. And Harding added that the Response to Literature
also included not only immediate response, but later effects,
and that overt response (verbal, etc.) may indicate very
little of one's inner response.45 Dartmouth suggested,
therefore, that teachers and planners must be aware of
these kinds of continuities also. At times, teachers ought
perhaps to help connect response, and at other times leave

responses unresolved in the expectation that a greater

 

*In retrospect, the Dartmouth Conference as a whole
ought not to be viewed as a total rejection of the structure-
centered curriculum projects of the USOE. Such a conclusion
“would be unwarranted, for Dartmouth was just as concerned
'with sequencing and continuity as were the most ardent
reformers of the early academic educational reform movement.
But while everyone at Darmmouth agreed on the need for more
continuity, it was also agreed that the profession as yet
did not know just how to plan for it successfully, consid-
ering all the "variables" an English curriculum must deal
with.

189

degree of imaginative growth may result from this avoidance
of closure.

Similarly, the Seminar pointed out that sequencing
would have to be acutely aware Of experiential growth
patterns as well. What kinds of experiences, for example,
can be considered typical of the elementary school child?
the adolescent? the urban youth? As John Dixon remarked,
if we are to construct a curriculum closely related to
student experiences, "to promote growth, (then) experience
must come in some sort of order."46 Dixon makes it abund-
antly clear that students do not merely want teachers to
entertain, they want them to teach; pupils need to feel
they are going somewhere and they need to experience both
accomplishment and success: "Improvisation can thrive only
within a framework that expresses, more or less articulately,
an underlying pattern of development."47 And yet, imagin-
ative growth patterns are often individual and complex to
understand. Why one type of literature is passionately
devoured by a certain youth at a certain time in his life
is a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer. And
finally, there are linguistic growth patterns to consider,
for the verbalization of literary responses and the increas-

ing desire for "formulation" and "conceptualization" are no

190

doubt closely connected with the student's growing language
abilities and his slowly emerging sense of awareness and
control over his linguistic powers.

Because the problem.of establishing continuity and
sequence, then, was seen as both vitally important and come
plex in the extreme, Dartmouth managed to twist about the
questions, What is English? and How should.we provide con-
tinuity? from the lofty theoretical plane established at
the Basic Issues Conference into a new and vital plane of
practicality. Dartmouth was not interested in establishing
a master plan--the ultimate curriculum for literature, for
English was seen as simply not lending itself to such mas-
sive all-encompassing constructs. Dartmouth was, there-
fore, more concerned with the problem, "What do we do in
Monday's English class?" The Conference wanted to get down
to specifics and it wanted to talk about actual response-
provoking activities within the classroom. This particular
and unique focus for the Seminar was aptly described by
Albert Marckwardt when he commented that the concept of
discipline at Dartmouth was "Operational rather than con-
tentive; almost immediately upon the Opening Of the Confer-
ence the familiar question, 'What is English?"was turned

into, 'What does the English teacher do?’ which in effect

191

was asking what the pupil or student might best be doing"

to develop his sensitivites to literature and his adroitness
in the use of language."8 And in this regard Dartmouth has
provided the profession with a good idea of what an English
class ought to look like and what both students and teachers
ought to be doing: using language, ggipg together, creating,
talking, dramatizing, miming, scripting, working in groups,
painting, improvising, sharing experiences, telling stories,
and both acting on literature and reading it. Involvement,
Activity, Engagement, Drama--these were the over-riding
themes of the Seminar.

As for literature particularly, Dartmouth suggested
that the curriculum cannot teach literature directly by
concentrating exclusively on what it is, but rather the
English classroom ought to instead create viable, meaning-
ful, personally relevant "contexts" within which literary
experiences--the need and the desire to experience fictions~
and to create them-~might naturally and organically be
inter-mixed with authentic, operational language activities.

This essential notion of the English classroom as providing

a "context, a "place,' wherein literature and human exper-
ience might find root, expand, and grow is eloquently

expressed by Benjamin DeMott in the article, "Reading,

192
Writing, Reality, and Unrealityz"

The substance of English is dramatic and presenta-
tional, a fullness, an embodiment, a wholeness not an
isolate or a swiftly nameable concentrate: not energy,
not heat. But as already indicated . . . it is the
place--there is no other in most schools--the place
wherein the chief matters of concern are particulars
of humanness--individual human feeling, human response,
and human time, as these can be known through the
‘written expression (at many literary levels) of men
living and dead, and as they can be discovered by
student writers seeking through words to name and com-
pose and grasp their own experience. English in sum
is about my distinctness and the distinctness of other
human beings. Its function, like that of some books
called great, is to provide an arena in which the
separate man, the single ego, can strive at once to
know the world through art, to know what if anything
he uniquely is, and what some brothers uniquely are.
The instruments employed are the imagination, the
intellect, and texts or events that rouse the former
to life. And, to repeat, the goal is not to know dates
and authors and how to spell recommend; it is to expand
the areas of the human world--areas that would not
exist but for art--with which individual man can feel
solidarity and coextensiveness.

"Solidarity” and "Co-extensiveness:"

with literature, stu-
dents ought to spend their time in class engaged in the
active and creative exploration of human experience--
responding to literature--where the ”stuff to be conceived"
is the raw stuff of human interaction and not concepts or
literary matters themselves:

The principal aim is to build on the method of
language learning by which he has already accomplished

193

so much. The classroom is a place for taking on new
roles, facing new situations--coming to terms in dif-
ferent ways with new elements of oneself and new levels
of human experience. In the course of doing so, with
the teacher's encouragement and guidance, language is
incidentally adapted to the new role, especially when
the teacher can avoid serious discontinuity. Thus the
movements from spoken to written, from dialect to
standard, from kinds of dialogue to kinds of monologue,
are all potentially points of rupture--of breakdown in
confidence, in acceptance of school, and at worst in
the sense of one's own identity. Each movement is
therefore a source of failure--or strength.

Fortunately, and partly because English is so rooted
in experience outside school, the resources for new
strength are latent in all children and young people.
We note particularly a resource that becomes our major
concern, in the high school and beyond: the power
through language to take on the role of spectator and
thus to enter into aBd share in the work of the mature
artist and thinker.5

Thus what emerges from Dartmouth--from all its
Official publications and its 1000 plus pages of "seminar
papers"--is not a curriculum.for teaching English or
Literature, but rather a set of values, a stance, a "clear-
ing of the air." Dartmouth deflated several theories and
endorsed several others; it frankly admitted the errors of
the past, but provided a positive sense of encouragement
for the future; it re-asserted the importance of the humane
and affective aspects of English and positively identified
those areas where research is most vitally needed: the

nature of oral language discourse, the nature of response,

194

psycholinguistic patterns of development, and all those
areas where child development intersects with the use of
language.

And so, although Dartmouth raised many more questions
about the teaching of English than it answered, the Seminar
as a whole managed to stir something very deep within the
profession, and even though six years have passed, its true
effects on the schools and the curriculum are yet to be
seen. It would not, however, be an exaggeration to say
that the Seminar in general will influence the teaching Of
English and Literature more profoundly in the next decade
than any single event of the past fifteen years. Simply,
what has stirred the heart of the profession so profoundly
and altered so radically individual perceptions about the
nature Of English was the Seminar's sense of "bravado."
Dartmouth's recommendations about the teaching and learning
of language and literature are not merely recommendations,
but manifestos. The term "The Response to Literature" has
come to stand for, not a curriculum, not even a plan of
action, but rather a philosophy of education, and in a very

real sense, a call to arms as well.

CHAPTER IV

THE NEW CURRICULUM:

LITERATURE PRODUCED AND RECEIVED

. . . in the act of talking about structure we
reify it into substance. The form of one man's
short story is the content of another man's
critical essay.

James Moffett
Teaching the Universe of Discourse

A central aim.in the teaching of English is for
the teacher to help young people become the best
stopytellers they can be, both by providing
situations in which students can discover the
stories they have to tell and by creating oppor-
tunities for students to share the fictions (and
lives) they have made.

 

John Rouse
Gull Lake, Michigan
May, 1972

While it is obvious that a detailed, fully articu-
lated and workable curriculum for literature is neither
possible--nor desirable--to construct, it is possible,

195

196

nonetheless, from the theoretical discussions presented thus
far in this study, to make the following statements about
what a literature curriculum in English ought to be primar-
ily concerned with in this post-Dartmouth age,* if the
teaching of literature is to be an educationally productive
learning experience for all the hundreds of thousands of
students currently enrolled in English classes in schools
across America. A.Curriculum.for Literature ought to be:

1. ‘both Productive-centered and Receptive-centered

2. Experience-oriented

3. Response and Feedback-centered

4. Pleasure-oriented

5. Student-centered

The Productive-Receptive Complex

This study clearly suggests that a literature cur-
riculum.based on the "Response to Literature" as established
at the Dartmouth Conference ought to revolve about two

closely related (in fact reciprocal) notions about how

 

*Professor Miller recently commented that the educa-
tional community has already entered a fourth major stage of
development: the "Humanistic," and he calls for, not a new
curriculum, but a new "anti-curriculum." See: English
Journal, 61 (1972), pp. 740-42.

197

literature ought to exist within an English classroom. On
the one hand, the teaching of literature ought to be viewed
as a functional, Operational and productive language
activity; that is to say, the classroom ought to provide the
student with many diverse and creative possibilities for
creating "fictions"--forging tales, stories and poems Eggp
the experiences of one's own life and imagination. These
activities would comprise the "skills" aspect of the cur-
riculum: the development and expansion of coming to know
how to through doipg, and as such, this aspect of the liter-
ary involvement in the English classroom, like the nature ‘
of the English curriculum in general, would tend to be

content-less.*

In this productive regard, then, the liter-
ature created by the students themselves would not be about
something already symbolized (like a novel or a poem), but
rather literature would exist as a creative-making'process
and curricular growth would be concerned with the act of
symbolizing upon whatever experience (past or present) the

classroom dialogue might happen to evoke for a particular

student or group of students. These experiences would be

 

*See the discussion of befett's article, "A
Structural Curriculum in English," in Chapter II.

198

operated upon, abstracted about, reflected upon, codified--
in short, made into narrative, communicated to others in the
class, and thereby further extended, explored, and res-
ponded to. With literature as a symbolizing activity, then,
there can be no necessary content for a curriculum, for
one's "stories" can be about anything, and therefore, in
this role, the teacher cannot plan to teach anything in
particular; there are few explicit concepts, experiences,
ideas, facts or theories that are necessary to know about in
order to produce literature. The teacher's concern here
would be to guide, to help, to foster growth-~to implement
learning how to expand and develOp what students already
possess: language, experience, and the ability to tell
stories. As befett reminds us, a story, poem, or play can
be anything, can have any kind of content, and portray,
examine and explore any kind of human experience or subject-

matter.*

 

*Actually there is a "content" in this mode, but it
is incidentially acquired through response. In the pro-
ductive dimension of a Response to Literature curriculum,
when students are given the opportunity to tell their own
fictions in as many different ways as possible, they learn
at the same time about the nature and structure of fiction
itself, for as Moffett suggests, when we use language
operationally, it turns in upon itself and we gradually
become aware of the structure of our own discourse. In this

199

At the same time, the literature curriculum does have
a content, for it does deal with professional literature--
with stories and poems (already articulated and patterned
experiences) that other pe0ple have written for the world
at large to read and enjoy. This is the literature cur-

riculum's receptive mode: satisfying the human need to

 

explore and respond to good tales, to delight in the
asthetic pleasures of myth and romance, to respond to the
human experiences of others, to have our own experiences
enlarged and commented upon, and to provide our encounters

with life with a significance that might otherwise escape

 

case, by creating narratives and sharing them students would
gradually learn incidentially about the nature, modes, and
structures of fiction: one's abilities to be both aware of
and to use such subtleties as plot construction, point-Of-
view, metaphor, suspense, irony, etc. ought slowly to evolve
for every individual's self-created fiction says something
implicitly about the nature of fiction itself. "A student
writing or speaking (creating fictions) in all the same
forms as the authors he reads can know literature from.the
inside in a way that few students ever do today."1 Every
response (verbal or otherwise) in the productive dimension
entails some form of "organization," and these are the
structures teachers ought to concentrate most on developing.
"Form consciousness" is most easily nurtured when the form
is of the student's own creating. "The structure of a work
for us is the structure of our experience while reading."2
It is the teacher's responsibility to create the best
possible story-tellipg situations. Naturally, there ought
to be a sense of progression and continuity to this pro-
ductive aSpect of the literature curriculum, and this pro-
blem will be examined in Chapter V.

200

us. It is the teacher's responsibility to introduce
appropriate literature into the classroom at the appropriate
time (commensurate with the imaginative and experiential
capacities of one's students), realizing all the while that
there are no specific works of literature which must be
covered and that at all levels there is no single book and
no one author that all students must read.

Thus, a curriculum for literature involves "content"
on two dimensions which co-exist and function simultan-
eously: (l) on an Operational and productive level, within
the dialogue and activity of the classroom (and this
includes narrative-making), particular stories, novels,
poems, and plays find their way into the classroom, 2352_
their right to exist, to be read and responded to, because
"language in operation" means involving students in such an
immediate and experiential way that the creativeness,
activity and excitement of the class itself generates the
peed for the further "perspective" on experience that only
the "added voice" of literature itself can provide. In
instances such as these, a specific content, a story for
example, is seen as complementing an activity, as being
incidentially adapted to the on-going explorations of the

classroom. (2) Or, with equal validity, the class may

201

begin, receptively, with the exploration of a specific
story or poem, and when students reSpond to literature in
this way (teacher-initiated, so to speak), the class is
once again involved in the productive dimension of the
literature curriculum. Thus, by beginning with literature
instead of with an activity, new realms of engagement may be
created and new possibilities appear for individuals and/or
groups of students to move to other activities and readings.
Both the productive and receptive aspects of the
literature curriculum are so inter-twined and inter-related
that in many instances it will be difficult to separate the
two.* And in fact, if one's classes are running smoothly,
it ought to be difficult to perceive where one dimension

ends and the other begins. Telling stories and learning

 

*And on another level of operation, as we have seen,
the literary concerns of an English curriculum cannot be
separated from all the other language processes: writing,
talking, listening, drama, etc.--all of these productive
language activities may be productive "responses" to liter-
ature as well. In addition, though it is difficult to
separate the two modes, on certain levels, one or the other
aspect may tend to dominate. In the early elementary
grades, for example, children possess a voracious appetite
to hear stories and tales, though their ability to create
fictions based on their personal experiences in most instan-
ces lags far behind their receptive thirst. But this of
(:ourse is not to imply that the productive mode ought to be
iieglected in the early grades.

202

how to tell stories leads to wanting to hear them and/or
simply wanting to hear them leads to telling them. The
productive and receptive aspects of a Response to Liter-
ature Curriculum are like two sides of the same coin, and
the curriculum as a whole ought to attempt to integrate
the world of personal experience (learning how to tell
stories) with the world of 1iterature--fictions that have
already been created but await exploration. Finally,
neither aspect ought to be considered more important than
the other and neither a necessarily more valid starting
point for literary exploration on any level. The receptive-
productive-literary-response complex is, ideally, truly

reciprocal in nature.

A Literature Curriculum Ought to be Experience-Oriented
Although as this study has shown, any curriculum.for
literature must recognize that there are many levels of
growth and develOpment to consider simultaneously, certain
priorities can be established with respect to the specific
concerns of specific classes. A.writing class teacher,
for example, though involved in all aspects of English,
ought no doubt to be more acutely attuned to the productive-

linguistic patterns of growth developing individually

203

‘within his class; he ought primarily to be concerned with
how his students are progressing in terms of their powers
to express and their awareness of their powers to express.
However, in a literature class (or when an English class is
dealing with literature) a teacher ought to shift gears
somewhat (all of these strands are tightly inter-related)
and concentrate more Specifically on the imaginative and
experiential patterns of growth involved in student res-
ponse. In any event, a literature teacher ought to be very
aware of the nature, value, significance and use Of
experience that pupils are capable of at various.levels
in their development. In short, one must know the extent
of'a pupil's ability to intellectualize upon experience
at a certain age. What do children do with the raw data
of perception and experience at age ten for example? What
forms are their narratives likely to take? What kinds of
experiences will their stories comprise, and what exper-
iences is a child of a certain age most likely to respond
to?
A Literature Curriculum.Cught to be Repponse-and-Feedback-
Centered
A Response to Literature Curriculum recognizes the

importance of feedback. A student does not necessarily need

204

to know whether his response was "right" or "wrong" accord-
ing to some abstractly defined norm Of evaluation; instead,
what he needs to perceive is how both he and Others
responded. He needs the opportunity of being flooded by
many, many responses and to talk about his own response so
that he may gradually discover for himself his own rules of
discrimination and consider how he might have responded
under different conditions or with a different piece of
literature. Just as with talk, after a reading experience,
there is always that positive need to want to respond, com-
municate, share. A main purpose for reading literature in
the first place is merely to provoke thought, to get one's
‘mind and imagination working. And in this regard, it is
perhaps the attitude of the teacher which is most crucial
towards encouraging response. Does this classroom militate
against self-expressiveness? Is creativity urged? DO
students feel safe that their responses and opinions will
be accepted and not rejected? Does the teacher care about
the experiences of his students? Do students feel that they
can turn to their teacher for help? enlargement? response?
direction?

It seems Obvious that it is vitally important for a

literature curriculum to begin to define its goals and

205

objective at the various grade levels in terms of a body of
questions: What activities will help introduce these
stories? How can I encourage my students to relate to the
experiences of this poem. What should we‘ggfwith this
group of stories? Where might this story lead? To what
other knowledges and/or experiences? Or conversely, what

experiences and knowledges will lead to this story?

A Literature Curriculum.Cught to be Pleasure-Oriented

A Response to Literature Curriculum sees as the
ultimate goal of any literature program that students con-
tinue to read, enjoy, and reSpond to literature with ever-
increasing satisfaction and with a deepening sense of
awareness lopg after they have left school. Growth, develop-
ment and awareness never cease, and as we have seen, English
is an "outside school" subject much more than an inside the
classroom one. As far as possible, literature programs
ought not to give students any "hang-ups" about what is
"good" literature and what is "bad," for nothing so stifles
response than to be told that this particular story is
"gOod" literature. Rather, the curriculum at all levels
should strive to give students good experiences with what-

ever literature pupils seek tO devour at any particular

206

time, allowing, that with the opportunity for growth and the
encouragement for advancement maximized, students will of

". . . Open doors . . . (and

themselves, as Britton says,
as they) advance, other doors will close behind them, with
no need for the teacher to intervene . . . reading without

satisfaction is like the desperate attempts we make to keep

a car going when it has run out of petrol."3

A Literature Curriculum Ought to be Student-Centered

There is no need to belabor this point. .A curriculum.
for any aspect Of English must be student-centered in that
it accepts unequivocally each individual for what he is as.
a person and welcomes into the classroom both his language
and experiences. Simply, any curriculum must recognize
that students are capable human beings (already well-
functioning learners) given both the freedom and direction
necessary for intellectual and emotional growth to occur.
Students are capable of bringing a great deal to literature
and thereby capable of learning a great deal as well.
Student-centeredness means that classrooms ought to offer
people a rich set of options and allow students to share in
the responsibility for choosing both Ehgt_they wish to

explore and learn in school and how. A Response to

207

Literature curriculum places its faith in the natural desire
of people to learn and it relies to a great extent on
intrinsic motivation: "It is only through wide involvement
‘with experience and activity that will solve the problem of
motivation."4 What literature a curriculum teaches ought to
depend more upon what one can learn about his students than
upon what literature one feels his students ought to learn
about; and a curriculum should attempt to seek out responses
just as often as it attempts to pre-suppose them:

In English . . . even more than in any other subject,

it is a sine qua non for the teacher that he should

understand his pupils in depth, sympathize with their

needs and aspirations, and be perceptively aware of.
their individual rhythms of growth and development.5
How then do we create a curriculum based on these
perspectives? It is obvious that these five principles can
operate most effectively if schools are first willing to
reorganize themselves in the following ways:

1) be willing to do away with textbooks, and instead
purchase every year a new supply of paperback books
and magazines; perhaps the school library could be
made into a discount bookstore.

2) be willing to make a sizeable investment in media

equipment, particularly one closed-circuit TV set-
up, if possible.

3)

4)

5)

6)

7)

8)

208

be willing to allow education to become student-
centered, rather than authority-centered; trusting
students, that is, to be responsible for their own
learning without direct teacher supervision (on
occasion), thus freeing teachers frequently to
teach independently either on an individual basis
or with small groups of students.

allowing students and teachers to go outside the
school frequently, if such experiences best serve
the interests of true education and real learning.

opening the community to the school and vice-versa.

making class scheduling flexible, so that students
will have some portion of the day to do what they
want or to attend any other class or activity they
wish.

allowing parents as well as many other members of
the community to come to the school frequently
(lawyers, carpenters, community leaders, etc.) to
share their experiences and knowledges with the
students; making the school, therefore, into more
of a "resource workshop" rather than a hallowed
place of learning.

be willing to do away with tracking and grades so
that students will feel free to learn, grow, and
explore in their own ways without fear or threat.

At the same time, research is desperately needed to find out

‘more about the nature of the process of literary reSponse

and the nature of story-ing. Specifically:

1)

2)

what kinds of stories are children.most likely to
write at the various grade levels.

what kinds of responses are children most likely to
create.

209
3) what archetypal-experiential patterns are most
likely to influence story-making and story-telling.

4) what stories are children most likely to respond
to and why.

5) what are the oral intricacies Of response.
6) and how might oral language be best adapted to
classroom situations to help evoke response.

But these administrative changes are unlikely in the
near future for most public schools, and even with research
underway, it is one thing to believe in a student-centered
response to literature curriculum, and quite another to
implement it effectively. Clearly, something workable,
flexible, and practical is necessary right now to effectiv-
ely guide the average teacher of English in the public
schools. The final chapter of this study, therefore, will
describe activities and sequences within a possible liter-
ature curriculum based on the above premises which might be
implemented (not constructed) in one form or another and to
one degree or another in schools as they presently function.

It is hoped that such a description might, at the
very least, provide teachers with confidence, direction and
some practical advice in helping them teach creatively a
flexible curriculum for literature based on student-

centeredness, humanistic philosophies Of education, and on

210

what the profession as a whole has learned about the teach-
ing of language and literature from.the Dartmouth Conference.

"What we need is something less specific than a curriculum

and more ordered than chaos."6

CHAPTER.V

A POSSIBLE STUDENT-CENTERED RESPONSE TO

LITERATURE CURRICULUM

It seems prudent at this point to list, as concisely
as possible, the overall Objectives of a student-centered
response to literature curriculum in English--goals valid
for all levels: elementary, junior and senior high school.
Since such a curriculum is by its very nature an open-ended
and continuously growing and changing process, within these
broad goals and objectives (and the general activities and
sequences to be outlined in this chapter), it will be
necessary for teachers and students alike to actually formu-
late the curriculum for themselves on a daily, weekly and
monthly basis: that is, plan, devise and implement creative
literary response activities and establish consensual short-
term goals and projects, as well as methods of self-
evaluation. What a response to literature curriculum
actually becomes, then, can only be seen through hindsight,

.after the school year has ended, for it may come to involve
211

212

"anything" (depending upon the individual students in a
particular class in a particular year), consider any number
of ideas, imaginings, concepts and activities, and include
any number of different stories, poems, novels or plays. I
These long range objectives, therefore, are probably best
viewed as attitudes-~values that teachers ought to teach for
and attempt to develop in their students, for only with
positive, pleasure-oriented attitudes toward literature will
students feel free to use their own capabilities and
creative talents to come to know literature widely, to
learn to love it, and to understand it in all its mature -
satisfactions and enlargements.

A Response to Literature curriculum in English,
therefore, ought to attempt:

1. to have each student come to realize for himself
that the natural delight to be found in telling about one's
own experiences and fictionalizing about them is the reason
why literature has come to exist in the first place

2. to help each student gain confidence in himself
by having the c1assroom.both welcome and validate his
experiences, perceptions, opinions, beliefs and ideas
through as diverse and as varied as possible an immersion

in literature, both productively and receptively

213

3. to produce good learners able to approach pro-
fessional literature (including the classics) with inde-
pendence of thought and self-assurance

4. to help each student use literature as a means
of-self-exploration and self-enlargement

5. to integrate the exploration of literature as
fully as possible with all other language activities

6. to promote saturation ("fictions" everywhere):
opportunity for each student to read as widely as possible
and to tell as many stories as he is capable of

7. to help each student realize that literary com!
munication is only one form.of communication among many:
oral discourse, television, painting, drama, collage,
photography, cinema, music, sculpture, etc.

8. and finally to have each student come to realize
for himself that reading and enjoying literature and coming
to understand it are life-long processes, and that one's
most rewarding and satisfying aesthetic literary exper-
iences are most likely to occur long after the last day of

high school.

214

The Elementary Grades: 1-6

For the sky, blue. But the six-year-
old searching his crayon box, finds
no blue to match that sky
framed by the window-~a see-through
shine
over tree-tops, house-tops. The wax colors
hold only dead light, not this water-
flash
thinning to silver
at morning's far edge.
Gray won't do, either:
gray is for rain that you make with
dark slanting lines down paper
Try Orange!
---Draw a large corner circle for sun.
egg-yolk solid, '
with yellow strokes, leaping outward
like fire bloom--a brightness shouting
flower-shape wind-shape joy-shape!

The boy sighs, with leg-twisting bliss
creating . . .

It is done. The stubby crayons
(all ten of them) are stuffed back
bumpily into their box.

"Drawing by Ronnie C., Grade One"

Ruth Lechlitner

The first years of school provide abundant oppor-
tunity for both productive and receptive literature activi-
ties and responses. On the one hand, young children come
to school with an insatiable thirst for the unconscious

delight to be found in poems, rhymes, romances, fairy tales

215

and stories of adventure and daring of all kinds. Numerous
receptive literary opportunities, therefore, need no
motivation whatsoever at this level: teachers may simply
tell stories to young children, orally, to the class as a
whole; or read to a group perhaps, while other groups of
students partake in other activities; or students can read
stories to one another as part of either a reading lesson or
a literature lesson. And of course there ought to be ample
opportunity for pupils to read stories on their own in
private, though in the earliest years children usually
prefer communal story telling listening situations. Only
gradually does the desire to read and enjoy for oneself
develop. At the same time, literature at this level may
also be approached very easily from the productive mode.
Children at this age are eager to engage in activities,
games, diversions and play of all sorts. Indeed, young
children make no distinction between learning and playing.
Furthermore, productive literature activities in the pri-
mary grades can provide even more Opportunity for teachers
to introduce stories and poemsinto the elementary cur-
riculum° But most importantly at this level, productive
activities can provide children with both the opportunity

and motivation to weave their own stories from the fabric

216

of their personal experiences. Since the receptive mode can
take care of itself more or less in the early grades, the
activity or operational aspect of the curriculum-~learning
how to fiction-~ought to be given perhaps more of an
emphasis in the primary grades. This first section, there-
fore, will sketch three of the most basic language activi-
ties for the elementary school that teachers ought especi-
ally to stress in order to promote growth in literary
response: oral language activity, direct experiential

explorations, and dramatic improvisations.

A) Oral Language Activity: Talk, as we have seen, is the
most naturally authentic of the uses of language and it is
the most powerful and familiar learning tool that young-
sters bring to school with them. Children of all ages want
to talk all the time because language is helping them dis-
cover the fascinating world around them and they want to
share their new perceptions and ideas with others and ask
innumerable questions about their private little realities
in order to determine for themselves if what they perceive
and experience is similar to or different from.what and how‘
others perceive and experience. Talk of all sorts, there-

fore, ought to be actively encouraged in the early primary

 

217’

grades, from gossiping and questioning, to word games, oral
compositions and oral narratives. For what is particularly
significant for a literature curriculum at this level is
that talk helps to get one's imagination going. Through
oral discourse we start to remember experience, and simple
conversation encourages the recollection of both the remote
and recent past. In short, talk is the very beginning of
the story-making process.“ By encouraging a youngster to
tell about his breakfast, for example, he may begin, after
a start, to talk about his Uncle Henry who always had fine,
brown horses to care for right after breakfast every morn-
ing on the farm he and auntie owned in . . . when . . . etc.
Gradually other children may join in the conversation with
their own stories and experiences. Or one could ask a
group of children to tell about the best (or worst) time
they ever had at the ballpark, the movies, the playground,
and in keeping with the reciprocal nature of a response to
literature curriculum, talk could also be initiated by
simply telling a group of children a good story and letting
them respond orally. Nor need the process of storying
always spring from a verbal stimulus. Children can be drawn
into conversation through the use of photographs, drawings,

films, and unusual objects or toys which either the teacher

218

or the students themselves bring to school for sharing,
examining and exploring. (Model cars and planes work just
fine here, as do erector sets and dolls for both boys and
girls.) What is important, simply, is that children be
given the opportunity to tell about themselves. And while
the teacher need-not oversee all the dialogues and all the
fictionings, he ought to encourage the process of rending
experience into story form as often as possible and in as
many different ways as possible.*

And finally, no matter what the nature of the oral
language activity in the elementary classroom, in nurturing
story-making and literary response among small children,
the tape recorder must be seen as the primary school's most
valuable classroom asset. For the stories that children
tell can be easily recorded and stored on tape and listened
to again and again, or perhaps re-told because the teller
wants to add something or change his tale around a little:
like all good story-tellers, children learn quickly, by

being involved in the process of making fictions on an

 

*James Moffett's publication, A Student-Centered
Language Arts Curriculum, K-13 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1968) contains many valuable suggestions for initiating all
different kinds of oral and written narrative sequences.

219

intuitive basis, that one cannot separate "the tale from the
telling . . . the dancer from the dance."1* In addition,
the stories and poems that children tape orally may be
transcribed onto paper and published for the whole class to
read, enjoy, and respond to in other productive activities.
And there is no reason why these stories might not be col-
lected and edited (preferably by the children themselves)
over a number of years and made into a continuously self-up-
dating "text" for future classes to enjoy, add to and/or

**

delete from.

Thus the child's first introduction to literature

 

*Besides taping their own stories, children should
read and record real stories as well--like a fairy tale.
Frequently the real story will become intermixed with their
own experiences and fantasies and all sorts of creative
possibilities may then emerge.

**Of importance here is attitude. Elementary teachers
ought to expect and teach for the very best from their young
pupils, for it would be very damaging to presume that the
stories that children will produce in these early grades
are most likely to be flat, episodic, unrevealing and just
plain "not very good." For the most part, young children
are very capable of creating fine stories and poems as
Kenneth Koch's new book, Wishes, Lies and Dreams (New York:
Chelsea House, 1970) convincingly demonstrates. And even
the youngest children can be encouraged to experiment with
discourse and style in order to make their story "as good
as possible."

220

ought to be oral, both productively and receptively. Their
stories can be tape recorded, and as writing ability
deve10ps, children ought to be encouraged to write down
their experiences. In these ways, of course, the elementary
literature program blends easily, as it should, with all
the other aspects of an English curriculum: ‘writing, read-
ing, speaking, and here especially, talk is the unifying
medium through which all the other language activities can
flow.2 It is vitally important in the elementary grades to
keep the class dialogue going all the time and to be pre-
pared at all times for both productive and receptive pos-

sibilities to emerge.

B) Direct Experiential Explorations: When considering pro-
ductive possibilities for a Response to Literature curri-
culum for the primary grades, it is necessary to keep in
mind that the young child's intellect is not yet fully
developed. In his explorations into the world in quest of
knowledge (the organization of reality) the young child's
native learning strategies are still very much tied to
concrete situations, to the immediately present. The
second, third and fourth grader is interested primarily in

occupying his mind with here and now situational activities

221

in an attempt, intellectually, to advance, through the use
of language primarily, his "symbolic" and "imaginative"
capacity to deal with reality, to order it, structure it,
explore it, and create new ideas and relationships for him!
self through it. But although the child of school age is

a competent language user, one must realize that often his
concepts are only pre-concepts: that is, they are sometimes
too general and sometimes too specific, and a great deal of
actual experiencing is still very necessary to facilitate

both language growth and learning in general:

Mental growth, too, consists of two simultaneous pro-
gressions-~toward differentiation and toward integration.
We build our knowledge structures upward and downward at
the same time. A child frequently over-abstracts as
well as under-abstracts: he cuts his world into a few
simple categories that cover too much and discriminate
too little, and that display no subordinate or super-
ordinate relations among themselves. Or he makes a
generalization that is too broad for the meager exper-
ience it is based on. He fails to qualify and quantify
his statements. Judging only by the surface generality
of his words and sentences, one would conclude that he
was thinking at a high level of abstraction. But he
may be understanding "international trade" as "barter,"
not as the complex of activities adults understand by
the word. That is, he may use early many concepts that
only later will take on the meaning adults give to them.
And his concepts are all ranged in his mind on the same
plane, awaiting the time when he will rank them.hier-
archically as super- and sub-classes of each other or
laterally as coordinate classes. His generalizations
will begin, however, to collide and conjoin, qualifying
each other or building syllogistically on each other.
This increasing interrelationship corresponds to the

222

organism’s continual reintegration of differentiated
functions. So, as regards individual concepts and
statements, growth is toward internal complexity and
external relationship. In the sense that abstraction
‘means hierarchical integration, the child does cleb
the ladder as he matures, but this integration neces-
sarily depends on a downward thrust into details, dis-
criminations, and subclasses. He is on a two-way
street: sometimes he needs to trace over his general-
izations down to their inadequate sources, and some-
times he needs to build new ones from the ground up.
Thus in the early grades, in addition to fostering
talk of all kinds, teachers ought to provide activities that
allow children to directly interact with and act upon the
world about them: to encourage, that is, the kind of look-
ing and exploration and observation of experience that
takes advantage of the way young children naturally learn
best. Whole classes or groups of children, therefore,
ought to frequently go outside the school building and into
the community to experience many things firsthand: taking
a trip to the park or playground and encouraging the young-
sters to feel and smell the bark of trees, to collect dif-
ferent grasses and leaves, to play in the sand, to collect
rocks and stones and to examine them, and to go to stores
and gas stations and factories and talk to policemen,

workmen and shopkeepers. Moreover, children especially seek

to perceive through all of their senses, and this is

 

223

precisely what these excursions invite. Many teachers
unknowingly limit the possibilities for perceiving and
experiencing by allowing only two senSe organs to be used.
The eyes and the ears are overworked, as the other senses
are neglected. But outside classroom walls, the child is
frequently seen fondling a new object, licking it, smelling
it, and banging it against other objects. Childhood is the
great period of synaesthesia, and all such doings ought to
be encouraged.4*

Direct experiential activity not only encourages
further talk, but also allows students to bringback to the
classroom fresh experiences and perceptions which may then
be further explored and enlarged either through talk or
through some other creative activity (paint, clay, dance,
writing, etc.). In addition, nmmerous other "imaginings"
have most likely been aroused so that stories and poems can
now be created, or built up so to speak, from the details
of the outing itself. Back in class, in small groups per-
haps, the children will be eager to share their new obser-

vations with their classmates, and hopefully, to

 

*I note here particularly Herbert Kohl's remark in
36 Children that the most significant learning experiences
for his sixth grades occurred "between classes."

 

224

fictionalize about them as well. Such excursions, opera-
tionally, provide pupils with opportunities for both
"symbolic and imaginative representations of experience to
emerge, if they will."

And receptively, of course, direct, whole exper-
iencings provide as well numerous opportunities for stories
and tales to be introduced into the dialogue of the class-
room. After examining with care some of the old houses and
trees in the neighborhood of the school, for example, the
fairy tale, 01d Mr. Vinegar,* would be a most appropriate
and enjoyable story to listen and respond to. In direct
experiential activities, the curriculum ought to attempt
to promote growth in the direction of "imagining about"
things and the states of things, and to emphasize the
child's world of experience as well as his experience of the

world.

C) Dramatic Activities: Finally, in the elementary class-
room, dramatic activities can be initiated either as a
result of reading or listening to an actual fairy tale,

story or poem, or to a story created by an individual

 

*See Time For Old Magic, an anthology of children's
literature edited by May Hill Arbuthnot and Mark Taylor
(Glenview, Illinois: Scott Foresman, 1970), pp. 15-17.

 

225

student or group of students. Children can be easily
introduced to dramatic activity through simple body games
or through the street games that students themselves play
and enjoy. Games like potsie, hide and seek, and Simple
Simon Says all entail a great deal of physical motion and
improvisation. Gradually, mime can come to form.a portion
of the day's activity, as well as simple dancing or moving
to music symbolically. Then simple improvisations and role-
playing situations can be deve10ped, with words ad libbed
for the most part at this level. Children will usually
need little persuasion to act out their own fictions and
stories with their friends, each taking a different role
and with the author playing both himself and others. In
this instance, each child can perceive how'he and others
react to certain common experiences and each is provided
with instantaneous feedback, on an intuitive level, as to
the quality, effectiveneSs, successes and inadequacies of
each other's fictionalized experiences. Puppets work
especially well in dramatic activities at the primary level,
and children enjoy both making their own puppets and creat-
ing roles and stories for them.at the same time.

Literature read receptively is also readily adapt-

able for dramatic activity. Children's stories and poems

226

are filled with one dimensional, stereotypic characters
whose actions and motives are thoroughly predictable and
easily mimicked. Simple ordinary folk tales and fables
contain hundreds of talking beasts, magicians, fairy god-
mothers, giants, witches and goblins, as well as enchanted
men and maidens--and so there is tremendous potential here
for children to role-play their own versions of these
familiar figures. Moreover, plots in these tales are epi-
sodic for the most part with the action revolving about
three wishes or three trials in a repetitional cadence until
the spiraling action ends abruptly or runs backwards to its
beginning.5 Since children's stories, then, give only the
bare bones of a plot, there is a great deal of room to flesh
out the sketch with more action and many different kinds of
sub-plots. From simple folk tales of home and hearth, for
example, children can play at being mother and father,
rejected and/or homeless child, friend to a lost dog, or
supernatural son or daughter. The simple English folk

tale, The Travels of a Fox, is perfect for such dramatic

improvisation; everyone will want to take turns jumping out

227
of the Fox's big brown sack.*

Sequencing

Sequencing is less a problem in the elementary grades
than in either the junior or senior high school. The order
of activities at this level can afford to be constructed
somewhat loosely simply because the direction of the class--
its context and its sense of continuity--will be provided to
a large extent by each child himself. Simply, it is assumed
that each individual student, given the freedom and oppor-
tunity to explore, play, create and respond, will learn to
rely in the classroom on the gradual expansion and develop-
ment of his own representational and experiential world to
the same extent that he has successfully relied on these
learning strategies outside the classroom. In short, the
classroom, by validating each child's own personal exper-
iences and by making children feel comfortable and at home
in school, will naturally generate its own activities and
its own sense of continuity both individually and communally.

Nonetheless, it is the teacher's primary reSponsibility at

 

*See Time For Old Magic, an anthology of children's
literature edited by May Hill Arbuthnot and Mark Taylor
(Glenview, IllinOis: Scott Foresman, 1970), pp. 12-14.

228

this level to constantly seek to encourage, enlarge and to
deepen, to nudge pupils in the direction of further imagin-
ative growth and awareness and to address the intellectual
and emotional needs that young pupils themselves will
obscurely indicate. Perhaps David Holbrook sums up the
situation best of all:
A teacher of English, one could well say, spends

his time in his better hours discovering through his

pupils. This is not hyperbole. It follows inevitably

if we accept personal experience as the vital core of

English work. Then good creative work can only be

spontaneous, and the teacher works best when he works

with opportunities as they arise. Why children decide

to take hate one week and flowers the next as themes

is unpredictable, but it is necessary to important

dynamics of their exploration of life to do so; and

the creative teacher must follow, enlarge, and

deepen.
The child who feels secure in his own experiences is better
able to perceive the pattern of his own growth and develop-
ment, first intuitively, and then gradually with more and
more awareness. In this way children learn to learn on
their own and learn as well to be independent in school--

invaluable assets for student-centered education in the

upper grades.

229
The Junior High Grades: 7-10

Although the Response to Literature recognizes that
greater maturity and sophistication of response is
an ultimate goal of reading, no pupil should ever
be pushed to the point of conceptualization until
he is so steeped in the level of operation that he
pushes himself to that level.
John Dixon
Growth Through English
A Junior High Literature Curriculum Receptively
and Individually Perceived
If the outline of a Response to Literature curri-
culum on the elementary level seemed overly optimistic a
portrait, the junior high years will provide a need to
remember the enthusiasm.and the successes of the "good old
days," for here in these middle grades, a Response to Liter-
ature curriculum will meet its sternest test. Traditionally,
the junior years have been the most difficult for teachers
and curriculum designers alike, for early adolescence is
undoubtedly the least understood of all the artificially
partitioned stages in human growth and development invented
by social scientists.7 The age period ll-lS has been
categorized under various labels—-pre-adolescence, the time .

of puberty, the latency period, and "myths" have sprung up

around this group of individuals to which one frequently

230

hears the phrase (a sure sign of adult chauvanism), "they
will grow out of it:" .15, in this case, referring to the
emotional, physical, and psychological imbalances society
gratuitously ascribes to "going through a phase."8 The
junior high student is seen simultaneously as both wanting
to become an adult all too rapidly and yet clinging to
{childhood_and immaturity; as anxious to discover who he is
and yet fearful of the knowledge of self; as compliant and
eager to learn on the one hand and yet rebellious and
unteachable on the other; as seeking independence and free-
dom, but desirous also of security and peer group conform-
ity; as overly self-conscious and introverted and yet
extroverted and out-going; idealistic and cynical: the
list is endless, but in essence it is partly, if not
totally, a fabrication. For while there is no denying the
pre-adolescence i§_a time of confused and unpredictable
growth, the conflicts and psychic contradictions attributed
to adolescents alone are in fact common to all of us. Every
normal person's life is a time of confused and unpredictable
growth--a period of transition. I personally possess all of
the above psychological conflicts in one form or another and
in varying combinations. What makes the situation so dis-

turbing to the adult world, however, is not necessarily the

231

nature of the emotional conflicts, but rather the speed with
which they occur. Psychological growth at this time is not
different in nature from psychological, human growth at any
other time-~the discovery of self, after all, i§,a life-long
process. It is simply that for what seems a very short
period of time all the developmental processes, at once, are
temporarily accelerated by virtue of their being linked
simultaneously with phenomenal physiological and biological
growth and maturation. As a result of misconception, myth,
and simple fear of young people, adults, in desperate
attempts to guide (or control) adolescent behavior-~to find
the underlying key principle, that is, about which to model
a curriculum-~have been too content to label, categorize and
work from abstract arbitrary premises about what the adoles-
cent world, intellectually and experientially, might pos-
sibly be about. Consequently, literature programs for this
age group in the last several decades, on a receptive level
(introducing literature into the junior high classroom),
have been constructed about many different theories, phil-
osophies, and approaches.

The Curriculum Development Center at Florida State
‘University illustrates this confusion dramatically. Aware

of the difficulties of dealing with the "transitional"

232

junior years, the Florida State staff, under the direction
of Dwight L. Burton, developed and tested several different
curriculums in literature for grades 7 to 9. One of the
curriculums was a structure-content-centered approach that
differed in no really significant way from the "academic"
curriculums developed at other project centers: Nebraska,
Oregon, Carnegie-Mellon, etc. Lesson units and literary
selections in this curriculum were structured according to
genre, style, technique, and theme, and presented at each
grade level sequentially and inductively. Seventh grade
lessons, for example, were concerned primarily with mythical
tales, legends, folklore, and traditional stories of adven-
ture and romance; the eighth grade introduced the more modern
forms of literature: the novel--"symbolism.in fiction," the

short story--"plot development,"

narrative poetry, and one
act plays; and the ninth grade was concerned with investig-
ating the principles of satire, classical tragedy (Saphocles,

etc.) and comedy (Aristophones, etc.), and lyric poetry.9

A second Florida State Curriculum* attempted to

 

*The third and final Florida State curriculum for the
junior high school was structured not on literary content
directly, but rather on inductive-cognitive processes. This
curriculum saw the junior high school as the age when
students traditionally begin to master the complexities of

233

Brunerize a literature program for the junior high schools
that has been immensely pOpular in American schools since
the progressive movement of the 1930's: the experiential-
adolescent-interest centered curriculum. Since adolescence

is "supposed to be" the age of self-discovery--the time when

 

adult thought--begin, that is, to employ hypothetical reas- .
oning ("formal thought" in Piaget's terminology), inferring
general truths both inductively and deductively. "The
junior high school is the logical chronological point, in
terms of cognitive development, to begin the all important
transition from the child's world of subjective immediacy

to the more adult world of inference."10 One of the direct
results of the beginnings of formal reasoning, the curri-
culum.notes, is that during the ages of 12-14 students

begin for the first time to ask questions about the "mean-
ing," "significance" and "structure" of literary works.

The pivotal concern of this curriculum, then, was an attempt
to take advantage of all of these intellectual forces at
once. Through a concentration on logical and cognitive pro-
cesses (recognition of form, perception of meaning, relation
of universals and particulars, generalization and analogiz-
ation) this program introduced literature, in sequence, into
the classroom and its lesson plans were intended to provide
students with the opportunity for developing their powers

of thought in problem-solving, literary analysis activities.
Students were expected to extract information from literary
works about character, plot, technique, style, etc. and

then use this information to infer meaning--to "discover"
the various themes and universal human concerns to be found
in different literary selections as well as to intuit the
connections and relations to be found in genre, style and
technique in similar kinds of literature. 2 In its final
form, this curriculum was perhaps even more inauthentic

and dishonest in its methodology than either the Carnegie-
Mellon or the Nebraska programs. See the Moffett-Shafer
Discussion in Chapter II.

234 _

each young individual becomes aware of himself as a distinct
and unique personality--it has been believed for many years
that a good literature curriculum for the junior high school
ought to concern itself with typical adolescent experiences
and introduce into the curriculum literature which deals
primarily with adolescent interests and concerns and which
presents both characters and themes in stories and poems that
young readers can easily identify with and recognize for
themselves as important and personally relevant. In fact,
this adolescent-interest-centered program is still the most
popular curriculum used in American junior high schools.
Simple classification of selections under a topic supposedly
.of interest to the young adolescent has been common in text-
book anthologies and story collections for the junior high
for many years. In addition to grouping selections by genre
(short story, poetry, biography, etc.) and/or structure
(plot, character, theme, etc.) some of the more common

typical classifications include:

I) Animal Stories:

Lassie Come Home, Eric Knight

The Yearling, Marjorie K. Rawlings
Old Yeller, Fred Gipson

National Velvet, Enid Bagnold

Big Red, Jim Kjelgaard

 

235

II) Sports Stories:

Rebound, Curtis Bishop

The Big Inning, Robert Bowen
Go, Team, Go, John Tunis
Breakaway Back, Nelson A. Hutto

 

III) Physical Adventure and Ordeal

Island of the Blue Dolphins, Scott O'Dell
Full Fathom Five, Lew Dietz

Burma Rifles, Frank Bonham

Shipwreck, Howard Pease

 

 

IV) Stories of Earlier Times

Johnny Tremain, Esther Forbes
The Innocent Wnyfaring, Marchette Chute
Light in the Forest, Conrad Richter

 

V) Science Fiction

VI) The Adolescent Novel--stories with adolescent
heroes and heroines and with themes that
explore and examine experiences and conflicts
of particular significance and importance to
young people: loyalty and friendship, young
love, racial hate, gang society, sex, lone-
liness, self-worth, etc. Some of these novels
are first rate.

A girl Like Me, Jeanette Eyerly

Two and the Town, Henry Felsen

Dark Adventure, Howard Pease

The Diany of a Youngicirl, Anne Frank
Death Be Not Proud, John Gunter
Durango Street, Frank Bonham

The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton

 

 

The Florida State staff merely "beefed up" and
tightened this curriculum, gave it a definite structure and

sequence and made it more academic. In this Florida State

curriculum, the "subject-matter" of literature was made into

generalizations about human experience, felt to be common to

adolescent growth and development, to which literary

selections relate. Six separate units on "thematic cate-

gories" were presented in each grade in the following

sequence:

The Unknown

Frontiers and Horizons
Decisions

Teamwork

Man in Action

Relationships

The Unknown

Frontiers and Horizons
Decisions

Teamwork

Man in Action

Relationships

Seventh Grade
Qualities of Folk Heroes
Far Away Places
Courage
Team Leaders
Man and Nature
Adolescents We Learn

About
Eighth Grade

Deeds and Qualities of
Men and Myth

The Village
Responsibility
The Family

Man Among Enemies

Close Adolescent
Relationships

237

Ninth Grade

The Unknown . Concern for the Unexplained
Frontiers and Horizons ,Frontiers in Space
Decisions Justice
Teamwork The Team and the

Individual
Man in Action Man Alone
Relationships Mirrors

(relations with self)13
Under these various categories there were such titles as:

7th Grade - Courage:

Call It Courage, Sperry Armstrong: a south sea
island boy proves his courage in a lonely
ordeal.

Third Man on the Mountain, James R. Ullman: a boy
conquers a great mountain on which his father
met death.

- Far Away Places:

The Big Wave, Pearl S. Buck: a typhoon destroys
a Japanese Village.

 

8th Grade - Man Among Enemies:

Call of the Wild, Jack London

 

- The Family:

Shadow of a Bull, Maia Wojciechowska: the son of
a great Spanish bullfighter feels impelled to
follow in his father's footsteps, but does not
really want to be a bullfighter.

 

238

The Ark, Margot Benary Isbert: A.Cerman family
just after the Second World War finally finds a
new home in an abandoned street car.

9th Grade - Mirrors (relations with self):

Swiftwater, Paul Annixter: A Maine woods boy,
his ambitions, his family, and the girl in his
life.

 

- Justice:

Face of a Hero, Pierre Boulle: an ironic story of
a prosecuting attorney who sends an innocent
man to his death.

The Ox-Bow Incident, W. Van Tilberg Clark:
psychological story of the lynching of innocent
men in early Nevada.1

This kind of curriculum for the junior high school
has been so durable and persisted for so long in schools in
one form or another simply because its basic premises are
essentially valid: the books and stories it contains deal
with experiences that adolescents are concerned about, and
many young readers have read these stories with pleasure and
enthusiasm for many years. In fact, a main purpose of this
entire study has been to show that a literature curriculum
at all levels ought to be both student-centered and exper-
ience-centered. But this experience-interest curriculum for

the junior high schools, whether a product of progressivism

or academic reform, has never really functioned properly

239

for two reasons: on the onehand, most junior high school
curriculums pay merely lip-service to the doctrine of allowe
ing students to do their own "free" reading based on their
interests, experiences and natural desires; and secondly,
although the typical junior high school curriculum attempts
to be experience-centered, it has never really allowed for
the growth of individual, creative response to develop
across a broad spectrum of activities in relation to the
human experiences vicariously perceived in adolescent
literature.

In the first instance, it has been the lament of
junior high teachers for decades that no matter what the
shape, content, or direction of the junior high curriculum
at about age eleven or twelve reading interest appreciably
declines. But this is in reality another "myth" about
teenagers. In most instances it is the curriculum itself
which un-motivates students to read (even about experiences
which do interest them) by structuring their reading
experiences in terms of a syllabus and by forcing students,
overtly or covertly, to put away what they are reading for

their own personal enjoyment and move on to literature of

 

 

240

higher quality.* Noticeably at this age (9-13)--and this
is not a myth as any news-stand keeper will testify-~a
passion for pulp literature emerges, the next highest step
up from the elementary school child's voracious receptive
capacity for fairy tales and romances. The sixth, seventh
and eighth grader seeks out on his own: comics, gory
magazines, horror tales, teen romances, auto magazines,
mystery stories, tales of the supernatural, war comics, and
slapstick humor and satire--such as commonly found in‘Mnd
magazine. NOW’Whlle most interest centered curriculums for
the junior high school supposedly respect the student's
"right to read," most schools do not in actuality make pulp
literature widely available in the classroom. Interest
centered literature curriculums for the junior years tradi-

tionally seek to move on to more "substantial" literary

 

*Adolescents are "supposed to be” interested in adven-
ture stories in the eighth grade and in all the other kinds
of stories that an experience-interest curriculum.provides--
and they are, to an extent. But let us not forget that
fear, adventure, loneliness, sex, peer pressure, self-
identity, justice, athletic competition, racial hate, etc.
are as much a part of the adult world as the adolescent
(these experiences are part of all literature and appeal to
people of all ages), and any adult would rightfully be put
off by having to read about "justice" next week when perhaps
he would rather read a spy thriller, or by being asked to
put down his neWSpaper and pick up Time magazine instead.

241

experiences; after all, these years are "transitional"
years. '(This of course was particularly true throughout the
1960's with the emphasis on academic and scholastic achieve-
ment). But these more substantial literary experiences can
only be grown into while students are at the same time
allowed to glut their passion on the kinds of comics, maga-
zines, and pulp literature that they wish to read and res-
pond to. Simply, one need not exist to the exclusion or
detriment of the other. Both in fact can exist simultan-
eously within the junior high classroom and one's aim should
be to allow students themselves to move imperceptibly in
their own personal reading from the comic book to the more
‘mature pleasures to be found in a good short story or an
adolescent novel. But just as a junior high curriculum must
not be timid about allowing pulp literature into the class-
room, in addition to all the fine titles traditionally
included in junior high literature programs, there is no
reason to suppose that young adolescents cannot, like adults,
respond in their own ways to literature like:

An American Trageny, T. Drieser (selections)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X

The Cross and the Switchblade, Wilkerson

The Cool World, Warren Miller
Last Summer, R. Hunter

 

and to

242

The Summer of '42, H. Raucher

Nigger, Dick Gregory

The Contender, R. Lipsyte

Down These Mean Streets, Piri Thomas

I'm Reallnyragged But Nothing Gets Me Down, Nat
Hentoff

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

Manchild in the Promised Land, C. Brown

The Collector, John Fowles

The Snow Goose, Paul Gallico

The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk

 

stories like:

"The Fastest Runner on Slst Street" - James Farrell
"Don't You Wish You Were Dead" - L. Woiwode

"The Wishing Well" - Phillip Bonosky

"A Good Long Sidewalk" - W. M. Kelley

"Phone Call" - Burton Roueche

"Sonny's Blues" - James Baldwin

"A & P" - John Updike

"Snowfall in Childhood" - Ben Hecht

"Skeleton" - Ray Bradbury*

In short, we need not worry about reading interest on a

receptive level in the junior high school if we disavow

elitism and allow students to determine what is "good"

literature for them and what is "bad," and most important

of all,

what they enjoy reading. Daniel Fader and Herbert

Kohl, particularly, have demonstrated that saturation and

 

*It is not suggested that these novels and stories

be taught necessarily, but only that literature of this sort

(along

with pulp literature) be made available.

243

diffusion do work if honestly implemented.

 

But even more significantly, the typical interest-
centered curriculum for the junior high school has never
really allowed for personal, creative response activities.
The teaching method most commonly used to implement an
interest-centered curriculum is discussion. This is true
of almost all the Project English literature curriculums,
including Florida State. But while it is true that formp
ulation (the desire to know and to verbalize to oneself and
for oneself what literature is about--what stories "mean")
first begins in the junior high years, reliance on discus-
sion activity exclusively has done more to hinder response
at this age than nourish it. Verbal communicative ability

" "significance" and "personal relevance"

about "meaning,
works to the advantage of the curriculum in junior high at
the expense of the student. Adolescents, like adults, often
become reticent about certain areas of experience (these of
course will differ from individual to individual) and dis-
cussion activities will only serve to "turn off" young
readers. It may take a youngster a year, for example, to
articulate for himself a sense of loneliness that has been

bothering him for some time. Consequently, non-verbal

response activities (paint, film, clay, etc.) in the junior

244

high are more likely to help articulation and formulation at
this level than a hundred class discussions.* When a
student projects his response into some creative, concrete,
meaningful and pleasurable activity-~a productive involve-
ment engaging one's whole personality--he is more likely
afterwards to be able to talk about both his response and
its relation to the literature from.which the response
evolved. Moreover, since creative activities are real,
whole involvements, each separate response allows a student
to bring more to each successive reading encounter in terms

of actual human experience accumulated and reflected upon.**

 

*As usual, these personal individual responses ought
also to include a great deal of personal, creative story
'making, both verbally and non-verbally, or perhaps a come
bination of several communicative modes at once. This‘
aspect of a Response to Literature curriculum.for the junior
high, as well as response provoking discussion activities,
wdll be taken up later on in this chapter.

In this regard also, re-reading the same selection
and re-renponding can help enormously in terms of building
self-confidence and providing students with visible proofs
of achievement and accomplishment. Simply, through activity
and response, through interaction with others and with
stories, we have more actual experience working for us on
each new story we read. When people re-read a novel, or
see a play over again, and say that they understood more the
second time, it is simply that on the re-run they have
'brought more to the encounter from.within themselves. Mbre-
over, it is interesting to note in this regard that because
the "academic" curriculums were so concerned with covering
content, they totally neglect to perceive that re-reading
can provide a valuable learning experience.

245

Literature is an experience-interest curriculmm on a
receptive level, then, ought to allow adolescents to reSpond
to literature, emotionally and intellectually, in productive
activity-oriented ways rather than discussion-oriented
ways-~ought to become, that is, truly student-centered and
response-centered.

By allowing for response to become a productive
creation, one becomes involved inextricably in the receptive-
productive complex. And besides helping formulation and
articulation, this interchange has an important additional
advantage as well: by observing how a student responds
productively (verbally, non-verbally or both) a teacher is
more likely to know what kind of literature will appeal to
the same student receptively. In other words, the Response
to Literature affords the teacher the Opportunity to really
get to know each of his students on a personal, affective-
first basis; to discard stereotypes and misconceptions
about adolescents, and to begin to really teach and to pro-
mote real learning on an individual basis. This presumes,
of course, that teachers be both prepared and willing to
re-respond to individual student responses, be willing to
help a pupil explore his own response, relate responses,

suggest other possible responses, really listen to student

246

verbalizations, and most of all, be willing to learn from
the response itself. This naturally is most difficult, and
it is here that a Response to Literature curriculum.is most
likely to break down from time to time. This new'kind of
teaching, as Maslow suggested, is very difficult indeed.
And Elton McNeil, the psychologist who helped Daniel Fader
create the Hooked on Books reading program, recently
remarked, "There is no handy well-indexed cookbook contain-
ing sure-fire recipes for dealing with pre-adolescents.
Teachers must learn to cook intuitively and with artistry if
they are to present a palatable education to young persons
in their classrooms."15 But assuming that no student-
centered teaching can ever hOpe to be perfectly executed,
at some point this student-teacher-response interchange can
shift back to the receptive mode: the teacher, using his
increased sense of awareness and knowledge about.a particu-
lar student, can now direct this pupil to some other story
or poem. In this way, then, an interest-centered curriculum
(now become an activity based Response to Literature cur-
riculum) need rely less on having to gng§§_about what kind
of literature might interest a particular group of students;
by permitting the junior high literature curriculum to

become student-centered and response-centered, teachers

b

247

‘will have a more solid basis for knowing what literature to
introduce to what students at what time. On an individual,
receptive level, then, a junior high literature curriculum
ought to help each student expand his imaginative awareness
and come to knOW'many different kinds of literature in many
different ways.
A Junior High Literature Curriculum Productively
and Collectively Perceived

But how can one teach and respond on an individual
basis with forty students in each class and six classes a
day. Now that, of course, is an excellent question. In
addition to an individualized and personalized level of
instruction, therefore, a junior high literature curriculum
ought to function at the same time on a collective group
activity level as well. Within the multifarious activities
of an English class in general, students ought to be working
simultaneously in groups (in addition to reading and respond-
ing on an individual basis) on productive literary response
projects, and the junior high teacher ought to attempt in
various ways to split his time between helping the various
groups and working with individual students. This next
section, therefore, will discuss four very broad creative-

response group activities within which individual teachers

248

and students alike may devise an infinite number of vari-
ations. In addition, each of these response categories,
hepefully, will open up numerous possibilities for formal,

professional literature to be introduced into the classroom.

A) Media Involvement: Ideally, an English classroom at all
levels--but especially in grades 7 through lO--ought to have
available as many different kinds of media machines as
possible: record players, records, tape recorders, still
and motion picture cameras, a projector, radios, lots of
building materials (wood, paper, paint, crayons, tape, glue,
string, etc.), different kinds of lighting fictures, and if
possible, a closed circuit TV available somewhere in the
school building for students to create, perform and tape
their own TV shows: Playhouse 90 and Queen for a Day a la
junior high school. Using these materials and mixing them
for a variety of communicative purposes, student media pro-
jects may take a number of forms:

1) A productive media project may be a completely
original creation; that is, a group of students may simply
become involved with certain materials and through the talk
that this sort of activity naturally generates create a

media diSplay or project to which, then, another group, or

249

an individual perhaps, may wish to respond.

2) A media project may be a response to a completely
original fiction: a group of students may attempt a res-
ponse to a story or poem written entirely from.the col-
lective experiences of the students involved in the project,
or the group may respond to a fiction written by one member
of the group alone who wishes to share his story with the
others and exchange responses.

3) A media project may be a collective response to a
professional story or poem read receptively by the group,
or read by one member of the group and suggested to the
others.

4) Options (1), (2) and (3) above all contain many
receptive possibilities, for in the course of creating a
media project, and responding in various ways, ideas,
questions, connections and other creative possibilities
‘will ariseand naturally lead to the consideration of other
stories and poems--just as hearing stories leads to wanting
to tell them, responding to stories leads to wanting to read
them. And here perhaps is where the teacher can be most
helpful. In working with a group on a project, he can sug-
gest other literature that will help to increase and further

extend the imaginative satisfaction of the group experience.

250

In this regard, then, the media might on occasion be used
solely to help implement the receptive aspect of the cur-
riculum. A group of students, for example, might wish to
put together a media display for the entire class in order
to introduce their classmates to a particular piece of
literature. Naturally, if the presentation is enjoyable
enough, many students will want to read the story as a
result of the group project. This can be an extremely
rewarding experience. In a ninth grade class I once taught
a group of students created a 10 minute media extravaganza
in preparation for Ray Bradbury's "The Skeleton." After
the presentation, we were all so scared, that no one that
afternoon dared read the story. Instead we spent the rest
of the hour responding to the project as a whole. Several
days later, however, another group asked if they could
challenge the first group's presentation, and within a week
almost everyone in the class had read the story; one poor
reader even asked to have it told to him. Naturally, on a
number of other occasions, other projects in this particular
class did not fare quite as well.

There is one final important point to mention here.
Under no circumstances ought the media activities in the

classroom appear to the students as subtle "con-jobs" to

251

get the class interested in literature. Using music, for
example, as an introduction to a poetry unit or devising a
project in order to recreate a passage from a story or
illustrate the "meaning" of a poem are activities as
inauthentic and dishonest as the inductive-discovery teach-
ing methods of the content-centered curriculums of Project
English. And today's student will immediately see through
this sort of facade anyway. Simply, media activity must be
undertaken in and for itself, and not for any ulterior
academic purpose. This means gging (not doing in order

to . . .) and responding in authentic, creative ways. Only
true involvements are capable of turning back in upon them-
selves; and only from a completely honest engagement can
students learn about what fictions mean (their own as well
as others) and how good ones are put together for others to

enjoy.

B) Creative Writing: This productive activity in the

 

junior high school literature program ought to be seen as a
further extension of the creative oral language "story-ing"
of the elementary school, and, in fact, oral language

activities themselves ought to continue unabated throughout

junior high school. But as writing ability improves, sixth

252

and seventh and eighth grade pupils ought to be gradually
encouraged to write about their experiences in personal
essays or simple narratives and to slowly begin to write
actual short stories and poems, all the while (with conscious
ability expanding now at this level) learning how to experi-
ment with and manipulate style, form, time scheme, diction,
metaphor, etc. for particular narrative purposes. Articu-
lated perSonal experiences at the junior high level ought to
be viewed as touchstones for entirely fictional narrations.
AS'With elementary school children, junior high students
will naturally bring many story possibilities to class with
them, and the involvement in the media and in other pro-
ductive activities will no doubt help to create many more
"story-ing" possibilities as well.

There are, unfortunately, few guidelines to follow
here. In the elementary grades, personal narratives are
most likely to be third person and episodic; then gradually
in the junior years stories will probably tend to become
more personal (and more first-person) as students try to
project into their stories their own newly-discovered
personal qualities and to act out through their stories
their own personal fantasies, wishes, dreams and desires.

He or she will want to become, in one way or another, hero

253

or heroine. But there is simply no way to tell; this is one
of those areas, particularly, where research is sorely
needed. Two things are certain, however, at this level,
with respect to helping each student learn how to create the
best stories he is capable of: (1) what is more important
than direct instruction in creative writing in the junior
high is simply that children be given as many opportunities
as possible to write in many different ways; and (2) creative
writing ventures must also involve group responses and
reactions. A student will want to know if his story is
"good" or not, how well written it is, and hOW'it might be
improved. Consequently, students ought frequently to

gather in small groups and, in workshop fashion, help each
other improve his/her story or poem. Moreover, teaching
each other to write in this way also helps each Student
reflect upon and articulate for himself-~for the benefit of
another--what he has gradually been learning in his own.way

about the nature of story-telling and story-making.*

 

*At the same time, of course, all the non-verbal res-
ponse projects, individually or collectively created, have
also been supplying instantaneous feedback to each student:
when a group of students Egg how each of them responded
creatively to a story or poem, it becomes immediately appar-
ent that there are many different ways of perceiving and
interpreting the same human experience. Thus, while on the

254

And finally, writing stories, of course, can never
really be separated from reading them. Thus, here too, a
teacher might suggest some professional story or poem to a
student which might relate either to the particular exper-
ience the student is struggling to convey or to the manner
and form under which the student is trying to shape and

direct his own fiction.

C) Dramatic Activity; As with oral and written language
activities, dramatic involvements in the junior high ought
to evolve directly from.the dramatic experiences and activi-
ties of the elementary school. In addition to continuing to
act out and improvize upon their own stories, and profes-
sional tales as well, junior high students are capable of

creating a role-playing situation totally from.acratch:

 

one hand, creative response is intended to help substantiate
and validate each student's experiential-world view, it can
also demonstrate to each pupil that others may not neces-
sarily share his perceptions, opinions and/or beliefs. Dif-
ferent responses will naturally provoke discussion and as
each student's views are questioned, each must defend his
own ideas and, in a sense, justify his reSponse. In doing
so, of course, one may be forced to either clarify his own
opinion or broaden his perspective so as to incorporate the
perceptiveness of another. The Response to Literature,
therefore, helps promote intellectual growth by allowing
students to discriminate and re-organize perception and idea
through authenticy,resnonse-feedback interactions.

255

that is, to begin an improvisation, junior high pupils need
not be confined to relying on either the simple plot lines
or the stereotyped, ready-made character figures from.fairy
tales, romances, and adventure stories. On their own,

these pupils will gradually begin to create for themselves
more "real-life" characterizations, all the while trying out
different roles and personalities--fictional and dramatic
versions of themselves. Starting together as a group,
seventh and eighth graders, then, ought to be encouraged to
merely imagine possible dramatic scenes or episodes and then
further formulate and articulate these situations by acting
them out spontaneously. For example, a simple street scene~
could be imagined, with students playing themselves and ad
libbing, a policeman or two perhaps, a candy store proprie-
tor and his wife, some children playing noisily, and an
action like robbery or a domestic squabble; or perhaps a
science fiction episode with students plotting the destruc-
tion of a neighboring galaxy; or role-playing about the day
school disappeared. Furthermore, involvement with media
projects at the same time will be an invaluable aid here in
helping to costume, create make-shift sets, and provide

music, lighting and sound effects.

256

Spontaneous drama of this sort in the junior high)
school immediately creates for the class many possible
further activities, both productively and receptively. On
the one hand, using their own improvisations for a start,
students can be encouraged to write their own plays; and
secondly, acting or role-playing of any kind naturally leads
to wanting to read and produce real, professional plays.

The inexpensive paperback anthology Fifteen.American One Act
‘Plnyg, edited by Paul Kozelka, is excellent for these pur-
poses. And there is no reason why short stories and parts
of novels and even poems might not also be converted by the
students themselves into small dramatic projects. The short

story Phone Call* by Berton Rouche is very adaptable for

 

junior high dramatic presentation as is Browning's My Last
Duchess for perhaps a ninth or tenth grade class. Bear in
mind also that all of these operational activities are
turning back upon themselves. By writing plays, producing
plays, and converting stories and poems into plays, students,
by story-ing (doing) on an intuitive-response basis, are

learning how to cope with character, motivation, metaphor,

 

*See Point of Departure, nineteen stories of youth
discovery, edited by Herbert Gold (New York: Dell Publish-
ing Co., 1967), pp. 88-93.

257

time sequence, theatricality, human conflict and experience,
etc. in all the very same ways that authors themselves do.’
But the object here is not to ultimately produce fine, pro-
fessional drama, but merely to afford students the oppor-
tunity to become involved in creating, responding and inter-
preting in ways that are meaningful and pleasurable for
them. It is their interpretation which is important, and

not fidelity to a text.

D) Discussion Activities: Finally, when all of these pro-
ductive activities result in students reading literature for
themselves receptively, there is no need to totally dis-
regard formal discussion. Class momentum is bound to dis-
solve from time to time, especially when everyone's pro-
jects are going badly. When a class is centered on student
activity for the most part, even the most energetic teen-
agers will welcome a respite. On these occasions, time for
free reading and participatory discussion activities--to
explore literary response verbally--might fit into the
curriculum quite well.

~These discussions might take a number of different
formats:

1) Teacher-Directed: Since during junior high

 

258

school the desire to "formulate" will first appear in one
form or another, discussion can help students verbalize how
they feel about a particular story and what possible signifi-
cance such a story might have for their own lives. A good
way to nurture formulation at this age (and to respect naive
responses at the same time) is to have students respond to
the different characters in a story on an affective basis
through personal identification by asking questions such as,
"How do you think so and so felt in this story when his
father died?"; or "Why do you think Joe became angry at
Bob?"; or "Why did Harold feel lonely at the circus?" etc.
After the students have explored the feelings, experiences
and motivations of the characters in a piece of fiction in
this way, the discussion might then move to an exploration
of how each student would personally feel and react if he
were involved in a situation or conflict similar to the one
portrayed in the story. Then perhaps the students could
examine the sources of those feelings within themselves,
culminating ultimately in a consideration of their own
personal belief system, principles and ethical values. In
other words, public, verbal response and formulation is
probably best approached at this level through discussion

activities which are affectively-oriented (i.e. how would

259

you feel in this situation) rather than cognitively-oriented

(i.e. what does this story mean?).

2) Student-Run: On their own, students might decide
what particular aspects of a story they might like to
explore in an open-ended, but somewhat formal discussion.
Panels could be set up for students to question and/or
debate other students on how they responded to various
aspects of a story. Courtroom games work great here, with
different students taking turns playing prosecuting and
defending attorney, judge, interested spectators, various
witnesses, etc. Naturally mystery stories are perfect here,
but many different kinds of stories can be converted into

”who-don-its" or "why" stories.

3) Group-Oriented: Finally, the class might be a
broken down into various groups, with each group discussing
a different aspect (response) of a particular story. If the
elementary years have been successful in providing each
student with confidence in his oral language ability and if
students are used to oral language activities from the lower
grades, there should be little difficulty initiating oral-
response-discussion activities in grades 7-10 to stories

read in common:

260

The comprehension of a piece of literature will always
stand in some ratio to what an individual has done,
heard, seen and felt in his personal life.

Thus a response to literature curriculum in the
junior high school ought to operate on two levels simul-
taneously: (l) a private, personal-response receptive
level where teachers must be prepared to teach individu-
ally; (2) and a group activity, productive level which may
at times tend to incorporate the private responses and
individual readings of some pupils on a personal level.
Sequencing here will be most difficult. Obviously on level
one there can be no pre-planned course of action. Teachers,
therefore, ought to attempt to plan their classes around
different activities on level two: improvisation for three
days, media projects for a week, a movie response next
Thursday, then, perhaps, some group discussion, etc. Books
should be flowing in and out of children's hands constantly
and teachers will have to organize class time so everyone's
projects can be seen and responded to. But most important
of all, students at this level ought to be gaining con-
fidence daily in their ability to initiate their own

activities and direct their own learning.

 

261
The Senior High Grades: 11-12

We can no longer cut the roots of experience which
alone can sustain the growth we look for. It is
not only that the classroom must more and more merge
into the world outside it, but that the processes of
school learning must merge into the processes of
learning that began at birth and are life-long.
James Britton
Language and Learning
A senior level response to literature curriculum
sees the last two years of high school as centering about a
series of many different student-centered courses, worked
into the over-all school curriculum by means of a loosely-
constructed modular scheduling system. These literature
courses would operate in two basic ways: a receptive

content-centered approach and a productive context-centered

approach.

A) Content-Centering:

 

l) Teacher-developed: English teachers in these

 

final two years of high school could schedule at the start
of each semester a whole series of literature related
problems which they would like to teach based on their
competencies, interests and/or natural desires to want to

learn (along with their students) more about a particular

262

aspect of literature, period of literature, or particular
author. Instruction here could be either standard fare:
the short story
American romanticism
contemporary American poetry

the fiction of Hemingway and Salinger
modern drama

or experimental, depending upon the creativeness of individ-
ual teachers:

the poetry of rock

the Victorian novel and sexism

Shakespeare and the cinema

the politics of contemporary Black Literature
These courses could run for any length of time--from an
intense three to four week involvement, to a two month long
encounter, to a whole semester-~and students would be free
to enroll in as many of these courses as they wish during a
term. Similarly, the selection of courses offered could be
up-dated and revised at any point during a semester. It is
hoped that at this point student-interest, subject-interest,
and teacher-interest would intersect fully. If the cur-
riculum has been working up to this time, teachers ought to
be responding both to the develOping interests of their

students as well as to literature itself under a wholly new

and creative perspective. In other words, a Response to

263

Literature curriculum ought to make real learners out of
teachers also. In any event, teachers ought not to use this
opportunity merely to teach content in new ways, but for the
old reasons. Nothing could be more inbmical to a Response
to Literature curriculum. Instead, teachers should attempt
to legitimately satisfy the demands of their students to
know more about literature and to fulfill their own curiosi-
ties and creative needs as well. And although this may
appear to be a throwback to content-centeredness and
structure-centeredness, it is presumed (1) that this our-
riculum, up to this point, has succeeded in creating stu-
dents who are good learners: people who have learned how to
learn and who can now generally be considered responsible
for supplying both the direction and the motivation for
their own learning; (2) that students who have had the
opportunity to respond to literature and to create with it
will already by this time have read widely and will know
what they like in literature and what they would like to
know more about; (3) that, therefore, students will be
enrolled in these content courses because they want to be
enrolled in them; and (4) finally that the literary explor-
ations within these classes will adhere to the ideas and

theories of a Response to Literature curriculum, in general,

264

and make use of any of the creative methods for teaching

already described in this chapter.*

2) Student-develgped: Within all these teacher-
developed content-oriented courses, groupsof students theme
selves ought to be allowed to suggest their owncontent-
courses: decide together what ideas they would like to
explore, books they would like to read, goals they would
like to achieve, and activities and projects they would like
to engage in. Given the nature of the school system.for
which this curriculum is designed, it should not be much of
a problem, then, to find a teacher willing to help direct
student-deve10ped courses and learn along with the students

at the same time.

B) Context-centering: These courses ought to attempt to

 

examine in depth some aspect of American society through a.

number of different activities, discussions and experiences

 

*But even with such content-centering, some teachers,
students, administrators and concerned parents might yet
feel that a curriculum of this sort has so far failed to
teach those "areas of knowledge" which must be covered for
success in all lower division college literature courses.
One of these content classes, therefore, might be scheduled
each spring designed Specificially to cover pre-planned sub-
ject-matter and teach literary criticism, technique, and
analysis. Such a class might be entitled, "Everything You've
Always Wanted to Know About Literature, But Have Been Afraid
to Ask."

265

in order to establish within the classroom a Socially
relevant context within which literature may then be intro-
duced and examined. It is hoped that through intense
involvements, both inside and outside the school building,
a body of knowledge, opinionation and different sets of
beliefs and values will gradually be drawn into the class-
room and that these forces will create a frame of reference
within which--through literary response--solutions to these
social problems might be probed. Because it will probably
take some time to establish a number of different contexts
'within the class, to explore a problem from.a number of
different aspects, and for everyone to get to know and trust
everyone else, these context-centered courses are probably
best scheduled for an entire semester or half-semester (two
months).* Each of these context-centered courses ought to
rely on extensive out of class and community field exper-
iences, and each will no doubt include a great many non-I
imaginative readings in sociology, history, politics, psy-
chology, etc. Consequently, these classes might best be
set up in conjunction with the other "arts" departments

within the high school. For in the final analysis, after

 

*Students should feel free to create these courses
as well.

266

all, all "subjects" become integrated anyway. Here are

some possible context-centered courses for grades ll-12:

A) "An Examination of Educational Theory and Practice in

the United States"

1)

2)

Possible Activities:

a) Students might interview teachers and admin-
istrators about educational problems both
within their own high school and at other
schools within the city or in neighboring
cities.

b) Students might canvass the neighborhood to
find out how different parent groups within
the city feel about public education.

c) Students might examine areas of disagreement
between the local police and various student
organizations.

d) Students might decide to set up a "model"
classroom, and then attempt to put their
theory into practice in another course the
following semester.

e) Students might examine the role of athletics
in public education; the role of the school
counselor; administrative bureaucracy, etc.

Possible Literature:

 

Up the Down Staircase, Bel Kaufman

The Waygof All Flesh, S. Butler

GulliverTs Travels, J. Swift

The Way It Spozed to Be, J. Herndon

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,
A. Sillitoe

How to Survive in Your Native Land, James Herndon

Inherit the Wind, J. Laurence-

To Sir,_With Love, E. R. Braithwaite

Good TimeSYBad Times, James Kirkwood

Great Expectations, C. Dickens

 

The Child Buyer, J. Hersey

 

I Never Promised You a Rose_Garden, H. Greene

267

‘ B) "An Examination of Violence in America"

1)

2)

Possible Activities:

 

a) The class might examine some of the more
popular violent movies and then discuss how
they reacted to the violence in these pic-
tures on a personal, introspective basis.

b) Some students might interviewwmembers of the
local police force and perhaps even become
involved in local community-police programs;
or better yet, manage to talk to some of the
inmates at the local jail.

c) Students might ask their parents how they
feel about violence; or question fathers who
have fought in WOrld War II and older brothers
who have fought in Vietnam.

d) Role- -playing situations might be set-up
‘within the class in order to allow everyone
to experience how he responds and reacts to
different violent confrontations.

e) Students might probe the causes of violence
'within themselves and society, and examine at
the same time different kinds of violence:
psychological, physical, political, etc.

Possible Literature:

 

In Cold Blood, T. Capote

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X
A Clockwork Orange, A. Burgess

Macbeth, Shakespeare

The Butterfly Revolution, W. Butler

The Godfather, Mario Puzo

Deliverance, James Dickey

The Last of the Mohicans, J. F. Cooper

Lord of the Flies, W. Golding

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,
A. Solshenitsyn

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, K. Kesey

 

 

C) "An Examination of Political Power: The Individual vs

the System"

268

1) Possible Activities:

a) This kind of context course is great for an
election year. For part of the term, stu-
dents could become involved in someone's
campaign effort (locally or nationally), and
then bring these experiences back to class
for examination and exploration.

b) Politicians, judges and lawyers could be
invited to the c1assroom.for a panel discus-
sion.

c) Students could interview the local radical
political groups.

d) Some students might wish to publish a politi-
cal newspaper for distribution both within
the school and the community.

e) Or some students might wish to volunteer to
work for local political organizations: the
city or county branch of the Democratic or
Republican Party, the MOdel Cities program,
CORE, OEO programs, etc.

2) Possible Literature:

 

All the Kingis Men, R. P. Warren

A Novel by Ayn Rand

The Armies of the Night, N. Mailer

The Naked and the Dead, N. Mailer

Brave New World, A. Huxley

The Crucible, A. Miller

Fail-Safe, E. Burdick

For Whom.the Bell Tolls, E. Hemingway

Looking Backward, E. Bellemy

Lost Horizen, J. Hilton

The Outsider, R. Wright

Seven Days in Mny, F. Knebel and C. W. Bailey

Prison Journal of a Priest Revolutionany,
D. Berrigan

Animal Farm, George Orwell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

D) "Is Religion Alive or Dead in America?"'

1) Possible Activities:

 

E)

2)

"War"

1)

269

a) Groups of students might wish to explore
through personal writing or through the media
their own religious heritage and values.

b) Students might wish to select several
religious conflicts from stories, novels
and/or poems and then re-create these epi-
sodes in role-playing situations to see how
they might react in moments of "conscience-
crisis."

c) Students might explore the relationships
between religious ritual and secular ritual.

d) Students might wish to make a film based on
religious allegory and symbolism.

e) And, of course, the local religious organ-
izations might be canvassed.

Possible Literature:

The Power and the Glory, G. Greene
Rabbitt, Run, John Updike

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
Siddartha, H. Hesse

The Old Man and the Sea, E. Hemingway
On the Road, J. Kerouac

The Lord of the Flies, W. Golding
Measure for Measure, Shakespeare
King Lear, Shake8peare

Babbitt, S. Lewis

Elmer Gantny, S. Lewis

 

 

The Assistant, B. Malamud
Another Country, J. Baldwin

The Nun's Story, K. Hulme

The Devil's Advocate, M. L. West
The Prophet, K. Gibran

Song of Myself, W. Whitman

The Exorcist, W. P. Blatty

 

 

 

Possible Activities:

 

3) Students might interview veterans as well as
the local anti-war groups.

270

b) Students might try and see as many American
war movies as possible (local late shows
program old war flicks at least once a week),
and then examine both the values in those
movies and their personal reactions to those
values.

c) Students might create war games for them,
selves based on Monopoly, Black and White,
The Education Game, etc.

d) Students might examine local industries,
colleges, business organizations, and farm
bureaus to see if the "military-industrial"
complex is fact or myth.

e) Students might make both a literature and
musical anthology of popular war songs and
ballads.

2) Possible Literature:

 

Johnny Got His Gun, D. Trumbo

A Farewell to Arms, E. Hemingway
All_Quiet on the Western Front, E. M. Remarque
The Bridges at Toko-ri, J. A. Michener
The Naked and the Dead, N. Mailer
Catch-22, J. Heller

Slaughterhouse Five, K. Vonnegut

Why_We are in Vietnam, N. Mailer

Little Big Man, T. Berger

The Caine Mutiny, H. Wouk

Mila 18, Leon Uris

The Bridge on the River Kwai, P. Boulle
The Guns of Navarone, A. MacLean

 

 

 

 

F) "Injustice in America"

1) Possible Activities:

 

a) Students could interview local residents with
political and/or economic gripes: factory
workers, school teachers, farmers, struggling
businessmen, etc.

b) Students could role-play typical situations
involving a sense of injustice: Black-White
confrontations, school grading policies, the

G)

2)

271

draft, the arrest procedure, etc.

c) Through small encounter-group situations,
students might reveal to one another their
own experiences with injustice and hypo-
crisy.

d) Local leaders of minority organizations might
be invited to the class to discuss the
political and economic difficulties facing
the various ethnic groups in a particular
community.

Possible Literature:

The Godfather, M. Puzo
The Confessions of Nat Turner, W. Styron

 

In Dubious Battle, J. Steinbeck
The Book of Job
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

 

The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare
Native Son, R. Wright

 

Black Like Me, J. Griffin
The Trial, F. Kafka
The Fixer, B. Malamud

 

King Lear, Shakespeare
The Grapes of Wrath, J. Steinbeck

"Women's Liberation"

1)

Possible Activities:

 

a) Each student in the class might like to keep
a journal recording all the occasions on
which he or she felt forced into a particular
role based on sex. Periodically, these jour-
nals might be passed around the room and dis-
cussed. ‘

b) The local NOW group might be interviewed.

c) Students might examine the ways in which
their own high school is sexist in its prac-
tices, overtly or covertly. The results
could be published in a report made available
throughout the school.

d) Female students and school athletics.

e) Female students and school academics.

2)

272

f) Role-playing situations might be explored in
which sex roles become reversed: the males
in the class assume female roles and vice-
versa. ‘ '

Pongible Literature:

Madame Bouvary, G. Flaubert

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom.9ueen, Alix K. Shulman
The Poetry of Nikki Giovanni

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, E. Albee
Wuthering Heights, E. Bronte

Women in Love, D. H. Laurence

Prisoner of Sex, N. Mailer

What Tin Going to Do, I Think, L. Woiwode
A Doll's House, H. Ibsen

Ariel, Sylvia Plath

Main Street, S. Lewis

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

Jane Eyre, C. Bronte

 

 

H) "The Occult"

1)

2)

Possible Activities:

a) Read everything you can about witches,
devils, ghosts, and Spells. Collect every-
thing you can about witchery and bring it to
class.

b) Media projects are obviously well suited;
making a film, of course, would be best of
all.

c) Maybe some in the class could find out if
there are any covens in the area.

d) Students might want to try and write their
own occult stories.

e) In various role-playing-media experiences
students could explore their own reactions
to the occult.

Possible Literature:

 

The Exorcist, W. P. Blatty
Rosemary's Baby, Ira Levin

273

Macbeth, Shakespeare

The Turn of the Screw, H. James

To the Lighthouse, V. Woolf

The Picture of Dorian Grey, 0. Wilde

Rebecca, D. DuMaurier

The Birds, D. DuMaurier

<The Narrative of Arthur G. Pym, E. A. Poe

The Poetry of William Blake .
The Search for BrideyMurphy, Morey Bernstein

 

I) Finally, every high school ought to have a real,
live theatre Operating throughout the school year as a
regular credit-earning, academic course. Students could
enroll in this theatre class on a continuous basis or for
one semester only. Such a theatre could perform whatever
plays it wanted, with different students being responsible
for the various aspects of production: acting, directing,
costuming, set design, finances, etc. Plays could be either
professional or student experimentations, and periodically
different classes (or the entire school, assembly fashion)
might take the morning or afternoon off and see a play in
the auditorium. And perhaps a similar on-going class could
be established for the cinema as well.

It is realized, of course, that all of these context-
centered courses are purely arbitrary and artificial intel-
lectual constructions. Any one of the titles above could be
logically placed under any one of the course descriptions.

But to put the emphasis on the particular focus or supposed

274

content of these courses is to totally misconstrue their
purpose. Simply, these classes ought not to emphasize the
examination of these ideas in literature; rather, each of
the courses should seek to involve its students in activi-
ties, projects and engagements that the students themselves
see as educationally relevant and worthy of both their time

and effort.

275
CONCLUDING NOTE

This study has argued against many current teaching
practices, and against, for the most part, the organization
of school systems and curricula as they now exist. But the
plain truth Of the matter is: in the future, curriculums
for English (and for most other subjects as well) will have
to become both student-centered and activity-response-
centered. But these arguments have been intended, from the
beginning, to be positive. Thus, while the English teach-
ing profession can no longer attempt to improve instruction
through upgrading content or redesigning curricula, there
are means available for institutional change to occur.
Inevitably, the burden for this new kind of teaching and for
the creation of a new kind of school-~as indicated by this
study-~will fall on the English teachers themselves. And
herein lies the profession's best hope for the future. If
English teaching is to fulfill the promise and hopeful
expectations set forth at the Basic Issues Conference many
years ago, the profession in the next decade must concen-
trate on educating excellent teachers as strongly and as
devotedly as it has in the past concentrated on producing

new materials and designing new courses of instruction.

276

While the English teaching profession in the 1970's will
still be in need of financial support to further basic
research.(particularLyin.linguistics, psycholinguistics,
reading instruction, literary response, and composition), it
must at the same time seek to establish teacher-education
workshops in university and community college English
departments across the country at both the undergraduate
and graduate levels. Specifically, future teachers of
English must:
1. be as thoroughly knowledgeable as possible about
the nature of language itself--its acquisition,
development, growth, and all its communicative

and discourse possibilities;

2. be well schooled in both learning theory and
the psychology of child develOpment;

3. learn how to communicate interpersonally, and
how to get to know and to trust children; and

4. future teachers of English must not only know
literature, but theymust respond to it them-
selves, creatively and Often.

But most important of all, the English teaching pro-

fession must educate its future teachers to be free and

creative individuals--free, that is, to know how to create

 

new and different methodologies on their own and how to
teach in the ways indicated by this study, revising and

implementing what happens in the classroom each year in the

277

light of previous successes and failures.

F OOTNOTES

FOOTNOTES

Chapter I

 

1James E. Miller, Jr., "Literature in the
Revitalized Curriculum," NASSP Bulletin, 51 (1967), p. 25.

2lhid., pp. 25-26.

3Michael F. Shugrue, English in aDecade of Change
(New York: Western Publishing Co., 1968), p. 22.

4William H. Evans and Jerry L. Walker, New Trends
in the Teachingiof English in the Secondary Schools
(Chicago: ‘Rand McNally and Co., 1966), p. 21.

5Ibid., p. 22.

6Shugrue, p. 23.

7Shugrue, p. 23.

8Shugrue, p. 22.

9James J. Lynch and Bertrand Evans, High School
English Textbooks: A Critical Examination (Boston: Little,
Brown and Co., 1963), pp. l-l6-+ 242. ‘

10J. N. Hook, "If a Curriculum is to be
Sequential," English Journal, 51 (1962), p. 79.

 

11Shugrue, p. 23.
12Evans and Walker, p. 32.
131bid.

278

279

1['Freedom and Discipline in English: Report of
the Commission on English (New York: College Entrance
Examination Board, 1965), p. 2.

15"The Basic Issues in the Teaching of English,”
in PMLA, 74, September Supplement (1959), p. 4.

16Shugrue, p. 27.
17Evans and Walker, p. 32.

18Jerome S. Bruner, The Process of Education
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 12-13.

19

Ibid., p. 20.
20Shugrue, p. 29.
21Bruner, p. 17.
22Bruner, p. 10.

23Bruner, p. 10.

24Shugrue, p. 29.

25Shugrue, p. 30.

26Bruner, pp. 52-53.

27Hook, p. 84.

28James R. Squire, "College English Departments and
the Professional Efforts to Improve English Teaching," PMEQ,
78 (1963), p. 36.

29Ralph C. M. Flynt, "The U. 8. Office of Education
Looks at Project English," PMLA, 78 (1963), p. 31.

3OShugrue, p. 36.
31Charles R. Cooper, "The New Climate for Personal

Responses to Literature in the Classroom," Engiish Journal,
60 (1971), p. 1069.

 

280

32Shugrue, pp. 36-38.

33J. N. Hook, "Project English: The First Year,"
PMLA, 78 (1963), pp. 33-34.

34Shugrue,.p. 37.

35A Curriculum for English, prepared by the Cur-
riculum Study Center in English at the University of Neb-
raska (Lincoln: The Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1966), p.
V111.

36Ibid., p. ix.

37Ibid., p. xviii.

38lhid., pp. xi-xii.

39Ibid., p. x.
401bid., p. xiii.
41Ibid., p. xiii.
42Ibid., p. xiii.

43Ibid., p. xxiv.

44lbid., p. xxiii.

45Ibid., p. xix.

46Ibid., grade 5, p. 80.

47Ibid., grade 5, pp. 84-85.

48A Curriculum for English, drawn up at the Woods
Charitable Fund Workshop for Teachers of English by the

English Committee on Curriculum (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1961),
p. 33c.

 

491bid., p. 28c.

501bid., p. 35c.

281

51Michael F. Shugrue, "NeW'Material for the
Teachers of English: The English Program of the USOE,"
PMLA, 81 (1966), pp. 26-27.

52A Curriculum for English, Woods Charitable Fund
Workshop (1961), p. 44c.

53A Curriculum.for English, Woods Charitable Fund
Workshop (1961), p. 43c.

54Shugrue, "New Materials for the Teaching of
English," p. 27.

55A Curriculum for English (Lincoln: The Univ.
of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. xiv.

56Bruner, p. 48.

57A Curriculum for English, Woods Charitable Fund
Workshop (1961), p. 33c. '

58Shugrue, English in a Decade of Change, p. 69.

59Shugrue, "New Materials for the Teaching of
English," p. 5.

6oShugrue, "New Materials for the Teaching of
English;'p. 6.

61Ibid., p. 6.

62Erwin R. Steinberg, et a1., Curriculum Develnp-
‘ment and Evaluation in English and Social Studies, A Report
on Research Development Conference for Personnel of USOE
Curriculum Study Centers (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Institute of
Technology, 1964), p. 12.

63Shugrue, "New Materials for the Teaching of
English," p. 6.

6['Dwight L. Burton, Literature Study in the High
Schools, revised edition (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1970), p. 215.

282

65lhid., pp. 217-18.

66Beekman W. Cottrell and Lois S. Josephs, "A
Genuine Accumulation," English Journal, 54 (1965), p. 92.

 

67Ibid., p. 92. .
68Ibid., pp. 92-93.

69Erwin R. Steinberg, et al., "The Inductive Teach-
ing of English," English Journal, 55 (1966), p. 146.

7°1hid., p. 142.

71Shugrue, "New Materials for the Teaching of
English," p. 6.

72Steinberg, et al., Curriculum.Development and
Evaluation in English and Social Studies, p. 13.

73Steinberg, et al., "The Inductive Teaching of
English," p. 146. ‘

7"Steinberg, et al., "The Inductive Teaching of
English," p. 144.

75Steinberg, et al., "The Inductive Teaching of
English," p. 140.

76Erwin R. Steinberg, "Research on the Teaching
of English Under Project English,” PMLA, 79 (1964), p. 74.

77Shugrue, English in a Decade of Changn, p. 66.

78Stoddard, Malarkey, ”Sequence and Literature:
Some Considerations," English Journal, 56 (1967), p. 398.

79Freedom and Discipiine in English: Report of
the Commission on English, p. 53.

80Shugrue, English in a Decade of Change, p. 66.
81Ibid.

82Burton, p. 19.

283

83Shugrue, English in a Decade of Change, p. 66.
84Ibid.

85Shugrue, "New Materials for the Teaching of
English," p. 32.

86Ibid.

87Malarkey, p. 399.

88Ibid., p. 398.

39lbid., p. 399.

901bid., p. 400.

911bid.

92Shugrue, Engiish in a Decade of Change, p. 66.
93Bruner, p. 20..

94Shugrue, "New Materials for the Teaching of
English," pp. 3-38.

95Shugrue, English in a Decade of Change, p. 70.

96Teacher's Manual to Gateway_English: A Litera-
ture and Language Arts Program (New York: The Macmillan
Co., 1966), p. 1.

97Ibid., p. 1.

98Ibid., pp. 1-2.

99lbid., p. 3.

100Ibid., p. 4.

1°11bi8., p. 3.

102Ibid., p. 69.

103Shugrue, Engiish in a Decade of Changg, pp. 45-46.

284

104James R. Squire, "The Running Water and the
Standing Stone," PMLA, 83 (1968), p. 525.

Chnpter II

1Shugrue, English in a Decade of Change, p. 60.

2Robert Shafer, "Curriculum: New Perspectives,"
English Journal, 56 (1967), p. 153.

31bid., p. 153.
4Ibid., pp. 152-53.
5Ibid., p. 153.

6A Curriculum for English (Lincoln: The Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 1966), grade 6, pp. 212-19.

7Shafer, p. 160.

8James Moffett, "A Structural Curriculum in
English," Harvard Educational Review, 36 (1966), p. 18.

91bid., p. 19.
10Ibid.

11Ibid., p. 21.
12Ibid., pp. 22-23.
13Ibid., p. 19.
14Ibid., p. 20.
15lhid., pp. 26-27.
16lhid., pp. 18-21.
17lhid., p. 19.

18Bruner, p. 50.

285
19James Herndon, The Way It Spozed To Be (New York:
Bantam Books, 1968), pp. 76-77, and 103.

20John Holt, How Children Fail (New York: Dell
Publishing Co., 1964), p. 15.

211bid., p. 16.
22Ibid., pp. 15-17.
231hid., p. 119.
24Ibid., p. 118.
25lhid., pp. 88-89.
26Ibid., pp. 23-24.
27Ibid., part I.
28Ibid., p. 48.
291bid., pp. 64-67.
301bid., p. 74.
311bid., pp. 75, 46.
32Ibid., p. 153.
331bid., p. 58.
34Ibid., p. 162.
35Ibid., p. 139.

36John Holt, The Underachieving_School (New York:
Dell Publishing Co., 1969), p. 17.

37Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching
as a Subversive Activity (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969),
pp. 31-33.

38

 

Herndon, p. 92.

286

39lhid., pp. 92-93.
40Holt, How Children Fail, p. 13.

41Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being
(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1968), p. 39.

42Holt, The Underachieving School, p. 21.

43Maslow, p. 45.

44AbrahamMaslow, "Self-Actualization and Beyond,"
in Challenges of Humanistic Psychology, ed. James F. T.
Bugental (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), p. 283.

45Gerald Weinstein and Mario D. Fantini, Toward
Humanistic Education: A Curriculum of the Affect (New

York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), pp. 25, 32.

46Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Boston:
Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1961), p. 356-59.

47Earl Kelley and Marie Rasey, Education and the
Nature of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1952), pp. 27929.

48Caleb Gottegno, What We Owe Children (NeW'York:
Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1970), p. 53.

49Ibid., p. 13.

SOHerbert Kohl, The Qpen Classroom (New York:
The New York Review, 1969), p. 39.

51George I. Brown, Human Teaching for Human
Learning (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 51.

 

52Louis Roths, et al., Values and Teaching
(Columbus, Ohio: Charles Merrill Publishing Co., 1961),
pp. 4-6.

53Carl Rogers, Freedom to Learn (Columbus, Ohio:
Charles Merrill Publishing Co., 1969), p. 114.

 

54Danile Fader and Elton B. McNeil, Hooked on
Books (New York: Berkeley Medallion Books, 1968), p. 6-10.

287

55lbid., p. 8.
56Ibid., pp. ll-l4.
57lbid., p. 26.
53lhid., p. 24.

Sglbid. , pp 0 82-94 0
Chapter III
1Herbert Muller, The Uses of English (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), p. v.
2Ibid., p. 52.
3Ibid., p. 52.
4Ibid., p. 10.

5Albert Marckwardt, "Perspectives on the Teaching
of English," PMLA, 82 (1967), p. 13.

6John Dixon, Growth Through English (London:
Oxford University Press for the National Association for
the Teaching of English, 1967), pp. 1-2.

7lhid., p. 2.

8Ibid., p. 4.

9lbid., p. 6.

10Ibid., p. 3.

111hid., p. 3.

lzIbid., p. 15.

13James R. Squire and Roger K. Applebee, Teaching

Engiish in the United Kingdom (Champaign, Illinois: NCTE,
1969), p. 91.

 

288

14Frank Whitehead, The Disappearing Dias (London:

Chatto and Windus, 1966), p. 16.

(London:

lslbido, pp. 15-160
16Muller, p. 41.

17J. W. Patrick Creber, Sense and Sensibility
University of London Press, 1965), pp. 9-10.

18Ibid., p. 12.
lgIbido ’ pp 0 10-1]. 0
20Whitehead, pp. 8-12.

21James Britton, "The Response to Literature," in

The Response to Literature, ed. James R. Squire (Champaign,

Illinois:

(Boston:

NCTE,1968), pp. 3-10.
22Squire and Applebee, p. 44.
23Muller, p. 43. '
2Z'Britton, p. 3-4.
25Whitehead, p. 16.
26Ibid., p. 13.
27Dixon, p. 84.
28Muller, p. 86.
29Britton, pp. 4-5.

30James Moffett, Teaching the Universe of Discourse.
Houghton-Mifflin, 1968), p. 25.

31Ibid., p. 27.
321bid., p. 24.

33Ibid., p. 28.

289

34Ibid., p. 26.
35Britton, p. 5.
36Dixon, p. 78.

37James R. Squire (ed.), The Renponse to Literature
(Champaign, Illinois: NCTE, 1968), pp. 49-50. '

38Dixon, pp. 32-33.

39lhid., p. 33.

40Creber, p. 14.

411bid., p. 15.

42Ibid., p. 17.

43Ibid., pp. 16-17-

44Muller, p. 52.

45D. w. Harding, "The Report of the Study Group,"

in The Resppnse to Literature, ed. James R. Squire (Cham-
paign, Illinois: NCTE, 1968), p. 11.

46Dixon, p. 72.

471bid., p. 91.

48Marckwordt, p. 12.

49Benjamin DeMott, "Reading, Writing, Reality,
Unreality. . . ," in The Response to Literature, ed. James
R. Squire (Champaign, Illinois: NCTE, 1968), p. 36.

SODixon, p. 31.
Chapter IV

1James Moffett, Teaching the Universe of Discourse,

 

290

2Louise Rosenblatt, "Literature-~the Leader's
Role," English Journal, 49 (1960), p. 305.

3Britton, pp. 4, 7.

4James Moffett, A Student-Centered Language Arts
Curriculum, Grades K-13 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1968),
p. 19.

5Whitehead, p. 16.

6Dixon, p. 91.

Chapter V

1Moffett, Teachingythe Universe of Discourse,

p. 122.
2Dixon, p. 36.

3Moffett, Teaching the Universe of Discourse,
pp. 29-30 0

4Kenneth Goodman, E. Brooks Smith and Robert
Meredith, Langnage and Thinkingiin the Elementary school
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 95.

5May Hill Arbuthnot (ed.), The Arbuthnot
Antholggy of Children's Literature, revised edition
(Glenview, Illinois: Scott Foresman, 1961), part II,
p. 5.

6Dixon, p. 48.

7Elton B. McNeil, "Early Adolescence--Fact and
Fantasy" in English for the Junior Years, ed. Stephen
Dunning (Champaign, Illinois: NCTE, 1969), p. 1.
8Ibid., p. 8.

9Shugrue, "New Materials for the Teaching of
English," p. 12.

291

10Shugrue, "New Materials for the Teaching of
English, p. 12.

11Ibid.

12lbid., pp. 12-13.

131bid., p. 12.

14Burton, pp. 78-80.

15McNeil, p. 3.

16Moffett, A Student-Centered Langnage Arts Cur-
riculumi Grades K-l3, p. 18.

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