The curriculum being proposed by Discipline Of English is a controversial one. It builds lesson objectives around discrete packets of academic knowledge, and not the development of reading skills, nor knowledge of a named text. Though passages from many texts are used to exemplify the academic knowledge, it is a curriculum with no book in mind.
This might be outrageous. Literature, with no literature! But it isn’t really intended to be book-free, just book-agnostic. DoF a curriculum of lessons that defines the substantive, transferable and universal knowledge that connects all literature. The curriculum is welcoming of the text that a teacher chooses to bring to it. The lessons say “bring me your book, and I’ll show you how to read it”.
Literature could, should, or must be a choice
A curriculum will typically mandate the book being read. Teachers will direct the reading. The book choice is owned by the department. Maybe this comes from the authoritarian position that “we know best what book is for best for you“, and “we are solely qualified to make this choice by training and experience“. The ownership of book choice, the responsibility and the attraction to a particular book is not that of the student. It is a teacher’s choice.
When I led a Media Studies department, I made a choice that was subversive of common practise. Our students would be given free choice over their own coursework project. Four Non Examined Assessments are given by the exam board, one needs completing. But many schools reduce the choice to one or two. I always felt this was at odds with the very objective of schooling; to foster independence, exploration and ownership and I wanted students to have free reign over this responsibility. What they produce is an act of creativity that reflects their interests and personality, which should not be managed by the preference of the teachers.
To prepare them for their choice, they would complete all four prior-year NEAs over the year 12 period, turning their projects into a portfolio of skills. In year 13, they would make their own choice of NEA based on those year 12 experiences. And it worked. Students loved the final NEA unit and the attainment was high. I put their success down to the structure: directed practise, leading to independent choice, autonomy and expression.
And I’ve gotten to thinking, why can’t we do this in Literature, at GCSE? Examboards provide a list of texts that can be examined, and we tend to prescribe what will be read, studied and assessed… This very curriculum structure removes independent choice, autonomy, Why can’t we place into the hands of students choice over the texts they want to study for two years? Why can’t we give students ownership over the material that will form the qualification and grade that impacts the rest of their lives?
Typically, all students must study the same text because lessons deliver text knowledge and not Literature knowledge. The curriculum is built to accommodate one single text that all students must be ready for. But when a curriculum is centered around the principles of Literature instead of the material, the students are unbound from the mandated class text.
When using lessons within DoE, students can learn the same knowledge as one another but apply it to whatever book is being studied across many units, but actually it’s wider than this; it can apply to any book the student chooses to study within the same class and within the same unit.
The opportunities of a book-agnostic curriculum
The blue sky thinking for a text-free curriculum is that students all study a particular learning objective based on the factual, historical, conceptual, or procedural nature of Literature which might be the first half of a lesson. In t he second half, they apply this learning to the book of their choice. They could work in reading groups having ‘text talk’, ‘book clubs’ or ‘Lit think tanks’. Students who choose the same text would work together to discuss why or how the learning objective applies to their choice in text. Or better phrased; how the discrete knowledge changes the way they understand the text.
And whilst a reader might latch onto the ‘book club’ scenario, and observe that many schools already put book talk into the hands of independent, student-led reading groups, those students did not select their book. Everyone in the class is managed by the text-orientated curriculum to read the same book.
In a book agnostic curriculum, students are selecting for themselves, reading for themselves and supporting one another, whilst the teacher controls the academic framing of analysis and the pacing of units.
Imagine now that some students study Romeo and Juliet, some Macbeth, Some Julius Ceaser. Some choose Conflict poetry, some Relationships. Now it is impossible for a teacher to prescribe interpretation and limit their response to a series of quotation banks and quote explosions. Now, a student is responsible for their own subjective experience of the reading.
The clouds in a blue sky
This is quite a scary proposition for any teacher of Literature, because whilst we talk about the importance of a love of reading, of aesthetic experience and subjective interpretations, the very structure of the curriculum denies these values. Prescriptivism of selection, the instruction of something that is a skill and not knowledge, the removal of time allocated to mastery, and the denial of the very purpose of critical engagement are all counter-motivational.
Such independence requires a great deal of training before hand. My A Level Media Studies students did not simply make the choice first. They were trained into having a high degree of knowledge first. And then, importantly, I let them use this knowledge for themselves, whilst I helped tweak and nudge their direction of travel. Giving students autonomy, purpose and mastery of their own choices is highly reliant on the quality of the curriculum that precedes this.
When students have ownership of their learning and the text, selecting from the range available to them, free to expose their personal preferences and moral subjectivity, they are acting as adults. What they find aesthetic is no longer governed by the authority of the curriculum but by the authority of the self. This freedom to select what we read is surely the pinnacle of Literature and one that we foster through library visits. It’s a freedom to read that we simply can’t offer through the dominant curriculum model.
It’s blue sky thinking. It couldn’t be done everywhere. And in the schools it can be applied, maybe not even with every class. But freedom of choice over GCSE texts is an opportunity that don’t exist when curriculum focuses on reading, recall and quoting from one text as a class. This freedom needs an entirely different approach to focusing on what matters: the material; or the methodological knowledge of Literature and its academic principles.
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