Modificación del reflejo de sobresalto en humanos

Competing and entrenched views of English have, over time, shaped and been shaped by what is offered in the classroom textbook. Their apparent congruence with official

curricula, policy trends and political forces, provides teachers with an additional tool to supplement a breadth of established classroom practices and materials. Textbooks can offer teachers organised units of work that can guide planning and reinforce instruction.

Furthermore, the range of resources and activities can provide practical bearings and support for teachers to help optimise student learning and address specific educational objectives. A brief historical review of textbooks demonstrates how they have contributed, in part, to framing educational outcomes, and shaping the professional identity of teachers and their classroom practices.

The influence of the textbook is apparent in a review of selected resources produced at the height of the Personal Growth Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. As previously mentioned, the movement rearticulated principles of Romanticism and the views of

subsequent leading educational reformers, such as John Dewey, to shape the aspirations of progressive education. Underpinned by humanist philosophies, this movement focused on self-development and social integration through language. It echoed the beliefs of Dewey

who saw formalised instruction as a barrier to genuine education and the freedom of the learner (Dewey cited in Skilbeck, 1970, p. 48-49). Dewey remained a trenchant critic of the “tests and measurement movement” (Skilbeck, 1970, p. 19) arguing that to “compare a person’s abilities in quantity with those of another is none of the teacher’s business”

(Skilbeck, p. 19). Essentially, progressivism eschewed explicit instruction and measurement of outcomes in favour of a process methodology that valued cumulative learning through experiences and an immersion in the natural world. Progressivism championed the

therapeutic and emancipatory benefits of providing a holistic education that emphasised a bias towards a “synthetic rather than an analytical approach” (Skilbeck, 1970, p. 7) to English. The resurgence of democratic ideals and the cultivation of knowledge through ‘natural’ experiences and personal recollections, echoes Rousseau’s reflections in Emile (1762). In this treatise to the nature of Education and student learning, Rousseau declares:

Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people’s thoughts (Rousseau cited in Jimack, 1911, p. 131).

The power of learning though natural experiences ‘free’ from external impositions encapsulates the ambitions of progressive education. As Moon (2012) notes, proponents of progressivism advocated the emergence of literacy skills, such as writing, from personal experiences and expressive beginnings. In terms of programming and lesson planning, contributions made to the English teachers’ journal (Education Department of Western Australia, 1974) encouraged teachers to draft a “rough extended plan of potential activities” (p. 2) and “capitalise on spontaneous ideas and current events” (p. 2). Furthermore,

suggestions were put forward to include formal student work and explicit instruction

“incidentally in context” (p. 2). These progressive practices are reflected in various textbooks produced at the height of the Personal Growth Movement in the 1970s including: Sandals in

One Hand (1971), The Runaway Sun (1972), Actions and Reactions (1972), Questionings

(1975) and I Mean to Say (1979).

To this end, the junior secondary textbook, The Runaway Sun (Boomer & Hood, 1972) focused on either scholarship for its own sake and using literature to incite aesthetic pleasure, or as an impetus for personal writing and creative reflection. The authors reiterated

established progressive homilies in the preface through their commitment to providing a range of texts that functioned to “extend and serve as starting points for further explorations” (p. 1). Such textbooks often linked content to the politics of social justice, reflecting the values of the rising counterculture, particularly, anti-war and feminist movements, and

reactions to conservative traditions and conformity. In the unit of work entitled “The Temper of Heroic Hearts” (p. 109), suggested activities focused predominantly on using literature to inspire student responses to issues of imprisonment, war, social justice and civil rights (p. 112). However, whilst progressive assumptions dominated education literature during the 1960s and 1970s, textbooks such as Language One (Sadler, Hayllar & Powell, 1977) still proposed to address both the “drift away from the study of formal language skills in English” and the progressive notion that “too much formal work was ‘killing’ English” (p. 1). Other commentary indicated that all was not well – for example, a speech presented by secondary teacher, John Smith, at a teacher conference in Narrogin in 1975, and later published in

Backchat: A Newsletter for teachers of English (1975), addressed growing concerns about the

ability of secondary students to read and write English effectively. The speech aired concerns about subject English becoming a “bewildering succession of themes, seeming to lead to very little” (p. 5).

As Mellor and Patterson (2004) note, by the late 1980s and the 1990s distinctive shifts in educational discourse emerged in reaction to the deficiencies of the Personal Growth Movement and an increasing concern for a more egalitarian Australia. Professor Simon Marginson (1993) explains how government and industry in Australia began to see “formal education as an arm of economic policy and part of the social process of commodity

production” (p. 20). Marginson echoes Hunter when he summarises how Education was expected to achieve the impossible brief of solving the “problems of individual futures; to provide jobs and satisfying careers; and also to deal with the problems of economic modernisation and national destiny” (p. 237). Subsequently, Mellor and Patterson (2004) explain that English began to be reshaped by Marxist discourse, as well as a Poststructuralist model of text analysis that embraced the “concepts of text, textuality and intertextuality” (p. 3). Rather than focusing largely on the personal and empathic readings of texts associated with the Personal Growth Movement, the Poststructuralist classroom became the umbrella term for “critical literacy” (p. 7). Deriving very much from Marxist critical pedagogy, this approach to English sought to engage students in interpreting multiple meanings from texts and analysing the ideas and experiences of others. Textbooks, such as Springboard 2 (Allen,

Chessell & McFarlane, 1980), were designed to further students’ skills by exploring “multiple voices,” and opening up opportunities “for a growth of critical, reflective, and inter-personal awareness” (p. 1).

It is evident that English textbooks have, in part, been framed by assumptions and theories guiding English and its educational objectives. An audit of recent research projects in Australia indicates a gap in significant studies of English from the analytical perspective described in this project. When one considers the recent implementation of the Australian Curriculum and the current educational concerns, there have been minimal systematic studies of English textbook materials in terms of the picture of English they promote or imply. Horsley and Wikman (2010) constructed a comparative study of teaching and learning resources in Finland and Australia just prior to the implementation of the then named National Curriculum in 2011. The research was grounded in the “consistent and convincing evidence indicating that textbooks continue to exert influence on teaching and learning in different educational settings” (Horsley & Wikman, 2012, p. 46). The aim of the research was to “compare textbook research conducted in Australia and Finland between 2000 and 2011” (p. 45), by focusing on elements of “content, form and use” (p. 45), and the role of the textbook in the “implementation of basic skills” (p. 45). Further to this, the research aimed to reflect the differences in the ways private and government schools “financed and funded” (p. 47) textbooks as well as how teachers used such resources to influence their teaching

strategies (p. 47). At this time of educational concern in Australia, this research project has attempted to provide a contribution to the current literature by both acknowledging and raising awareness of the role of the textbook as another contingent source informing the orientation and identity of the subject. This thesis project and its methodology are unique in combining a Hunterian analytical matrix with a rigorous content analysis.