Arthur N. Applebee

Curriculum as Conversation is not a great book in the sense that it's a pleasure to read. It's pretty turgid prose and full of all the eduspeak that embodies most educational writing. But the book is nonetheless great. It puts into words some pretty powerful ideas that create some really interesting potentials for education. The basic premise is that we've spent too long teaching what Applebee calls "knowledge-out-of-context". You know this term whether you've used it because most likely you've experienced it first-hand as a student and perhaps even unleashed some of it on students if you're a teacher (I have). This approach often goes under the name of "coverage" or "background information". Without it, the argument goes, kids will never be able to participate in meaningful conversations. The problem for Applebee is that this information remains "decontextualized and unproductive".

The alternative is "knowledge-in-action" which introduces students into meaningful conversational discourses about a given area. In other words, rather than having students learn all about the basic facts of a given topic, the teacher instead introduces the students into some of the more meaningful conversations that people in the field are having. Sure, students will make mistakes and stumble, but they're more likely to actually care about a given topic and even become engrossed in said topic.

The book is largely rooted in Applebee's research into English curricula, so there's a clear bias in terms of providing concrete examples. There's also a fair amount of theory thrown into the text that gets a bit dense and reminds me of my graduate school days. Mikhail Bakhtin is mentioned frequently, as is Thomas Kuhn and others of that ilk. Still, I found those sections enlightening and they provided some much-needed context to Applebee's premise. The style of this book will, I suspect, turn some people off, but I strongly recommend you read it and get into its core arguments. These are persuasive and worth the attention of educators and administrators.… (more)

A profession should keep its own history, which should be passed along to those who enter the profession and shared with those who would like to be well informed about the critical developments that have shaped it. Just as all USAmerican citizens are expected to know something about their nation before they become voting and tax-paying citizens, so doctors, scientists, lawyers, educators, ministers, journalists, even English teachers, should know how their profession has evolved through the years and what values have guided their forebears before they become full-fledged members of that profession.

I am an English teacher — was for forty-five years before my retirement. I always believed that beginning English teachers should know how their subject was defined from the beginning, what challenges it had faced, who had served it well and shaped its professional image. So far, to my knowledge, only one book has met that challenge, and it has been out of print for some time, and is badly in need of revision.

That book is Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: a History (NCTE, 1974), written by Arthur N. Applebee. As Applebee says candidly in his preface, that history has been simplified and , hence, severely limited by his decision to focus only “on the aspect of English that has, since its beginning, taken up the largest proportion of the English teacher’s time, energy, and enthusiasm: the teaching of literature.” Only passing attention is given to other critical issues, such as the role of grammar and linguistics in high-school English, the attention given to the rhetoric of spoken and written English, and the critical reading of non-literary prose, including news media, political oratory, articles and essays on current affairs, issues, and ideas, as well as individuals’ personal, local and family histories. Even so, Tradition and Reform (T&R) has served a vital function for me and the prospective teachers and teacher educators with whom I have worked. Until a more comprehensive volume comes along, it would easily rank in my list of the top ten books within the profession that all teachers should know about.

T&R is a documentary history. That is, it is based primarily on archival documents about the profession preserved within the profession, not personal stories from teachers’ or students’ own classrooms. The latter kind of history would be more diverse, more personal, and probably less definitive with regard to forces shaping the profession. It would require a different sort of resource material: diaries, letters, memoirs, personal accounts, oral histories, interviews, and the like. Also, T&R is intended to examine the theory, policy, and curricular movements as reported in professional literature, not so much research on actual classroom practice. Hence, it is addressed primarily to practitioners inside the profession, not to social historians.

There is, therefore, an underlying complacency about the final presentation. Though Applebee is rigorous in accounting for tensions within the profession, especially within its national leadership through the decades, and though, as his title suggests, he records both continuing traditions and outright reforms, he announces from the beginning his own ultimate bias: “The teaching of English . . . has had a rapid and healthy evolution. I think it is better today [in 1974 presumably] than it has ever been in the past; it is certainly different.”

Well, yes. And no. To start with this assumption is not to write the kind of critical history that the public might like or that the profession might need. If, for instance, we compare English as it is now with the way it was defined by the Committee of Ten in 1894, one could argue that certain basic premises have never changed: the dominance of literature; the emphasis on college preparation; the dependence on textbooks and/or an implicit teaching canon (not always the same as a critical canon); a failure to work at developing lifetime reading habits (in spite of efforts called free reading, individualized reading, and independent reading initiated through the years); and an emphasis on silent, individual reading of poetry, fiction, and drama rather than on storytelling, oral performances, theater and film, the reading of nonfiction, and criticism of so-called “nonliterary” prose. And, of course, that’s just the literature curriculum. That’s not to mention grammar, usage, and writing — nor the continuing neglect of speaking and listening.

Even so, T&R is the best our profession has, and it compiles a wealth of information. Starting with the New England Primer and McGuffey’s Reader, Applebee traces the origins of high school English, with emphasis on the Committee of Ten, the Uniform College Entrance Requirements, the founding of the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Progressive Education movement, stimulated by the work of John Dewey at the University of Chicago. The somewhat standardized high school anthologies (the Adventures series of Harcourt Brace, and the America Reads series of Scott-Foresman) are still likely the strongest influence on what is taught to whom and when. However, Applebee reports on several major challenges to that dominance through the years: the Experience Curriculum of the 1930s, especially Lou LaBrant’s free writing in the famous Eight-Year Study at the Ohio State University laboratory school; the New Criticism of the 1940s and 1950, particularly as represented in the handbook of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; Project English, the federally funded effort to devise an “academic model” for high-school English; the rise and growing popularity of adolescent literature, as represented in 17-year-old S. E. Hinton’s novel, The Outsiders, and the subsequent Hollywood movie; and the competing British Model of curriculum reform in the 1960s, given national prominence in the USA by the Dartmouth Seminar. It is this competition between “academic model” of Project English and the “process model” of the Dartmouth Seminar that, of course, was still raging in 1974, at the time of the publication of T&R. However, but a year or two later would bring a full-fledged Back-to-the Basics movement, and then the demand for accountability expressed in A Nation at Risk in 1983. This public (and political) outcry eventually would lead to the Bush/Clinton/Bush era with its nationalized curriculum and standardized assessment, culminating in No Child Left Behind. At the same time, women’s studies, ethnic studies, the needs of special students, and the influence of post-structural criticism have all had their impact on professional thinking, and in some cases on classroom teaching. Of the proposed reforms that Applebee chronicles, probably only the “New Criticism” and “adolescent fiction” have had a major impact on what literature is presented and how it is taught.

So a time has come for an updated version of our history as well as a broadening of the basic concept embodied in the work.

The last chapter of T&R is devoted to “The Problems Remaining.” These include (in my words, not Applebee’s) the need to clarify the goals of the English curriculum, a reexamination of the canon and the role of the canon in the high school curriculum, the politics of English including the study of literature, the narrow conceptualization of language skills, and the nature and effects of the act of reading itself. Applebee is ready to insist that literary study should focus on fostering personal response rather than correcting students’ taste; it should be sequenced on the basis of psychological rather than logical principles: it should emphasize value conflicts as represented in literary texts, not a unified value system to be inculcated in each new generation; and contemporary thought and texts are more important than historical ones. However, but a year or two later would bring a full-fledged Back-to-the Basics movement, and the demand for accountability expressed in A Nation at Risk in 1983. This public (and political) outcry eventually would lead to the Bush/Clinton era with its nationalized curriculum and standardized assessment, culminating in No Child Left Behind. At the same time, women’s studies, ethnic studies, the needs of special students, and the influence of post-structural criticism have all had their impact on professional thinking, and in some cases on classroom teaching. Of the proposed reforms that Applebee chronicles, probably only the “New Criticism” and “adolescent fiction” have had a major impact on what literature is presented and how it is taught.

So a time has come for an updated version of our history as well as a broadening of the basic concept embodied in the work.

The last chapter of T&R is devoted to “The Problems Remaining.” These include (in my words, not Applebee’s) the need to clarify the goals of the English curriculum, a reexamination of the canon and the role of the canon in the high school curriculum, the politics of English including the study of literature, the narrow conceptualization of language skills, and the nature and effects of the act of reading itself. Applebee is ready to insist that literary study should focus on fostering personal response rather than correcting students’ taste; it should be sequenced on the basis of psychological rather than logical principles: it should emphasize value conflicts as represented in literary texts, not a unified value system to be inculcated in each new generation; and contemporary thought and texts are more important than historical ones.… (more)