Abstract
Required Reading is a collection of responses to the Analysis of Literature in Australian Schools (ALIAS) database. ALIAS contains ‘all the reading material listed in the syllabuses of every publicly examined English subject for each year … from, 1945 to 2005’ (Yiannakis, 2017, p. 25). ALIAS is an invaluable resource for both making and testing claims about how English has been taught in Australia. As claims of this nature are invariably made in order to influence how English is taught right now, having comprehensive historical evidence with which to weigh those claims is not merely of historical interest.
The contributions collected in this book provide models of how to utilise the data of ALIAS. While not formally open-access, login details for ALIAS are provided in a footnote to one early chapter, a fact pointed to in another early chapter in case the reader missed it. I will not provide them here as, alarmingly enough, once logged in I seemed to have the option to delete parts of the database. For the record, I did not check to see whether that also worked.
In the foreword, Rod Quin (2017) reminds readers that claims about how English has been taught tend towards either the ‘golden age’ view – an ideal past collapsing into an ever more debased present – or the ‘Whig interpretation’ of history – we boldly stride from the unenlightened into an ever more progressive future (p. xv). ALIAS allows us to steer between those two extremes. While the book as a whole does slighlty favour Whig, it does push back: ‘it seems as if later cohorts of teachers can’t acknowledge the ingenuity … of their forebears’ (Dolin, Jones, & Dowsett, 2017b, p. 55), and there are some fascinating examples of just how contemporary the unenlightened past was: a Victorian English paper from 1945 asks the student to provide critical comments on a newspaper advertisement for shoes (Dolin et al., 2017b, p. 40).
The title Required Reading implies certain questions: what do we make students read? How are we trying to shape them? What does that say about us? How does that relate to policy and society at a given point in time? How could we do it better? Those are the central questions around which most of the contributions revolve. Different chapters cover how Australian reading lists have been impacted by policy-driven reform, organic social change, schools of thought and even specific individuals. Understanding these kinds of impacts is important because change, intentional or otherwise, will not stop. Indeed, it cannot – any successful reform inevitably replaces one orthodoxy with another, ‘beneficial or not’ (Reid, 2017, p. 74), an observation borne out by Prue Gill’s recollections of marking VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education) papers and how these papers, over time, shifted to a ‘stifling … standard structure’ (McLean Davies, Doecke, Gill, & Hayes, 2017, p. 188).
As many of the contributors note, what is (or was) required reading is only part of the picture: the fact that, say, Othello is a perennial favourite might suggest that not much has changed, yet how students are expected to think about Othello certainly has. This becomes obvious through various analyses of historical essay and exam prompts and the implicit assumptions on which they are built. Within Required Reading, these analyses are both frequent and revealing. In one of the few chapters which considers how required reading plays out in the classroom, we are reminded of just how important it is to ensure that assessment pulls students (and teachers) in the same direction as the goals of the course, as the examination often becomes the ‘de facto syllabus’ (Sawyer, 2017, p. 150).
Others contributors consider not just what was on the reading list but what was actually read. Dowlin, Jones, and Dowset (2017a) show how an inclusive broadening of a reading list can even work to mask stasis if teachers keep teaching the same core texts anyway (p. 10): if Tree of Man is on the reading list but no one reads it, is it really there? In another chapter, Jones (2017) provides tables that rank set texts by popularity, showing that what is most popular in terms of inclusion over time is as revealing as what was included.
The last third of the book focuses on individual authors and theories with case studies being used to illuminate broader issues. The typical critique of the canon is that it perpetuates the values and mores of a certain class. Jenny de Reuck (2017) offers an interesting critique of that critique, arguing Shakespeare ‘continually escapes the boundaries of any particular age’s moral theory’ (p. 228), that is, could just as easily serve the needs of those who subvert as those who perpetuate but will ultimately escape both: there are more things in Shakespeare than are dreamt of in your philosophy. This would also apply to many other authors, as the chapters on Hardy, Dickens, Wright and Emily Bronte could be said to demonstrate.
If there is a weakness to the book, it is in the slight mismatch between its stated goals and what it actually is. The foreword observes that ‘teachers who lack an adequate understanding of the history of their discipline’ are likely to ‘fall prey to prevailing educational fads’ and ‘bureaucratic dicta’ (Quin, 2017, p. xv). This is impossible to argue with. An inoculation for teachers against faddism would be valuable and (always) timely. But the book as a whole is not quite it. In both tone and focus, its audience feels academic in the tertiary sense, aimed more at people undertaking higher degree studies on teaching English than actual teachers – although many of the authors were secondary school teachers, the point of view from which they are writing is manifestly tertiary. The collection would have been more balanced in terms of its stated goals with more representation by practising secondary school teachers who could consider ALIAS’s data through the lens of current practice rather than the lens of academic speciality. This is not a criticism of any given chapter within the book, rather its overall balance. Similarly, while the chapter on Tess (Barnett, Douglas, & Healy-Ingram, 2017) contains some authorial comments about studying Tess at school – contextualised by later teaching it – the collection contains little else by way of representation from a student perspective about required reading. These omissions are not insignificant in a book prepared to complain that reading lists reveal the ‘consistent marginalisation of teachers and students’ (Manuel & Carter, 2017, p. 133) from decision-making. All of that said, Required Reading remains an important book, and it is difficult to disagree with the hope that it should be ‘required reading’ (Quin, 2017, p. xvi) for all teachers of literature even if its tone and focus do present some headwinds to that hope.