Literature Study Post-16 I

Initiatives and Alternatives

• In recent years a number of important publications and initiatives have presented powerful arguments for taking a fresh and critical look at post-16 English provision.
• NATE's Text: Message: The Future of A-level English (2004) argued for a complete re-think, based on the premise of re-integrating the splintered subject in a theoretically and socio-culturally informed way. It draws on evidence from teacher-surveys, international approaches to post-16 English, and past and present best-practice initiatives
• Carol Atherton's Critical Literature: Context and Criticism (2004) put a strong case for the centrality of literary criticism in A-level literature, making the very good point that other A-level subjects take for granted the importance of students engaging with serious academic approaches and critical methodologies. The same author's book Defining Literary Criticism (Atherton, 2005) is a convincingly balanced history of the institutionalizing and professionalizing of literary study.
• The Higher Education Academy: English Subject Centre's Four Perspectives on Transition: English Literature from Sixth Form to University (ESC Report No.10 2005) focused on the problems faced by students moving from post-16 to university but its very valuable analyses of surveys of students at both levels, and of teachers and lecturers, shed illuminating light on literature post-16
• Gary Snapper has published a number of very important articles on literature teaching at post-16 and beyond (Snapper, 2004; 2006; 2009) and in his role as editor of EnglishDramaMedia is a leading figure in the post-16 English field.
• The single most important full-length book published to support A-level literature teaching over the last few years is Adrian Barlow's World and Time: Teaching Texts in Context (Barlow, 2009). This is very strongly recommended for student teachers. The first part asks really important and timely questions about the nature of the subject at A-level and above, and the second part contains wide-ranging, nuanced and acute critical readings that amount to an extended and exemplary demonstration of the crucial interdependence of close and contextual reading
• Student teachers should regularly check the contents of these three excellent periodicals
• EnglishDramaMedia (NATE)
• Emagazine (English and Media Centre)
• Wordplay (English Subject Centre)
• The increasing popularity of two of the alternatives to A-level Literature should also be noted.
• The International Baccalaureate is attracting more and more institutions and not just in the private sector. Why this might be is suggested in NATE's Text : Message and in Snapper, 2004.
• The Cambridge Pre-U literature specifications are also being taken up, largely by independent and grammar schools. These offer a linear route (exams and course work at the end of the second year) with an important stress on critical close reading of unseen passages. Cambridge Pre-U literature has been criticized as a return to old-fashioned, pre-theory teaching but that certainly wasn't its originators' intentions, though much will depend on how it has been taught and how it is assessed. The first examinations are in Summer 2010.
• Student teachers are again urged to find out whatever they can about how their placement schools are responding to these and other alternatives as the picture continues to become clearer over the next few years.

Student teachers could valuably undertake this back-to-the-drawing-board exercise in the light of current debates and initiatives.

• Given the current system in schooling and in the teaching of English up to KS3, and assuming a framework of examination and assessment roughly analogous to those current, how would they design their ideal 'map' of English from 14-19?
• What would be entailed in their model of 'English'? Would they include – and when, where, how and in what proportions would they include – literature, language, media, drama?
• What would the study of 'literature' entail across the 14-19 range? Would they assume an enforceable notion of 'the canon' or would they be working from a 'cultural studies' model?

The present writer's view is that the authors of Text : Message are right to call for a complete overhaul to ensure a healthy future for English literature in post-16 education. I am less sanguine than they about the Language and Literature specification providing a useful model for the way forward.

I would like to see (not only in post-16 but across 14-19) an integrated course (or series of courses) with an enlarged literature component as the core with language studies, media studies, cultural studies and performance studies as 'spokes' round the literature core, representing different models of how literature can be variously understood. I would like to see more texts studied but not all to be studied or examined in line-by-line detail and texts understood in more systematically informed theoretical and socio-cultural ways. In terms of that last sentence, the post-2008 literature curriculum looks positively cheering.