TY - BOOK
T1 - The history of curricular control: literary education in Western Australia, 1912-2012
AU - Dowsett, Patricia
AU - Dowsett, Trish
N1 - The development of English in Western Australia is a history of conflict and contestation that has shaped the subject's strength, content and intelligibility. Since the establishment of the state's first university in 1912, the control of English by various groups and individuals has positioned English at the centre of recurrent political debates about literacy, literature and language according to the priorities and agendas pursued by policy-makers of the day.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - By analysing professional journals, Government Reports such as those by Dettman (1969), Martin (1980), Beazley (1984), McGaw (1984) and Andrich (1995), and socio-cultural histories by Fred Alexander, Leigh Dale, John La Nauze, Marnie O’Neill, Bill Green and Robin Peel, Annette Patterson and Jeanne Gerlach, this thesis demonstrates how the bureaucratisation of English in Western Australia since the 1960s, marked a significant transition from an autocracy controlled by the University and the Professor of English. It distinguishes the Western Australian story of secondary English within Australian education, by considering the particular effects of the ‘London School’, the Petch Report (1964), the teacher-writer figure, and the specialised study of Media. These historical aspects of subject English in Western Australia still influence English teachers today as they engage with a ‘national’ English curriculum, exemplifying that it is not the existence of conflict and contestation within the subject that alone is destabilising, but rather, how power is wielded within the conflict of enacting curriculum change.
AB - By analysing professional journals, Government Reports such as those by Dettman (1969), Martin (1980), Beazley (1984), McGaw (1984) and Andrich (1995), and socio-cultural histories by Fred Alexander, Leigh Dale, John La Nauze, Marnie O’Neill, Bill Green and Robin Peel, Annette Patterson and Jeanne Gerlach, this thesis demonstrates how the bureaucratisation of English in Western Australia since the 1960s, marked a significant transition from an autocracy controlled by the University and the Professor of English. It distinguishes the Western Australian story of secondary English within Australian education, by considering the particular effects of the ‘London School’, the Petch Report (1964), the teacher-writer figure, and the specialised study of Media. These historical aspects of subject English in Western Australia still influence English teachers today as they engage with a ‘national’ English curriculum, exemplifying that it is not the existence of conflict and contestation within the subject that alone is destabilising, but rather, how power is wielded within the conflict of enacting curriculum change.
KW - Contestation
KW - Curriculum
KW - Functional literacy
KW - Western Australia
KW - literary education
M3 - Doctoral thesis
ER -