Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Theses

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    Evaluating textual diversity in perspective and practice: a case study
    Griffiths, David James ( 2009)
    This study takes questions and debates over ‘what makes a good classroom text?’ as its starting point. With the growth of critical literacy in the secondary English curriculum, the reasons why teachers select and use specific texts have started to be considered and contested. Textual diversity is a construct that has emerged out of this debate: the idea that students should engage with a range of texts exposing them to a variety of beliefs and perspectives not their own, better enabling them to understand, reflect and critique their own positions in society and consider those who may be ‘othered’ by traditional literary canons. Taking the emancipatory aim of textual diversity as a given as a classroom teacher, I was soon forced to consider the different and distinct motivations of other teachers in choosing and using the set classroom text. The subsequent research involved a detailed analysis of existing Victorian curriculum documents from the past decade (CSF II, VELS and two iterations of the VCE study design) to examine how the potential of classroom texts and associated student outcomes were positioned in official policy, and then interviewing a series of secondary English teachers to gain an understanding of the perspectives on the policies used to determine ‘good classroom texts’ as well as their own individual ideals. Although grounded in my own perspective that textual diversity is a positive and desirable concept for text selection, the thesis found that the use of similarly critical and progressive concepts around text choice and use have decreased in the state government’s English curriculum between years 7 and 10. Conversely, the last two years of school education, comprising the senior school certificate in Victoria, has seen the opposite change with the most recent version of the VCE study design heightening the capacity for students to speak back to, criticise and understand dominant paradigms by a close study of texts. Interestingly, the teacher interviews further highlighted a dissonance between various interpretations of what the official curricula mean and promote, with the majority of teachers interviewed finding them dry, vague and unhelpful in creating their teaching practices around text selection, unaware of the change in text teaching theory embedded in different revisions. Furthermore, each teacher interviewed believed that their own perspective on selecting and using texts was normative and widespread – despite each teacher having a distinct and separate view of the usefulness of official curriculum, and the means to which text teaching should be put.