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cally all boards with a traditionally ethno-
centric focus. Are teachers entirely trapped
by that? Does it mean that teachers can
only reinforce a sense that literature can
only be about and written by people embedded
in this society? That’s what literature
is for those kids.
Hums
Well,
there’s a lot of black literature
around now.
SSl But it’s not being studied, that’s the whole
argument - same with the history example.
Res
Tutor
One of the other things that strikes me there
is the way that literature is conceived of
at
A level which is
abstracted
its
context and from a possible notion of a task
for literature in society which is a similar
problem to the one that Sociology is con-
fronted with when it’s abstracted and put
into parcels. It’s very difficult to confront
those issues so you’re having to do something
different with it and here the whole problem
of separate subjects at A level. I mean
just how far the English teacher on her own
can address something like that or maybe
by working with History or Social Studies
teachers some of those things can come up.
Yes
just brings to mind the
we had
X from an< FE college (in a Method group
session) and he has put forward this new
Mode III Sociology syllabus and it was inter-
esting that the
was actually 4
it asked how a
last question on the paper
poems
by D H Lawrence and
sociologist would interpret
or she would get out of them
them - what he
their own discipline.
Tutor Well that’s fascinating - because what I
think I was leading to in a way was the, kind
of work that Raymond Williams (1973) has
done with English literature. In The Country
and the City what he is looking at is how
a lot of that literature ignores the real
life experience of the majority of the popu-
lation but also that it both carries within
it certain attitudes -
The level of the analysis here can pull away from the students’ exper-
ience and
capacity arguably leading theι
to reject rather than con-
ceive the possibility of change within their own subjects. The tutor