A Multimodal Framework for Computer Mediated Learning: The Reshaping of Curriculum Knowledge and Learning

English as a school subject. It is also emphasised by its prominence in the National
Curriculum.

As an academic subject English began in the working men’s colleges of Britain. The
emphasis was on the transmission of moral values to the working class. That has been
an essential part of the ideological project of English advanced by the work of, among
others, F.H. Bradley and the F.R.Leavis (Eagleton, 1983). For the Leavisites, as for
others (Marxists for instance), literature and society were intimately bound together.
In such theories the very stuff of ideology is thought by people to be reflected in great
works Ofliterature. In colleges and schools, literature that enabled the communication
of strong moral values through close engagement with such texts was encouraged.
Such literature, it was thought, offered the potential for students to discover a
spiritual home, and ultimately to discover the self through reading it “...[to] know
how they came to be as they, very idiosyncratically, are.” (Kermode, 1979:p. 15).
This notion of literary character is realised in Steinbeck’s writing. Throughout the
20th century, the traditional notion of literary character as a means for knowing
oneself has underpinned an oblique form of moral education in British schools. The
residue of this legacy persists in the English curriculum’s inclusion and exclusion of
authors, and texts such as Steinbeck’s OfMice and Men.

The study of set texts is a central element of school English. GCSE English course-
work and examination includes the demand for responding to a set text by
recommended major authors. The English National Curriculum programme and
assessment schema highlight ‘character’ as a core entity. Understanding character is
explicitly specified as central to a critical and creative response to a range of texts.
Students are expected to demonstrate how character is constructed through an
author’s choice and style of language. Students are also assessed on their ability to
make comparisons between the characters in a text and their role in the narrative, and
to demonstrate the motivation and behaviour of a character through the analysis of a
text (DFEE, 1999).

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