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The Rhetorics of English in Education

This Special Issue of Changing English is intended to raise questions about how ‘English’ is and might be defined, invoked, constructed, and of course learned and taught. Those questions arise in light of the increasing instability of English as a subject and, as well, proposals for resolving that instability, indicated by any number of publications (see for example Andrews 2010; Berlin 2003; Cope and Kalantzis 2000; Downing, Hurlbert and Mathieu 2002; Ellis, Fox and Street 2007; Leung and Street, forthcoming; Mailloux 2006; Seitz 1999; Shumway and Dionne 1992; Slevin 2001). The essays in this Special Issue addressing the ‘rhetorics of English in education’ provide a sampling of responses to that state of instability of/in English. In this introduction, we consider points of departure and provocations these essays provide to an understanding of such rhetorics in the ways they address and contest dominant notions of the origins and political effects of English as a language and its definition, place, and value in the curriculum as a ‘subject’ or field of academic practice. We proceed by identifying several of the key (rhetorical) tropes on English, for English, why English that circulate in these essays and the broader current debate in which they participate – including not least invocations of ‘rhetoric’ itself as an anchor to which subject English in education – in primary, secondary and tertiary settings, in a global and multilingual context – might achieve mooring. English, our contributors show, seems to search continually for such an anchor, with ‘rhetoric’ itself currently heralded as offering the kind of framework for English that, in the past, ‘media’, ‘general semantics’, ‘communication’ or ‘language arts’ were thought to have offered. In focusing on the rhetorical action of ‘English’, our attention to rhetoric therefore differs from increasingly more common invocations of rhetoric itself in contemporary discussions about English education. These invocations adopt a familiar narrative pattern and pursue the same fundamental argument: that (a highly partial version of Western ‘classical’) Rhetoric, with a capital, provides English with the theoretical framework, programmatic coherence, and justification it needs, and in fact represents its (unacknowledged) Edenic origin, to which it can and should return. In this narrative of English, literature often emerges as the antagonist (e.g. Willinsky 1990), seducing the subject from its proper role by the permissive Romantic, the ‘progressive’ or the liberal emphases on aesthetics and (sometimes) ethics (e.g. Reid 2004). Rhetoric thus appears to offer a way of returning to a theoretical Eden as a ‘new organising principle for English teaching’ (Green 2006, 11) that might offer some capitalising socio-political or ‘civic’ messages for teachers and students. From the slightly different perspective of a functional linguistics approach to critical literacy, rhetoric appears as a tragic figure in the grammarian mourning for the ‘loss of a robust tradition’, in contrast to a view of composition as its ‘pale shadow’ (Christie 1993, 76; cf. Crowley 2003). Rhetoric also figures in more future-oriented, even Changing English Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2011, 245–249