The #1970 Club: Language and Learning

The #1970 Club is starting tomorrow (October 14th) and I’m prepared with some reading and re-reading. 

1970 offers a rich literary landscape, from Germaine Greer and Graham Greene to children’s classics like Mr. Gumpy. It ranges from Sexual Politics and Mog, the Forgetful Cat, to works by Susan Hill, Shel Silverstein, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison, alongside Ruth Rendell, Robertson Davies, Roland Barthes, and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. 

Basically, there’s something for everyone. 

I’m starting with an author I actually knew – James Britton. I didn’t read Language and Learning when it was first published, though I should have—Britton was head of the department when I was a student. (After three years of doing nothing but reading, I was too busy growing up to read anything educational not strictly required.) It was not until a decade plus beyond – after I had been teaching in London and New York and when i went back to school – that I began to appreciate his work. At NYU summer programs in NY and Oxford, he was my teacher.

This is less a book review and more a tribute to an outstanding teacher whose work provided a progressive, interdisciplinary framework for effective classroom practice.  And it all starts with the language of the child,

As a teacher, Britton practiced what he preached. He created classroom environments that emphasized exploration, discussion, and the value of students finding their own voices. This approach mirrored his belief that learning is most effective when students feel free to express themselves and engage with language in a meaningful way.  He was a natural collaborator and his classroom was a place of open dialogue, active participation and deep engagement. And there were times when the learning spilled beyond the  classroom and continued over a pint in the pub.

“Language in use is a flow, a current of activity, and not any sort of reservoir” (163).

Britton was a natural collaborator.  He cared deeply about both ideas and the people behind them. He was learned but never dogmatic and he had a capacity to listen attentively that made you feel valued and appreciated. His intellectual curiosity extended beyond his field and it is this capacity for broad ranging intellectual synthesis that gives Language and Learning both depth and breadth.

The Synthesis

In Language and Learning Britton introduces us to his heady brew of thinkers and researchers in psychology, linguistics sociology, linguistics, philosophy and literature that shaped his thinking. They include George Kelly, D.W Harding, Michael Polanyi, Martin Buber, his brother-in-law D.W. Winnicott, and Suzanne Langer. He draws on the then little known work of the Russian Lev Vygotsky whose theories played an important role in Britton’s constructivist view of mental development, particularly the idea that learning has a strong social component and the concept of the zone of proximal development. 

A Champion of Teachers

Above all, Britton championed classroom teachers, collaborating with them and highlighting real classroom scenes in his writings. Throughout his career, he supported teacher- and classroom-based research across the English-speaking world.

“The teacher’s relationship with those he teaches cannot be sustained in a vacuum. The homes and neighbourhoods of the children must remain a part of their life when they come into school–which means that we cannot afford to have schools that stand aloof in the communities they serve” (188).

Language and Learning is a landmark text in the study of language development and the teaching of writing and it is where Britton articulated his ideas about the connections between language and intellectual development. Language for him was not a set of skills to be mastered but a fundamental tool for exploring and understanding the world. 

The book is the story of his own research on language development based on the his own children as well as scholarly conceptual framework. His work placed language – and especially talk and writing writing directly at the center of children’s  learning, claiming it as  the  fundamental engine of intellectual growth rather than as a set of conventions and stylistic choices,

He advocated a learning-centered pedagogy, consistent with his view that students learn best by taking the initiative, pursuing their distinctive interests, asking questions, and making ideas their own, rather than by accepting received tradition. 

Britton’s whole cast of mind was strongly interdisciplinary. Language and Learning provided the theoretical underpinning for the progressive learning-centered classroom practice of the subsequent decades. It gave the intellectual foundation for the “Growth through English” approach that emerged after the Anglo- American Dartmouth conference of 1966. 

While it feels like a distant era, I often wonder how much of Britton’s influence—and that of his cohort like Nancy Martin and Harold Rosen—endures. It was a delight, then, to discover today the upcoming release of 

James Britton on Education An Introductory Reader

Here’s the blurb:

James Britton’s work addresses central educational questions that are as relevant today as they were half a century ago. Britton was the architect of a theory of language and learning which has influenced the thinking and practice of generations of teachers across the anglophone world. This Reader helps teachers and students explore his theories of the relationships between language and thought, between thinking and feeling, the links between unconscious and conscious ways of knowing, and the symbolising nature of language.

This carefully curated collection of Britton’s key writings renders his work accessible to today’s students, educators and researchers. Fully annotated chapters explore how his work fuses observation and theory in a remarkable synthesis, and demonstrates the continuities between the early use of language and later, more complex achievements in speaking, listening, reading and writing.

All those involved in teacher education and training, including researchers and scholars, will find this a rich and insightful text.

It says it’s a “carefully curated collection”. In other words all the best bits in one place. That can’t be bad as an introduction to he work of this extraordinary scholar and teacher. 

Britton is part of a long tradition of progressive thinkers and practitioners  who see education as an interactive process, where students are encouraged to pursue subjects of personal interest and engage in genuine communication with supportive teachers. It’s a perspective that contrasts with the top-down “transmission” or “banking” model of education.

Britton’s influence extended beyond the UK. He was a key participant in the 1966 Dartmouth Conference, which brought together educators from the UK, the US, and beyond to redefine English teaching. He emerged as a leader among those advocating for the use of informal language to support student development, challenging the prevailing emphasis on formal literary analysis and grammatical correctness..

Language and Learning is more than just a book about teaching language; it’s a call to view language as a powerful tool for thinking, learning, and personal expression. It’s how we make sense of the world. His emphasis on learning-centered classrooms, the role of language in cognitive development, and the value of exploratory talk remains relevant. Britton’s work inspired teachers to nurture the unique voices of students and create classroom environments where learning is something you do, rather than something that is done to you. 

Artificial Intelligence and Student Writing

I have some thoughts about how Britton might respond to the challenge of AI in the writing classroom. Here’s one of them: Arthur C. Clarke famously said that any teacher who can be replaced by a computer should be. In a similar vein, I think Britton might argue that any writing assignment that could be completed by AI should be. I could be wrong (imagine!). On that, more anon. 

“We cannot afford to underestimate the value of language as a means of organizing and consolidating our accumulated experience, or its value as a means of interacting with people and objects to create experience  nor can we, on the other hand, afford to ignore the limits of its role in the total pattern of human behaviour” (319).