Robert Scholes

Preamble

In their senior year, most secondary school students have been taking courses in English or Language Arts for thirteen years. Pacesetter English is a serious attempt to provide a suitable capstone course for all those years of study--for students who expect to enter the work force when they graduate, and for those who plan to continue their formal education in college--recognizing that both those expectations are subject to change. A capstone course in English should enable students to use all they have learned in their previous years of study, and it should help them to realize how that learning connects to the lives they hope to live. The goal of such a course should be for all students to attain the highest degree of literacy that they can.

Literacy involves the ability to understand and to produce a wide variety of texts that use the English language--including work in the traditional literary forms, in the practical and persuasive forms, and in the modern media as well. Whether students go on to higher education or enter the work force after graduation, their success will depend to a great extent on their ability to understand and use the English language. That is why this course makes language itself--and its use in various forms, genres, and media--the center of attention.

Language can be as personal as the pronouns I and you--or as impersonal as a tax form. To live as mature human beings and functioning members of society we need to be able to communicate with others. In some cultures the ability to speak and listen carries the whole burden of communication. But our culture is organized by the most complex system of textuality the world has ever known. We need speaking and listening skills, to be sure, and we need to be literate in the traditional sense: able to read and write. But we also need to be "literate" across a various and complex network of different kinds of writing and various media of communication.

It is this complexity that has led us to the use of the word text in designing the Pacesetter English course. Poems, plays, stories, letters, essays, interviews, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television shows, yes, and even tax forms, are all different kinds of texts. What the course aims at, then, is to increase the textual power of the students who take it: to help them learn how to read in the fullest sense of that word. Reading, in this sense of the word, means being able to place or situate a text, to understand it from the inside, sympathetically, and to step away from it and see it from the outside, critically. It means being able to see a text for what it is and to ask, also, how it connects--or fails to connect--to the life and times of the reader.

This is textual power, but textual power does not stop there; it also includes the ability to respond, to talk back, to write back, to analyze, to extend, to take one's own textual position in relation to Shakespeare--or to any kind of text. Shakespeare wants audiences whose love of language and ability to respond to it matches his own textual power. A tax form (like most other bureaucratic forms) wants a person who can follow directions. Every text offers its audience a certain role to play. Textual power involves the ability to play many roles--and to know that one is playing them--as well as the ability to generate new texts, to make something that did not exist before somebody made it. That--all that--is what this course is about.

The course is also--as its title proclaims--about "voices" and "cultures." Modern American culture is a product of its history--a history in which many voices have spoken and continue to be heard: voices from our past, voices from abroad, individual voices, institutional voices, the loud voice of the media and the still, small voice of individual conscience. This course is about listening to those voices, understanding how one culture can be made out of many voices, and finding the voices one needs to express oneself and be heard in the midst of this hubbub. This notion of "voice," of course, is a metaphor drawn from speech--and this course will not neglect the skills of speaking and listening, but it will also stress the ability to understand and use the written word, and it will offer at least an introduction to the languages of the modern media. But let us look at the course in more detail and see these ideas will work in action.

The Course

The common features of the course as it is taught in different schools should not be a particular set of works to be "covered," but a set of certain kinds of works to be studied and responded to in certain ways. That is, the emphasis must be on the students' ability to situate and comprehend a range of texts in different genres and media, from different times and places, and to produce new texts of their own in response to what they have read and considered. In order to make the intent of the course concrete, it will be described here in terms of specific works and projects, but we will also offer for every unit a set of criteria that should enable substitutions to suit local conditions.

In any case, all the texts considered in the course, from the past and the present, from far away and from close to home, should be studied in such a way as to connect them to the issues and concerns of this country and its people at the present time. For example, a play by Shakespeare chosen for this course should be studied both as a voice from another culture, another time, and because it addresses human concerns that are still important and alive for us. That, too, will become clearer as we make a brief tour through the seven units that constitute Pacesetter English.

The Units

Unit 1: Introduction to "Voices in Modern Cultures"

At the center of this unit is the student--and that student's relation to language. Students will be asked to consider their own position as cultured speakers, with voices shaped by their heritages, their experiences, and their schooling. If this were Sesame Street, we might say that this unit is brought to its audience by the pronouns "I," "you," and "we." Each student will be asked to investigate how she or he is "situated" as an individual who belongs to certain groups and addresses insiders and outsiders in different voices. Students will be asked to consider their present command of language and voices, invited to take pride in what they know, and encouraged to strive to increase their linguistic range and depth.

At the same time, they will be investigating the voices of a range of writers addressing the questions "Who am I?" and "Who are we?" For this purpose lyric poems and essays will provide the most useful examples of linguistic grace and power in the service of personal expression and self-examination. The whole purpose of Pacesetter English and its relation to traditional English courses can be found here in Unit 1. Like traditional courses, it will present poems and essays to be read by students. But it will present these texts as examples of textual power for students to emulate. The goal will be for students to see themselves as users of language, with voices of their own, that are similar to those of the writers they are reading. Confronting the same kinds of questions and concerns as those writers, students can see themselves as active partners in the writing process. In this mode, they should read not only to understand but also to emulate the text they are reading. "What can I learn from this text, this writer, about how to express myself?" is a question that energizes the relationship of the student as reader to the text being read. It is that energy that should drive this whole course.

Unit 2: "Stranger in the Village": Encountering the Other, Being the Other

The pronoun "they" dominates this unit, which is about the way culture and language work to include and exclude individuals, but the pronouns "I" and "we" are back again, too, since the unit is about I/they or us/them relationships. Essays and stories about the situation of being an "other"--a stranger in a village--or about encountering such a stranger will make the core readings for this unit. And, once again, students will be reading these texts in preparation for writing their own narratives about such an encounter. The experiences of James Baldwin in a Swiss village or George Orwell in a Burmese town (or comparable texts) will be read not only as "literature" but also as "writing"--as solutions to the same kind of task that the students themselves will be performing. The difference between this kind of reading and traditional reading might be thought of as comparable to the difference between just watching a play or a basketball game and watching one in order to learn some moves you might make yourself on stage or on the court. The goal of the unit is to help students avoid feeling like strangers in the village of literature but like members of a literary culture that includes them as well as writers like Baldwin and Orwell.

Unit 3: Cultures and Voices in a Single Text

In this unit students will explore the power of a single complex text (such as a novel) to represent a medley of voices engaged in a conversation and/or a struggle for cultural space. This unit should resemble study of the novel as it is presently undertaken in senior English classes. (This course, after all, is not being written on a blank slate but is a development of the best practice currently available.) But, for Pacesetter, this study of a novel will also be different in certain crucial respects. First of all, the novel must be chosen not simply because it has literary merit, but because--in addition to literary merit--it takes up directly the problem of voices speaking from places separated by cultural gaps. (This is a theme that will return in the other units as well.) In this unit "voice" will be considered specifically as dialect and register, speech patterns that are audible signs of the groups that use them--signs of class, signs of race, signs of gender, signs of educational level.

This is, in a certain sense, hot stuff. We are all sensitive to the ways in which our language marks us, enables--or disables--us in certain situations. As a country, we do not like to think of ourselves as divided into distinct classes by our speech. We attribute that kind of thing to the English. And perhaps our social classes are not so distinct as theirs. But we are not exactly a melting pot, either. Language, with its textual power to enable or disable us, is always at work in the ways we speak and write.

The purpose of this unit is to look at language working in a fictional situation that is recognizably American but in which different varieties of the American language are represented. In considering the voices within this text, students will be encouraged to "situate" the different voices. There is no voice without a group--and that group's culture--behind it. To "situate" in this sense is to "place" a dialectic or register, to ask who speaks it, where they come from, and what values that they share are embodied in their speech.

In studying a novel, one asks about the voice or voices in which the narrative is told. Who is speaking to us? What kind of voice is that? Does it present itself as reliable, trustworthy? How does it establish its authority? How does that voice compare to the voices of characters as they are represented? Is the narrator a character? Is the narrator the author? When is each voice at its most eloquent pitch? What are its strengths? When does that voice reach limits or barriers? Do characters speak always in one voice, or in more than one? How do different characters speak to one another?

The length of a novel requires prolonged engagement with it by the class. One needs time to read it, time to discuss it, time to write responses to it. In this unit, the novel chosen should not be a fantastic work, but one set in a time and place that is accessible by means of other texts. The novel, too, should be seen as a voice speaking from a particular cultural site. Knowing more about the author, more about the background of the represented world, should enable students to read a text more powerfully. The point is not to find the answers to fictional questions in the author's life or in the history of a time and place, but to use such information to ask more interesting questions about that novel. A novel that is about a known spot in the world is also always an interpretation of that spot and that world. It is a text, a voice, speaking about a place as it looks from a certain spot.

In this unit one can hardly expect students to emulate the author by writing a novel, but one can expect them to understand that novels are made by human beings with ideas and feelings, strengths and weaknesses, axes to grind and values to promote. The point of the unit is to help students develop their ability to read a text as coming from some specific source, a human being inhabiting a particular cultural place--and to ask how the fictional events and characters represented in that printed text connect to their own lives, their own hopes and fears, their own values and beliefs. A good novel should help us understand more about some other place or time--but it should also bring us to a deeper knowledge of ourselves and our own place and time. One reason for studying the voices in a novel is to listen for echoes of the voices that will become ours when we assert our own textual powers.

Unit 4 Inheriting Earlier Voices

This is meant to be a major unit (planned to cover eight weeks of the course) in which a dramatic text from the past is the center of an investigation that has two parts or tracks. One of these tracks has to do with the double situation of any work from the past--in its own time and in ours. The other has to do with the spoken voice and theatrical production. Neither of these tracks is simple. In a course that is built around the metaphor of voice and the concept of culture, this unit is the centerpiece, around which everything else turns. We have chosen a play by Shakespeare for this model version of the course not simply because of his famous name but because of his expressive mastery of spoken English. To speak his lines with understanding is to enrich one's own ability to use the medium of spoken English and, ultimately, one's ability to listen, read, write as well.

We have also chosen a play, Othello, in which the issues of cultural conflict are in the foreground. Othello himself is a stranger, not in a village but in one of the great city states of his time, Venice. In the play Shakespeare himself has made racial and gender differences the pivots on which the tragedy turns. It is also a play about reason and emotion, about evidence and argument, about truthfulness and deceit. And finally, because it is a play written four centuries away from our own time, with a history of productions and performances, it offers an opportunity to consider performance as interpretation, performances as "readings" of the play--readings that changed over time to suit different audiences in different cultures. The simple question of whether the role of this dark-skinned Moor would be played by white man in black-face or a black man turns out not to have been so simple in certain times and places.

One track of this unit, then, will give attention to "situating" the play in the history of its writing and its productions down to the present time. Another track will involve thinking about it as theater, as staging, as vocal interpretation and performance. The idea, here, is to get students thinking about the play the way a director must think about staging it, the way an actor must think about expressing character, not just through the voice, but through the body and its movements as well. This means giving students the opportunity to put on scenes from the play themselves, to view different performances on video, to discuss and write about the play not simply as a written text but as the basis for many possible realizations. To read a play knowing that you may direct or act in a scene from it is to read actively, as a participant. One project in this unit should be the keeping of an actor's or director's notebook, in which one reads looking for keys to the way a scene should be dramatized or a role should be played.

Literature, Ezra Pound once said, is news that stays news. That is true enough, but it is also true that readers must help to renew literary texts by connecting them to their own times, their own lives. Thinking about the modern performance of a play from another time, another culture, makes all these questions of interpretation real and vital, offers the student, once again, the chance to be not the passive recipient of literature but an active participant, the partner of the writer in the realization of a text.

Unit 5 Film, Language, and Culture

One of the most powerful voices in modern culture is that of film. It is an international medium, but unlike the play or the novel, it is one in which this country has played a decisive role from its beginnings a century ago to the present time. Like the drama, film uses spoken language, but films have never been merely recordings of plays. They are a medium to which speech, music, and sound effects all contribute, but the medium is primarily visual. The composer Richard Wagner said that he wanted each of his operas to be a Gesamtkunstwerk--a total work of art. Film often comes close to achieving that. But, to understand film is to realize that it is dominated by its apparatus--by the camera and the editing table in particular.

The goal of this unit is to enable students to "read" films with a real grasp of the language of the medium. To achieve this, we propose studying one film as a sort of laboratory example of how the apparatus works to achieve its effects. In our model syllabus we have used a film by Alfred Hitchcock for this purpose, because Hitchcock is a cinema magician whose tricks are so powerful that they reveal themselves easily to an attentive "reader." Studying such a film will be the occasion for students to learn how the apparatus works. One project associated with part of the unit will be the student's own "storyboard" or "shot list" of a film or video. That is, students, working in small groups, perhaps, will either demonstrate how one might film a scene of their own choosing, or they will use the same technique to analyze a scene from a film, a television commercial, or any other appropriate text.

Another very useful possibility for this part of the unit would be a film by Orson Welles, especially his version of Othello, which is very definitely a film based on Shakespeare rather than a recording of a stage performance. Even if not studied in depth, this film would make an excellent transition from a drama unit based on Othello to this film unit. Like Hitchcock, and like certain Impressionist painters, Welles makes the viewer very aware of the medium itself, even while using it to represent its objects with great power and eloquence.

One again, the idea in this unit is to help students learn how the medium works from the inside, to become better readers by gaining a deeper understanding of how certain texts are composed. The second film selected for this unit should be one in which the larger themes of the course are represented: voices in cultural conflict or conversation. One example that we have proposed is a late Western film by John Ford, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. This film is a good example of cultural conflict and conversation because it is about two cultures that come into conflict: the old West and the new. It is also about how the media, and journalism in particular, deal with truth and legend. It also offers representations of women and of ethnic minorities, including a freed slave, Pompey, coming to terms with the positions offered them in the culture of the American west. There is much food for thought in this film, which even gives us two different versions of the same crucial event, leaving us very much aware of the difficult gap between any event and the cultural representation of it.

In discussing this cinematic text (or an equivalent) students should be expected to put their knowledge of the film apparatus to work, as they analyze how this film uses the resources of the medium to generate responses from its viewers and to make its own points about the world that it represents, just as they would consider the resources of language in reading a poem or a persuasive essay. A good understanding of how films work should help students to a better understanding of how written texts use resources that are in certain ways very similar but often crucially different. In Hitchcock's film Psycho, for example, a shot of Norman Bates from below, against a background of stuffed birds of prey, works much the way a verbal metaphor works. This is a course in which all the units should connect to one another and reinforce one another, with the constant goal being greater awareness of language and greater textual power for the student.

Unit 6 Mediating Culture/the Representation of Events

At the center of this unit is the study of those textual media that represent culture for us and thus influence the culture itself: especially print and video journalism, but not excluding personal accounts and oral histories. The idea driving this unit is that students should understand the news media as always offering not transparent reflections on events but interpretations of events, presented with varying degrees of reliability and power. To distinguish power from reliability will be a major function of this unit. The point is not to pretend to offer students some magic talisman that will enable them to tell truth from falsehood in the media, but to help them understand "mediation" (the pouring of raw data through the sieve of any particular medium) as a textual process that requires interpretation.

As a substantial unit in the course, this one should lead to a serious piece of work in the mode of reporting and representing: the saturation report. As in other units, in this one students will be examining the way that this kind of textual job has been done--and they will be doing the job themselves. For the unit to work the instructor must make a good choice about the central "event" to be studied--something important enough to have been reported on and "mediated" in different ways in different places. We think that ideally it should be an event somewhat in the past but not so far back in time that there will not be people who remember it and can talk about it. We also think that this is an occasion to select an event that was important to the people living in the part of the country where the course is being taught. It might be a national event with local impact, or a local event of importance. But it should be something substantial enough to have received many kinds of coverage and responses.

In our model syllabus, we have suggested the sixties as a possible "event" for this unit, because the sixties are both past and still accessible by interview as well as written, visual, and musical texts. And this decade exists as both myth and history, side by side. A national "event," the sixties also had their local dimensions. The whole point of this kind of study is for students to learn how an event that took place in the past is connected to their present lives, and how the various media of representation offer different versions of that event--how, even in a single medium, such as print journalism, different newspapers may offer quite different versions of the same event.

The function of this unit is to enable students to refine their sense of how events are investigated and reported, both by studying an example of reporting and by producing an investigative text of their own: the stauration report. If the unit works properly, they will be reading as reporters and writing as readers. That is, they will always position themselves both inside and outside of the texts they are considering. This is meant to be a substantial unit, with time for them to produce a major item for their portfolios.

Unit 7 Voice, Person, Place

Like the other units in this course, this one has been designed by people who actually teach. That means, in this case, that the designers are aware that the last month of senior year is full of distractions for students, so that a course needs to offer counter-distractions of its own. That is why we have suggested building the unit around a moderate sized text that offers the opportunity for reflection on what has been learned during the year's work, with the understanding that the heavy lifting has already been done.

In the model syllabus we have suggested Shaw's play, Pygmalion, which exists as a written text, as a film (with a changed ending), and a musical. Parts of the film, in both versions, can be used to help catch the attention of students who may have other things on their minds. The virtue of this particular play, however, is that it raises in the most concrete manner the issue of whether learning to speak with another voice changes a person, cuts one off from one's roots, or opens the door to greater opportunity--or all of the above.

There are other texts that do this, of course, but the chosen text, whatever it is, should enable students to accomplish two goals: 1) to see how the issues of voice and culture raised in the text take up these same issues as they have been considered earlier in the course, making connections to specific texts from previous units, and 2) to see how the treatment of voice and culture in the chosen text address matters that are of concern to the students as individuals who have been changing in the course of their education and will continue to change throughout their lives.

What voices can I understand? What voices can I use? And what do my voices have to do with who I am and what I can be?" These are the questions that students should be addressing in the last month of this course. The central text should help them to focus on those questions. What we hope for the students who have taken this course, is that they will be able to say that they have increased their ability to handle many American voices--without haveing been cut off from the voices of their parents, their past, their heritage. The promise of this country, expressed in its motto in a foreign language--e pluribus unum, from many one--is the promise that one nation and one people can be made out of individuals coming from all over the world, in all sorts of conditions of life. The purpose of this course is to help students recognize and use the many voices out of which the one nation and its culture are always being made and remade.

To send comments or questions to Robert Scholes click on the address [email protected]

To find out more about the Pacesetter Program click on this address: [email protected]