‘As I Learn from you, I Guess You Learn From Me’: Three Modernists on the Teaching of English

Abstract

Abstract The subject of this essay is the way modernist literary texts represent and think about the teaching of English, especially when it is conceived as a subject grounded within relational pedagogies and experiences of collaboration and interdependence between student and teacher. I begin with an autobiographical reflection on my own experience of teaching a text that calls attention to its pedagogical import, before outlining a view of English that resonates with the work of D.W. Winnicott as well as an existing body of education-focused scholarship in modernist literary studies. The first of three examples at the centre of the essay comes from the long work of experimental modernist fiction Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson, who depicts a moment of English teaching based around friendship and equality. The next section examines a moment from D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, in which the young Tom Brangwen undergoes a deep and troubling experience listening to his teacher read Shelley’s poem ‘Ode to the West Wind’. The final section reads Langston Hughes’s poem ‘Theme for English B’ as a parable of dialogic learning.