ABSTRACT
The 1966 Anglo-American Seminar at Dartmouth stands as a landmark event in the history of English teaching. Among other things, Dartmouth popularized the ‘growth model’ of English (Dixon, 1967), which shaped my practice as a self-identified ‘student-centered’ English teacher who began his career in the 1990s. At the same time, the practice of locating Dartmouth as a progressive moment that spawned the ‘New English’ can overlook social and political struggles of the 1960s that not only shaped the past of English teaching, but also its present. This chapter offers an American perspective on Dartmouth based on early 1970s publications that offered contradictory accounts of the post-Dartmouth moment of English teaching. It reads with, across, and against these texts to complicate progressive readings of Dartmouth and sensitize us to historical shifts and struggles from the (post)Dartmouth-era that have influenced present struggles over the teaching of English across Anglophone countries.
