ABSTRACT
It is hard to imagine any subject English classroom in the Anglophone world that does not continue to be impacted by the model of personal growth that was developed through the month-long Dartmouth Conference in 1966 and explored through Dixon’s now famous book Growth through English (Dixon 1969, 1975). The importance of the Dartmouth conference, and the influence of Dixon’s book, are evident through the ways in which English teachers across continents, even those who were in their infancy when Dixon published his first edition, subscribe to the notion that students’ personal growth is core business to subject English (Goodwyn, 2017; Dowsett, 2016). The question ‘What is English’, which was central to, but not able to be satisfactorily answered at the Dartmouth conference, remains an elusive obsession for those involved in the teaching, research and scholarship of English as a school subject (Evans, 1993; Medway 1990; Durrant, 2004). However, there is both tacit and explicit agreement that the individual growth of learners through and with texts is a major aspect of the subject as it is taught throughout the world (Reid, 2003; Tarpey, 2016).
