ABSTRACT
The Dartmouth Conference of 1966 is widely recognised as a watershed moment in the history of English as a subject in schools. It seeded pioneering conceptualisations of the subject that found fertile ground in educational contexts across the globe (Brock, 1984a, 1984b; Sawyer, 2008, 2009) – particularly in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The re-visioning of English, initially set out in John Dixon’s Growth through English (1967/1975), was at the heart of the transformation of the NSW junior secondary English Syllabus in 1971 (cf. Brock, 1984a, 1984b, 1993, 2009; Sawyer, 2008, 2010). Homer (1973) described this syllabus as ‘the most carefully considered application of “growth” principles yet seen in Australia’ (p.212), while two decades later Brock maintained that it was ‘the first “personal growth” model syllabus anywhere in the English-speaking world’ (1993, p.30): it was ‘suffused with the spirit of what has been called the “new English”’ (1984a, p.204). According to Sawyer, ‘[c]ommentators on the Syllabus have generally agreed that it was: (1) a “revolutionary” document, certainly within NSW itself and (2) an institutionalised manifestation of the “growth model”’ (2010, p.288).
