How have English teachers responded to the pressing demands for educational change as the world has moved from the sixties into the nineties? How have they dealt with the issues of feminism, equity, mainstreaming, multiculturalism and non-elitist definitions of literacy itself? Stubborn Pilgrimage examines the particular case of Ontario English teachers, detailing their pattern of resistance and reform.
In part, this pattern may be unique to Ontario. By 1960 the province's English teachers already had an indigenous pedagogy - the Diltz Literary Method - and a long tradition of producing their own textbooks, teaching materials and curricula. Thus they had much of their own to conserve. Yet by 1990, according to Don Gutteridge's analysis, a virtual transformation had taken place in both English pedagogy and curriculum - changes that are illustrated in Ian Underhill's exemplary teaching-unit. On the other hand, the Ontario case, involving as it does the response to pressures and notions common to much of the English-speaking world, may well represent some general features of educational reform wherever a strong local tradition is challenged simultaneously from abroad and within.
Stubborn Pilgrimmage is an intensive analysis of teaching methods in a period of profound transformation.

Don Gutteridge is the author of more than forty books: poetry, fiction and scholarly works in educational theory and practice. He was born in Sarnia, Ontario, and raised in the nearby village of Point Edward. He graduated from Western University in 1960 with an Honours English degree, and taught high school English for seven years before moving to the Western Faculty of Education. He taught there for twenty—five years and is now Professor Emeritus. He lives in London, Ontario. In a review of his book The Way It Was, in The Western News, Kane Faucher said Gutteridge's poems have been "memorially 'lived in'" and "must negotiate a world with - and without - words…Both pleasant and haunting, we are treated to a world of velvet voices…in a memorial transfer from past to present, from present to beyond."

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Ian Underhill taught high-school English for many years before joining the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Starting the Ark in the Dark: Teaching Canadian Literature in the High School and Family Portraits: A Casebook in Canadian Literature.Canadian Author

Ian Underhill's profile page