This narrative inquiry explores the author's attempt to teach Henry James's novella "The Turn of the Screw" in a high school English class, making the celebration of confusion -- in the tradition of John Dewey -- the cornerstone of the experience. The students' interpretive discourse is analysed, prompting reflection on promising…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine how evangelical teachers' religious identities influence their interpretation and teaching of texts in high school English Language Arts classrooms. Further, this paper examines how evangelical teachers make choices about how to balance the demands of their religious and teacher identities as they interact with…

In this narrative inquiry, the author dramatises the tensions and discoveries that emerged in a literature course for pre-service and in-service teachers in an English education graduate programme. The students' resistance to the instructor's choice of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" as a central text led to reflection on responsible and…

Subject English is a knowledge structure that is hard to discern for many students and even teachers. The abstractions that underpin analysis and interpretation of texts can be fuzzy, even invisible. Furthermore, traditional knowledge is inadequate when it comes to websites, graphic novels and films. What guiding abstractions are relevant in…

English teachers select texts for the edifying qualities they possess: a good poem, novel or film can act both as a window looking out over different lives and as a powerful mirror for reflection. When teachers reflect on their professional practice, however, they generally look to education theory, to research or to action learning strategies.…

Recent reforms to Initial Teacher Education in England are a continuation of a decades-long political project, aiming to change the whole social complex around teachers' professional education. But the most recent frameworks present some new inflections to the construction of learning, pedagogical relationships and difference. Positivist versions…

This paper has two complementary objectives. After providing some theoretical perspectives on fiction generally, and on the teaching of fiction more specifically, it firstly evaluates, from a literary-critical perspective, a reasonably representative selection of the portrayal of teachers and teaching in some twentieth-century Anglo-Irish fiction…

This article examines the deeper purposes behind the teaching of creative writing. To extend an analogy created by William Blake in his poem 'The Tyger', its furnaces are examined and its 'deadly terrors' clasped. It re-interprets the different views of teaching English, as drawn up in the United Kingdom's Cox Report. It argues that these views…

The space between the two epigraphs presented at the beginning of this article marks the difference between an insider and an outsider. Ms Barbieri, from "Voices from the Middle," made the first comments as an expression of what reflective practice -- observing and critiquing video tapes of hers and others' teaching -- could mean to her…

This essay draws on the work of Raymond Williams in identifying a shift from the attempt to have students engage with literary texts in personal terms to a concern, founded on theoretical innovation, that they should read at a more sophisticated level in order to discern the ideology of a given text. It argues that what Williams calls an…

This paper introduces the concept of the phallic teacher, a spectral figure negotiated in teachers' everyday work and in school-based disciplinary communities of practice. Reporting the findings of a 3-year Australian doctoral study completed in 2014, the paper looks closely at how English teachers design both curriculum and identity in an…

Many have argued that English classrooms have an important role to play in supporting students' development of critical consciousness and civic engagement (Kirkland 406; Lyiscott 48). Recently, Monique Cherry-McDaniel called for English teachers to design "woke" learning opportunities that would support students' critical consciousness…

Despite ongoing and prolific critical scholarship arguing for the widening of the secondary language arts curriculum, many practicing teachers are required or encouraged to teach a curriculum dominated by canonical texts. This is often the case at schools with highly diverse students whose varied cultural and linguistic backgrounds have…

This paper introduces the concept of the phallic teacher, a spectral figure that needs to be negotiated in teachers' everyday work and in school-based disciplinary communities of practice. Reporting the findings of a three year doctoral study completed in 2014, the paper looks closely at how English teachers design both curriculum and identity in…

The French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) wrote that "to read good books is like holding a conversation with the most eminent minds of past centuries and, moreover, a studied conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts" (translation of the "Discourse on Method" by F. E. Sutcliffe…