Over the last two decades in many countries, culturally responsive, multicultural and bilingual approaches to teaching have largely been replaced by standardised curricula and pedagogy, rooted in a political shift toward neoliberalism that has pushed business models of school reform. I argue that neoliberal reforms, by negating the central…

In this brief retrospective essay, the value of a particular kind of classroom talk is extolled--not the kind of talk that simply feeds back information, but rather talk that has the power to shape knowledge through participant engagement with a range of processes: hypothesising, exploration, debate and synthesis. This kind of talk is the…

This essay focuses on the recent introduction by the Australian Federal Government of standardised literacy testing in all states across Australia (that is, the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN), and explores the way this reform is mediating the work of English literacy educators in primary and secondary schools. We…

In this semi-autobiographical short story, Malcolm Reed writes about English teachers' responsibilities towards the pupils they teach. This work grew from his insight that the armed forces have traditionally recruited from areas of high unemployment and low literacy. Reed taught for many years in an all-boys, secondary school in one of London's…

This article problematises representations of professional practice. It investigates assumptions behind received accounts of professional practice, including professional standards that purportedly capture what accomplished English teachers "should know and be able to do", "scientific" studies that construct accounts of classrooms from the…

Alan Reid's (2004) article, Towards a culture of inquiry, constructed a sharply focused challenge to the wave of neo-conservative educational research and policy-making sweeping the Western world at the time. In contrast to the familiar deficit constructions of individual teachers needing injections of knowledge, Reid envisions teachers as…

This article argues that broader, more open and inclusive scientific and educational discourses are necessary to achieve social justice through the provision of public education. Paradoxically, research and policy trends over the last two decades have constituted a "narrowing" of educational focus, educational response, and educational…

I invite and encourage students to take risks in their writing, to engage innovatively with a wide range of genre, to push limits in order to explore creatively how language and discourse are never ossified, but always organic, how language use is integrally and inextricably connected to identity, knowledge, subjectivity, and living. Informed by…

Fifty years ago poetry was a key element in the English programme in most secondary schools in New Zealand. Today many teachers avoid teaching poetry for several reasons, one of these being the nature of the assessment of the subject, English, by the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) set up by the New Zealand Qualifications…

Poetry performance is an approach to learning where students can use theatrical techniques to develop a response to the poem. This paper argues that ELL students can explore the aesthetic function of language and, more widely, develop confidence in using English as a communicative tool through the dramatization of poetry. We describe the process…

Borrowing the title of Raymond Williams' famous study, the following reflections--sometimes collective and sometimes individual--are based on a series of "Keywords", specifically: "fear" "community" and "creativity". By reflecting on the meanings these words have for us today, we attempt to capture their dialogical character, posing them as sites…

This paper is an exploration of the ways in which the concept of montage (a principle of film editing developed first by a group of Russian film makers in the 1920s) might be mobilised in support of the teaching of English, in particular the teaching of poetry. I will argue that montage can be used as the basis of a different kind of pedagogy in…

In this interview, Gunther Kress proposes how English needs to expand beyond its traditional linguistic frame into a semiotic frame which recognizes not only the visual but other modes. He argues also for a shift to forms of production in which the acts of reflection and meaning-making are fused, rather than separating the production of new…

Socio-cultural models offer great scope for scope for theorising the complex processes involved in teaching and learning, and of capturing the nature of the co-constructions, which are important factors in success for both teachers and learners. But the implications of this theoretical stance are perhaps, not fully recognised in the attendant…

The following essay explores aspects of my professional identity as a teacher of English, presenting a focus on "the reflexive project of the self" (Goodson, 1998). I argue for the way rich professional learning can occur by keying into a discourse that values penetrating reflection on classroom practice, teacher identity, self and professional…