This article uses Karen Barad's agential realism to re/world the English language as used in Pakistan. My arguments draw on my students' term project where they not only 'resist' the ex-coloniser's language by creatively adapting it while translating an Urdu text into English but make gender related and political statements. Using post/colonialism…

This essay shows how I came to assume the role of an activist-scholar and educator through engaging in self-observation and self-reflection in the course of my day-to-day professional practice. The story of my professional growth comprises epiphanies that were transformational, enabling me and my students to transcend our traditional roles. This…

This essay examines a half-term of Year 9 work on "An Inspector Calls," with a particular focus on group discussion, writing in role and class reading of the text. I argue that extensive talking before writing is an invaluable way to elicit pupil insight; I then argue that this is necessarily a collaborative endeavour. I then go on to…

Ian Cushing's 'Standards, Stigma, Surveillance: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and England's Schools' draws on raciolinguistic theory to offer a detailed and compelling critique of language policies and teaching practices in contemporary urban schools in England. It argues that 'minoritised' pupils and teachers are consistently positioned in deficit…

This article uses a quasi-spiritual lens to examine why some teachers feel compelled to inappropriately control student writing. For almost half a century, professionals in composition studies have engaged in vigorous conversations about the problem of teachers co-opting, correcting, and rewriting (essentially appropriating) student texts as part…

This article examines the role of code-switching in recreating the place, Palestine, that contemporary Palestinian memoirist Ghada Karmi was expelled from by providing a close analysis of the code-switched expressions and the plurality of voices and perspectives that this linguistic and cultural phenomenon imply in her work "Return: A…

Audiobooks have been growing in popularity over the last decade. Although researchers have increasingly recognised the value of audiobooks as rich multimodal texts that support literacy engagement in classrooms, there have been few detailed pictures of classroom practice related to audiobooks. In this practitioner narrative, a secondary English…

Acts of sexual violence and rape, as well as the ensuing treatment of survivors and those who perpetuate the crimes, are pervasive in canonical texts that populate mandated reading lists in secondary English classrooms. Given the outsized role the literary canon places in English curriculum, we believe English teachers must develop practices that…

This article is an exploration of two podcast composition projects carried out in English literature classes at a private, not for profit secondary school in Catalunya. Despite a growing body of research that indicates the richness of meaning making offered by multimodality, written texts remain central in many formal educational settings. Factors…

This paper comprises a re-reading of the 1955 novel by John Wyndham, "The Chrysalids," in conversation with philosopher Rosi Braidotti's formation of critical posthumanism. The author argues that such re-readings of curricular fixtures within secondary English classrooms constitutes a necessary pragmatic intervention in a school system…

China's impressive growth over the last three decades warrants the need to re-evaluate the position and positioning of English in the country's educational system. For long, English has been taught and learned compulsorily alongside Chinese and maths in primary and secondary schools in the mainland of China. It was not until recent years that the…

This paper is an extension of our 2021 research into pre-service teachers' linguistic autobiographies in a culturally diverse South African university. The paper, which is presented as conversations, examines what we learned about ourselves and our students through their reflective writing, our reflective writing, and our ensuing conversations.…

This essay explores the importance of formative creative writing in schools through a Key Stage 3 Creative Writing lunchtime club. I examine the power of unassessed and unconstrained writing through the work of one Year 8 pupil in the early stages of English language acquisition, who so often chooses to write about snow. Reflecting on her writing,…

This article examines the terms "avant-garde" and "vanguard" as keywords for teaching English through the concept of political agency. For example, political theorist Lea Ypi has conceptualised an 'avant-garde political agency' as an experimental process that is meant to be both rhetorically effective and grounded in historical…

This article draws upon Roland Barthes' theory of "myth" to unpack how "student progress" is conceptualised and measured in the curriculum and assessment of GCSE English in secondary schools in England. Using case studies of three Year 11 students, I critique aspects of the government's Progress 8 accountability measure, their…