In this essay, four teacher educators explore their journeys towards foregrounding students' lived experiences when teaching literature. Data about our teaching of literature in different contexts were generated through our personal reflective narratives and ensuing dialogic critical friend conversations. Inductive thematic analysis of the…

This essay presents a decade-long reflective account of resisting (in) and appropriating English that I have experienced as a young, female academic from the Middle East who has been engaged in teaching and researching Academic English pedagogy transnationally. Informed by Bakhtin's philosophy of dialogue and his notions of insided-ness,…

Efforts to decolonise foreign/English language teaching involve recognising the importance of diverse meaning-making resources rooted in speakers' socio-cultural realities, traditions, and values alongside English practices. This focus highlights the value of multicultural and multilingual environments, particularly in dominant English-speaking…

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 paper tells a story of one student teacher's experiences as she considers the choice of fiction texts studied by young secondary learners of English, and how those texts are taught. Based on a series of interviews carried out in the South-West of England and Wales, the narrative provides a perspective on the limitations of current curricula…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, academics and students have had to respond to the unexpected and unplanned shift from face-to-face to online teaching. Since teaching and learning through online portals has been a new experience, this has prompted the academics in the English Language and Literature Department at Çankaya University to seek…

Drawing on data from a larger feminist study that explored how secondary English teacher candidates responded to a sexual trauma text set and pedagogy for teaching such narratives with Canadian adolescents, this paper examines how caretaker discourses emerged in response to these stories and learning. This especially manifested as emerging teacher…

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 reports on the process of understanding myself and my pre-service teacher education students better through my lecture reflections and deliberations with critical friends as I taught a South African film entitled Tsotsi. Conversations with colleagues deepened my analysis as I was challenged to revisit my musings on lecture reflections,…

Across the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching effects on many aspects of our everyday lives. Changes have also been apparent in the field of teaching since most teaching now has to be carried out online. Despite its drawbacks, this forced change to online instruction and learning has helped me reflect on my teaching. Based on my…

In this paper, I reflect on a series of lectures, underpinned by the principles of critical pedagogy, when engaging with Shakespeare's "The Tempest." Working with student teachers in a South African School of Education, I used a talk-back design to enable students to talk back to the canon and open the dialogue about resistance. I used…

The English classroom is an indispensable site to critically engage the social complexity of the climate crisis and COVID-19. A question comes up, however, about how to plan for such critical engagement when teaching canonical literature that is seemingly removed from the specific concerns of the current moment. The focus of this article is on…

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…

This essay explores how and why English teachers, especially women, must unpack and honour the many facets of our autobiography that make up our experiences and identities in classroom practice. Drawing on the work of Jane Miller and Anne Turvey, it starts with a 'moment' with a Year 10 class. It calls for attention to be paid to the intensely…

Today, reading aloud is considered 'a significant component of instruction across grade levels'; particularly as a tool for teaching reading in elementary classrooms. It is basically an essential literacy practice for all student teachers to understand how to implement. In this study, authors understand the importance of modelling effective…