Autumn 2004

Talking English

Seeking professional identity

TERRY HAYES draws on the contribution of leading educators in defending the professionalism of fellow teachers.

Times past

Aneurin Bevan once said of a speech of Neville Chamberlain’s that it reminded him of the bargain basement in a Woolworths store: ‘Everything in its place and nothing above the price of sixpence’. I was reminded of this analogy when rereading English Teachers at Work: Ideas and Strategies from Five Countries, a text edited by Stephen Tchudi and published in 1986 as a prelude to the 1988 International Federation for the Teaching of English (IFTE) conference in Ottawa. Unlike Bevan, I don’t intend this comparison in a derogatory sense. The publication is a considerable achievement, showcasing the best practice of the 1970s and 80s from teachers in the major IFTE countries. However, there’s an air of familiarity about the territory. This may be in part to do with the fact that what was cutting edge then has become mainstream practice now. It’s more to do, however, with an air of certainty about the material and the homogeneity of outlook of the contributors; as if there is an unspoken shared assumption about what the components of subject English are. A quality English curriculum is a matter of getting the mixture of ideas and strategies embedded in these components right.

Times present

Fast forward to 2003 and the publication of English Teachers at Work: Narratives, Counter Narratives and Arguments, also published to coincide with another ‘historical moment’ in the life of the profession—the 2003 IFTE conference in Melbourne. It’s a very different scenario altogether. If we continue with the store analogy, the bargain basement will no longer do. It requires a whole store at least, possibly in a shopping mall with space for interrelated disciplines such as Drama and Media. A whole level given over to things technological and another for popular and kids’ culture with plenty of scope for interactivity, production and design signalling the ways in which the curriculum needs to respond to students as creators and consumers of culture. And a section marked ‘Exotica’ or ‘Strange Fruit’ for those ‘products’ that are difficult to categorise.

‘What on earth is a story about cultivating a garden in a primary school in South Africa doing in a text on English teaching?’ I can hear some of my colleagues asking. The more discerning will recognise a salutary tale of principles and processes that are just as applicable to the construction of an English curriculum that is productive, relevant and transforming in Hilary Janks’ exploration of Foucaultian concepts of transformative power and Frierian ones of ‘creative subjects’ and ‘wordandaction’ in the achievements of Paulina Sethole and her colleagues at Banareng Primary School. In the words of the Paul Kelly song, ‘From little things big things grow’.

Perhaps subject English no longer requires a store of its own, but is just one of many departments in a big megastore labelled ‘Communications’, ‘Cultural Studies’ or ‘Literacy Education’ to cater for the new explorations of its status and substance as a branch of each. Literacy Education would certainly need to be capacious to accommodate the rich definitions of literacies that have proliferated over recent years— digital, multi, critical, vernacular, cine, visual, etc. How might subject English embrace these subtexts in ways that are responsive to its history and traditions rather than reductive of them?

Perhaps we should take a lead from the subtitle, ‘Narratives, Counter Narratives and Arguments’, and discard the store analogy altogether. The emphasis in the 2003 version is as much on teachers’ sense of their professional identity as it is on the subject itself. Subject English is a contested site, and what it is might well be the sum of the heterogeneous voices that tell their stories in the text. Since some of those stories are from South Africa, New Guinea and Australian Indigenous communities we are also reminded of English’s status as a global language, its history as a hegemonic power and the need for it to be responsive to its responsibilities in postcolonial and multicultural contexts. We are reminded, too, in the opening and closing narratives of the text in which teachers talk about the powerful impulses that led them to become teachers and to continue teaching, and the social and cultural contexts that shape that motivation; that for many teaching is as much a life as it is a career choice, a question of personal as well as professional identity. It is, I think, one reason behind the persistence of growth pedagogy, with its valuing of personal experience, a phenomenon Ian Reid explores in his contribution.

Seeking professionalism

Questions of professional identity are not new for teachers. Rather, they have become foregrounded of late in educational research and given urgency, particularly in Australia, by the proliferation of State professional standards bodies. In English Teachers at Work (2003) we can see three recurring themes. One is that teachers have always striven to achieve a holistic sense of their professional identity. They want to feel that what they do is more than the aggregation of this particular theory and that specific mandated curriculum program. This comes through particularly strongly in the interviews Barbara Kamler and Barbara Comber conduct with recently retired and late career teachers. As they succinctly state: ‘Things change, gurus come and go, but teachers are selective about what is best for their students’. To gurus we might add, judging on the evidence provided by other contributors to the publication, education bureaucracies and systems, preservice education services and teaching standards authorities. Consequently ‘it is teachers who should be in charge of building professional knowledge and remaking practice in ways that suit their context and their children’; teachers working together in professional learning communities, with their professionalism enhanced by an awareness of the historical construction of their subject, as the contributions of Bill Green, Phil Cormack and Ian Reid attest.

The second is that teachers’ sense of their professionalism usually finds itself at odds with government and bureaucracies who require ‘simpler’ versions of English and literacy, ones that are reductive and measurable, and a malleable, ‘regulated’ profession for implementing them. ‘Toxic’, in terms of its implications for both education and teacher professionalism, is not too strong a term for the ‘new world order’ Denny Taylor describes unfolding in the USA.

The third is that such tension inevitably makes teaching English and literacy a subversive activity. Occasionally that subversion is an overt public act as David Homer describes in the history of ‘Category B: Papers from the Alternative English Cooperative’, a journal produced in South Australia in the 80s by teachers and educators at odds with the ‘official’ versions of English constructed by a combination of vogue theorists, professional associations and educational systems. But it is there, too, in the daily lives of teachers as they go about meeting ‘official’ expectations of them. The stories Kamler and Comber record have something of that feel. For me it is most splendidly realised in Claire Mallord’s wonderfully surreal account of her conscientious attempts to implement the secondary version of the National Literacy Strategy in England. Awash in a sea of rapidly ballooning educational acronyms, she creates a sort of hybrid text in which the bland certitudes of the strategy— education as a template—are juxtaposed against her own journal entries recording the messiness of ‘engagement’ with kids and colleagues, dictums and resources; all handled with a mixture of good humour, resilience, sympathetic collegiality and lashings of chocolate and chardonnay.

Reference

Doecke, B, Homer, H & Nixon, H (eds) (2003). English Teachers at Work: Narratives, Counter Narratives and Arguments, AATE Interface series published jointly by Wakefield Press/AATE, SA.

Terry Hayes is the executive officer for the Council of Professional Teaching Associations of Victoria (CPTAV). He coconvened the 2003 International Conference for the Teaching of English (IFTE) in Melbourne in July.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au