Editorial

In the essay which opens this issue, Brenton Doecke quotes William Ayers’ (1993, 129) proposal that teaching entails ‘a serious encounter with autobiography’. In its recognition of the inadequacy of technical-rationalist accounts, in its assertion of the importance of the particular, the local and contingent, and in its insistence on the need to historicise, it is a phrase that might stand as an epigraph for this issue. Reflecting on what he has learnt from the interviews with early career English teachers, conducted as part of a recent research project in Australia, Doecke explores the irreducibly personal nature of the processes of literary socialisation that have shaped these teachers. What emerges from this is a renewed sense of the agency exercised by these teachers, even in this era of standards-based reforms, of centrally mandated curricula and regimes of surveillance and performativity.

Education as a discipline (if that is what it is) and English as a subject (however that subject identity might be defined) have always been plagued by status anxiety. As Jane Miller (1996, 193) argues:

… the ‘femaleness’ of English lies partly in its uncertain status, its association with women, its potential as a ‘civilising influence’ rather than a rigorous course of study or an established body of knowledge. More than that, there has always been some suspicion cast on moves to academicise the teaching of reading and writing and the reading of literature, when these were so obviously domestic activities, undertaken by women, particularly mothers, in the home.

More recent incursions in policy and research can plausibly be seen as attempts to masculinise both education and English, to professionalise both through an assertion of proper academic rigour. What, after all, could be more butch than the randomised control trials favoured as the gold standard of research by funding bodies across much of the Anglophone world? And what of the attempts to enforce an absolute separation of disciplinary knowledge from the everyday knowledge that is acquired through experience, in the world beyond the school gates? This movement encompasses influential sociologists such as Michael Young (2008, 2014) and psychologists who press the claims of a version of cognitive science that is predicated on the categorisation of oral language as biologically primary and written language as biologically secondary (Geary 2007; Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark 2006; Sweller, Ayres, and Kalyuga 2011), which is then used to justify the prescription of particular forms of pedagogy (‘direct instruction’) and a highly restrictive definition of learning.

All very rigorous, to be sure. What matters, though, is what is missing: what is omitted from, or marginalised in, these encapsulations of learning, of schooling, of literacy and of the field of English. No space is offered for the kind of careful account of literate practices presented by Chin Ee Loh and her colleagues, as they investigate the pleasures and purposes of adolescent girls’ reading of Korean Manhwa: this is not the kind of reading that is recognised by PISA studies or by high-stakes tests. And there is certainly no space for the queering of (English) teaching that is performed in Lewis Goodacre’s contribution. It would be hard, indeed, to squeeze all that is achieved (and celebrated) in his essay into an alteration in individual long-term memory: teaching and learning are, like identities, accomplished in the social. And what happens when students encounter The Handmaid’s Tale cannot be reduced to ‘retrieval practice’: as Sulaxana Hippisley shows, there is a need to attend to the aesthetic and affective dimensions of reading, to be alert to the ways in which the novel illuminates, and is illuminated by, her students’ experience of the world beyond the text.

In the world beyond the classroom, Generative Artificial Intelligence, and specifically large language models such as ChatGPT, have figured prominently in conversations about the future of writing, of work, and of what it is to be human. Stuart Marshall Bender’s essay is more modest in intent – and more focused on what such resources might have to offer in an English classroom. Rejecting both evangelical and dystopian framings of AI, Bender focuses on how it might be more usefully regarded as an essential component of digital literacy.

Vivien To offers a critique of a different kind of binary: rather than treating Cantonese and English as hermetically sealed containers, she argues for a translanguaging pedagogy that acknowledges students’ language – that is, all of their linguistic knowledge and expertise – as a resource for meaning-making. Likewise, within the domain of English for Specific Purposes, Shahanas Punnilath Shanavas and her colleagues make the case for less instrumental, more collaborative approaches which recognise the expertise of all participants. And there is common ground between their argument and Xiaohan Liu’s contribution, which emphasises the need for EFL teachers to remain attentive to the particular needs of individual learners.