What does it mean to be a student or a teacher of English when your own identity is other(ed) – when, for reasons of diaspora or dislocation or (simply?) difference, you somehow don’t belong within the dominant, and hence unmarked, categories – of whiteness, of anglocentricity, of masculinity, of heteronormativity? What does it mean to be a student or a teacher of English when neoliberal discourses render invisible all such markers of identity, all those forms of difference that are the products of culture and history, by reducing education to the countable, to inputs and outputs that can easily be represented on a spreadsheet? And how might we develop our attempts to reinsert in the account of educational processes those affective and ethical dimensions that are erased by the instrumentalism of ‘what works’?
Bella Illesca’s story of a day spent at a large, ethnically and linguistically diverse school on the outskirts of Melbourne offers some answers to these questions. Her account offers a challenge to facile claims of objectivity through her insistence that knowledge is constructed from a particular standpoint. Who she is, as a person situated in and shaped by culture and history, matters in the construction of an account of what happens on International Day in Melaleuca Secondary College.
Illesca’s commitment to the dialogic finds an echo in the contribution from Adam Wolfsdorf and DaMonique Ballou: between them, they tell the story, or rather stories, of a group of NYU graduate students’ exploration of Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give – Wolfsdorf as the seminar leader, Ballou as the only Black student in the group. Together they provide an exemplary account: exemplary not because it provides some sort of template for other discussions about racialised identities and the experience of racism (how could it?), but because of the honesty with which they confront what is most difficult about the conversation. On the other side of the Atlantic, Amy Saleh considers the issues raised by teaching Black British literature, arguing the need to develop racial literacy in the classroom.
Questions of representation are also to the fore in the following piece, where Rachel LaMear and Sam von Gillern investigate how young children engage with notions of gender in video games and gaming. What is, perhaps, most interesting about their study is the agency of both the focal participants in their research: April and Skye are able to contest gendered stereotypes both in the world represented within the video game and in relation to assumptions about who gets to play the games. Gendered identities are equally salient in Nick Bentley’s careful exploration of the affordances of role-play and his 11- and 12-year-old students’ stunningly sophisticated understandings of what happens when they, and their teacher, take on roles.
Among other things, what Bentley’s essay provides is a story of classroom practice that is attentive to the intricate, shifting dynamic of pedagogic relations. This is equally true of Andrew Rejan’s account of teaching The Turn of the Screw. Allowing his students to express and explore what they find confusing about the text opens a space for a much more open-ended, dialogic and collaborative encounter with it, in which the class becomes an interpretive community. Such practice is not much in evidence in the survey of UK school Shakespeare pedagogies conducted by Victoria Elliott and Sarah Olive. Their report indicates that not much has changed in the past thirty years: active approaches, in which students are given opportunities to play with the text, remain somewhat marginal. It is not hard to discern the looming shadow of high-stakes testing behind all this: in such contexts, acknowledging different interpretations, let alone cultivating confusion, can feel too risky a strategy.
We conclude this issue with at least a glimmer of hope. As Patrick Creamer’s review essay indicates, a recent book by Oli Belas provides intellectual resources that can be mobilised in the necessary struggle against fashionable – and wholly inadequate – versions of knowledge in English (and elsewhere in the curriculum).