We start this issue with a wonderful essay from South Africa, in which the four contributors reflect on their journeys as students and teachers of literature and as teacher educators. The essay traces the paths followed by Bridget Campbell, Bonakele Mhlongo, Bheki Mthembu and Eugene Marais as, individually and later in dialogue with each other, they began to question the teacher-centred, transmissive forms of pedagogy which they had adopted from their own teachers. What makes this part of their story particularly remarkable is that each of the contributors was very differently positioned within the racially segregated apartheid society in which they had been schooled and in which they first worked as teachers. What emerges from the professional conversation that is enacted in the essay is a commitment to approaches that foreground literature students’ own experience, of life and of the texts that are being studied.
The following three contributions also address questions of history, coloniality and alterity in relation to English education. Tanya Davies and Jack Davis, writing in the aftermath of the failure of the Australian Voice to parliament referendum, confront the legacy of empire and of settler-colonialism that is inscribed in education policy and practice, and in how English (Standard Australian English) has become the means whereby other languages, identities and cultures are marginalised and excluded. They grapple with what it might mean for English teachers, in the words of Evelyn Araluen, ‘to unlearn a language: to unspeak the empire’. The urgent need to challenge deficit attitudes to students’ and teachers’ linguistic repertoires and experiences informs the research conducted, also in Australia, by April Edwards and Hyejeong Ahn. They report here on the trialling of activities designed to unsettle the reductive binary of ‘native’/’non-native’ speaker discourse and to open up spaces in which more nuanced understandings of cultural and linguistic diversity can be developed. That such spaces can be found – or created – even in the most constrained circumstances, is suggested by the account of an English lesson, taught by Sanaa Noor during her practicum in a London secondary school. For all the pressure of high-stakes testing, however powerful the incentives offered by regimes of compliance, school students tend to find ways of speaking back, of resisting the single interpretation.
Robert LeBlanc makes a compelling case for the inclusion of rhetorical-functional approaches to the analysis of narrative in the classroom. His starting point is that it is worth considering narrative as a purposeful construction – something that has designs on the readers, paramount among which is the intention of arousing and maintaining reader interest. He provides plentiful examples of what this approach might look like in practice, from the exploration of narrative beginnings and structures to the investigation of power and ethics in narrative perspective. LeBlanc’s suggestions include recreative practices, such as rewriting part of a narrative from the perspective of a character marginal in the original. This writerly orientation also informs the final two contributions to this issue. Reading and writing are brought into a close and dynamic relationship in Xia Fang’s advocacy of a translation-based creative writing pedagogy. And Hawk Chang reports on his university students’ reading of Andersen’s ‘Thumbelina’ alongside ‘The Tale of the Bird’, Emma Donoghue’s rewriting of Andersen. What is achieved through this juxtaposition is more than an enhanced sense of the texts, in that Chang’s students are also enabled to consider the stories in the light of their own experiences, their own context. There is an echo then, in Hong Kong, of what Bridget Campbell and her colleagues have learnt in South Africa.