Reading in the Classroom and Beyond: Learning from Early Career English Teachers

ABSTRACT

This essay emerges out of conversations with early career English teachers about their experiences of teaching literature. During those conversations, they reflected on their own literary socialisation, including the reading they did at home and at school, as well as their tertiary education. They then considered what they had learnt as teachers from the way their students engage with literary texts in classroom settings. Their insights into the nature of a literary education provide a counterpoint to the ideological work of standards-based reforms, even though their professional practice has been unavoidably shaped by those reforms. They open up dimensions of a literary education that contemporary curriculum and policy discourses fail to recognise. Above all, they highlight the importance of affirming the primacy of a reader’s personal response to a text as a condition for any meaningful conversation to take place in classrooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Literary sociability
• literary socialisation
• literary education
• neoliberal ideology

For so long we have been inclined to think of reading as a silent solitary activity that we have neglected those things that are part of our reading together. (Meek [1988] 2009, 6)

Introduction

We need to find alternative ways of talking about the teaching of literature to those that are currently available to us. That, at least, was the thought that ran continually through my mind while reading the transcripts of interviews with early career teachers who were participating in a longitudinal study in which I was involved (see McLean-Davies et al. 2023, for an account of that project). The aim of the project was to explore how their own literary socialisation might shape their perceptions of their work as English teachers; whether the knowledge they took with them from university into school provided a salient frame of reference for understanding their professional practice; and whether their teaching had in any way caused them to engage reflexively with the beliefs and values underpinning their own education and upbringing. Had they been prompted to interrogate their own ‘making’ as English teachers? Did they feel that the cultural capital they brought into schools allowed them to connect with the students they met there?

My burgeoning disquiet at how we talk about literature teaching did not arise out of any dissatisfaction with the quality of the insights these early career teachers had to offer about their work. They almost invariably took the opportunity provided by the interviews to make sense of their teaching experiences, fashioning responses to our questions that showed a genuine struggle to represent the complexities of their professional practice and the contingencies of day-to-day classroom life. Sometimes they seemed to stumble in their efforts to find words to embody their experiences because of the nature of the questions we were asking. The research project had been formulated partly in response to claims by Michael Young about the necessity for a school curriculum to have its foundations in so-called ‘powerful knowledge’ (see Doecke and Mead 2018; Yates et al. 2019; Young 2008; Young et al. 2014). One of our aims was to test this claim by exploring the role that literary studies might play in the professional practice of early career teachers. Could literary studies be conceived as foundational in Young’s sense? It was therefore inevitable that the word ‘knowledge’ would surface in our interview protocols, even though by using this word we obviously ran the risk of gesturing towards knowledge that the early career teachers might feel they should possess (but lacked). Yet while there was certainly a distinct hesitancy on their part about using words like ‘knowledge’, I now feel that this hesitancy could equally well be interpreted as signalling a reluctance to represent their work as English teachers in terms that were simply inadequate to this task, not a lack in their understanding. What, after all, has a reified concept of knowledge (especially when it is dressed up as ‘powerful’ knowledge) got to do with the work of English teachers?

The early career teachers who participated in the project told stories about their work that were fresh and engaging, full of insight into the complexities and contradictions and ambiguities that inhere within the teaching of literature in secondary schools. They also almost invariably seized the opportunity to reflect on their education and upbringing, in the spirit in which William Ayers characterises English teaching as ‘a serious encounter with autobiography’, showing a preparedness to confront the conditions of their own making (Ayers 1993, 129; cf. Doecke and McClenaghan 2011, 41). Far from arising from any sense of inadequacy in how these early career teachers represented their work, my disquiet about the ways we think and talk about literature teaching was prompted by the realisation that they were opening up dimensions of a literary education that contemporary curriculum and policy discourses simply fail to recognise. Their reflections on their experiences as students who had now become English teachers challenged accepted ways of thinking and talking about literature teaching, most notably those embedded in standards-based reforms, offering far richer understandings of the role that a literary education might play in our lives than are evident in the mandated curricula that characterise those reforms.

My purpose in writing this essay is to tease out some of those intimations of how a literary education might be conceived differently. I shall do this by interleaving my reflections with excerpts from the interviews in order to convey a sense of the early career teachers’ voices. Thus I hope to gesture towards the complexity of their experiences without reducing everything they say to my terms. The task of generational renewal, as Hannah Arendt reminds us, always involves enabling a new generation to conceive the world differently from the way their parents conceive it (Arendt [1954] 1976, 196). So although many of the insights of these early career teachers resonate within a larger history of English curriculum and pedagogy (that is part of their richness), those insights remain their own.

Literary socialisation

The stories the early career teachers gave of their literary socialisation provide a counterpoint to grand narratives about the significance of literature within history and society. Their stories have an intensely situated character, showing the role that reading has variously played in their efforts to negotiate interpersonal relationships and to reflect on their experiences of the world around them.

This is not to say that those larger metanarratives do not figure in the memories they shared with us about books they have read. When Rebecca characterises her father as being ‘very sort of Australian, loves his literature, he’s always reading the “classics”’, ‘even though he’s like a council worker’ (Figure 1), you can hear echoes (at least if you’re an Australian reader) of a once influential account of the role that literature might play in the lives of ordinary people (cf. Docker 1984, 34–37; Esson et al. 1943; Palmer [1954] 1980). This version of an Australian literary culture was bound up with a belief in the possibility of creating a genuinely democratic society in Australia in the years immediately following World War Two. And although Rebecca might not find much pleasure in the literary texts that were once read as embodying this social democratic vision of Australian society, she implicitly acknowledges how this tradition has sustained her father in pursuing his education despite his modest socioeconomic status as a council worker. By way of contrast, Debra recalls her father’s mildly disapproving attitude towards The Simpsons and his attempts to counterbalance her enthusiasm for popular culture by establishing a routine of reading books like Animal Farm and The Chronicles of Narnia around the dinner table every evening (Figure 1). Although Debra remembers small victories, such as the time when she and her siblings were able to surprise their father by reciting lines from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’, a poem which they had got to know through watching an episode of The Simpsons, she still thinks he ‘would have liked to push us towards you know a literary canon of sorts … towards the classics’.

Figure 1. English Teachers’ Voices (1)

Debra’s story might be interpreted as reflecting a larger struggle between a belief in the value of a literary canon and recognition of the popular cultural resources on which people draw in their everyday lives. Taken together, Rebecca’s and Debra’s accounts of their literary socialisation might be seen as representing differences between ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ cultural practices as they are played out in a larger public sphere, illustrating major shifts in the meanings and values ascribed to literature (to borrow from Raymond Williams’s analysis of how cultural formations change over time (Williams 1977, 127ff)). You could read their personal narratives as reflecting larger stories about changing historical conditions and successive literary -isms that paradoxically unfold in a realm where arbiters of taste debate the value of literature at a remove from the pleasures that ordinary people derive from their reading.

Yet the stories that Rebecca and Debra tell are also stories about how their efforts to negotiate relationships with family members centred on the reading they liked to do. Generational differences get played out as differences in taste, opening up the prospect of social renewal as the young Debra and Rebecca begin to voice their own cultural preferences as distinct from those of the adults around them. None of the players in these stories is simply a puppet of larger cultural formations or ideologies that somehow exist apart from their everyday activities. To borrow from Raymond Williams again: reading is ordinary, inextricably embedded in the conditions of everyday life (cf. Williams [1958] 2001). Take Debra’s father, for example. He isn’t simply a mouthpiece for an old-fashioned belief in the value of the ‘classics’, but the owner of a general store in a country town that also housed a video shop. His preference for the ‘classics’ is bound up with his aspirations for his children and reflects their shared experience of life in rural Queensland. The fact that he ran a video shop explains why Debra and her siblings could watch not only The Simpsons but all the movies they liked, when ‘every two weeks we would have new videos coming through, so we would also be watching movies and we loved … my brother, sister and I really loved the stories, so just tons of movies from a young age. And lots of Simpsons episodes [laughs]’.

The reading Debra and Rebecca recall is bound up with people and scenes of their childhood and their burgeoning awareness of ‘self’ as it emerged through their interactions with others. These traces of memory signify a primary level of response, an irreducibly personal engagement with reading that is elided in public discourse about the value of literature, both in literary theoretical discourse that circulates within universities and neoliberal policy statements. Metanarratives about ‘regimes of value’ (Frow 1995) bracket out the subjective character of Rebecca and Debra’s encounters with language and the play of thought and emotion involved in each of those encounters.

I am not suggesting that literary history, such as that reflected in the idea of shifting ‘regimes of value’ (Frow 1995) or other forms of periodisation that have traditionally structured the curriculum in university English departments, has no relevance to understanding a personal encounter with literary texts or to the discussions around literary texts that occur in classrooms. This kind of literary history shouldn’t, however, be at the expense of acknowledging the deeply subjective character of the play between language and meaning that we experience when engaging with a literary text. To the contrary, any claim about the value of our work as English educators should affirm the primacy of a reader’s personal response to a text as a condition for any meaningful conversation to take place (cf. Rosenblatt 1978). This is what early career teachers like Rebecca and Debra have reminded me through their redolent accounts of their socialisation as readers, when their burgeoning awareness of the imaginative possibilities opened up by reading became a crucial dimension of their emerging sense of their identities and their relationships with others.

The salience of our autobiographies as readers¹

The stories that Debra and Rebecca share about their experiences of reading literary texts when they were young show the salience of their autobiographies for understanding the significance that a literary education has had for them. By saying this, however, I am doing more than acknowledging the role that anyone’s upbringing might play in forming a disposition to engage with literary texts, important though such a focus might be for understanding how subject English has historically provided a vehicle for discriminating between students with respect to the cultural capital they bring to school and their location within the class structure. As it happens, hardly any of the early career teachers who participated in the project experienced a disjunction between the values of their families or communities and the values and expectations associated with formal schooling, though it is also noteworthy that very few of them were the products of wealthy private schools that cater for social elites in Australia, where everything hinges on inculcating students with a sense of cultural privilege that sets them apart from everyone else. Debra and Rebecca’s stories reflect their experiences of being ‘first in the family’ to make the transition from secondary school to a university education. The literary events they recount show how they became aware of possibilities that took them beyond the values and beliefs of the communities in which they grew up, while at the same time giving rise to a paradoxical recognition that it was their education and upbringing that provided the conditions for them to imagine those larger possibilities in the first place.

This contrasts with the historical narrative to which I have just alluded about the role that English has played in determining which students experience success at school and those who fail, when a certain kind of literariness is privileged at the expense of acknowledging local cultures and communities. English curriculum and assessment have historically been geared towards rewarding those students who (as Terry Eagleton once put it) are ‘sensitive, imaginative, responsive … about nothing in particular’ (Eagleton [1985] 1986, 98), parading a level of refinement that, according to Eagleton, floats above anything as grubby as class division and social struggle. Richard Teese, an Australian educational sociologist, has likewise criticised the way literature examinations in the state of Victoria discriminate between those students (typically from disadvantaged schools) whose writing is embarrassingly ‘naïve’ and those from elite private schools whose verbal dexterity when writing essays under exam conditions enables them to produce a response that shows the right ‘subtlety’ and ‘complexity’ (Teese 2011, 14).

Teese’s supposition, however, that the exercise of literary taste can be equated with a particular position in the class structure begs the question as to whether the fluency he caricatures amounts to anything more than the precocity of knowing how to play the language game of competitive academic assessment. It is dubious to conflate this kind of verbal dexterity with authentic engagement with the language of the texts chosen for study and to see a capacity to respond to the words of a poem or a short story as the exclusive preserve of a social elite (Duck 2018, 2019). The examples he gives from the high stakes Literature examination that is held each year in Victoria show adolescents miming a discourse about ‘the danger of a polarised world view’ and the need to do ‘justice to the full complexity of human experience’ and ‘the paradoxes of the human condition’ (14). Rather than attempting to convey what the text has meant to them personally, these students are juggling culturally loaded abstractions and using language that allows them to avoid confronting the conditions of their own privilege. Their chief goal in using these abstractions is to please the examiners.

The memories the early career teachers relate about their own education and upbringing show how their reading has been bound up with the social relationships they have negotiated at different phases of their lives, both at home and at school. The books and poems they mention loom large in their memories because of the people and circumstances around them when they read these texts, rather than because of any qualities inherent within the texts themselves. Relevant here is Louise Rosenblatt’s characterisation of the ‘creative transaction’ that occurs when readers engage with a literary work, involving ‘a coming-together of a human being (with all that implies of past experience and present preoccupations) and a text’ (143). She goes further: ‘Each reader brings to the transaction not only a specific past life and literary history … but also a very active present, with all its preoccupations, anxieties, questions and aspirations’ (144). The stories these early career teachers tell about reading that has been especially significant at particular moments in their lives convey exactly this kind of existential quality, as literary ‘events’ when they were confronted by fundamental questions relating to ‘self’ and ‘identity’ and their relationships to the people around them.

I think this is what Brittney is getting at when she highlights the way a particular moment in your life can shape your interpretation of a literary text, and what you can learn by revisiting that text some years later (Figure 2). The experience of returning to a particular text a few years after you have first read it obviously prompts comparison between your initial response and the meanings you take from it now, but this does not necessarily mean judging one reading to be naïve and the other somehow more sophisticated. Brittney recalls how her responses to particular texts changed after she left university and travelled a bit, when she was able to bring new experiences to her reading. This reminds her of something she was told at university:

that the person that you are today is not the person that you were five years ago and is not the person that you’re going to be in five years time, so the way that you approach each of those texts … sorry the way that you approach that same text in each of those different time periods is going to be different.

Figure 2. English Teachers’ Voices (2)

Brittney is gesturing towards dimensions of reading that are far larger than the steady acquisition of a set of skills that supposedly culminates in an accomplished reader. Her standpoint is at odds with the learning continua that standards-based reforms fetishise as marking the stages of an individual student’s progress through formal education. Several of the early career teachers who participated in the project saw rereading texts as crucial to a reflexive awareness of their growth as readers. Laura, for example, relates how after initially studying The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye when she was a senior secondary student, she returns to those novels ‘like every year, I read it once a year’, even though she has since read more widely and now has a richer array of literary resources to draw on. By contrast, Morgan recalls thinking that Catch 22 was ‘a brilliant book, just a fantastic book’, when she read it in secondary school, but she has never read it again ‘because I don’t ever want to be disappointed by going back and finding that it wasn’t as amazing as I thought it was at the time’ – an admission that illustrates how literary events are constitutive of one’s sense of self or identity. Morgan knows that the meaning she was able to make from reading Catch 22 arose out of her subjective investment in the text at that time, but the ‘self’ she has since become would be likely to experience a very different type of encounter if she were to read the book again.

The very commonality of this experience as it emerges in the interviews has prompted me to pause and consider why this practice isn’t sufficiently acknowledged as a vital dimension of a literary education when it comes to teaching literature in schools (or for that matter in tertiary institutions). One of the most striking impressions that I’ve taken away from the interviews with the early career teachers is how so many facets of their autobiographies as readers seem to be systematically excluded from the official curriculum and the assessment practices that underpin it. To become teachers of literature, these early career teachers seem to be required to repress the most significant dimensions of their own literary socialisation. I am thinking of the emphasis they place on reading as a sociable activity (see Doecke and Mead 2023a, 2023b) and all that follows from a recognition of the primacy of social relationships for making meaning around literary texts, most notably the identity work that Brittney highlights. Above all I am reminded of the subjective dimension of reading, of the need for readers to find reading personally significant for them, something that nearly all the early career teachers emphasised in their conversations with us (cf. Rosenblatt 1978, 144, 140). Outcomes-based curriculum treats such dimensions as incidental to an individual’s growth as systematised in the form of a learning continuum – those dimensions are at best discrete factors that might be conducive to an individual’s achievement of the outcomes specified for each stage of development, but they never constitute an integral part of what it means to read. At school students receive instruction that effectively defines reading as a discrete cognitive ability to be measured in comparison with the individual abilities of other students, while reducing literary sociability to something secondary. This is ideological work that ought to be named as such.

But it is not as though the early career teachers have simply acquiesced in the ideological role assigned to them by standards-based reforms. Their memory work when recounting significant literary events in their own lives has clearly sensitised them to the sociable nature of the classroom conversations in which their students engage around literary texts, providing them with a critical standpoint on the machinery of standardised curriculum and assessment that shapes their everyday lives as English teachers. Not that it would be legitimate to construe them as taking an adversarial stance vis-à-vis that machinery. They have no choice but to live with the paradox of trying to foster a sensitivity towards language and meaning in their students while attempting to meet the demands of a system geared towards privileging functional literacy of an utterly narrow kind. Yet their autobiographies as readers nonetheless yield insights into the complexities of language and meaning that point beyond the ideological apparatus of standards-based reforms. Brittney, for one, observing that ‘a younger class in Year 7 or Year 8’ are likely to view a text ‘in a very different way’ than she would view it, qualifies this by insisting that you can’t ‘necessarily assume how they’re going to view it because they’ve got experiences that you don’t know about really’.

Brittney is talking about much more than the difference between her knowledge and skills as an English graduate and the more limited interpretive strategies that her students might bring to their reading of the texts chosen for study as these might be set out on a continuum of learning. The challenge, as she characterises it, is more complex than devising strategies that might ultimately give her students the same access to the text that is available to her as a ‘mature’ or ‘sophisticated’ reader. The difference she is pinpointing between herself and her students isn’t primarily one between her knowledge as a teacher and their lack of knowledge, as though it is her job to render her literary theoretical knowledge in a concrete and accessible form for them (a la Shulman’s notion of ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ (Shulman 1986, 1987)). To conceive of a literary pedagogy in these terms would be to lose sight of the richly complex nature of reading as she is conceptualising it. She gestures towards that complexity through her reference to ‘experiences you don’t know about really’, paradoxically reversing the hierarchical relationship between herself as a teacher and her students by positioning herself as the one who does not ‘know’. She is acknowledging that her students are appropriating the text selected for study on the basis of their own experiences, their own beliefs and values, and that it is only thus that it might constitute a personally significant moment in their lives.

Post-literary theory?

For Brittney the activity of rereading texts provides a vehicle for becoming reflexively aware of her own beliefs and values and how these might mediate her interactions with students. This is a radically different conception of her experience as a reader from the way an individual’s development is constructed by the continua of learning that have proliferated since the advent of standards-based reforms. It’s now thirty years since the Australian Federal Government attempted to introduce a national curriculum in key subject areas, each describing ‘the progression of learning typically achieved by students during the compulsory years of schooling’ (Curriculum Corporation 1994, 1), and sidestepping questions about the culturally loaded nature of any notion of ‘typical progression’. The rationale provided for this initial attempt at an outcomes-based curriculum gestures towards students whose ‘backgrounds and experiences have not prepared them for their schools’ way of doing things’, cautioning that ‘the different linguistic knowledge and experience of these students ‘ should not be ‘denigrated’ (5). But the document’s emphasis falls squarely on the need for schools to promote Standard Australian English in the form of learning outcomes that fail to acknowledge the experiences of students who are bilingual or multilingual. Those outcomes are conceived in exclusively Anglophone terms, with the result that linguistic and cultural diversity is constructed as a deficit that supposedly leaves students unprepared for schooling, rather than being treated as a rich resource for learning and engagement in formal education.

This document was the first of a plethora of bi-partisan curriculum and policy reforms at a Federal and State level that have culminated in the implementation of standardised literacy testing across Australia and an English curriculum, the Australian Curriculum: English, which are directed at instilling in students a formal knowledge about Standard Australian English rather than providing them opportunities to explore the relationship between language and meaning as they experience it in their everyday lives. The English curriculum is segmented into three categories or ‘strands’ – ‘Language’, ‘Literature’, ‘Literacy’- without any acknowledgement of the history of these words or their provisional nature as organising categories when it comes to envisioning a young person’s experience of language. The strand ‘Language’, for example, is objectified as comprising a set of rules that students must learn, with the focus, even for children who are just commencing school, predominantly on ‘understanding’ and ‘recognising’ the way language works. It is as though language can unproblematically be isolated as an object of inquiry without any acknowledgement of the way my sensibility is shaped by the language I speak. That a burgeoning awareness of who ‘I’ am and who ‘I’ might be is crucially bound up with language, as are my relationships with people around me, is simply beyond the ken of this document.

This marginalising of the subjective dimensions of language is integral to the social engineering that the Australian Curriculum: English attempts to perform, something that is also evident in the rationale given for ‘Literature’ as one of the ‘strands’ of the curriculum. Here we are told that the curriculum ‘aims to engage students in the study of literary texts of personal, cultural, social and aesthetic value’ (Australian Curriculum: English 2024). This aim might at first seem to acknowledge the multiple ways in which a literary text can be read. Yet listing the ‘personal’ alongside other more public dimensions of reading is hardly sufficient recognition of the intensely subjective nature of anyone’s response to a literary work. Any judgement about the significance of a literary work (including its ‘cultural, social and aesthetic value’) is at its heart a subjective judgement – a judgement about what this text means to ‘me’ as ‘I’ engage with it on the basis of the experiences ‘I’ bring to it (Doecke 2019; Rosenblatt 1978; Shah 2020; Zabka 2016). This is what the stories told by Brittney, Rebecca, Debra, and the other early career teachers who participated in the project observed repeatedly. But rather than providing a framework for students in dialogue with their teachers to actively engage in this process of valuing and to do so in an increasingly self-aware way, the Australian Curriculum: English is typically directed towards imposing adult designs on students, as is shown by its recommendation that texts chosen for study ‘include some that are recognised as having enduring social and artistic value and some that attract contemporary attention’. Who is doing the ‘recognising’ here? The passive construction elides the very process of valuing through which a reader might judge the significance that a story or poem has for her. That process of personal response and evaluation is displaced by the lumbering operations of an ideological apparatus that decides which texts might enrich ‘students’ understanding of the breadth and complexity of human experiences’.

But what has come to intrigue me most about the genealogy of standards-based reforms in Australia is the way this development has intersected with certain shifts in academic discourse over the same period. Tell-tale in this respect is Jack Thomson’s influential book, Understanding Teenagers’ Reading which was published a few years prior to the first attempt to develop a national curriculum (Thomson 1987). In this book Thomson shows what you can learn from young people if you listen to what they have to say about their experiences of reading, the pleasures they derive from certain texts, and how they make meaning from what they read. This was a ground-breaking study, largely because of Thomson’s starting point: he had interviewed young people about the pleasures and challenges they experienced when reading, thus providing a powerful model to English teachers of what you can learn by attending to your students when they talk about their reading habits and preferences. At the time it was published, Thomson’s study undoubtedly made a valuable contribution to the way English teachers in Australia taught reading, such as underscoring a recognition of the value of providing young people with a wider range of reading materials to cater for their abilities and interests than simply teaching the set texts, as well as prompting them to devise other means for students to respond to texts than comprehension questions and essay writing. So many aspects of his study anticipate the insights gained in the course of our project because of its premise – which Thomson takes from Louise Rosenblatt and Reader Response theory – that

literature should be conceived as an activity and experience rather than as an object of study; and reading and responding to literature should be conceived as processes of making and sharing meanings, as ways of exploring and understanding what it means to live, as well as understanding of one’s own and authors’ meaning making processes. (13)

The reflections in which the early career teachers have engaged in our study likewise reflect a belief in the importance of treating literature as ‘an activity and experience rather than as an object of study’.

Yet while many of Thomson’s insights into the reading habits of adolescents and the role that literature might play in English classrooms are still apposite today, the ‘developmental model’ of ‘response to literature’ that he constructs on the basis of the experiences of the teenagers he interviewed is a problematical legacy. That he went down this track may seem paradoxical, given the richness of the interviews he conducted, but this shows how he was being spoken by a discourse that was emerging at that time, which supposed that mapping the stages of a students’ learning could be of benefit to teachers in their efforts to support their students. The most influential example of a developmental model at that time (which claimed to encompass not only reading but writing, speaking and listening, each area constructed as a sequence of stages culminating in expert or accomplished performance) was obviously the first version of the national curriculum, which I have already discussed. Thomson’s model begins with ‘unreflective interest in action’ as a first level of engagement with fictional texts, progressing through ‘empathising’ and ‘analogising’, and culminating in a capacity to recognise ‘textual ideology’ (Thomson 1987, 360). The final level of engagement signals a critical distance from the pleasures of the text, pleasures that are rendered suspect because they can blind readers to the ideological designs that texts have on them, to the ways a text can ‘work them over’ (141) – a familiar position that has been argued repeatedly by advocates of ‘critical literacy’ (see Morgan 1997).

Thomson is at pains to emphasise that one level of response does not necessarily displace another, that the pleasures of immersing yourself in the action and identifying with the characters of a story should not ultimately conflict with a capacity to recognise the text’s ‘ideology’. But it is impossible not to see the final level of – as Thomson formulates it – a ‘consciously considered relationship with the author, recognition of textual ideology, and understanding of self (identity theme) and of one’s own reading process’ (360) as throwing the other dimensions into perspective. This is a construction of an ideal reader that provides the goal to which teachers ought to strive in their efforts to enable students to grow as readers, which comprehends all the other phases of the ‘developmental’ model and ultimately gives point to them as staging posts towards achieving this goal.

Language is going on holiday here, to borrow a phrase from Ludwig Wittgenstein ([1953] 2001, 16; cf. Moi 2017, 162), and though it is unfair to juxtapose Thomson’s abstractions with the language used by Brittney, Rebecca, Debra, and Katya (Thomson was, after all, writing out of his own situation, using the language that was available to him at the time to offer a summary account of the dimensions of reading), I am struck by the way these abstractions fail to do justice to the rich contingencies of the literary events the early career teachers have narrated. Their stories undoubtedly reflect many of the dimensions of reading that Thomson identifies as stages in his ‘developmental model’, including feeling empathy for the characters in a story (stage 2) and becoming enthusiastic about a particular author (stage 5). And they’re manifestly all now able to exercise a degree of reflexivity that characterises the final level of response (stage 6), revealing a sophisticated awareness of what it means to read that draws on their multifaceted experiences of reading at home and at school, as well as the experiences they have now had as early career English teachers. Yet the way the literary events they narrate endure in their memories, prompting them to revisit the concrete particularities of the world as they experienced it when they were growing up and the social relationships that shaped their responses to the texts they were reading is utterly diminished by a notion of reading as a sequence of stages leading to preconceived outcomes. Their memories of their experiences as readers stay with them, not as answers to the question of who they are now, but as clues which they are still trying to interpret. Nor can the dimensions of reading they highlight be understood as pertaining simply to their individual development conceived as a linear progression that occurs inside each of their heads, regardless of the context of their social interactions with others and the social relationships that variously constitute their worlds. The emphasis in the conversations they had with us was repeatedly on sociability both as a condition for engaging with literary texts and as a desirable goal to be achieved through facilitating conversations around texts in their classrooms (see Doecke et al. 2023a, 2023b). Meaning-making is something that occurs in ‘in-between’ spaces (Hourd [1949] 1968, cf Doecke 2019), as people share their impressions of a text in conversation with one another, not simply the result of a cognitive operation that an individual reader silently performs in order to decipher the words on a page.

Yet the way the early career teachers talk about the value of a literary education is clearly indebted to the work of educators like Thomson and others who argued the need to cultivate a literary theoretical awareness of reading, such as is reflected in stage 6 of Thomson’s developmental model. What kind of inter-generational dialogue might happen if Brittney, Rebecca, Debra, and Katya were to find themselves in a room with early advocates of the transformational potential of ‘theory’? Whatever happened to the moment of ‘theory’? For although many of the insights the early career teachers express into the process of making meaning from a literary work (both the meaning making they experienced in their own literary socialisation and the insights they have since gained through their exchanges with students) obviously derive from the body of writing we name when we use the word ‘theory’, their accounts of their teaching hardly turn on the differences that were once so important to educators like Jack Thomson, Pam Gilbert, Annette Patterson and Wendy Morgan (to stop with just those names): between ‘work’ and ‘text’ (Gilbert 1989),between treating a text as ‘a unity, complete and consistent’ and recognising that it encompasses ‘silences, incoherencies, contradictions’ (Morgan 1992, 78), between ‘empathising’ and a ‘recognition of textual ideology’ (Thomson 1987, 360), between seeing English as facilitating the ‘personal growth’ of individuals and conceiving it as a ‘discursive construction’, as exposing the myth that the individual is ‘the source and origin of her or his own meanings’ (Patterson 1992, 134). These binaries did not loom large in the accounts the early career teachers gave of themselves. They certainly didn’t adopt the same suspicious stance towards empathising and identifying with characters espoused by the theorists I have just mentioned.

Perhaps this generational difference merely shows that ‘theory’ has lost the aura it once had, that it has now become one of a set of theoretical resources that mediate the professional practice of English teachers in their efforts to understand the interpretive practices in which their students engage in classroom settings. You only have to read the story that Rebecca tells in her final interview about how she had used René Magritte’s ‘The Treachery of Images’ to stimulate discussion amongst her senior English students about representing landscapes to sense a distinctive literary theoretical awareness (Figure 2). Her aim was to highlight to students that texts are representations, they’re not real, they’ve been ‘constructed’, an insight that she hopes they can take into their lives beyond school. Or we could also consider the language that Katya uses (Figure 2) in her efforts to characterise the ‘embodied’ love of reading shown by a student who dresses like a Manga character, an insight that obviously takes us back to the way cultural studies initially challenged us to rethink the relationship between the semiotic practices in which teenagers engage outside school and the meaning-making practices that school has traditionally privileged (Buckingham and Sefton-Green 1994). Such insights into the relationship between language and meaning within classroom settings may not have the polemical edge of early attempts to argue the significance of ‘theory’ for English teachers, but they nonetheless provide compelling representations of the complexities of teaching literature that are shaped by a literary theoretical awareness.²

But the fact remains that the policy context in which Rebecca and Katya are working is a radically different one from that which existed at the moment of ‘theory’. Standards-based reforms were on the horizon when Thomson wrote Understanding Teenagers Reading, and nobody could have imagined how all-encompassing those reforms would become. I have already observed that Thomson’s ‘developmental model’ of ‘response’ to literature might paradoxically be interpreted as a harbinger of subsequent attempts to map students’ cognitive development on to learning continua, though at the time this attempt to promote a more differentiated concept of ‘reading’ was undoubtedly a welcome initiative. However, the innovative work in which Thomson and his contemporaries were engaged was not primarily defined by a tension between system-wide pressures to standardise and a commitment to affirming more complex understandings of the relationship between language and meaning. For Thomson and other advocates of ‘theory’ everything hinged on a critique of the so-called ‘expressive realist’ assumptions (Belsey 1980) underpinning the teaching of literature, and they paid scant regard to the policy levers that were beginning to shape schooling in response to changing economic and social conditions. This is in stark contrast to the situation of the early career teachers in our inquiry and the stories they have told us about their experiences of attempting to foster a sensitivity towards ‘literary’ language and pressures to teach their students ‘literacy’ as it has been constructed by a series of neoliberal policy blueprints over the intervening decades. Every aspect of their work is shaped by standards-based reforms, even as they try to create spaces in their classrooms for thinking and feeling differently. The tensions that Katya experiences, for example, when she finds that her judgement about the way her student imaginatively invests in the world of Manga – ‘I’m really like fascinated in the way she is in the world… she looks like a manga character. She made friends with all the kids who are into manga’ – is flatly contradicted by the results this student receives on a standardised test, do not loom large in the representations of classrooms to be found in the writing of Thomson and his contemporaries.

Re-affirming the ‘personal’

The heavily regulated nature of their professional landscape does not mean that the professional discourse of the early career teachers reflects some kind of retreat from the poststructuralist insights into language and meaning advocated by educators like Thomson, Gilbert, Patterson and Morgan. To the contrary, I’m led to conclude that the way they act and think about their work simultaneously abolishes and preserves the moment of ‘theory’, that the stories they have told can be read as transcending that moment – such at least is the view I have formed in the course of revisiting their interviews many times in the course of the project and beyond.

This is not to ascribe to them a critical stance vis-a-vis the legacy of ‘theory’ of the kind that has started to emerge, for example, in the critique of critique associated with Rita Felski and other literary theorists and educators (see Felski 2015; Moi 2017; Warner 2004; Zabka 2016). Their situations as they have represented them through their storytelling arise out of a reflective practice in which they are drawing on all the resources available to them to understand the meaning-making that is occurring when their students engage with literary texts in their classrooms. Those resources include their reflective accounts of their own literary socialisation, as well as the insights they have gained through their university studies and their varied experiences of working with adolescents since completing their degrees (See the vignettes in McLean-Davies et al. (2023) for an idea of their remarkably varied pathways into English teaching.). It would be reductive to see them as counterposing a new theory or paradigm to an old one. They are attempting to understand the complexities of their professional practice as English teachers, and the insights they have had to offer in the course of their conversations with us arise out of their reflections on that practice.

When read together, the stories of the early career teachers give rise to a critical perspective on the moment of ‘theory’ because of their intensely situated nature and the way their representations of their teaching practice speak back to the literary-theoretical understandings they bring to it. The anecdotes that I have taken from Debra, Rebecca, Brittney and Katya about their teaching are primarily about how they negotiate the human relationships that comprise their everyday worlds, at the centre of which are transactions around literary texts. Those relationships are not simply experienced by them as a mixed bag of contingencies that might affect whether they are able to achieve their objectives – such as when teachers talk about the challenges of handling an uncooperative or recalcitrant class. They are the ineluctable conditions for meaning making to occur (cf. Mead and Doecke 2020; Mead, Doecke, and McLean Davies 2020). That meaning does not sit within the book that has been set for study, as something for the students to comprehend, but arises out of an interaction between the students and the text – or perhaps it would be better to refer to multiple interactions, as individual students in the class attempt to make meaning from the book they are reading and then share their impressions with others. In her last interview for the project Katya described reading as a social act:

Yeah well I think it is a big part of what we do as English teachers, sort of I guess what we do is make that sociability of reading very visible, and instead of reading being that sort of isolated experience it is a social act in schools. We read together, discuss together… it’s having a conversation about a text, it’s a sociable activity.

Without wishing to diminish the significance of the moment of ‘theory’, and specifically the contributions that educators like Jack Thomson, Pam Gilbert, Annette Patterson, Wendy Morgan and others have made to re-envisioning the purpose of literature teaching within schools, I have become increasingly aware in the course of the project of how the stories the early career teachers have told present a different representation of their professional practice from that evoked by a ‘post-structuralist English classroom’ (Morgan 1992). For the paradox is that the text largely remains the focus of attention for these theorists, albeit a deconstructed text that supposedly enables students to see beyond its lifelikeness in order to recognise the ideological work that it is performing on them. They give scant attention to the meanings that might be negotiated through the exchanges that comprise classroom settings, even (as in Annette Patterson’s case) dismissing those meanings as the product of a personalist discourse that is open to critique. Perhaps Thomson’s work is the exception here – in Understanding Teenagers Reading the body of literary theory with which he obviously has the strongest affinity is Reader Response criticism because of its emphasis on the way readers actively construct meanings on the basis of the experiences they bring to the text. For educators like Gilbert and Patterson, by contrast, such an emphasis smacks too strongly of the privileging of experience that is the hallmark of ‘Personal Growth’ pedagogy and its failure to recognise how individuals as subjects are constructed by discourses (see Gilbert 1987; Patterson 1992).

I began this essay by questioning big-picture scenarios, and so it would be contradictory for me now to see in the conversations with early career teachers evidence of a significant generational change that heralds the advent of a new paradigm in English education. The seriousness of our situation means that we should put those kinds of language games behind us and focus instead on what we can learn from our conversations with students, teasing out what Mehrunissa Shah characterises as ‘the more reflexive and elusive subjective aspects’ of how students read (Shah 2020, 405). If it is possible to discern a generational change on the basis of the conversations with the early career teachers who have featured in this essay, it is one that involves precisely this kind of reprioritising and reconceptualising of the ‘personal’ or ‘subjective’ as it figures within the social exchanges of the classroom. This does not mean jettisoning the intellectual resources named by the word ‘theory’ – Katya, Rebecca, Brittney and the other early career teachers who shared their stories are drawing on ‘theory’ to reconceptualise the significance of ‘subjective’ engagement in reading as an ineluctable condition for any meaning-making to occur. They recognise the contribution that theory makes to enhancing our capacity to reflect on how we are situated as readers when we engage with literary texts. But this does not get around the fact that the ‘personal’ remains the starting point for any meaning-making to occur, that reading involves an immense personal investment on the part of our pupils that we should respect. To discount the subjective dimension of reading, or what Shah calls ‘the inward-looking face of reading’ (404), is to deny students the opportunity to engage with texts that are personally significant for them (cf. Rosenblatt 1978, 144, 140), when they can feel that their personal response to a literary text and the language in which they express their thoughts and feelings about what they have read matters and is valued.

Acknowledgments

This essay is dedicated to Lorenzo. With thanks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this essay is part of a larger Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project, entitled ‘Investigating Literary Knowledge in the Making of English Teachers’ [DP160101084 2016–2019]. Associate Professor Larissa McLean Davies (University of Melbourne), Professor Lyn Yates (University of Melbourne), Professor Wayne Sawyer (University of Western Sydney), Professor Philip Mead (University of Western Australia), and Professor Brenton (Deakin University) are the Chief Investigators in this project.

Notes on contributors

Brenton Doecke

Brenton Doecke is Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University. He has published widely in the fields of teacher education and English curriculum and pedagogy.

Notes

1. This section reworks some reflections that I have published in McLean Davies et al. (2023, 216–220).

2. Both Katya and Rebecca are the subjects of ‘vignettes’ published in McLean Davies et al. (2023, 69–70, 179–180).