Editorial

Here in England, education is plagued by a fashion for objectivism, manifest in a succession of injunctions about what teachers must do and what learning looks like. Knowledge has become the assimilation of Gradgrindian facts and learning is now little more than a function of memory, a matter of storage and retrieval. What gets missed out of this paradigm is any sense of the agency – or the subjectivity – of those involved, learners and teachers alike. The essays in this issue might be construed as insisting, in their very different ways, on the centrality of these dimensions, on the need to consider the standpoint of those involved in the processes of education.

We start with Lewis Goodacre’s account of a lesson as an instance of the literary sociability of the classroom. He develops an argument about the importance of experience – the lived experience of school students – as constitutive of English as a subject. In direct contrast, what happens when English becomes divorced from students’ lifeworlds is revealed in Rose Veitch’s study of GCSE re-set classes, where instrumental, test-focused approaches position students as deficits.

Goodacre’s attentiveness to the meanings his students are making is taken up in Bethan Marshall’s exploration of two lessons, one in England and the other in Canada. Despite the marked differences in the contexts of the two lessons, Marshall traces similarities in the dialogic practice of the teachers, their capacity to remain responsive to their students’ contributions. Ross Collin’s interest in the classroom has a different orientation, as he draws on the philosophy of Iris Murdoch to explore how literary study might contribute to students’ development of moral concepts. Where there is commonality, though, is in Collin’s emphasis on the central importance of attention in Murdoch’s work: reality, thus understood, encompasses not merely objective facts but also one’s own and others’ subjective experiences. Responsiveness as the instantiation of a teacher’s responsibility to their students is equally salient in Andrew Rejan’s narrative inquiry into his own practice as a teacher educator. Here, though, issues become somewhat more fraught, as we see pre- and in-service teachers contesting his choice of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the central text on a literature course.

As the American educator, William Ayers, has suggested, teaching

… requires a serious encounter with autobiography: Who are you? How did you come to take on your views and outlooks? What forces helped to shape you? What was it like for you to be ten? What have you made of yourself? Where are you heading? An encounter with these kinds of questions is critical to understanding teaching because teachers, whatever else they teach, teach themselves. Of all the knowledge teachers need to draw upon, self-knowledge is most important (and least attended to). (Ayers [1993] 2010, 137)

Bridget Campbell’s reflection on her practice on a pre-service teacher education module in South Africa might be taken as just such a ‘serious encounter with autobiography’. As Campbell recognises, her professional learning involved much more than a consideration of the film that was the ostensible object of study; it entailed a reappraisal of who she is and of how her subjectivity has been shaped in history and culture.

The following two contributions address questions of language and identity. Zoë Guzy-Sprague considers the part that Yiddish has played in her family’s life and the complexities of its enduring significance for her, as a marker of both alienation and belonging. Hyeseung Jeong, Raquel Sánchez Ruiz and Georgia Wilhelmsson report on the ambivalence in Spanish and Swedish pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards English. Their research indicates that it is not only at the level of national language policy that contradictions are to be found; for individuals, too, there are ambiguities and uncertainties: is English to be treated as a foreign language or as a transnational lingua franca – and what are the implications for practice?

We conclude this issue with an essay by Jane Miller. This is a different encounter with autobiography, as she reflects on what she has been reading – but also on how she has been reading. Might this contribution prompt others to explore something of themselves as readers and how these reading habits and identities have altered over time?