Stepping Inside an English Classroom: Investigating the Everyday Experiences of an English Teacher

ABSTRACT

This essay presents an English teacher’s inquiry into her professional practice in an institutional setting that is heavily regulated by standards-based reforms. Rather than something external to her, she sees those reforms as part of an internal conflict that affects her capacity to be fully responsive to her students. In dialogue with a colleague, she writes stories that reaffirm the deeply relational character of her work, both as an ethically responsive stance and as a means to understand the socially mediated character of her everyday world. She attempts to find alternative ways of seeing and accounting for her work than the reified mentality of standards-based reforms, positing a world that is relational, rather than compartmentalised, where our chief responsibility as teachers is to cultivate a sensitivity towards others around us, rather than continually being compelled to classify and judge them.

KEYWORDS:

• Practitioner inquiry
• narrative
• English teaching and cultural diversity
• standards-based reforms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) is a two-year programme (Years 11 and 12) that students complete at the end of their secondary education. It concludes with high-stakes state-wide examinations that produce a score that is used for the purposes of entry to tertiary education courses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Breen

Lisa Breen is now a leading teacher at a northern suburbs state secondary school, having formerly taught in a state school in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne for seven years. She completed a PhD in the School of Education at Deakin University, focusing on her work as a secondary English teacher in a disadvantaged school in the south-eastern region of Melbourne, using both Foucault and Smith to reconceptualise her practice as an English teacher. She has since continued to engage in inquiry on the changing nature of her work in relation to the introduction of standards-based reforms, publishing essays with this focus.

Bella Illesca

Bella Illesca was born in Chile and in 1974 arrived as a political refugee at the Sydney Villawood Migrant Hostel, today better known as the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre. She spent eight years working as an English language and literature teacher in schools in Melbourne. She has also worked as a sessional academic in the English Education programme at Monash and Deakin University and has been involved in a number of research projects about language, literacy and English teachers’ professional ethics. She is currently a PhD candidate in the School of Education at Deakin University. Her PhD thesis examines representations of English teachers’ everyday work and she is interested in the potential of storytelling as a form of inquiry.

Brenton Doecke

Brenton Doecke is Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He has published widely in the fields of English curriculum and pedagogy and teacher education, including essays on the role that narrative can play in the professional learning of teachers. Brenton has been the editor of English in Australia, the journal of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE), and is a life-time member of that Association. As one of the lead researchers in the STELLA project (Standards for Teachers of English Language and Literacy in Australia: see stella.org.au) he helped to co-ordinate workshops in which Australian English teachers wrote stories about their professional practice, subsequently publishing those stories in the national journal. He is currently engaged (with Larissa McLean Davies, Philip Mead, Wayne Sawyer and Lyn Yates) in a major Australian Research Council Project on the role that literary knowledge might play in the professional learning and practice of early career English teachers.