Embracing Counternarratives: Negotiating the Authority of Teacher and Text

ABSTRACT

In this narrative inquiry, the author dramatises the tensions and discoveries that emerged in a literature course for pre-service and in-service teachers in an English education graduate programme. The students’ resistance to the instructor’s choice of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a central text led to reflection on responsible and responsive approaches for managing the inclusion or excision of canonical texts by white authors in the syllabi of literature courses designed for secondary English teachers as well as within the secondary English curriculum. The author also explores the tension between a belief in an open, democratic learning environment and the authority structures that reinforce the power of the teacher or teacher educator.

KEYWORDS:

• Literature
• teacher education
• authority

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The principles of language acquisition may provide a model or metaphor for many forms of authentic learning. Pointing to the work of Jerome Bruner, Blau (2003, 160) comments on the way the adoption of academic discourse in a classroom community mirrors ‘the same kind of process that defines the learning of language and thought by children in their interactions with parents and older siblings.’

2. Student names are pseudonyms; the exception is Noah Gordon, who, although enrolled as a student in the class, has been a longtime colleague and collaborator, and whose real name I am using at his request. Student work is quoted with the students’ permission. Class dialogues are reconsructed from memory.

3. Noah later elaborated on his story: ‘Returning to my parents’ house in the winter of 2002, I happened on a book whose title struck my curiosity and, after discovering a poem written hundreds of years ago by Basho, literature changed my life.

When I look carefully,

I see the nazuna

Blooming by the hedge!

This poem opened my mind to the transformative power of literary experience and to a love of reading closely …

So I was surprised in my initial writing for the course when I realised that my love for Basho’s looking might actually be more properly called a reanimation of D.T. Suzuki’s thinking in his interpretive commentary. Through writing about my experience I realised that my appreciation for the poem and its long-lasting resonance (maybe even my aesthetic reading of the poem itself) were essentially constructed from Suzuki’s accompanying lecturer’s notes to the poem. At the very least, these notes made an aesthetic reading possible for me and led me to my own discoveries. That is, I experienced the commentary before I could encounter the poem.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Rejan

Andrew Rejan teaches English at Darien High School in Connecticut (USA). He holds degrees from Yale University, Middlebury College, and Teachers College, Columbia University, where he received his PhD in English education and served as an instructor in the Teaching of English master’s programme. His articles have been published in English Education and English Journal, and his current research projects include work on the role of confusion in meaningful discourse about literature, the complexities of teaching during the pandemic, and the disciplinary history of English education.