Constructing Identity in the Time of Coronavirus: Reading as Recovery

ABSTRACT

How does a beginning teacher go about constructing a teacherly identity in a pandemic? How does one reconcile what might be with what is, as dictated by the rhetoric of a neoliberal government, which prizes the individual mind over the collective one, the product over the process, and results over relationships? This essay explores these questions through the experience of reading Jane Eyre with a Year 9 English class. Personal and professional stories form the core of this investigation that explores the complexities of finding a teacherly identity; this is a discussion about aims and values and relationships, rather than just ‘effective’ teaching strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Coronavirus
• teacherly identity
• reading
• recovery
• change
• stories

The coronavirus pandemic has changed the world irrevocably. To borrow from epidemiologist Frank Snowden, who describes COVID-19 as a ‘disease that holds up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are’ (Levantesi and Snowden 2020), this mirror has revealed to us the sharp injustices of our world. For me, this process of seeing has shifted something irrevocably on a personal level. I have been changed.

To hold up the mirror as to who I really am is not straightforward. I was in the midst of constructing my teacherly identity – one that reconciled the actor with the teacher, and allowed them to co-exist in the same skin, the same face – when lockdown struck. And so, the identity I had been forging, the reflection that had only just started coming into view, began to blur, to lose its shape and outline. Thereafter followed some time when the face of the teacher could no longer be seen – remote learning was rubbing her away, erasing her existence. Perhaps, I wondered, teaching was not for me.

But then, the world began to fight back against what it saw reflected in the mirror – and, in the unrest that followed – the recharged call that ‘Black Lives Matter’, the toppling of statues, the calls to decolonise the curriculum – a new teacherly face began to form and gain agency. In the mirror there emerged the face of the teacher I wanted to be, who took courage and inspiration from the education projects of 1970s and 80s that positioned ‘education as a site where imperial legacies and present injustices should be opened up to question. Where new ways of constructing the social – curriculum, pedagogy, institutional practices, personal relations – should be attempted’ (Jones 2021, 36).

An overhaul, then, a re-evaluation of what really mattered in education.

Returning to school in September 2020 felt electric with hope. In the call for change, for the world to be re-spun, for the curriculum to be a ‘Recovery’ one, there was hope for how we might change, hope for how we, as a school community, might look at what we do with fresh eyes, might begin again, might ‘be forever changed’ (Snowden 2020).

The hope soon fizzled out; this was not echoed from those above.

Aside from a couple of tokenistic gestures – teaching Underground to Canada (Smucker 1977/2009) with Year 7 (a somewhat dated story about the Underground Railroad written by a white woman), and a request by the English head of department for staff members to propose more diverse texts for A-level (my suggestion of Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams rejected for its lack of ‘proper’ literary merit), the English curriculum remained largely unchanged. And, in the first short unit of work with my Year 9 class, ‘Poetry by Heart’, a unit that required students to memorise and perform poems, I was instructed to challenge my ‘top set’ class with a spread of the ‘greats’ to learn: Coleridge, Wordsworth, et al. Canonical poetry, I was to understand, would be the only way to stretch their minds. I found this extremely problematic. What of the ‘Recovery Curriculum’? What of choosing poems that might speak to them, that might speak of the time, might help to deal with some of the anger and the pain? The term ‘Recovery’ curriculum was quickly superseded by the term ‘Catch Up’ curriculum – with the notion that we could ‘catch up’ the students with all that they had supposedly ‘lost’ (content-wise), during the time of the school closure. How sharply I felt at the butt of every policy whim, every decision by my superiors to determine the fate of my students. The loss not being discussed was the collective emotional one, the question not being asked was how we help recover these young people, and the adults who stood before them – for whom, it was clear the desocialised model of education had not worked.

I want to make something clear here – I do not wish to admonish the senior members of my school community. They are, as much as I, charged with implementing a neo-liberal vision of education that values the individual mind over the collective one – an ideology that Bourdieu saw to be ‘a programme for destroying collective structures’ (Bourdieu 1998), or, put more plainly, a ‘policy of desocialisation’ (Philippart 2020). And, what occurred to me during this time, what gave me heart, was that the mighty, human power of the English classroom – or at least the one I ascribed to – lay in its resistance to the neoliberal market value system of product over process, results over relationships – for, in its very insistence of the latter over the former, it continually reminded us of all to be gained through collective structures of learning that place the social at its heart.

So, to return to the social, and to my Year 9 class – a class I had dearly missed, and longed, above all others, to see again. Perhaps it is wrong to admit to such overt favouritism, but, in my defence, this class had been instrumental in the forging of my English teacher identity, helping me begin to reconcile the actor self with the teacher self. And, in allowing me to see the value of my previous skin, they had liberated me, for, as Britzman suggests, if ‘such multiplicity is suppressed, so too is our power to imagine how things may be otherwise’ (2003, 32). And, unlike most of my classes (and this is important), they were wholly my responsibility. So, much like I imagine a new mother to feel about her newborn child, I saw them to be the most precious, the most unique, the most in need of my love and care, not least after many months of separation.

I was to meet them again in our library lesson – and entered in nervous anticipation of our emotional reunion. How naïve I had been, in imagining such an event, not least because the very setting in which the reunion was to take place – the previously warm and inviting space of the library – was now rendered cold and clinical by means of COVID-19 safety protocols. Sitting in rows facing forwards, my beloved class looked back at me in weary resignation as I delivered a speech on the joy I felt at being able to learn together in the real classroom once more. Few appeared to share my (slightly forced) enthusiasm, with many averting my gaze, their facial expressions hidden beneath masks. I left the library – post-cleaning regime – emotionally stunned. Where had my effervescent class gone, those young people eager to learn, to laugh, and to play? But, I had to admit that I, too, had lost some of my spark. We felt uncomfortable together, after so long apart. But, I wondered, could the collective structures of the English classroom, the sharing of literature, be the path to our recovery? I left the library determined – determined to rouse these young women from their stupor, to engage them in the stuff of English once more.

The first step was in choosing the poems. This was my first act of defiance, an attempt at a Recovery Curriculum of my own. I began with Dave’s ‘Black’ and Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’, hoping, through these choices, to drip feed some life back into them, to see them re-energised by the words I thought to be inspiring. But it was not working; they were not inspired. Feeling around for poems that might ignite them, I remembered ‘Hollow’ (2020) by Vanessa Kisuule, written in response to the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston. Thinking of this poem, I saw that, despite my initial desire to use the classroom as ‘a site where imperial legacies and present injustices were opened up to question’ (Jones 2021, 36), I was, in reality, afraid. Afraid of what it might unleash, emotionally, both for the students and myself. But I needed to go there. And if, as Scholes asserts, ‘the political enters the study of English primarily through questions of representation’ (1998, 151), then I needed to ask, and to make space for these young people’s thoughts and feelings, however messy and hard to solve they may be.

So, with ‘Hollow’, I took a deep breath, and began by asking the class to reflect on their experience of the school closure, and how world events had changed them. What had they learned, thought about, how had they grown? There was a palpable shift of energy in the room, a ripple of something new. I asked them to express their thoughts by writing a few words down – if they wished – before showing them some images of the statue of Colston being lowered into the water. What did they think of this act? What had this meant to them? The air became alive, the students jostling for airtime. They had something to say at last! But, of course they did. In avoiding the issue, pulled along by the school current which told me to continue ‘as normal’, I was inadvertently advocating a return to what was, rather than allowing us to imagine what might be. And, as Jones argues, it is precisely in the allowing in of ‘live issues of contestation … where the possibilities of change become stronger and where the movement for a democratic and inclusive politics of education can take on new life’ (2021, 34).

‘Hollow’ spoke to them of the present – down even to the mode through which we viewed it – Kissule’s performance of the poem in her home – small, urgent, self-recorded – much more relevant to them than Dave’s live performance at the Brit Awards, which seemed to belong to the world before. Small wonder the floodgates were opened, and the debate raged and became emotional. Anna seemed close to tears as she vehemently disagreed with Becca’s point that the statues were important reminders of what had been, arguing instead that there was no need, that they were memorialising a shameful past; Georgia shouted that we needed to move on, that there was no longer space for people like him; Rosha told the tale of her mother, who had lived in Bristol, joining the voices that had called for the removal of Colston long ago. Something shifted that day. The possibility of change had entered the classroom, and, in allowing in live issues of contestation, had become one that fizzed and popped with thought, ideas, and feeling. Looking at the poem, these lines in particular became imbued with new meaning:

But the air is gently throbbing with newness.

Can you feel it? (Kisuule 2020)

We all felt it. I had to tap into this energy, not fear it, but use it. This was their world, not ours – but I was torn, faced with, as Britzman so eloquently puts it, ‘the dilemma of carving out one’s own teaching territory within preordained borders’ (2003, 32). Preordained borders that asked me to Cover The Content, Get Through The Work, move on regardless, and my desire (and it seemed the students’, too) to stop, recalibrate, and reflect on all that had been learnt during the school closure. We were different, those girls and I; not one of us was the same as before. Kisuule’s poem had offered me, as much as my students, a moment to reflect on how I had changed, to share, with these young women, the acknowledgement that things were not the same, that what we had experienced meant something, held vital significance in the classroom.

For, in amongst all of this, there was me. The pandemic had meant that I had been thrust into remote teaching for the last term of my year as a newly-qualified teacher (NQT), which had plunged me into a well of despair, from which, I was still recovering. My English teacherly identity was one still struggling to be born, still trying to find and assert itself, the precariousness of the world outside the classroom bleeding into the world inside, and my role within it. I needed time to recover, time to establish myself within the real world of the classroom once more. The support systems of the NQT year had been swept away – I was now a fully-fledged teacher. But I did not feel as such. I felt strangely untethered, unbound, the ground beneath me lacking in solidity. There was the sense that everything might suddenly change, as it had done in March, when all that I had thought to be constant, immoveable, – the very structure of school itself, an institution I had sought for its security – had melted, evaporated to dust. The culture of my classroom, the identity I had been forging pre-pandemic – the reconciliation of past and present, of actor with teacher – had been stopped in its tracks, its growth stunted, and I had, in a sense, to begin again, to rebuild my place within the classroom. There can be drawn here real parallels between the students’ search to situate themselves within the world, and me within the classroom. We were both trying to find a space.

But, how to find that space? There was, in the school world, no time allocated to process all that had happened, no time to think or talk about it. The ‘time-organisation’ of schooling, ‘the ways in which policy at national and institutional level establishes a template for the use of time in schools’ (Kress et al. 2005, 71) had spoken. The rhetoric of the government was clear, the language choice of Education Secretary Gavin Williamson indicative of the pressures schools, and in turn, teachers, were under.

I think all of us recognise how much children have missed out, and why it is so important we support them to catch up on lost ground … That’s why we are launching the £1 billion Covid catch-up plan that will lift outcomes for all pupils … to help them to make up for the lost teaching time. (Williamson 2020)

The choice of language is stark, for it is, as Harold Rosen asserted, the ‘literature of deprivation’, which ‘springs not from sympathetic participation in the life being described, nor from informed awareness and insight, but from special researches which set out to find out what has gone wrong, not what has gone right’ (Rosen). In Williamson’s oratory, the neo-liberal model is clear: learning is firmly situated in the market-place, becoming that of a business transaction, a consumer model of supply and demand, with the emphasis on what has been ‘lost’. The loss of time is what is important, and as educators our task is ‘make up’ this time through the retrieval of content, not the retrieval of all that I hold at the heart of my practice – meaning making, identity forming, and relationships. There is no sense of the opportunity being offered, the opportunity to re-imagine existing structures of education, to build on all that may have been gained in the time away from school structures of learning. To cite Rosen once more:

Whatever language the pupils possess, it is this which must be built on rather than driven underground. However narrow the experience of our pupils may be (and it is often wider than we think), it is this experience alone which has given their language meaning.… children are interested in the life they live, in those who share it with them and their own part in it. (Rosen 1974/2017).

Instead of, as Rosen suggests so powerfully, using the pupils’ experience of lockdown to imbue their language, and in turn, lives with meaning, I felt tasked with driving it underground in a harried game of catch up. Time to move forwards, onwards. No looking back. Time to move on.

And so, on we moved, to Jane Eyre. And I was already a week behind in the curriculum planner, a seemingly unconscious error, that, in retrospect, is glaringly conscious. I was afraid, again. Afraid that Jane Eyre – a novel that brought to the fore all that I felt I lacked as an English teacher, namely, a ‘proper’ grounding in the canon, eschewed when I dropped the English part of my joint honours degree in favour of Drama – would expose my literary deprivation, exposing me as a fraud, a fake, as anything but a real English teacher. Its canonical status weighed heavy on my novice teacher identity, weighing heavier as a result of starting late.

Time to catch up, to make up for lost time, it would seem.

I would, it was advised, have to cut corners in order to hit all the key moments of such a substantial text (and how weighty it felt in actuality, handing out copies to the students!). But, I was loathe to cut too many, for, despite my insecurities, I was certain of what I believed in – and that was Jane’s story. And, in this insistence on story, the actor and teacher were reconciled. As an actor, I knew this to be the glue that held the audience rapt, binding them to the characters, and in turn, each other. This was no different in the classroom. And, what a story for us to bind ourselves to, how apt, how relatable the themes of isolation, death, and injustice felt in the time of coronavirus. And, if narrative is ‘the primary act of mind’ (Hardy 1977, 12), then I felt certain Jane’s story must be our central concern, or it would not be about reading, or its pleasures, at all. And reading needed to hold significance in my classroom, needed ‘to be conceptualised as a complex set of motivated, historied processes’ (Yandell 2014, 14), whereby the readers in my class held space, were put resolutely in the picture as social, historical beings. This is a version of reading that runs counter to the government-endorsed Oak Academy online English lesson Yandell critiques, a version that positions the learner as distinctly desocialised and dehistoricised – wherein, through its focus on language acquisition with regards an extract of a (short) story, the study of English becomes nothing but ‘a vehicle for the inculcation of exam skills’ (Yandell 2020, 268).

Yandell questions this rationale for English at the time of lockdown, and I question it for the very same reason post-lockdown, – when the GCSE and A-level exams of 2020 had been cancelled, and the world continued to hold itself in the balance – was this really the best I could do for my students? Borrowing from Doecke’s idea of ‘Literary Sociability’ (2019), and Rosen’s ‘resolute insistence on narrative in education in defiance of other priorities … to keep meaning itself at the centre of language education’ (1985/2017, 399) – did we not need story, more than ever, to unite us, to make sense of the world – to become resocialised?

But, as I was painfully aware, to insist on narrative in defiance of other priorities meant time, and time was something I was in short supply of. To follow the time-organisation ‘catch up’ model, that placed the emphasis on the acquisition of skills, I would have to cut corners, omit details, skim and gloss chapters. But, to insist on narrative, and keep meaning at the centre, I would have to allow time to read, time to connect to one another. For, this was what we had ‘lost’ – the experience of being in a room, together. We needed to recover, to ‘catch up’ with one another, through the rebuilding of our collective, through the collaborative act of reading the class novel.

But, I was in a quandary, torn, pulled in multiple directions at once. I was answerable to my Head of Department, the Headteacher, to the Government, and so, on I paced. But the students did not match my pace with energy – they remained reticent, unforthcoming in front of one another. And, it was not until I slowed down and allowed time for us to read, and to play – for the narrative to unfold in defiance of other priorities – that something shifted.

The section of narrative in question is early in the novel, when Mr Brocklehurst visits Jane and Mrs Reed at Gateshead. In remembering and recounting this lesson, the space in which it is situated is of huge significance, for, on this day, (due to a last minute timetabled room change) we were transferred from our usual gloomy, cramped classroom in the bowels of the building, to a light, airy one at the top. And, as I entered the classroom, finding there floor to ceiling windows with sunlight streaming in, I felt myself physically exhale, physically relax. And, if the semiotics of the classroom space, its very layout and design, is integral to how meaning is made, (Diamantopoulou 2020) then this is of significance, for there was no doubt I felt more inclined to play that day. Vygotsky speaks of the immeasurable learning at the heart of play – that, ‘play creates a zone of proximal development in the child … in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself’ (2016, 18), but, play cannot exist when one feels constrained by the pressures of time and space.

And, on that day, the pressure lifted, and I decided to let go – to let the narrative play out. And, play the students did. Volunteering to read Mr Brocklehurst, Rosha – an assuredly cool customer – immediately took on an exaggerated way of being, much enjoyed by her classmates. This, combined with Becca as a Jane with attitude brought the dialogue resolutely into the here and now. Coming to the following part of the dialogue, the girls hooted with laughter.

‘And the Psalms? I hope you like them?’

‘No, sir.’

‘No? oh, shocking! … ’

… ’Psalms are not interesting,’ I remarked. (Bronte 1848, 28)

After delivering this line, Becca looked up at me squarely, a broad smile illuminating her face. ‘She’s playing’, she told me. It was a statement, but it felt like a call to arms, an invitation to do the same. I had forgotten to play, so preoccupied was I with performing the role of Teacher as Expert, the English teacher well versed in the canon. But Becca, in this moment, was reminding me – no, instructing me, to allow dramatic play into the English classroom – to allow for the two disciplines to co-exist.

The potential power and liberation of allowing for such co-existence became clear when watching the students improvise what Jane might most like to say to Mrs Reed when faced with her alone. Seeing just how much the students were enjoying inhabiting the fiery Jane, it struck me that this character, in her desire for change, in the rawness of her strength and resistance, was providing a model for these young women, was urging them to do the same. How timely her radicalism felt, and, if ‘the challenge is the point’ (Jones 2021, 34), then Jane was just the character they needed to inhabit in order to open up the possibility of change. And, moreover, the students were relishing playing her in this moment, as she asserts herself to the elder Mrs Reed – pointing to the idea that role-play allows release, and, as Brady posits, gives ‘pupils the opportunity to explore ideas, characters and concepts; to put themselves into a story and make it into something that makes sense to them. It allows them to bring their own world knowledge, their own context to that story’ (Yandell 2014, 177).

Through this lesson, I saw that the reverence and fear I had attached to Jane Eyre’s canonical literary status had stupefied me. It had led me to discount my own value system, my own belief in the worth of drama as an inclusive and democratic learning tool, as the embodiment of the politics of education to which Jones speaks, and I ascribe. And, moreover, through the students’ evident enjoyment, I saw that such a way of working had allowed these young people, and indeed, myself, a moment’s respite from the pandemic that raged outside the classroom door. The world of the fiction was liberating them from themselves, and their present realities, allowing them to explore their thoughts and feelings through the mouthpiece of another. Jane’s story was affording them, and me, the space we had so needed – it was affording us a place of safety.

I held onto this lesson, this realisation – allowing the weight to shift, allowing for reading to lead us to recovery, together. In short, I chose to insist on narrative in defiance of the time-organisation of the school and department. And in this way, I saw reading – the collective, experiential, meandering and pleasurable quality of reading – to be a subversive act, a challenge to the neo-liberalist politics of education that positions learning as individual, measurable and finite. Reading can never be measured or contained, because it is, by its very nature, infinite. It will always stretch beyond the lesson, beyond the here and now, because, when it succeeds, it captures the very soul of the person, it becomes personal – it considers what it means to be human. In the process of reading there lies a politics of education that places the human at its heart. For, it is the people reading the text that allows the canonical work to endure; it was these young women who had transformed my fear into enjoyment, had breathed new life and meaning into the text. Moreover, we were rebuilding the collective structure of the classroom through the shared act of reading Jane Eyre, we were stepping into the world of the fiction, together, in an act that asked not for distance, for students to stand back and ‘appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage (DfE 2014), but for closeness, immersion – for a deep engagement that went beyond the text to the world itself.

Shah (2020) sees the spontaneous interjections of pupils, both verbal and physical, as indicative of such deep engagement – and I witnessed this through my students’ uncharacteristic, and often startling, vocal interjections, in particular, with regards Jane’s relationships with men. It began with a lesson looking at Rochester’s proposal, a lesson I decided to luxuriate in the reading of. As we progressed through the scene, it became increasingly hard to hear the reading above the students’ groans and lamentations, which built to a climax at this line: ‘You – poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are – I entreat to accept me as a husband’ (Bronte 1848, 212). The class was in uproar, Becca looking at me squarely once more – ‘what kind of proposal was that?’ she asked, in great seriousness. There was much anger in the room, Greta in particular incensed by what she saw as Rochester’s derogatory, domineering use of language in relation to Jane.

The class’ close attention to language at word level become striking with regards Rochester, whom they found a flawed character, and an inadequate match for Jane. His choice of language became increasingly dissected and pored over, with Marta picking up on Rochester’s claim that he had ‘resolved’ to marry Jane, questioning where Jane’s desire fitted into all this, and Nicola and Lilian, teeming with rage, telling us how, on the way to Science, they had been discussing the insinuation of rape in Rochester’s line, ‘if you won’t, I’ll try violence’ (Bronte 1848, 307). I saw that the students had come to care deeply about Jane, and to identify with her – this was not language analysis for the purposes of assessment, but for the world outside. Through Jane, they saw reflected themselves, and I saw that she was raising for them important questions and ideas, – of female identity and empowerment, love and marriage – which they were grappling with, and expressing outwardly in the form of outrage on Jane’s behalf.

When it came to Jane’s next proposal, in the form of St. John, the mutterings began early, the class’ deep engagement evident once more. The mutterings continued to build until St. John’s following lines, uttered by Rosha:

‘God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife. It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you: you are formed for labour, not for love. A missionary’s wife you must — shall be. You shall be mine: I claim you — not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service.’ (Bronte 1848, 395)

After these words, – delivered with great aplomb by Rosha, clearly relishing the role of pompous male once more – the classroom became deafening, a maelstrom of noise. What had I unleashed? I stood, looking out upon the scene, trying, and failing, to be heard above the clamour. What if Senior Management walked in, I wondered, and encountered my class of ‘top set’ students at this moment, could this be justified as ‘learning’? Yes, it could. This was learning, this was true, deep engagement – seeing the students incensed, full of life. They riled against the idea of Jane being ‘formed for labour’, they questioned it, refuted it, they had a guttural, visceral response to it. I felt energised.

In this lesson, reading had restored us, had recovered to us our energy, and through this recovery came possibility – the possibility of change. For in their energy came ceaseless questioning, pointing again to Jones’ idea of the challenge being the point, and that, through these live issues of contestation, these moments when real questions are being asked: ‘Why can’t she be alone, stay a teacher?’ ‘Why are you always asking about Jane in relation to men?’ emerges the possibility of a democratic and inclusive politics of education – a process whereby, through our reading, we construct new forms of identity, together. For in these moments, as much as my students attempt to find their place in the world, I attempt to find mine in the English classroom, and, together, through the dialogic encounters we are having, our identities are being shaped; we are finding our place.

And what occurred to me, nearing the end of the novel, was just how much time we had truly needed to find our place post-lockdown – time for the students, and me, to land, both literally and metaphorically, time for meanings to percolate and change, time for us to connect with Jane, and in turn, with one another. Jane’s story was not something we could shortcut, sidestep or gloss over – time was needed for reading.

So, in our last lesson on Jane Eyre, I felt it fitting to dwell languorously on the sentence: ‘Reader, I married him’, positioning it in relation to the many conversations we had had around marriage, power and gender. Then, nearing the end of the lesson, Aaliyah made a comment that said much of the process of reading together – ‘I see it as indicative of the evolution of Jane’ she said. ‘I see the novel in images – and it is as if the brambles, the thorns, have now been moved, and her path is clear’. Shah speaks of the uniquely reciprocal quality of reading together – of it being simultaneously inward, and outward facing (Shah 2020). In this statement, Aaliyah revealed to me the depth of both, her thorn and bramble imagery linking to an early class discussion around the prickly quality of Thornfield Hall and its owner, and her own path imagery revealing the inward-face of her reading. That both can co-exist in the same breath, the same mind, seems remarkable, and says much about the complex, multifaceted quality of reading together.

Aaliyah’s vision feels a fitting metaphor with which to sum up and reflect on the experience of reading Jane Eyre with my Year 9 class. It speaks of my own personal evolution, of my attempt to navigate and clear the path towards my own English teacher identity. But this evolution, this process of becoming, was not a solitary process, but one engendered by my students. And in this way, it feels right that Aaliyah should have the final word, for the evolution was a collective one. For, though our individual paths were blighted at first, through the process of reading, we helped one another to move the brambles and the thorns, and make our paths a little clearer. No, our paths are not cleared entirely, our future remains uncertain; we still stand on precarious land. But, through the experience of reading Jane Eyre together, – of insisting on narrative and collective structures of learning in defiance of other priorities – we have gone a little way towards recovering and regrouping, not making up for lost time, but making the loss of time together matter. And for this experience, we have been forever changed.

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Notes on contributors

Louise Torres-Ryan

Louise Torres-Ryan is currently a teacher of English and Drama at an inner-city comprehensive girls’ school. This is her third year of teaching. Before this, she worked as an actor. She is interested in how these identities can co-exist and support one another in the teaching of English. Alongside this, she is completing an English Education MA at the UCL Institute of Education.