The act of representation is fraught with complexity. Always, it involves questions of what is being represented and how (questions of mimetic subject and technique) and, equally important, who is doing the representation, from what standpoint, on whose behalf, and with what warrant, is the sign being made (questions that are inescapably ethical and political). In the essay which opens this issue, Rosie Hunt explores these complexities of representation in considering her responsibilities as a researcher to the young people who are participants in her research. These obligations extend far beyond the gaining of informed consent to the ways in which learner identities are rendered in accounts of classroom practice.
What emerges from Hunt’s argument is a picture of research, and of learning, that is irreducibly social, dialogic and contingent. Similar emphases are to be found in the contribution from Gill Anderson and Benjamin Elms. Resisting currently powerful versions of teacher formation that privilege quite reductive, technicist/cognitivist models of teaching and of teacher education, Anderson and Elms insist on the vital importance of the affective, the situated and the relational.
Issues of representation are central to the following two pieces. Geoff Bender reports on research, conducted in a predominantly White high school in upstate New York, that investigates students’ responses to ‘diversity insertion’ – that is, the tokenistic inclusion in the literary canon of a text such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. While many of the responses, informed by what Bender terms the ‘rhetoric of white innocence’, might indicate that the novel had no effect on students’ understanding of the oppressive force of colonialism, there was clear evidence that the experience of reading the text created spaces for other students, particularly those occupying marginalised positions within the school community, to articulate more critical, anti-colonialist perspectives. John Hodgson and Ann Harris explore the genealogy of E. D. Hirsch’s concept of ‘cultural literacy’ and the way in which this concept has been mobilised within current education policy in England, in a consciously exclusionary, monocultural, monolingual, nation-building project.
One of the problems with the Hirschian project for a single national language and culture is that it entails a wilful disregard for the fact that culture and language are constantly being remade, differently, in ways that reflect the interests of the sign-makers. How code-switching enabled two Palestinian writers to represent their diasporic identities and experiences is the subject of the essay by Ahmad Qababa and Bilal Hamamra. Examining instances of the incorporation of Arabic words and phrases in memoirs by Edward Said and Fawaz Turki, they argue that such code-switching serves multiple purposes, enacting the rupture of diaspora and demonstrating affiliation to the lost homeland, but also (elsewhere) functioning as a sign of multiple, heteroglossic identity.
The following two pieces might be construed as contributions to our understanding of writing pedagogy – and of reading, or literature, pedagogy. Scott Jarvie and Michael Lockett explore a range of close writing practices, all of which tend to blur the lines between reader and writer, between textual analysis and creativity, between study and play. Kate Bomford, drawing on her experience of teaching Frankenstein, argues that creative tasks can produce (and demonstrate) critical insight, that writing in role is particularly generative of students’ illuminating, thoughtful and affective engagements with literature, and that the critical essay is, by contrast, a somewhat limited (and much overused) form.
We conclude this issue with an essay by John Yandell, Faduma Mahamed and Soumeya Ziad. Drawing on observations of two parallel English lessons, they explore the sharp contrast in how questions are posed, and who poses them, and the equally profound difference in the versions of English that are instantiated in these two lessons.