Editorial: Culturally responsive research and pedagogy

This special and extra issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique had its origins in an international symposium held in the Faculty of Education at the University of Waikato in November, 2010. The Faculty had already established a tradition of hosting conferences on the theme of language, education and diversity, which had been organised in 2003 and 2007 with input from the Departments of Arts and Language Education, Applied Linguistics and representatives from tainui iwi, and in recognition of the University of Waikato’s strengths in respect of bicultural and multicultural education. In 2010, the thematic focus shifted from a specific focus on language to a broader

Heteroglossia : a space for developing critical language awareness?

This paper reports on research into the challenges of implementing a critical writing pedagogy within a teacher education program in Australia. Participants in this study are student teachers enrolled in a compulsory subject, &ldquo;Language and Literacy in Secondary School&rdquo;, a subject requiring them to develop a knowledge of the role of language and literacy across the secondary school curriculum and to show personal proficiency in literacy as part of graduate outcomes for teacher education dictated by the State Government of Victoria. To develop an understanding of the way that language has shaped their lives, students write a narrative about their early literacy experiences &ndash; a task which they all find very challenging, especially in comparison with the formal writing of other university subjects. Rather than simply reminiscing about their early childhood, they are encouraged to juxtapose voices from the past and the present, and to combine a range of texts within their writing. Later in the semester they revisit these accounts of their early literacy experiences and, in a separate piece of writing, endeavour to place these accounts within the contexts of theories and debates they have encountered in the course of completing this unit. The students&rsquo; writing provides a small window on how they are experiencing their tertiary education and their preparation as teachers, including the managerial controls that are currently shaping university curriculum and pedagogy. We argue that such heteroglossic texts (Bakhtin, 1981) prompt students to stretch their repertoires as language-users, enabling them to develop a socially critical awareness of language and literacy, including the literacy practices in which they engage as university students.<br /

Beginning again: a response to Rosen and Christie

Genre theory has been around for a long time now. The exchange between Michael Rosen and Frances Christie recently featured in Changing English is the latest in a series of exchanges between advocates of genre and their critics over the past three decades or so. Our aim in this response-essay is not to weigh up the merits of the cases made by Rosen and Christie. Rather, we want to think about how individual teachers might confront the hegemony of genre theory and the harmful effects we believe it is having on language education. Our starting point is Lisa&rsquo;s own professional practice, as she enacts it from day to day at a state secondary school in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, one of the most ethnically diverse regions in Australia. We draw on Lisa&rsquo;s journal to construct a sense of the time and place, as well as samples of students&rsquo; writing that she gathered in the course of a year with her Year 7 class, in order to gain a better understanding of her work as an English teacher. How does this material compare with &lsquo;all the genre work done over some 25&ndash;30 years&rsquo; by the genre theorists? What &lsquo;knowledge&rsquo; will she be able to construct on the basis of the classroom observations that she made over that time? What should we make of the fact that her world is not the same as the world as genre theorists conceive it

Teacher education and critical inquiry : the use of activity theory in exploring alternative understandings of language and literacy

This paper explores the challenges of espousing a critical pedagogy within the managerial climate that presently shapes teacher education. It argues that current discourses of professionalism are incommensurate with a view of literacy as social practice and that they disregard complex semiotic ecologies in which both school and university students operate. Graduate teachers are constructed as the &lsquo;providers&rsquo; of decontextualised literacy skills to school students whose existing communication networks are ignored. Rejecting this narrow view of professional practice, we draw on activity theory to analyse the social configuration of tertiary students&rsquo; identities and the textual resources that mediate their professional learning. This kind of research is needed to reveal the contradictions within and between activity systems in which tertiary students participate as well as to construct possible solutions to the contradictions identified.<br /

Standards-based accountability : reification, responsibility and the ethical subject

Over the last two decades, teachers in Australia have witnessed multiple incarnations of the idea of &lsquo;educational accountability&rsquo; and its enactment. Research into this phenomenon of educational policy and practice has revealed various layers of the concept, particularly its professional, bureaucratic, political and cultural dimensions that are central to the restructuring of educational governance and the reorganization of teachers&rsquo; work. Today, accountability constitutes a core concept of neoliberal policy-making in education, both fashioning and normalizing what counts as teacher professionalism in the &lsquo;audit society.&rsquo; This article focuses specifically on the recent introduction by the Australian Federal Government of standardised literacy testing in&nbsp;all states across Australia, and raises questions about the impact of this reform on the work practices of English literacy teachers in primary and secondary schools. We draw on data collected as part of a major research project funded by the Australian Research Council, involving interviews with teachers about their experiences of implementing standardised testing. The article traces the ways in which teachers&rsquo; work is increasingly being mediated by standardised literacy testing to show how these teachers grapple with the tensions between state-wide mandates and a sense of their professional responsibility for their students

Hunger artists : literacy, testing & accountability

This article interrogates the dominant ideology that is shaping education in Victoria at the current moment. It does so by analysing the government school publication, Education Times, focusing on the years 2000&ndash;2003. During those years the Victorian Government invested a significant amount of money into improving the literacy outcomes of so-called underperforming students through initiatives such as Restart and Access to Excellence. Education Times played an important role in promoting these initiatives, and thus provides a useful vehicle for examining the ideology driving educational reform in Victoria

Teacher Education and Critical Inquiry : the Use of Activity Theory in Exploring Alternative Understandings of Language and Literature

This article explores the challenges of espousing a critical pedagogy within the managerial climate that presently shapes teacher education. Current discourses of professionalism are incommensurate with an understanding of the way that literacy practices are grounded in the social worlds in which both school and university students operate. Such discourses construct graduate teachers as the providers of decontextualised literacy skills to school students whose existing communication networks are ignored. We argue that an alternative understanding of professional practice can be developed by focusing on the textual resources university students use to mediate their learning, and by locating their emerging professional identities within the activity systems and meaning-making practices in which they participate