Editorial: The professional content knowledge of the English/literacy teacher: Addressing the implications of diversity

When this topic was mooted by the journal editors, it was seen as having two parts: 1. The professional content knowledge of the English/literacy teacher, and 2. The implications of this “knowledge construction” for classrooms that in many places are becoming increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse. We saw ourselves as wanting to provide an opportunity to revisit themes raised in two early issues of English Teaching: Practice and Critique. In the inaugural issue of the journal (1:1; November 2002), members of the newly established Editorial Board and others shared a personalised account of the “state of English (Language Arts)” in their respective constituencies. The overriding question was: “What is it like to be an English teacher right now in this time and place?

Book review: "A Tingling Catch": A century of NZ cricket poems 1864-2009.

The article reviews the book "A Tingling Catch: A Century of NZ Cricket Poems 1864-2009," edited by Mark Pirie

English teaching in New Zealand: The current play of the state

Curriculum, assessment and qualifications reforms in New Zealand have wrought significant changes in the construction of English as a subject and in the practices of English teachers. While the content of the new English curriculum suggests continuities with past syllabuses, its structural parameters indicate a different discursive agenda. Reforms in senior secondary school qualifications have also acted to construct English in ways that need to be contested and which may be making the subject less responsive to changes in textual practice resulting from the rise in digital technologisation. In a variety of ways, the reforms are also serving to reshape the everyday classroom practices of English teachers, both overtly and covertly through a process of discursive colonisation. Because the reforms have been highly centralised, state initiated and state managed, they have posed a huge challenge to teacher professionalism and identity. Through all of this, the hegemonic status of English as the vehicle through which literature is studied remains unchallenged. The article concludes by listing five challenges to English teachers

Teachers as action researchers: Towards a model of induction

Towards the end of 2006, a group of secondary and primary teachers, in collaboration with university researchers based at the University of Waikato, began a two-year journey where they researched their own practice as teachers of literature in multicultural classrooms in Auckland, New Zealand. This presentation briefly outlines the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI), which initially provided a vision of teachers, working in partnership with university researchers, researching their own practice with the aim of enhancing the practice of the teaching profession as a whole. Through the eyes of one of the university-based researchers, but drawing on the experiences of four of the teacher participants, this presentation reflects on factors that had a bearin

Do university rankings contribute to transparency?

The paper outlines the findings of research into league tables (university rankings) and their impact on higher education institutions (HEIs) in England. It suggests that league tables fit well with the UK's hierarchy of institutions and the increased marketisation and consumerism of the higher education system. However, university rankings are shown to largely reflect and reinforce reputation and tend to conceal quality, performance, added value, value for money, fitness for purpose etc (in other words, the very information that consumers of HE are looking for). HEIs in the UK are responding to university rankings and the individual indicators featured, but they are obscuring better measures of mission achievement and inducing perverse behaviour. In effect, it is argued, league tables maintain and refine the hierarchy of HEIs, despite the abolition of the binary divide between universities and polytechnics in 1992 and the creation of new, so-called ‘teaching-only’, universities from the larger previously higher education colleges in 2004

Book review: The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap

This article reviews the book “The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap”, by Michael Harlow

Editorial: Grammar in the face of diversity

The river one dips one’s toes into from one editorial to the next is never the same, as Heraclitus might have observed. Part 1 of this double issue (December, 2005) consisted of eight articles from contributors based in five countries: the United States, England, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. Part 2 contains six articles and two teacher narratives from the United States (two), Scotland, the Netherlands, Australia (2), Indonesia and Denmark. The inclusion of contributors from European countries outside of the United Kingdom is a reminder that debates over the “grammar” question are not confined to the Anglophonic world. I am grateful to Amos van Gelderen and Anette Wulff for finding time to contribute to a journal, which hitherto has addressed itself to readers in a relatively small range of (officially) English speaking constituencies. I am also grateful to Handoyo Widodo for his contribution, written in the context of English-language teaching in Indonesia

Minding the aesthetic: The place of the literary in education and research.

The article discusses the significance of aesthetic as a mode of cognition and means of social cohesion. It notes the relation of aesthetic knowledge with the perception or intuition, the emergence of such awareness into something durable and the response to the embodiment. It describes the evolution of aesthetic delight in the human species, the sense of sense of beauty arising on one's realization of the formal qualities of something, through the poem presented by the author on achievement

Introduction

An introduction to the international study of the Changing Academic Profession and the pre-survey reports from twelve of the twenty or so countries participating in the study