Editorial:Futures for English

We could hardly have imagined what the immediate ‘Futures for English’ would look like when we set out the call for papers for this Special Edition in 2019. As we write this Editorial, the world has been plunged into online and home-based schooling in response to the ‘once in a century’ COVID-19 pandemic: it is impossible, in the midst of this, to conceive what English, or indeed schooling will look like in the next months and years. English teachers at all stages of school and tertiary education have rapidly developed or expanded technological literate practices, as students encounter new approaches to the reading and production of texts in different forms and spaces. In Australia, this worldwide crisis follows an intense and unprecedented period of bushfire, where lives and livelihoods were lost, towns and national parks razed, smoke blanketed major cities, and dystopian accounts of destruction and survival dominated the media. We know that the stories that come from these unprecedented, life-changing local and global events will impact the nature of the texts we read and produce, and therefore the nature of subject English which has, since its inception, been responsive to changing contexts, discourses and social imperatives (McLean Davies, Doecke & Mead, 2013)

School English, literature and the knowledge-base question

This article takes up questions about knowledge and the school curriculum with respect to literary studies within subject English. Its intention is to focus on literary studies in English from the context of current waves of curriculum reform, rather than as part of the conversations primarily within the field of English, to raise questions about the knowledge agenda, and the knowledge-base agenda for teaching and teacher education. The selection of texts and form of study of literature within the English curriculum has long been an area of controversy. Without assuming a particular position on knowledge in this area, this article shows that important questions of what knowledge-base teachers are expected to bring to their work are elided both in current regulations and debates, and in research on ‘good teaching’ in this area. If ‘literary studies’ (as a discipline or university major) is itself an unstable and changing field, what kind of knowledge does a good English teacher bring to their work? This paper takes up these questions in the context of the Australian Curriculum and standards for teacher registration, but it also points to the way these issues about knowledge are of broader relevance for researchers and teacher education