Myth and Christian Reading Practice in English Teaching

This chapter identifies myths which hold special significance in English classrooms, and, in doing so, weave them into the otherwise conventional, well-nested, even imperial logics of English as a school subject. Barthes explains as much, arguing that myths have a social history, and are in that sense unnatural, though they operate by naturalizing. Yet English teaching and the research which undergirds it has historically sought to demystify the field, positioning its relation to myth antagonistically. The chapter focuses on myths of linguistic and grammatical instruction, which cut across the traditional domains of English teaching as well as recent curricular expansions towards media literacy, and new and multi-literacies. A consideration of the myths that shape English as a school subject, both critically and affirmatively, helps to better see and render the beauty in the daily work

The Black Box: Close Reading Literary Life

This paper reimagines a quintessential literary practice: close reading.The autoethnographic inquiry examines the relationship between a single text and my experience with it as teacher, student, reader and writer: Jennifer Egan’s short story “Black Box”. In doing so I make a case for the literary as a useful mode for being and teaching in classrooms, and for the literariness of the lives caught up in those classrooms. I examine various properties of the text, including the story’s unusual form, the implications of its content and genre, the narrative voice, and the central metaphor of a black box. Reading through these, I consider how the story came to shape my imagination and practice as an English teacher. A final section considers the limitations of such a formalist approach to close reading, exploring how a novel framing of close reading as relational work makes ethical readings (Gallop, 2000) possible. The paper concludes with an analysis of the implications of that approach to reading and advances resonance as a concept of value for English teachers and researchers interested in thinking about the relationship among teachers, students, and texts

I never quite got it, what they meant: an introduction to poetic teaching

We have become well-familiar with how unpoetic teaching can be. The prevalence, furthered by much recent reform, of a systematic school culture focused on accountability, standardisation, and learnification often renders teaching dehumanised work. This paper theorises a poetics of teaching. We begin considering poetics, focusing on figurative language as a concept at the core of the art. Figurative language offers a model for figurative education, in which teachers treat their practice as metaphors treat language, a move that opens education towards complexity and ambiguity. Further, we consider what makes poetry matter to people: resonance, or the relational aspects of writing. We explore resonance in conversation with philosophies of relationality, theorising how poetic teaching necessitates an engagement with the relational. We find what may be required to teach poetically is risk-taking, risks all the more beautiful for the ways they engage teachers and students as complex persons doing meaningful work

Difficult Knowledge and the English Classroom: A Catholic Framework Using Cormac McCarthy\u27s The Road

In this article, the authors explore the generative possibilities of risk-taking in the Catholic school English classroom. They associate pedagogical risk with what Deborah Britzman (1998) has called “difficult knowledge”—content that causes students to consider social trauma. Incorporating difficult knowledge meaningfully requires English teachers to take significant pedagogical risks, especially in the Catholic school classroom. Drawing on critical theology and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) as a difficult text, the authors employ a case study looking at how the traumatic difficulty of the novel could be fruitfully taught at a Catholic school. How might students reckon with The Road in a way that recognizes the terrible difficulty of its subjects? How might this difficulty help them to better understand their schools, their communities, and themselves? In engaging these questions, the authors provide new possibilities for class discussion, student engagement, and assessment. Connaissances difficiles et la classe d\u27anglais : Utilisation de La route (The Road) par Cormac McCarthy dans un programme d\u27enseignement catholique Dans cet article, les auteurs étudient les possibilités génératives de prise de risques dans les classes d\u27anglais des écoles catholiques. Ils associent le risque pédagogique avec ce que Deborah Britzman (1998) a appelé des « connaissances difficiles », c\u27est-à-dire un contenu qui amène les élèves à prendre en compte le traumatisme social. L\u27intégration fructueuse des connaissances difficiles exige que les professeurs d\u27anglais prennent des risques pédagogiques substantiels, notamment dans la salle de classe d\u27une école catholique. En s\u27inspirant de la théologie critique et du roman de Cormac McCarthy La route qui est un texte difficile, les auteurs se servent d\u27une étude de cas montrant la manière dont la difficulté traumatique du roman peut faire l\u27objet d\u27un enseignement fructueux dans une école catholique. Comment les élèves peuvent-ils considérer La route d\u27une manière qui reconnaisse les terribles difficultés des sujets traités ? Comment cette difficulté peut-elle les aider à mieux comprendre leurs écoles, leurs communautés et eux-mêmes? En soulevant ces questions, les auteurs ouvrent de nouvelles possibilités de discussions en classe, d\u27engagement de la part des élèves et d\u27évaluation. Mots-clés :Œuvres en langue anglaise, littérature, connaissances difficiles, risque, évaluation, écoles catholiques La route Cormac McCarthy Conocimiento difícil y la clase de inglés: un marco católico usando The Road, de Cormac McCarthy En el presente artículo, los autores exploran las posibilidades generativas de toma de riesgos en la clase de inglés de la escuela católica. Asocian riesgos pedagógicos con lo que Deborah Britzman (1998) ha llamado “conocimiento difícil”, contenido que provoca que los estudiantes consideren el trauma social. Para introducir de una manera profunda el conocimiento difícil, los profesores de inglés deben tomar riesgos pedagógicos significativos, especialmente en las aulas de la escuela católica. Extrayendo de la teología crítica y de la novela The Road (2006), de Cormac McCarthy, un texto difícil, los autores emplean un estudio de caso que observa cómo la dificultad traumática de la novela se podría enseñar fructíferamente en una escuela católica. ¿Cómo podrían considerar los estudiantes The Road de una manera que reconozca la terrible dificultad de sus personajes? ¿Cómo podría esta dificultad ayudarles a comprender mejor las escuelas, sus comunidades y a ellos mismos? Al abarcar estas preguntas, los autores ofrecen nuevas posibilidades para la discusión en clase, la motivación del estudiante y la evaluación. Palabras clave: Lengua y literatura inglesa, literatura, conocimiento difícil, riesgo, evaluación, escuelas católicas, The Road, Cormac McCarth

“We do investigate ourselves”: figurative assessment practices as meaning-making in English education

In this study of microteaching in a secondary English methods course, we intentionally stray from normative assessment practice, instead asking pre-service teachers to provide feedback on their peers’ microteaching using assessment practices designed to orient them figuratively. The term ‘figurative’ refers to ‘figurative language’: the bringing together of multiple, seemingly unrelated things, through associative configurations, and placing them side-by-side in order to reorient thought towards new or unexpected meanings. This study reframes assessment, not as a means of collecting data on what students have learned from a given lesson in order to evaluate and augment learning, but instead figuratively, as providing opportunities to expand and imagine ways of meaning-making through and with assessment. We examine in detail four modes of figurative assessment practices through which we sought to surprise and disorient students, producing new and different kinds of responses to microteaching that went beyond normative feedback practices

Intellectual humility and the difficult knowledge of theology

We seek, in this analytical essay, to complicate the conversation around knowledge production in the academy by proposing “intellectual humility” as a mode for moving toward new avenues of knowledge-making, particularly as an epistemic stance against the kinds of “intellectual arrogance” (Lynch, 2017) that have made certain avenues of knowledge, especially in the social sciences, sparsely traveled in the last half century. Drawing on the conceptual frames of difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998; Garrett, 2017; Pitt & Britzman, 2003) and weak theology (Caputo, 2006), we turn to our own stories of faith and inquiry as ways in to thinking humility, through which we draw broader conclusions about what humility may offer that’s especially useful in this particular post-truth moment. We might unsettle the dangerous story that theology has no use for educational research, other than as a caution against the backwardness of faith in a patriotic god. If we’re to consider the possibility of evidentiary epistemologies as valuable in the work of combating ignorance and asserting certain values in and around education, then we’d do well to further diversify our sense of the possible in public education to include the difficult knowledge of theology as a rich framework for pursuing new ends

Literary Philosophy and the Use of Uselessness

We build this work from the memory of the time we stumbled into tulips at city hall. As guard sirens fled off into the night, we wondered, “Maybe we can borrow some.” We ripped handfuls from the ground and ran. “Don’t worry,” we said, “they are too busy to catch us stealing tulips.” Likewise, we get away with this useless project because others are busy doing useful work: exigent, coherent, important work. We support much of that busyness, and at the same time wonder what is lost with all that attention towards usefulness. What we offer here, through a hybrid of reflective, poetic, essayistic and scholarly forms, may be an attempted escape from the obligations of scholarship. It may be indulgent. It may tell the reader nothing, or only what the reader already knows. Yet it is oriented towards an enduring promise. This is the promise of a literary experience, understood as a kind of resonance, ineffable primarily, but nevertheless one that matters. Such a promise is found in the power and possibility of story, through poetic lines that must be broken and conceptual tethers left incommensurable. We enter this space of breaking and unfurling through an inquiry into use. The question of use and uselessness is one way of holding human contradictions in both hands. By this we mean that we make and leave space for literary and philosophical inquiries considered useless—in that they do not resolve anything—but nevertheless matterful. We suggest that readers meander these curated pages as they \ meander through an art exhibition or a museum. Within a literary exhibition one can wander through pages, spaces, and ideas. Pause. Dwell. Think. We curate a literary home beyond the demands of making something of use and we invite the reader to sit with us. As with an exhibition, possibility cannot be controlled for and so we exist in potentiality acknowledging both its positive and negative potential. Through our use, misuse, and abuse of literature and philosophy, we make ourselves a home in a possibility that can only be offered, not demanded. We manifest this literary home through fragments of philosophy evoked through a series of microfictions. As scholars, learners, teachers, and writers we are often asked to defend what our writing does. And it is implicitly suggested that knowledge creation is the result. What is the use of a work that cannot promise new knowledge? Literary knowledge may only be one gorgeous possible ordering. It is a practice which produces a kind of knowledge which is no knowledge, which is useless. If we must answer what it is that our writing does we suppose that—if anything—it offers up fictions for philosophizing. We explore a home for this work in scholarly contexts which too often find it useless, which is to say we position uselessness as a concept of value for our work as scholars, writers, and teachers. In the end we name no new uses but fiction; we steal tulips