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_ English Teachers: a diverse community of learners Negotiating the sameness and the tensions Connections between professional and student learning communities What are pre-service teachers learning and how are they learning? Teachers learning how to know their students? Professional learning: obligation or accomplishment? school (university) stuff’ and ‘practical stuff’ Writing critically reflexive narratives as a focus for professional learning Critical inquiry as professional learning _ Page 11 _
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professional learning

english teachers: a diverse community of learners

English teachers come to teaching with very different biographies. They tend to give very different accounts of themselves as learners in secondary English classrooms. Some thoroughly relished their English and/or Literature learning and would like future students to share in the joys similarly. Others recall their time as learners in secondary English classes with … less enthusiasm. Amongst their reasons for becoming English teachers is a desire to provide a richer more enjoyable English classroom than they experienced. English/literature studies at university are remembered very differently by different teachers.

Pre-service students have invariably traveled diverse academic pathways on their way to their teacher education courses. Some have completed three years of an undergraduate degree in various discipline areas (in a BA, BMus, BSc, BEc ….) and are now ‘doing a DipEd’, and some are completing a degree that has combined discipline studies with education studies from the outset. Different teacher education settings themselves are not monolithic in their approaches. These differences in academic pathways serve to deepen the diversity of backgrounds that pre-service teachers bring to their learning to become a teacher.  

And yet, despite our different biographies and cultures, most of us share a love of reading texts of many different kinds. In this respect, at least, English teachers are similar. This mix of homogeneity and heterogeneity is not unusual in teacher education institutions; indeed, it is characteristic of most English teaching communities

DISCUSSION POINT: There is something seductive about communities being united and speaking with one voice. We often hear politicians or policy makers hankering for a ‘common language’ in education broadly and in teacher education especially. What do you see as the benefits and dangers of such a ‘common language’?  

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_ English Teachers: a diverse community of learners Negotiating the sameness and the tensions Connections between professional and student learning communities What are pre-service teachers learning and how are they learning? Teachers learning how to know their students? Professional learning: obligation or accomplishment? school (university) stuff’ and ‘practical stuff’ Writing critically reflexive narratives as a focus for professional learning Critical inquiry as professional learning _ Page 11 _
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voices
"English and art were always my favourite subjects. Expression for me was like cooking (and I LOVED food!); the art was the chance to get messy but the writing and analysis of English was the creation and consumption of something to be savoured, tasting the richness of rolling chocolate around on the tongue."

Sam Boucher
Pre-service teacher ('05)

 

 

“The subtext of our literary education was the continuance of our moral education. It was organised around the premise that the complex world of personal relationships was our primary focus and interest, and fundamental to our developing feminine identity. It was stifling, and it did not for me open up the worlds.”

SS
Pre-service teacher (’05)

 

  

 
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