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some voices from the profession

Here are some different voices from the broader English teaching community talking about their different work settings, their professional knowledge and their professional identity. In coming weeks, it should be possible to view video of these teachers speaking on the site.

Natalie Bellis

“… [My Yr 10 students and I] left the classroom and trooped off to the park next to the school grounds, to enact our own version of a Dead Poets Society meeting, during which they would share their oral presentations. My vision of us all having a Thoreau-like moment amidst the gum trees did not really come to fruition. I was largely disappointed with what I felt were limited attempts at creativity, and wondered where I had gone wrong.

Then, on the second last day of term I watched the same class present their research into an Aboriginal issue or aspect of culture. The standard was fantastic, but I was most impressed with the creative way that many students chose to share their ideas. One group performed an entertaining role play of a Dreamtime myth, a couple of groups incorporated visual images through their use of PowerPoint, another group asked the class to close their eyes while they helped them to imagine an Aboriginal ceremony (complete with music), another group conducted an interview with footballer Michael Long (complete with costumes), and another group explored the concept of racism by symbolically rearranging the room.

It was a great lesson, for me most of all, because I realized that just because the results of learning are not immediately apparent does not mean that the seeds have not been planted.”

(Bellis, English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 3.2, Sept. 2004. Click here to access the full hypertext:

Prue Gill

“One of the luxuries of teaching senior students is that it is quite easy to break down some of the formal and artificial barriers that commonly exist in schools. My students wander into class – sometimes a little early, sometimes a little late. They bring their recess talk with them, and I like that. They flick in and out of personal chat as they prepare for what we will be doing in Literature. It may take 10 minutes to set up the class (which, admittedly, is 75 minutes long). In the context of my particular institution, that can make me uneasy, but I see such informality as a way of learning about each other, and hence as contributing to our ability to have a conversation about an idea or a text or a piece of writing. Strict boundaries are so ‘naturalised’ in schools, that it is easy to be nervous of blurring them. I have to remind myself how artificial the bell is, how artificial the notion that we’re only working when we’re doing something formal. I like to value the ‘liminal spaces’ – what I earlier refer to as ‘border’ territory - as being productive. I tell my students that my mother broke her hip, that I’ve spent the night in hospital, that I saw a good film, that I am outraged by something in the press. They do the same. And then when they email me they often add – ‘hope the weekend is good’, or ask ‘how’s your mother’?”
(Writing = Learning, 2005, p. 153)

Bella Illesca

Bella had been teaching a particular grouping of students, a year 9 literacy class, who had been withdrawn from mainstream English classes to address what was labeled their ‘deficiency’ in English. Her narrative tells the story of how together they (teachers and students) managed to subvert this sort of labeling. She is talking here about the changes in these students by the end of the year.

“Paul’s [significantly improved] attendance, [his] creativity and enthusiasm for the work we were doing in this Year 9 literacy class was much more than ‘good fun’. The ‘fun’ and ‘easy’ time that Paul [talked about] stemmed from being engaged in interesting and challenging literacy practices that acknowledged his situated history, experiences, beliefs, and the characteristic ways in which he used oral and written language to communicate with others in the classroom. In this class he knew that he did not have to struggle on alone because learning did not have to be an individual activity, but something that happened with and between people. He came to feel that he had something to offer to the learning in which everyone was participating and that he was capable of authoring his own experiences through his writing in a way that would have significance for others. These students perceived their learning as ‘fun’ and enjoyable because they were working out of spaces and within social relationships that did not define them according to what they could not do, but by their potential. Certainly, they still farted, chewed gum, made loud noises and gave each other ‘nipple cramps,’ but through their writing they also demonstrated a wonderful capacity for being clever, funny, ironic, honest, inspiring and so many other things that cannot be captured in any single account [or test] of their achievements.” (Writing = Learning, 2005, p. 179)

[See also Bella’s article in English teaching: Practice and critique, 3.3, Dec. 2004. Click here to access it:

Douglas McClenaghan and Brenton Doecke

“Many English teachers create opportunities for young people to explore popular culture in their classrooms. This does not mean aping their tastes and enthusiasms, but attending to the way popular culture mediates their social relationships and the formation of their identities. You need only wander around shopping centres on weekends to find young people immersed in a range of activities, from lining up with huge boxes of popcorn at the latest Hollywood blockbuster to singlemindedly pounding the machines in games parlours. Not content to occupy one place and live through one moment, they simultaneously chat into their mobile phones or text-message people located elsewhere. They talk and laugh excitedly, parading their allegiances and identities in a veritable Shakespearean display.

Young people inhabit a rich semiotic environment, full of songs, dialects, slang, corporate logos, cross-gartered vanities, mustachioed Violas and other personalities: ‘A great while ago the world begun, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain…’. It is vital that English teachers cultivate a sensitivity to the cultural practices in which adolescents engage in their everyday lives and that they open up a space for young people to explore the meaning-making potential of those practices in their classrooms. The challenge for English teachers is to break down the divide between school literacy practices and youth culture, providing a curriculum that matches the richness of the semiotic practices in which young people participate outside schools.” (W=L, p. 247)

[See also Doug’s narrative in English teaching: practice and critique, 2.2, Sept. 2003. Click here to access the narrative:

Judie Mitchell

The following excerpt was written in the days before official curriculums talked about authentic rich tasks as in the much heralded new curriculum in Victoria, Australia – ie. Victorian Essential learning standards (VELS) – with its emphasis on exploring and enhancing links between curricular domains and disciplines. It will be interesting to see how, or to what extent, Judie’s concerns are addressed in the day-to-day lived curriculum of VELS.

“Many of us struggle with the problem of the cut-up curriculum in secondary schools. The divisions between subjects and periods means that kids don’t transfer their learning. In English, this seems unbelievably absurd. If ever there were understandings and skills that needed to be transferred, those learned in English are surely top of the list. Many students still do not carry their learned essay skills, for example, from one subject to another. My students do not carry their ‘learned’ punctuation skills from many years of exercises into their writing. Making links is a powerful learning tool, but our school system militates against what is, I believe, a natural human behaviour.” (in Doecke, ed., Responding to students’ writing, 1999, p. 113)

David Lee

“…the current pre-occupation with outcomes-based assessment, for purposes of public accountability, as well as for reporting individual students’ achievements, runs the risk of distracting attention from formative assessment practices that are directed to enhancing student learning. When [I enter] a conversation with a student about the student’s progress as a writer, and when that conversation is focused on a range of pieces, [I] may well have notions of outcomes – what knowledges and skills the student has demonstrated – as a framework for reporting the student’s achievement. But the purpose of entering into such conversations, and creating opportunities for them to occur, has far more to do with encouraging students as reflective and active participants in their own learning than it does with reporting student achievement.’ (Responding to students’ writing, 1999, p. 107)
[Cf. also the ‘Assessment for learning’ website developed by the Curriculum Corporation. Click here: ]

Scott Bulfin

“I have tried, sometimes successfully and at others times unsuccessfully, to invite students into a different sort of dialogic relationship, what others have argued is a reframing of curriculum as communication or as a conversation (cf Barnes 1976; Applebee 1996). This is more than an end of semester chance to ‘get the teacher back.’ I encourage students to continue the conversations we begin in class, outside class, whether in the corridor, via email, online chat, blogs, or whatever medium is available. I want to suggest that when students have an opportunity to do these things there are important and beneficial flow-on effects; certainly for classroom relationships and dynamics, and for students’ confidence, and sometimes for their desire to engage each other about issues that bear some relevance to their lives in and out-of-school. I also hope that in encouraging students to talk and write to me often about our classes, informally, we might begin to carve out a space where they do not feel they have to tell me what they think I want to hear. I hope that they can ‘try on’ different voices and find one that fits (or several), all the while letting their thoughts and talk move and shape around the ideas swirling in their conversations and around their lives.” (In press, 2006)

Graham Parr

"There is something distinctly Dickensian about the political environment in which English teachers in Australia are working at the moment. It’s as if a dour and humourless Thomas Gradgrind is driving education policy making on all sorts of levels. More and more, it’s about tighter accountability. It’s about more efficient education. It’s about (as Dickens put it) ‘causing’ students to be ‘strictly educated.’

Thus we hear the call that all students should be taught according to a centrally constructed Australian Certificate of Education. Students should be ‘caused’ to learn in highly regulated, centrally prescribed curriculums. And teachers should be required to restrict all of their professional learning toward this content and only this content.

If attempts to exert ‘strict’ control and to impose more constraints over teachers’ professional learning opportunities continue, I believe the consequences will be bleak for the professionalism of English teachers in Australia. It will be the professional equivalent of concreting over the rich and imaginative spaces that accommodate English teachers’ current practices, and degrading the professional learning spaces that enliven these practices. The outcome might appear to the Gradgrinds of this world to be a more efficient, more highly managed force of teachers, but these teachers will tend to be impersonal, unimaginative technicians, inhibited in the development of a meaningful sense of professional identity. Indeed, it may be, as Goodson (2003) says, that such attempts will turn teaching into a job ‘attractive only to the compliant and the docile, and conversely unattractive to the creative and resourceful’ (p. 84).

On the other hand, I am encouraged by the professional possibilities I see all around me day after day. I feel proud to be connected to a profession in which imaginative, collaborative, critically attuned English teacher colleagues (and pre-service teachers) continue to subvert the attempts by others to control and constrain them."

DISCUSSION POINT: Are there any issues about teaching identity or teacher knowledge that these teachers raise here that you’d like to comment on?



	If standards could be used to promote genuine professional development, improve knowledge of teaching practice and raise the professional standing of teachers, I welcome them. If all teachers could be involved in the kind of collaborative, productive development of literacy teaching standards we were involved in with STELLA – fantastic. Robyn Perkins 2000