The sacred and the profane : writing the secondary English subjects and the delimiting of professional identity

The research I present in this portfolio is broadly concerned with the programming, politics and ethics of secondary English and its teaching in New South Wales, my home state, and Australia in the years 2003 to 2013. It was undertaken in a time of significant curriculum change. These developments took place in a media and political context that was generating a good deal of comment and controversy, including strident criticism from some commentators and politicians of the quality of contemporary English teaching. The research specifically relates to the conditions of being for the secondary English subjects in a time of curriculum change and contestation. Following Green and Beavis (1996), English subjects is used here to signify that, in the field of English studies, subject identity necessarily entails consideration of both the subject that is taught, in its different historical configurations or ‘models’, and the discursive ‘writing’ of the teacher subject that each ‘model’ anticipates. I argue that a notable element of the contestation currently surrounding the teaching subject English in Australia is that it has exceeded various moves to delimit the secondary English curriculum. The English teacher subject has also become a site of contestation upon which the future prospects of English depend. The struggle for the English subjects is about setting the boundaries of possibility for English teachers’ pedagogy and defining their role as agents of a preferred ‘model’ of English. The preface (Chapter 2) and four papers that comprise Chapter 3 of the portfolio accordingly explore how English teachers can reconceptualise their subject and their practice through ‘rewriting’ their professional identity in their classroom programming. It has a conceptual-theoretical basis in the development of what I call ‘a transformative model for programming secondary English’. The act of writing a programme is understood here as (professional) writing in a poststructuralist sense, through which English teachers write themselves into being. The ‘transformative model’ is a recursive curriculum model integrating significant models of English teaching into a coherent, developmental teaching and learning cycle that I have come to recognise as enacting an ethic of hospitality to difference. The four papers presented in Chapter 4 extend on my exploration of the significance and affordances of this ethic to secondary English teachers by recontextualising it within consideration of professional responsibility and advocacy, primarily through the lens of dialogical ethics (Kostogriz and Doecke, 2007 and 2013) and its theoretical underpinnings. The movement from programming to advocacy, I argue, was a necessary extension of the critical-theoretical basis of the ‘transformative model’ given it was developed and disseminated in a time of subject contestation. In such conditions, advocacy is integral to, even indivisible from, the dissemination of the sort of research for praxis I have undertaken (cf. Mullen and Kealy, 2005; Parr, 2010). The research enhances understanding of key aspects of the professional identity work English teachers can undertake in the context of subject renewal through their programming and in publicly representing their work through other forms of advocacy, which is now widely considered to be a defining element of teacher professionalism (e.g. AATE and ALEA, 2002). It demonstrates possibilities for challenge and resistance available to secondary English teachers in “speaking back to standards-based reforms” (Parr, 2010), and contributes in an original way to the “increasingly researched area of English teachers’ professional identities” (Sawyer, 2006b, p.30; cf. Doecke, Homer and Nixon, 2003)