Editorial

Abstract

Not very long ago, a student on the pre-service teacher education programme that I lead told a story about the end of term test that confronted her class of elevenand twelve-year olds at her practicum school in East London. Presented with a list of poets, the pupils were asked to arrange them in chronological order, according to the date of their deaths. The task represents a form of perfection, the reductio ad absurdum of the current fashion for a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum. Here was English as a school subject reimagined as a set of easily testable facts; more than this, though, as facts that could not possibly be of assistance to a student’s efforts to develop a coherent picture of English in general or of poetry in particular. This was English shorn not just of difficulty but of meaning itself. You may not be surprised to read that this version of English is not one that figures prominently in the essays that follow. Each, in their very different ways, wrestles with the school subject and its attendant pursuits and pedagogies as contested spaces. Each acknowledges, too, that thinking about English involves an engagement with history; but the histories that are at stake here are infinitely richer, more complex and more uncertain than a list of dates. We start with Brenton Doecke’s account of his own formation – an act of Gramscian inventory-taking that simultaneously involves probing the significance that Marxist literary theory has had for him as an English educator. As Scholes (1998, 151) suggested, ‘Understanding the category of literature as a problem – and a problem with a history – is part of what every serious student of English should know.’ Doecke, though, takes this argument further, in at least two important ways: first, that the problem extends beyond definitions to questions of value, and that doubts about what literary education is for must remain central to literary education itself; second, that the fundamental weakness of much literary theory lies in its longstanding failure to take seriously the cultural praxis that is enacted in (school) classrooms. Francis Gilbert’s exploration of the teaching of creative writing is, likewise, grounded in autobiographical reflection – in his own experiences as a creative writing student as well as in his more recent work as a teacher and educator. Gilbert offers a typology of different approaches to, and rationales for, creative writing courses; more than this, though, he insists that teachers of creative writing need to examine their reasons for teaching if they are to understand (and develop) their pedagogy. Questions of identity intersect with pedagogic strategies and dilemmas in the following four contributions. Salomé Romylos analyses the formation of the professional identities of English literature teachers in one region of South Africa. In a series of case studies, she traces the influence of larger forces and discourses on individuals, while also observing the complex relation between the participants’ practice and their sense of themselves as teachers. Edward Collyer writes of his own experience as a pre-service teacher in England, encountering pupils who were quite fiercely resistant to the form of CHANGING ENGLISH 2021, VOL. 28, NO. 2, 131–132 https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2021.1893499