The Place of English Revisited

In this essay I explore the constraints and opportunities confronting me as a newly qualified teacher and how these affect my pedagogy. I have reflected on my own development from beginning to newly qualified teacher and considered how such forces have shaped my identity as a teacher, my values and my approach to the job. As part of my exploration of my practice and the values I hold, I have revisited ‘The Place of English’, an essay I wrote midway through my Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) year; I have reconsidered how the current climate of educational reform and my subsequent experience have altered or strengthened these initial perceptions. In what follows I have reflected critically on two episodes of teaching and learning with my Year 10 class, my most challenging group, in order to further understand the way in which I have responded to the responsibilities and pressures placed on a classroom teacher. These pressures, I suggest, are intensified by the preconceptions of age and gender within my school and implicit more widely in the traditional values of our culture. The fragments of my practice that I have explored reveal tensions that gesture at a gap between educational theory, first-hand professional experience and governmental policy. They present an argument to resist the temptations of oversimplified, linear conceptions of teaching and learning, and maintain the place of English as a subject of creativity, exploration and expression that, at its heart, values both individual and collective student voices and identities.     

Adapting the boundaries in primary physical education: an account of my learning,my educational influence and improved practice

In this paper I explore how I have come to theorise my work as a critical emancipatory practice as a lecturer in primary physical education (PE). I give an account of what I understand to be the epistemological foundations and practices of practitioner research and my potential educational influence in my own and other practitioner-researchers’ learning. I explain how I have generated my living educational theory of practice and discuss the changes in my learning from a propositional approach towards a dynamic epistemology of practice that is grounded in inclusional and dialogical ways of knowing. Within my paper I position myself as a professional educator and researcher, and share the exciting and transformational experiences of teaching and learning in evolving action research cycles of practice. I view my learning to date as an active act, working with the novice teachers I support to offer improvement and change in our future practice. I celebrate my reconceptualised view of education as a learner from within my practice and explain my move from knowledge transfer to knowledge co-creation. I make an original contribution to educational knowledge by explaining how I try to inspire others to research their practice and contribute to a new scholarship of educational enquiry.     

微笑

一想到自己明天就没命了,不禁陷入极端的惶恐。我翻遍了口袋,终于找到一支没被他们搜走的香烟,但我的手紧张得不停发抖,连将烟送进嘴里都成问题,而我的火柴也在搜身时被拿走了。我透过铁栏望着外面的警卫,他并没有注意到我在看他,我叫了他一声：“能跟你借个火吗？”他转头望着我,耸了耸肩,然后走了过来,点燃我的香烟。     

Exploring Self-Study to Improve My Practice as a Mathematics Teacher Educator

While supervising a student teacher in school, an incident occurred that highlighted a contradiction between my practice and my beliefs and prompted me to question why I do not always live the values I profess. The aim of this article is to investigate how self-study can help me to understand the complex and context-based situations of my practice. I draw on the work of other teacher educators to examine the potential of self-study to improve my practice. Through this exploration I have begun to transform the way that I comprehend teaching and learning in teacher education. I identify several tensions and challenges in implementing the methodology within my professional context. I believe that self-study can help us in our roles as teacher educators to develop more reflexive self-awareness and to problematize taken-for-granted assumptions relevant to our contexts of practice.     

我的大学，我做主：兼职，我的大学我买单

早在上大学之前我就渴望能够独立,不仅仅是像其他人叫嚣的那种精神思想上的独立,我更渴望经济上的独立,因为我深知,经济独立是一切的基石,而且我也不想再向父母伸手要钱,所以,我的大学我自己买单。     

Self‐Reflexivity and the Creative Voice: Issues of Transgression Identified with Participant Ethnographic Research in Art and Design Education

This article shares my experience as a doctoral student researching within the domain of art and design education. This is a professional doctorate bringing together my experience as an educator and that of researcher where boundaries between education and social science research disciplines cross. My research paradigm is situated within critical theory. It is an interpretive hermeneutic study where I am cast as a participant ethnographer. At the time of writing I wanted to make known the issues and tensions that I encountered with research protocols, such as permissions mechanisms and ethical gatekeepers. These tensions I still perceive as confining, but more significantly, I realise that knowing and understanding research methodology is key to achieving creative and unpredictable research practice. This article is, therefore, focused on my journey to discover a research methodology that enables me to use a creative voice. By this I mean a method by which I can develop a writing style that articulates my practice that enables me in the construction and reporting of my research analysis to fully capitalise on my reflexive self. I have referenced papers produced by others at the time of writing their doctoral thesis and have found this enlightening. This is my contribution.     

心灵日记

11月8日 我在寻找闪闪发亮的言外之意,寻找生活中各种事件背后的深层含义,当我感到痛苦和混乱的时候,当我一蹶不振,受到伤害的时候,     

What I ‘Know’: Literary Studies and the Teaching of English

This essay unfolds through a series of juxtapositions, involving storytelling and writing of a more analytical nature. In thinking about what I ‘know’ as an English teacher, my aim has been to present my ideas in a form that might do justice to the contradictions and complexities of my professional life, including my continuing efforts to negotiate a pathway between the rich particularities of the educational settings in which I have worked and my knowledge and values as an English teacher. My primary focus is on how my literary education has shaped and been shaped by my work as an English teacher vis-à-vis a devaluing of teachers’ disciplinary knowledge that has occurred through standards-based reforms. I attempt to make the standpoint from which I am writing an object of scrutiny, thus producing an account of what I ‘know’ that arises out of my work as an English teacher and returns to it as a necessary dimension of a politically committed praxis.     

Striving for Discussion: An Analysis of a Teacher Educator’s Comments in Whole-Class Conversation

During my English Language Arts methods class, I noticed that my discussion patterns were teacher-focused and in an Initiation-Response-Evaluation format. Because I wanted to model dialogic methods of whole-class discussions for my preservice teachers, I recoiled from this finding and began a self-study using an action research method to examine the techniques and comments I used while leading whole-class discussion. Using dialogic instruction as the theoretical perspective, I examined 11 class sessions, including 32 whole-class discussion events. I found that I was using phrases that stopped student-to-student interaction and that I often took over the conversations. These findings led to more questions about the nuance in the analysis of whole-class discussion, as well as some specific concepts that I incorporated into my teaching of the next year’s class.     

去伦敦

On a hot summer morning in 1989 I finished packing my things in my flat in Dublin. Two suitcases were not enough to hold them all so I had to use plastic supermarket bags for the remainder. My friend Tom arrived in his car to take me to the airport. After coffee at the airport we shook hands and said goodbye and it was only then that I noticed my hand was shaking. My voice was also shaking and my breath was coming out in uneven waves. Tom was my good friend from schooldays and in saying goodbye to him I was saying goodbye to so many good memories, saying goodbye to my country.     

从感性体验出发的生命飞升旅程

1985年,是我写作的重要转折。在文学艺术的各种流派新潮的涌动里,接纳并试验了我以为可以信赖的学说,打开了自己;在见识各种新论的时候,吸收了不少自以为有用的东西,丰富了自己;也在纷繁的见识中进行了选择,开始重新确立自己,争取实现对生活的独自发现和独立表述。正是在趋于理性的思想认识和不断成熟的艺术自觉中开始了我的长篇小说《白鹿原》的构思。     

An Australian s Perspective of an American University

Since high school I have always wanted to study in a country other than my own. However my parents always informed me that it was too expensive. This was until luck turned my way one day while I was at university. My advisor called me and asked me to go and see him as soon as possible. I just knew it had to be good news. I could barely stand the suspense and went to his office with a nervous happiness in my tummy My advisor told me that I had been offered a scholarship to study at Central Washington Univers...     

Confessions from the Performatively Confused

“Confessions” begins with an auto-ethnographic account of my learning-through-movement in a relationship that was intimate, therapeutic, embodied and instructive—with a teacher called Annie. It seems sensible to start with a choreographic teacher of Feldenkrais therapies and theatre-movement to think about the meanings I import from my roles as learner, therapist and performer to my roles as educator and feminist—and back again. My work with Annie, as her student, brought choreography back into the social science class rooms in which I teach, along with an acute awareness of my embodied self as a condition/centre of my pedagogical strategies in teaching the social. Amplifying this experience, I present ways of storying and reading my teaching praxis in conventional academic classrooms, as informed by the ways in which I theorise my learning that has occurred outside of them.     

Developing holistic practice through reflection,action and theorising

This article outlines how I, as a primary teacher engaging with a self-study action research process, have come to a deeper understanding of my practice. It explains how I have also come to an understanding of why I work in the way I do; of how this understanding influences my work, and the significance of this new understanding. My work as a teacher frequently includes doing collaborative digital projects with my class. As I engaged in research on my practice, I initially experienced difficulties problematising this work. I struggled to achieve clarity not only with engaging in critical thinking but also with articulating my educational values. I found Mellor’s idea about ‘the struggle’ helpful as he explains how ‘the struggle’ is at the heart of the research process. My new understanding around these collaborative projects emerged in terms of holistic practice; clarifying my ontological values and learning to think critically. I am now generating an educational theory from my practice as I see my work as a process for developing spiritual and holistic approaches to learning and teaching. I conclude by outlining what I perceive to be the significance of my work and its potential implications for education.     

To Alleviate Suffering: A Professor Reflects on the Moral Stakes of His Teaching

This article is a meditation on a professor's effort to fuse the personal and political in his teaching and, especially, to reframe the stakes away from the technical and toward the moral. As a teacher and educator, I consider two questions about my teaching that emerged from the mandate to reflect on teaching effectiveness during my promotion and tenure review process: Are my students more powerful in the world because of my teaching, and does my teaching alleviate suffering? I theorize what each question means for how I approach my classes to uncover larger questions about what it means to teach. In particular, I argue that any consideration of teaching reduced to a set of skills fails to attend to the sociocultural reality of students' lives, and thus reproduces suffering.     

Parochial Schools for Jewish Children—An Adverse View

In the over fifty years of my involvement in Jewish Education, I had my share of undeserved frustration and sleepless nights, which I prefer to relegate to oblivion. Instead, let me recall some of the more pleasant aspects of my work since that marked most of my career in Jewish Education.     

Interreligious Hermeneutics,Prejudice, and the Problem of Testimonial Injustice

As interreligious educators we challenge our students to engage in hermeneutical self-reflection. In this article, I turn the tables, and engage in an exercise of reflective practice: I look back on my own pedagogy, consider my own religiously diverse classroom, and ask in what way the theoretical framework from which I approach interreligious learning has facilitated and hindered the learning process of my students. I especially inquire into chances and limits of the hermeneutical approach of interreligious learning, an approach with which I identify. I will first elaborate on the importance of the so-called hermeneutical approach to interreligious learning and dwell on my own appropriation of this approach. Here the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur and his hermeneutical anthropology will occupy center stage. Next, and triggered by my own experiences as an interfaith educator, I will argue that the hermeneutical approach to interreligious learning has a tendency to level relations between self and other and falls short when it comes to reckoning with unequal power relations. I will illustrate this shortcoming on the basis of a concrete case of testimonial injustice that has occurred in my classroom.     

Resilience in the AESA During the Last Decades of the Twentieth Century

I belonged to several professional organizations during my career. The AESA was the one in which I engaged most deeply with people from other disciplines than my own. Through those discussions, my ideas about education developed most fully. I thank you all for that. This article explains some of what I, and others, experienced during the years of conservative reaction to both the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Women's Movement following the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States. I hope my ideas may prove useful to you, today.     

‘In-between’ Asia and Australia: on the politics of teaching English as the ‘Other’

This article mobilizes story-telling to narrate my lived experience of teaching English as a minority academic in one Australian university. Positioning myself as living ‘in-between’ two cultures and as an ‘Other’, I tell my story of how I have been ‘racialized’ and ‘Othered’ because I do not look White, and my spoken English is distinctly accented; hence, my legitimacy of teaching English is held suspect. My story contributes to the theorizing of the sociology of the in-between with the argument that while living in-between culture can be a space of negativity, it can also be a space of empowerment if one exercises choice and agency by forging new spaces. I end my story-telling with a happy ending by presenting a contrasting story of how my run-away from Australia to (a new space in) Hong Kong to teach English has reaffirmed my cultural capital as I morph into a different ‘Other’.     

Writing the queer self: Using autobiography to mediate inclusive teacher education in Canada

Writing the queer self involves locating the self within a broad understanding of queer that recognises a spectrum of sex, sexual and gendered subjects. In this article, I discuss how I write the queer self to link the personal to my positional practice as a gay teacher educator. I overview my work with Agape, which is a focus group that I initiated in my university's teacher education programme to explore sex, sexual and gender differences in education and culture. I explore how I link my queer autobiography to the professional and the pedagogical, and how I use it to engender deliberations about queer presence, representation and place in education. I conclude by speaking on the importance of doing this work as an ethical project for social justice and educational transformation.