On secondary English teacher education

Some mixed and contradictory feelings

Banksy at It’s Nice That - reminded me of Prof. Pamela Snow’s work on the school-to-prison pipeline.

With all the talk about initial teacher education (ITE) in Australia at the moment, I’ve been reflecting on my training as a secondary English teacher. In Australia, many of us English teachers become qualified through an undergraduate degree, with a major in Literature, followed by a two-year teaching qualification. The teaching methods — the actual English teaching bit — is a small part of the postgraduate ITE course. Five years is a long time to learn not very much about teaching literacy.

Before I became a teacher, I worked in the advertising and fashion industries as a creative rep. It was very rock and roll, but at some point, I discovered that I wasn’t saving any lives. I had children of my own and perhaps had bought into the myth that teaching was family friendly or something. I came from a family of working class readers and had an instinct for what was ‘classic’ or ‘quality.’ Remember, this was pre-internet and it was possibly just good cataloguing in second-hand bookshops that was the real tell. Either way, reading was in my blood.

But because I came from a creative background, I chose to retrain as an art teacher. There was one small problem: I didn’t want to teach anyone how to do anything. I loved waxing lyrical about art, took a few Literature electives, and with some early academic success decided that cleaning lumps of clay off a ceiling was not for me. I studied three years of literature (some classic, some contemporary, no film and no non-fiction) and felt fairly prepared to teach the Great Australian/American/British novel.

Nobody told me — or apparently the universities — that this approach prepares English teachers only for teaching seniors in the final two years of high school. I suppose there was some token attempt in my Methods classes to prepare me for secondary English teaching, and others may have had more fruitful experiences. I learned how to sit a final examination (yes, this was a whole Methods subject), how to choose books for study (the course was dubiously run by a bookstore owner), and some ideas for class activities. Of course, the writing of unit plans was overemphasised but with no actual teaching about how to write a scheme of work.

My formative moment was a few years ago when I met the speech pathologist who had come in and out of my school for years and had long since given up on trying to make connections with the school’s English teachers. When we met and got chatting, I invited her to present to our department. I realised how little I knew. We started collaborating and I came to see her as actual effective learning support, something we need more of as an industry. A parallel could be made to the fact that the people who know most about learning (the learning scientists of Ed Psych) often have very little to do with initial teacher education.

The Australian Curriculum features strands of Literacy and Language, but many English teachers (and professional orgs) focus on their first love, Literature. The teacher education pathway does little to redirect them. It might be time to firstly make sure that Methods teachers are equipped to teach (at a minimum) the Language Comprehension strands of Scarborough’s Reading Rope, with an awareness of the Word Recognition elements. You can have all the passion in the world for texts like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or Hamlet or even a bog-standard Jackie French, but it won’t help you to impart literacy to children.

The remit of secondary teachers is mainly in Language Comprehension but an awareness of word recognition is ideal.

All this is aside from any discussion of teaching writing, which we know to be another area of neglect. Did I enjoy studying Anna Karenina? Of course! Did it help me to be a teacher of literacy? Kind of. There’s a bind here: I know a lot of English teachers who read. And I know a lot who don’t. Those initial three years might be the only intensive exposure to the canon that some teachers get, and I think that text structure and convention are best learned from quality texts. I have a thing for hyper-masculine, American classic authors like McCarthy and Roth, and contemporary canonical Brits like McEwan and Barnes. Completely useless knowledge in the classroom.

So there is an argument for a solid foundation in literature. But I think we can agree that things have changed. When we know better, we can do better. We know the Science of reading exists. We know what teaching methods work. It’s time that our training reflected all the strands of literacy, and this is a largely unexamined policy area. We need the most highly qualified Methods instructors and an ITE curriculum that trains us to do our job. English teachers have one of the most complex jobs in the world and our secondary training just isn’t cutting it.