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Debates about subject English in Australia are often conducted through the senior years curriculum. In light of the anticipated interest in the new Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) English study design released in 2022 to be implemented in 2023, this paper outlines the current state of research on the VCE English subject by mapping areas of interest, types of evidence and gaps in research. The authors utilise a hybrid approach of narrative scoping review to identify methodological and thematic trends in the scholarly literature, and intersecting professional and media discourse on VCE English from 1990 to 2021. Finding that the student experience and the enacted curriculum have been largely elided, the paper identifies fresh lines of inquiry into VCE English and advocates for new discussions around scholarly interest and approaches to senior secondary English in Australia.

It is well established that literacy as a social practice is fundamental to supporting and facilitating student learning across the years of schooling, and research has shown the importance of all teachers understanding the literacies of their learning areas and being able to mobilise effective literacy practices to support student learning outcomes. During the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic teachers across the globe were forced to (re)negotiate the reading, writing and speaking demands of learning and teaching in uncharted, digitally mediated environments. In this paper, we report on findings from a research project undertaken at a large secondary school in Victoria, Australia which investigated the ways in which teachers' priorities during online learning impacted on their approaches to and enactment of disciplinary literacy. We identify two priorities that emerge from interviews with teachers during and after the COVID lockdown: (1) to support the development of student disciplinary and content knowledge and (2) to engage in pedagogies that consider cyber-safety and student-wellbeing. We explore these priorities in the context of teachers' literacy knowledge and practices and students' literacy engagement and learning, and consider the implications of this analysis for issues of equity and quality in fully online digital contexts.

This paper thinks with the concept of intertextuality to consider the multiple intersecting power structures inside and outside of literary education in secondary schools that continue to dominate text selection policies and teaching practices. We draw on our research with in-service teachers to reconsider how intertextual networks circulate on multiple levels: textual, social, cultural, and institutional. Although the concept of intertextuality has been activated as an alternative to rarified conceptualisations of literary heritage, as we unpack in this paper, intertextuality often distributes, reinforces, and perpetuates canonical power structures such as institutional whiteness, and Euro western values in secondary school subjects that feature literary studies. Rather than abandoning intertextuality, we attempt to tease out how it operates in various registers in schooling and we suggest how critically engaging with the concept might provide a way forward for English study in the twenty-first century.

Despite ongoing attempts to disrupt the white cis-hetero-masculine nature of the literary canon the secondary school English curriculum remains tethered to its lineage. In conversation with feminist new materialist scholars who argue that the stories we read and write have material affects on who we are becoming, this paper argues that in order to mobilise change in the secondary years of schooling, interventions into the canon must move beyond (re)forming text lists or providing teachers with readymade pedagogical resources. Drawing on the Australian context, the authors outline some of the contemporary challenges teachers face in diversifying and decolonising the curriculum. Drawing on their Literary Linking Methodology the authors discuss a pilot project that seeks to unsettle the canon by supporting teachers to undertake extended immersion with both contemporary literary texts and archival research. Accordingly, this paper contributes to understandings of the tensions and challenges teachers face in introducing contemporary Australian texts into the curriculum and offers insights into the ways in which professional learning might be (re)imagined so that English teachers might draw on available cultural resources as researchers and literary knowledge producers in the twenty-first century.

While "born digital" artefacts such as video games and e-books have been part of secondary school English in Anglophone countries for over two decades, databases of mass-digitised (hence "re-mediated") literary texts are yet to have a significant presence in, or influence on, literary work in subject English. The authors contend that engagement with these digitised texts requires a postdigital "literary literacy". They explore how "distant reading" -- applying digital tools to large-scale data to identify patterns beyond the scale of human perception -- offers a form of postdigital literary literacy that can be enacted alongside others, including productive reading and code switching. Using the example of the To be continued… database of fiction originally published in 19th and 20th century Australian newspapers, the article argues that postdigital literary objects offer new literary knowledge and new ways of thinking about literary study and teacher expertise in English in the 21st century.

This essay begins with vignettes showcasing the pedagogy of three teachers of literature in contrastive settings (one in Brazil, two in Australia). These act as prompts for a transnational dialogue between us that unfolds in our writing of this essay. The aim is not to assess or make judgements about the quality of the teaching presented but to identify and explore the assumptions we share about the value of literature teaching across the languages and national contexts that divide us. We argue the primacy of language as a social phenomenon, characterising the exchanges around literary texts in each classroom as forms of "literary sociability".

This article reports on an innovative pedagogical approach within the "Learning Partnerships" program in which school students help to "teach the teachers" within pre-service teacher education. Classes of school students join with classes of pre-service teachers to provide input on how teachers can enhance school students' engagement and wellbeing. The article draws on data collected from 125 students (aged 13-16) and 120 pre-service teachers in these workshops. Findings generated from a mixed methods study combining pre-workshop focus groups (n = Students: 38, Teachers: 33) and post-workshop focus groups (n = Students: 69, Teachers: 15) and post-workshop surveys (n = Students: 96; Teachers: 101) demonstrated that the workshops were mutually beneficial for both students and pre-service teachers. Participants found that workshopping together enhanced their belief in the possibility of positive student--teacher relationships. The pre-service teachers reported greater confidence in communicating with young people about the issues that affect student engagement and wellbeing. The school students reported that they were more willing to use teachers as a source of help. Implications include the need for increased attention to a "third space" for learning in teacher development which provides opportunity for learning with and from young people about how to foster their engagement and wellbeing.