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Initial Teacher Education has been informed by diverse perspectives in recent years; while the debates around what constitutes teacher quality and adequate preparedness focus on the structure and focus of programs, entry and exit requirements, the current era presents new challenges to which teachers must respond such as an increased call for cultural responsiveness. In this context, the way that literacy itself is conceptualised within teacher education requires expansion. We argue in this paper that literacy plays a key role in the ontological and epistemological development of quality teachers, beyond the way it is currently conceived as either a hurdle requirement for the successful completion of an ITE program (Barnes & Cross Teachers and Teaching, 26(3-4), 307-325, 2020) or as a set of skills to support students to develop content knowledge across the disciplines (Scott et al. Teaching and Teacher Education, 73, 1-13, 2018). We contend that literacy is central to teacher's professional becoming (Matusov et al., 2019) and explore how a dialogic approach to teaching can support pre-service teachers' professional meaning making. The paper proposes a dialogic framework to embrace different levels of dialogue not merely as a means of 'doing' in the classroom, but as central in the process of knowing, being and becoming a professional teacher. Keywords Dialogic theories * Teachers' becoming * Literacy practices * Initial teacher education, 1 Introduction The March 2021 announcement by Hon. Alan Tudge, Australian Federal Minister for Education, to review the quality of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programs nationally, has rekindled dialogue around [...]

This paper takes up key questions of this special issue regarding tensions and challenges in the field of literacy education by exploring how literary knowledge and skills intersect with subject area teachers' disciplinary ontologies and epistemologies. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's thinking tools, we analyse how literacy across the curriculum has been approached in policy and practice terms in recent decades, particularly in the context of neoliberal reforms and increasing accountability cultures. We then discuss the implications and limits of these approaches for teacher identity and professionalism, and using two initiatives in both pre-service and in-service contexts as examples, we consider ways of reconsidering the field of disciplinary literacy and the habitus of subject experts, so that secondary teachers might be best placed to support diverse learners in their classrooms. Keywords Disciplinary literacy * Teacher expertise * Bourdieu, 1 Introduction While there is general agreement that all teachers are teachers of literacy (Christie & Derewianka, 2008; Humphrey, 2017), how literacy learning might be embedded across the curriculum areas [...]

This paper furthers the understanding of literacy being developed through this Special Issue by bringing a pluralistic, complex account of literacy into conversation with assessment. The rise of neoliberalism in education--and its related focus on standards, accountability, and efficiency--has seen literacy positioned as the 'core business' of contemporary education systems and, accordingly, a construct that must be rendered readily measurable, benchmarked, and accounted for. Through a critique of current literacy assessment practices in Australia relying on standardized testing to achieve such accountability using National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy and Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education as examples, we argue that the resulting dominant account of literacy is both reductive and deficient. On the one hand, we show how standardized literacy testing fails to recognize students' actual potential, in terms of the diverse and varied plurilingual and cultural meaning-making resources that many students now bring to literacy, beyond using Standard Australian English alone (and as a monolingual speaker would use SAE as an isolated language system). On the other, we show how standardized tests can render the assessment of literacy as effectively meaningless, given difficulties discriminating between test-takers' full range of literacy skills in meaningful ways. We conclude by considering alternative practices with potential to more accurately assess learners' literacy capabilities from a plurilingual perspective, and implications for education policy. Keywords Literacy assessment practices * Standardized testing * Plurilingual perspectives * Technological affordances, 1 Introduction: the rise of standardized testing as a substitute for literacy This paper furthers the understanding of literacy being developed through this Special Issue by bringing a pluralistic, complex [...]

The task of English language and literacy education to define citizenship, and shape citizens, has rarely been more compelling or more challenging than it is today. Globally and nationally, our civic response to COVID-19 has catapulted us into a world where our rights as and responsibilities as citizens are being fundamentally re-negotiated at the same time as we come to rely on technologically mediated literate practice to connect a world that is more spatially and temporally separated than many of us have ever known it to be. We are challenged to remake our identities and commit to new kinds of personal and civic relationships--nationally and globally--as we try to navigate uncharted waters. Our focus here is on the role that literacy education plays in understanding and defining active citizenship in a turbulent context in which foundational literacy practices are transforming just as accepted understandings of active citizenship are under challenge. We direct our attention specifically to the distinctive role that literacy practice plays in the production of identities and relationships and consider new ways for literacy education to build active citizenship across the lifespan from early education through primary and secondary education through to workforce education. Keywords Literacy * Citizenship * Technology * School English * Life course education, 1 Introduction Australia's civic response to the COVID-19 virus has propelled us into a world that relies on technologically mediated literate practice to an extent that we could not have [...]

This article takes up questions about knowledge and the school curriculum with respect to literary studies within subject English. Its intention is to focus on literary studies in English from the context of current waves of curriculum reform, rather than as part of the conversations primarily within the field of English, to raise questions about the knowledge agenda, and the knowledge-base agenda for teaching and teacher education. The selection of texts and form of study of literature within the English curriculum has long been an area of controversy. Without assuming a particular position on knowledge in this area, this article shows that important questions of what knowledge-base teachers are expected to bring to their work are elided both in current regulations and debates, and in research on 'good teaching' in this area. If 'literary studies' (as a discipline or university major) is itself an unstable and changing field, what kind of knowledge does a good English teacher bring to their work? This paper takes up these questions in the context of the Australian Curriculum and standards for teacher registration, but it also points to the way these issues about knowledge are of broader relevance for researchers and teacher education.

Australia has recently moved from having curricula developed within individual states to national curricula, including in English. This move in Australia has coincided with debate over Michael Young's call for 'bringing knowledge back in'. English has historically been epistemologically unstable with an ever-contestable knowledge base, and this is especially true of literary knowledge. The "Australian Curriculum: English" was nevertheless framed in early consultation papers as focused primarily on knowledge--a focus reflected in the main organizing elements moving from the 'traditional' language mode organizers 'reading', 'writing',' listening', 'speaking', etc., to the organizers 'Language', 'Literature' and 'Literacy'. Here we investigate the specific uses of the words 'knowledge' and related terms such as 'know' and 'knowing' as one kind of analysis of how knowledge plays out in the Curriculum. We show that as the Curriculum itself developed, the constituent elements of the phrase 'knowledge, understanding and skills' came to align specifically to the constituent elements of the organizers 'Language', 'Literature' and 'Literacy', to the point where the term 'knowledge' came to be attached almost exclusively to 'Language', and then mainly in the Years Foundation--Year 6. This 'Language knowledge' then became continually positioned as underlying the 'skills' of 'Literacy', so that Literature is seen to be almost arbitrary to the fundamental imperatives of the Curriculum--a means through which the cultural intentions of the Curriculum might be serviced.

This paper examines the role of literature in the English classroom in Australia and its part in shaping national identity. We contend that it is important to consider the possible roles of national literatures in contemporary school contexts, where students are becoming local and global citizens and argue that reading Australian literature as a part of the field of "world literature" can support a pedagogical approach which enables dynamic reading practices. Drawing on a 2016 research project titled Teaching Australia, which sought to explore English teachers' engagement with Australian texts, this paper examines current and future uses of Australian literature in both the globalised world and in the Australian secondary English classroom.

In the British "zone" of the English education world, which Australia largely inhabited throughout the 20th century, the key book that came out of Dartmouth was John Dixon's "Growth through English." Some in the British "zone" may not even be aware of the equivalent American book, Herbert Muller's "The Uses of English," and the authors suspect that the set of five monographs published by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in 1968 that represented the various Study Groups of the Seminar are even less well-known. These latter were: (1) "Drama in the English Classroom" (Douglas Barnes, Ed.); (2) "Language and Language Learning" (Albert Marckwardt, Ed.); (3) "The Uses of Myth" (Paul Olson, Ed.); (4) "Response to Literature" (James Squire, Ed.); and (5) "Creativity in English" (Geoffrey Summerfield, Ed.). All of the monographs were sub-titled, "Papers Relating to the Anglo-American Seminar on the Teaching of English at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, 1966." Each monograph presents a series of papers from people in the relevant Study Group. In this article, the authors present a selection of these publications and view each through particular lenses that represent key issues in the teaching of English that were highlighted in the Seminar in general, in the Study Groups in particular, and which have continued to be central issues in the history and the historiography of the subject.

Garth Boomer's democratic and often provocative vision for English teaching continues to play an important part in the professional development of English teachers. In particular, Boomer's work is often used by Teacher Educators in preservice degrees to introduce emerging English teachers to key ideas such as curriculum negotiation and student/teacher collaboration. Importantly, Boomer's work encourages professional dialogue, reflecting the concept that theory and scholarship about teaching, like school English curricula, should be negotiated and debated. This is evident in many of his publications, and particularly in his 1993 article "How to Make a Teacher". In this article the writers (a teacher educator and pre-service teachers) engage in a close reading of Boomer's paper, and continue this dialogue by exploring the continued affordances of these "essences" as a paradigm for English teaching in the 21st century.

Recently Australia has witnessed a revival of concern about the place of Australian literature within the school curriculum. This has occurred within a policy environment where there is increasing emphasis on Australia's place in a world economy, and on the need to encourage young people to think of themselves in a global context. These dimensions are reflected in the recently published "Australian Curriculum: English", which requires students to read texts of "enduring artistic and cultural value" that are drawn from "world and Australian literature". No indication, however, is given as to how the reading and literary interpretation that students do might meaningfully be framed by such categories. This essay asks: what saliences do the categories of the "local", the "national" and the "global" have when young people engage with literary texts? How does this impact on teachers' and students' interpretative approaches to literature? What place does a "literary" education, whether conceived in "local","national" or "global" terms, have in the twenty-first century?

The year 2012 is significant for English teachers in Australia, not only is it the National Year of Reading, but it is also the year when an increasing number of English teachers across the country are implementing the "Australian Curriculum: English," the first national curriculum in the history of the nation. This paper addresses the ways in which Australian literature is privileged in both the National Year of Reading and in the Australian English curriculum documents, and considers what can be learnt about the challenges and rewards of teaching Australian literature through placing these two events, and their associated texts, in dialogue. This results in the recommendation that English teachers consider auditing the texts they set for study, and text selection practices more broadly, as part of their professional learning activities. In light of this, the second half of this paper is concerned with providing a rationale for a textual audit, and pragmatic suggestions for the way such an undertaking might be implemented.

In the past two years, considerable media and government attention has been directed towards the teaching of Australian literature in secondary schools. This article explores the main themes of this discourse, and considers recent discussions about Australian literature in the National English Curriculum in the context of this debate. By way of responding to the emphasis on canonical works that has been a hallmark of media texts about this issue, this article contends that Australian secondary students will be best served by an English curriculum that supports a nexus or relational approach to the teaching of Australian literature, and recognises the role the national literature plays in enabling students to mediate their lived experiences, and make connections with others. (Contains 6 notes.)

A literary criticism of the book "My Brilliant Career" by Miles Franklin is presented. It explores the institutional possibilities and constraints of worlding settler texts in secondary school and university environments. Also expands on the practices of reading, to incorporate an analysis of documents that frame the intended, espoused, and enacted curriculum.

This paper describes the implementation of the Master of Teaching degree which was introduced at the University of Melbourne in 2008. The programme aims to produce a new generation of teachers (early years, primary and secondary) who are interventionist practitioners, with high-level analytic skills and capable of using data and evidence lo identify and address the learning needs of individual learners. The programme marks a fundamental change to the way in which teachers have traditionally been prepared in the University of Melbourne and builds a strong link between theory and practice. This linking occurs within a new partnership model with selected schools. The model was influenced by the Teachers for a New Era programme in the USA and by the clinical background of senior faculty. The programme sees teaching as a clinical-practice profession such as is found in many allied health professions; this understanding is also embraced by the university's partnership schools. These schools are used as clinical sites, actively involving their best teachers in the clinical training component. These teachers are recognised as members of the university and are highly skilled professionals who are capable of interventionist teaching and who use appropriate assessment tools to inform their teaching of individual children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses about English classroom and literary engagement arises out of the project Investigating Literary Knowledge in the Making of English Teachers, funded by the Australian Research Council (2016–2019). It mentions many educationalists have emphasised the determinate social aspects of the classroom in the context of the history of English curriculum; and in the history of English teaching, the idea of literary sociability has been important to a number of influential documents.