Commonsense, manners, guts' : 'manliness' in the English school story 1887-1917

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New world orders in contemporary children's literature : utopian transformations

"New World Orders shows how texts for children and young people have responded to the cultural, economic, and political movements of the last 15 years. With a focus on international children's text produced between 1988 and 2006, the authors discuss how utopian and dystopian tropes are pressed into service to project possible futures to child readers. The book considers what these texts have to say about globalisation, neocolonialism, environmental issues, pressures on families and communities, and the idea of the posthuman."--BOOK JACKET.

"Finding myself in someone else’s land” stories by teachers of literatures in English in Padang: A postcolonial framework

My study reveals what teaching English literature means to teachers in universities in a polyglot society like Padang, Indonesia. Their stories reveal how these teachers chose to teach at the interface between languages and cultures. These are the ways they believe they can help their students find themselves in their English Literature classrooms.

Just 'good and bad news'? Disciplinary imaginaries of head teachers in Australian and English print media

Australian and English print media are actively engaged in producing reports that claim to find the 'best schools', the 'real state of education', and 'star head teachers'. This article considers the production of knights and dames, maverick heads and struggling schools. It argues that some of these stories are clearly the products of departmental press bureau activities and policy agendas. It shows, however, that even those stories intended to critique government policy support paradoxically a notion of the singular importance of the headship and the virtues of heroic leadership. It is suggested that the simulacrum of the heroic head works as a normative disciplinary device for performative and market practices and is singularly off-putting to both serving and aspirant school leaders.

Girls' school stories, 1749-1929

As part of the ongoing project of retrieving women writers from the margins of literary and cultural history, scholars of literature, history, and gender studies are increasingly exploring and interrogating girls’ print culture. School stories, in particular, are generating substantial scholarly interest because of their centrality to the history of girls’ reading, their engagement with cultural ideas about the education and socialization of girls, and their enduring popularity with book collectors. However, while serious scholars have begun to document the vast corpus of English-language girls’ school stories, few scholarly editions or facsimile editions of these novels and short stories are readily available.

Telling stories: my work as a literacy intervention teacher

This text is a “narrative inquiry” (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) in which the author presents an account of her experiences as an English teacher working in an Australian public secondary school. The author explores the ways in which her beliefs as an English teacher conflicted with her role as a Literacy Co-ordinator/teacher and how — even though she may have consciously questioned and resisted performing certain ideological work, such as administering standardised tests and sorting students into remedial groups — there was still a sense in which government policies mediated her professional practice, transforming it into something with which she remained deeply at odds. The author's aim was not just to provide an empirical account of how students and teachers experienced these literacy initiatives, but to capture the dominant ideology that is shaping education at the current moment. This is done by examining the Victorian government school publication, Education Times, specifically to demonstrate how the rhetoric of this official publication shaped the author's professional practices and knowledge as an English teacher. Through this narrative the author interrogates taken-for-granted understandings about what counts as “knowledge” in an age of increasing accountability.

Stories: a common currency

This article offers an account of a series of writing workshops involving English teachers in Victoria, Australia, known as the stella2.0 project. It argues that storytelling can potentially provide a valuable counterpoint to the ‘knowledge’ underpinning standards-based reforms. The argument serves to introduce two other essays published in this issue of Changing English: ‘Storytelling and Professional Learning’, in which Brenton Doecke articulates a standpoint about storytelling that helped to shape the workshops, and ‘Professional Learning and the Unfinalizable: English Educators Writing and Telling Stories Together…’, by Graham Parr and Scott Bulfin, in which they inquire into the conceptual foundations of the stella2.0 project and discuss some of the writing generated by teachers in the workshops.

The world to come: stories

In 1738, English preacher, Isaac Watts wrote ‘The world to come’, a Christian tract about departed souls, death, and the glory or terror of the resurrection. Almost 300 years later the world to come still fascinates readers. It’s not only climate change, it’s the climate of everything: from technological ‘advances’ that threaten to create an immortal humanity; to an endless ‘war on terror,’ which means that, though we may never know war, nor will we ever truly know peace; to a thousand visions of post-Apocalyptic life in the media. The world to come is everywhere; it is with us now… In this anthology, twenty-one writers respond to the world to come – the one just around the corner, the hereafter and the everywhen.