Turvey, A; Yandell, J; Ali, L; (2014) English as a Site of Cultural Negotiation and Creative Contestation. In: Doecke, B and Parr, G and Sawyer, W, (eds.) Language and Creativity In contemporary English classrooms. (pp. 237-254). Phoenix: Putney, NSW, Australia.

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Abstract

We offer this piece as an essay, a dialogic, many-voiced attempt to represent the tensions and contradictions in our work and the work that goes on in London schools. Locating our work within a polyphonic, narrative-based tradition of inquiry into practice (Burgess & Hardcastle 1991; Doecke & McClenaghan 2011; Parr 2010; van de Ven & Doecke 2011), we start with two stories arising out of our work as teacher educators. These stories provide insights into the effects of standards-based reforms on the lived experiences and the creativity of school pupils and their teachers in England. We argue that they show something of the ways in which these changes in schooling are profoundly reshaping social relationships and subjectivities. To chart the effects of these changes is important, in our view. And yet, for all the discursive and institutional power of the standards-based reforms, they fail to provide an adequate account of the complexity of what goes on in English classrooms. The agency of teachers and learners, effaced by the dominant discourse, is continually being reasserted, continually threatening to undermine the false simplicities of the standards. Questions of identity, of how learners and teachers alike are situated – and situate themselves – in history and culture, though absent from the dominant discourse, cannot so easily be dismissed.

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