This arts-based research considers creativity in the professional lives of English teachers in a school in England within the context of a progressively performative education system. In addition, it explores how found poetry can represent participants' voices in an illuminating and authentic manner. The teachers who participated in the study were…

This paper draws on a survey conducted in 2020-21 in which 163 secondary English teachers in England named a total of 68 individual poems by poets of colour from the global majority which they taught in Key Stage 3 (students aged 11-14). Using the concepts of framing and mental schemas, we categorised these poems by considering which was the most…

This arts-based research explores the place of creativity in the lives of a focus group of teachers of English in an English secondary school who work within an increasingly performative educational system. As well as interrogating the place of creativity in their lives, the study explores how found poetry can be used as a research method to…

Reading is fundamental to academic success, but international reading surveys indicate current pedagogy fails a fifth of adolescents, disproportionately from lower-socioeconomic groups. This UK, mixed-method study evaluated the impact of two whole-text reading approaches on comprehension, using standardised tests. Twenty teachers of English and…

The article analyses in detail two lessons that were part of a larger research project on English teaching in Canada, England and Scotland. It considers whether the two English lessons are by their nature both dialogic and formative in practice. The research undertaken was carried out using arts-based criticism. It found that Eaglestone's notion…

In light of recent protests at Drag Queen Story Hour events, this essay offers a critical examination of the role of gender performance in secondary schools and English lessons through a personal exploration of how I perform gender as a queer English teacher. I show that schools perpetuate a model of gender that is binary and heterosexist; that…

In considering how to bring joy back to education and the curriculum in England, I argue that it is also necessary to bring the joy of teaching back to classroom practitioners. A fundamental contribution to this may be leadership typologies employed by schools' senior leadership. As an experienced secondary English teacher, over the last 20 years…

Teacher workload is an important policy concern in many education systems around the world, often considered a contributory factor in teacher attrition. One aspect of workload that could be addressed is reducing the amount of written marking and feedback that teachers do. This article reports on the results of an evaluation of FLASH Marking, an…

The nature of English as a school subject -- and particularly English literature -- is a longstanding issue of debate for practitioners and researchers internationally. One dimension of this concerns the forces that shape the diet of literary texts that students are fed. In this study, we draw on the ecological model of agency to interrogate the…

This paper explores GCSE English re-sits in post-16 education. The re-sit policy was introduced in England and Wales to improve national literacy rates, yet persistently poor pass rates have drawn robust criticism of the policy. This article argues that traditional discourses of literacy predominate and contribute towards antagonisms between…

This article explores possibilities for challenging liberal humanism, often expressed through cosmopolitanism, in global citizenship education (GCE) in European contexts, specifically England. Thinking with Sylvia Wynter's genealogy of the creation and universal imposition of "Man" as the dominant descriptive statement for the human and…

This paper reports the findings from a small-scale study conducted over the first two years of a novel post-16 qualification, the Apprentice of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (AFA). It foregrounds the voices of English teachers teaching the AFA, to explore whether and how the AFA contributes to developing subject English's 'signature pedagogies'…

This article investigates the teaching of rhetoric as a discrete discipline within the curriculum of Tudor-era English grammar schools (such as the King's New Grammar School in Stratford-Upon-Avon, where William Shakespeare is believed to have been educated). It examines more recent attempts to advocate for the value of rhetoric as a unifying…

The idea that education should value imagination has lost currency over the last few decades and this has implications for teachers as well as pupils. Situated in a system of increased accountability, teachers in England are arguably less able than ever to act on their freedom and to imagine curricular and pedagogical possibilities beyond those…

This paper tells a story of one student teacher's experiences as she considers the choice of fiction texts studied by young secondary learners of English, and how those texts are taught. Based on a series of interviews carried out in the South-West of England and Wales, the narrative provides a perspective on the limitations of current curricula…