English Teaching: Practice and Critique
Heteroglossia: A space for developing critical language awareness?
Volume 3 Number 3 December 2004
Brenton Doecke (Deakin University, Australia)
Alex Kostogriz (Deakin University, Australia)
Dr Claire Charles (Deakin University, Australia)
This paper reports on research into the challenges
of implementing a critical writing pedagogy within a teacher education
program in Australia. Participants in this study are student teachers
enrolled in a compulsory subject, “Language and Literacy in Secondary
School”, a subject requiring them to develop a knowledge of the role of
language and literacy across the secondary school curriculum and to
show personal proficiency in literacy as part of graduate outcomes for
teacher education dictated by the State Government of Victoria. To
develop an understanding of the way that language has shaped their
lives, students write a narrative about their early literacy
experiences – a task which they all find very challenging, especially
in comparison with the formal writing of other university subjects.
Rather than simply reminiscing about their early childhood, they are
encouraged to juxtapose voices from the past and the present, and to
combine a range of texts within their writing. Later in the semester
they revisit these accounts of their early literacy experiences and, in
a separate piece of writing, endeavour to place these accounts within
the contexts of theories and debates they have encountered in the
course of completing this unit. The students’ writing provides a small
window on how they are experiencing their tertiary education and their
preparation as teachers, including the managerial controls that are
currently shaping university curriculum and pedagogy. We argue that
such heteroglossic texts (Bakhtin, 1981) prompt students to stretch
their repertoires as language-users, enabling them to develop a
socially critical awareness of language and literacy, including the
literacy practices in which they engage as university students.