English Teaching: Practice and Critique
English teaching in New Zealand: The current play of the state
Volume 1 Number 1 November 2002
Terry Locke (University of Waikato, New Zealand)
Curriculum, assessment and qualifications reforms
in New Zealand have wrought significant changes in the construction of
English as a subject and in the practices of English teachers. While
the content of the new English curriculum suggests continuities with
past syllabuses, its structural parameters indicate a different
discursive agenda. Reforms in senior secondary school qualifications
have also acted to construct English in ways that need to be contested
and which may be making the subject less responsive to changes in
textual practice resulting from the rise in digital technologisation.
In a variety of ways, the reforms are also serving to reshape the
everyday classroom practices of English teachers, both overtly and
covertly through a process of discursive colonisation. Because the
reforms have been highly centralised, state initiated and state
managed, they have posed a huge challenge to teacher professionalism
and identity. Through all of this, the hegemonic status of English as
the vehicle through which literature is studied remains unchallenged.
The article concludes by listing five challenges to English
teachers.