English Language Arts [English/literacy] teachers in the main anglophone countries experience extreme pressures on their teacher agency, especially in England, Australia and the USA.  The curriculum has narrowed, accountability is extreme, tests are high stakes and many teachers are leaving.  Our research, involving four, projects, from USA, England and Australia analyses these issues and reveals a desperate situation. Certain teachers have developed ‘adaptive agency’, a powerful aspect of such which is their retention of loving literature and profound belief that all students can still love and enjoy literature, passionately believing that the curriculum/test combination is ruining this fundamental element of professional lives. They express hope, drawing on long experience, that reforms may bring about a time of more equitable opportunity.

Purpose and context

Around the world teachers have been experiencing strong external pressures on their work, reducing their autonomy, constraining creativity [Author 1., 2013, 2016, 2020], especially true of a subject area like Language Arts [English/literacy – see note below] where teachers have deep convictions about the vital importance of engaging students in local and immediate ways, untrammelled by nationalistic agendas.  The identity of Language Arts teachers in the USA, Australia and England has marked similarities, characterised by a passionate attachment to teaching literature [Author 1. et al, 2015], a student centred ideology often constructed around a Personal Growth model of the subject and strongly inflected by a view of students as agents in meaning making who adopt a critical literacy perspective on texts and language [ Author 1., 2004, 2005]. 

Another common factor is what is happening to the subject of English/Language Arts in schools and universities, less students choose to study it at school and numbers on degree programmes are rapidly reducing.  It is becoming more difficult to recruit LA teachers onto teacher preparation programmes coupled with the remarkable increase in LA teachers leaving either during their first 5 years of teaching or at a later stage taking early retirement or making a career change.

Conceptual framework

Teacher agency is important in all curriculum subjects but we argue it has an additional element in Language Arts [LA] because of the centrality of literature to teachers own lives and to their teaching.  In former times of more ‘harmonious practice’ there was an alignment between the kind of literature teachers themselves wanted to teach and the curriculum and modes of assessment. 

Adaptive agency can be first defined in a simple way as: The evolving agency of the individual teacher within the power matrix of external and internal regulation.  When viewed in more detail its components are: [1] Agency this relates to the individual’s degree of control over classroom practice and curriculum design at the point of the present tense, that is when ‘English’ is happening in a classroom (Author 1., 2019). [2] The external matrix has many elements, some are subject documents [like a curriculum definition or an examination specification], teacher standards, inspection frameworks, these documents are pervaded by principally neoliberal discourses [3] the internal regulations are those elements where the teacher behaves in alignment with the documents and the ideology that pervades them.  The adaptive quality relates to the Darwinian characteristic (Darwin, 1869) of surviving and coping in a difficult environment but also to adaptive expertise (Author 1., 2016) where the agent can still exert some power and control in a skilled and personal manner.  Inevitably this set of factors creates a very tense and conflictual strain on the teacher’s personal and professional identity, too much strain for some teachers to bear, the emotional toll is too high and many leave the profession [certainly in England].  

The authors have engaged and continue to be engaged with several qualitative projects, four are drawn on here and the data synthesised to focus on teacher agency and the importance of literature. The projects are [1] Teachers literary knowledge (2015-17)[2] Contested Territories (2017-18) [3] The literary knowledge of early career teachers (2017-2021)[4] The Professional Lives of English Language Arts Teachers (2019-202) Projects [1] and [2] were conducted across England and Australia, [3] only in Australia [4] USA, Australia and England. In summary the projects are:- [1] A study of experienced ELA teachers in England [ 8 from London and Reading] and Australia [8 from Sydney and Melbourne]. This year long project was partially a pilot for project [3]. The focus was on their own literary knowledge and how they were approaching teaching literature at that time. [2] This was an investigation of teachers’ current experiences of teaching LA generally and literature in particular in schools around Sydney [16 teachers] and across England [16 teachers] – research was conducted over 12 months. [3] This project is an ongoing investigation of early career LA teachers and what they consider to be ‘literary knowledge’ as it exists for them as individuals, as it is defined in society, and as it operates currently in schools as a teachable and assessable concept. [4] This project is an ongoing study [affected by Covid] of the Professional lives of 50 English teachers in the USA, England and Australia. All the projects are qualitative inquiries using in-depth semi-structured interviews to create rich data, interviews typically lasting 45-60 minutes and being fully transcribed. The total number of teachers participating so far is 120 over a period of 4 years. All teachers are volunteers and provide a valuable range of levels of experience offering a strong degree of professional representation. It is a shared belief amongst the very experienced research team that LA is severely affected by neoliberal policies at governmental and state level [in Australia and the USA] having ‘reductive effects’ on teachers’ autonomy and agency, the place of literature is absolutely reduced and diminished. All the projects have investigated the truth of this belief by asking teachers to explain how they see the current situation, where relevant [depending on their years of service] how it compares to former periods and how they see the future.

One major finding is that the hypothetical characteristics outlined above - 1 to 8 – are all present in the views of current LA teachers to such an extent, with minor differences, that they can be considered the reality of current teachers’ lives. Those teachers with considerable years of experience reflect on this as a steadily increasing state of affairs. The most experienced – minimum 20 years – recall periods that were so different that we have categorised them as a period of ‘harmonious practice’ when teachers’ beliefs and way LA was defined and assessed were in alignment. This finding also influenced their view of a potentially better future. A second key finding was that literature teaching remains central to the concerns of all the teachers, despite the issues discussed above. In general they strive to maintain a student centred pedagogy that privileges personal response above what we term ‘easily assessable literary knowledge’. A third finding is that ‘easily assessable literary knowledge’ [EALK] has mostly replaced ‘personal literary knowledge’ [PLK] in the later years of high school. EALK is knowledge about texts, often factual and contextual and where there is an implied ‘right answer’ about the author’s meaning and literary importance. PLK is what the teachers themselves believe they have and retain, they may well have ‘literary readers’ training, through university study and so understand literary criticism, but their relationship to literature is one of love and engagement. Literature matters to them personally more than because any text belongs to the literary canon. A fourth major finding is that texts have become ‘officialised’, diminished into artefacts of state sanctioned property. A fifth finding is that the majority of the experienced teachers [our definition is simply 5 years of teaching or more] have developed adaptive agency, especially when it comes to literature teaching.

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