Writing: A common project

Writing: A Common Project (Penultimate Draft of Chapter One, Writing=Learning) Brenton Doecke and Graham Parr From Doecke and Parr (eds) Writing=Learning, published by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE), Interface, AATE/Wakefield Press 1. Stepping into the Future? Recently much debate about curriculum has centered on the knowledge and skills required for participating in the ‘knowledge economy’. Governments around Australia, as well as major international organizations like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, have invested considerable resources into researching the requisite skills and knowledge for economic growth, questioning the relevance of traditional academic disciplines and exploring the viability of alternative understandings of human ability, including cross disciplinary knowledge and generic skills (see, e.g., McCurry 2004, OECD 2001). The ‘reform challenge’, according to a consultation paper distributed by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority last year, is ‘to equip students with a range of knowledge, skills and attributes for them to prosper in this new social and economic environment and to foster the ability to manage constant change’. Schools are faced with the task of producing individuals who are capable of forming social relationships and contributing ‘at a local, national and global level’. This means developing curriculum that focuses on generic skills and enables students ‘to take their learning and apply it in new contexts’, rather than remaining confined within traditional disciplinary boundaries (VCAA 2004, p.2). There is no doubt that the demands of the ‘knowledge economy’ have usefully prompted a renewed focus on learning and teaching, giving rise to significant alternative models of knowledge and curriculum. Any challenge to the strangle hold that the competitive, academic curriculum has had on schools is long overdue. A focus on generic skills, for example, can provide a useful lever for reconceptualising curriculum and questioning traditional divisions between ‘academic’ knowledge and the situated knowledge of the workplace (see McCurry 2004, Withers 1997, King & McRae 1997). Research on the learning that occurs in workplaces has produced useful concepts, such as ‘situated learning’ and ‘communities of practice’, that offer a critical perspective on school learning (e.g. Lave & Wenger 1991, Wenger 1998). The alternative models of learning available to us might conveniently be set out in the following way: Traditional understandings of learning Alternative understandings of learning Learning is conceived as purely a matter of individual cognitive development. Learning is deeply social, something that occurs through interactions with others. This understanding is evident in traditional school assessment practices, such as standardized testing and examinations for tertiary entrance, which treat students as individuals who are competing with one another. The product of learning is conceived as a social product, what Neil Mercer calls ‘the joint construction of knowledge’ (Mercer, 1996) or Gordon Wells defines as ‘dialogic inquiry’ (Wells, 2001). Accountability is conceived primarily in the form of showing improved performance by individuals against certain standards (e.g. ‘typical progression’ as mapped out by the National Profile – see AEC, 1994). The product of collaborative learning and inquiry is rich and complex, and more likely to match the kinds of learning that occur in workplace and community settings, requiring more complex forms of accountability than simply relying on standardised testing. The notion of learning as ‘individual cognitive development’ spawns popular conceptions of learning, such as those kids who have ‘ability’ or ‘brains’ and those who don’t. A wider variety of knowledge and skills are valued in the process of learning, breaking down distinctions between pure and applied knowledge, theory and practice. Such conceptions, and the practices associated with them, are meant to enable individuals to access another level of education and ultimately gain entry to high status professions. Such conceptions of learning imply community involvement and socially productive work, promoting a sense of community obligation and membership of a larger social network. Such practices are presented as having their own justification, as things that you ‘do’ to succeed in school; their meaning or value is rarely questioned. Such learning is engaging and meaningful, not routine or simulated; learners can make connections with their daily lives and inquire into matters that are of significance to them. Whether the rhetoric of the ‘knowledge economy’ ultimately brings about lasting educational reform remains to be seen, as does the precise nature that this reform might take (see Kenway, Bullen & Robb 2004). Several worthwhile initiatives have been taken at a systems wide level around Australia, most notably the Queensland New Basics and Productive Pedagogies, which firmly place the need for reconceptualising pedagogy, curriculum and assessment on the agenda. (See also Tasmanian Essential Learnings [Department of Education, Tasmania 2004] and Victorian Essential Learning Standards [VCAA & DE&T 2005].) The challenge, according to Allan Luke, is not simply to give kids stuff that ‘they feel is motivating and relevant’, but ‘to deliver high stakes knowledges, complex discipline and field-specific discourses, higher order thinking, critical meta-languages and intellectual engagement’ (Luke 2000, p.137). Luke tackles ‘the silo mentality’ of secondary schools, where curriculum is boxed into KLAs, and disciplines are treated as ‘static corpuses of fact’, and not ‘dynamic sets of discourses and practices, literacies and knowledges’ (Luke 2000, p.139). The key is to enable students to establish ‘some degree of connectedness’ to the world, and the new economies and cultures that are forming around them (p.137, p.139) Yet for all the excitement generated by such reforms, other factors remain at work that threaten the possibility of worthwhile change. You need only contrast New Basics with the opinions of a conservative critic like Kevin Donnelly to recognize how deeply polarized debate about education in Australia has become. We shall use the name ‘Donnelly’ as a convenient shorthand for a cluster of neo-conservative views about education and schooling that are currently being propagated by main stream media in Australia. According to Donnelly, the most successful educational systems ‘adopt a strong, discipline-based approach to school subjects’, enforce ‘accountability’, ‘define clear educational standards’, ‘have greater time on task in the classroom and an emphasis on formal, whole-class teaching’, and ‘have regular testing and high risk examinations’ (Donnelly 2004, p.14, see also p.22, p.34). Rather than a vision of the future, this reads like a scene out of The Simpsons. (We keep waiting for Bart to show how he feels about these types of regulation and control). The populist character of Donnelly’s rhetoric is largely due to the way he taps into some parents’ fears and their desire for success for their children at school. The continuing drift towards private schools in Australia, for which Donnelly is an unashamed apologist, has likewise traded on these fears. Much of the publicity for private schools typically promotes an ideology of individual competitiveness and a traditional view of human ability as simply a personal attribute. This ideology flies in the face of theories about the distributed and socially grounded nature of learning to which we have just referred. Unfortunately, however, this same ideology is used by governments of both political persuasions around Australia to judge the performance of state schools, with the result that all students are subjected to the continuing hegemony of traditional notions of teaching and learning, involving normative practices that reflect the values and interests of a limited cross-section of the Australian population at the expense of any acknowledgement of cultural diversity and difference or alternative forms of knowledge (cf. Teese 2000). A desirable scenario for educational reform in Australia would involve creatively mediating between the alternatives set out on the foregoing table, rather than treating them as hard and fast binaries. Common sense assumptions about measuring human ability cannot simply be wished away. Indeed, educators who are committed to enabling their students to experience more collaborative forms of learning often find themselves negotiating with students and parents who imagine that an activity only has validity if it can be tested and given a mark. Many writers in the following chapters show how they have managed to satisfy conventional expectations of schooling, meeting the ‘outcomes’ set out on literacy continua like The National Profile (AEC 1994), while opening up other dimensions of language and learning through collaborative work and dialogue that are grounded in the social relationships of the classroom. All English teachers are committed to the welfare of the individual students in their classrooms, and this means treating the values and expectations of students and parents with sensitivity, even when you do not agree with them. In this respect, working within a student-centred curriculum means negotiating with the range of values and beliefs that students bring with them into class. However, English teachers are also committed to enabling their students to learn from one another, when individual accomplishment – the writing of a poem or a play, the production of a video clip or pop song or website – is also at some deep level the product of the community in which those students are working, of their interactions with one another, of the talk and laughter they have enjoyed together. Despite the threat posed by neo-conservative political correctness, the following chapters provide abundant evidence of teachers who are working with their students to explore the complexities of language and meaning, and to share their worlds of experience and imagination. 2. The Role of English? English has always been the centre piece of the competitive academic curriculum, and it seems fair to say that English teachers have been to some extent complicit in maintaining the hegemony of traditional models of learning. As Mark Howie observes, ‘to teach is to live with guilt’, and this applies not only to a daily sense of failure to accomplish everything they might have done (see Howie 2002), but to the way English teachers feel obliged to equip their students with the skills to compete successfully in statewide exams and other forms of standardized testing. In Victoria, for example, many teachers have become adept at teaching the conventions of essay writing (Teese 2000, p.17, p.50), spending hours coaching their students to produce essays within the time limit imposed by examinations. And the fluency shown by students who write the ‘best’ papers is indeed remarkable. But there is no walking away from the culturally loaded nature of this practice (Teese 2000, Clyne 1999, Kostogriz, this volume), even as teachers continue to meet their professional obligations to drill and skill students in handling the conventions of essay text literacy. Why should essay writing be prized over other literacy practices? To what extent should a capacity to write essays be equated with ‘ability’ in language and literacy? How does essay writing compare with the literacy practices in which students engage outside school? Why should schools focus on essay text literacy at the expense of enabling students to produce other kinds of text, most notably the multimodal texts they use in their everyday lives (cf. Beavis, this volume)? These questions must be asked if teachers are to maintain a critical perspective on their professional practice, even though the answer might well be to reaffirm the value of school literacy practices as peculiarly suited to the intellectual and emotional growth of students (cf. Doecke & McClenaghan, this volume). Yet English teachers also rightfully feel obliged to explore the promise held out by alternatives to traditional models of language and learning. The research traditions behind alternative understandings of language and learning are extraordinarily rich, and it is a tell tale sign that conservative critics like Donnelly have baulked at engaging with arguments about the relationship between thought and language (Vygotsky 1986) or the way that language mediates the social relationships in which it is used (Bahktin 1981). Focusing on the complexities of language and meaning, language and social relationships, does not mean that school literacy practices as they have been traditionally enacted should be completely displaced by some kind of new age pedagogy that is completely unlike anything that has gone before. The challenge for English teachers is to remain sensitive to the ways that language mediates experience, as human beings think, learn, imagine, and negotiate their relationships with one another within the local and global networks available to them at any one moment in time (see Doecke, Locke & Petrosky 2004). We are both teacher educators who have the privilege of observing pre-service teachers in action, as they attempt to negotiate the complexities of the social relationships they encounter in secondary English classrooms. The idealism of pre-service teachers is a key factor in keeping our own idealism afloat – they clearly believe, with William Blake, that classrooms should be sites for opening up ‘immense world[s] of delight’ (1790/1994), and that the imagination and language of young people should not simply be contained and controlled. Here are some anecdotes about their teaching, which show them exploring the complexities of language and meaning in precisely the way we are describing. A pre-service teacher is teaching a Year 9 class in a state secondary school in an outer region of the Melbourne metropolitan area. You need to imagine an indifferent backdrop of the walls of a classroom in an under-resourced state school, the desks and chairs grouped haphazardly together. The kids are having a go at creating their own Garfield cartoon strips, attempting in three frames through a combination of imagery and text to tell jokes. The pre-service teacher laughs as he encourages them to present their jokes to their peers. The social relationships in this classroom form an inescapable context for learning and teaching – not a delimitation, but a condition for learning – and the pre-service teacher has got it right by giving the kids an opportunity to work with a genre they know and to construct meaning by using those conventions. They are distilling their worlds of experience and imagination into cartoons that are actually very funny, and they laugh appreciatively when they show each other their work. Another pre-service teacher is teaching a class of Year 7 students, many of whom are learning English as a second language. But everyone knows The Simpsons, and the students laugh as Homer saves the day by preventing a disaster from occurring on the monorail. The pre-service teacher then invites the class to imagine how such an incident would be reported in the press, showing them an example of a front page which she has created, and the students then spend the rest of the lesson designing front page spreads depicting the incident. In a Grade 2 classroom, a pre-service teacher monitors his class of Year 9 students as they read stories to small groups of children. The stories have been specially written by the Year 9 students for their primary school audience; it is an audience they have come to know well through previous visits over the five-week teaching round. The pride of these Year 9 (often reluctant) writers in their own writing is palpable. Of particular interest to the pre-service teacher is Pedro, in one corner, who is reading his own horror story, ‘Max the Vampire and the Monster from the Lake.’ Young faces peer up at Pedro as he reads. Back at high school, Pedro had described his attitude to writing: ‘I write when I am ordered to…. I also prefer drawing over writing….’ In Pedro’s story, the eponymous Max seems to draw on Pedro’s own experiences of having to produce school literacy texts. At Scaryville Primary School, Max can write ‘when ordered to,’ but growing fear at the onset of writer’s block seems to provoke an especially frightening experience at the lake on the way home from school. And, yet, here is Pedro (like his other Year 9 peers) engaged and engaging as he discusses his story with his younger audience. A Year 8 class includes students from a wide range of cultural and educational backgrounds; they have not responded well to conventional ‘creative writing’ exercises in the past. The curriculum dictates that it’s ‘time to teach issues’ and ‘to learn about newspapers.’ The pre-service teacher has found out, in a previous lesson, that few if any students even see a newspaper in their homes. And yet twenty minutes into the lesson, the classroom is a buzz of excited chatter and laughter as students relish the task of selecting fragments of newspaper text to produce collaborative poems or mini-narratives. The end of the lesson is ‘a hit’: students applaud the efforts of their peers as they read them out aloud. There is entertaining use of parody and absurd non-sequiturs. Some poems draw unlikely coherence out of disparate text fragments; other poems satirise the advertising discourses these students know so well. One group of writers has mounted a surprising social critique by juxtaposing the characters of George Bush, the principal of their school, and an Olympic champion. Most surprising of all, perhaps, is that these students have engaged in focused and animated work in association with newspapers – a form of media that might otherwise be deemed alien to their worlds. What these incidents have in common is not that they each model a successful strategy for enabling students to write, as though writing (or any aspect of English) can ever be a matter of learning and applying mechanical skills. The key element in each anecdote relates to the way the pre-service teacher was able to tap into the students’ interests and enthusiasms and situate the activity within the social relationships of the classroom. What do we know about cartoons? Why do they make us laugh? How do you tell a good joke? How do incidents get reported in the press? How do you write a newspaper article? You could say that students and teachers alike were engaged in a joint inquiry into the complexities of language and meaning (see, e.g., Nystrand 1997, Beach & Myers 2001; Gill, this volume). The classrooms we have just observed are sites for genuinely critical engagement, imaginative play and inquiry, in which students jointly construct knowledge about their lives. Language, as theorists like Vygotsky and Bahktin have shown, cannot be understood simply as a matter of personal ‘expression’ or ‘intelligence’. In many ways, schools are locked into practices which treat language as though it were an individual property – this is perhaps no more perversely revealed than by the ritual of examinations, when students are obliged to sit in long rows of single desks, each individual engaged in a solitary struggle to write words for an anonymous marker. It may be impossible to imagine a world where schools or high stakes assessment are organized differently, and yet it is worth contemplating how educational institutions might enhance students’ awareness of language as affirming the social nature of their being and as a medium through which they can work together to achieve common purposes. For all the emphasis on the imaginative ‘flair’ or ‘ability’ shown by the ‘best’ exam essays, the ritual of examinations reduces language to a preexisting body of agreed conventions to which students are obliged to conform (something which is painfully obvious when you encounter the naïve handling of the conventions of essay text literacy in papers of an ‘inferior’ quality). Bahktin’s understanding of language as a field of conflicting voices and dialectics, professional discourses, slang, the slogans of the moment, as well as echoes from the past, is more than a celebration of heterogeneity. It involves a tension between pressures towards standardization and conformity (as in a ‘standard’ language or grammar) and a rich human capacity for invention and resistance to standardization and conformity. Paradoxically, Bahktin’s understanding of the way that people appropriate language, of the way they struggle to occupy the space of the words that preexist them, is a more powerful model of human agency than the ideology of neo-liberal individualism enacted in the ritual of examinations and other forms of standardized testing (see Bahktin 1981). Classrooms are sites for what Gordon Wells calls ‘dialogic inquiry’, by which he means the kind of joint inquiry into language and meaning that we are envisaging here (Wells 2001). It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of such inquiry and the ways it equips students to meet the demands of the ‘knowledge economy’. We are imagining classrooms in which teachers and students explore the meaning-making potential of the complex range of literacy practices in which they engage in their everyday lives. English teachers can confidently affirm the need for such an inquiry to be at the centre of any curriculum design that might be introduced in order to enable students to handle the challenges of the future, whether this is driven by conservative attempts to reduce English to a reified set of skills or more forward looking initiatives, such as an emphasis on generic skills or multiple intelligences. As the authors in this book show, language cannot be boxed as simply one skill (e.g. ‘communication’) or ‘intelligence’, as though it were one component of an array of skills or intelligences from which you might choose. Language is emphatically not one skill or intelligence amongst many. It is an indispensable medium for communication, for negotiating human relationships, for forming a social identity, for constructing knowledge, and for imagining worlds other than the one we currently inhabit. You might object that music or visual literacy coexists with language, and that they likewise cannot be explained in terms provided by any of the other ‘intelligences’. Isadora Duncan shrugged off attempts to get her to explain her dancing by saying that if she could put it in words her dancing would be superfluous. And she was right. We can grant this without stepping back from the fact that language is always there, like life itself; that while one might wish to affirm the value of other forms of ‘intelligence’, our experiences are crucially mediated by words. This is what we understand by Derrida’s famous statement that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (1976), or Wittgenstein’s aphorism that ‘what cannot be said must be passed over in silence’ (1994), or Vygotsky’s explorations of the ‘living’ relationship between ‘thought’ and ‘word’ (1986), or Bahktin’s meditations on the ways in which words ‘sparkle’ with ideology (1981, p. 277) – all these theorists (who can roughly be bundled together as exemplifying the ‘linguistic turn’ in the human sciences) can be used to underline the inescapability of language, the centrality of language to our lives. They can also be used to argue that English is not one subject (or key learning area) amongst many, but that it should be the dynamic of any meaningful curriculum reform that enables students to step into the future. To say this, however, is both to join the many voices demanding curriculum reform in order to create a ‘knowledge economy’ and to maintain a critical distance from such rhetoric. For to say that language is crucially bound up with thought is to acknowledge that any attempt to imagine the future (or a new ‘knowledge economy’) is likewise mediated by language. And just as we remain confined within our language, we remain confined within the present, as we continually grapple with words and meaning, language and experience, in order to make sense of our lives. A curriculum should therefore be not only about ‘writing the future’ (Kress 1995), but about writing the present. And yet we know that even as we try to find words to capture the present, it slips away from us. A curriculum cannot simply be shaped by future projections about the state of the economy or the kinds of citizens we feel we should be producing. Rather than viewing our students through the lens of such futuristic scenarios, we need to attend to their efforts to use language to understand the current moment, to articulate their needs and values, to achieve a sense of identity, and to find their place. The classroom inquiry we are envisaging should crucially engage with the current moment, enabling students to grapple with their local and immediate concerns. Young people are confronted by a multiplicity of texts and images each day, many of which locate them in their immediate worlds, while others signal global settings and networks. Even as they actively participate in the social relationships of their immediate neighbourhoods or communities, they are participating within networks that stretch beyond them, challenging their capacity to think about and imagine their local world. To suppose, indeed, that the local and immediate do not open themselves up, with analysis, to being reconceptualised within the context of the global flows and networks of the information society, is to deny students the opportunity to make connections between their local contexts or spaces and larger international forces. A focus on the local and immediate can also become an inquiry into the connections between your local community and global forces, between what Castells calls the ‘space of flows’ and the ‘space of places’ (Castells 2000, pp. 408-409). It can take you beyond the immediacy of the present to an understanding of the way the present moment as you experience it is the product of complex mediations and relationships that challenge your sense that this is how things ‘are’. Yet this is also to affirm the challenge and excitement of engaging in the present, of living this moment through. 3. Professional Learning = Student Learning? While language is preeminently a social phenomenon, it is also an intensely personal experience – you need only think of how children puzzle about the mystery of words and things, or of those words that echo in your mind, conjuring up images of people and places you once knew: ‘Down the passage which we did not take/Towards the door we never opened/Into the rose-garden’ (Eliot 1999). As teacher educators, we invite our students to write about their earliest experiences of language and literacy and to reconstruct moments from their pasts that might explain their commitment to becoming English teachers. This is not simply because, as teachers of writing, they ought to practise what they preach, continually reminding themselves of (to borrow once again from Four Quartets) that writing is always ‘a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate’ (Eliot 1999). We are equally concerned to promote the value of writing as a vehicle for grappling with issues emerging in their professional lives. A number of the chapters in this volume explore the nature of professional writing, showing how it enables teachers to refine their understanding of the complexities of teaching and learning. This is obviously of benefit to the students in their classes, although those benefits do not necessarily translate into tangible outcomes that can easily be measured. It is possible to construct a table showing models of professional learning that matches the previous table. Traditional understandings of professional learning Alternative understandings of professional learning Teachers are positioned as ‘individual professionals’ (Caldwell & Hayward 1998). Teaching is considered to be collaborative in nature, a function of the network of relationships in which individual teachers and groups of teachers operate. Professional learning is presumed to be generic in nature, and can be applied to all educational settings regardless of their particular character. It can be unproblematically transferred or exported from context to context. Professional learning is anchored in the specific contexts in which teachers operate. Knowledge of teachers and teaching is imported from outside and delivered through professional development programs. Knowledge of teachers and teaching develops from, and involves, sustained inquiry into teaching and learning, including focused observation of learners. Knowledge of teachers and teaching is unproblematically avowed, and is typically delivered as a remedy for deficiencies in teachers’ existing practices. The findings of research into the knowledge of teachers and teaching is considered provisional and contestable, especially with regard to how those findings might be applied to other settings. Evidence of the knowledge of teachers and teaching is often demonstrated in large-scale surveys that systematically bracket out the specific nature of school communities. Evidence of the knowledge of teachers and teaching is often explored in non-canonical forms of inquiry, such as action research, narrative inquiry, and other types of qualitative research that include some focus on the nature of school communities. Teachers’ professional practice is judged against pre-existing or traditional outcomes - outcomes which are unproblematically measurable, such as their students’ standardised test results. Teachers draw on academic and practitioner research and theory in order to review and critique their existing practices. Teachers are rendered accountable through performance appraisals which require them to specify targets (for themselves and for their students) and to demonstrate that these targets are achieved. Teachers work together to create a culture of critical inquiry at their school in which everyone – teachers, students, parents – can participate. They are mindful, nevertheless, of the managerial systems within which they continue to be accountable. This table is perhaps misleading to the extent that what we are calling ‘traditional understandings of professional learning’ actually reflect a managerial culture that has only recently begun to affect the way teachers’ work is understood (cf. Locke 2001, Mahony & Hextall 2000). The threat and promise of the current moment described by this table broadly map on to the previous table, reflecting a conflict between an ideology of neo-liberal individualism and an alternative vision of human sociability and collaboration to achieve common goals. As with the alternatives set out on the previous table, these contrasting understandings of professional learning present themselves less as choices than as positions between which teachers must mediate in the course of their professional lives. They cannot close their eyes to the managerial forms of control and accountability that have been reshaping their professional practice, although they might still steadfastly adhere to an alternative model of professionalism and critique those forms (Locke 2004, Parr 2004). But rather than supposing that they must choose between alternatives, as though their professional world splits right down the middle, they might more productively conceive of themselves as engaging in a dialogical struggle over the language used to describe their professional practice, in which they seek to appropriate the vocabulary of policy makers and use it for their own purposes. This has been the case with the word ‘standards’ (cf. Doecke & Gill 2000) - English teachers involved in the STELLA project have appropriated that word to name the values and aspirations that drive them as a profession, rather than allowing it to signify merely crude benchmarks against which their practice can be judged - and a similar struggle might be played out with respect to other managerial rhetoric. Those chapters in the following volume which focus on professional learning might be read as engaging in this kind of struggle (see Bulfin, Parr & Bellis, Mitchell, this volume). A key theme in all these chapters is the way teachers talk and write their way into a shared understanding of the complexities of their professional practice. This presupposes the central role that teachers play in providing quality learning experiences to students. However, all the writers are careful to distinguish between the way they position teachers and recent claims that ‘ “what matters most” is quality teachers and teaching, supported by strategic teacher professional development’ (Rowe 2003, p.1). These words are taken from a paper by Ken Rowe, in which he dismisses ‘the traditional and prevailing dogmas surrounding “factors” affecting students’ experiences.’ Rowe is especially dismissive of ‘socio-cultural and socio-economic factors’, which are merely, ‘the products of methodological and statistical artefact’. Those who emphasise the importance of such ‘factors’ are apparently guilty of ‘“religious” adherence to the moribund ideologies of biological and social determinism’ (Rowe, 2003, p.1). Rowe’s own brand of ‘evidence-based’ research presumably transcends the status of an ‘artefact’ and provides direct access to ‘what matters most’ – a curious position for anyone who is presenting research that by definition should be open to refutation. (How else could it have the status of ‘knowledge’?) The accounts of professional learning in this volume make far more tentative claims than so-called ‘evidence based research’, and in this respect they might paradoxically be said to be more ‘scientific’, reflecting a genuine spirit of inquiry that invites scrutiny of the assumptions that inform it (Freebody 2003, p.37). Socio-cultural and socio-economic dimensions cannot be reduced to isolable ‘factors’ that can somehow be measured against ‘teacher effects’ (Delandshere & Petrosky 2004), but they form the inescapable conditions under which teachers try to establish relationships with their students. It follows that a crucial aspect of any teacher’s professional engagement is a capacity to reflect on the values they bring to any school community and to monitor how those values might shape their dialogue with students (see Cochran-Smith & Lytle 2001; Goodson 2003; Etherington 2004). The writers on professional learning in the following volume all display this kind of reflexivity, and thereby subject themselves to a more rigorous form of accountability than managerialism’s attempt to measure what it chooses to measure. The professional learning of the practitioner researchers who have contributed to this book is closely linked to student learning. This is not to say that their learning is directly connected with improved learning outcomes as narrowly defined by Rowe and other advocates of school ‘effectiveness’. (See other school effectiveness advocates: Reynolds 2002, D. Hargreaves 2001.) One of the most compelling chapters in the following volume recounts the efforts by a group of teachers at a state secondary school to implement a literacy intervention program. It concludes by questioning how students are classified as needing remediation, while still affirming the ‘temporary validation’ that the students experienced through participating in this program (see Illesca, this volume). Such insights into the complexities of implementing a literacy intervention program should not be dismissed, but might guide other teachers in their efforts to grapple with the contradictory nature of similar programs. However, the link between professional learning and student learning embraces more than just a capacity on the part of teachers to evaluate the success or otherwise of any initiative, important though such a capacity might be. Rather, the qualities that teachers value most in their students’ learning – intellectual curiosity, a willingness to engage in exploratory talk, imagination, a preparedness to collaborate while also accepting a degree of autonomy, a capacity to engage in metacognition and reflexivity – are the very same qualities that characterize their own professional learning. Teachers who engage in practitioner inquiry are much more likely to be able to generate a ‘culture of inquiry’ in their own classrooms (Reid, 2004, p.12). 4. Conclusion This collection of essays replaces Responding to Students’ Writing: Continuing Conversations in AATE’s Interface series (see Doecke, 1999). The previous volume was organised around a dialogue between past and present, including the reprinting of seminal essays from the 1980s, such as Brian Johnston’s ‘How Can I Usefully Respond to Students’ First Drafts?’ and Frances Christie’s ‘Learning to Write: A Process of Learning How to Mean’, alongside essays in which writers reflected on the continuing significance of these texts for their professional practice. The collection signalled an attempt to move beyond the debates which had divided the English teaching profession during the 1980s, most notably the process/genre debate, and tried to facilitate a conversation between people who had hitherto belonged to opposing camps. From the standpoint of the present, debates between advocates of ‘process writing’ and the ‘genre’ school seem to be a luxury we can no longer afford. This introduction has presented an account of a very different professional landscape, one in which the rich intellectual and professional tradition represented by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English and the wider English teaching profession is being challenged. Several of the chapters in this volume review this tradition, showing how the English teaching community has engaged in continuing inquiry and a refinement of its understanding of the complexities of student writing (see Locke, Sawyer, this volume). We have republished two influential essays by Kevin Murray and Michael Clyne (from Responding to Students’ Writing) to show how, through their critiques of these writers, Locke and Kostogriz respectively are enacting a continuing process of reflection and inquiry. Other chapters show how writing continues to be a focus of inquiry for English teachers, as well as for teachers of other subject areas (see Kent, Hildebrand, this volume.) One aspect of the ongoing conversation that has not changed is the focus on writing and learning. To conclude the volume, we have republished statements about the language modes which were developed in consultation with teachers of English around Australia as part of the STELLA project. Taken together, the authors in this book propose a three-fold (and interconnected) conceptualization of writing: writing as artefact - generated by students and/or educators in the process of teaching and learning, and constituting the object/s of critical and imaginative inquiry; writing as process - not constrained by expectations of particular artefacts but supporting and inspiring ongoing critical and imaginative inquiry and evaluation; and writing as medium - in which and through which this critical and imaginary inquiry can be enacted and enabled, stimulating richer learning for students, teachers, and teacher educators. At the present time, the English teaching profession in Australia is indeed under serious attack from several quarters. English teachers in schools, their professional associations in supportive and advocacy roles, and teacher educators in collaborative inquiry with pre-service, early career and more experienced English teachers – all are threatened. Certainly, the profession cannot afford to rest complacently on its laurels, as if what they have done in the past were good enough for the present and the future. Nor is it time to adopt a bunker mentality: dig in and wait until the attack passes. Rather, we believe it is time to work proactively, to take the initiative in public debates about English teaching and learning. If the English teaching profession is to maintain its integrity, if we as English educators are to continue to work in ways that allow us to inquire critically, imaginatively and collaboratively into our students’ learning and our own practices, we must all accept the professional and political challenge of the moment. We need to generate and disseminate critical accounts of our practices, of the theory and conceptual framework underpinning these practices, of the beliefs and values driving the combination of theory and practices. Traditionally, a focus on writing in research into English teaching has tended to concentrate mainly on writing-as-artefact. Yet such a focus, de-emphasising as it does writing-as-process and writing-as-medium, tends to limit the richness any accounts of English educators’ practices. By inquiring into the broadest possibilities and contexts of writing, as we have here, it can indeed be the case that writing = learning. 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