English teachers' perspectives on how they create space for their students’ voices and agency in challenging times

This chapter draws on a small case study of interviews conducted with Australian secondary English teachers in New South Wales who share the practicalities of their planning to develop materials to help their students to go beyond the mundane and merely functional. These teachers might be from any IFTE country as they describe the opportunities and spaces they generate in their classrooms to open up new worlds for their students’ personal exploration and learning. The research demonstrates that their creative endeavours reveal that innovative approaches to planning, thoughtful selections of diverse texts and confident professional judgement can facilitate change and enrich community. They are also very cognisant of the tensions and pressures on their classroom work and clearsighted about the impact of the forces beyond them that perpetuate student disadvantage in its varied forms. However, they persist with purposeful commitment. What this research highlights are the visions and abilities of teachers in English to recognise the subject’s power for building students’ connection and agency and for providing opportunities to hear diverse voices about finding your own unique space in the world. Evident here is a firm commitment to teaching all students, a willingness to push through multi-pronged attacks on what the teachers truly value, and ultimately, the capacity to find pleasure in small shared moments in an English classroom. The teachers are guided by an unwavering belief, ‘it’s one of those subjects where you can definitely … make a difference’.