The article examines the widely circulated speech attributed to Chief Seattle and its continued use in English teaching materials despite its highly mediated and unstable textual history. Focusing particularly on the Perry/Stevens environmental version reproduced in Danish upper-secondary materials, the article explores how the speech acquires authority through institutional framing, cultural repetition, and contemporary expectations concerning Indigenous authenticity and environmental wisdom. Drawing on textual analysis, scholarship on the speech tradition, and a classroom case study, the article demonstrates how students initially accepted the text as historically authentic before engaging critically with questions of mediation, representation, and authorship. The article argues that the persistence of the speech reflects broader processes of othering, co-optation, and symbolic authenticity within educational discourse. More broadly, the case highlights the importance of critical literacy practices that examine not only sources themselves, but also the cultural assumptions embedded within teaching materials.
Conducting insider ethnographic research as a teacher within one's own classroom presents unique ethical strands that when sought to be understood can illuminate useful dimensions of ethnographic research and education. Three entangled strands are explored here: the complexities of rewarding the efforts and labour of student participants, the naming, shaping, and maintaining of relationships, and finally the impact of wanting and choosing to remain in the field after the research ends. Further, there are relational, professional and institutional contexts involved in researching with young people that inform the ethical role and perspectives not simply as a teacher, but as their teacher. It is this relational aspect that most tightly binds the generative knot of these strands.
This article examines how English is learned, experienced, and made meaningful beyond the classroom in digitally mediated contexts. Drawing on a case study of a Jakarta-based municipal officer (Satpol PP) whose English-language interaction went viral on social media, the study traces how a brief moment of speaking becomes a site of public engagement, interpretation, and circulation. As the interaction moves across platforms - from a street-level encounter to institutional reposting and media coverage - it becomes a shared resource through which viewers reflect on language, effort, and possibility. The analysis develops the concept of affective mobility to describe how English enables speakers to gain visibility and recognition while inviting emotional engagement from others. Rather than focusing on correctness, participants orient to confidence, courage, and willingness to communicate. The findings highlight everyday encounters with English as sites of learning and meaning-making and show how digital environments shape how English is imagined, valued, and lived.
With the increasing prominence and proliferation of social media influencers promoting 'exam hacks', 'things your English teacher won't tell you' and even paid for predicted English exam papers, this article highlights the implications for English education and the professional teaching community. By applying a Baudrillardian framework, the essay explores the 'murder of reality' within the English classroom, arguing that digital simulacra, created by 'influencers' replace actual literary analysis with a hyperreal, commodified performance of knowledge. It is hoped that this can serve as a starting point for discussions regarding how English teachers and subject organisations might respond to the growing influence of these personalities on pupils' attitudes. This is particularly problematic, as this essay will demonstrate, when the information shared by these influencers is, at best, tenuous and, at worst, factually incorrect.
What constitutes quality English language teaching is rarely a settled question, yet in Vietnamese EFL classrooms it is especially fraught. Teachers in private language centres, public schools, and universities navigate a landscape where quality is contested by at least four stakeholder groups: communicative teaching advocates aligned with national curriculum policy; market-driven institutions and parents who prioritise examination outcomes; employers and students who associate quality with native-speaker teachers; and professional bodies that frame quality in terms of pedagogical credentials and reflective practice. This paper examines tensions among these competing notions and argues that they reflect deeper ideological conflicts about what English is for, who owns it, and what professional authority an English teacher should possess. It proposes a typology of quality discourses and argues that sustainable improvement depends on greater critical awareness of the ideological assumptions underpinning each discourse.
This research report explores how curriculum gatekeepers - textbook writers, reviewers, and teachers - negotiate gender representation in ESL textbooks used in government schools in Sindh, Pakistan. Moving beyond textbook content, it examines curriculum development as a process shaped by institutional, cultural, and political constraints. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, the study shows that gender inclusivity is typically approached through visible adjustments such as balanced images or language, while deeper patterns remain unchanged. Men continue to occupy positions of authority, whereas women are more often confined to domesticated or socially acceptable roles within binary frameworks. I introduce the concept of optical inclusion, referring to forms of inclusion that make equity visible while leaving underlying epistemic structures intact. Participants describe how bureaucratic pressures, cultural expectations, and fear of public backlash shape curricular decisions. This essay contributes to debates on curriculum governance and the politics of inclusion in postcolonial English education.
In a 'post-truth' international media landscape increasingly shaped by misinformation and propaganda, English teachers face new and growing challenges in teaching critical literacy. This article reports selected findings from a six-month multiple case study examining how secondary English teachers integrated critical media epistemology (CME) - a new framework synthesising critical media literacy and epistemic cognition - into literature instruction. Focusing on three strategies for embedding CME within existing literature units that emerged from our data analysis, we illustrate how teachers connected student- and teacher-selected digital media to anchor texts and engaged students in creating media grounded in literary study. Drawing on classroom examples from diverse instructional contexts, the article demonstrates how integrating CME into everyday English instruction can foster students' rhetorical awareness, epistemic reflection, and critical engagement with texts across media. The findings suggest that CME offers a feasible, theoretically grounded approach for addressing post-truth conditions through literature-centred instruction.
In this article, I attempt to answer the question: what does it mean to say students respond spontaneously? I look at student responses, the teacher's position, and institutional demands. Spontaneity, I argue, contains a contradiction and movement. On the one hand, spontaneity must, in fact, be mediated. On the other hand, spontaneity is a lens through which we can view literature in production and culture more broadly; a way in which we can see students' responses to texts as social practices that are always negotiated. I attempt to show how spontaneity is, in fact, a praxis, crucial to the production of knowledge and culture. My critique of the concept of spontaneity is an attempt to recognise what students bring to the classroom, their resources, potentialities and amplitude, and therefore offers a way in which teachers can be more sensitive and responsive, to be better readers and listeners.
This auto-ethnographic narrative seeks to challenge prevailing narratives surrounding my experience of learning English as a second language. Drawing inspiration from the biblical figure Joseph, whose journey resonates with themes of perseverance and identity, I position myself as a passionate learner navigating the complexities of language acquisition. Grounded in socio-cultural and motivational theories, this study reflects on how my academic path and professional identity as a teacher have been shaped through the process of learning English. Through reflective analysis of early educational experiences, I examine the cultural dimensions of my schooling and their influence on my evolving self-concept. Engaging with literature on language learning and auto-ethnographic methods, I came to recognise auto-ethnography as both a tool for self-discovery and a means of inspiring other second language learners and educators. This methodology offers a powerful avenue for capturing the delicate, often underrepresented voices in language education research.
This study examines the Israeli destruction of Gaza's education system through the conceptual frameworks of scholasticide and educide. Drawing on thematic content analysis of twenty-nine semi-structured interviews with thirteen mothers, seven boys, and nine girls displaced in Rafah camps, it documents the Israeli deliberate dismantling of educational spaces. Testimonies reveal classrooms converted into shelters, school materials repurposed for survival, and learning routines fractured by displacement. Six interrelated themes emerge, including schools transformed into camps, learning under tents, survival labour supplanting instruction, buried credentials and deferred futures, mothers acting as improvised 'shadow schools', and a children's lexicon of loss in which study persists as refusal. The findings demonstrate that education is not a collateral casualty of war but a strategic target aimed at erasing intergenerational knowledge transmission. While families reconstruct fragile forms of learning as endurance, such efforts cannot replace institutional guarantees, underscoring scholasticide as an integral component of genocidal violence.
This essay uses Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own to reflect on my identity as an English teacher. Woolf critiques the exclusion of women from the literary canon, exposing the cultural norms that marginalise them. Her work speaks to many aspects of my struggle as a woman and an English teacher to remain true to my 'self' (or to the 'many selves' that make me), offering a counterpoint to educational reforms that construct my identity in a way that is alien to me. I offer a reading of Woolf's essay that is grounded in my autobiography in an attempt to disrupt dominant discourses of standardisation and highlight the importance of reflexivity in shaping teaching and learning.
In translanguaging, multicultural students with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds utilise their entire linguistic repertoire to learn English. This study underscores the pedagogical value of adopting ELF-informed pedagogy by recognising students' translanguaging, a common practice in Indonesia, during student-led Zoom discussions. Critical case purposive sampling, which focuses on information-rich cases, was used to focus on a group of cases in which students used English, Bahasa Indonesia, and Sundanese to participate in the discourse. Involving 37 third-year English education students at a public university in Bandung, Indonesia, this study reveals that translanguaging sustains dialogue in the discussion, invites active student engagement, and fosters meaningful knowledge construction. In short, translanguaging creates an inclusive, context-responsive space for student voices.
This article reflects on a year-long English reading and writing project with 32 secondary students in an alternative learning centre in Malaysia. Working with refugee, stateless, and undocumented learners, many of whom had experienced disrupted schooling and, in some cases, had little or no prior literacy, I explore what happened when English lessons centred on shared reading, review writing, dialogue, and story making. Over time, students moved from hesitant responses to more confident acts of authorship, culminating in the creation of illustrated storybooks in English. Drawing on classroom texts and my reflections as a teacher- researcher, I consider how sustained engagement with narrative enabled students to position themselves as meaning makers rather than passive learners. The article suggests that long-term, narrative- based English projects can create spaces for voice, identity affirmation, and imagination in contexts where young people are routinely excluded from formal education.
As of 2025, there is no reason that the presently ubiquitous and required 'College Writing' course should even exist - at least as long imagined. The very status of the student essay, a longstanding staple of most disciplines, has been radically transformed in less than three years. Generative AI chatbots have effectively rendered classroom and workplace textual-generative skill development obsolete. From this sobering reflection, this article seeks to elucidate the capabilities of new technology as concerns academic writing and, importantly, the social dimensions of its use. Ultimately, the author proposes a post-utility vision of writing studies that neither condemns nor embraces AI but rather circumvents its relevance by abandoning the hyper-expedient 'service discipline' model for one more centred around holistic personal and intellectual development. AI needn't be a deathblow to writing studies, but the catalyst for its reinvention.
Secondary English instruction often reduces literary analysis to fixed interpretations that overlook the dialogic nature of narrative and adolescent identity development. This article argues that Dialogical Self Theory (DST) provides a powerful framework for restoring literature's polyphonic richness and fostering inquiry-driven classroom practice. Drawing on Bakhtin's multivoiced novel and Hermans's conception of the self as a dynamic configuration of I-positions, DST enables students to examine how characters negotiate competing voices, social discourses, and situated experiences of authenticity. Through pedagogical demonstrations using Julius Caesar and American Born Chinese, I show how students collaboratively map internal and external positions, analyse power dynamics, and adopt meta-positions that deepen interpretive flexibility and support identity work. DST also benefits teachers by offering language to navigate the multiple, often competing professional roles they inhabit. Integrating DST into English instruction positions literary analysis as a relational, socially situated process that strengthens both student inquiry and teacher resilience.
