English Teaching: Practice & Critique: Volume 18 Issue 2

Guest editorial

James S. Chisholm, Jennifer Alford

Teacher agency in English language arts teaching: a scoping review of the literature

James S. Chisholm, Jennifer Alford, Leah M. Halliday, Fannie M. Cox

This paper aims to examine ways in which English language arts (ELA) teachers have exercised agency in response to policy changes that have been shaped by neoliberal education…

Adaptive agency: Some surviving and some thriving in the ‘interesting times' of English teaching

Andrew Cecil Goodwyn

This paper aims to introduce the concept of adaptive agency and illustrate its emergence in the field of English teaching in a number of countries using England over the past…

Polic(y)ing time and curriculum: how teachers critically negotiate restrictive policies

Christy Wessel-Powell, Beth Anne Buchholz, Cassie J. Brownell

The purpose of this paper is to theorize teacher agency as enacted through a P/policymaking lens in three elementary classrooms. Big-P Policies are formal, top-down school reform…

Expanding repertoires of resistance: Teachers cultivating critical English language arts pedagogies through collaborative narrative inquiry

Kara Michelle Taylor, Evan M. Taylor, Paul Hartman, Rebecca Woodard, Andrea Vaughan, Rick Coppola, Daniel J. Rocha, Emily Machado

This paper aims to examine how a collaborative narrative inquiry focused on cultivating critical English Language Arts (ELA) pedagogies supported teacher agency, or “the capacity…

Rights, duties and spaces of agency amidst high-stakes testing: Narrative positioning as resource for teacher agency

Laura A. Taylor

By recognizing high-stakes testing as a key constraint to teacher agency, this paper aims to provide a close analysis of one teacher’s testing narrative to illustrate how emerging…

Promoting teachers’ agency and creative teaching through research

Anne Cloonan, Kirsten Hutchison, Louise Paatsch

In response to threats to teacher autonomy and creativity by measurements of teacher quality through student performance on high-stakes test scores and standardised professional…

Conditions that mediate teacher agency during assessment reform

Jill Willis, Kelli McGraw, Linda Graham

A new senior curriculum and assessment policy in Queensland, Australia, is changing the conditions for teaching and learning. The purpose of this study was to consider the…

Agency as the achievement of reform ownership: A case study of two middle school teachers’ participation in the Pathway Project

Lauren Godfrey, Carol Booth Olson

The purpose of this study is to explore how, through the cultivation of reform ownership in the professional development (PD) program, the Pathway Project, agency was achieved for…

Literacy educators’ practices of solidarity within an educational network

Rebecca Rogers

This paper aims to share findings from an interview study with literacy educators who are working together to imagine and build a transformative, humanizing and expansive…