Language Arts Teachers' Adaptive Agency in the United States, England, and Australia, Committed to Equity.

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Leadership for Language and Literacy

Abstract

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.

Author

• Andy C. Goodwyn, University of Bedfordshire