English Education - Volume 29, Issue 3, 1997

Offers a discussion, in the form of a portfolio, of how the author helps student teachers reflect on their teaching through learning portfolios including artifacts on the culture of teaching, pedagogical insights, big risks and monumental leaps, and failures. Notes that these portfolios often surprise and instruct the author about students’ subjective teaching experience. Full article available in print version only.

Explores and problematizes the author’s colleague’s teaching performance, using the colleague’s own performance theory and an Initiation-Reply-Evaluation (IRE) framework of pedagogical principles. Reconsiders the author’s own assumptions about IRE and teaching. Finds the colleague’s teaching to be a model of what political struggle should enable: systemic, improvisational, mutually but asymmetrically developed liminality. Full article available in print version only.

Examines critical incidents in the author’s own teaching to consider the concept of“teacher” and to explore the complicated subject positions teachers occupy. Examines how the professional literature helped to produce and validate this “splintered” subjectivity. Full article available in print version only.

Explores what the author learned about teaching and the limits of language through a series of mishaps that occurred during a family move, which disrupted his assumptions and led him to question the limits of language to represent experience. Invites students to discover for themselves how representations of reality which differ from language are valuable in and of themselves. Full article available in print version only.