I stepped into my first English classroom as a teacher in 1970, and for the forty years since I’ve either been teaching secondary English or watching (from various vantage points) the way the work of English teachers has changed over time.

In that first year, I found myself in the midst of what seemed like some exciting developments. David Holbrook was encouraging us to link what was increasingly known about the unconscious mind with a particular approach to writing for the secondary English student. A dynamic young teacher named Powell was travelling the world getting students writing poetry, and he spent some time in the school where I was working. Anthologies were coming out of energetic adolescent poetry. James Britton was asking us to pay particular attention to the rich languages that the students were bringing to the classroom. John Holt was one of many who was asking us to observe our students closely, to see the ways they were constructing and adapting to the world. Exploration and experimentation was in the air, unsettling the old brigade in the staffroom but exciting those of us yearning to make of our English classrooms a place where students discovered new aspects of the big world around them through what they were reading and writing.

Recently, there has been a spate of journal articles and books (Rethinking English in Schools by Ellis, Fox & Street, The Rise and Fall of English by Scholes) explaining the discontents and societal changes that led to these new developments, and tracing what has happened within secondary English teaching since.

For some time now, I have been thinking and writing about the nature of English teaching, and in particular about the kind of subject it seems to have become. You can read some of this in the blog posts listed in the right hand column.

I’d like to provide a place for preservice and practising English teachers to explore the following big questions:

1. How do we now experience our work as English teachers?
2. How do various discourses about the subject shape our twenty first century consciousness and actions?
3. How do we see our calling? Are we able to be the English teachers we would want to be?

Here are some ideas about how we might further this work.

• There are a number of journal articles, some written in collaboration with others and some written on my own, which explore these kinds of questions about English teaching. Some have already been published and there are more in the pipeline. One of the activities of our Collective would be to disseminate and discuss these articles.
• There’s a great deal more that might be written about our experiences as English teachers as we attempt to reconcile what we find and what we would like to create. As we pool our experiences and insights, and as we work to find ways of documenting and deepening these, new writing projects will emerge.
• This Group, too, could be a pathway into higher degree research: a Masters or a PhD. What I’ve called a mythopoetic methodology might be particularly appropriate for scholarly work around English teaching, though many other ways of doing research around the nature and function of English teaching would be possible.