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This article explores the paradoxical situation of early career teachers in this era of standards-based reforms, beginning with the experiences of an English teacher working in a state school in Queensland, Australia and expanding to consider the viewpoints of her colleagues. Our goal is to trace the ways she and the other early career teachers at this particular school negotiate the tensions between the current emphases on standardisation of curricula, testing regimes and teaching standards and their burgeoning sense of their identities as teachers. We shall raise questions about the status of the professional knowledge that these early career teachers bring to their work, showing examples of how this knowledge puts them at odds with standards-based reforms, including the professional standards recently introduced by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) and the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).

\"Literary Praxis: A Conversational Inquiry into the Teaching of Literature explores the teaching of literature in secondary schools. It does this from the vantage point of educators in a range of settings around the world, as they engage in dialogue with one another in order to capture the nature of their professional commitment, the knowledge they bring to their work as literature teachers, and the challenges of their professional practice as they interact with their students. The core of the book comprises accounts of their day-to-day teaching by Dutch and Australian educators. These teachers do more than capture the immediacy of the here-and-now of their classrooms; they attempt to understand those classrooms relationally, exploring the ways in which their professional practice is mediated by government policies, national literary traditions and existing traditions of curriculum and pedagogy. They thereby enact a form of literary 'praxis' that grapples with major ideological issues, most notably the impact of standards-based reforms on their work. Educators from other countries then comment on the cases written by the Dutch and Australian teachers, thus taking the concept of 'praxis' to a new level, as part of a comparative inquiry that acknowledges the richly specific character of the cases and resists viewing teaching around the world as though it lends itself unproblematically to the same standards of measurement (as in the fetish made of PISA). They step back from a judgmental stance, and try to understand what it means to teach literature in other educational settings than their own. The essays in this collection show the complexities of literature teaching as a form of professional praxis, exploring the intensely reflexive learning in which teachers engage, as they induct their students into reading literary texts, and reflect on the socio-cultural contexts of their work.\"--Publisher's website.

The Assessment Issue of English in Australia has prompted Brenton Doecke to ask himself about significant moments in the history of subject English in Australia when truly innovative work was done in the area of assessing English. There are many examples to choose from, including Brian Johnston's Assessing English: Helping Students to Reflect on Their Work (1983/1987), which provided excellent support to teachers who were implementing process writing in their classrooms in the 1980s; Robert McGregor and Marion Meiers' Telling the Whole Story: Assessing Achievement in English (1991), which showed what teachers can learn through careful observation of students' language from day-to-day; and Brian Johnston and Stephen Dowdy's Work Required: Teaching & Assessing in a Negotiated Curriculum (1988), a book with a cross-disciplinary focus that was designed, as its subtitle suggests, to support teachers in a range of subject areas to implement forms of assessment that were congruent with the ideal of negotiating the curriculum with students. All these publications are signs of an extraordinarily rich period in Australian curriculum history, when English teachers were able to exercise their professional responsibility in developing and implementing forms of assessment that accorded with their sense of the richness of their subject area. The text that Brenton eventually chose for 'Perspectives from the Past' was Graeme Withers and Margaret Gill's, Assessing Text Response: The 1990 Pilot CAT: A Review for Teachers. This text is anchored in attempts by educators in Victoria in the 1980s and 1990s to develop and implement a new senior school curriculum that was responsive to a diverse student cohort and which would serve as more than an instrument for tertiary selection. Its significance, however, extends beyond the Victorian scene, because of the way it conceptualises a form of assessment that was congruent with what literary scholars and educators had come to understand about how readers make meaning from literary texts.

This essay focuses on the recent introduction by the Australian Federal Government of standardised literacy testing in all states across Australia (that is, the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN), and explores the way this reform is mediating the work of English literacy educators in primary and secondary schools. We draw on data collected as part of a research project funded by the Australian Research Council, involving interviews with teachers about their experiences of implementing standardised testing. These interviews indicate that the introduction of standardised testing does not merely constitute an additional part of teachers\" workloads, but that it is having a significant impact on their identity as language educators, their understanding of curriculum and pedagogy, and the relationships they seek to maintain with their students. By introducing the NAPLAN tests, the Australian Federal Government is going down the path of other neo-liberal governments around the world. No doubt the story we tell will be familiar to readers in other countries. Our aim, however, is more than simply to give yet another account of the tensions experienced by committed language and literacy teachers as they implement neoliberal policy mandates. Key questions for us include: Why is the Australian government persisting with such policies, even when they have had such dubious consequences (teaching to the test, dumbing down, and so on.) in other national settings? How might educators resist these reforms? What intellectual resources might enable us to articulate an alternative vision of language education to that imposed by neoliberal reforms? We present an account of conversations with a group of teachers in a primary school in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, not in order to make large claims about how the profession in Australia as a whole judges standards-based reforms, but because their talk prompts reflection about the possibility of resisting such policy initiatives. Our impulse is largely a philosophical one - we are raising questions about how neoliberal reforms construct teachers and their students, what they presuppose about the nature of life and its potential, and how educators might dissent from the world view that is being imposed. And rather than simply investigating how teachers are grappling with standards-based reforms, as though it is yet again a matter of putting teachers under the spotlight, we also raise questions about the responsibility of academics and teacher educators to maintain a critical standpoint within the policy environment created by such changes.