English Matters: An English Teacher Looks Back, Looks Within, Looks Ahead

English: The Big Picture

In 1987, sixty leaders in the field of English assembled at the English Coalition Conference (ECC) to discuss what “English” is and what it is, exactly, that English teachers do. While they grappled with these questions, I entered a credential program to become an English teacher, a curious choice for one who barely graduated from high school (earning a D- in English senior year) and was placed in a remedial writing course at the local community college the following year. This decision to become an English teacher was all the more surprising since I eventually earned a degree not in English but Cognitive Psychology and spent my first years after college as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia where, after learning Arabic, I taught woodshop to special needs boys at this school.

It is what I did during those years after college that led me to become an English teacher: I read. And I read and I read. By the time I returned home to the US in 1987, I wanted only to live the questions that literature was teaching me to ask and to share that passion with my students as an English teacher. Soon after entering the credential program, I also discovered a desire to do the same for my fellow teachers by writing about our work as English teachers. My first published article was about the experience of being a student teacher.

English as a discipline, in other words, did for me in the late 1980s what I have spent the last thirty-five years trying to do for my students and, through my books and other contributions, for English teachers: advocating for and approaching the study of literature as a source of “personal, social, and intellectual benefits” (Langer 7). For me and those who have influenced me most, English has always been a discipline of hope, one which, at its best, teaches us to understand and to tell a better story about ourselves, each other, and our country, one that “will give [students] power––power of voice, control of their growing ideas, and the sense of self that comes from participating in a group of peers who do not always share the same insights or interpretations but respect one another enough to gain richness from diversity” (Langer 157). This is what teaching English has done for me and what I hope I have taught my students.

Between 1987, when those sixty teacher-leaders convened for the ECC, and 2022, when I retired after thirty-five years in the classroom, agreement about the purpose of English has been elusive. More recently, debates about our work have become contentious, even toxic and dangerous at times, due to heightened political and social divisions, especially when it comes to what and how we ask students to read. According to the American Library Association, 2023 saw an unprecedented number of attempts to censor books in schools and ban topics and words teachers can use in classes. In the last twenty years, English teachers have experienced a series of efforts to codify what we should teach; these mandates and initiatives came from institutions and organizations such as the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the College Board, Common Core Standards, as well as state and district agencies. In 2017, NCTE itself released a position statement on the preparation of English teachers, stating that English teachers should:

embody the qualities we seek to develop in all learners: creative, literate, agentive, compassionate individuals; contributors to the cultural, social, and economic health of their communities; critically aware, participatory citizens in a complex, diverse, and increasingly globalized world.

It is worth noting that throughout my career, I served on the board or in other key positions for many of these initiatives, often as the only active classroom teacher on the committee. Each time I was invited to attend such meetings or serve on such committees, I did so with the belief that it was important to have an actual teacher at the table to clarify and advocate for what English teachers generally thought English should be trying to accomplish. Occasionally, colleagues raised concerns about my participation, questioning whether I had somehow sold out by endorsing the Common Core State Standards (by writing a book to help teachers and myself understand what they actually meant since I was required to know and teach them) or working with the College Board (as part of the AP English Framework Committee and, later, as chair of the Pre-AP English team). Yet my own belief regarding such opportunities has always been that it is better to be at the table than on the menu, as the saying goes. In other words, I always joined in good faith and with the hope that I could make a contribution that served our discipline, our profession, and our students, even if did not always work out that way in the end.

In What Is English? his 1987 book about the ECC, Peter Elbow concluded that ours is “a profession that cannot define what it is…or what we are” (v). More recently, however, English teachers have resisted attempts to define their roles and responsibilities, taking a more active stance within their schools, districts, and communities to define for themselves what they will and will not teach. In recent years, for example, #DisruptTexts entered the scene to shake up the old paradigms about the who, what, how, and why of teaching English. Its stated mission describes itself as “a crowdsourced, grass roots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum that our students deserve. It is part of our mission to aid and develop teachers committed to anti-racist/anti-bias teaching pedagogy and practices.” Their work and that of others exerted an enduring influence on my own, for when I was given the opportunity to contribute to major textbooks and, more recently, to serve as sole editor of Uncharted Territory, a Norton anthology for high school students, it was important that the readings I selected honor the ideals their work challenges us all to consider going forward.

What’s more, in my last few years in the classroom, I overhauled the books we taught, either replacing books such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with authors such as Mohsin Hamid and his remarkable novel Exit West or pairing books like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried with Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees to allow for more complex and culturally relevant conversations between the authors and my students. The integration of these new texts, along with others, such as Beloved and Tommy Orange’s There There dramatically improved the course, challenging us all, myself included, to think in new ways. When I encountered resistance to adopted new texts, I decided it was better to ask for forgiveness than seek permission––then ordered and taught the books. This was during Covid; as the saying goes, “Never waste a crisis.”

English Is: A Personal Perspective

How different things were in 1988 when I began my career as an English teacher. When I asked my department chair Doug Rogers what I would be teaching in my freshman classes that first year, he simply handed me a single sheet of paper with about ten titles of novels typed out (on a manual typewriter), smiled, and said, “Here you go. Let me know if you have any questions.”

In some ways, what my department chair was telling me was, to borrow from the poet Antonio Machado, to make my own path by walking it. Now that I was a full-time English teacher, he seemed to be saying, it was up to me to answer my own questions about what to teach and how to teach it. Yes, I was expected to teach Homer, Huck, Holden, Hamlet, and Hester, along with all the other old familiars back then; yet how I taught them was my decision. How we ourselves answer these important questions differs, in my experience, according to one’s values, background, experiences, and, in some cases, culture. I learned this lesson almost immediately when Bev Edwards, the only Black teacher in my first English department, declared to the department that she would not teach I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a book many in the department loved and thought was an important addition to the titles we taught. In short, she explained that, though she herself loved the book, she would not permit that book to be the sole representation of Black people and Black culture in a school and a community that had such significant problems with racism.

Looking back to that moment, which has stayed with me these many years, I realize it was the first of many lessons about what it looks like to take a stand, to say as Bartleby did, “I would prefer not to,” or, as Bev Edwards did in 1988, “No.” Until that moment, which took place within the first months of my career, I did not know English teachers could do this. After all, one of my mentor teachers during my student teaching was a Black woman who went on national television decrying, “They will NOT take my Faulkner!” when the school district declared they would be requiring greater diversity of the titles taught in the district. Fortunately, when it comes to what texts to teach, teachers now have such guides as Kimberly Parker’s Literacy Is Liberation: Working Toward Justice Through Culturally Relevant Teaching (2022), Tricia Ebarvia’s Get Free: Antibias Literacy Instruction for Stronger Readers, Writers, and Thinkers (2023), as well as books by people like Penny Kittle, Kelly Gallagher, Carol Jago, and Matthew R. Kay. Their work and leadership allows teachers to challenge assumptions and validate their decisions about the texts, titles, and topics they choose to teach.

Writing about her own journey as an English teacher who initially “insisted [her] students read the books [she] loved, or had been taught,” Kimberly Parker recalls the important role that “Black women mentors” played in helping her realize that “race and ethnicity are complex, multifaceted, and continually changing” (6). The same can be said of our work, since ours is the only subject students are required to take all four years of high school: the work of English teachers is complex, multifaceted, and continually changing.

As a first-generation college student whose father dropped out of high school and lacked what today we would call the necessary “academic literacies,” I have done my best these many years to engage as well as educate, to instruct and inspire all my students, all the while keeping an eye on the demands of the adult world for which I also felt obligated to prepare them. Through the assignments I designed, I worked to cultivate in my students the literary thinking that would help them succeed along with the desire and curiosity to explore those fields where they might best employ these skills in college and their lives in general.

Mike Rose, author of Lives on the Boundary, illustrates the unique and decisive influence English teachers can have through his stories about his own high school English teacher, Mr. MacFarland. One day, Mr. MacFarland simply asked Rose where he was going to college, an idea Rose had never considered since, as with my own family, no one in his had ever gone to college. Mr. MacFarland told Mike Rose in his senior year of high school, “Listen, you can write” (35). It is in such small ways, such quiet moments that happen in class, through a comment in the margin on a student’s paper, or during the sort of mentoring chats that arise after class that we highlight ours as a discipline of hope, our classes as places where “children are honored and well served” (Kohl 332).

English teachers tend to see more sides of, even more selves in, our students because we “stimulate the production of possibilities” through the study of not only others’ lives but students’ own (Eisner). And, as Tom Newkirk argues, “writing is a performance of self,” a self which we, as English teachers, often play an active part in helping them compose through our reading and writing assignments (xiii). Mr. MacFarland’s observation that Mike Rose could write changed everything for him: in that moment, the English teacher was taking Rose seriously, showing him that he had something, a skill, a talent, an intelligence. It was an opportunity to validate one of Rose’s possible selves, one he did not know until that moment that he had within himself. What teachers say and do in such moments matters.

Mike Rose spoke and wrote about Mr. MacFarland for the rest of his life, trying to unpack what a teacher such as MacFarland did “to make the light go on…so that a student finds [a learning experience] meaningful” (4). In the late 1990s, while I began writing my first book The English Teacher’s Companion, Sam Intrator, a doctoral candidate at Stanford, spent a year studying engagement in my classes and my curriculum, looking for those moments when “the light went on,” all of which he discussed in Tuned in and Fired Up. My favorite comment about what I did as a teacher that made an impact on kids came from a student Sam interviewed. When they finished, the student told Sam casually but with a tone of amused respect, “It’s so weird, Mr. Burke talks about reading and all this stuff like it actually matters.”

English Is: A Perspective on the Profession and Its Evolution

English––as a discipline, as a subject, as a field, as a profession, and a community––has given me the chance to make a living, make a life, and make a difference. In what ways?

Over the course of my career, I have worked with, observed, listened to, and learned from English teachers, English departments, administrators, politicians, and parents in forty-eight of our fifty states. I have participated in or presented at summer institutes offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Writing Project, the Expository Reading and Writing Curriculum program, and national conventions such as the one NCTE puts on each year. These experiences all deepened and expanded my notion of what English is—or could be; they also allowed me to forge lifelong friendships and develop relationships with leaders in the field who became crucial mentors and friends.

In addition to these experiences, I have also taught every course at every grade level at one time or another in the thirty-five years I taught high school English. I have taught in urban schools, suburban schools, and online schools. I’ve documented my work and shared what I learned along the way by writing over thirty books, dozens of articles, and blogs; I also created the English Companion Ning, an online community once described as the world’s largest English department where we all met to help each other for a period of about ten years.

I loved the work and my students until the day I retired and handed in my keys.

In many ways, English has not changed that much over the last thirty-five years. Our mission remains focused on developing the sort of textual literacies demanded by an increasingly hypertextual, connected world. It was Pat Hanlon, my mentor teacher, who showed me in 1987 where English teachers and our discipline were heading. Working with the librarian at Lowell High School in San Francisco, Pat showed me what she referred to as her Steinbeck Project. An article in the Journal of the Apple Education described it as a collection of “material in every medium for teaching John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath, including the political and social history of the 1930s [including] 54 related works: books, films, television documentaries, still photographs, record albums and sound tapes, filmstrips, magazine and newspaper articles, and more.” If you saw it today, you would likely shrug and say, “Yeah, cool website.” But they created this before the internet as we know it today existed.

Pat Hanlon, who mentored me with such intense dedication and high expectations, was teaching what Robert Scholes would eventually call “textuality”:

We need to see the main function of English [teachers] as helping students become better users of the language––basically better readers and writers. Literary works have a role to play in this function, but as they are a means to, not the end of, studies in English, I want to make the case for a shift in the field––from privileging literature to studying a wide range of texts in a wide range of media––so what I call “textuality” can become the main concern of English departments. (xv)

Some years later, Judith Langer would lament, perhaps with Scholes’s words above in mind, that “a growing concern with informational and content texts [has led to] a concomitant reduction of attention to teaching literature” (157). I would like to imagine, however, that Langer, Scholes, and those such as Arthur Applebee, who devoted his life to studying the work of English teachers for forty years, could meet over a nice meal and agree with Langer’s conclusion that “the act of literary understanding is the promise of the many-sidedness of human sensibility…[and that] literature makes us better thinkers” (158). They might simply differ in their beliefs about how English teachers these days might get their students to such a place where students can “see the multi-sidedness of situations…and expand the breadth of [their] own visions” (Langer 158).

English Is: A Profession Struggling

Many would insist that our field faces more pressing issues than a mere pivot to “textuality” or such enduring challenges as those posed by standards and testing. A quick scan of the demographics of our field raises daunting questions and concerns. When I retired from teaching English in 2022, there were approximately 594,000 high school English teachers in the US, 68.3% of whom were women, 72% of whom were white. Only 11.8% of these English teachers identified as Latino or Hispanic, and 8% as Black (Zippia). Of these 594,000, approximately 4% belong to NCTE as of 2023 according to a 2023 NCTE advertisement which claims the organization has 25,000 members, not all of whom are high school English teachers. In 1987, it was a point of pride to belong to NCTE, an organization which has had a profound impact on my work through the opportunities it has afforded me and the people I have come to know.

Around the country, enrollment in or availability of English degree programs has declined by nearly 50% in recent years (Heller). And to top it all off, trust of teachers (in general) has hit an all-time low because “a large number of Americans…look at what schools are doing and the messages that are being sent by advocates of public education…and it sounds like these folks are pushing agendas and values that feel alien, feel destructive, and it winds up eroding their faith in the profession as a whole” (Natanson). English teachers almost always draw more of this heat than other subjects due to the more personal and, in the eyes of some, more political nature of what we have students read, write, and think about in our classes.

Pressure on English teachers also comes, at times, from within our own profession as people engage publicly about what we should do and teach. As Deborah Appleman observes in Literature and the New Culture Wars: Triggers, Cancel Culture, and the Teacher’s Dilemma, “trigger warnings, cancel culture, and [recent] movements [such as #MeToo] have reshaped the politics of teaching literature”; the resulting “cleansing of the curriculum of any potentially offensive language or character portrayals has had a significant influence on what does and does not get taught” (14) or even published, as teachers and authors themselves show a growing willingness to attack even their own progressive publishers such as Heinemann in certain circumstances.

And yet, within the last few months of writing this, I have had a surprising number of people write to me about their interest in becoming English teachers. Why? I think it is because English teachers, in a way that few other teachers can, “help children be more, not less, human,” as Carol Jago said in her NCTE presidential address (2010). And English, through its emphasis on language and voice, its focus on story and power, gives us, as Valerie Kinloch said in her 2022 NCTE presidential address, the chance to “demonstrate our unwavering commitment to equity and justice,…and, more importantly, freedom.”

Kinloch’s emphasis on freedom is all the more poignant when you realize that the 1987 ECC conference was held at what was then called Wye House, but was originally known as the Wye plantation. “Wye,” as many ECC participants called it, once employed more than 1,000 enslaved people, one of whom was Frederick Douglass. No one better illustrates the call for “Democracy Through Language,” a theme that emerged during the 1987 ECC retreat, than Douglass himself, for whom “the will to power was the will to write…[and whose] ‘leap to freedom’ [was] so inextricably intertwined with literacy” (Gates 3). In his 2015 NCTE presidential address, Ernest Morrell emphasized the liberation and empowerment that result from developing students’ skills as critical readers (of all forms of media) and writers. Morrell lamented that he had “buried too many students over their inability to critically interpret these images” (315). As Douglass would no doubt have agreed, Morrell insisted that “literacy…is a matter of life and death.”

English Is: A Parting Perspective

When I retired in June 2022, I had a series of exit interviews required by district protocols. They all asked me pretty much the same questions: What did I understand my job to be as an English teacher and how had it changed over the years since I began? They wanted to know, in short, if I thought it was worth it, if I would do it all over again knowing what I know now, if given the chance.

My answer: Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I cannot imagine having done anything else with my life.

Why? Because, as I have said here repeatedly, English is a discipline of hope, one of transformation. In his NCTE presidential address in 2015, Ernest Morrell said as an English teacher, “you have to foster…hope. It is our responsibility as a profession to have that hope. People come into our classrooms, they look at us, and what they need from us are reasons to believe. Reasons to believe in the future. Reasons to believe in themselves…. [For we are] inheriting a legacy of greatness. Critical hope is as essential to our future as a profession as it has been essential to our past” (326).

This hope that Ernest Morrell speaks of is, he insists, impossible if we do not love our work and the students we teach. In addition to the inspiration I have found in Morrell’s (and others’) words, Marshall Gregory outlined what, for me, has remained one of the best guides to what English is, what it should be, what we are and do as English teachers. In “Six Contributions to Student Development Made by English as a Discipline,” Gregory argues that English makes unique and substantive contributions to students’ (1) intellectual development, (2) cognitive skills, (3) aesthetic sensitivity, (4) intra- and intercultural awareness, (5) ethical sensitivity, and (6) existential maturity (49).

No doubt some would come up with some different contributions, but just trying my best to make those six contributions Gregory identifies has kept me busy in all the best ways for the last thirty-five years. So for me the answer to “What is English?” is, in short, Marshall Gregory’s six contributions.

But there are, of course, other answers. English is what you and every English teacher I ever had, even the ones whose classes I failed or fumbled through in high school, gave me, though the impact was not always apparent at the time. While I sat there in the struggling writing class at the local two-year college, people such as yourself sat with me, patiently explaining, showing, and encouraging me through those successive drafts of not just my papers but myself until I realized that I wanted nothing more than to be an English teacher, to make the sort of difference you make every day when you enter your classroom and teach, as that student told Sam Intrator, “as if it actually matters.”

Because it does matter. Because you matter––to me, your students, our profession, your community, and this country. If we are fortunate, as we all are if we stay in the game of teaching and give it our best, we will get the occasional affirmation such as I recently got from a student I taught ten years ago:

Hi Mr. Burke,

I hope you are doing well. I wanted to reach out because the program I'm in has been talking a lot about the importance of expressing gratitude for the mentors/people who have impacted your life/academic trajectory. You were the first teacher that ever made me feel anything positive about my writing and gave me confidence in myself. I wanted to say I'm so grateful for the English class I took with you senior year. I still think about what you taught us about resilience. It has helped me immensely in times where I've gotten bad grades on assignments. I see those moments as a form of growth/learning rather than a reason to give up.

I also really appreciated how you took interest in all your students and wanted to know them. It showed how much you cared. Sorry for the cheesiness–but I do feel it important to express my thanks even though these few sentences don't quite feel as though they can adequately encapsulate my appreciation for the impact you made on my life early on…

It really mattered.

Thank you, truly.

Annabelle

I am tempted to say that the answer to the question “What Is English?” is: whatever leads a student to feel as this student does about all that she has learned about herself, the world, and the literacies she needs for life. But English is more than just that.

As I move into retirement after thirty-five years, what I will miss, aside from my students and the company of my colleagues at school, is you, wherever you are, whatever you teach, and all that I learned from seeing your work, hearing your ideas, watching you teach, or reading your tweets, blogs, and emails. Because you are English. You are the future of the field we have cultivated together these many years along with all those who came before us, whose learning and lives taught us what a teacher could be if we approach our work like it matters every day.

Because it does.

Because you do.

Because we do.

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Note: I am grateful to Dave Stuart for inviting me to share this article with you through his remarkable blog, which DSJR has turned into a treasure chest for teachers.

It seems appropriate to provide some context for “English Matters” as the article itself reflects some of the ways the profession and perspectives within it have changed since I entered the field in 1987. I originally submitted “English Matters” to the English Journal for its forthcoming issue “What Is English?” It was “conditionally accepted” so long as I made a variety of revisions spelled out by the editors and the three “reviewers” to whom the article was sent. The feedback from the editors and reviewers was helpful, providing me a useful guide as I reworked the entire article.

In all my previous experiences with journals and newspapers, this would bring the process to an end and the article would move through the process of publication. Instead, I received a letter from the editors of the English Journal saying they were “delighted to inform me [that my] submission had been conditionally accepted” for the second time so long as I was “willing to undertake the work required.” This was confusing, as the article had received an enthusiastic response from the editors and two of the three reviewers, one of whom said it was “an important article” and another calling it a “thoughtful revision” that addressed all their previous concerns.

I was given a list of twelve substantial changes I would have to make for it to be published. The third reviewer’s comments would have made mine a substantively different article than I was trying to write (and the journal seemed to be asking for). All the changes required of me seemed to be driven by Reviewer #3; yet had I made them, which would have effectively required rewriting the entire article, I would have felt I was trying to please this one reviewer whose criticisms suggested to me that they should write their own piece, even possibly as a response to mine.

So after thinking about it, after reviewing my article with these twelve required changes in mind, I decided to withdraw it from consideration. The following excerpt comes from the letter I sent to the editors about my decision to withdraw the article:

I am grateful for the patience and encouragement of the editors as I have attempted to contribute to this very important issue of the EJ that asks us all to reflect on a question that you and I have spent our professional lives trying to answer. Indeed, I have always told my students that our job is to find a problem or a question that so engages us that we would be content to spend our entire life trying to solve or contribute to the answer of it. This article gave me the chance to try to do that––and I did, for myself and for the few of you who read it. 

It is a difficult position that you occupy as editors of the definitive journal of our profession: you must stand in the center, at the hub of all the perspectives, positions, both those you agree with and those you resist or even reject––and steer the conversation about who we are, what we should do, why we are English teachers and how we should do this work we all chose and which so deeply defines us.

I am grateful to Dave Stuart for inviting me to publish the article here on his blog and to Carol Jago, who will publish a shorter version in California English in the coming months. In my experience as a writer, the role of the editor has always been to do as Carol did for that issue: help the writer say more clearly and effectively what they are trying to say, not what the editor or the reviewers think the writer should say.

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