How do English teachers negotiate their identity in the context of the “knowledge rich” curriculum?

Abstract

This thesis explores the human impact of policies that positioned English at the heart of the National Curriculum and of the accountability and inspection frameworks shaping secondary teachers’ work. At the core of this work is the impact that implementing policy has had on a group of English teachers, on their experiences, subjectivities and the way they know themselves, negotiate and construct their identities in relation to the “knowledge rich” curriculum. The study combined a social constructivist (Cresswell & Poth, 2018) and social realist ontology (Lawson, 2012), seeking a range of views whilst taking a position that there are aspects of our reality which are shared and objective, namely policy. A range of policy was scrutinised to interrogate the conditions which precipitated the so-called “knowledge rich” curriculum and the accountability structures which maintained it in schools, how this relates to traditions and accepted practices within the teaching of English and the potential for how this might impact upon how English teachers negotiate their identity. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight participants: two trainee teachers; two undertaking their ECT training, in their first year of teaching; two experienced teachers with more than fifteen years service and two retired teachers. Participants worked, or are working in, a range of secondary school settings in England. Thematic analysis (Braun, Clarke, & Hayfield, 2022) was used to determine key aspects of their experiences: how they construct their identities within their own personal narratives; their beliefs and perceptions of English as a subject and their views on knowledge and the curriculum. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 2010) was used to analyse the words of participants, considering how their language reflected the ideologies and discourses which constituted their experiences and understandings. A significant and original contribution to knowledge is constituted by the critical examination of how policy and accountability frameworks function as regimes which construct, constrain and fragment the professional identities of English teachers. The combination of thematic analysis and CDA, and the foregrounding of the voices of English teachers across career and generational stages reveals a complex contradiction: teachers often resist the imposed curriculum in discourse, yet simultaneously reproduce its traditional, canonical, structures in practice. The tension that exists between resistance and reproduction has not previously been articulated in research on English teacher identity. This, in turn, challenges the assumption that English as a discipline is inherently radical or progressive, showing instead how both policy and disciplinary culture act as regulatory forces. Finally, the study offers a methodological contribution by demonstrating how insider research, grounded in close discourse analysis can reveal deeper, unspoken dimensions of policy impact at the level of subject specific identity offering a new lens through which to examine performativity, power, surveillance, identity and professional subjectivity in English education.