The Paradox of English Language Arts Teaching in the Scripted Era: The Potential of Teachers’ Knowledge-of-Self for Adaptive Professionalism

Abstract

English Language Arts teaching is increasingly defined by a paradox. Contemporary curricula articulate expansive disciplinary aims such as meaning-making, aesthetic engagement, multimodal literacy and critical participation. Yet teachers are simultaneously required to deliver scripted units of work and narrow pedagogies to prepare students for high-stakes standardised assessments. This paper explores how English Language Arts teachers work to realise the disciplinary intentions when the means of enactment are tightly prescribed. I posit that one resolution lies in how teachers mobilise their professional knowledge bases, including their knowledge-of-self, to interpret, adapt and recontextualise curriculum in principled ways. Building on Shulman's influential model of teachers’ professional knowledge bases, this paper extends the framework by foregrounding teachers’ identities, values, histories and ethical commitments as integral to their work. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives and Bernsteinian theories of recontextualisation, and adopting an epistemological stance that understands teaching as interpretive, relational and identity-inflected, I examine how teachers’ knowledge-of-self underpins their capacity for adaptive professionalism. The paper brings together two qualitative studies conducted in diverse Australian contexts. Firstly, I report on a qualitative study that investigates a Teachers-as-Writers initiative that repositions teachers as literary meaning makers, illuminating how teachers’ re-invigorated writerly identities in turn re-shape curriculum interpretation and classroom practice. Secondly, I examine how an experienced early years teacher working with a school-mandated pre-packaged commercial program enacts adaptive professionalism in phonics and spelling teaching. Both studies draw on interviews, classroom observations, artefact analysis and an abductive analytic logic that moves iteratively between empirical material and theory. Across both studies, findings show that teachers draw deeply on their identities, histories and value positions to make principled judgments to adapt content instruction and pedagogy to their students’ needs.