The following comment by the American literary critic and theorist Robert Scholes powerfully captures the nexus and interplay between the two critical literacy modes of reading and writing: ‘Reading and writing are important because we read and write our world as well as our texts, and are read and written by them in turn. Texts are places where power and weakness become visible and discussable, where learning and ignorance manifest themselves, where structures that enable and constrain our thoughts and actions become palpable. This is why the humble subject English is so important.’

After teaching English for nearly fifty years, I have come to appreciate that this wonderful subject’s core is ‘story’: the students’ stories, the teacher’s story, and the endless array of the stories of others. The storyteller deep inside each one of our students can potentially find expression through the opportunities English teachers provide and the strategies they implement in their classrooms. The goal is to fill young people with intense curiosity, lively imaginations, and the capacity to be comfortable with life’s ambiguity and complexity, while at the same time joyfully anticipating its possibilities.

My Year 9 English students are currently writing their own short stories with an evident enthusiasm, perseverance, and commitment to the task. These compositions, exploring a diverse range of thematic concerns including war in the Middle East, homelessness, the refugee experience, and life at sea, will be published in a collection to be displayed in the College Library. After immersing themselves over the past three terms in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and short story writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Roald Dahl, Anton Chekhov, and Tim Winton, students are now writing with considerable confidence, enthusiasm, and skill. This supports contemporary writer Stephen King’s assertion that ‘If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others, read a lot and write a lot.’ American poet Charles Bernstein echoes King’s claim when he states, ‘To create good writers you need to create good readers. There is not shortcut.’

Clare Murphy

English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach