Teachers’ intertextual identities and English education

The sociocultural weight of associations between reading and identity presses heavily on many individuals, especially those who discuss texts as part of their profession. Goodwyn, (English Teaching: Practice and Critique 1:66–78, 2002), for example, finds that around 75% of trainee English teachers will cite a ‘love of reading’ as their primary reason for wanting to enter the profession, not necessarily because this is true, but because they feel that this is what they ‘ought’ to say. Spiro (Creativity in language and literature: The state of the art. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 231–244, 2011) shows that when biographical information and knowledge of literary accolades about authors are removed, readers’ assessments about whether poems are high quality or otherwise can be completely transformed. Talking about books, in any setting, is both socially and culturally loaded, with every admission of a literary preference or a gap in narrative knowledge a potential risk to identity. This chapter explores 300 teachers’ anonymous reports about their experiences of embarrassment in relation to their reading histories and practices.