AustLit

'Production notes

'It was week three of the first semester of my Master of Teaching degree at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and already my lecturers were talking about our first assignments. In my English method unit, we students were required to write a reflective autobiographical narrative inquiring into particular critical incidents from our past experiences in the English classroom as a way of conceptualising the impact of English and literacy teaching on our own evolving professional identities. I had been studying to be a teacher for only a few weeks, having left a career of 11 years in the wine industry to begin a new path, one I had started down and diverted from many years before. Through those 11 years I had continued to read voraciously, but I had fallen out of practice with my writing. I wasn’t sure I had what it takes to become what I kept hearing that all of us were becoming  – an English teacher. I questioned whether I would be able to teach writing to young people if I had lost touch with myself as a writer. I wondered how I could help them make meaning from their own experiences through writing if I struggled to construct meaning from my own.'  (Publication abstract)