English Teaching: Practice and Critique September, 2011, Volume 10, Number 3 http://education.waikato.ac.nz/research/files/etpc/files/2011v10n3ed.pdf pp. 1-8 Copyright © 2011, ISSN 1175 8708 Re-membering the body in English Education JAMES ALBRIGHT University of Newcastle, Australia The preparation of this issue of English Teaching: Practice & Critique has offered me the opportunity to reflect on how the body has figured in my work and study, first as a teacher and later a researcher. Memory is as much a bodily re-experiencing of sense and feeling as it is a mental process. As I recollect back to my pre-service induction into primary English language arts teaching in the early 1970s, I recall that my training afforded no appreciation of the bodily nature of reading and writing or teaching for that matter. My classmates and I were apprenticed in the received wisdom and professional lore on how best to teach such things as letter recognition and phonics. I remember the feel of the bright winter’s, Nova Scotia sun streaming through the wall of windows warming our prefab, barrack-like classroom, still in use some 25 years after Dalhousie University hastily constructed it to house the influx of post-war veterans. I remember the authoritative look and voice of the Sister of Charity who taught us the ins and outs of the current basal series employed in the province’s primary schools. I found our professional understanding of literacy and literate processes and practices quite changed when, some twenty years later, I took up graduate studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. The intervening years had given me a seasoned practitioner’s feel and knowledge of what it was like to plan and teach English language arts from primary through middle to secondary school. In those intervening years, our field’s research and scholarship had developed cognitive and socio- psychological theories and research on reading and writing. And, yet, most of these still focused on reading and writing and teaching as primarily mental processes. My old files are filled with papers illustrating through boxes and vectors how readers’ brains come to make sense of texts. Nonetheless, during these intervening decades, among some theorists and researchers, there was a growing appreciation of the affective and relational nature of teaching and learning to speak, hear, read, write, view and design well – literacy as a social practice or set of embedded social practices. Affect and relation happen through the body as well as the mind. This period provided many naturalistic accounts of textual pleasures and relationships with and through texts, that tapped into available realist, expressivist and critical literary traditions. These accounts illustrated how readers, writers and teachers (of a particular kind, mind you) identify as literate and are concerned with those who do not value reading and writing. Our reasons vary, but our emotional responses to “illiteracy” appear to be similar. The American poet, Robert Bly, expresses in “Words Rising” these sentiments, “We are bees then; language is the honey.” His poem offers a benediction: Blessing then on the man who labours in the tiny room, writing stanzas on the lamb; blessings on the woman, who picks the brown seeds of solitude in afternoon light out of the black seeds of loneliness. And blessings on the dictionary maker, huddled