The metaphors we teach by: A Cumulative and cohesive design for Bachelor of Education English education units

At the University of Tasmania, the Australian Curriculum: English (2012) has been the impetus for a major restructure of our three Bachelor of Education (Primary and Early Childhood) units in English. Historically, the education faculty at the University of Tasmania has faced the challenges of a high turnover of staff, and an old Literacy curriculum which did not foreground SFL. Additionally the pervading metaphor of how to teach English was “a balanced literacy diet”. According to Lakoff and Johnson (2003), metaphors are ideological and structure both thinking and practice. The old metaphor of “a balanced literacy diet” resulted in “bite-sized chunks” of content divided up and taught in a piecemeal manner, starving the students of deep and interconnected understandings of the field. In our restructure we have reconceptualised the metaphor to become “a rich and integrated model of English teaching”, and we have designed the units to tell one cumulative and cohesive narrative about how to teach English. These reconceptualised units are anchored in the systemic model of language strata (Halliday & Matthiesson 2004; Martin & Rose, 2003), and in this presentation we will discuss the process and outcomes to date of the redesign.