Investigating literature as knowledge in school English

In this chapter, we focus on knowledge in the subject English, particularly a core element of this subject: literary studies. The teaching of the mothertongue (here English) – and the teaching of literature specifically – is central and often mandated in the secondary years of schooling, yet is notoriously and paradoxically difficult to pin down in terms of epistemic quality (Hudson et al. 2015). While agreeing with other scholars (Doecke 2017; Doecke and Mead 2017; Yandell 2017) that the arguments of Young and others do not adequately capture or represent the ways knowledge is made in English classrooms, between students, and between teachers and students, we argue that it is possible, and politically desirable, to discern a perspective on the distinctive knowledge qualities of this field.