Knowledge, making and English teachers

When we commenced this book, we could not have imagined that most of the book's authors, like its readers, would eventually experience extended times in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Much has been said about teachers' work and student learning as a result of the pandemic, and English teaching journals and professional associations led the way both in supporting the profession to make sense of the experience, and resourcing English teachers in the day-to-day, as they took their classrooms online (Marstaller, 2020; Yandell, 2020). It is not our purpose to focus on this specifically, but it is worth drawing attention to one of the many insights that the COVID period has offered us. At a time when standardised tests, in countries such as Australia, were temporarily paused, curriculum content was reduced, and assessment expectations more generally scaled back (for general discussion, see Hughes, 2020), many people-children, adults and families-undoubtedly took to reading. In part, this was because there was more discretionary time available, no commutes, or other regularly scheduled activities outside the house. However, there was another aspect to the turn to text. Boucheretal. reported that in the early months of the pandemic,'Books about (literal and metaphorical) isolation, like Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Gabriel García Marquez's novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera saw an increased uptake in sales' (Boucher et al., 2020).