On being 'well read'

In this chapter we will explore the ways in which notions of being 'well read' have circulated in the history and scholarship of subject English and will consider what being 'well read' means to contemporary English teachers. The corpus of material on which we will draw includes key documents in the history of the subject, as well as interviews with English teachers who form the central data group of an international project concerned with midcareer teachers' perceptions of literary knowledge (this study formed a pilot investigation for a current Australian Research Council project entitled Investigating Literary Knowledge in the Making of English Teachers [DP 160101084]). In the interviews for that study, teachers in Australia and the UK convey a sense of what they regard as being 'well read' with regard to their students, but also in relation to themselves" though questions about being 'well read' are never asked directly about either group. This will lead us to explore the enduring nature of concepts of literary capital, and what understandings of being 'well read' are mobilized by teachers in their classrooms. To see how these notions of being 'well read' have been treated historically, we turn first to a discussion of key reports and major curriculum statements on the teaching of English and the teaching of literature in particular. We should say that the notion of being 'well read' is not explicitly foregrounded in these documents in these precise terms; however, we believe they say much that is relevant to that notion.