Here I Am

The study of English, like the teaching of English, is bound with thematic concerns of love. Notions of love, and the range of experiences that come with them, coalesce in learning spaces when both teachers and students analyse texts, unpack social issues, and construct arguments in daily teaching and learning practice. Within the broader social context, ideas of love are continually politicised and filter into the education space as they are tethered to social conceptions of gender and sexuality. Schools are called upon to protect both young people and parental rights time and time again, fracturing the central unifying idea of love into modes and types of love that are deemed acceptable by government bodies and wider social discourse. The aim of this piece is to give voice to the lived experience within my own classroom and articulate the encounters and affective politics of notions of love, and at times gender, that arise within teaching spaces. This piece also discusses the possible consequences faced by students in the modern classroom, when they participate in these discourses and their own conceptualisation of love is deemed unacceptable, and the implications this then holds for teachers as the arbiters of power within these spaces.