Supporting Students to See the Work of English

During the COVID-19 pandemic university teachers of English Literary Studies were challenged to think about how to replicate the experiences of classroom close reading in the online classroom, and for synchronous and asynchronous studies. We are teachers of English, broadly conceived. During the pandemic, we were each new to teaching English flexibly. Though we were aware that some universities had been teaching online English subjects for many years, informal conversations with colleagues across Australian universities suggested that teaching English online was new to many of us. This paper offers reflections on our teaching as we began our steep learning curve teaching English online. We focus on our shared experiences and research interests in the pedagogies of reading and student engagement across different modes of teaching, through which we attempt to make the work of English more visible to students and better measure and evaluate their reading practices. We discuss the current demands for flexible and hybrid approaches and explore strategies we currently employ in this emerging space, including collaborative reading tools, online discussion-based activities, classroom reading activities, and flipped learning models.