The Australian Curriculum provides a warrant for all subject English teachers to enact the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures Cross-curriculum priority (CCP). This priority is 'designed for all students to engage in reconciliation, respect, and recognition of the world's oldest continuous living cultures' (ACARA, n.d.-a). This paper provides an example of how Ziggy Ramo's video text Little Things might be used to achieve some of the subject-specific aims of the English Curriculum while embedding the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures CCP in subject English. This paper is written by pre-service teachers and teacher educators working together out of university campuses located on Wurundjeri and Wathaurong Country.
A significant body of research highlights the rich linguistic and cultural experiences offered by spoken word poetry when integrated into English pedagogy, particularly through its fusion of written and performative modes and its opportunities for cultivating empathy and creativity. However, few studies have examined secondary English teachers' experiences in balancing the multimodal literacies inherent in spoken word poetry with the demands of highstakes examinations. This study addresses this gap by exploring the beliefs and practices of Australian English teachers around the inclusion of spoken word poetry in the text prescriptions for the New South Wales Higher School Certificate (HSC) examination. It offers insights into the scope for broadening existing understandings of literacy in the context of high-stakes assessment in secondary schools. Despite a general enthusiasm for spoken word poetry, it can be challenging for teachers and students to meaningfully engage with the textual form within the constraints of written examinations and assessment outcomes.
Multimodal discourse analysis (MMDA) has been instrumental in the evolution of English curriculum and pedagogy. However, it is unusual for educators to direct the tools of multimodal inquiry to their own text productions. In the context of prioritising accessibility within the new Queensland Certificate of Education in Queensland, which has increased standardisation requirements and placed pressure on schools to prepare students for high-stakes assessments in Year 12, three English Heads of Department (HoDs) and two academics worked together to analyse samples of their Year 10 summative task designs. The aim was to 'make the familiar strange'. When they analysed the design of assessment task sheets, HoDs were able to identify barriers for students negotiating the reading pathway. Results demonstrate that task sheets have multiple demands within their composition that provide cues for how teachers and school leaders can design tasks that prioritise the interests of the learner.
English teachers have long stood at the intersection of helping young people to read the 'word' and read the 'world' through rich learning experiences that tap into diverse literature, literacy and language practices with purpose, creativity and flair. However, given the complex set of crises facing young people, English curriculum and pedagogy need to actively support them in understanding their engagements with the world through close examination of texts in their contexts, and exploring the effects of those texts on themselves and others. As such, this conceptual paper argues for the central role of English teaching and learning in the project of reimagining schooling and society in more democratic, inclusive and sustainable ways. This paper was developed from invited presentations delivered to the 2022 English Teachers Association of Queensland State Conference and the 2022 Victorian Association for the Teaching of English State Conference.
This workshop was presented as an introduction to the forthcoming AATE text: Listening from the Heart: Rewriting the Teaching of English with First Nations Voices. Its purpose was to engage non-Indigenous teachers who have doubts about their capacities to teach First Nations topics and literature, to ascertain what their main concerns are and to provide some introductory approaches and resources for them to use.
In 2019, a new English Senior Secondary syllabus (QCAA, 2019) was implemented in all schools across Queensland, Australia. This syllabus, incorporating high-stakes external examinations and supporting documents, instigated a shift in the teaching and assessing of senior secondary English that has been both challenging and revitalising for teachers. We present findings from an instrumental case study designed to explore how a new, more highly defined syllabus has been shifting and reshaping Queensland English teachers' practices. These teachers noted significant and strategic shifts in their practice concerning teaching creative writing, giving feedback, sharing understandings of grading descriptors with external markers, the quantification of marking, and large-scale external assessment processes. We argue that emergent practices that result from wholesale curricular reform need to be carefully observed and reflected on by all stakeholders as teachers move beyond initial transition stages, to ensure that practice is always evolving in professionally responsive ways.
Schooling has long been identified as a tool for nation-building and cultural reproduction. In early post-Federation Australia, English and literacy education played a significant role in producing colonial subjects. Although Australia today is heralded as a successful multicultural nation with momentum growing for constitutional recognition of First Nations peoples, English education remains haunted by the legacies of colonisation. This paper, based on a workshop given at the 2022 AATE conference in Darwin, proposes placestory as an orientation in subject English aimed at encouraging more historically and culturally nuanced imaginings of being and belonging in Australia. The paper provides an account of the development of English education in Australia as a contextual rationale for reimagining English education as situated within postcolonial possibilities. The paper then discusses three possible orientations for placestory: restore(y)ing place; becoming-with place; and place as being.
David Homer, AATE Life member, has been keeping a diary for nearly 70 years. He recently 'bequeathed' ten of his diaries (1994-2004) to the AATE archives. This selection covers the years when David served on AATE Council and was successively president of SAETA, AATE and IFTE. During David's time on Council he was heavily involved in many curriculum initiatives, including the implementation of the NPDP (particularly in South Australia), the development of the STELLA standards project, and the creation and delivery of the IFTE 2003 conference in Melbourne. The diaries are an engaging example of hypertext, a rich collage of descriptions, anecdotes, reflections, mementoes and 'things to do' of an insider's take on the organisational life of professional teaching associations (and the personalities and politicking involved), as well as the wider political and educational contexts in which they work. It is a narrative interwoven with two others. One, that of David's 'day job', first in teacher education, then professional writing. And two, that of his vibrant personal and social life. The sustaining sociability of community is a key subtext informing all aspects of the diaries.
Landscapes of Learning, in the conference title, prompts a literal reading of landscape and its place in film analysis. This article considers landscape's mental and emotional dimensions and the discovery of landscape as a malleable analytical concept. A critique of film as a visual text is invited. Particular analytical approaches to film follow, through notions of soundscape and, using Gilles Deleuze's work on cinema, through orientations such as the tectonics of sensation' (percept and affect) and the mis-eenscene of the brain' (landscape as a mental construct). These concerns and their implications put us in a position to approach the rest of the conference title's focus on hearts, minds and stories, both in terms of film study in the English classroom and in the light of questions and approaches that open up a film for students.
Teachers are obligated to support students with developmental writing disorders, referred to as dysgraphia, in line with policy and legislation related to disability. Dysgraphia is a relatively unknown writing disorder within English classrooms, with an estimated 3-5% of school -aged students bearing this hidden disability. Within the field of education, research on dysgraphia has always been limited, contributing to insufficient awareness within the teaching community. Consequently, students with dysgraphia may be required to morph into parkour-style athletes to keep pace with the writing demands of the classroom, navigating a range of obstacles. These include a lack of awareness about dysgraphia, or inadequate skills in handwriting, spelling or composition to keep pace with expectations. Students' writing productivity may also seem at odds with their appearance of academic potential and good intellect. However, increased awareness, coupled with the implementation of reasonable adjustments, can better support students with dysgraphia to make learning gains in the classroom.
The subject of English offers a unique context to embed Indigenous perspectives for the benefit of all students through its availability and variety of text choices. Currently, the New South Wales (NSW) English Syllabus requires teachers to include texts which provide 'insights into Aboriginal experiences in Australia' (NESA, 2012). With no structured auditing method for this inclusion, there is room to further understand how teachers select texts to include Indigenous perspectives. This paper will present some factors influencing text selection when including Indigenous perspectives through four teacher profiles. It presents four teacher profiles to explore some influences on their text selections when including Indigenous perspectives. It is a snapshot of decision-making for class texts identified from semi-structured qualitative conversations with four Western Sydney English teachers. The study aims to provide some insight into the process of embedding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives through text selection in Years 7-10 English.
There is a persistent view that reading Shakespeare's writings is automatically good' for student learning, and its persistence can be traced back to the beginnings of the modern education system as a tool of British imperialism. This article argues that his plays challenge audiences and readers in ways that can represent barriers to learning. In overcoming these barriers, the students can complete valuable lessons on how to learn. One way to do this, it is suggested, is by developing preliminary exercises based on developing plays as adaptations of existing stories and formats rather than as self-contained pieces of spontaneous artistic creation. Students can then compare their own products with Shakespeare's adaptations of the same stories, with the goal being to discover Shakespeare's writing in the process of change.
Students graduating from secondary school in 2021 have received their education through some of the most contested years in recent history. This article argues that English text lists present a unique opportunity to engage students in a diverse range of ideas that can equip them to be active citizens in a rapidly transforming society. We argue that due to the socialising impact of literature, English text lists should incorporate a range of 'mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors' that broaden students' horizons (Bishop, 1990). We provide a case study of one secondary school on the rural-urban fringe of Melbourne, Victoria that wanted to meet and challenge the needs of students. The staff, with the support of leadership, conducted a Text Diversity Audit, drawing on the work of McLean Davies (2012) to complete three key stages: data gathering; reflection and analysis; and implementing change. In this article we discuss the challenges English staff faced in introducing change and draw on data from students to highlight their positive responses. Ultimately, we demonstrate that the opportunities presented by textual studies in English classrooms need to be embraced, and propose a series of steps that teachers and school leaders can follow to increase the diversity of text lists.
The power of the coloniser within colonial Australia is clear when we consider how central to the teaching and learning and schooling in Australia is the privileging of Standard Australian English. Prior to 1788, the peoples and the lands of this country were abound with languages. That was until the coloniser exerted their power and insisted on a supposedly monolingual society despite being an amalgamation of various Englishes. Quintessential to maintaining the status quo and assumed power of the coloniser is subject English. I want to query the privileged positioning of subject English and its role in privileging the dominant norm. The subject content, the privileging of the coloniser 's language, the silencing of Indigenous voices, even the naming of the subject - all work to maintain the status quo. In a world where technology auto-corrects and predicts our writings, where 'new' ways of communicating such as emojis are becoming prevalent, where the written word is reduced to memos, text messages and emails, where the evolution of language is studied and yet, the consistent message is that you must excel in Standard Australian English. There has never been a 'pure' English nor a standard Australian English in colonial Australia. Our curriculum makes this explicit when we ask students to explore the evolution of language. In this paper, I share the script from my Garth Boomer address provided in 2021 where I wanted to extend the provocation, I raised in 2019 - why is Standard Australian English the only means of communication privileged in the Australian Curriculum? And be so bold to ask: could (or should) subject English be renamed? Why not Languages, literacy and communication as found in the Welsh Curriculum or how about, simply, Language Arts?
Writing involves a complex web of deliberations as writers make specific choices from their repertoire of grammatical resources. However, curriculum and assessment criteria that favour top-down prescriptions of writing marginalise the agency of the writer (Gardner, 2012). Conversely, we posit a bottom-up process that integrates grammar teaching with the agentic role of the writer as they make ongoing writerly choices. This study draws on Myhill's work (2012, 2022) on the teaching of 'grammar as choice' by exploring the impact of explicitly teaching six embodied grammatical concepts: generating energy; tracking motion; scanning the scene; creating perspective; focusing; and zooming in. The study demonstrates how explicitly teaching these concepts to 11 Year Five students during short, personalised writing conferences improved the range and application of their linguistic choices, their writerly agency and the quality and quantity of their writing. The study contributes to the growing body of research that emphasises students' agency as writers.
This opens with a critical and historical exploration of the terms that make up the phrase 'EnglishNational Curriculum', breaking them down to build them up differently. This prompts a critique of thenominally singular subject 'English' that stresses its plurality ('Englishes') and introduces the concept'Englishing' to highlight its ongoing dynamism as a reflexive verbal practice. The conclusion is organisedround five prefixes and a suffix: multi-, inter-, trans-, co-, re- and -ing. These, it is argued, combined with avariety of stems and roots, point the ways forward for a subject that is always one and many, a series ofopen processes as well as more or less achieved products. The emphasis throughout is upon actualreaders, as potential (re)writers, responding creatively as well as critically, in and on their own terms.
In an attempt to control the spread of COVID-19 in Australia in 2020 state and territory governments mandated the closing of schools for all but vulnerable children and the children of frontline workers in various parts of Australia for various lengths of time. In what follows, five English teachers from across Australia reflect on the everyday experience of teaching during lockdown. Using the framework of 'who' and 'what' stories (Cavarero, 2000), these narratives explore the individual and contextual experience of the everyday work of teaching remotely, while also contributing to the collective story of English teaching during a global pandemic. The narratives raise questions about teachers' identity and development as well as broader questions about subject English. [GRAPHICS]
