Consuming culture, creating curriculum

ok, here is the presentation. just click on the thumbnails to enlarge them!

Filed by Scott at 10:05 am under blogging
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I’ve been reading Jim Gee’s newish book, ‘Situated Language and Learning: A critique of traditional schooling’ (2004, Routledge) and thought I’d share …

Learning academic varieties of language and thinking in school is now ‘old’. It is (for most people) important, but not sufficient for success in modern society. People must be ready to learn new specialist varieties of language and thinking outside of school, not necessarily connected to academic disciplines, throughout their lives. Children have more and more learning experiences outside of school that are more important for their futures than is much of the learning they do at school. (Gee 2004: 5)

It seems to me that this kind of thinking is all but absent in discussions about ‘new’ curriculum in Victoria, whether is be VELS or the new VCE English Study design.

What do you think?

Filed by Scott at 2:25 am under News
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We have rerealeased the conference program due to some errors. It has been mailed and all VATE members should have received a copy. If not, jump on over to VATE and get a copy.

Registrations are coming in fast and there is limited room (really!) so get in quickly.

The biggests changes are:

• We now can confirm that a wine and cheese session will be held in the afternoon
• We are showing two short films ‘Crackerbag’ and ‘Birthday Boy’ at the end of the day (after the wine and cheese). These short films are being intoduced by Gary Simmons from the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI)
• We now have the details for the Monash Graduate sessions.

  ‘Burrowing deep and wide: a (V)ELS approach to visual literacy’
  Matthew Cullen, Katrina Harvey, Naomi Thyer, and Jennifer White
  Recently, there has been great debate as to what constitutes a text and how many texts should be taught in any English curriculum. This workshop will address some of these questions while exploring a range of approaches to teaching the picture-story book, The Rabbits (John Marsden and Shaun Tan). The range of approaches explored here can be used with a variety of texts in line with the (V)ELS framework.

  ‘Teaching taboo topics’
  Luci Green, Helen Barr, Claire Pritchard and Kate Pearson
  An interactive session approaching the difficulties one may face when teaching a text containing a topic which some consider ‘taboo’. The session will provide various activities that may be done with students before during and after teaching the text/s in question. The session will also allow participants an opportunity to build on these options and swap personal approaches.

I’m sure you’ll agree that these changes sound great and add plenty of value to the day.

Filed by Scott at 11:51 am under News
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Yes the conference program is out and it’s looking great. Thanks to the office for all their work and especially to the committee for their very hard work. I hope you can find something of interest amongst the offerings.

Oh a problem too. There are some problems/errors that you should be aware of, some to do with timing of sessions and others to do with the sessions themselves. Perhaps the biggest blunder is that the program indicates repeat sessions when there is actually NO repeat sessions. Where the program indicates a repeat session (there are two places when it does this) is should read either that the session actually runs over two time slots (such as James Farmer’s blog session) or that the blurb is the same but that the sessions will be distinct (as with the Dip/Ed-B.Ed sessions in the afternoon).

I’ll post about the other errors later. But we hope to have a revised version of the program for download ASAP (at present the office is in recovery from Student Revision Days).

Thanks for your patience.

Filed by Scott at 4:34 am under News
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Ok, so after a couple of busy weeks getting everything together, the conference program is in press and will be mailed out to VATE members some time next week. I’m pretty happy with the program at this stage and hope that you’ll be excited too (whoever you are). Time was short and so we’ve not been able to do all we would have liked but there’s always next time!

When the program is ready I’ll post a link on this blog. Hopefully you can expect more activity in this space now that the program is finalised. I think what we may do is regularly post an abstract and invite some discussion about the issues and ideas it might raise.

So in the meantime feel free to post your comments and ideas.

Filed by Scott at 8:35 am under News
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There has been plenty of discussion on the [English] listserv today – all of it interesting (some more considered than others, I have to say). Some comments have focused on how the proposed VCE English study design frames English as a study in terms of what might be called ‘new literacies’ and changes to notions of text and textuality. The buzz-words of course are ‘multimodality’, ‘multiliteracies’ etc.

There seems to be some deep reservations out there about these changes and their perceived importance and place in the proposed study design and in English education altogether.

The VATE mini conference is this year looking at these very issues. Check out the conference outline and keynote panel pages on the righthand side of this blog. You might want to have a go at some of the questions we are raising. Post your comments, we’d love to hear from you.

Oh, if you want to get on the [English] listserv send an email to english-request@curriculum[dot]schools[dot]net[dot]au with the word ’subscribe’ (without the quotation marks) in the body of the message. To unsubscribe do the same with the word ‘unsubscribe’!

Filed by Scott at 12:44 pm under News
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We’ve decided to begin a blog to track the development of the mini conference. Things are well underway and we wanted a place to keep discussion about the conference themes, news about new presenters, and other bits and pieces that crop up. We hope that you’ll join the conversation and feel the same sense of excitement that we are beginning to feel.

‘We’ refers to those of us silly enough to take on the role of planning the conference.

Filed by Scott at 11:56 am under News
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