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The need for English and literacy curriculum to connect with young people's lifeworlds to build bridges and frames of reference that connect traditional English curriculum with digital texts and literacies, are increasing priorities in curriculum frameworks in Australia and elsewhere. This paper reports on a project in which the authors worked with teachers and students in five secondary schools to research the ways in which digital games might be incorporated into the English curriculum. Central to this endeavour was "turning around" to the affordances of digital games and their paratexts to understand how they can be understood as text and action. Drawing on classroom observations and literature in Games Studies and English curriculum we present a timely model and innovative heuristic that we argue facilitates teachers incorporating digital games into their English classrooms. We illustrate how each assists teachers in "turning around" to digital games to make their English classrooms more relevant to students' lifeworlds.

Contemporary curriculum guidelines, such as those provided in the incoming Australian curriculum, call for English to attend to multimodal forms of text and literacy as well as more traditional forms. Students are expected to become capable and critical readers, users and creators of texts and forms of literacy that span everything from newspapers to classic texts to visual art to computer games. How to do so, and what this means for English, is often less clear. In this paper, we describe an English curriculum that was at once literary and multimodal, analytic and creative, and embraced a range of opportunities for students to study and create literary and aesthetic texts in many forms. We discuss the opportunities this presented to connect with the excitement of the contemporary world, and the ways in which longstanding principles and philosophies of good teaching and learning, and the central concerns of English curriculum across time, might be understood and reconstituted in the digital age. (Contains 5 figures.)

Both James Britton and James Moffett were keynote speakers at the Sydney International Federation for the Teaching of English conference in 1980--a fact reflective of the wide recognition and acceptance of their work and influence throughout Australia by that time. In Victoria, Moffett's writings became known initially through teacher education, in particular at the University of Melbourne and the State College of Victoria, Rusden, then through the visits and writing of figures from the London Institute and others, and through the State and national English teaching association, the Australian Association for the Teaching of English. In the 1970s, Moffett's influence in Victoria came rather through the mix of his vision and writing, both theoretical and practical, in conjunction with others in Australia and elsewhere. This paper takes two separate but related sites or moments in English education in the 1970s in the Australian city of Melbourne, Victoria, as instances of the permeating influence of Moffett's work--in conjunction with leading figures from the London School associated with the "New" English"--on education discourses and practice in that State's English curriculum history. It concludes with a consideration of the ways in which Moffett's work might still act as a "rallying call" today.

Despite the emphasis in the press and elsewhere on the print-based nature of English curriculum, opportunities to develop digital English, with attention to web-based and multimodal forms of text, literacy, location, and activity, are present in the draft national (Australian) curriculum for English, alongside more traditional forms. This paper examines the place of digital and multimodal texts and literacies within the draft paper for the Australian English curriculum, and the possibilities offered by a national curriculum, for exploring and imagining an English for the Digital Age. (Contains 3 figures and 1 note.)

Explores complex relationships between teachers (in Victoria, Australia) and curriculum change. Explores ways in which the teachers' positioning within a mix of discourses and settings variously supported or undermined their preparedness to accept new configurations of the subject Literature as well as the implications of curriculum change not just for constructions of the subject but also for teacher subjectivity. (SG)

Considers what happens to teachers and the curriculum when the philosophical and theoretical bases of subjects to which they are committed undergo significant change. Explores patterns of text choice for 9 teachers across 3 years. Finds all teachers were challenged into rethinking their views of literature. (SC)

Provides support for using computer games in the English curriculum, as texts of the new technologies, to strengthen links between students' in-school and out-of-school worlds. Claims that far from presenting a threat to accepted literacy practices, the games help students gain an awareness of how texts work and become more reflexive about the reading process. (NH)

Relates the evaluation of a secondary school writing program that concentrated on three areas: (1) the level of group participation and group feeling generated in the classroom, (2) the level of security felt by students and teacher within the process approach, and (3) the linking of the students' reading and writing. (HOD)