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This article examines the transformation of Australian EAL/D (English as an additional language/dialect) classrooms, transitioning from a monolingual focus on Standard Australian English (SAE) to embracing plurilingual and intercultural approaches in English language and literacy teaching and learning. Employing hermeneutic phenomenological and narrative analyses, the study reflects on the lived experiences of 16 English teachers who learned English as an additional language and migrated to Australia. The research highlights the significance of fluid affective processes, cultural responsiveness, plurilingualism, and intercultural identity development in language and literacy classrooms. Findings emphasise the central role of affect in EAL teaching and its implications for cultural responsiveness and linguistic diversity. The lived experiences of these teachers underscore the transformative potential of diverse teaching strategies that resonate with students on affective and cultural levels. Implications include fostering plurilingual literacy and identity development, promoting global identity, and cultivating intercultural capabilities among learners and educators. Ultimately, the article highlights the paradigm-shifting power of English language and literacy education when enriched with empathy, creativity, and a commitment to linguistic and cultural diversity. This approach not only enhances EAL/D education but also offers valuable insights and implications for other areas of the curriculum and pedagogical practices, promoting a more inclusive and responsive educational environment across disciplines.

Current research suggests that students who struggle with grammar, spelling, mechanics and other "problems of ability," as well as students who suffer from "problems of engagement," as well as those students who see reading and writing as a chore, can benefit from creative writing assignments and learn to enjoy reading and writing on the college level through this genre of writing. This paper explores several benefits from teaching creative writing in composition courses, and proposes that creative writing assignments be assigned to composition students as a precursor to teaching academic writing. Several Anglophone countries worldwide have been deploying creative writing pedagogies in their English classrooms as replacements for, or supplements to, other forms of college writing with great success.

Purpose: Faced with increasing systemic constraints and pressures, secondary school English teachers often implement transactional approaches to pedagogy and curriculum aimed at improving student results on external exams, which are then used to rank schools. Despite the pressure to teach this way, teachers acknowledge the power of literature, literacy and language in the English curriculum as vehicles for educating students to be critical readers of texts for a democratic society. As such, the purpose of this paper is to share perspectives of secondary English teachers in relation to the democratic potential of their subject. Design/methodology/approach: Using a qualitative case study method, this paper shares data from six Australian secondary school English teachers who work in culturally diverse schools. Teachers were interviewed about their perspectives regarding how the Australian English curriculum enabled and/or constrained the teaching of critical and creative thinking in support of a democratic society. Findings: Using Marri's model of multicultural democratic education, interview data were deductively analyzed to identify elements of the model, including critical pedagogies, disciplinary content and community building. Teachers were concerned that building critical literacy skills was minimized by the system and students' personal dispositions. Originality/value: The English teachers in this study held a strong belief that the subject of English could emancipate students, although they felt it might be "the last bastion" for a democratic education.

Although interdisciplinary scholars have long debated the ethics of empathy, it continues to be widely seen as universal, prosocial, and reparative in education. Subject English, long associated with the work of producing civilised, moral and cultured students, is a critical locus for the activation of empathy. But what becomes of empathy in the high stakes senior secondary English classroom? Drawing on an in-school ethnography, the paper begins to map the ways in which empathy is activated through and around set literary texts in Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) English classrooms in Australia. In so doing, it highlights the unpredictable nature of empathy as a relation exceeding pedagogical mediation, as well as the troublesome aspects of empathy entangled with neoliberal imperatives and the interpellation of the civilised English student. Finally, it turns to the generative possibilities of an empathy unsettled -- an unruly empathy.

Purpose: Videogames are complex, meaningful and multimodal texts. This study aims to explore how students could learn about narratives from, and be engaged by, playing a videogame and how a teacher adapted their pedagogy to incorporate the young adult videogame (YA game) "What Remains of Edith Finch" into an English Language Arts curriculum. Design/methodology/approach: This case study examined the experiences of a classroom teacher and students in a Year 10 English class in Australia. Thematic analysis included a wide range of data, including interviews, surveys, observations and artefacts. Findings: First, students demonstrated a strong understanding of the game as a narrative text, including essential components of narrative such as plot, characterisation, themes, settings and literary techniques. Second, students experienced a consistently high level of engagement and embodiment throughout the study as a consequence of the interactive, collaborative and multimodal nature of YA games. Third, the teacher discovered that he was able to achieve key curriculum outcomes with the videogame through re-imagining pedagogy. Originality/value: A playful approach allows teachers and students to be curious about the diverse narrative pathways possible within YA games and offers new opportunities to experience embodiment within and through digital texts.

This article was originally published in "English in Australia," number 5, 1967. The text is Professor A. D. Hope's presidential address to the Australian Association for the Teaching of English from April, 1967. It manifests his concern for the state of English teaching in Australia.

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?

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.

Feedback is a cultural tool through which English teachers can facilitate secondary students' evaluative expertise in their writing development. While there is increased concern to use feedback to enhance learning at all educational levels, there is currently little empirical knowledge of how secondary teachers of English design feedback for complex appraisal. Using data from two qualitative studies, this paper explores practices drawing on Anglophone cultures of secondary schooling for subject English. Observation, artefact and interview data are analysed using a socio-cultural theoretical lens. Cultural tools including student planners, peer feedback and discussion linked students' self-regulated learning to community norms for evaluating written texts. Two distinctive feedback conditions for written texts in the school subject of English are identified: the disciplinary practices of evaluation of texts within community cultural values, and the role of cultural tools in co-regulation of learning in the classroom context.

The space between the two epigraphs presented at the beginning of this article marks the difference between an insider and an outsider. Ms Barbieri, from "Voices from the Middle," made the first comments as an expression of what reflective practice -- observing and critiquing video tapes of hers and others' teaching -- could mean to her as an experienced teacher who had logged four years of work with the development of national board certification for early adolescence/English language arts (EA/ELA) teachers. She made the second set of comments after the Educational Testing Service (ETS) had taken over the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certification assessment, and after she had participated in their 'scoring' of teachers' performances on three exercises in the assessment's teaching portfolio. This article offers the reader the opportunity to think about standards setting, certification assessments, and professional development. It also offers the reader to think about who benefits and about who is invited to the table. The author hopes to have convinced educators that they have to be active in these things in order to be insiders in standards and certification assessments. [This article was originally published in "English in Australia," 122, pp. 45--55, 1998.]

This article is a call to literacy teachers and researchers to embrace the possibility of attending more consciously to the senses in digital media production. Literacy practices do not occur only in the mind, but involve the sensoriality, embodiment, co-presence, and movement of bodies. This paper theorises the sensorial and embodied dimension of children's filmmaking about place in two communities in Australia. The films were created by pre-teen Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in Logan, Queensland, and by Indigenous teenagers at the Warralong campus of the Strelley Community School in remote Western Australia. The films were created through engagement in cross-curricular units that sensitised the students' experience of local places, gathering corporeal information through their sensing bodies as they interacted with the local ecology. The analysis highlights how the sensorial and bodily nature of literacy practice through documentary filmmaking was central to the children's formation and representation of knowledge, because knowledge and literacy practices are not only acquired through the mind, but are also reliant on embodiment, sensoriality, co-presence, and kinesics of the body in place.

This essay focuses on the recent introduction by the Australian Federal Government of standardised literacy testing in all states across Australia (that is, the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN), and explores the way this reform is mediating the work of English literacy educators in primary and secondary schools. We draw on data collected as part of a research project funded by the Australian Research Council, involving interviews with teachers about their experiences of implementing standardised testing. These interviews indicate that the introduction of standardised testing does not merely constitute an additional part of teachers' workloads, but that it is having a significant impact on their identity as language educators, their understanding of curriculum and pedagogy, and the relationships they seek to maintain with their students. By introducing the NAPLAN tests, the Australian Federal Government is going down the path of other neo-liberal governments around the world. No doubt the story we tell will be familiar to readers in other countries. Our aim, however, is more than simply to give yet another account of the tensions experienced by committed language and literacy teachers as they implement neoliberal policy mandates. Key questions for us include: Why is the Australian government persisting with such policies, even when they have had such dubious consequences (teaching to the test, dumbing down, and so on.) in other national settings? How might educators resist these reforms? What intellectual resources might enable us to articulate an alternative vision of language education to that imposed by neoliberal reforms? (Contains 1 footnote.)

This paper examines and reports on beginning generalist teacher self-efficacy, which Bandura (1997) suggests plays an important part in student outcomes. In 2008, 201 beginning generalist teachers throughout the state of Queensland, Australia, participated in a study that aimed to provide a snapshot of current perceptions towards support in schools for the arts. Beginning teachers were asked to rank their school support for a number of different subjects in the school curriculum and provide written justification for these rankings. Results suggest that beginning teachers perceived a general lack of support for the teaching of the arts in their classroom, compared to English and maths. They reported that schools provided greater financial support, assistance and professional development for the teaching of literacy and numeracy with a view to increase school performance in national testing. Findings provide key insights for school administrators and policy makers for the adequate delivery of arts education in Queensland schools, particularly when this task falls to generalist teachers with little or no subject expertise in the arts. (Contains 3 figures, 2 footnotes, and 1 table.)

This article presents the authors' critique of lessons proposed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21). The authors initiate a discussion about content that they hope will play out in schoolhouses and statehouses across the country. They take on a different task: they present a handful of lesson ideas from P21 that could enhance studies of academic content. They present examples of content-rich education in which they hope P21 will use as models to revise its current skills maps. (Contains 11 endnotes.)

Purpose: This study aims to seek to demonstrate how explicit teaching of SFL metalinguistic and multimodal "grammars" enhanced 8-9-year-old children's deeper understanding and production of multimodal texts through critique of the construction of mini-documentaries about animals: the information, language of narration, composition of scenes and resources to engage the viewer. It also seeks to demonstrate how a knowledge of metalinguistic and multimodal "grammars" contributes to students achieving both content knowledge and understanding of the resources of semiotic modes. Design/methodology/approach: A design-based approach was used with the teacher and author working closely together to implement a unit of work on mini-documentaries, including explicit teaching of the metalanguage of information reports, mini-documentary narration (aka script) and multimodal resources deployed to scaffold students' creating their own mini-documentaries. Findings: The students' mini-documentaries demonstrate how knowledge of SFL written and multimodal SFL-informed "grammars" assisted students to learn how meaning was created through selection of resources from the written, visual, sound and gestural modes and apply this knowledge to creating multimodal texts demonstrating their understandings of the topic and how to make meaning in a multimodal mini-documentary. Research limitations/implications: The research is limited to the outcomes from one group of students in one class. Generalisation to other contexts is not possible. Further studies are required to support the results from this research. Practical implications: The linguistic and multimodal SFL-informed grammars can be applied by educators to critique multimodal texts in a range of mediums and scaffold students' production of multimodal texts. They can also inform assessment criteria and expand students' conception of what is literate practice. Originality/value: Knowledge of a linguistic and multimodal metalanguage can provide students with the tools to enhance their critical language awareness and critical multimodal awareness.

Australia has recently moved from having curricula developed within individual states to national curricula, including in English. This move in Australia has coincided with debate over Michael Young's call for 'bringing knowledge back in'. English has historically been epistemologically unstable with an ever-contestable knowledge base, and this is especially true of literary knowledge. The "Australian Curriculum: English" was nevertheless framed in early consultation papers as focused primarily on knowledge--a focus reflected in the main organizing elements moving from the 'traditional' language mode organizers 'reading', 'writing',' listening', 'speaking', etc., to the organizers 'Language', 'Literature' and 'Literacy'. Here we investigate the specific uses of the words 'knowledge' and related terms such as 'know' and 'knowing' as one kind of analysis of how knowledge plays out in the Curriculum. We show that as the Curriculum itself developed, the constituent elements of the phrase 'knowledge, understanding and skills' came to align specifically to the constituent elements of the organizers 'Language', 'Literature' and 'Literacy', to the point where the term 'knowledge' came to be attached almost exclusively to 'Language', and then mainly in the Years Foundation--Year 6. This 'Language knowledge' then became continually positioned as underlying the 'skills' of 'Literacy', so that Literature is seen to be almost arbitrary to the fundamental imperatives of the Curriculum--a means through which the cultural intentions of the Curriculum might be serviced.

Many primary, secondary and tertiary educators need support to engage in inclusive pedagogical practices that challenge homophobia, transphobia and heteronormativity. We present a border-crossing pedagogy (BCP) designed to assist English language arts educators in translating knowledge into action to demolish deeply engrained anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and intersex (LGBTIQ+) bigotry, discrimination and violence. This model is timely given the rise in anti-LGBTIQ+ bigotry as governments pass LGBT-inclusive hate crime laws, executive orders prohibiting LGBT discrimination and marriage equality. We illustrate how the BCP can be used to explore affordances and barriers located in the English curriculum, and beyond, to teach about diverse genders and sexualities, positively recognising and affirming LGBTIQ+ identities.

The 2016 "Garth Boomer Address" considers the teaching of film. It challenges the orthodoxy that calls for a predominantly visual analysis, arguing that editing, sound and a fresh look at the script are equally important. This invites an understanding of characterisation and narrative in terms of the creation of "wholes" and their ruptures and potentials. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's cinema books, editing, for example, can be reconceived as placing "moving wholes" in relation to other moving wholes and not just connecting shots. There is a striking resemblance to Garth Boomer's early work in which he speaks directly to teachers especially in terms of fissures and their productive capacity to create new spaces for learning, just as for cinema. "We now seek and find new questions, new spaces, and new discontinuities in need of exploration." All this raises questions of creative spaces, how filmmakers and others open them up, and how we might work to understand (or remind ourselves) that classrooms are spaces open to creative opportunities.

The processes of puberty, including reproductive fertility and social-role transitions, now begin earlier, last longer, and are experienced in very different contexts. Because of this, all children and adolescents need good-quality puberty education in school curricula, and this need is supported by positive cost-benefit analysis and international professional consensus. The introduction of a new nationwide curriculum is an ideal opportunity to seek evidence for the presence of puberty education, in this case, in the Australian Curriculum. This study, a concise account of the first-known search for such evidence, aims to examine the compulsory curriculum Content Descriptions in the subject Learning Areas (LAs) developed for Australian students in Years 1-10. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses were conducted of audits taken at critical learning/teaching stages for students aged 5, 10 and 15. Findings highlight negligible levels of puberty education presence, even in the LA of Health and Physical Education (HPE), but immense potential for the inclusion of puberty education in all audited LAs. The introduction of consistent, continuous and competent programmes in all school years would likely enhance students' well-being, health and safety, educational outcomes and life chances.

Based on a sample of over 3000 primary and secondary school students located in regional and rural schools in Tasmania (Australia) this research had three aims: (1) to identify students' self-perceptions of schooling with a focus on high school completion (referred to as school retention); (2) to determine if gender, socio-economic factors, level of school absenteeism, and school setting (primary or secondary) influenced the students' responses; and (3) to identify which factors had the greatest influence on the students' aspirations to continue their schooling. A 42- item survey produced eight factors: (1) Teacher Support, (2) Aspirations, (3) School Organisation, (4) English Ability, (5) Maths Ability, (6) Friends, (7) Other Activities, and (8) Career Goals. Higher levels of absenteeism, lower socio-economic status, and transitioning to secondary school reduced scores on the factors. Girls had higher scores for three factors: (1) Teacher Support, (2) English Ability, and (3) Aspirations. Regression analysis identified Friends, English and Mathematics Ability, Other Activities, and Teacher Support as the 'best predictors' of students' aspiration to continue schooling. The implications of the significant findings for school practice are discussed with recommendations for interventions.

Based on a sample of over 3000 primary and secondary school students located in regional and rural schools in Tasmania (Australia) this research had three aims: (1) to identify students' self-perceptions of schooling with a focus on high school completion (referred to as school retention); (2) to determine if gender, socio-economic factors, level of school absenteeism, and school setting (primary or secondary) influenced the students' responses; and (3) to identify which factors had the greatest influence on the students' aspirations to continue their schooling. A 42-item survey produced eight factors: (1) Teacher Support, (2) Aspirations, (3) School Organisation, (4) English Ability, (5) Maths Ability, (6) Friends, (7) Other Activities, and (8) Career Goals. Higher levels of absenteeism, lower socio-economic status, and transitioning to secondary school reduced scores on the factors. Girls had higher scores for three factors: (1) Teacher Support, (2) English Ability, and (3) Aspirations. Regression analysis identified Friends, English and Mathematics Ability, Other Activities, and Teacher Support as the 'best predictors' of students' aspiration to continue schooling. The implications of the significant findings for school practice are discussed with recommendations for interventions.

This article is part of a larger ethnographic study on teaching and learning in one of Australia's only stand-alone adolescent New Arrival Programs (NAPs) for students learning English. These multilingual adolescents represent four world regions: the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and East Asia. Eventually, they will enter mainstream high schools. Instead of grade levels, the school uses initial language and literacy assessments to assign students Pathways, which determine their lengths of stay in the NAP. The school focuses on intensive English language instruction and social/emotional well-being through subject-area lessons, electives, excursions, community partnerships, personal wellness, and clubs. Through all of these efforts, the collective goal is to prompt students to use literacy and language as tools for living with the past and interpreting new experiences in Australia. According to the author, Mary and Roger teach in the school's Pathway A program, where students typically come from refugee backgrounds. Pathway A students have had unreliable access to formalized schooling due to displacement, poverty, and simple or complex health issues. While new to English, the students are all experienced language learners. In this particular state, students in Pathway A attend the NAP for up to two years before transitioning into mainstream high schools. Previous or current trauma affects these students' progress in written literacy; sometimes, they appear afraid, resistant, or anxious about new experiences. Most of the time, however, they smile and laugh, play soccer at recess, sing, dance, use social media, misbehave, and engage in a range of typical adolescent behaviors. Students' trauma does not define them. Some might see these students as leagues behind their native English speaking counterparts, but Mary and Roger know they are substantially ahead in their linguistic, cultural, and life experiences.

Numeracy is a fundamental component of the Australian Curriculum as a General Capability in each subject. Here, we report on an aspect of a larger project that aims to provide insight into how teachers can assist their students to develop a critical orientation to life-related situations through a cross-curricular approach to numeracy. Specifically, we draw on data collected via lesson observations and semi-structured teacher interviews exploring the use of mathematics in a critical fashion within the teaching of two subjects outside of mathematics--English and social education. Our investigation revealed that attention to the details of a rich model of numeracy can support the framing of such activities but that time, experience, and initial intent for the learning activity are factors which shape the effectiveness of teachers as designers of such tasks, especially in relation to a critical orientation to numeracy.

Gifted students have been provided the opportunity to study three core subjects through an academically selective virtual high school in western NSW, Australia. At the same time they continue to attend their local public high school for their other subjects. This article presents the mechanisms that have provided this opportunity, and describes successes and challenges that have been overcome. Students are located across 385,000 km[superscript 2] and meet online through web conferencing to engage in real time. They are also able asynchronously to access study materials in an online repository.

Contemporary views of literacy, and of English and Language Arts curriculum recognise the importance of digital culture and communication forms in many young people's lives and the multiple forms of literacy students engage with as they work, interact and play. Amongst these, videogames, whether played on PCs, laptops, wiis, or on mobile devices of various kinds stand out as highly popular, engaging and sophisticated emergent cultural forms. Drawing on research in Australian secondary schools over a number of years, this paper describes approaches to working with games in the English classroom, and presents a model for critical games literacy which entails thinking of games as both text and action. It describes the ways in which the model might be used for planning and teaching with and about games, stressing the active nature of games and play, and calling on understandings of literacy as design.

For most Anglophone countries, the history of grammar teaching over the past 50 years is one of contestation, debate and dissent: and 50 years on we are no closer to reaching a consensus about the role of grammar in the English/Language Arts curriculum. The debate has been described through the metaphor of battle and grammar wars (Kamler, 1995; Locke, 2005), frequently pitting educational professionals against politicians, but also pitting one professional against another. At the heart of the debate are differing perspectives on the value of grammar for the language learner and opposing views of what educational benefits learning grammar may or may not accrue. At the present time, several jurisdictions, including England and Australia, are creating new mandates for grammar in the curriculum. This article reviews the literature on the teaching of grammar and its role in the curriculum and indicates an emerging consensus on a fully-theorized conceptualization of grammar in the curriculum.

As part of the "Bridging the Language Gap" project undertaken with 86 State and Catholic schools across Queensland, the language competencies of Indigenous students have been found to be "invisible" in several key and self-reinforcing ways in school system data. A proliferation of inaccurate, illogical and incomplete data exists about students' home languages and their status as English as an Additional Language/Dialect (EAL/D) learners in schools. This is strongly suggestive of the fact that "language" is not perceived by school systems as a significant operative variable in student performance, not even in the current education climate of data-driven improvement. Moreover, the National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), the annual standardised testing regime, does not collect relevant information on students' language repertoires and levels of proficiency in Standard Australian English (SAE). Indigenous students who are over-represented in NAPLAN under-performance data are targeted through "Closing the Gap" for interventions to raise their literacy and numeracy achievements (in SAE). However, Indigenous students who are EAL/D learners cannot be disaggregated by system data from their counterparts already fluent in SAE. Reasons behind such profound language invisibility are discussed, as well as the implications for social inclusion of Indigenous students in education.

In the conceptual triumvirate of "language," "literacy" and "literature" that have been central to thinking about English curriculum--indeed, are the overarching organisers for the "Australian Curriculum: English"--that which received possibly the least attention from Garth Boomer was literature. This paper attempts to pull together Boomer's writings on literature, which, with the exceptions considered here, are largely contained in broader essays (often on language or literacy) as sub-sections, brief ideas or seemingly throw-away phrases ripe with implication. This piece will consider Boomer's writings on literature both in his time and in the context of current issues around the teaching of literature. His own themed school-texts of the 70s and 80s will also be examined in the light of these writing.

The article focuses on the notion of tablet technologies as placed resources (Prinsloo, 2005; Prinsloo & Rowsell, 2012) by exploring how an international research project in Australia, Canada, and the United States forged community through online spaces. There is a tendency in media and in literature to romanticize technologies like iPads as a panacea, as an answer to the challenge of 21st century literacy education. Prinsloo's notion of new technologies as placed resources is helpful to contextualize where, how, when, and in what ways these networked artifacts (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010) can be used and understood.

How might a tertiary English teacher use Garth Boomer's ideas on "teaching against the grain" to challenge the rules and assumptions that dominate the Academic Language and Learning (ALL) industry in the university sector today? How might such a teacher use Boomer's ideas to enact "emancipatory pedagogies" (or something like them) in an otherwise conservative landscape? In this paper I endeavour to imagine an alternative teaching identity and an alternative pedagogy by re-reading and re-appropriating some of Boomer's ideas of the late 1980s and applying them, selectively, to a twenty-first century context. To challenge the status quo, Boomer advocates a revolution in "explicitness" and "honesty" -- even "perversity" and "courage" -- to call education at all levels as it is. This paper responds to Boomer's call to critical arms and critical perversity by imagining as a means to enacting. After all, as Boomer (1988) suggests, "Making out is a forerunner to making changes" (p. 69). And who better to start this habit-shattering praxis than Boomer himself.

A national survey of senior secondary English curriculum content has confirmed that contemporary literature predominates among set texts, being seen as an "essential" category for study because of its "relevance" in helping students "understand the world in which they live." Perhaps uncontentious -- depending on the meaning of that phrase "contemporary literature": is it what's written in our own time, or also set in our own time? Too much of the latter could mean that students' reading confines them narrowly to the here and now. Part of our responsibility as educators is to help our students go beyond the familiar, and to reframe their experience of the world in which they live by introducing them to worlds elsewhere. Their understanding needs to move across time as well as across different places. In considering what these principles imply in practice for the selection and interpretation of texts, this article combines the perspectives of teacher, curriculum designer and fiction writer.

In this article we draw on queer theoretical and critical literacy perspectives to investigate elementary school teachers' pedagogical approaches to addressing same-sex parenting and non-normative sexuality in the elementary classroom. Through undertaking case study research, we examine two Australian elementary school teachers' reflections on using literacy resources in their classrooms which include representations of same-sex families/relationships. Our overall aim in reporting on this study is to provide further insight into the pedagogical potential for interrupting heteronormativity in the elementary school classroom and within the broader context of English education. Implications of the research for pre-service teacher education and for the professional learning of teachers more generally are outlined.

Capitalising on areas in which teachers feel most comfortable, the teaching of Biology, environmental education or nature to young children can be an alternative way of introducing and understanding Science. A "Citizen Science" program currently being run by the University of South Australia (UniSA) may be an appropriate starting point. "Citizen Science" is research involving interested members of the public, including school groups and parents, who participate by collecting scientific data in collaboration with scientists and professional bodies. Following the success of two previous projects, "Operation Possum" and "Operation Bluetongue", the 2009 venture of "Operation Magpie" encouraged interested participants to access a website, where information was provided regarding magpie behaviour and bird watching. This paper reports on a series of lessons developed from the program to encourage teachers and students to understand how better to interact with wildlife in their backyards (UniSA 2009). (Contains 1 table and 2 photos.)

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.

The current version of the draft National Curriculum (1.0.1) remains a document which dis-integrates the subject through its three strands and fails to conceptualise a relationship between these strands. Drawing on curriculum history, I argue that this stands in strong contrast to a curriculum such as the 1971 NSW Syllabus for Years 7-10, which was integrated by an overarching vision that dealt with language modes, contexts, knowledges and skills. This vision was partly provided by the work of James Moffett, on whose work I draw to address the National Curriculum approach to writing in particular. I adapt Paris's notion of "constrained"/"unconstrained" skills in order to argue for a renewed concern with rhetoric and style and for actively teaching towards "surprise". (Contains 4 notes.)