Sunday 4 December
Keynote: Erin McKean
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Listen to Erin McKean's presentation
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Guest speakers: Jeff Sparrow, Val Klenowski Ray Misson and Amanda McKenzie
Panels: Assessment in the context of curriculum reform; Catching the wave—women writer's journeys; Finding a place for contemporary Australian poetry in the Australian English Curriculum; Beyond 'Simpson and his donkey, flags, values and traditions': cultural production and national identity; Read it and scream; and Education for an ethical society. more panel info...
Monday 5 December
Keynote: Raimond Gaita
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Listen to Raimond Gaita's presentation
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Guest speakers: Mark Davis, Georgia Webster, Jeff Siegel and Tony Ayres
Panels: 'New paradigm' anyone? Enriching the culture by disrupting it; 'What we might be'; The play(ing)s the thing....creative approaches to Shakespeare; Connect, Multiple voices, multiple grammars; Navigating shifting digital landscapes: new technologies and life on the ground for teachers in classrooms; trials, triumphs and tribulations? 'Trialing' the Australian Curriculum. more panel info...
Tuesday 6 December
Keynote: George Megalogenis
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Listen to George Megalogenis' presentation
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Guest Speakers: Angela Thomas, Alan Reid, Benjamin Law and Cordelia Fine
Panels: Educating for a democratic, equitable and just society; Literary magazine journalism in new times; Reading Asia—Community contexts and curriculum. more panel info...
Biographies A-Z (by first name)
Alan Reid is Professor of Education at the University of South Australia. He has a long involvement in curriculum and policy development in Australia. His research interests include educational policy, curriculum change, social justice and education, citizenship education and the history and politics of public education. He was recently awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Council of Educational Leaders (ACEL) which is presented annually to an educator whose 'contribution to the study and practice of educational leadership is assessed as most outstanding at the national level'; and is currently President-elect of the Australian College of Educators.
Guest speaker: Tuesday 12:30pm-1:30pm
Angela Thomas is a senior lecturer in English and Literacy at the University of Tasmania. She teaches across a range of areas, including: New Media Literacies, Children’s Literature, Social Semiotics and Discourse Analysis. Her research includes multimodal authoring in classrooms, and studying the ways we can use virtual worlds in education.
Guest speaker: Tuesday 12:30pm-1:30pm
Benjamin Law is a Brisbane-based freelance writer. He is a senior contributor to frankie magazine and has also written for The Monthly, The Courier Mail, Qweekend, Sunday Life, Cleo, Crikey, The Big Issue, New Matilda, Kill Your Darlings, ABC Unleashed and the Australian Associated Press. His essays have been anthologised in Growing Up Asian in Australia, The Best Australian Essays 2008, The Best Australian Essays 2009 and the forthcoming Voracious: New Australian Food Writing.The Family Law (2010) is his debut book, and is published by Black Inc. Books. A French edition will be published by Belfond in 2012. The TV rights have been sold to Matchbox Pictures.
Guest speaker: Tuesday 12:30pm-1:30pm
Cordelia Fine is an academic psychologist and writer. Her most recent book, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, was a Guardian and London Evening Standard Book of the Year, a Washington Post Best Non-Fiction Pick, andhas been described as 'a powerful, clear and scholarly rebuke of the growing genre of "popular" pseudoscientific accounts of sex difference … conducted with wit and humour' (Gender & Education). She has a PhD from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, and is currently a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Agency, Values & Ethics at Macquarie University.
Guest speaker: Tuesday 12:30pm-1:30pm
Erin McKean's job as a lexicographer involves living in a constant state of research. She searches high and low -- from books to blogs, newspapers to cocktail parties -- for new words, new meanings for old words, or signs that old words have fallen out of use. She involves us all in the search through Wordnik (www.wordnik.com), an online dictionary that houses all the traditionally accepted words and definitions, but also asks users to contribute new words and new uses for old words. Wordnik pulls real-time examples of word usage from Twitter, image representations from Flickr along with many more non-traditional, and highly useful, features. Before Wordnik, Erin was one of the youngest editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary. She continues to serve as the editor of the language quarterly Verbatim ('language and linguistics for the layperson since 1974') and is the author of multiple books, including That's Amore and the entire Weird and Wonderful Words series. She writes about dresses in her blog, A Dress A Day, and about lexicography at Dictionary Evangelist. Her 2011 novel ('her first book where the words are arranged in something other than alphabetical order') is called The Secret Life of Dresses. She writes occasionally for the Boston Globe’s ‘Word’ column. Erin is part of the next wave of lexicographers who are taking over guardianship of the English language, and who disprove Samuel Johnson's definition of a lexicographer as 'a harmless drudge’.
Keynote: Sunday 9:00am–10:30am
George Megalogenis is a political journalist at The Australian and author of the Quarterly Essay 'Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the End of the Reform Era' in November 2010. Most delegates would recognise George Megalogenis as one of Australia’s most discerning and dispassionate political commentators from his appearances on The Insiders and his writings in The Australian. He is a journalist who actually researches before he speaks or writes. These qualities of discernment and dispassionate analysis of the economic, cultural, social and political forces shaping contemporary Australian society are also evident in George’s books, Faultlines: Race, Work and the Politics of Changing Australia and The Longest Decade. More recently George has written on two of the themes underlying the conference. One is the role language and media play in shaping critical debate and analysis about social, political and cultural issues. The other is the role literature plays in developing concepts of ‘national identity’. In his Quarterly Essay, 'Trivial Pursuit and the End of the Reform Era' one of the subtexts he explores is the way in which developments in the media have made a sustained ‘national conversation’ about a 'considered policy debate' almost impossible: 'When talkback asserted itself in the 1990s print journalists began to type as if they were shouting and TV current affairs went from topical to trashy…The internet has made print even more aggressive and self conscious…The demand for another story, another column, another bulletin, another live cross, routinely pushes the journalist into the gibberish zone.' In ‘Slip, slop, slap’ The Australian Literary Review, July 2009, a review of Cristos Tsolkias’s The Slap and Kathy Lette’s The Marriage Club he asserts provocatively that: 'It’s long been a pet theory of mine for some years that the people best able to interpret contemporary Australia are women and wogs. The tertiary educated daughters of old Australia and the sons and daughters of new Australia are middle class but they don’t belong to the mainstream yet. They share the outsider’s eye, so their impressions of what Australia is becoming are closer to reality than the Anglo male insiders who keep glancing at the review mirror.'
Keynote: Tuesday 11:00am-12:00pm
Georgia Webster is a presenter of the 'Superlinguo' segment on community broadcaster Triple R, where she chats about language and its relationship with the world. The segment aims to connect the Triple R audience with theories and research in linguistics, and often also includes Georgia's own anecdotal observations of the way language lives and evolves around her. Georgia studied linguistics and Italian at the University of Melbourne, and did an Honours research project on vowel length in spoken Italian. She is currently the General Manager of SYN Media, a youth-run media organisation. Georgia will discuss her current take on the grammar debate. She offers a basic overview of prescriptivism and how difficult (but liberating) it is to let go of it. She argues that we need to shift our focus on grammatical correctness' to an appreciation for language shift and fluidity.
Guest speaker: Monday 12:25pm–1:15pm
Jeff Siegel taught English for ten years at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels in Fiji, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea before obtaining his PhD in Linguistics at the Australian National University. For the past twenty-five years, he has been teaching linguistics, first at the University of the South Pacific and then at the University of New England (UNE), where he is currently Adjunct Professor. He also took two years leave from UNE to become the foundation director of the Charlene Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole and Dialect Studies at the University of Hawaii. Jeff has done research on Fiji Hindi, Pidgin Fijian, Melanesian Pidgin and Hawaii Creole English. His recent work has focussed on the origins of pidgins, creoles and other language contact varieties, and on the use of these varieties and vernacular dialects in formal education. His latest book is on learning an additional dialect (Second Dialect Acquisition, Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Guest speaker: Monday 12:25pm-1:15pm
Jeff Sparrow is author of three books, Radical Melbourne and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within and (co-authored with his sister, Jill Sparrow) and Killing: Misadventures in Violence, a finalist in the Melbourne Prize for Literature Best Writing Award 2009. With a PhD in Creative Media, Jeff now works at Victoria University and is editor of Overland.
Guest speaker: Sunday 1:30pm–2:20pm
Raimond Gaita was born in Germany in 1946. He is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at Kings College London and a Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Law School and the Faculty of Arts of the University of Melbourne.
His books have been published in many translations. They include: Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, Romulus, My Father, A Common Humanity, The Philosopher’s Dog and Essays on Muslims and Multicultralism (as editor and contributor), and his most recent work, After Romulus.
A feature film of Romulus, My Father was released in 2007, and won the AFI award for Best Film, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Young Actor.
Keynote: Monday 9:00am–10:15am
Mark Davis is Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Melbourne University. His research interests include Australian public culture and cultural politics, the state and possible futures of Australian publishing and globalisation and the media. He is the author of Gangland:Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism, which generated considerable, and at times, heated debate. His most recent book is The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s, an incisive, lively and wide ranging analysis of contemporary Australia’s economy, society and culture. As Christos Tsiolkas said, The Land of Plenty is exactly what we need at the moment—a lucid, compelling and rigorously tough examination of where we are as a nation…. It gives me hope that a reinvigoration of Australian politics and culture is possible'.
Guest speaker: Monday 12:25pm–1:15pm
Ray Misson is the recently retired Director and Associate Dean (Learning and Teaching) at the University of Melbourne. Ray has had a long and distinguished career in education, and an equally long involvement with English teaching associations both nationally and internationally. His work has done much to make literary theory accessible to teachers, and his Critical Literacy and the Aesthetic: Transforming the English Classroom (co-authored with Wendy Morgan) has addressed the complementary roles that critical literacy and aesthetic appreciation might play in subject English. More recently Ray has written on the ways in which he believes concepts of ‘creativity’ have been addressed in fragmented ways in the Australian Curriculum: English, arguing that more work needs to be done to give it a cohesive presence which underpins deep thinking and student agency.
Guest speaker: Sunday 1:30pm–2:20pm
Tony Ayres is a Chinese born Australian screenwriter, director and producer. His works include China Dolls, Walking on Water and the multiple award winning Home Song Stories, which contains many autobiographical elements. Of the film Tony said ‘Yeah, the title’s a bit weird. It kind of just came to me. The film is about a woman looking for a home; the film seemed to be full of song. It wasn’t quite literally that she was a singer, but somehow it is important in the film; and the film is about storytelling, retelling stories of the past to try and make sense of the past'. More recently, Tony has been involved through his production company, Matchbox Pictures, with producing and directing the television adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap. Tony co-founded Matchbox with four other producers in 2008. The company’s philosophy is to be ’open, fearless and to respect the creative process'. It develops and produces feature films, TV drama, comedy, documentary, children’s television and online content. Its productions include the thirteen-part children’s TV series My Place and RAN, and recently it acquired the rights to Benjamin Law’s The Family Law.
Guest speaker: Monday 12:25pm–1:15pm
Val Klenowski is Professor of Education in the School of Learning and Professional Studies. She has researched curriculum development and assessment practice internationally at all levels from early childhood through to higher education. She is particularly interested in teachers' classroom assessment practices and the interrelationship with learning, curriculum and pedagogy. Her diverse range of teaching and learning experiences and roles include: teacher, researcher, evaluator, academic advisor, policy officer and professional developer. She has worked as academic advisor to Education Queensland and continues to engage in policy related research.
Guest speaker: Sunday 1:30pm–2:20pm