Mutual support and dialogue across secondary and tertiary English is vital work in urgent times. In this article, the authors examine Australia's secondary-tertiary English education nexus, building on previous scholarship to explore points of connection and disconnection with a view to identifying sustainable ways of supporting points of…

This reflection draws on a non Indigenous educators' first four years of practice in Arnhem Land, to reflect on the varying perspectives that surround Indigenous education, specifically in literacy. Tensions are described between the challenge of finding rigorous and effective literacy pedagogies, while problematising the notions of…

The ancient literary form of commonplace books offers rich possibilities to students and teachers of English in Australian schools in the 21st century. By briefly tracing early uses of commonplace books and examining contemporary approaches to the teaching of writing, this paper re-imagines the 15th century commonplace book as a personal learning…

The Personal Growth (PG) model, as outlined by John Dixon in 1967, is unquestionably still recognisable to English teachers, remaining aligned to their philosophy of teaching English. This article traces a key aspect of the history of Personal Growth and explores present continuities traceable to Dartmouth in 1966, in suggesting an invigorated…

This paper provides a description of practice outlining changes made to English assessment structures for the purpose of facilitating improved teaching and learning. These changes, which included marking, feedback, reporting, and the evaluation of the efficacy of teaching, were implemented across Years 7 to 10 English classes in an independent…

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…

This is the text of a paper given at the 2011 Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities on the theme, "Educating the Nation: The Humanities in the New Australian Curriculum", the 42nd Annual Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities at the University of Melbourne, 17 November 2011. It was presented in a session on…

In this article, I report on the first stage of a whole school literacy project," Embedding Literacies in the KLAs" (ELK), which aims to support multilingual learners to access the literacies they need for high stakes curriculum learning. As it is "quality teaching" that has been found to have the greatest impact on student…

The recently introduced "Australian Curriculum: English" (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), 2012) requires students to "read" multimodal text and describe the effects of structure and organisation. We begin this article by tracing the variable understandings of what reading multimodal text might…

The move currently underway to construct a formalised national curriculum presents us, as educators and as citizens, with both opportunities and challenges. This is perhaps especially the case with English teaching, clearly the most contentious of the four subject areas in the front line of such initiatives and agendas. Why this is so needs to be…

In his paper in "English in Australia" in 2002, Bill Green called for a literacy project of our own, and for the need to think again, and think newly about the place of literary literacy within contemporary curriculum. But what does literary literacy mean in curriculum that recognises a wide diversity of texts and literacies? If…

In his article, Jack Thomson counsels against crudely instrumental models of English curriculum. His imagining of a national curriculum draws on the strong traditions of English curriculum in this country, and it is built on what he calls "Foundational Principles of Good Educative Practice."

The authors draw on some powerful practitioner research they have been associated with recently to envision ways in which a national curriculum might redress the inequities experienced by Australia's most disadvantaged young people.

Prue Gill calls for a national English curriculum that appreciates the complex relationship between curriculum and assessment, one that is supported by strong government investment in professional learning, and one that will enable young people to imagine a different future from that which has been imagined for them by their elders.