What happens if you stretch personification to the point of absurdity? What is the grossest onomatopoeic word you can come up with? Who can use the most metaphors or idioms in the course of a school day? If you wrote down every found poem you encountered in a week, how many would you end up with? How much could you change your school report by turning it into ‘black out poetry’?! What are the ten top tips for tongue twisters that tongue trip? In this keynote, poet and author Maxine Beneba Clarke shares some of the tricks she’s trialled on author visits to primary classrooms – what’s failed, what’s flourished, and what’s led to fabulous discoveries – all in the name of making words fun.
Affordances offer clues as to how a literary effect is achieved in texts. When students read with a writer’s eye they attend to the use of details, their composition, and their purpose. Locating affordances in texts supports higher-order comprehension through inference and synthesis, and consideration of how texts are constructed. The presentation demonstrates visual and verbal sets of affordances, as concrete teaching points, based in the kinds of meanings all texts embody simultaneously. This principled approach makes visible aspects of how characterisation and point of view can be constructed in image and words, how a descriptive scene or a mood is organised and made cohesive, how ideas and events can be represented and expressed. While literary texts will be the source for locating affordances, the principles apply equally to non-fiction texts.
Explore how Melita used Maree Coote’s critically acclaimed Azaria: A True History as a model to explore tricky themes, teach reading comprehension and rich writing techniques and consider ideas for the contextualised teaching of spelling and grammar.
This session will explore how you can bring your school vision to life by aligning it to your student cohort, improvement priorities, and importantly, your approach to literacy and literature. We will examine how this can build your staff and and student's sense of purpose, engagement and efficacy. This will be an interactive workshop, that will provide opportunities for you to consider your own school's vision for literacy and literature.
Explore how English curriculum outcomes can be embedded across a project-based learning or inquiry units to support students in becoming effective communicators of complex ideas and problems. This workshop will feature practical tips and strategies you can bring back into your classroom.
There is a gap that exists between the professional learning leaders work so hard to design and what actually happens within classrooms. How do school leaders work alongside teachers to ensure our actions lead to embedded and sustained high impact strategies and improved students’ learning in literacy? How can we be more intentional about designing professional learning trajectories that help teachers to achieve student-focused goals in their unique classroom settings? In this interactive workshop, Stephanie will share proven strategies to uplift students’ growth in literacy through strong teacher growth.
Learning to read and learning music are potentially joyful, reciprocal, and mutually beneficial processes. In this workshop, we focus on teaching reading in the early years using quality texts and how it can be enhanced through the inclusion of music to encourage, engage, and enrich young students in learning, setting them up for success on their beginning literacy journey.
Texts are central for empathetic engagement with cultural, historical and social issues, and exploring these issues with children is not only possible but necessary. This workshop will incorporate the teachings of key critical literacy theorists addressing the notion of young children being critically literate, and the use of selected children’s literature, to practical ways to help young children critically approach texts.
Our Island lies beneath a big blue sky, surrounded by the turquoise sea. Turtles glide through the clear salt water. And dugongs graze on the banks of seagrass… And so begins the text of a most stunning pictorial book about Mornington Island, the largest of the Wellesley group in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the result of a collaboration by the children of Gununa – the main township- and Alison Lester and Elizabeth Honey. Alison will share her experience of working with the children of Ganuna in creating Our Island.
Alice Pung is a bestselling author, winner of the 2011 WA Premier's Award and the Ethel Turner Prize at the 2016 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Her second novel, One Hundred Days, was shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Award and has been optioned for a film. She is the author of children's books When Granny Came to Stay (ill. Sally Soweol Han) and the Meet Marly books (ill. Lucia Masciullo). Alice was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for services to literature in 2022. Sher Rill Ng is a Melbourne-based author and illustrator. She designed and illustrated for software companies before releasing her debut picture book, Our Little Inventor. Her work also includes contributing Thumbelina's illustrations to the anthology Fairytales for Feisty Girls by Susannah McFarlane, illustrating Emma Allen's The Night of the Hiding Moon. Together, they created picture book Be Careful, Xiao Xin! which was shortlisted in the 2023 Australian Book Designers Awards - Best Designed Children's Book, and the 2023 ABIA awards, and is a 2023 CBCA Notable Book. Their latest collaboration is the middle-grade novel Millie Mak the Maker and they will present a writing and illustration workshop for all attendees.
The English curriculum covers a vast array of content and skills, and it can be easy to lose sight of its overarching purposes when our attention is constantly pulled towards meeting so many different outcomes. In this talk we explore some pedagogic principles for helping us to keep the thread of literature strong and coherent, through our dialogues with students, through our shared reading of text, and through our creative writing processes.
Tim Warwick, Founder of the Educational Equity Alliance, will chair a panel of authors, researchers and educational experts who will discuss the meaning, value and power of literature – both for children and as an educational tool.
The person who does not read has no advantage over those who cannot. (VanBuren,1996). While there is much discussion and debate in relation to the skills that contribute to becoming a proficient reader, what is often lacking in these discussions is the place of reading engagement and motivation. Educators run the risk of being able to tick off a list of reading skills that children have achieved, which demonstrates they can read, but they may not like reading. This session will explore the place of reading engagement and motivation and examine a range of teaching approaches to facilitate engagement and motivation.
Drinks - presentation of awards
When are story genres useful across the curriculum? This keynote investigates the role of story genres to engage and motivate, affirm, illuminate, and assess. It discusses the types of story genres that are likely to have a role in various learning areas, whose voices are heard, and the considerations teachers must give in using story genres intentionally, lest we turn rainbows into mud.
We know that when children’s funds of knowledge are valued and visible in the classroom their sense of belonging and their motivation to learn increase and children are more likely to succeed in their learning. By using diverse literature and resources through culturally responsive practices, we can give equitable space to the funds of knowledge of underrepresented students as well as building and extending background knowledge for all children. In this keynote address Helen Adam shares the voices, concerns, and wisdom of the many diverse scholars she interacted with during her recent Churchill Fellowship to the USA and UK investigating expertise in children's books as vehicles for disrupting prejudice and discrimination. Helen will share the findings from key studies in the UK and USA demonstrating the impact of sharing diverse literature. She will conclude with a call to action to conference participants to advocating for change in our libraries, in our book collections and in our approaches to building a love of reading.
During this workshop we will look at a framework developed by Maria using theories of how children learn (Nicholas, 2022) that was then used to analyse the teaching of reading in practice in three Victorian classrooms. The framework draws heavily on the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model of teaching but was modified to capture the responsive nature of a teacher's work both when planning to teach, and when teaching in the moment. Together, we'll use the tool and practice applying it, then consider how it can be used in a variety of settings.
Examples of evidence-based strategies including multiple exposures, worked examples, and feedback will be used throughout this workshop to highlight how teachers can effectively scaffold their students' skills and gradually release responsibility to promote independent writing proficiency. Anchored in a real-life success story of a Year 3/4 informative writing unit, offering a tangible example of effective implementation, participants will be inspired and invigorated, and desperate to hit the ground running in Term 4.
The Australian Curriculum: English Version 9 is organised by three interrelated strands - Language, Literature and Literacy - and learning in one strand is designed to support and extend learning in the others. This workshop will demonstrate how to lead teams of teachers to begin with curriculum and use rich children's literature to plan productively across the strands and modes (reading, writing and oral language) for supportive and engaging literacy learning experiences.
Literature is at the heart of the English Curriculum, but it can be a key learning tool across other key learning areas, such as maths. With a focus on mathematical concept development, this workshop will explore how teachers can use picture books to introduce students to a range of mathematical concepts in a way that is both engaging and accessible.
Literature, and narratives in particular, are valued for many reasons, not the least of which is their potential to shift individual perspectives and by extension, to change communities. In working with interpretive responses, we describe a sequence of explicit teaching, joint construction and guided practice as a means of apprenticing upper primary students into the literary ‘gaze’; that is, particular ways of acting, valuing and believing in and about the world.
Jasmine Seymour (Cooee Mittigar, Baby Business) will share her journey as an author, illustrator and teacher, her passion to promote the learning and revitalisation of Aboriginal language, and how her books incorporate Dharug Language, culture and community for contemporary times.
This keynote, built on Callow’s years of research and expertise, will draw together a number of themes around the changes in the shape of texts over the past 10 years. Together we will explore new texts, as well as old favourites, to consider how words and pictures – as well as sound and music – contribute to literature, and in our lives, today.
Reflection: Where do we go from here?
See you next year!