Exploring Iceland through its Viking past

A co-authored article about the Icelandic sagas, and a journey undertaken to tell the saga stories in the places of their setting. "Kári Gislason and Richard Fidler travelled to Iceland with a two-part mission: to tell stories from the Viking sagas written early in the country's history in the places where they actually unfolded a thousand years ago, and to settle a longstanding family mystery."--Publisher website

Saga land: Richard Fidler and Kári Gíslason in Iceland

This is a four-part radio documentary produced for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National. Richard Fidler and Kári Gíslason travel to Iceland to tell the stories of the ancient Vikings, and to settle a longstanding family mystery.

Literature, tourism and the city: Writing and cultural change

Today national and regional tourism organizations look to sophisticated cultural tourism programs to enhance the visitor experience for tourists of their particular city. Yet research indicates that a challenge exists in designing and implementing programs that take full advantage of a city’s historical and emergent literary cultures. In this paper we offer critical insights into how literary cultural heritage can foster the development of an integrated and dynamic approach and provide the experience sought by local and global tourists. International exemplars are cited together with an analysis of the Australian city of Brisbane that describes itself as a ‘new world city.’ The findings of our research show that programs that harness diverse literary cultures, rather than adhering to a single literary representation, are better equipped to build identity and thus extend cultural tourism potential.

Learning to write: Analysing writing samples as part of considering how children become writers

This chapter draws on a large data set of children's work samples collected as part of a five-year school reform project in a community of high poverty. One component of the data set from this project is a corpus of more than 2000 writing samples collected from students across eight grade levels (Prep to year 7) annually, across four years of the project (2009-2013). This paper utilises a selection of these texts to consider insights available to teachers and schools through a simple process of collecting and assessing writing samples produced by children over time. The focus is on what samples of writing might enable us to know and understand about learning and teaching this important dimension of literacy in current classrooms.