Silly us! Of course the grid doesn`t work : reading methodologies and policy texts on principals' work

This symposium presents work in progress from an ARC (discovery grant) funded investigation of principal supply, conducted by Jill Blackman, Judyth Sachs and Pat Thomas. Our research goals are to examine claims of an impending shortage of school principals in particular schools and localities, critically evaluate a range of possible reasons for this shortage, and ultimately, through woprk with principals' organisations, to develop some possibilities for policy action. In this symposium we focus on: (1) existing studies of principal supply (2) trends apparent from demographic and employment data, and (3) a text and interview based study of 'human resources' policy. We invite discussion on the implications of this first stage for the next - a national survey and interviews with teachers in pre-service training and in their first years of teaching.

Paying attention to texts : literacy, culture and curriculum

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 literature and close attention to the aesthetic and imaginative dimensions remain important, what kinds of texts should we value, and how should we attend to them? This article considers how such matters might be taken up with multimodal texts of different kinds.