Deep ecology and Australian suburbia: learning from Aboriginal Australia philosophy

Naess’ Deep Ecology [50] represents a fundamental philosophical and conceptual shift from the dominant Western thinking that can be traced back to the Greek and Roman Empires. Like all philosophy, Naess’ Deep Ecology was born of and is most relevant to a specific time and place being northern Europe. Although the fundamentals of the Deep Ecology philosophy were new to modern Western thinking, it is not new to traditional Indigenous cultures, including the world’s oldest culture, that of Aboriginal Australia. While the past four decades has seen an increasing recognition of Aboriginal philosophical approaches, there is very little understanding of what this philosophical approach is and means for the management of the Australian environment in which humans are a central part. Since European arrival, Australia has been one of the world’s most urban societies. Unlike northern Europe, urban Australia is low density and suburban, a legacy of British and North American influences. Nearly 90% of Australians live in detached houses surrounded by gardens. Managed by individual residents, this land use accounts for about 70% of the total area of cities like Melbourne. Deeply culturally embedded, the Australian desire for living in low-density suburbs is unlikely to change soon. Contemporary cities are widely recognized as causing severe environmental degradation and are not sustainable. Yet in Australia introduced philosophical and design approaches are still used to address the unsustainable impacts of urban forms introduced from another time and place. While impractical to remove the existing suburban form in Australian cities, there is a significant opportunity to retrofit them using Australian Aboriginal philosophical and land management understandings developed and tested over tens of thousands of years. This paper establishes a contemporary Australian Deep Ecology philosophical approach to sustainably living in the suburbs that recognizes and works with the legacies of Australian Aboriginal, English, North American and contemporary Australian influences.

Managerialist vis-à-vis learning and development goals for EAL teachers: A case study of an in-service professional development provider

Under current Western neoliberal philosophy, promotion of efficiency and resolution of issues are typically expected to result from effective management. The education sector, too, has responded well to these expectations. Amongst such expectations, engagement in professional development activities (PDAs) by teachers of English as an additional language (EAL) is widely encouraged, considered to be essential, and usually conducted with a view to facilitate effective and effortless administration. As such, institutional offerings of PDAs driven by managerialist agendas generally tend to be ad hoc attempts to facilitate administrative decisions rather than opportunities for teachers’ lifelong learning and development. Under such circumstances, providers of in-service PDAs are faced with a conflicting dilemma – that of facilitating an effortless flow of administration and, at the same time, promoting teacher learning and development. We foreground one case of such dilemma surrounding the offering of PDAs derived as interview data from an experienced provider of in-service PDAs for EAL teachers.

Uncertainty and reluctance in teaching taboo language: a case study of an experienced teacher of English as an additional language

Despite its ubiquitous employment by users of English to achieve authentic communicative goals, taboo language has received little attention in the education literature. Even less focus has been placed on such language in English language teaching - specifically, in teaching English as an Additional Language (EAL). Given the multiplicity of communicative struggles experienced by EAL learners surrounding the use of taboo language in authentic communication, meaningful consideration of this aspect can be seen as crucial in EAL instruction. Classroom learning could prepare learners for navigation and negotiation of taboo language use they will inevitably encounter in social interactions in target language communities of practice. However, EAL teachers' uncertainty or reluctance to introduce taboo language in classroom instruction is a key impediment in developing learners' sociocultural knowledge regarding such language use. We foreground one case of such uncertainty and reluctance surrounding the introduction of taboo language in EAL instruction derived as interview data from an experienced EAL teacher.

English as an additional language teachers, policy enactments and intercultural understanding

The literature on policy enactment identifies the pivotal role played by school leaders and classroom teachers in response to attempts to implement reforms of current practices. An intersection of teachers’ personal and professional domains, such as enactment of National Curriculum priorities that identify intercultural understanding as a cross-curricular general capability embedded across learning areas, invests individual teachers’ attitudes and beliefs with additional significance. As local policy actors at the centre of this policy mix, teachers of EAL are presented with opportunities to play important roles in reconceptualising understandings of difference that resist categorisation and promote intercultural understanding. We argue that teachers’ beliefs and their attitudes to classroom linguistic and cultural diversity may be shaped significantly by their interaction with broader policy discourses, and that these are reflected in enactments—as opposed to implementations—of intercultural understanding policy in classrooms.

Lost (and found) in translation: learning from German language educators

This essay introduces two presentations (or Vorträge) by Ulf Abraham and Thomas Zabka that were originally published in the German journal, Didaktik Deutsch. I reflect on the complexities of translation and intercultural communication, and ask how we might meaningfully compare the policy environment of one country with that of another. In this era of globalisation and standards-based reforms it is easy to suppose that those reforms are the same everywhere. The essays by Abraham and Zabka, however, provide insights into a policy environment where debates about the importance of language and literature are being played out differently vis-à-vis standards-based reforms than is the case in the Anglophone world. I ask what we can learn from these essays, and how the insights they provide might be applied in an Anglophone context.

English revisited: Sucker punch, moffatt, avatars and forensic evidence

Contemporary curriculum guidelines, such as those provided in the incoming Australian curriculum, call for English to attend to multimodal forms of text and literacy as well as more traditional forms. Students are expected to become capable and critical readers, users and creators of texts and forms of literacy that span everything from newspapers to classic texts to visual art to computer games. How to do so, and what this means for English, is often less clear. In this paper, we describe an English curriculum that was at once literary and multimodal, analytic and creative, and embraced a range of opportunities for students to study and create literary and aesthetic texts in many forms. We discuss the opportunities this presented to connect with the excitement of the contemporary world, and the ways in which longstanding principles and philosophies of good teaching and learning, and the central concerns of English curriculum across time, might be understood and reconstituted in the digital age.

Exploring implementation of dialogical inquiry into a Korean English classroom

An alternative approach to the teaching and learning of spoken English in Korea was investigated to maximise students’ collaborative meaning-making through dialogical inquiry. It was concluded that oral proficiency of foreign language could be facilitated by a learning environment that is oriented to student interaction and is responsive to social and cultural identities of students.

Literature review for senior syllabus revisions: English

The review began with a survey of recent issues of nine key English education journals widely recognised as influential within the field, and reflective of current practice and debates about future directions in Australia and internationally.Common areas of focus and concern were identified within this literature scan, including:• definitions of ‘English’ in current times, and their implications• the nature of literacy — which literacies?• English for students from multiple linguistic backgrounds, and how this might best beconceived and organised• text selection and related issues — canonicity, choice, genre, prescription, analytic frameworks etc.• digital texts and technologies• English as a vehicle for the discussion of themes, issues and social concerns• assessment — policies, practices and effects.This research formed a background against which subjects in the Queensland English subject group were examined.A close reading of the Queensland syllabuses under review, and the construction of an overview of the teaching, learning and assessment focuses followed the literature scan.English literature reviewSenior syllabus redevelopmentQueensland Curriculum & Assessment AuthorityPage 1 of 25February 2016The four syllabuses were mapped against each other for similarities and differences. Connections between these syllabuses and the Australian Curriculum, and Queensland F–10 curriculum were identified.Then, after gathering documentation, a close reading of similar syllabuses from Western Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, New York State, the International Baccalaureate (IB), and England’s A-levels was undertaken, and an overview of the teaching, learning and assessment focuses, the scope of learning, and how learning is organised and described within these syllabuses developed. In the course of this process, reflections on the relevance of these syllabuses from other jurisdictions for the Queensland syllabuses were noted.Finally, the Queensland English senior syllabuses were reviewed against six areas identified by the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority (QCAA) as 21st century skills reflecting current educational trends.

The role of play in teaching English as foreign language in early childhood settings in Indonesia.

This research highlights a teacher’s transformative thinking which has profound implications on how teachers conceptualise child play and learning, thus leads to a way of thinking about English as a foreign language (EFL) could better be supported through the use of play-based pedagogies, especially dramatic play in Indonesian context.

Prioritizing social and moral learning amid conservative curriculum trends: spaces of possibility

Conservative trends across western schooling contexts are signalling an explicit devaluing of social and moral learning within their official curriculum mandates. These mandates are increasingly privileging the ‘academic rigour’ of traditional subject disciplines. This paper draws on interview and observation data from a case study of a large and highly diverse English secondary school to explore this school’s prioritizing of social and moral learning. Such prioritizing is supported at this school by its ‘Academy’ status—which in the English context allows schools a measure of freedom over curriculum as part of broader government moves to increase school autonomy. The paper’s focus is on how these conservative trends are understood and disrupted to support a critical view of existing curriculum and a desire to modify and re-shape it to support more relevant and connected learning for students. The paper describes particular examples of practice at the school in the areas of Citizenship and Religious Education to illustrate this approach. Engaging with social and moral learning along these lines is argued as productive in working within and against the constraints of current conservative curriculum priorities.