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.

Take four pioneering poly women : a review of three classical texts on polyamory

This article reviews three classics of polyamory, Anapol's Love Without Limits: The Quest for Sustainable Intimate Relationships; Easton and Liszt's The Ethical Slut; and Nearing's Loving More: The Polyfidelity Primer. The reviewer defines the authors as pioneering poly women who have mapped the territory for authentic alternatives to compulsory monogamy in realistic yet visionary ways.

Subversion or socialization? Humor and carnival in Morris Gleitzman's texts

Like their counterparts elsewhere, Australian children favour humorous novels; comedic writers consistently dominate the preteen and early teen fiction market in Australia. Regardless of its popularity, however, in comparison to more serious writing, humorous literature has received little critical attention. Of the studies aimed at this area, most have tended to concentrate on the various stages of development in childrens preferences for humor, its strategies, forms and appeal, with very few examining the ideological assumptions informing particular texts. Yet, this article argues, humorous books are no less concerned with culture, value and meaning than any other kind of fiction for children. As Morris Gleitzmans texts illustrate, by highlighting the cultural processes involved in the construction of language and meaning, inviting readers to play with ideas about language, social roles and behaviors, and creating characters who act in ways which are oppositional to usual socializing expectations, humorous literature, especially in carnivalized forms, has the potential to problematize unquestioning acceptance of various ideological para-digms, values, social practices and rules.

(Im)plausibilities: a rhizo-textual analysis of policy texts and teachers' work

In this paper I argue for the use of Deleuzian theories in educational contexts. In particular, I am interested in the use of the concept of rhizomes, and the analysis of texts as rhizomes, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's work in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). I discuss the possibilities for using rhizomatics in educational contexts through an exploration of the construction of an 'apparatus of social critique' (Buchanan, 2000). I then describe a rhizomatic understanding of the relationships between teachers and policy texts, which can disrupt commonsense understandings of these relations. I provide examples from my own research (Honan, 2001) of a rhizo-textual analysis of policy texts. This rhizo-textual analysis involved an exploration of the construction of the subject position, teacher, within one policy text, as well as a mapping of two teachers' readings of this text. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for using Deleuzian theory in educational contexts, implications for both policy developers and educational researchers.

Education, state and agency in dystopian children's texts

The manifestation of dystopian and utopian discourses in children's texts, are inflected by questions of agency, often played out through narratives in which protagonists forge identities as members of communities and citizens of nations. Education shapes not merely what children know but how they regard themselves and the possibilities open to them.

Locating non-western enlightenment texts for a global curriculum

The context of this paper is a university-based teacher education course in Melbourne, Australia. The assumption underpinning the course is that it is crucial for trainee teachers to examine the lenses they typically use in terms of common-sense understandings of children and adolescents. We point to the 18th century Western enlightenment period as the source of this thinking. I argue that it is important to be aware of other enlightenments that have shaped the traditions of students in our multicultural mix. In this paper, I explore the writings of the Mahabharata and other early Indian texts to see how they have also influenced ways of thinking about childhood and adolescence. Data for this paper have been drawn from course materials, student responses, translations of early Indian texts and popular stories depicting childhood and adolescence.

Real english and english lite : what texts should we teach in the english classroom? (1) or English lite and thick lit : what is the debate about?

Why is it that Prime Minister John Howard wants to micro-manage English curricula? Why does how teachers teach English and Literature regularly make it to the front and editorial pages of the national dailies? The author attempts to critique that phenomenon, to explain her state of mind - that of being both alert and alarmed. The latest round of the debate began with Tony Thompson's article, 'English Lite is a tragedy for students', in 'The Age' on 12 September 2005. He was concerned that VCE English might be reduced to a single print text and he was alarmed about the watering-down of curriculum driven by 'postmodern notions'. The author is at odds with many of Thompson's views and discusses her stance on various aspects of his propositions. Issues examined include Thompson's argument that no multimodal text yields as much significance as a piece of genuine literature; that students are not being 'stretched' far enough; the false dichotomy between aesthetic/formalist manoeuvres on the one hand and postmodern ones on the other; how texts make meaning to students as consumers and the rationale for the use of pop culture texts to connect with students.

Picturing Australian history: visual texts in nonfiction for children

Time is one of the most prominent themes in the relatively young genre of children's literature, for the young, like adults, want to know about the past. The historical novel of the West grew out of Romanticism, with its exploration of the inner world of feeling, and it grew to full vigor in the era of imperialism and the exploration of the physical world. From the end of the 18th century, children's books flourished, partly in response to these cultural and political influences. After Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, literary works began to grapple with skepticism about the nature of time itself. This book explores how children's writers have presented the theme and concept of time past. While the book looks primarily at literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, it considers a broad range of historical material treated in works from that period. Included are discussions of such topics as Joan of Arc in children's literature, the legacy of Robinson Crusoe, colonial and postcolonial children's literature, the Holocaust, and the supernatural. International in scope, the volume examines history and collective memory in Portuguese children's fiction, Australian history in picture books, Norwegian children's literature, and literary treatments of the great Irish famine. So too, the expert contributors are from diverse countries and backgrounds.

A spectroscopy of texts for effective clustering

For many clustering algorithms, such as k-means, EM, and CLOPE, there is usually a requirement to set some parameters. Often, these parameters directly or indirectly control the number of clusters to return. In the presence of different data characteristics and analysis contexts, it is often difficult for the user to estimate the number of clusters in the data set. This is especially true in text collections such as Web documents, images or biological data. The fundamental question this paper addresses is: ldquoHow can we effectively estimate the natural number of clusters in a given text collection?rdquo. We propose to use spectral analysis, which analyzes the eigenvalues (not eigenvectors) of the collection, as the solution to the above. We first present the relationship between a text collection and its underlying spectra. We then show how the answer to this question enhances the clustering process. Finally, we conclude with empirical results and related work.