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This article highlights how mentors in spoken word poetry workshops drew on culturally sustaining pedagogy, modeled their own creativity and vulnerability through their poetry, and amplified the voices of youth poets by encouraging them to explore their identities and grapple with inequities in their own lives. Situated in western Sydney, one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse communities within Australia, the article focuses on the Real Talk program, a 6-week school-based spoken word poetry workshop organized by the Bankstown Poetry Slam, the largest slam in the southern hemisphere. It examines the critical role that mentor poets play in supporting young people's storytelling through spoken word poetry.

Current social and political arrangements of higher education are inequitable for students from asylum-seeking backgrounds. In many countries, their access to university is limited and if they are accepted, their status as forced migrants puts them at multiple disadvantages. This inequity is in contrast with the universal aim of higher education institutions to serve all people and their societies. Utilising a voice centred relational method (VCRM) and the theoretical lens of Aaron Antonovsky's salutogenesis, this article is a poetic presentation of the experiences of asylum-seeking students in Australian universities. We show that higher education can provide asylum-seeking students with the means for safety (making life manageable), belonging (making life comprehensible), and success (making life meaningful). Thus, we argue that higher education institutions have the potential to help facilitate students' sense of coherence, which in salutogenetic terms refers to their ability to comprehend their own situation, and the capacity to use the resources available. However, asylum-seeking status poses barriers in achieving this, and this inequity should be addressed.

Purpose: Poetic inquiry is an approach that promotes alternate perspectives about what research means and speaks to more diverse audiences than traditional forms of research. Across academia, there is increasing attention to decolonising research. This reflects a shift towards research methods that recognise, acknowledge and appreciate diverse ways of knowing, being and doing. The purpose of this paper is to explore the different ways in which poetic inquiry communicates parallax to further decolonise knowledge production and dissemination and centre First Nations' ways of knowing, being and doing. Design/methodology/approach: This manuscript presents two First Nations' perspectives on a methodological approach that is decolonial and aligns with Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing. In trying to frame this diversity through Indigenous standpoint theory (Foley, 2003), the authors present two First Nation's women's autoethnographic perspectives through standpoint and poetics on the role of poetic inquiry and parallax in public pedagogy and decolonising research (Fredericks et al., 2019; Moreton-Robinson, 2000). Findings: The key to understanding poetic inquiry is parallax, the shift in an object, perspective or thinking that comes with a change in the observer's position or perspective. Challenging dominant research paradigms is essential for the continued evolution of research methodologies and to challenge the legacy that researchers have left in colonised countries. The poetic is often invisible/unrecognised in the broader Indigenist research agenda; however, it is a powerful tool in decolonial research in the way it disrupts core assumptions about and within research and can effectively engage with those paradoxes that decolonising research tends to uncover. Practical implications: Poetic inquiry is not readily accepted in academia; however, it is a medium that is well suited to communicating diverse ways of knowing and has a history of being embraced by First Nations peoples in Australia. Embracing poetic inquiry in qualitative research offers a unique approach to decolonising knowledge and making space for Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing. Social implications: Poetic inquiry offers a unique approach to centring First Nations voices, perspectives and experiences to reduce hegemonic assumptions in qualitative research. Originality/value: Writing about poetic inquiry and decolonisation from a First Nations' perspective using poetry is a novel and nuanced approach to discussions around First Nations ways of knowing, being and doing.

Purpose: School climate strikes are opening spaces of appearance, becoming differently active forms of public pedagogy where new and previously unthought collective climate action is possible. This inquiry contributes to understanding school climate strikes as important forms of climate justice activism by exploring how they work as public pedagogy. Design/methodology/approach: The inquiry process involved poetic inquiry to produce an affective poetic witness statement to an event of school climate strikes, and then a performative enactment of diffractive reading using the poem created. The diffractive reading is used to conceptualise school climate strikes as public pedagogy and move towards an understanding of how school climate strikes work as public pedagogy. Diffused throughout is the question of where the more-than-human fits in public pedagogy and youth climate justice activism. Findings: School climate strikes are dynamic and differently acting (diffracting) public pedagogies that work by open spaces of appearance that enable capacities for collective action in heterogeneous political spaces. Consideration of entanglements and intra-actions between learner, place, knowledge and climate change are productive in understanding how phenomena work as public pedagogy. Originality/value: This inquiry extends on important considerations in both climate change education and public pedagogy scholarship. It diffuses consideration of the more-than-human throughout the inquiry and enacts a move beyond the humanist limits of existing public pedagogy scholarship by introducing climate intra-action, heterogeneous political spaces and non-conforming learning to an understanding of activist public pedagogies and the educative agent.

This article considers how new materialist, Indigenous and posthuman feminist theories might be applied to drama pedagogy and research to empower young people to play "within" the trouble of colonial legacies and heightened climate crises. It references an Australian school project that used Heathcote's Rolling Role system of teaching (1993) as an imaginative and transdisciplinary climate activist pedagogy, framing young people inside the entangled 'trouble' of our times, so they can 'make oddkin' with critters needing care, protection, and sanctuary. Using a critical autoethnographic approach, this article considers how drama can work on/within the ethical imagination in tentacular ways.

This paper reports on a collaboration between advocacy organisation, "Sweltering Cities," artists and researchers who developed a multi-site research project that provided South West Sydney residents an opportunity to engage in drama and poetry workshops that gave voice to their lived experience of rising surface temperatures, as well as their desire for environmental protection and climate action. The research featured in this paper contributes to previous research that finds aesthetic modes of engagement to be powerful with regard to ecological awareness, capable of being a positive motivator of small shifts in thinking which are a precursor to climate action.

Creativity has been identified as an increasingly important graduate attribute for employment in the 21st century. As sites of significant development of disciplinary specialization, universities seem to be the natural place for creativity to be fostered. However, there remain contestations and ambiguities in the ways creativity is theorized, and this translates to difficulties in operationalization, particularly in the higher education context, which attracts significantly less research than the school setting. Here, we report on interviews with physicists, historians, and poets, as both educators and producers of knowledge that progresses their disciplines, to provide elaborations on the nature of creativity. We draw on sociological theory to elucidate the characteristics of creativity as expressed by experts in particular disciplinary fields. We find that whilst perceptions appear common across the disciplines, on further analysis, they tend instead to encapsulate discrete attributes. Further, there are some qualities of creativity that are uniquely emphasized by participants in specific disciplinary fields. We argue that theorizing both the discipline and the nature of creativity together is important in order to understand how creativity might more fruitfully be discussed and fostered in higher education.

While attempts to decolonise the school curriculum have been ongoing since the 1970s, the recent Black Lives Matter protests around the world have drawn urgent attention to the vast inequities faced by Black and First Nations peoples and people of colour. Decolonising education and other public institutions has become a front-line public concern around the world. In this article, we argue that poetry offers generative possibilities for the decolonisation of Australian high school (and university) curricula. Inspired by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander approaches to knowledge creation as "intergenerational," "iterative" and "intercultural," and by postcolonial and decolonial theories, we explore ways in which poetry events can begin decolonising and diversifying the school curriculum. We suggest that poetry creates spaces for deep listening with the heart ("dadirri") that can promote truth-telling about colonial histories and the strengths, achievements and contributions of First Nations Australians. These decolonising efforts underpin the "Wandiny" (Gathering Together) -- Listen With the Heart: Uniting Nations Through Poetry research that we discuss in this article. In these ways, we argue that decolonised curricula create the conditions for cognitive justice in schooling that is an important precursor to other forms of social justice, such as equality, diversity and inclusion.

Drawn from an ethnographic study of spoken word poetry in Australia, this article offers case studies of two youth poets and follows their journeys with spoken word over three years as they performed in community-based slams, engaged with the New South Wales English Extension 2 curriculum, and served as mentor poets in culturally and linguistically diverse schools. Situated in western Sydney, this article considers how spoken word poetry can be integrated into the secondary English curriculum in order to enhance critical literacy and promote social justice pedagogy. As the first study that explores the intersection of spoken word poetry with high-stakes assessment, it offers insight into how social justice shapes young people's creative practices that interrogate and celebrate their intersectional identities.

The "Wandiny" creative gathering of Indigenous and non-Indigenous poets, artists, Elders, and participants across Australia actively sought to foreground First Nations voices, stories, poetry, art, and ontology. This paper presents the auto-ethnographic reflections from the event organisers, demonstrating that participation in a gathering that honours Eldership and Country is a profoundly personal and spiritual experience. Following a call-and-response format, the event promoted deep listening and responsive writing contributed to a cultural sense of being and understanding.

In this article, the authors experiment with data-ing as a methodology, and wonder how three researchers?--?two in Oslo (Norway) and one in Melbourne (Australia)?--?can come closer to-with the research material by following and buggy-walking a young wayfarer in urban spaces and places. The ideas of not knowing and experimenting, making-with urban landscapes, transportation, materials, sounds, surfaces, bodily movements, minor gestures, and haptic engagement, transform their thinking about data-ing as research-creation while traveling and walking the city with a buggy and a young wayfarer's adventure. Their experimental method uses smartphones and digital technology, and the methodological contours in this article are attuned to and engage in and with multiple surfaces of an urban city landscape. Lines and threads transform into traces and create surfaces, and lines transforming into threads dissolve surfaces. The authors create city maps and investigate what digital tools, social media, and a chat service can generate and unfold when wayfaring locally and talking and writing across continents. Their project follows two layers?--?doing data-ing as research-creation and wayfaring. To do data-ing as collective open-ended productions among researchers invites one to ask what happened and what might occur temporally in cities as minor gestures here and there. The bodily movement offered by an urban wayfarer invites the authors to speculate with what the phenomenon of an investigator, an artist, a maker, a runner, or an activist can unfold in the moments to come.

This study investigates the impact of cultural and politico-religious dominance on the practice of critical reading (CR) of texts by a group of Iranian postgraduate students in Australia. Four postgraduate students were interviewed individually four times (each time for reading one text) for critical understanding of two pairs of Persian texts, each with opposing viewpoints, on current socio-political and nationalistic debates of Iran. They were then involved in a focus group discussion for further critique of each other's viewpoints. Findings indicate two major Persian constructs that influence CR: "hefz-e zaaher" 'keeping up appearances' and "ta'sob/gheyrat," approximating to 'one's honor combined with prejudice and bigotry'. Findings also reveal that participants' CR is contributed by heavy emotional attachment to nationalistic views engendered by Persian poetry. Chafe (1982), too, found that emotional attachment in appraising text was true with American English speakers. Finally, the focus group discussion had a slight impact on encouraging CR. Overall, it seems that participants' repositioned journeys in Australia have influenced their perspective.

This article simultaneously explores the dynamic nature of teacher educator identity and highlights the methodological potential of poetic inquiry in self-study. Using tensions as a conceptual framework to explore identity as a process of becoming, I draw from a series of found poems to examine my identity as a mid-career teacher educator working in a leadership position at an Australian university. In this article, I assert that poetic inquiry is a vehicle for representing the embodied, emotive aspects of ongoing identity development. I contend that poetic inquiry is a doorway to sharing experiences and understandings of identity in authentic, lived ways that speak back to metanarratives of academic work. Poetic self-study enables us to map the otherwise hidden tensions mediating our identity development and generate collective knowledge of what it can mean to "be" a teacher educator in higher education contexts.

Compared with other age groups, the literacy practices and creative outputs of older adults (50+ years) have been seldom researched. Generally, research about older adults has tended to focus on decline and agential passivity, rather than potentiality. In this article, we report on a small ethnographic study of older Australians who were part of a University of the Third Age (U3A) poetry group in Melbourne, Australia. We examine the literacy practices of the group in writing poetry, especially focusing on the triggers for poetry ideas and the beginning processes of poetry writing. The reported research centres on a session of the group conducted online in 2020. Employing ideas from David Hume, particularly his notion of the empirical basis for the development of concepts, as well as the idea of dialogism from Mikhail Bakhtin, the transcript of the focus group was analysed using themes that the participants discussed. Results suggest that the older adults in the study employed sensory images together with imagination, life memories and feeling states to create and form highly individual poetry of significance to their lives in the context of the positive rapport and dialogic engagement that developed within the poetry group.

Spoken word poetry encourages youth to engage in identity construction, resist oppression and construct counternarratives. Through participating in community-based slams, school workshops and online events, young people can take part in visible activism through exploring their own identity, power and agency and seeing themselves as change agents. In this article, we share longitudinal case studies of two youth poets based in Sydney, Australia. As young women of colour coming of age in troubled times, we consider how poetry offers them a way to engage in story telling and to create counternarratives. We also explore how spoken word allows them to explore their cultural identities, offer testimony about their lived experiences and participate in activism. We situate our research within the COVID-19 pandemic and critically reflect on how the shift online has offered new opportunities whilst also presenting unexpected challenges for youth poets.

A significant body of research highlights the rich linguistic and cultural experiences offered by spoken word poetry when integrated into English pedagogy, particularly through its fusion of written and performative modes and its opportunities for cultivating empathy and creativity. However, few studies have examined secondary English teachers' experiences in balancing the multimodal literacies inherent in spoken word poetry with the demands of high-stakes examinations. This study addresses this gap by exploring the beliefs and practices of Australian English teachers around the inclusion of spoken word poetry in the text prescriptions for the New South Wales Higher School Certificate (HSC) examination. It offers insights into the scope for broadening existing understandings of literacy in the context of high-stakes assessment in secondary schools. Despite a general enthusiasm for spoken word poetry, it can be challenging for teachers and students to meaningfully engage with the textual form within the constraints of written examinations and assessment outcomes.

The supervision and mentoring of pre-service teachers during professional experience is complex work that requires a range of skills and capacities. Professional development for this work has traditionally been limited, however, and mentor teachers report experiencing tensions in their work stemming from their roles as both supporter and assessor of pre-service teachers. Despite the central role that mentors play in professional experience, their voices are underrepresented in the literature. In this paper, I draw on interview data to examine teachers' experiences as mentors and the tensions they experience. I use poetic representation to illuminate the tensions and emotions of mentoring and present seven poems that provide insight into these tensions. I argue that poetic representation of interview data provides an opportunity to connect with the experience of being a mentor and offer suggestions for teacher educators to work collaboratively with mentor teachers to explore the dimensions of their role.

The actualization of a neoliberal rationality has been widely explored in global education policy and Australian schools. This paper draws on engagements with neoliberalism as rationality made 'real' through government practices, specifically those that reify the teaching profession into one of risk-management and problem-solving at the expense of deliberation about purposes. In this paper, redacted policy poetry and participant-voiced poetry are employed in parallel to explore the COVID-19 crisis as it emerged in the State of Victoria, Australia with a specific focus on the reconfiguration of risk-management discourses through blanket policy directive. This paper identifies and explores three themes highlighted by this reconfiguration of risk discourse and shifts in modes of governance during this time that are magnified by a teacher's affective and practical responses to the situation. They are: (1) collective teacher response to overt policy decisions that compel the teacher to embrace risk; (2) contradictions of expectation for schools to continue as usual; and (3) an explicit shift away from instrumental evidence-based pedagogies toward new purposes, pedagogies, and community engagement with little guidance.

Australian students come from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds with each context providing unique challenges. Tensions however exist between the intentions to address diversity and the competing influence of a high-stakes context that prioritizes monolingual classroom practices and diminishes teachers' use of engaging pedagogy. Viewed through the lens of socio-spatial theory, these tensions highlight how the ideal of education for diversity is re-shaped by the everyday practices in schools and systems. This can result in monolingual 'firstspace' practices that do little to develop the knowledge of language and culture that is central to students' engagement with learning. This article reports ethnographic research in which secondary subject English teachers challenged routinized monolingual practices and re-imagined their classroom practices. The use of translanguaging and the reading and writing of poetry -- translanguaging poetry pedagogy -- created 'space' to support a dynamic process in which students could use all their linguistic resources to produce identity texts. The use of translanguaging and identity texts disrupts a transmission pedagogy that positions the student as a blank slate. Teachers reported how translanguaging poetry pedagogy moved from a 'thirdspace' practice to a 'what we do' or 'firstspace' practice as they came to see that using students' full language repertoire is a way to return the power of language to their students. The resultant translanguaging space and the symbolic propensity of poetry helped students to develop powerful personal representations and reinforces the need for pedagogies that acknowledge students' diverse backgrounds, and honor the languages and identity of all students.

University disciplines are grappling with how best to incorporate Indigenous content and frameworks for practice into their teaching to better prepare graduates to work with Indigenous communities. Yet the pedagogical approaches that can best engage students in Indigenous Studies as a field of critical study are still being debated. This article has two aims. The first is to consider how an uncomfortable reflexivity may provide an alternative theoretical and methodological approach to preparing university students for future work. This reflexive approach is an alternative to frameworks such as transformative learning. The second aim is to consider Nakata's "cultural interface" as a teaching tool that may open discussion around how professionals embody the disciplinary histories that govern their work. To do so, I present the writing of a pre-service teacher undertaking a professional experience placement and her engagement with the cultural interface to make sense of her experiences within the classroom. The cultural interface is used to analyse both the engagements between teachers and students, as well as presented as an analytical framework that can be taught to students to prepare them to engage in complex and contested Indigenous spaces.

My thoughts on the question of 'Textuality as the Centre of English' were presented at a Roundtable session at the 2020 International Federation for the Teaching of English (IFTE) Conference. Through critical discourse analysis of media and curriculum texts, I highlight how the 'being' of the English subjects is always and already textual in nature. From here, I make a necessary gesture to attendant questions of syllabus requirements and specifications. With a review of the NSW curriculum underway, I suggest that the question of the place of poetry brings onto-ethical considerations to dialogue about HSC English text requirements. Understanding HSC English as being in 'an immunocompromised state' (in the Derridean sense), I propose that poetry is the 'first idea' in considerations of English as textuality. I conclude with a wish that poetry be given restored emphasis in the NSW curriculum.

The COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, and political and social movements have required each of us to pause. Collectively they signal a unique moment in our history, and we argue that they provide us with an opportunity to consider what matters most as we move forward. Using poetic representation and Brené Brown's guideposts for wholehearted living as a framework, we offer a series of provocation for readers to consider the role of wholeheartedness and wellbeing in education.

This paper uses a Gwen Harwood poem to open up questions of "knowing" around the teaching of Literature. Following our own brief reading of the poem, we particularly discuss ways in which questions of knowing/knowledge have been considered in Literature teaching historically, such as: - the binary of "knowledge" and "experience" - the role of the cognitive in teaching/studying Literature - forms of knowing that include the aesthetic and affect - how knowledge might be "made" in the Literature classroom: the role of pedagogy and the question of "producing culture" The article concludes with a discussion of how such issues have arisen in a set of interviews with a small number of teachers in Australia and England. Their views on the teaching of Literature help us reflect on the knowledge issues opened up earlier in the article.

What do we see when we observe an excellent English lesson? What's going on in the room? Perhaps what stands out is a collaborative making of meanings inspired by stimulating texts. Perhaps what's most important is an ever-deepening knowledge about, and facility with, the many ways that language works. Maybe what we're seeing is a carefully sequenced preparation for future hurdles to be negotiated. Or a blend of all three. And perhaps, as this story suggests, there is more. Perhaps every English lesson is affected in all kinds of subtle and sometimes invisible ways by unconscious fears and desires and by half-remembered histories, the territory towards which a story -- more easily than a piece of non-fiction -- can gesture.

This paper describes and analyses, through the use of case studies, two experiences of transformative learning in an undergraduate arts education unit. Pre-service teachers designed and engaged with arts-based curriculum activities, created their own artwork, participated in a modified production of The Tempest and kept a reflective journal. These activities constituted the data which was analysed using creative frameworks such as case writing, script writing, narrative analysis and found poetry as ways of developing richer understanding of pre-service teachers' self-perceptions and self-awareness as teachers and as potential artists. The stories explored here uncover two different ways of encountering the challenges of learning--resistance and struggle--and highlight the significance of the educator's response to individual student needs, and the value of reflective skills in shifting pre-service teachers' cultural, political and institutional understandings.

A change-of-life issue for older people is finding ways to engage meaningfully and be creative. Sustaining a sense of self-efficacy in one's abilities to be productive is vital for wellbeing. Our research explored the perceived self-efficacy developed in an Australian University of the Third Age poetry class. We gathered data from one class session through observation, a focus group and paired interviews. Transcribed data identified participants' voices, and common themes were noted. We use Bandura's idea of perceived self-efficacy, through examining mastery experiences, modelling, social persuasion and a positive learning climate to understand the data. These sources of self-efficacy were pivotal for participants' positive self-efficacy. We offer this example of how older people can achieve mastery in a new field of creative endeavour at a time in their life-course often positioned as diminishing. In doing so, we challenge conventional understandings of ageing.

Young people around the world are engaging in innovative literacy practices through their creation of, and engagement with, spoken word poetry. From community-based slams to school-based workshops to online videos, this genre has become increasingly popular with marginalized youth who have an opportunity to have their often-silenced voices heard and receive instantaneous feedback on their creative work. Situated in Sydney, Australia, the authors used a multicase embedded research approach to investigate how spoken word poetry workshops employ culturally sustaining pedagogy, create a third space for literacy development, and encourage diverse students to develop and strengthen their critical literacy skills. The authors highlight a rich array of diverse voices, explore the instrumental role of mentor poets, and provide teachers with practical approaches to incorporating culturally sustaining pedagogy while enhancing students' critical literacy.

This article explores how Australian English teachers can thoughtfully and critically address the cross-curriculum priority 'Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia' in secondary classrooms. It builds on our prior research, which highlighted factors that shape teacher attitudes towards addressing this cross-curriculum priority, the perceived evidence of political and economic motivations behind the inclusion of the priority, and the ways English teachers define and conceptualise Asia. We offer case studies of two New South Wales English teachers as they strive to reconcile curriculum requirements with classroom practices and to address the cross-curriculum priority in a way that promotes deep learning and critical engagement for students. This article draws on culturally sustaining pedagogy, highlights the importance of text selection and offers recommendations for high-quality and award-winning films, plays, memoirs, poems and novels that can be readily integrated into the secondary English curriculum.

The impetus to decolonise high schools and universities has been gaining momentum in Southern locations such as South Africa and Australia. In this article, we use a polyvocal approach, juxtaposing different creative and scholarly voices, to argue that poetry offers a range of generative possibilities for the decolonisation of high school and university curricula. Australian First Nations' poetry has been at the forefront of the Indigenous political protest movement for land rights, recognition, justice and Treaty since the British settlement/invasion. Poetry has provided Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with a powerful vehicle for speaking back to colonial power. In this article, a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers argue that poetry can be a powerful vehicle for Indigenous voices and Knowledges. We suggest that poetry can create spaces for deep listening ("dadirri"), and that listening with the heart can promote truth-telling and build connections between First Nations and white settler communities. These decolonising efforts underpin the "Wandiny (gathering together)--Listen with the Heart: Uniting Nations through Poetry" research that we discuss in this article. We model our call-and-response methodology by including the poetry of our co-author and Aboriginal Elder of the Kungarakan people in the Northern Territory, Aunty Sue Stanton, with poetic responses by some of her co-authors.

This essay begins with vignettes showcasing the pedagogy of three teachers of literature in contrastive settings (one in Brazil, two in Australia). These act as prompts for a transnational dialogue between us that unfolds in our writing of this essay. The aim is not to assess or make judgements about the quality of the teaching presented but to identify and explore the assumptions we share about the value of literature teaching across the languages and national contexts that divide us. We argue the primacy of language as a social phenomenon, characterising the exchanges around literary texts in each classroom as forms of "literary sociability".

Despite the growing numbers of migrant students enrolling in Australian secondary schools, and an official acknowledgment of their complex support and learning needs, there has been little policy focus on the pedagogical changes that need to be made by teachers to accommodate these needs. There is also little understanding of the depth and diversity of linguistic resources and cultural funds of knowledge that migrant students bring to Australian classrooms, and the ways in which these might enrich classroom learning experiences for all students. This paper draws upon data from a qualitative, ethnographically oriented case study research project in which teachers and researchers collaborated to enact bottom up language policy that involved the use of translanguaging (Garcia, 2009) to enhance communication and classroom learning amongst multilingual students from migrant backgrounds. The aim was to draw upon students' observable languaging practices from their full repertoire of languages, and to tap into their existing cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge to support their academic language development and foster their linguistic and personal identities in the classroom.

This essay comprises multiple sets of dialogues between us as colleagues and friends as we revisit the question of the status of English as a global language. Through the metaphor 'multiple classrooms of life', we share reflections and narratives arising out of our experiences with English that are embedded in our professional work, scholarship, pedagogy and creative interests. Our discussion encompasses a range of artefacts, including excerpts from our diaries, poems, vignettes, visuals, letters, songs and anecdotes. This amalgam of materials represents our personal engagement with English, as distinct from treating the spread of English simply as a metanarrative played out at a remove from personal experience. We reconstruct 'sparkle moments' arising from personal encounters and social interactions that have caused us to reflect on the role of English in our lives. We thus focus on ideology as personally felt and lived from within and through inter-personal interactions.

German Romantic Art Songs or German "Lieder" constitute a consistent part of every aspiring classical singer's repertoire around the world. This study investigates a contemporary Australian audiences' appreciation of the genre; it asks further what role the various Romantic characteristics play in German "Lieder" genre, gauges respondents' awareness of stylistic characteristics of "Lieder" and explores the importance of the "German-ness" of "Lieder". A survey conducted at the prestigious annual competition National Liederfest elicited surprisingly passionate responses which suggest new ways of teaching "Lieder" in Australia.

This paper draws on findings of comparative international research on students' poetic writing about the natural environment in the context of the classroom and a naturalistic setting. The study involved 97, nine- to 10-year-olds in four classes: two classes were in an English primary school with their counterparts in a Western Australian primary school. One class in each school had vicarious contact with nature as a stimulus for writing, using a previously taught technique for writing poetry; the other class in each school used the same technique but had direct contact with nature. The study has implications for students' literacy development, creativity and agency and suggests that students' poetic writing is enhanced through direct contact with nature. Teachers in both England and Australia, countries where 'high stakes' testing dominates the literacy curriculum, may find that standards of writing improve when students are given direct contact with natural spaces and are scaffolded to elicit their poetic voice.

The tradition of teachers engaging in narrative-based inquiry is now well established, as is its value for creating situated knowledge about teaching. This reflexive autobiographical article weaves together narrative accounts around a senior literature classroom environment. The article features two voices: a teacher (Natalie Bellis) and a Year 12 literature student (Jessica Garcia). Through this process of narrative inquiry, the teacher reflects on her experiences of exploring literary texts with senior students within a landscape of high-stakes assessment. In this way, the teacher engages with Dorothy Smith's notion of "writing the social," by using narrative to illuminate and critically inquire into the lived experience of teaching and learning. The motif, or thread, that binds these three narrative accounts is the act of letter-writing, which serves as a metaphor for the foregrounding of the personal within a context that is shaped by external forces that can result in conformity and generality. This tension between the "local actualities" of experiences and the institutional structures that govern them is theorised using de Certeau's metaphor of the city map.

This paper examines the way in which narratives, including stories and poetry, have been used in school texts relating to moral instruction. The paper will draw on texts used in Queensland classrooms in the early part of the twentieth century to demonstrate the ways in which description of sights and the experiences of the senses, and of exaggerated consequences, are used in narratives and poems with the intention of imparting moral lessons. The texts analysed include both those used in "Civics and Morals" lessons and the Queensland School Readers, a long-running series of classroom readers designed to suit the unique needs of the state's children.

The following essay explores aspects of my professional identity as a teacher of English, presenting a focus on "the reflexive project of the self" (Goodson, 1998). I argue for the way rich professional learning can occur by keying into a discourse that values penetrating reflection on classroom practice, teacher identity, self and professional knowledge, particularly in the wake of current professional challenges about professional learning. This paper aims to foreground a space that was, for a time, difficult and invested with uncertainty. Yet, the opportunity to experience a textually rich moment of professional growth arose from dilemmas and "chaos" (Parr, 2004, p. 41) as I grappled with a socio-cultural context different from what I had previously known. The other key focus of the following essay concerns the way my new context, teaching in an all-girls, Jewish independent school in Melbourne, prompted me to reconsider the nature of schools as interpretive communities. As a teacher of literature my aim is to open up texts to a diverse range of readings, enabling my students to explore the complexities of language and meaning. This approach to the teaching of reading is not one promoted by statewide examinations which tend to reduce texts to the one (examinable) meaning. Nor is the idea of promoting a multiplicity of interpretations necessarily associated with religious orthodoxy. I show how I was able to use the cultural and religious understandings of my students to open up alternative readings of literary texts in a way that is congruent with post-structuralist understandings of language and meaning.

Measurement of academic work has become more significant than the intellectual, pedagogical, cultural, political and social practices in which academics and students engage. This shifting emphasis creates paradoxes for academics. They experience a growing sense of disconnection between their desires to develop students into engaged, disciplined and critical citizens and the activities that appear to count in the enterprise university. As measurement discourses preclude the possibilities of human emotion and hinder intellectual labour, we embarked on an arts-informed research project that established new creative spaces for our colleagues to illustrate the pleasures and paradoxes of their academic work. In the research project, we developed critical pedagogies through art and poetry that enabled academics to speak back to university management--and each other--about how they experience their work. In this paper, we draw upon poststructural "micro-physics" of power, the poststructuralist "politics of reinscription", and art, poetry and drama as critical pedagogies to interrogate the potential of arts-informed research to speak back to the measured university. The key contribution of this article is to recommend arts-informed methodologies as a forum for dissent and resistance at a time when the spaces of collegiality, pleasure and democracy in the measured university are under attack.

This essay seeks to recognise the value in a literature-focused model of the discipline of English, using I.A. Richards, C.K. Ogden and the American New Critics as models of critics who placed the text, and the reader's relationship with the text, at the centre of any study of literature, arguing that this relationship is analogous to that which should exist between text, teacher and student. It surveys developments in structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory and the way they have shaped the teaching of English over the second-half of the twentieth century, exposing flaws in the approach of the "Growth," "Cultural Studies," "Textuality" and "Critical Literacy" models of the discipline. It builds towards an analysis of David Campbell's poem, "Night Sowing" that aims to show how a "traditional" close reading of the text's aesthetic components reveals more than the politically-motivated application of the Critical Literacy model, concluding that the human connection of the reader/author relationship should be the foundation of any student's encounter with a text.

The aim of this study is to review research on poetry reading pedagogy in secondary education from 1990 to 2015. Today there is little research on poetry teaching in Sweden and thus little guidance for secondary teachers. Therefore, this study thematically analyses peer-reviewed articles from English language international journals. Articles were retrieved through a systematic literature review. The results show that many researchers suggest personal response pedagogies mainly developed from Louise M. Rosenblatt's work. Further, a progression of poetry interpretations seems to require explicit teaching throughout the years of secondary education. Also, current educational politics, heavily influenced by neoliberalism, impose high-stakes examinations that challenge poetry curricula. Teacher education needs to address this issue. Minor themes found were: ontologies in relation to teaching poetry reading, and poetry reading as identity formation/tool for social critique. These could be possible areas for future research.

This case study examined a Romanticism unit within a Year 9 English class in Sydney, Australia. It considered whether popular culture could build connections between students' lives and Romanticism, and whether the process of remixing "high" Romantic poetry with "low" popular culture could foster student engagement. Thematic analysis of interview, survey, observation, and artifact data revealed three key findings. Firstly, through exploring popular culture texts, students believed Romantic concepts related to their world but not to them. Secondly, the extent to which students understood Romanticism through popular culture was influenced by personal, textual, and educational factors. Thirdly, students felt that the collaborative remixing process promoted freedom of expression. While many teachers are concerned that popular culture will displace canonical literature, this study found that this is not the case: incorporating popular culture is not an "either/or" approach, but it is an enriching, complementary practice.

Spoken word poetry is a means of engaging young people with a genre that has often been much maligned in classrooms all over the world. This interview with the Australian spoken word poet Luka Lesson explores issues that are of pressing concern to poetry education. These include the idea that engagement with poetry in schools can be enhanced by putting spoken word poetry on the curriculum, the suggestion to provide teachers with professional development opportunities in order to equip them with the confidence to create poetry, and the need to surmount some of the societal, institutional and pedagogical challenges that hinder the promotion of poetry in education.

This report details examples of praxis in the creation and presentation of "Joy Fear and Poetry": an intermedial theatre performance in which children aged 7-12 years generated aesthetic gestures using a range of new media forms. The impetus for the work's development was a desire to make an intervention into habituated patterns of positioning children in society while challenging the "worthy but unprofessional" discourse surrounding the field of theatre for children and young people in Australia [Watts, R. (2013). "Turning the Tables: Youth Theatre for Adult Audiences." "ArtsHub." Accessed April 20, 2016. http://performing.artshub.com.au/news-article/news/performing-arts/turning-the-tables-youth-theatre-for-adult-audiences-197207]. Through an academic investigation of performance techniques, the study aimed to extend the practical and theoretical means by which artists and children might collaborate to produce aesthetically rich works for public audiences. The practice-led study examined dramaturgical, directorial and design strategies with the potential to harness and maintain performer focus, motivation and cognitive engagement. The result was a constructivist performance praxis that applied theories of knowledge construction to the process of theatre making. When applied, this praxis dictates that the stage become an intermedial play-space that affords new modes of theatrical expression and perception, which expand the communicative potential of child performers and the experience of audiences.

This article shifts from the formal learning spaces of school and university to an Australian public swimming pool to playfully engage some of the dilemmas that recent theory poses for curriculum studies. The article enacts multiple diffractions (Barad, 2007) as theory becomes swimming and swimming becomes theory, and ideas and movements are themselves diffracted or changed by the writing of a poem. "What does the pool teach us?" "What is learnt at the pool?" "How does learning emerge at the pool?" Physics, chemistry, biology, and artistry combine, as multiple human and non-human bodies intra-act (Barad, 2007), calling each other into being in this exploration of how distributed agencies and fractal causalities (Bennett, 2010) change how learning might be thought, represented, and swum. The poem incorporated here serves as provocation and inspiration for other scholars struggling with these educational dilemmas and interested in arts-based research.

Poetry is the art shaped through language; to talk about a poem we need at least to talk about its language--but what can be said will depend on the particular linguistic theory, with its particular modelling of language, which we bring to the description. This paper outlines the approach of SFL (Systemic Functional Linguistics), describing in turn its five dimensions of language choice and the relevance of each to talking about poetic text. This includes ways of talking about the poem as a visual text and as a spoken text, and of relating those choices to choices of wording (grammar and vocabulary), meaning and social context. Two poems by contemporary Australian poets are discussed in detail, "Open Hands", by Geoff Lemon and "Tigers", by Judith Beveridge.

The production of writing occupies a significant place in English classrooms; it also underpins current assessment regimes. While curriculum policies emphasise the need for students to become proficient writers, scant attention has been given to the position of teachers as writers and the impact that such an omission may have on writing pedagogy. This paper examines recent literature on teachers as writers, and draws upon the emerging writing identity of a practising secondary English teacher in Victoria, Australia, who, as a pre-service teacher, began work on a children's novel that reached completion during his third year of teaching. The symbiotic nature of writing informed by classroom experience, which in turn shapes the teaching of writing, is examined in this paper. The authors suggest there are profound pedagogical consequences arising from the demonstration of writerly behaviour in the English classroom. In particular, the capacity for teachers to use writing as a means of creating and affirming cultural capital is explored.

Focusing on subject English, this article considers the role that "creative output" in the form of narrative fiction and poetry might play in the field of educational research. Drawing on philosophical insights from Biesta, and combining these with Nussbaum's articulation of the importance of literature to education, a case is made for the suitability of research that focuses on the production of a creative piece with an adjoining exegesis. The applicability of this approach to classroom English teachers and their students, as well as researchers in tertiary education whose task it is to prepare pre-service teachers for the English classroom, is then explored.