Search

Secondary students are often reluctant to work collaboratively and take responsibility for each others' learning, relying instead of the teacher to the the 'sage on the stage' and the point of truth This project seeks to explore approaches which promote collaboration and foster critical thinking through the adoption of a Cognition-Centred Inquiry pedagogy, which foreground the explicit teaching of metacognition and critical thinking in Year 11 and Year 12 History classrooms to develop student autonomy and problem solving capacity.

This chapter uses the BBC cyber series Years and Years to illustrate social thinking around the most contemporary turn in modernist thinking about society. Explaining the social condition of humanity has been the focus of sociologists since the field’s inception. The basic point of sociology is to gather enough evidence to theorise why collectivised humans do what they do. Unfortunately, humans are fickle beings and unable to act as predictably as sociologists would like. So social theory is built by using the best available evidence. Descriptions are formed and predictions are made. As new evidence comes to light, new theories are drawn in an iterative and dynamic field. In this chapter, I describe the theory of Ulrich Beck who challenges the thinking of sociologists who have developed their theories of society in a world dominated by the effects of the Industrial Revolution. He argues that society has moved to a “risk society” that looks to mitigate the risks of industrial society. Loved and hated by sociologists, Beck outlines a theory for the modern world affected by climate change, pandemics and economic disaster.

This book demonstrates how pop culture examples can be used to demystify complex social theory. It provides tangible, metaphorical examples that shows how it is possible to "do philosophy" rather than subscribe to a theorist by showing that each theorist intersects and overlaps with others. The book is embedded in the literary theory that tapping into background knowledge is a key step in helping people engage with new and difficult texts. It also acknowledges the important role of popular culture in developing comprehension. Using a choose your own adventure structure, this book not only shows students of social theory how various theories can be applied but also reveals the multitude of possible pathways theory provides for comprehending society.

During the catastrophic 2019 and 2020 bushfire season and the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020, Queensland’s Courier Mail regularly celebrated firefighters and health workers as national archetypes. By positioning them as the ‘new Anzacs’, the Courier Mail was able to communicate an understanding of the crises using a rhetoric that was familiar, unthreatening and reassuring. The firefighters, both professional and volunteer, were easily subsumed into the mythology’s celebration of national identity. As Queensland’s health workers were predominantly female, urban-based and educated, the article used a more modern iteration of the Anzac mythology better suited to this different context. The emergence of a ‘kinder, gentler Anzac’ in the 1970s and its focus on trauma, suffering and empathy proved equally useful as a rhetorical tool. Both approaches were underpinned by a move away from a narrow military context to the Anzac mythology’s standing as a civic religion that celebrates more universal values such as courage, endurance, sacrifice and comradeship.

This paper outlines the lesson planning framework we designed to make the historical inquiry process explicit and how we then tailored this to the specific needs of our young historians through the adoption of a consultative interactive cycle which shaped our teaching practice. We will outline how our inquiry-driven framework uses visual cues and explicit skill identification to support students in quickly mastering the language of the history syllabus and how a student-centred collaborative approach to learning informs our lesson design. This includes the use of explicit phases in learning, elements of Visible Learning, and a focus on developing a ‘cohort collaboration culture’. We will then share how we engaged in a series of cohort consultations to reflect upon and refine learning experience design to maximise efficacy and engagement. Through the use of a series of Reflection activities, students were able to self-identify areas of strength and weakness and provide feedback on how effective and engaging they found different types of learning experiences. We then undertook an interactive cycle where we trialled three of the most popular modes of content delivery which allowed us to further refine how we move through our inquiry-driven unit framework to genuinely cater to the needs of our students and give them the best chance of growth and success in their study of History.

Entree into the wider academic research community can be a challenge to recently graduated PhDs who are yet to secure ongoing or permanent employment in academia. This paper will share my experience of fostering collegial relationships with senior researchers which have in turn opened up an array of opportunities in employment, publishing, research and grant acquisition which would not have been possible alone. Having established a positive profile through strong performance in teaching contracts, opportunities for co-authored publications have become available. The reciprocal nature of this co-authorship meant that as an ECR I gained experience and guidance in navigating the processes of publication and also had support in further developing ideas. This collaboration then resulted in contact with other senior academics and the opportunity to join a research team as part of the USQ Open Educational Practice grants project. While approaching more well established academics with similar research interests may feel like you are stepping on toes or riding on coat-tails, the experiences and exposure gained allow ECRs to stand shoulder to shoulder with leaders in their field, gaining opportunities and experiences that would otherwise not be possible until later in one’s career.

Fiction, since Mary’s Shelley’s Frankenstein, has consistently addressed our fear of losing control of our corporeal self, which is ultimately the centre of our sense of identity. As Chris Shilling describes: 'as science facilitates greater degrees of intervention into the body, it destabilises our knowledge of what bodies are, and runs ahead of our ability to make moral judgements about how far science should be allowed to reconstruct the body' (4). This makes the body a key site of anxiety in fiction, particularly the horror and science fiction genres, which have their genesis in Shelley’s novel. Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection gives us an explanation as to why we keep revisiting this anxiety. She asserts, 'the phobic has no other object than the abject…thus, fear having bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject' (Kristeva 6). The phobic here is not an individual, but the modern world. Our way of ‘ceaselessly confronting that otherness’ is through popular fiction, where the abject is particularly addressed in horror and science fiction. This paper will discuss Shelley’s exploration of the possible regenerative powers of sciences like Galvanism as a means of addressing our fundamental concerns about our power over our own and others bodies. I argue once new ideas, new threats to the body have been explored, particularly that we have envisaged a worst case scenario, the threat to our bodies is reduced, the object of our imagination may no longer be so abject, as we have approached the boundary, peered over and seen less of a threat than what we imagined, or been offered a way to deal with it. As Barbara Creed states, horror provokes 'a confrontation with the abject…in order, finally, to eject the abject and re-draw the boundaries between human and non-human' (53) and so redefine how we perceive our embodied se

Many teachers adopt the Socratic Method as a model for student conversation, however, at its core this is still teacher-driven, as they provide the questions in order to achieve a pre-determined outcome. This presentation will outline our recent experiences in adopting the Harkness Method, which fosters a more genuine student-driven mode of conversation and provides a strong scaffold for the gradual release of responsibility and decision-making to the students. Our initial experiences have shown that if given full control, students develop not only a deep knowledge of historical content but also refine their ability to engage critically with historical source material. Beyond these discipline-specific skills, they also work collaboratively to reach decisions and make judgements, provide thoughtful feedback to their peers and both lead and participate in conversation. Many of these skills transcend the History classroom and better equip our students as they become active members of our democracy and of the global community, reflecting the 21st century skills of the Australian Curriculum. We see the Harkness method as a valuable addition to our repertoire of learning experiences we can offer our History students.

Many teachers adopt the Socratic Method as a model for student conversation, however, at its core this is still teacher-driven, as they provide the questions in order to achieve a pre-determined outcome. This presentation will outline our recent experiences in adopting the Harkness Method, which fosters a more genuine student-driven mode of conversation and provides a strong scaffold for the gradual release of responsibility and decision-making to the students. Our initial experiences have shown that if given full control, students develop not only a deep knowledge of historical content but also refine their ability to engage critically with historical source material. Beyond these discipline-specific skills, they also work collaboratively to reach decisions and make judgements, provide thoughtful feedback to their peers and both lead and participate in conversation. Many of these skills transcend the History classroom and better equip our students as they become active members of our democracy and of the global community, reflecting the 21st century skills of the Australian Curriculum. We see the Harkness method as a valuable addition to our repertoire of learning experiences we can offer our History students.

When Mary Shelley cast her debut novel Frankenstein into the pool of Romantic culture in 1818 she triggered waves of influence that are still being felt today. Almost immediately, Frankenstein’s creature was adopted and adapted within popular culture. This rapid uptake of the core imagery of the novel will be traced using the Google Advanced Interface tool to show not only the speed of uptake but also the diversity in the ways the imagery of the Creature was utilised. It was not until almost a century after Shelley’s death scholars turned their attention to why the image of Frankenstein’s creature had become so culturally pervasive. For almost a century after Shelley’s initial publication, the ripple effect of responses to the morally ambiguous close of Frankenstein were largely cultural and critical, rather than literary. As Fred Botting suggests in Making Monstrous, there is a doubling (or fragmented mirroring) in the authorship, structure, characters and responses to the novel. This inability to identify a definitive reading of the novel is part of the reason debate continues to rage about whether Brian Aldiss’s famous assertion that Frankenstein is 'the first real novel of science fiction' (1973, 30) is accurate. I propose that this debate stems from the lag time between the novel’s publication and the firm establishment of SF as a genre. This lag can be accounted for by seeing the influence of the novel as a series of ripples that followed out, intersecting with other cultural ideas and discourses, before hitting the ‘shore’ and rebounding back in to the literary space from which they emanated. That is, 'Frankenstein' (the image/term) was absorbed into the zeitgeist before Frankenstein’s (the novel’s) influence on genre was perceptible. We can see Shelley’s novel as a Gothic work, with something ‘superadded’ that is the ripple of the “what if” premise that would rebound back into literature as a fundamental feature of the SF genre. The moral ambiguity of the no

This session will outline how pastoral care has evolved at the Glennie School, a regional, Anglican, all girls boarding school in South East Queensland. Glennie is in the process of implementing proactive pastoral support for all students. The first strand in this is Glennie's place as the flagship school for the MFit program from Openmind Education. We will hear from company director, Meg Durham about how this program teaches students resilience strategies as they progress through the middle years of schooling. This is reinforced by the school's new epractices course, which emphasises safe online behaviours. For students who experience issues that require additional support, the school is rolling out the use of the Pastoral suite in Seqta, to allow us to keep track of and easily communicate concerns to all relevant parties. This proactive approach has allowed us to better support each child at Glennie, and develop a collaborative understanding of each child's needs.

Martha Nussbaum’s argument that literature cultivates 'powers of imagination that are essential to citizenship' centres on literature as a vehicle for empathy. Yet Suzanne Keen suggests 'a society that insists on receiving immediate ethical and political yields from the recreational reading of its citizens puts too great a burden on both empathy and the novel' (168). While Nussbaum and Keen offer differing positions on the social function of literature, both focus on its ethical function, suggesting reading should affect readers’ sense of responsibility to others in society. As Harpham describes, 'Ethics is the arena in which the claims of otherness - the moral law, the human other, cultural norms, the Good-in-itself etc. - are articulated and negotiated' (394). This paper will offer a reading of Mary Shelley as a Foucauldian founder of discourse. In doing so, it will argue that Shelley established a new way for readers to navigate ethical questions: Frankenstein results in the reader responding to 'the claims of otherness' precisely because Shelley does not provide them with a response - she leaves it to the reader to decide which ethical consideration takes primacy. She 'articulates' but allows the reader to 'negotiate'. It is this new discourse, most often articulated through the genre of science fiction which explores 'who we are and might be' (Nussbaum, 2323), that results only not in an empathetic response but in an ethical one. Literature, and particularly the unanswered ‘what if?’ of science fiction as established by Shelley, provides readers the space to engage with the ethical demands of their citizenry.

The restorative power of biography in recognising ‘forgotten lives’ is well established. In the field of literary criticism, this has led to the rediscovery of many writers and works now considered canonical. One of the most successful biographical recuperations is of Mary Shelley, who was lifted from her husband’s shadow by the feminist biographers of the 1980s (Spark, Poovey, Gilbert and Gubar). However, this paper will argue that once biographical recuperation has (re-)established critical interest, it is possible to go beyond biographical approaches, which identify figures worthy of study, in order to reanimate these figures and make new offerings to the existing body of criticism as well as broader theoretical approaches. As such, although biographers have recognised Shelley as an important Romantic figure and the progenitor of the science fiction genre, this paper goes beyond that to assert that her work provides an understanding of science fiction as a discursive space. In presenting this new view of Shelley as a founder of discourse, I will demonstrate the potential long-term benefits of recovering forgotten figures through biography. Consideration of how place, time and personality shape authors can enrich our understanding of the emergence of new cultural forms, such as science fiction, and also give insight into the formation of discourses that reach beyond genre. In viewing Shelley as a founder of discourse we witness the ultimate power of biography: when it restores figures worthy of study and so gives critics the opportunity to go beyond biography and assess the emergence of new cultural forms and offer new insights into the discourses that underpin how we engage with our modern world.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818, 1831) has long been regarded as the foundational text of the science fiction genre. In this paper, I argue that this assertion holds a number of significant consequences for the way in which we understand both the novel and its author. Through a close reading of the two primary editions of Frankenstein I will show that by narrativising contemporary science, Shelley created a new space for moralising in an increasingly secular world. More importantly, however, in creating this space Shelley becomes what Michel Foucault terms a 'founder of discourse'. This recognition allows us to assign Mary Shelley a significance not currently recognised in literary criticism and so offers a new lens through which to consider not only Mary Shelley but the function of science fiction as a whole.

While the critical heritage of Frankenstein acknowledges it as one of the progenitors of the science fiction genre, this paper will argue for a new reading of the text as a moralisation of modern science and in doing so allow for a redefinition of the genre itself. The first life of Frankenstein was insignificant, with only 500 copies being sold initially. However, Frankenstein and his creature quickly became catchphrases for playing God. The text again evolved when Mary Shelley redrafted it for the 1831 edition; influenced both by how the text had been received and her own experiences in the intervening years. This new edition evidences the living nature of the text and this life continues in today’s reinterpretations of the work. The second life of Frankenstein is as a pioneer of the science fiction genre. Mary Shelley was uniquely positioned to write this watershed novel: an unprecedented confluence of personality, place and time. Hers was not a Gothic horror but rather something new - a narrativising of the science of the day. Victor Frankenstein’s creature became a symbol of the dangers of playing God in an increasingly Godless world. Shelley’s novel then is not only a narrativisation of science, but also a moralisation - she does not so much ask, what if? as she does, should we? And it is this new moral space that gives Frankenstein a unique heritage as the first genuine science fiction text, both creating and redefining our understanding of the genre as a whole.