Of Tumut, Tiny Frogs, Trout, and a Terrifying Lack of Bookstores

This pic was taken by my wife, Nicole. She took a few of the pictures below (the better ones)

Ever since I was a little boy I have been drawn to the idea of exploring the map. This was no doubt influenced by my idle plotting of imagined adventures across my father's globe, the random flipping of pages in a big leather-bound atlas, and our family's annual journeys to Queensland to visit my grandparents. 

By the time I was 22 I was cut adrift from everything that had been stable in my life - I hadn't lived with my parents for a couple of years, my first university degree was done and dusted and quietly filed away in a random drawer, and I quit work at Target three weeks before Christmas in order to avoid serving the rabid blood-eyed masses as they poured forth into Westfield shopping centre like the 11th Biblical Plague of Egypt. 

I unfolded my dog-eared map of Australia and looked at where I had been. Canberra; cold and educational. Queensland; I had travelled from the Tweedy border-part right up to the Daintree. Melbourne; a cool city with cool trams. Where could I go next? My finger trailed south, along the NSW coast, and landed at the coastal settlement closest to the border: Eden. 

I had never heard of it. I looked it up and learned that it had once been associated with whaling; a taboo and arcane industry that Australia has long since distanced itself from. Eden may as well have been the end of the Earth. I've always felt attracted to such places, the ends of the Earth - the barnacles beyond the outstretched fingers, the frayed edges of the map. I vowed to go there.

Fast-forward to now and it's 15 years later. Life intervened and I never travelled there in my supposedly adventurous youth. I'm married now, working as a teacher, and I have a nice place of my own. Things are relatively stable in comparison to the headier days of my early 20s. And so, today, I finally got to my end of the Earth. I currently write this blog entry from Eden. 

Here are some photographs of our journey, in which Nicole and I travelled across the Snowy Mountains.

The town of Tumut is at the north-western edge of the Snowy Mountains. Some of the back-areas of the town have really cool street art created by the Tumut Youth Council in collaboration with the Snowy Valleys Council. I really wish my home town, Penrith, would do something like this. This artwork was easily the highlight of the town (in other words, there wasn't much else to see there).

The Southern Corroboree Frog is a species endemic to the Snowy Mountains. The Information Centre in Tumut has a tank with 8 of these unique frogs in it, designed to help raise awareness and funding for their conservation. There are thought to only be about 200 left in the wild, which is quite appalling! 

The Corroboree Frog is:

• Poisonous, and could be lethal to other animals if they ingest it. They are the only vertebrate known to science to produce their own poison (as opposed to generating it via diet).
• Not a hopper! They actually crawl in a weird side-to-side fashion (see the first of the two photos above for what I mean). 
• A tiny little guy. They grow to just 3 cm.

Adaminaby is a small town of about 300 residents, situated at one of the highest and more remote parts of the Snowy Mountains. During summer it seems incredibly quiet, however, in winter it accommodates tourists attracted to the area for horse-riding, skiing, and trout-fishing. The last of these is what Adaminaby is best-known for, hence the Big Trout pictured above. 

The construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme in 1949 led to severe flooding of the township's original location, and so the residents were re-located to the current locale. In 2007, the water levels of Lake Eucumbene dropped enough to reveal the ruins of the original town beneath the surface, leading to significant media interest.

As we travelled across the Snowy Mountains I made use of the internet to look up bookstores we could visit. It turns out that bookstores are quite scant in this part of NSW. In Tumut, we looked for the Between the Lines Bookstore and The Night Owl Book Shop, both of which no longer exist. When we got to the next major town, Cooma, we made our way to Pages of Life, but alas, this also seems to have shut forever as there was nothing in the spot indicated by Google Maps. 

Eventually I found Dorothy Dickens' Books and Music in Cooma, and it was a lovely secondhand bookstore with good range in general fiction, locally-based authors, and sci-fi/fantasy.

Sugar Gliders live in the Snowy Mountains. We didn't see any, of course, but we did see an echidna, some kangaroos, eagles, lots of livestock, wild rabbit, wild brumbies, and an emu.

Brumbies have been a staple of the Snowy Mountains for over 150 years and, thanks to the romance of the Australian Bush Legend, they're probably one of the most respected kinds of feral wildlife found in this country. In fact, the attachment of the brumby to Australian folklore (IE. The Man From Snowy River) means that attempts to cull these horses in this region have run afoul of the State government, and there are currently significant problems relating to overbreeding and the ecosystem.

Our final stop along the way was in Candelo, where we ate at the riverside pub seen above. We also pulled over to look at some ponies grazing on the side of the road, and I wandered off under a bridge to find some strange artwork featuring a centaur and what I imagine to be the troll from the Three Billy Goats Gruff story.

About an hour later we pulled in to Eden and found our accommodation. The drive here was quiet but dotted with several interesting townships, and the everchanging scenery reflected dramatic shifts in altitude. The winding view of the high country, with thousands of bone-white gum tree-skeletons clustered together like a giant graveyard of antlers, had a strangely ominous effect on us as we drove through the State National Park.

Each town felt remote and cloistered in its own pocket of history, something that was most evident in the ghost gold-mining town of Kiandra - once Australia's highest settlement but now just a sparse collection of frost-beaten ruins with a bristling but under-used potential for tourism and historical preservation. 

The loneliness of today's drive appealed to me in much the same way as this journey across Nevada's desert, taken exactly two years ago with Nicole. Perhaps this solitude is down to the Snowy Mountains being with snow at this time of year but, really, it was this eeriness that probably spoke to me most as it made the day feel exactly as it should - like a drive to the end of the Earth.

Discovery: Go Back to Where You Came From

One of the more memorable examples of mise en scene from Go Back to Where You Came From. Note the use of shallow focus, framing, gaze, and slight high angle to keep the sky out of frame (hence dampening any chance of symbolic 'openness' or optimism)

Last year, on the recommendation of the excellent folks at Into English, I taught Go Back to Where You Came From as my Discovery text with Year 12 Advanced English. As we gear up for the last year of the Area of Study I thought I'd share the revision notes I made for my Advanced English class last year. 

These notes consist of a tabulated approach to analysing the three episodes and the reunion special. In the left hand column you'll find a screenshot from the episode, and on the right are some rough paragraphs that model appropriate ideas and approaches that can be used by students. As I mentioned just over a week ago in my Dracula post, providing exemplar responses is a really important part of opening up the learning process for students. 

Click the link for modelled responses for HSC Area of Study 'Discovery': Go Back to Where You Came From.

Here are some additional notes I also used with my students last year when revising the Area of Study and the text. I'd like to stress that these are just summarised dot points designed to prompt students when preparing for the HSC.

Ways of Approaching the Area of Study / Rubric Terms

• Influence of context on discovery
• Nature of discovery
• Impact of discovery
• The responder's discovery
• Representation of discovery
• Positive vs. Negative discoveries
• Meaningful, emotional, creative, intellectual, physical or spiritual ways of discovering
• New worlds and values revealed through discovery
• Speculation about future possibilities due to discovery
• New perceptions of self and others afforded by discovery
• Transformation
• Confrontation 
• Significant Experience (also known as Impetus)
• Anagnorisis (also known as Epiphany, Revelation, or Realisation)
• Departure Point
• The influence and reflection of metanarratives  

Raquel discovers that she doesn't actually much like being a participant on Go Back to Where You Came From.

Techniques / Devices Used

• Editing - jump cuts, crash zooms, montage
• Subtitles
• Direct-to-camera interviews (also known as: talking heads)
• B-roll (also referred to as: cross-cutting during interviews)
• Font
• Voice-over (narration and exposition)
• Pathetic fallacy
• Symbolism
• Close-ups, Extreme close-ups
• Mise-en-scene
• Handheld camera
• Ambient sound
• Cinema verite genre
• Archival footage
• Diegetic sound
• Sensationalism
• Characterisation through editing choices
• Rhetoric - logos, ethos, pathos, kairos
• Slogans
• Facial blurring
• Labelling
• Repetition
• Truncated dialogue
• Emphasis
• High modality in language
• Colloquialism
• Connotation
• Euphemism
• Word associations
• Blunt language
• Profanity
• Emotive language 
• Jargon

I tend to teach in a way where I provide students with more than they can possibly use. The thinking behind this is that students will then have a selection of things that they can pick from when formulating their own paradigm for understanding the text and rubric. There are so many different ways to approach Go Back to Where You Came From in terms of identifying techniques, and the modelled paragraphs are intended to demonstrate this breadth and depth.

If I had another run at this Area of Study I would try to include some paragraphs that continue to broaden the diversity of potential approaches. The hope is that this promotes critical thinking and independence, and allows for differentiation even at the higher end of the spectrum with Year 12 Advanced English. Students can look at these 'orphaned' paragraphs (IE. Paragraphs of analysis that aren't written in specific response to any essay question) and then attempt to write their own. By doing this they will be practising and implementing their own approach that can then hopefully be adapted for any number of HSC questions.

Dracula: Texts, Culture and Value

1902 edition of Dracula

Hello and Happy New Year!

This year I find myself teaching Extension English 1 for the first time, and it's quite an exciting prospect. The Preliminary Module 'Texts, Culture and Value' pertains to the study of a core text and its replication across the ages in various manifestations. These manifestations are defined further in the syllabus as texts that have been 'carried forward', 'borrowed from', or 'appropriated into more recent culture'.

After a brief dalliance with Jane Eyre, I've jumped on board wholeheartedly with Dracula (which seems to be the popular option as we move into the new syllabus for the first time).

The way I see it, the reasons for choosing Dracula are:

• It's a good practice run for Frankenstein, which is one of the texts in the Elective I'm looking at doing for the HSC.
• There is a near-infinite variety of texts to look at that reinterpret, reinvent, and 'borrow from' from Dracula.
• The Victorian context of Bram Stoker's seminal horror novel is more than ripe for the sort of analysis needed to look at the 'values' part of the module. 
• Lots of other teachers in NSW are doing this option, which is very helpful for purposes of collegiality - which is not to be underestimated when tackling a brand new syllabus!

Over the last week or so I've been reading the novel to start off my programming. I finished it a couple of days ago, and I've made a chapter-by-chapter table of my annotations, which can be found here:

Dracula Notes - PDF

I've arranged the notes into three columns;

1. Example / Quote
2. A brief summary or identification of the techniques and what is happening in said example
3. Further notes explaining the author's purpose and/or the context and/or anything else that I thought was interesting

Reflection

I think it's important to model this sort of stuff for the students straight off the bat so they can see what they should or could be aiming for, especially when they're entering into a subject like Extension English 1. The table also assists with giving the students reference points for their own reading... I don't want the reading of Dracula to be unnecessarily difficult, I want it to be an illuminating experience that will serve as a jumping off point for wider reading and analysis. At this point, in a public system Western Sydney context, I see the name of the game as primarily being one of engagement and encouragement.

I saw American educator Ron Berger speak at the iOnTheFuture conference in 2016, and something he spoke about that was really inspirational was models of excellence. I mean, he spoke about a lot that I found inspirational (including feedback and the growth mindset - check out 'Austin's Butterfly' on Youtube to see what I mean) but his ideas around modelling helped me to better articulate one of the key parts of my practice as a teacher. 

I'd been submitting student assignments under fake names for a couple of years by that point and then using them as samples with classes, but that's a story for another day. The point is: in order to get students delivering work of high quality we first need to show them we expect.

The idea of making all the answers 'secret' flies in the face of everything we know about creating excellence in students. If we want someone to be good at something, we show them a model. For example, to be a good musician you need to see and listen to musicians performing. To be a good illustrator you need to look at drawings. Athletes study other athletes. So why is it, in English and other school subjects, that we often hold back on showing students what the 'answers' looks like? It's been great to see the idea of exposing students to exemplars become more and more predominant in education throughout the 21st Century, and it's something that's continuing to develop in some interesting ways. 

Anyway. In short, I want students to look at the attached table and the core text of Dracula and use it as an example of the level I want to see them working at. It's not intended as perfection, and I hope to show them other models as I find more of them, but, hopefully it's a good starting point. Students will be able to take this information and then use it to practise skills in constructing extended responses and other higher order forms of expression.

Where To From Here?

A common theme that arose during this year's ETA NSW Conference was the challenge and excitement of navigating the space between creativity and 21st century learning.

I'm only three sessions in (at the time of writing) but already we've had Megan Heyward delve into the world of emerging digital media narratives, a poetry session that repositions well-known poems as part of a lively dramatic performance, and Karen Yager exploring the myriad ways of unlocking student creativity through multimodality and other lateral means.

It's an ongoing dialogue.

Will technology blanch out the creativity of our children? Or will it elevate the creativity of the next generation into an entirely new realm that will eventually be beyond the rest of us? 

What can we, the English teacher, do to maintain relevance in the face of so many reflective surfaces? The black screens of smart phones and associated devices offer a literal reflection as well as a figurative one; a feedback loop of social media-enabled naval-gazing and validation-seeking that cuts our fingertips off. In a way, social media is an externalised extension of an internalised space - a world in which we swim against irresistable currents of conformity that stifle the bravery and experimentalism of a pen and paper in a finite room. 

It's a world that is changing in rapid and unfathomable ways. The word 'navigate' couldn't be more apt - because that's what teachers need to do. We need to observe the 'stars' and plot a course through these emergent technologies that will allow a meeting ground between the content we teach and the app-heavy sedation of our screen-scrolling students.

Image from Wikipedia (also a great example of a prodused text). Thanks Wikipedia.

Students have moved into a space where they are neither (and paradoxically both) producer and/or user - leading to the academic portmanteau 'produser'. This is a great term for describing that state of being both passive/active in relation to digital text-making. Students can create in contexts such as mindcraft, wiki sites, and social media apps; but their production of 'text' in this mode is also a result of their participation as a consumer. Check out this produsage site for a more in-depth explanation, courtesy of the work of Dr Axel Bruns.

If you're a kid of the 1980s or earlier, like me, you won't necessarily be a natural produser. But, rather than tell students how to use technology they've already deemed passe or irrelevant, we can make a venn diagram of sorts with them. They know the tech, we know the English/communication stuff, and in combining these two domains we can form a crossover space (that little oval in the middle of the venn diagram) where students can begin using digital arenas in increasingly sophisticated ways.  

You may not know how to use an iPad to make a movie, but what you do know is how that movie should look when it's shown to an audience. Students, on the other hand, will have less of a problem operating MovieMaker on the iPad, but the products they inevitably create are not likely to reflect the filmmaking acumen of the cinematically-literate.Teacher and student can collaborate together here to forge a way ahead, and this is why technology will never make the knowledge held by the previous generation irrelevant.

Film Craft: Teaching Film as a Skill

Extract: 21st century learning practice in Australia has led to an increasing shift away from summative assessment of learning to the more authentic, project-based approach of assessment as learning. In regards to the study of film, this workshop demonstrates the ways in which frontloading of information and project-based learning can facilitate greater student efficacy in building skills for critical thinking, collaborative learning, and innovative problem-solving. Students move away from the identification and analysis of film techniques towards authentic application of cinematic skills in order to become active meaning-makers in regards to the grammar of film. The benefit of this multimodal approach to literacy demonstrates the continuing development of Project-Based Learning as the greatest tool at the disposal of teachers in striking an effective balance between the demands of the syllabus, enculturated practices dictated by policy, and the need to provide opportunities for students to cultivate competencies required in increasingly complex work spaces.

In other words, students learn to write film rather than write about it. This becomes evident through their application of learned skills in a collaborative project with their peers.

Here's my presentation on this from the ETA NSW 2017 Conference:

Resource: Film Craft PPT

Resource: Close-Up Instructions Activity Sheet  

Cross-Cutting resources:

Print on coloured paper. Students then edit the images together to create a storyboard sequence that incorporates too concurrent narratives. Thus, cross-cutting. See the PPT for more information.

More on specific film skills:

• Close-Ups blog post. 
• The 180 Degree Rule blog post.

For more detail, see the article 'Uncovering the Paradigm' in the academic journal English in Australia, Volume 52, No. 3.

Write Right: Authentic Engagement and Creative Writing

It's November 2017 and the English Teachers Association NSW Conference is underway once again, bringing hundreds of English teachers together to talk crafty writing, Stage 6, new continuums, and all things multimodal.

My colleague, Kira Bryant, and I are presenting today on using mini-lessons to build engagement with students in relation to creative writing.

Here are our resources:

Resource: Write Right PPT (our presentation)

Resource: Activity booklet (this accompanied our presentation)

*Please note that the activity booklet omits the short story 'Grandpa's Place' as this piece appears in Volume 2 of the ETA's Creative Writing textbook

Differentiation: Using Assessment for Learning

Batman: definitely a fan of education

I often find myself coming back to the concept of Day One.

Day One can be the point where you first meet a class, or the point where you decide to start again with a class you already know. Day One is a beautiful thing because it allows you to essentially reboot; you can reboot your expectations, reboot your teaching methods, reboot the resources you use, and even reboot your opinion of the students. Day One can be therapeutic, for both the teacher and the students. Don't we all deserve a new Day One sometimes?

Day One is a time for trying new things. It doesn't matter if it all goes horribly exercise-book-ripped-in-half wrong because when you get to the end of Day One you get to make a decision: is tomorrow Day Two or will you forget and try again with another Day One?

Day Twos are good when they build on something that's worked, and it's important to remember that even the lessons we perceive as 'failures' are still useful lessons in what does and doesn't work, but if a Day One doesn't completely pan out then it's inevitably best to give everyone (yourself included) a second chance. An potentially essential part of an effective Day One is collecting data on your students to assist with their instruction in the days to come and I guess this post, in essence, is about allowing ourselves as teachers to evaluate students from scratch at multiple points throughout the year.

If, like me, you're teaching in a context where the majority of the classes are mixed ability, you'll find yourself tasked with a need to differentiate your curriculum. The idea of targeting your resources to match the strengths and needs of your students isn't a new one. It should be noted, however, that if you're starting out in teaching or just looking to stretch yourself, it won't always be clear how exactly one should identify the differing needs of a class of 20-30 students. You can lean on your Learning and Support Teacher if you have one, and they should be able to give you some helpful pointers, but at the end of the day it's up to each individual teacher to evaluate and judge the abilities of their students accordingly.

This brings us to the three modes of assessment in our current syllabuses: assessment as, of, and for learning. The qualification of assessment into this particular taxonomy is designed to make explicit the need for a teaching-and-learning cycle; that process where we teach, and then we learn, and then we use that learning to teach again (only better). Assessment for Learning is perhaps the most important factor in a healthy and innovative teaching-and-learning cycle. By assessing students at the beginning of a unit of work we can figure out the general level of the class's knowledge about the subject and, more pertinently, ascertain the full spectrum of ability amongst the students. 

In the course of programming a Year 8-aimed Heroes and Villains unit built around visual literacy I wanted to have a diagnostic activity that would allow me to create ability streams in the mixed classroom.

The idea is that students would start out by designing their own superhero. They would be given a period or so to write details about an original character and drawing said character. The 'test' can be found just below.

Activity: Design Your Own Superhero

After this the teacher takes the product the student has created and marks it in four different ways, using the analytical criteria below:

Through the use of this criteria, the student is being evaluated four separate times before starting the unit of work. These criteria are:

• Visual Representation: The teacher assesses the student's ability to use visual literacy to represent ideas. This will be seen in the image created by the student to represent their hero, and the use of symbolism and other visual techniques to show ideas related to their character.
• Textual Representation: How closely do the image and student-written content link together? Has the student taken their written ideas into account when designing the visual part? This is also where skills in creative writing can be assessed.
• Literacy: Starting out with a class always gives the teacher a chance to check on each student's ability to form sentences, write at a whole-sentence and whole-text level, use correct spelling and punctuation, and draw upon a wide vocabulary.
• Topic Knowledge: You're about to teach a unit on heroes and villains so finding the students who already have a strong background knowledge on comic book characters and the generic conventions associated with them will be invaluable in the days ahead. This means that it's incredibly useful to check this work to see which students know their stuff.

After you've used the analytical criteria to mark the students you can then began to see where their strengths are, and what areas need working on most. Students can subsequently be sorted into separate 'streams' of ability so that activities throughout the unit can be targeted towards different ability levels (IE. Differentiation). 

A thing to remember with differentiation is that you won't need to do it all the time - the separation of marks into five separate streams (see below) doesn't mean that you have your class split into five groups with five different kinds of work every lesson. That would be impossible to organise. The idea is that, sometimes, you can do some group work (with three different streams - core, adjusted, and extension) and other times you can individually target students who may be extremely talented in one particular area (visual literacy) with some homework.

The analytical criteria and the stream guide is included in the activity sheet linked further up. Obviously not everyone teaches heroes and villains to their Stage 4 students but feel feel to backward map anything and adapt it accordingly to suit other units of work.