Archive for category conferences
What Giroux said…
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, politics on April 16, 2012
…in his address at the launch of the Werklund Foundation Center for Youth Leadership Education in Calgary.
Before coming to the 2012 AERA conference I had the absolute pleasure of attending the Inaugural International Youth Studies Congress at the University of Calgary.
As well as hearing from distinguishes scholars, teachers and students on issues relating to youth studies, the major highlight for me (and tbh, the carrot that helped me decide to attend in the first place), was the keynote address by Henry Giroux.
#whatgirouxlookslike
If you consider yourself a ‘radical’ educator and have not yet read Giroux’s work, I highly recommend it! He is doubly awesome in my book, given his commitment to getting his scholarly thoughts out into the wider-read public domain. I thought it very fitting, therefore, that I should tweet the ideas from his talk that stood out most for me.
You can read the gist of his talk in this op-ed article: The ‘Suicidal State’ and the War on Youth.
(NB: I accidentally tweeted the term ‘suicide state’ instead of ‘suicidal state’. Oops…)
I used the hashtag #girouxsays to mark the tweets…given the fickle, temporal life cycle of hashtag searches, I’ve collected them all here for y/our convenience and later reference:
A big shout out to Shirley Steinberg, the Werklund Foundation Chair in Youth Leadership Education, for hosting this inaugural event. She’s kind of a big deal in the fields of #radical_education #freire_project #critical_pedagogy – loved hearing more about this work! (my radical itch was in need of a scratch…)
Pecha kucha at the first #TMBrisbane
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, learning community, online tools, social media on March 2, 2012
I really enjoyed meeting new people and hearing them share their work yesterday at the first TeachMeet in Brisbane.
Steve Box (@wholeboxndice) hosted the TeachMeet at Moreton Bay Boys College (thanks Steve!):
TeachMeet Brisbane
I presented a 7 minute pecha kucha on how to construct ‘fair’ assessment when using project-based learning (PBL).
My presentation included shout-outs to @BiancaH80 @malynmawby @Vormamim and @benpaddlesjones who are some of the wonderful people that have tweeted around ideas with me on my PBL journey. It was the first time I presented a pecha kucha and adhered strictly to all the rules! Making cards to help me stick to the topic helped a lot (something I haven’t done since school tbh):
Actual palm cards - old school!
If you’d like to check them out I’ve put the slides up on slideshare. I hope that showing these resources helps future TeachMeeters plan their Pecha Kuchas – I loved the mode of presenting and highly recommend it!
Congratulations to TeachMeet Sydney on their WORLD RECORD ATTEMPT tonight! I hope the next #TMBrisbane event at the State Library of Queensland will be able to be video streamed online like #TMSydney was tonight, I had a ball watching along and tweeting with everyone from home 
TeachMeet Brisbane
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, learning community, social media, technology on January 23, 2012
During 2011 a range of TeachMeets were held throughout Sydney. A central wiki was set up to coordinate the events and the hashtag #TMSydney ran hot during the meets.
The events were great successes, described by participants as welcoming, supporting and positive. This is not surprising, when you consider that the ethos behind the event is that it is strictly free professional development run ‘for teachers, by teachers’. What I thought was most attractive about the TeachMeet structure was the short presentations – either a 2 minute ‘nano-presentation or a 7 minute micro-presentation (or Pecha Kucha). It sounds like an ideal way to hear a little bit from a lot of people.
You can therefore imagine how stoked I was to hear that someone was organising the first ever TeachMeet in BRISBANE!
#TMBrisbane
TEACHMEET BRISBANE will be held from 4-6pm at Moreton Bay Boys’ College on Thursday 1st March 2012.
If you would like to register or get more information, you can visit and join the TMBrisbane wiki: http://tmbrisbane.wikispaces.com/
Of course, I was so excited to see the event come to Brissie that I had to volunteer to present. It will also be a great chance for me to refine my pecha kucha style!
(I also look forward to the #TMBrisbane hastag drawing together more of the Brisbane edu-community)
Pass it on
If you would like to be involved in TeachMeet Brisbane, or to support the event, take a look at the flyer available for download on the wiki.
In the Twittershpere you can participate in the backchannel from anywhere (not just Brisbane!) on March 1st by adding #TMBrisbane to your tweets.
Finally, this video about TeachMeets made for Sydney West is a great one to pass around to folk who are new to the TeachMeet concept…enjoy!
Next Stop: AERA! and AARE, and AATE…
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, english, learning community, research, university on October 31, 2011
When you have a research paper to present, choosing the right conference to take it to is important.
I have long been affiliated with the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE). When I first started out as a postgrad student, I used to go to their conferences to present papers, and I even was elected as student rep. to the Executive Committee. I also had one of those awful experiences of being a small fish in a giant pond, and having only three people turn up for me to deliver my paper to. Devo’d…In the end I ultimately stopped being involved in AARE because I needed to narrow my focus and concentrate on English curriculum teaching and scholarship.
Since then I’ve been going to the annual conference of the Australian Association for Teachers of English (AATE) – every year since 2004! And this year is no exception – I’ll be in Melbourne for the AATE conference in December (will you?). Only, for the first time in awhile, I’ll be heading to the AARE conference too, in Hobart the week before. With more skills in networking under my belt, and a clearer direction for engaging with the ‘special interest groups’, I’m feeling really positive about reconnecting with AARE and sharing my PhD findings there.
For me though, as far as big, generalist conferences go, AARE was always plenty big enough – and having developed an instinct to narrow my scope rather than broaden it, I didn’t think I would ever attend the EVEN BIGGER, EVEN BROADER, international ‘annual meeting’ of the American Educational Research Association (AERA)…
But, attend it I am!
Both the paper and group session I submitted have been accepted to AERA 2012, which will be held in Vancouver in April next year:
Curriculum Change and Resistance: Challenges Identified During the Implementation of An Expansive State English Curriculum.
This paper presents the findings of a doctoral study that undertook a content analysis of a corpus of curriculum texts, news reports and case interviews with teachers during a period of curriculum change in the Australian state of New South Wales.
Producing the young citizen in texts of families, neighbourhoods and nations
This session critically analyses popular fiction, nonfiction and television texts for children and young people focusing on sexuality, sexual safety, bullying and heroism. Each of the selected texts can be understood as a pedagogical apparatus that works to instantiate children and young people as particular subjects and objects of knowledge. (with Gannon, Lampert, Bethune and Gonick)
So, let’s count ‘em up: AATE and AARE in December; I already went to ALEA and IFTE earlier in the year; AERA in 2012.
That’s FIVE amazing conferences in 12 months!
And one BUSY girl :/
Totally worth it
(By the way…’what’s with all the four letter acronyms starting with A’, I hear you ask? Tell me about it! Took the first year of my research degree to decipher this shiz! And the kind of ugly websites of AERA and AARE…you can tell all of their energy goes into research!)
Use #etaq21c to ask me things tomorrow!
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, english, learning community, online tools, personal, social media, technology on August 19, 2011
More specifically, use #etaq21c to ask me questions about Digital Literacy and electronic text practices in English curriculum. The conference theme says it all: “English and Generation Next”
ETAQ’s Annual State Conference will be held atLourdes Hill College on Saturday 20 August. The theme is “English and Generation Next”.
The program will feature a keynote address by Professor Peter Holbrook from the University of Queensland’s School of English, Media Studies and Art History, a Q & A style panel session [that's where I'm presenting!!], and a range of supporting workshops. Professor Holbrook’s address is entitled “Literature, Literacy, the Imagination, Freedom”.
So, if you are an English teacher, or if you are interested in digital texts and the future of the book, please, shoot some questions our way! You can post them here as a comment, but if you use Twitter then posting a comment or question there with the hashtag #etaq21c would Really Make My Day
I am soooo looking forward to this panel presentation! The full list of people in the panel session are:
- Professor Catherine Beavis (Griffith University and ETAQ Patron)
- Professor Peter Holbrook (University of Queensland)
- Kelli McGraw (Lecturer, QUT)
- Janina Drazek (Executive Director, Teaching and Learning, Education Queensland)
I’ll be talking about ‘acts of reading and writing’ and ‘digital pedagogy’.
ETA mailout showdown and dates of state conferences
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, english, learning community on July 23, 2011
Living in Brisbane but being from Sydney, I am a member of both the NSW English Teachers Association and the English Teachers’ Association of Queensland.
The holiday break and a fresh term starting has brought mailouts from both associations my way.
This is a show-and-tell of what was in the respective packs.
Both mailouts contained information about Literacy and Numeracy Week, which this year has as it’s theme ‘The Fundamentals are Fun!’ (hmmm, invoking fundamentalism to talk about literacy…looking forward to critiquing that), as well as a catalogue of publications available from the AATE Bookshop.
The impetus for each mailouot is sending members the newest issue of the association journal. While I like the style of the NSW journal mETAphor better (the ETAQ journal is full of Arial font and the cover design could be developed, imho), I have to say I am really satisfied with the content and tone of Words’Worth, and look forward to contributing some material myself in future. Unlike in NSW, ETAQ doesn’t have resources to pay contributors for their articles (yet), but nevertheless the collegial spirit in the association currently ensures a flow of material to sustain the publication.
Both associations also included their annual state conference program notices. Seems like August is the flavour of the month…of the month… (?)
Here is a comparison of the two conferences (I’ll be at ETAQ, but wish I could get down for the NSW one too, bummer!):
ETAQ State Conference: English and Generation Next
- Saturday 20th August 2011
- 8.15am – 5.00pm
- Lourdes Hill College, Hawthorne
- Cost to members: $143 (presenters $44; students and pensioners $66)
- Keynote speaker – Professor Peter Holbrook ‘Literature, Literacy, the Imagination, Freedom’
ETA (NSW) Annual Conference: Makinig Connections That Count
- Friday 5th & Saturday 6th August 2011
- 9am-4pm / 9.30am-3pm
- Australia Technology Park, Eveleigh
- Cost to members: $290 one-day / $430 two-day (presenters register free)
- Ken Watson Address – Dr Felicity Plunkett ‘Blood and Bone: An Anatomy of Wreading’
Queer as folk: my ALEA conference paper
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, english on January 30, 2011
Anyone who has attended the AATE/ALEA national conference in the last…well, many years, might have noticed this year that ALEA and AATE have gone separate conference ways – ALEA in July and AATE in December.
There are a range of practical reasons for this, but for me it highlights some common territory between English and Literacy teachers that has perhaps been assumed over the years. After all, when we go to these conferences aren’t the Literacy teachers invariably Primary school teachers? Are English teachers really Literacy teachers at all? To what extent to we belong ‘at each others conferences’?
So I have put in a proposal to deliver a 30 minute paper on the topic: Queer as folk: The English and Literacy teacher divide
The title purposefully invokes queer discourse in questioning the way we use labels in constructing our identity.
I’m hoping to stir up some controversy with this one – hope it gets accepted!
IFTE Conference Seminar 2011
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, english, university on December 2, 2010
In April 2011 the International Federation for the Teaching of English is holding its triennial conference in Auckland, New Zealand.
I’ve proposed the following seminar – fingers crossed it’s something they want to see!
The English teacher-practitioner: Re-writing our role
This seminar will weave together two strands of reflection on the nature of English teachers’ work. On one hand the nature of assessment in English will be considered, with a critical exploration of the relationship between standardised assessment and teachers’ capacity to positively engage in providing formative feedback. A central question that participants will be asked to reflect on is ‘how can we reconceptualise our role as a co-practitioner in the classroom and consequently find more enjoyment in the marking process?’ The second line of reflection will be a recount of my own journey to seek an antidote to the processes of ‘school writing’ and recommendations for avenues that other English teachers can explore to stimulate their own creativity and willingness to see themselves as a practitioner as well as a teacher of others.
English teachers: would you want to come to this? If you came along, what would you be expecting/hoping to hear about?
AATE Annual Conference 2010
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, english, research on June 4, 2010
The full program for this years annual conference for English teachers in Australia can be found at:
http://www.englishliteracyconference.com.au/index.php?id=48&year=10
The conference is on this year in Perth from 4-7 July. I’ll be presenting a paper on the Monday about National Curriculum, based on my PhD research on curriculum change:
Getting comfy with the ‘new’: What we can expect to feel about curriculum change.
The National Curriculum will bring with it a host of challenges and problems that may leave us grieving for our familiar local curriculum. What can we expect to feel in this time of change? And what will the effects of this be on our beliefs, our pedagogy and our practice? How much of what we are already doing, really, are teachers expecting to be able to carry forward? It seems this point in curriculum history is an ideal spot for us to revisit and revise our curriculum philosophies, as well as our beliefs about the purpose and goal of teaching English.
Reflecting on the findings of my PhD research into the changes and innovations of the 1999 HSC English syllabus in NSW, in this paper I consider the processes by which teachers have coped with change. What is likely to make us uncomfortable in the National Curriculum for English? What have we already shown in NSW that we fear? The audience will be invited to consider their own philosophies, and begin preparing for change.
The 2011 conference will take place in Melbourne (in December), and the 2012 conference sees the conference returning to Sydney (in October).
Hit Refresh!
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, english, online tools, social media, technology on December 4, 2009
Last weekend I attended the English Teachers’ Association Annual Conference in NSW, which was held at the University of NSW on Friday 27th and Saturday 28th of November. The conference theme was ‘Hit Refresh!’, so it was apt that this was the first conference we have run that had an officially constructed online aspect, using both Ning and Twitter to engage presenters and participants in discussion and networking before, after, and behind the scenes of the conference.
This (longish) post is a report I wrote on the success of these online tools at the conference.
Many educators by now have heard of ‘blogs’, ‘wikis’, and learning management systems such as Moodle, and hopefully we are fast approaching a time where the these strange names and terms are accepted as useful (rather than childish) jargon. In the meantime, jokes about the ‘Ning-nang-nong’ and Twitter users being ‘twits’ will abound. But while these tools might sound goofy, they are anything but.
Ning.com is an online tool that is fast gaining popularity with educators. It combines many other features for writing and connecting online – such as being able to have a personal profile page, make ‘friends’ with other members of the Ning, write blog entries, add to discussion forums, and join sub-groups – and for that reason the term Ning was coined to describe the NetworkING that occurs on the site. For our conference we created a Ning a few months ahead of the conference (http://etaconf09.ning.com/), set up all of our conference workshops, presentation, keynotes and plenaries as ‘events’, invited presenters (first, then later, people who had registered for the conference)…and waited.
The response was slow but sure. Before the conference had even started we had 70 people who had joined as members of the Ning. ETA committee members and presenters who were keen to explore the Ning started adding discussions and material right away. New presenters felt welcomed and included in the lead up to conference, and could ask questions and establish contacts with others before arriving on the big day. On the Thursday before the conference, the number of members had grown to 130. Many more joined up during and following the conference, and the count currently stands at 230 members. Some presenters used the Ning directly in their workshops, getting participants to add their own questions, ideas and resources. Many people were glad to have an easy way of contacting and keeping in contact with other members, and as many people did upload information about themselves, including a photo to their profile, there was a definite sense of familiarity and closeness at the ‘real life’ conference between Ning users.
As well as establishing a conference Ning, the micro-blogging service Twitter.com was used to ‘tweet’ short, 140 character updates from the conference, in particular from the Saturday morning panel on National Curriculum. This allowed attendees to create a ‘backchannel’ at the conference, communicating with others from around the globe, as well as other members at the conference, about events as they happened. Before the conference I blogged a description of a backchannel, which was used at the conference to explain the concept.
As this was our first attempt at using a backchannel, we decided not to display the tweets live on a big screen behind the speakers – though this is something that is occurring frequently now at many conferences that use a backchannel. For our own, and the speakers’ peace of mind, Darcy Moore and I fielded questions and comments that came in via Twitter at the same time as chairing the panel and the real-life questions from bodies inside the auditorium, and integrated these into the plenary. The response was very positive, and people (speakers included) only seemed disappointed that we didn’t display the tweets on the big screen!
So, next year we are bound to do this again, with the screen on live display. Using technology this way can be risky of course, as there is far less control being exercised when members can publish their unfettered thoughts for all to see. But the benefits of this far outweigh the risk, and the message from members was ‘bring it on!’
Increasingly, educators are connecting online in very powerful ways. This includes English teachers. As online tools become easier to use to connect, communicate and collaborate with colleagues they are being seen as more of a joy (and a time saver) than a chore. I heartily encourage other professional associations to consider adopting online elements for future conferences and events, and would be happy to share ideas and advice with anyone who is going in that direction.
Anyone else care to share their experiences or tips?
-
You are currently browsing the archives for the conferences category.
Nominated!
Recent Comments