DISCIPLINE-BASED INITIATIVES SCHEME, 2007
Discipline-based Initiatives Investigation Funds Expression of Interest – Application Form An initiative of the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training
Carrick Discipline-Based Initiatives Scheme: Guidelines Part 3 Discipline-based Initiatives Investigation Funds Expression of Interest – Application Form
CARRICK INSTITUTE FOR LEARNING AND TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION CARRICK DISCIPLINE-BASED INITIATIVES SCHEME
DISCIPLINE-BASED INITIATIVES INVESTIGATION FUNDS EXPRESSION OF INTEREST
APPLICATION FORM 2007 Proposal No: Office use only
Discipline Australian Literary Studies
Applicants Dr Philip Mead (Director) (List) + Name & Institution, University of Tasmania Role in Initiative Association for the Study of Australian Literature AustLit Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Ms Kerry Kilner (Co-Director) Executive Manager, AustLit The Resource for Australian Literature, University of Queensland Research Fellow, Faculty of Arts, University of Queensland Chief Investigator, ARC Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities Grant (2007) project: AustLit: Phase Two – humanities research infrastructure development, augmentation and expansion Dr Alice Healy (Co-Director) Lecturer in Australian Studies, David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research (DUCIER), University of South Australia Executive Committee, Association for the Study of Australian Literature Proposal Director Dr Philip Mead Position Senior Lecturer in English, and Discipline Co-ordinator (English), School of English, Journalism & European Languages, University of Tasmania Executive Committee, Association for the Study of Australian Literature Chief Investigator, ARC Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities Grant (2007) project: AustLit: Phase Two – humanities research infrastructure development, augmentation and expansion Co-editor, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Member, AustLit The Resource for Australian Literature Advisory Board
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Institution University of Tasmania
Contact Phone: 03 6226 2352 Fax: 03 6226 7631
Postal Address School of English, Journalism & European Languages Private Bag 82 Hobart TAS 7001 Email [email protected]
Commencement date 1 November, 2007
Interim Report 1 July, 2008
Final Report 1 March, 2009
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PROPOSAL BRIEF
Title: Australian Literature Teaching Survey
1 Aims (Vision) Presently, tertiary students must sense confusion in the value that universities place on the study of Australian Literature. The richness and historical depth of our literary culture are only hesitantly and fragmentarily reflected in the curricula of Australian literary studies at universities. Our commitment to investing in the future of our national culture and knowledge – a vital aspect of which is teaching the present and coming generation of students – is compromised by a lack of organization and support for dynamic and varied Australian literature curricula across the sector.
Meanwhile, teachers of Australian literature have few opportunities for sharing and developing curricular ideas and resources; they are often unaware of the history and practice of Australian literature teaching in other tertiary institutions; they tend to teach in multi-disciplinary settings where the role of Australian literature in the curriculum is uncertain; they struggle to connect with students who may come to university with little knowledge of their own literary heritage; they have few discipline-specific structures of communication that allow and encourage them to contribute, locally and nationally, to the advocacy and advancement of Australian literature teaching; the teaching of Australian literature is undervalued in terms of their own professional development.
The aim of this discipline-based initiative is to enhance and to help sustain a new paradigm for the teaching of Australian literature. There is an imperative at the moment, widely felt across the sector, that we need to renew and reaffirm our belief in the value of teaching Australian literature. The vision of this proposal is of a collaboratively developed and future-oriented substrate of knowledge about Australian literature teaching across the field, and the building of new structures of communication for the co-ordination and strengthening of Australian literature pedagogy at the tertiary level. The idea is to foster, in ten years time, an Australian literary studies discipline community that is informed about, and can draw on, the historical depth and institutional variety of its own teaching and curricular practices; that has powerful, technologically advanced infrastructure to share information about all aspects of the Australian literary studies curriculum; that has professional bodies and publication structures that encourage the advocacy of Australian literature teaching at tertiary level – as well as cross-sectorially, and publicly – and that enhance the professional standing, nationally and internationally, of Australian literature education within the tertiary sector. We envisage that students coming to university over the next decade will experience an attractive, confident and innovative range of possibilities for learning about Australian literature and many, rich paths of study within the field.
The principles that underpin this proposal are communication, collegiality, and collaboration. The Australian literature teaching survey will:
• gather and disseminate comprehensive educational data on current and recent past teaching practice of Australian literature • enable on-going collaborative communication between disciplinary stakeholders and teaching practitioners across the field of Australian literary studies
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• analyse the needs of the discipline and support a new internationalised paradigm of Australian literature teaching.
This is a pragmatic proposal to richly enhance the learning experience of Australian students of our national literature with concretely defined and sustainable outcomes that will be of benefit to humanities and social science teaching communities at the tertiary level into the future, with special attention paid to the experience of beginning tertiary students, and therefore to developing and supporting cross-sectorial collaborations and communication.
The immediate context for this proposal is the current national debate about the study of Australian literature in our schools and universities. This debate reflects a broad, public concern about the fate of our national literary heritage. The public profile of this debate is evident in Rosemary Neill’s article, ‘Lost for Words,’ in the Weekend Australian (December 2-3, 2006) and the responses to it in Professor Elizabeth Webby’s masterclass for postgraduate students at the University of Sydney, ‘The Future of Australian Literature’ (2 February, 2007), in Associate Professor Peter Kirkpatrick’s article, ‘The Strange Death of Australian Literature, or a Furphy Exposed’ for the Australian Society of Authors’ journal The Australian Author (forthcoming April, 2007), and Professor Robert Dixon’s comments as the incoming Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, in ‘Dixon the Defender’ in the Sydney Alumni Magazine (Autumn 2007) and in a keynote address to the February 2007 ASAL mini-conference, excerpted in the Australian Higher Education Supplement (28 March, 2007), as ‘An Agenda for Our Own Literature.’ In turn, these issues are related to a broader debate about education in contemporary Australia (see below, ‘6 Value to the Sector’).
This context suggests the urgent necessity of a shift between an older, isolationist paradigm in which Australian literature was taught as a subset of ‘English’ or literary studies and as part of debates about Australian identity and national culture, and a new, multi-disciplinary paradigm in which Australian literature has a central role to play in the response of Australian educators to national and state curricular frameworks, to the internationalisation of the humanities, to globalisation, and to newly emerging Indigenous knowledges. In this new paradigm, ‘future prospects [for Australian literary studies] are related to ways of thinking about liaisons with other fields of literary studies that are […] being required to change and become more strategic’ (Dixon, ‘An Agenda for Our Own Literature’ 37).
Crucial to this paradigm shift is a systematic survey of the teaching of Australian literature in various disciplinary contexts, in universities and at upper secondary level, in the present and the recent past, nationally and internationally. Such a survey has never been conducted. The outcomes of the proposed survey will provide an informational base for strategic changes in the teaching of Australian literature and for the development of long-term policies, curricular benchmarks and innovative resources for a new model of Australian literature teaching. The process, as well as the outcomes of the proposed surveying, are specifically designed to foster the networking of teachers in the discipline and the sharing of quality teaching practice, across sectors and state boundaries, wherever Australian literature is taught.
This proposal is motivated by a vision of ‘new trajectories in Australian literary studies’ (Dixon, ‘An Agenda for Our Own Literature’ 37) in universities (and schools) that will be grounded in the actual experiences and needs of teachers and students and in the
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awareness of newly emerging disciplinary contexts for literary studies in Australia and internationally. The results of the survey to be undertaken in Phase 1 of the project will firmly underpin the work in Phase 2, ensuring that the development of textual, digital and other material to support the teaching of Australian texts will be undertaken within an informed and engaged scholarly environment.
All the disciplinary stakeholders represented by the attached letters of endorsement have been unequivocally enthusiastic about the proposal and represent very broad, inclusive, sector-wide and cross-sector, support for the proposal. As these letters of endorsement indicate, there is a strong sense that the issues currently facing the teaching of Australian literature are of common concern and that these stakeholders are seeking to involve themselves in various practical ways in the initiatives envisaged in this proposal.
2 Investigation Strategy Teaching Experience Database – quantitative data The primary investigation strategy for the proposal is the systematic surveying of the current and recent-past teaching of Australian literature, nationally and internationally. Australian and overseas tertiary institutions, state upper-secondary institutions, students and teachers of Australian literature, and stakeholders in the discipline community will be surveyed. Ms Kilner will co-ordinate the surveying for Queensland, New South Wales and international institutions; Dr Mead will co-ordinate the surveying for Tasmania, Victoria and the ACT; Dr Healy will co-ordinate the surveying for South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. All ethics requirements, including participant privacy and copyright, of the three partner institutions will be met in the design and conduct of the survey.
The results of the survey will form the basis of a carefully designed, interoperable database aligned with AustLit (www.austlit.edu.au), the key resource for the teaching of and research into Australian literature. The Teaching Experience Database (TED) will provide the first widely disseminated, systematically identified and accurate profile of the teaching of Australian literature. The alliance with AustLit will create an environment where users will be able to make a seamless transition from biographical and bibliographical data to teaching and textual support data and material. The community of users – teachers, academics, education researchers – will participate in the continued enhancement of the database via a wiki-style interface, moderated by Australian literature specialists and the Working Group.
The TED will include (at a minimum) the following information:
• units, subjects, courses and institutions in which Australian literature is taught at tertiary and upper secondary levels, including sectorial context (university award/degree, secondary curriculum), and teaching mode (lecture, seminar, distance, web-supported), etc • number of students taking the above units, subject and courses • reading lists, examination papers, assessment types and assignments, bibliographical information etc about Australian literary texts taught in discipline and cross-discipline contexts, including date of offering, broad category of text (genre), title, author, publisher, etc • format and availability of Australian texts used in teaching (anthologies, individual works, traditionally published, PoD, electronic texts, etc)
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• unit, subject, course and study guide descriptors, outlines and statements, including broader curricular policy documents, about the teaching of Australian texts • supporting and contextual educational materials used in the teaching of Australian texts, including a bibliography of publishers’ reading guides for book clubs and reading groups
Central to the design of this proposal is ensuring a sustainable future for he Teaching Experience Database and the other textual and data outcomes. The investigation and survey phase of the project will involve the discipline community in establishing and implementing a scheme for the on-going, collaborative updating of the database, while the integration of AustLit into the program design ensures that a natural relationship is taken advantage of. AustLit is already used by academics in the design and resource of courses that include Australian literary texts. The TED will be a natural extension of current practice.
There is a commitment from state and territory representatives on the Executive Committee of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) to take responsibility for facilitating communication between teachers of Australian literature in the states and territories, and across the sectors, submitting this information at least on an annual basis to TED. Similarly, commitments have been foreshadowed from the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) about co-ordinating similar, on-going input into TED from the upper secondary sector. A perpetual survey for the collection of new data will be a key feature of the TED, and the engagement of the tertiary teaching communities in the continual updating of what will become a central resource for their practice, including for curriculum development, will be possible. The Working Group will oversee and co-ordinate this activity.
Survey Archive – qualitative data The second method of systematic survey is principally qualitative. It will consist of a range of interviews with, and focus groups including
• discipline specialists in the teaching of Australian literature like academics, teachers, writers • publishers of Australian literature • specialist readers and educational leaders.
Interviews and focus groups will also concentrate on
• the learning experience of students • curriculum development issues • teaching methodologies • narratives of teaching experience • teaching requirements and infrastructure issues • institutional contexts • regional/state emphases and perspectives • issues of gender • theoretical perspectives • cross- and inter-disciplinary experiences and perspectives • publishing and production issues (text availability, editing, publishing, influences of literary festivals and awards, high/middle/low brow cultural perspectives, political interventions).
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Specific case histories of important and successful Australian literature teaching discovered during the surveying will be highlighted. These instances of teaching practice will provide practical instances of where Australian literature is being taught in multidisciplinary contexts and in ways that are proving meaningful and attractive to the current generation of students; they will also identify possible benchmarks for the ‘new Australian literature teaching,’ especially at first-year level. This qualitative material will complement and be accessible through the TED and will also be archived on The University of Queensland's e-space digital repository. UQ is a member of the APSR (Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories) and can ensure that datasets will be perpetually available, according to defined access permissions. The archive will allow the discipline community, for the first time, to share detailed and up-to-date information about teaching experience and practice and will, no doubt, be materially usefully for research into teaching practice and disciplinary evolutions.
Annotated Bibliography – disciplinary history There are also important records of the history of the teaching of Australian literature that need to be systematically identified and surveyed as part of the comprehensive purpose of this investigation. This literature provides a history of the discipline for non- specialists and is important for the self-understanding of the discipline for those actively engaged in the field. It also articulates theoretical and practical perspectives and problems that have been important in defining the discipline of Australian literary studies. This part of the survey will require a different research methodology because it is text-based. It includes, for example, discipline histories, bibliographical resources and overviews (like Leigh Dale’s The English Men: professing literature in Australian universities , 1987), influential reports like Knowing Ourselves and Others: The Humanities in Australia in the 21st Century (Vol 2: Discipline Surveys; Vol 3: Reflective Essays, 1998), government educational policy statements, position papers from influential practitioners in the discipline, for example the influential inaugural lectures of Professors of Australian Literature, department and university statements and papers on the teaching of Australian literature, and biographies of influential teachers. An annotated bibliography of this literature will be compiled.
3 Goals (deliverables) Phase 1: November 2007–March 2009
The three major outcomes of Phase 1 of the project will be the publication of the Report of the Australian Literature Teaching Survey, the establishment of the Australian Literature Teaching Survey Working Group, the delivery of the Teaching Experience Database, and the establishment of an archive of qualitative survey results.
The first deliverable of this proposal will be a co-authored report that clearly and concisely represents the work of the investigation. The report will provide a narrative of the discipline-based initiative of the ‘Australian literature teaching survey.’ It will highlight critical issues in the teaching of Australian literature and specific aspects of the information represented in the database and survey archive, like analysis of trends in cross-disciplinary teaching of Australian literary texts, the teaching of Indigenous literature across disciplinary sites, the international context of Australian literary studies teaching, the relevance of methodological innovations in the teaching of Australian literary texts (e.g. gender studies), identifying problems and future directions from stakeholder surveying and focus group responses. The report will also outline plans for Phase 2 of the project. It is proposed that this report be a ‘Carrick’ publication.
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The report will also outline the constitution of the broad-based Working Group on Australian Literature Teaching that will have an advisory role in Phase 1 of the project, and that is intended to play a further role in the future dissemination of the outcomes of the project. This Working Group will be co-ordinated by the Director and Co-Directors of this proposal and will include representatives from the broad spectrum of relevant organizations within the sector, indicated by the attached letters of endorsement. In the initial contact we have had with stakeholders across the sectors, we have not only received enthusiastic encouragement for this proposal, we have already opened new lines of communication between teachers and leaders within the education, arts, and library sectors that haven’t previously existed. Clearly, there is an urgent need for communication about Australian literature teaching across and between teaching institutions, publishing and literature funding bodies, libraries and professional associations of humanities scholars from a range of disciplinary contexts. These nascent networks will be formalised and strengthened by the actual resources developed by the project in conjunction with its Working Group.
It is proposed that members of the Working Group comprise the Director and Co- Directors of this proposal, the Project Officer, the President of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the Editor of Australian Literary Studies , Dr Anita Heiss (Co-ordinator, BlackWords subset, AustLit; Australian Society of Authors), the Director of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, the President of the International Australian Studies Association, an expert in the field of Australian curriculum history, the President of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, and a nominee of the Director General of the National Library of Australia.
The Working Group will have three main functions. The first is the oversight and co- ordination of Phase 1 of the proposal and its three deliverables. Secondly, the Working Group will advise on the design of the three deliverables and the processes by which they will be achieved. Thirdly, the Working Group will have an evaluative role in relation to the three deliverables.
Primary responsibility for the work of the proposal will lie with the core group of the Director, Co-Directors and Project Officer. It is not envisaged that the Working Group will have responsibility for conducting the project. Instead the Working Group will achieve its agenda through consultation, reference and advice. It is envisaged that the Working Group will meet by video-link three or four times during the life of the project. Some members of the Working Group will also be members of the AustLit Advisory Board and as such they will take an ongoing interest in the future development of the TED and ensure that the outcomes of the Survey remain relevant to the future-oriented focus of the AustLit Board.
The second deliverable of the project will be the TED (Teaching Experience Database), a comprehensive, up-to-date and widely available resource presenting the survey data and establishing a new forum for communication and future content development. Presently there is no systematic and centralised source of information about the current and recent-past teaching of Australian literature, or of the textual and reference sources available for the teaching of Australian literature. This comprehensive and systematically organised information will be available for the first time and will be useful as a reference point for what are currently only anecdotal assumptions about the teaching and reading of Australian literary texts. It will also provide an authoritative reference point for the less than informed and alarmist claims about this aspect of Australian education that have recently found their way into the media and that are
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troubling the sector. Importantly, the TED will provide a reliable and informed reference resource for disciplinary developments, including teaching initiatives while its ownership and updating will contribute to networking between institutions (nationally and internationally) and across sectors. The TED will become a teaching resource in its own right, for historical, sociological and educational inquiry.
The third deliverable will be a digital survey archive of qualitative information about the current and recent-past teaching of Australian literature at tertiary and upper-secondary level (nationally and internationally). This archive will draw together and make accessible (with permission) information of special interest and relevance to the discipline community. As a resource that is designed to be a sustainable contribution to the field of Australian education, it will be available for use by individual scholars and teachers of Australian literature, other stakeholders in the field of Australian literary studies – like education academics, teacher-librarians, writers, arts administrators, scholars at overseas institutions – and all target audiences, as well as provide a focus for future work and communication within the discipline community.
Phase 2 (mid-2009–2010) A second phase to this project is envisaged and will be the focus of future applications for funding. This phase will include a collaboration with the leading scholarly journal in the field, Australian Literary Studies , edited and published from the University of Queensland, that sees an annual issue of the journal devoted to discussions, resource- sharing and development, themes and problems in Australian literary studies education. The editor of the journal, Dr Leigh Dale has responded enthusiastically to this suggestion about ALS ’s possible future role. These issues of ALS will draw on and be linked to the database and archive developed in Phase 1.
Phase 2 will simultaneously involve the development of a set of policies, guidelines and (adaptable) educational resource packages that will be useful for the teaching of Australian literature in future contexts. Policies and guidelines will suggest the elements of a flexible and innovative new paradigm for the teaching of Australian literature. Again, utilising the physical infrastructure and collaborative networks already in place for AustLit, the production of appropriate resource packages will be facilitated. Working in partnership with Sydney University Press, University of Queensland Press, the editors of the Macquarie/PEN anthologies of Australian literature and Indigenous Australian literature, the Copyright Agency Limited and other organisations as appropriate, it will become possible to formulate educational packages for specific courses or outcomes in print-on-demand or digital formats deriving content from a wide array of existing and newly developed resources. Packages could include, for example, reprints of canonical and representative Australian literary texts, alongside reviews, critical works and innovative AustLit components, like the ‘Black Words’ subset (www.austlit.edu.au/BlackWords), which is in itself a unique storehouse of richly described information about Indigenous writers and story tellers or the Australian Multicultural Writers subset. This material could be used for national curriculum development, study guides, etc and would also be relevant to book clubs and lifelong learning groups.
4 Building on past Success There has never been a systematic, nationally co-ordinated survey of the teaching of Australian literature. Previous initiatives in this area and in cognate disciplinary areas like Australian Studies have been unco-ordinated and therefore not widely available, or are now out of date (for example, Kay Daniels, ed. Windows onto Worlds: studying
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Australia at tertiary level: the report of the Committee to Review Australian Studies in Tertiary Education , (1987). In 2006 the Association for the Study of Australian Literature undertook a state-based survey of current teaching in Australian literature, co-ordinated by Dr Philip Mead and Dr Alice Healy. This survey yielded some limited results and provided the initial investigation that underpins this proposal. The ASAL survey was also specifically useful in identifying the methodological, scoping and resourcing aims that are at the core of this project’s design.
Highly relevant expertise in the conduct of large-scale systematic inquiry into the Australian literary studies discipline and advanced management of data and IT resources is available to this project through the involvement of Ms Kerry Kilner (UQ), the Executive Manager of AustLit and Dr Philip Mead (UTas) who are both Chief Investigators, on the ARC (Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities) grant on the three year (2006-2008) AustLit enhancement and augmentation project. The database of survey information, an interoperable module of AustLit will build on, and draw from, its huge bank of biographical and bibliographical data, providing new mechanisms for the identification of teaching and source material across the education sectors.
5 Impact The value of the investigation lies in the provision of high quality, relevant educational information for the development of new practices in the teaching of Australian literature and in establishing mechanisms for communication and collaboration between teaching communities of individuals who are currently isolated and atomised. If teaching is going to move away from an older disciplinary paradigm that is obviously proving problematic in terms of curriculum design and teaching and learning experience, such resources will be an invaluable contribution to the evolution of a new paradigm. Participants in the current debate about teaching Australian literature, referred to at the beginning of this application, frequently allude to our imperfect and partial knowledge about what the state of national literary studies in the curriculum is. (Peter Kirkpatrick, President of ASAL and one of the endorsers of this proposal, makes this point in his article for The Australian Author .) For example, we know very little about the actual institutional contexts, whether in Australia or at a host of sites internationally, of the teaching of Australian literature. Channels of communication between teachers of Australian literature across sectors and national boundaries are non-existent outside the conference circuit. Important infrastructure for the study of Australian literature, as with all literary studies, continues to change in response to developments in information and communication technologies. As well, there is already evidence that what constitutes a ‘text’ is under revision in Australian literary production – Aboriginal ‘sayings,’ life- writing, film, adaptations, performance. The database will provide a comprehensive survey of these constantly changing contexts for contemporary literary studies, just as its upkeep will provide a network of communication and information sharing for the discipline.
The revitalisation of Australian literature teaching will provide students with a vibrant and relevant aspect of their learning experience, across the secondary and tertiary sectors, and especially in terms of Australia’s educational futures. The project is designed to contribute information and data relevant to the urgent need for cultural literacy in the specifically Australian context, and to current initiatives by state and federal education authorities to address issues of national heritage in education.
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This investigation will promote the sustainability of the study of Australian literature in multi-disciplinary contexts and raise the profile of the teaching of Australian literature by making available significant resources and identifying benchmarks to enhance the standard of that teaching and to help maintain excellence. It will also encourage the adoption of AustLit more widely available across the secondary sector, which will have a major impact on the discipline. Five years from now, a new cohort of tertiary students will have studied Australian literature within a new paradigm of teaching, at upper secondary level, and will be familiar with, and used to using, national cultural infrastructure like AustLit in their tertiary study of Australian literary texts.
6 Value to the Sector The investigation directly addresses the national, mainstream agenda of humanities education for Australian students. Since 2005, the teaching of the humanities in Australia has been the subject of considerable media coverage and intense public debate. The Prime Minister’s History Summit (July, 2006), the forthcoming roundtable on Australian Literature (August, 2007), the teaching of literary classics in secondary schools, the national curriculum debate, and the state of Australian literature in the secondary and tertiary curricula have all focused attention on the teaching of Australian materials in our universities and schools. In 2007 education, and the place of Australia’s cultural heritage in education, will no doubt be important election issues and the contribution of disciplines with their foundations in our national discourses – like Australian literature and history – will be central to debates about the future of education in Australia.
This series of educational debates is likely to impact on secondary curricula, on university entry requirements and prerequisites and on the kinds of degrees that are being offered. It will identify the changing needs of tertiary students, particularly the important position of cultural heritage studies in relation to a vocationally oriented education sector. In order to be able to respond to this changing topography of higher learning, teachers of Australian literature need to be informed about their discipline and networked with each other. This project aims to provide specific, pragmatic and updatable information about Australian literature in secondary and tertiary education for use by teachers responding to future directions in Australia’s education system, state and national, including focuses of current concern like the early tertiary experience and the transition from secondary to tertiary. Value to the sector/s will include expanded access to AustLit, the most authoritative and comprehensive resource for the teaching and research into Australian writers and writing available, the development of which has had significant intellectual and financial investment by the Australian government through the university partners and the ARC.
In terms of skills bases and curriculum development the teaching of Australian literature in the upper secondary and tertiary sectors is currently fragmentary. That is, there is no specific training to produce teachers in either sector. Nor is there any co- ordination of developments or innovation in the teaching of Australian literature in either sector. This investigation will assist in maintaining a necessary and useful diversity while also focusing attention on required skills bases and developments in curricula. Phase 2 of the project involves the editing and publication of issues of Australian Literary Studies focused on Australian literature education, which will aim to address these issues of disciplinary training. Phase 2 also involves the development and distribution of specifically designed resources for the teaching of Australian literary texts in future educational settings.
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7 Engage with the Values and Principles of the Carrick Institute This project is characterised by inclusiveness in its discipline-wide focus on the teaching and learning of Australian literature across the upper-secondary and tertiary sectors (nationally and internationally). The investigation will promote the co-ordination of collaborative exchanges between networks of all teachers of Australian literature, including teachers of Indigenous knowledges, in terms of curricula development and teaching practices.
The project recognises diversity in its support for the range of pedagogical styles and innovations in the teaching of Australian literature that are emerging nationally and internationally. The investigation’s support for diversity comes from its development strategies to co-ordinate this diversity within the new paradigm of Australian literature teaching that responds to globalisation, internationalisation and Indigenisation. For example, the move to introduce Indigenous knowledges as a component of all degree programs at University of South Australia is particularly relevant to the study of Australian literature, where Indigenous writing plays a key role in changing concepts of literature, text and history.
The investigation is designed to enhance and support long-term change in the teaching of Australian literature. Its provision of systematic and co-ordinated information and resources for the teaching of Australian literature are all designed to contribute to the effectiveness of a new paradigm of Australian literature teaching.
The investigation fosters collaboration by being national and international in focus. It necessarily requires involvements from all sectors of the Australian literary studies discipline community, nationally and overseas.
The investigation is characterised by excellence in its aim to support and enhance a new paradigm of Australian literary studies that is characterised by teaching excellence and curricular innovation. As discipline-based leaders, the personnel of the investigation are well qualified and experienced to ensure the excellence of the project at all points: Philip Mead has long experience in the teaching of Australian literature, from first-year to Ph.D levels, at Australian universities and in India and North America, Kerry Kilner has long experience in the design and building of bibliographical resources like the Bibliography of Australian Literature and the AustLit database, that are at the interface of all teaching and research in Australian literary studies, and Alice Healy is working in new cross-disciplinary areas of Australian Studies in a university with an explicit, institution-wide commitment to Indigenising the curriculum.
8 Interdisciplinary Possibilities The project will be surveying and providing resources for a network of teachers of Australian literature across a very broad range of disciplinary contexts, including ‘English,’ Australian literary studies, Australian studies, Indigenous Australian cultural production, cultural studies, gender studies, Education, SOSE (upper-secondary), comparative literature, film and screen studies (film adaptations of Australian texts), media studies, creative writing and creative arts, history of the book in Australia, bibliographical studies, publishing and editing studies, theatre studies, and archival and curatorial studies. The project’s deliverables will also be designed to facilitate collaboration and the sharing of quality practice across and between the many disciplinary contexts in which the teaching of Australian literary texts plays an important role.
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9 Cross-disciplinary Learning The design of this investigation could be applied to any of the adjacent disciplinary formations, for example Australian historical studies, or indeed other disciplinary knowledges in the humanities across the upper-secondary and tertiary sectors. This proposal also embraces cross-disciplinary initiatives, and is designed to learn from them, like the advanced curriculum survey initiatives undertaken in the field of Australian history (see for example, Carly Millar and Mark Peel, ‘Canons Old and New? The Undergraduate History Curriculum in 2004: Final Report to the AHA Executive,’ History Australia 1.3 [December 2004]: 14-1 – 14-13, and the ‘Australian Historical Association 2005-6 History Curriculum Review: Honours and Postgraduate Coursework Programs,’ available on the Australian Historical Association site
10 Stakeholder Engagement The multiple stakeholders in the teaching of Australian literary studies, represented by our letters of endorsement, include educational leaders in the field, as well as teachers of Australian literary texts at upper-secondary and tertiary levels, past and present students of Australian literary studies, upper-secondary curricula designers and educational researchers, teacher-librarians, teachers and students of Indigenous and multicultural backgrounds, the members of the professional Association for the Study of Australian Literature, editors of scholarly journals like Australian Literary Studies and the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature , research scholars in the field of Australian literary studies, the national arts funding body representing Australian writers, and teachers and students of Australian studies (in Australia and overseas). These stakeholders represent very broad, inclusive, sector-wide and cross- sector, support for the proposal. Each of these stakeholders and their constituents will be surveyed in the process of the investigation; some will be active collaborators in the conduct of the survey. They will all contribute to the project’s sustainability through the proposed Working Group.
In addition, at least three of the discipline leaders invited to the Australian Literature in Education roundtable by the Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, to be held on 7 August, have read this application and will be endorsing its importance in that forum.
11 Evaluation Plans The evaluation of the project will primarily involve the achievement of its deliverables. The report will be published in the first quarter of 2009; the use of the TED will be evaluated by a bibliometric analysis. Phase 2 of the project will begin with a formal evaluation of the project conducted by a consultant with the relevant expertise, and on the advice of the PVC Teaching & Learning, University of Tasmania.
12 Dissemination Plans The project Directors will ensure the wide dissemination of the report and facilitate Australia-wide access to the TED. Publicising the project will be done through the already existing channels of communication within the discipline field – the AustLit newsletter and subscriber base, the ASAL membership and email list – and by information and feedback sessions at the annual conferences of ASAL and of the AATE. The project Directors are in positions that command easy access to the
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networks and communication channels across the discipline. The methodology of the survey itself necessitates contact with a very broad range of national and international stakeholders in the field and the establishment of a new network of connections for the regular and continuing updating of the TED and survey archive. This network will provide one of the important, on-going channels of dissemination for the project. One of the important purposes of the proposed Working Group is to ensure sustainable, on- going communications and engagement across the sectors for the resources developed by the project. Once the project is nearing completion and the TED and qualitative archive are functional, it will be possible to disseminate information about the project to cognate disciplinary communities and associations like the Australian Historical Association, the Australian History Teachers’ Association and the Australian Teachers of Media (for example).
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BUDGET Please indicate clearly how the funds sought will be allocated (example – salaries, travel costs, consultants.) The total budget must not exceed $100,000 (inclusive of GST).
Line Item Funding Sought In-Kind Year 1 Year 2 Year 1 Year 2 Personnel (including on-costs) Project Manager 0.70 HEO5.1 $ 6,438 $ 40,124 Program Administration 0.2 HEO5.1 $ 984 $ 6,136 $ 984 $ 6,136 Teaching Relief - A Healy $ 5,050 Computing Consultant $ 20,909
Travel Project Meeting - UQ Hobart-Brisbane return airfare $ 1,000 Canberra-Brisbane return airfare $ 889
Data collection Adelaide-Canberra return airfare $ 987 Adelaide-Sydney return airfare $ 956 Adelaide-Perth return airfare $ 1,065 Adelaide-Darwin return airfare $ 1,298
Consumables Printing $ 1,000 $ 500 Office expenses $ 800 $ 5,000
Equipment 3 x iPod digital recorders $ 1,309
Other Advertising $ 600 Evaluation $ 2,000 Teaching Experience Database Interface $ 5,000 Network and server support for Teaching Experience Database $ 4,000
Total $ 11,220 $ 79,525 $ 1,784 $ 20,636
Total Cost $ 113,165.00 Total In-kind $ 22,420.00 Total Funding (excluding GST) $ 90,745.00 GST $ 9,074.50 Total Funding Sought (inc GST) $ 99,819.50
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Budget Justification This budget is framed in terms of the effective and timely completion of the project over a 16-month period (November 2007-February/March 2009). The budget is designed to support the conduct of a comprehensive national and international survey, and the conversion of the survey data into a TED that will provide authoritative and highly searchable data for a large discipline community.
Personnel The Project Manager, a 0.7 HEO5.1 (16 months), will be based at the lead institution, the University of Tasmania, and will be responsible for the administrative co-ordination of the project, under guidance from the Director, Dr Philip Mead. Duties of the Project Manager will include designing surveys, arranging the distribution of surveys to participants, liaising with the Co-Directors and the computing consultant about the data-entry for the TED and the survey archive, collating bibliographies, providing administrative support for the project overall, and observing all relevant ethics protocols.
Project Administration will be part-funded by the Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor Teaching and Learning, University of Tasmania, and will include arranging meetings, note taking and minutes, travel arrangements, internal and external reporting and financial management and reporting.
The Co-Director at UniSA, Dr Alice Healy will oversee and conduct face-to-face surveying and interviewing for the project and in addition to airfares (see below) will need some relief from her current teaching and administrative load as a Lecturer.
An essential aspect of this project is the design and building of a database as a module of, and interoperable with, the AustLit database. Mr Kent Fitch, of Project Computing (Canberra), is a consultant with considerable relevant experience in the design, building and support of databases for projects like AustLit.
Travel The project Director and the computing consultant will need to meet at least once at the University of Queensland, from where the AustLit database is administered and where Kerry Kilner, the project Co-Director is based. This meeting, in the early stage of the project, will entail development of use-case scenarios for the TED and the qualitative survey archive. Dr Alice Healy will be the Co-Director most involved in face- to-face surveying and interviewing. In 2008, she will need to travel to the ACT, NSW, WA, and the NT for conducting surveys, interviews and focus groups.
Equipment and consumables Costs associated with recording aspects of the survey include iPod digital recorders for each of the project Directors/Manager and incidental costs of advertising for the Project Manager position. Costs associated with producing and copying surveys, as well as collating survey results and the circulation of survey materials between the Project Manager and the Co-Directors, will be covered by the lead and other host institutions. An important outcome (deliverable) of the project is a published report that clearly and concisely represents the work of the investigation and provides a narrative of the discipline-based initiative of the Australian Literature Teaching Survey. It is important for the evaluation and dissemination plans of the project that this report be produced in a timely and cost-effective manner. It is envisaged that this report would be a ‘Carrick’ publication and would be offered to the Carrick Exchange.
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Other It will be necessary to advertise in the Tasmanian press for the Project Manager position. An independent evaluation of Phase 1 of the project has been built into this proposal. The person conducting this evaluation needs to be engaged as a consultant for the purposes of evaluating and reporting on Phase 1 of the project. The budget also indicates the specific in-kind support that is committed by the University of Tasmania, in terms of administrative support and office costs for successfully funded Carrick projects, and by the University of Queensland in terms of database interface maintenance, and network and server support.
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Endorsement of VC/ DVC of Lead Institution □See attached endorsement with signature Professor Gail Hart, Pro-Vice Chancellor (Teaching and Learning), University of Tasmania (lead institution)
Endorsement of Stakeholders □ See attached endorsement/s from stakeholders Please note: some of these letters of endorsement refer to the current proposal under a slightly different title from the one on the application form, Australian Literature Teaching Survey . This is because we had to send an earlier draft of the proposal, before we had finalised its title, to stakeholders to give them time to consult their members and to prepare their responses.
Dr Elizabeth McMahon, President, Association for the Study of Australian Literature, University of New South Wales
Dr Leigh Dale, Editor, Australian Literary Studies , University of Queensland
Ms Karren Philp, President, Australian Association for the Teaching of English
Director-General, The National Library of Australia
Dr Anita Heiss, Deputy Chair, Australian Society of Authors; Co-ordinator, ‘Black Words’ subset, AustLit The Resource for Australian Literature
Ms Josie Emery, Director, Literature Board, Australia Council
Professor Kate Darian-Smith, President, International Australian Studies Association, University of Melbourne
Submit this completed form by email and mail a copy to : Julie Adams Program Administrator The Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, PO Box 2375 Strawberry Hills NSW 2012
Email: [email protected] ph (02) 8667 8514 fax (02) 8667 8515
______Personal information provided to the Carrick Institute is protected by the Privacy Act 1988. The Institute collects your personal information for management and recruitment purposes only. The Institute will not disclose the information without your consent except where authorised or required by law. Non- identifying information may be used for statistical purposes.
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