Carrick App Mead Kilner Healy
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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 1. Carrick Discipline-Based Initiatives Scheme: Guidelines Part 3 Discipline-based Initiatives Investigation Funds Expression of Interest – Application Form 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 2. Carrick Discipline-Based Initiatives Scheme: Guidelines Part 3 Discipline-based Initiatives Investigation Funds Expression of Interest – Application Form 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 3. Carrick Discipline-Based Initiatives Scheme: Guidelines Part 3 Discipline-based Initiatives Investigation Funds Expression of Interest – Application Form • 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