This paper presents an analysis of the prescribed text list for senior school English (including English as an Additional Language or Dialect, EAL/D) in Queensland, Australia. Queer understandings about the normalization of cisgender and heterosexuality provide a framework to analyze prescribed texts for adolescent learners. Hetero-cisgender norms…

This article presents the authors' successful experiences with Cirrus, a purpose-built Digital Humanities teaching and learning platform developed at The University of Queensland between 2016 and 2018. Our case studies in teaching the crafts of close reading, critical analysis, and writing show that Cirrus's annotation tools enable teachers to…

This essay draws on the work of Raymond Williams in identifying a shift from the attempt to have students engage with literary texts in personal terms to a concern, founded on theoretical innovation, that they should read at a more sophisticated level in order to discern the ideology of a given text. It argues that what Williams calls an…

With global risks such as terrorism, fundamentalism, and xenophobia permeating our everyday consciousness, there is a pressing need for educators to cultivate in their students a cosmopolitan hospitality toward multiple and marginalized others in the world. Yet, despite growing interest in ethics among literary scholars, theorizations of ethical…

Recently Australia has witnessed a revival of concern about the place of Australian literature within the school curriculum. This has occurred within a policy environment where there is increasing emphasis on Australia's place in a world economy, and on the need to encourage young people to think of themselves in a global context. These dimensions…

In his paper in "English in Australia" in 2002, Bill Green called for a literacy project of our own, and for the need to think again, and think newly about the place of literary literacy within contemporary curriculum. But what does literary literacy mean in curriculum that recognises a wide diversity of texts and literacies? If…

This course, one of 16 sequential courses comprising phase one of a part-time Bachelor of Arts degree program in Australian Studies, examines the bases for the selection of particular works of Australian literature as classics. The roles played by educational curricula and by literary criticism in presenting an Australian literature in the context…

A partial report of research on high school student response to literature, using Alan Purves's categories of engagement, perception, interpretation, evaluation, and miscellaneous. (RL)

This course, one of 16 sequential courses comprising phase one of a part-time Bachelor of Arts degree program in Australian Studies, uses literary authorship as an example of a highly individualized social role and shows how authorial attributions and modes of composition have changed over time. It is designed for independent study combined with…

This course, one of 16 sequential courses comprising phase one of a part-time Bachelor of Arts degree program in Australian Studies, uses Australian literary and documentary writings of the 19th century to examine the formation of the proposition that the Australian national character is based on rural life. The course is designed for independent…

The free writing responses of 120 gifted/average Australian high school students (grades 8, 10, and 12) to a short story and a poem were coded according to Alan Purves' categories--engagement, perception, interpretation, evaluation, or miscellaneous--to detect any patterns of differences. The students also provided data about their preferences for…