How to be in the world

The 2025 AATE/ALEA Conference

When I was in my last years of high school, trying to decide what to do with my adult life, the only thing I really knew I wanted to do was to go to university and study English. That was it. I just wanted to keep learning about literature. I had been fortunate enough to have mostly excellent English teachers all through high school, and in Years 11 and 12, which I completed at Phillip College in Canberra, I took as many English courses as I could (a “double major”, it was called). I also did music and Australian history with a brilliant teacher name Trish Payne, and basic maths and science courses, and Drama, with an extraordinary drama teacher, Alanna Maclean, who was also a playwrite who wrote plays which her students performed. (Not me, I was too busy doing actual amateur musical theatre with my music teacher, Viv Arnold, who also wrote musicals and happened to play the organ at our church.)

So I knew what I wanted to do immediately after school, I just didn’t know what to do after that. So like any sensible would-be bluestocking, I went off and asked our careers advisor what I should aim for with an English degree. She had one piece of advice for me, and one piece only: obviously, with an English degree, you become an English teacher. So that’s what I did. Apparently our careers teacher had never heard of publishing, or the arts, or journalism, or any other career for which an English degree might come in useful, and I had no clue and nor did anyone else in my life, so off I went to Macquarie University and became an English teacher. I don’t regret it, it’s stood me in good stead, and I plan to write a lot more about my thoughts about teaching and schools and education, but I didn’t become a teacher because of a burning passion for the profession. I became a teacher because I literally did not know what else to do with myself. As soon as I found out about those other options, I quit. But that’s another story for another day.

Because despite what sounds here like a complete lack of enthusiasm for teaching, I did actually fully commit and became, and remain, very passionate about teaching, and education, and the teaching of English. I have, as they say, Opinions. And I also have a lot of experience and knowledge to bring to bear, which, having Opinions, I happily did when I finally returned to working fulltime in schools when my arts career ended in around 2017 (or a bit earlier, depending how you count it).

And once a chalkie, as my mum used to love to call me and my primary school teacher sister and our colleagues well past the time chalk was no longer used in any ordinary classroom, always a chalkie.

I didn’t actually do a lot of teaching when I went back to work in schools. I spent six years working as a teacher librarian, with some English classes at one of the schools, which was also where I was working during COVID lockdown. I worked with a brilliant English faculty at that school, which included a dear friend I have known since we went to promary school together, and an actual ex-student of mine from my first year out teaching, who not only grew up to be an excellent English teacher, but a bloody good deputy principal as well. (I didn’t actually teach her English, I taught her a long-defunct subject called General Studies, which basically involved 22 year old me arguing with a class of 18 year olds on topics such as feminism and the death penalty.)

These fine teachers were very welcoming to me, and very interested in my views on updating what we teach in the English classroom, by which I mean, which texts and authors we choose to highlight. Right from my first year out, I was keen to try more contemporary works in the classroom than the same old texts that had been feeding silverfish in the book room for decades. As my knowledge of and advocacy for children’s and youth literature grew, so too did my desire to bring contemporary YA books into my teaching, and when I left teaching, this interest in what English teachers choose to teach and why never left me.

And this is why we do it… 😭

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to bits and pieces of professional development with teachers and librarians about middle grade and young adult books that would work in the classroom, and to advocate for more contemporary and representative voices in the senior classroom. In 2022, the English teachers Association of NSW invited me to deliver a full 90 minute PD session on text selection for student engagement, which was a really successful sessions with dozens and dozens of really engaged teachers contributing to an incredible comments thread that alas, I didn’t have a chance to properly read because I had so much material to cover.

And while I am no longer teaching, outside of doing supply relief teaching, I’m still very passionate about the topic, so when I heard that the AATE/ALEA annual conference was going to be held in Hobart, I put in proposals to give two presentations, both of which were accepted. One was based on my PhD research, and the other was a revised version of my ETA presentation from 2022. I called it “So we have to read this? Text selection for student engagement”, and the room was packed out. Yikes. Terrifying.

My intention with the session was to encourage English teachers to think about what texts they teach, and why they teach them. We kind of know why, and here’s a slide from my presentation with common reasons why English teachers often return to the tried and true:

These are all actually perfectly valid reasons, and challenging them is not me having a go at my colleagues, but rather asking us to maybe make some different priorities when choosing what we teach. Then I asked them to consider the following:

The presentation is backed up with research, and is not just my own personal bandwagon, and I am more than happy to make all the slides, research and handouts available if anyone is interested to read them. If you’d like a link to access them, please message me or leave a comment, and I will send you think link.

I believe so deeply about the importance of encouraging students to engage deeply with books, but to do so, we need to find books that interest them, challenge them, represent them, and respresent people not like them: the sliding doors, windows and mirrors analogy created by Dr Rudine Sims Bishop in 1990 remains as pertinent today as ever, if not more so.

The conference was really wonderful. It had a great balance of presentations, from specialists from around the country and the world. Tasmanian writers and teachers were well-represented, and I enjoyed hanging out with new friends from the Tasmanian educational and writing communities (as always, big crossover there!), as well as friends from my life in children’s and young adult literature. I was really encouraged by the absolute dedication by teachers to bring diversity and representation into their classrooms, and by their passion for contemporary Australian literature. Sadly, another theme was the deep concern we all share about declining rates of reading for pleasure across all demographics, and by our students (and sometimes our own) growing incapacity to read in a sustained fashion. So lots of good news, but as always in education, much to be done.

And I’ll leave you now with another slide from my presentation, which gives me the title for this post. Thanks for reading, and do let me know if you’d like me to share either or both of my presentations with you.