Media Release
June 2 2008
UniSA brings Indigenous focus to literature survey
UniSA’s
David Unaipon College of
Indigenous Education and Research (DUCIER) will participate in the
newly funded tripartite Australian Literature Teaching Survey, bringing
an Indigenous focus to the $100,000, year long audit of Australian
literature teaching.
The project, led by the University of Tasmania and including researchers from the University of Queensland, involves a systematic survey of current and recent-past teaching of Australian literature in both national and international contexts, through examination of subjects, texts and surveys of teachers.
Lecturer in Australian Studies at DUCIER and project member, Dr Alice Healy, said the survey was prompted by the ongoing national debate about the study of Australian literature in schools and universities.
“Such debates had entered the secondary school forum in 2007, with commentators criticising ‘post modern’ approaches to literature study at the expense of studying Australia’s literary heritage,” Dr Healy said.
“We are hoping this project will reveal the extent to which Australian literature is used in traditional literary studies contexts, as well as interdisciplinary contexts like Australian History, Aboriginal Studies and so on.”
“Indigenous writing in all its diversity continues to make an important contribution to Australian literature and history, and therefore to education.
“As a member of DUCIER, I am particularly interested in discovering how Indigenous literature is taught in various contexts, as well as the project’s wider aim of auditing Australian literature courses.”
Dr Healy said that in the long term, the project would aim to provide a forum for scholarship in teaching Australian literature through online resources and a journal of Australian Literature Education, and ultimately enhance and sustain a new framework for teaching of Australian literature in upper secondary schools and tertiary institutions.
Project leader from the University of Tasmania, Dr Phillip Mead, said that such a new multi-disciplinary framework would see Australian literature play a central role in the development of national and state curricular, and to the internationalisation of the humanities, to globalisation, and to newly emerging Indigenous studies.
“There is the sense within the Australian literature teaching and research community that we need to move beyond 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,” Dr Mead said.
"The results of the survey will provide an information 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 12-month project is being funded through a $100,000 grant from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (formerly the Carrick Institute for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education) and an extension of an initial audit driven by Executive Committee of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL).
The project will also link into resources already provided through the Australian Research Council (ARC) funded gateway project AustLit: The Resource for Australian literature, run by partner University of Queensland’s Kerry Kilner.
Contacts for interview
- Dr Alice Healy office (08) 8302 9280 mobile 0422 981 991 email alice.healy@unisa.edu.au
- Dr Philip Mead office (03) 6226 2352 email p.mead@utas.edu.au
Media contact
- Linda Hein office (08) 8302 0965 mobile 0411 257 029 email linda.hein@unisa.edu.au