ETAQ E-pistle 21-10
Reminder re Literary Spring Breakfast
Members in the greater Brisbane area are reminded that ETAQ’s final PD activity in the city for the year is the Literary Spring Breakfast which will be held this coming weekend on Saturday 30 October. Members are strongly encouraged to attend.
The venue is the Botanical Cafe in the Mt Coot-tha Botanical Gardens which is accessed from Mt Coot-tha Road just west of the Toowong Cemetery.
Our guest speaker is UQ academic and author Dr Kim Wilkins. As well as being a literary scholar, Kim is also a prolific author with 21 books to her credit across a range of genres. According to a recent story in the Brisbane News, this range includes supernatural and fantasy fiction, young adult novels, children’s fiction and romance. The topic of her talk will be “How readers become writers” which should have significant implications for practice in schools.
The cost is the very reasonable $35 for ETAQ members and $40 for non members. This includes a buffet breakfast.
The activity is timed to run from 8:15 to 10:30 am. A CPD certificate will be available for 1.5 hours.
The registration form was included in the most recent mailing. It was also uploaded to the ETAQ website but, unfortunately, the site is temporarily down. In response to this inconvenience, the registration form is reproduced below.
The reply date is Wednesday 27 October. We need to confirm numbers with the restaurant so please advise Admin Officer Jim Buckley jimb.etaq@bigpond.com of your intention to come by COB Wednesday.
I look forward to seeing a good roll-up of members on Saturday.
Brisbane Spring Literary Breakfast
The final PD activity in Brisbane for the year is the Literary Breakfast which will be held at the Botanical Cafe in the Mt Coot-tha Botanical Gradens on Saturday 30 October. Our guest speaker is UQ academic and author Dr Kim Wilkins.
The reply date is Wednesday 27 October.
The flyer can be downloaded here:
The registration form is available here:
etaq-spring-breakfast-rego-form-2010
ETAQ E-pistle 20-10
Literary Spring Breakfast
ETAQ’s final PD activity in Brisbane for the year is Literary Spring Breakfast which will be held at the Botanical Cafe in the Mt Coot-tha Botanical Gardens on Saturday 30 October. Our guest speaker is UQ academic and author Dr Kim Wilkins. The flyer and registration form are included in the mailing about to go out and can also be downloaded from the ETAQ website at www.etaq.org.au The reply date is Wednesday 27 October.
Copy for Words’Worth
The editors of our journal are in need of some more copy for the next issue of Words’Worth. Indeed, this is always the case! Sharing professional practice is ETAQ’s raison d’etre and, along with face-to-face PD activities, the journal is one of the main mechanisms for effecting this sharing.
All members are urged to give serious thought to submitting a contribution for publication in the journal. Your topic might be your favourite unit of work (surely, everyone has one), an effective assessment task, a useful classroom activity or a review of a resource that has worked well with students. Alternatively, members could express their views on some aspect of English teaching via a letter-to-the-editor or a longer opinion piece. Members doing post graduate study could well find that university assignments could be readily adapted to be suitable for the journal.
Material can be sent to either of our co-editors: Sue Grotherr sue.grotherr@calvarycc.qld.edu.au or Lynda Wall lyndawall@hotmail.com
Bell Shakespeare Regional Teacher Scholarships
If you teach English and/or drama at a rural or remote secondary school and have a maximum of eight years teaching experience you might be interested in applying for one of Bell Shakespeare’s Regional Teacher Scholarships for next year. Full information can be found at www.bellshakespeare.com.au/learning and a pdf of the application form is available for downloading from the Competitions page of the ETAQ website www.etaq.org.au Scholarship winners will attend a 4-day workshop in Sydney during the period 12-17 May 2011. This is in Queensland term time so you’d need to be able to arrange a few days release from school. Applications close on 26 November.
Poetry – Opportunities and Resources
The following information from Fiona Curran, Education Officer of The Red Room Company, deals with poetry learning opportunities that some members have found extremely useful for their schools. Fiona presented a workshop at this year’s ETAQ State Conference.
“We are currently seeking expressions of interest for our 2011 Papercuts program. The Red Room Company is a non-profits arts organisation offering free creative poetry workshops to students in Australian high schools. We have worked with schools in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, and Tasmania in the past.
These poetry workshops usually involve 3 visits to the school by a practising Australian poet, who works through one of our education kits (The Cabinet of Lost and Found, or Toilet Doors), which have different core activities for the students to focus their creative expression on.
The Cabinet of Lost and Foundtakes the students through a linguistic and creative contemplation of an object that has some special significance to them. Toilet Doors is based around the concept of guerrilla poetry; unexpected poetry in unexpected places, or presented in strange new (and often public) ways. Both kits culminate in a school-supported installation, reading night, anthology, or similar. The Red Room Company hosts the student poems, photos of the event, and the original poem commissioned by the workshop leading poet on our website. To see examples of the exciting work that we have been able to help students and poets accomplish, please take a look at our website: http://redroomcompany.org/education and blog: http://redroomcompany.org/wordpress/
We provide another educational resource for teachers a small boxed set of poetry and exercise cards to be used as stimulus for creative writing activities. These are called Poems to Share, and each poem is an original work commissioned by us for this purpose. The activities on the back are only a beginning; we have had students and teachers create mini anthologies, swap exercises based on the colour of the cards, rewrite poems in order to see the way in which the meaning changes, and more! The cards are available for purchase on our website for $22 (http://redroomcompany.org/goodies/); they have proved very popular at recent ETA conferences in QLD and NSW.”
National Professional Standards for Teachers
AITSL (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership), the replacement for Teaching Australia, is developing National Professional Standards for Teachers. As part of the validation process, any interested stakeholders (we’re all stakeholders) can complete a survey online at www.une.edu.au/simerr/standards where all to contribute to the discussion before the final changes are made. The survey is open from now until October 29th. The survey takes about 30 minutes and needs to be completed in one sitting. The current draft of the standards is available on the Discussions page of the ETAQ website.