2023 VATE State Conference

Conference program
Download and read the full conference program here. 

We are excited to return to an in-person State Conference at Deakin University, Burwood on Thursday, November 23 and Friday, November 24. A section of the conference will also be presented in a hybrid-format incorporating live streaming via Zoom all the keynotes, guest speakers, panels and a small range of workshops. You can find more information about registering to attend the conference in-person on the State Conference event page. You can find more information about registering to attend the conference online on the Hybrid State Conference event page. Interstate delegates can register to attend the conference online here.

A VATE Collaborative Inquiry Community: Ways to engage in authentic learning and teaching in English

This year VATE created a unique year-long professional learning experience for members. The Collaborative Inquiry Community comprised 9 English teachers from different schools and sectors located around the state. The teachers initially shared their personal concerns and passions and asked their students to voice their concerns about the teaching of English. Based on emerging ideas, teachers agreed to examine the nature of authentic learning and teaching in English. They then used a narrative inquiry cycle devised by VATE to conduct inquiries in their classrooms and met during the year to share progress and artefacts. This forum, facilitated by the group’s critical friend Amanda McGraw, will be presented as an interview with the teachers involved. Why do they have concerns about authenticity in English, what did they do in their classrooms, and what have they learned? The teachers will share examples from practice and will reflect on the impact on their teaching and students’ learning. As a group, they will examine the nature of authentic inquiry into practice and will reflect upon what they hope to do next.

Panel chair

Associate Professor Amanda McGraw, Federation University

Listening deeply to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices through text selection

I knew the style and intent of the national narrative would always be one of the greatest challenges I would have as a writer. We are all collectively the inheritors and generators of the country’s psyche, and I wanted to know how I would be affected by this. The way that this country shapes its people would constantly be on my mind while trying to tell stories of who we are, how we see the world, what our traditional ground means to us, and our desires and ambitions. The cloud is always present.

Aboriginal people have not been in charge of the stories other people tell about us. Alexis Wright, 2016

In 2023 we have the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures Cross-curriculum priority (CCP) and a deepening awareness and commitment to the CCP by VCAA, schools and teachers. This provides an opportunity to listen deeply to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices through our enactment of the CCP in subject English.

Since time immemorial Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been telling stories and crafting texts. There is a plethora of brilliant works available for study in subject English – including literary texts, films, television shows and songs – written, directed, acted, produced, and performed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors, directors, actors, singers and scriptwriters. Around the state, many subject English teachers are selecting texts authored by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

In this panel we consider text selection processes and what influences text choices when including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives through texts, what to keep in mind and how to listen deeply to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices through texts.

Panel chair

Associated Professor Jo O'Mara, Deakin University

Panel guests

Dr Tamika Worrell (Macquarie University) and Nicole Marie (Point Cook Senior Secondary College)

‘This (AI generated, Nick Cave inspired)  song sucks’:  AI, creativity, and human agency

AI related issues  are burgeoning exponentially and  at what seems at times a bewilderingly pace. Ethical issues related to copyright and intellectual property, plagarism and cheating in exams and  assignments. As with any technological change or innovation, impacts on pedagogy. And now, as each iteration of AI becomes more sophisticated, even existential threats to the profession itself in a future where teachers are marginalised or made redundant.

These are obviously issues for English teachers to consider, and no doubt many are already doing so. Perhaps even more immediate than these matters are questions we pose about any text types we ask our students to read and write. What do we ‘make’ of AI generated texts? What creative processes are involved? How do we make judgments about their aesthetic qualities and their capacity for emotional engagement? Where is their potential for authenticity, originality and personal voice?  

Nick Cave  answer to all of this was brutal. When asked by an avid fan what he thought of an AI generated version of a song inspired by Cave he dismissed it as ‘a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human’.

Author and cultural critic, Richard King, concurs, though perhaps less  apocalyptically, positing a world in which AI might indeed produce texts that challenge our concepts and expectations of creativity, but at what cost. For him it would be ‘a scenario in which the social phenomenon of artistic engagement – of creation and reception – was reduced to the mere simulacrum of itself: a travesty of agency, creativity, shared life’.

Along with Richard, we have invited a teacher librarian, Bridget Forster, and a novelist, Kate Mildenhall, to speak about AI and the creative process, and the ways in which they see AI impacting on education and the arts in general.  

Panel chair

Dr Lucinda McKnight

Panel guests

Richard King, Bridget Forster (Mentone Girls' Grammar) and Kate Mildenhall

Writers Talk Writing

Sisonke Msimang is the author of two books and the columnist behind Ms Understanding, which tackles race and racism in the Guardian on a bi-weekly basis. Sisonke has also published widely, including in the New York Times, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, and a range of other publications, focusing on questions of belonging, home, motherhood, and politics. She has been a fellow at Yale University, the Bellagio Centre, the Aspen Institute and is a long-term associate at WISER in Johannesburg.

Sisonke has also worked as a long-term collaborator with the Centre for Stories where she heads up storytelling and curated the Perth Writer’s Festival from 2020 - 2023. Sisonke has told stories on the MOTH main stage and her TED Talk If a story moves you act on it has been seen watched over a million times.

Gurmeet Kaur is a writer, critic and poet living on Wurundjeri Country. Her work appears in Kill Your Darlings, Mascara Literary Review, Liminal, The Suburban Review, Ambit, Cordite, Sydney Review of Books, Peril, The Victorian Writer and elsewhere. Gurmeet is a recipient of fellowships and residencies at Varuna, Footscray Community Arts, Incendium Radical Library, and others. She is one of the 2023 New Critics at Kill Your Darlings.

Jessica Zhan Mei Yu is a writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. Her writing has been published in Best Australian Poems, Overland, Yen, The Sydney Morning Herald, The White Review and more. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Literature Award in the Unpublished Manuscript category. But the Girl is her first novel and her first essay collection, All the Stain is Tender, is set to follow.

André Dao is a Melbourne-based writer, editor, and artist. His debut novel, Anam, won the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, the award-winning oral history project documenting the stories of the adults and children who have been detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum in Australia. His work for Behind the Wire includes a Quill award winning article for The Saturday Paper, and the Walkley Award-winning podcast, The Messenger. He co-edited Behind the Wire’s collection of literary oral histories They Cannot Take the Sky.

Ennis Ćehić is a writer whose work focuses on ideas of displacement, creativity and capitalism. His debut collection of stories, SADVERTISING, was published in March 2022 by Penguin Random House to critical acclaim and has been described as an ‘electrifying and genre-defying new voice in Australian fiction.’ SADVERTISING was released in Bosnian in August 2023 and is currently in development for a screen adaptation by See-Saw Films. He has been awarded the prestigious Wheeler Centre’s ‘Next Chapter Fellowship’ and is a recipient of a UNESCO City of Literature residency in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Ennis lives and works in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina.