voices

voices, conversation, and community

This website is intended to provide an inclusive democratic space for all educators in English language and literacy. Although the website operates from within Monash University’s pre-service English education course, we hope it provides an opportunity for participation by groups of educators across all levels of experience (pre-service, early-career and more experienced teachers; retired teachers; teacher educators), from widely diverse settings (urban, regional, school-based and community-based, state, independent, TAFE, Australian, overseas). It’s important to point out that the term ‘educators’ can include researchers who are also teachers and teachers who are also researchers.

So, we see this as a professional space, a community space, a discursive space, a space for individual voices and group voices to come together in an ongoing professional conversation. Although the space encourages a sense of community, this does not mean we expect consensus or even a ‘common language’ uniting all the voices of different groups and individuals.

The professional conversation in this space could inquire into everything from teaching practices and teacher identities in particular local settings to education and socio-political policy at state, national or international levels. Having proposed these broad boundaries, though, we might safely assume that different voices in the conversation will feel some freedom to choose the focus for their conversations. The focus might be on issues of curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, professional identity and professional learning, and the way that these interact with and impact upon each other. Invariably, different voices will be critically engaging with what they know and yet imagining possibilities with respect to any or all of the above. And we’d like to think that some voices will be speaking in or to spaces beyond the very boundaries we propose here.

Shakespeare Hardhat



	If standards could be used to promote genuine professional development, improve knowledge of teaching practice and raise the professional standing of teachers, I welcome them. If all teachers could be involved in the kind of collaborative, productive development of literacy teaching standards we were involved in with STELLA – fantastic. Robyn Perkins 2000