3rd Global Conference
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Friday 9th February - Sunday 11th February
2007
Sydney, Australia
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 2: Another View of Creative Engagement
Chair: Mike Hagan
The ‘Hero’s Journey’: Personal Resonance as Response
to Narrative
Kori
Nemme Wollongong University, NSW, Australia
This paper discuses an investigation into the claim made by Joseph Campbell that all narratives across all cultures and time have a similar underlying structure which he termed the ‘Hero’s Journey’. Using one year six class and their teacher as a case study, this paper details the investigation into Campbell’s claim and describes the relationship between using the ‘Hero’s Journey’ as shared reading experience and personal resonance as response to narrative. The findings of this project have implications for the implementation of the ‘Hero’s Journey’ as a reader response tool for learning narrative on a meaningful and personal level, and the development of a personal development program incorporating the use of narrative.
Digital Stories and Animations: Engaging Creativity
in Education
Lyn
Hawkins
Finn Cragg Multimedia, North Perth, Western Australia
Captivating, intriguing and stimulating storytelling forms an essential springboard for creative expression. New technology makes it viable to create, tailor and deliver content in a contemporary and engaging medium. When Finn Cragg Animation and Multimedia Studio worked with Australian teachers and students during 2005/2006, new methods to inspire student inquiry, interpretation, creative thinking and creative pursuit were generated using short dialogue-free animations and multimedia resources made accessible to students. In this presentation, a number of interesting classroom case studies will be described that indicate the important role of new media in engaging creativity in very different education contexts, with an emphasis on laying the creative and technical foundations for young story tellers and achieving multiple learning outcomes. These trials were undertaken in primary, secondary and ESL classrooms, and resulted in the development of new animation-focused education resources which will be showcased during this presentation. To highlight the value of utilising new media and ICTs in literacy education and to develop the skills and processes that support aspiring storytellers and cultivate critical literacies, samples of student's work in repurposing texts will be shown. Lyn will also discuss how Australian teachers are utilising multimedia to interconnect overlapping learning areas such as English, Media Production and Analysis, Texts, Traditions and Cultures, the Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design. Delegates who are interested in trialling the multimedia resources developed as a result of the research discussed in this presentation are invited to bring their laptops to the workshop being held on Sunday 11th at 09.00.
Cultural Contexts and Critical Thinking
in Children’s Engagement
with Texts: Indigenous Australian Artist-in-Residence and Text Creation
in a Primary School
Rob Davis
This paper reports on a project developed out a photographic survey of the entrances to 120 primary schools in regional area of Victoria, Australia, with only four suggesting a relationship with Indigenous Australia in some way. Thus 116 schools welcome parents/caregivers, children and teachers to institutions which recognise only their relatively recent migrant heritage. The project has constructed this dimension of school entrances as a discursive field which foregrounds the country’s European history, thereby silencing Indigenous Australian voices. It has constructed school entrances as visual texts read as European-focused, integral to foregrounding and silencing functions of discourses. Taking up such issues, the project has initiated an Indigenous Australian Artists-in-Residence program in one of the schools for children’s engagement with visual, oral, music and print-based texts in relation to Australianness as being more than European-based constructs of history and current sociocultural perspectives. In doing so, it examines a major problem in relation to these children’s successful engagement with more comprehensive Australian history and modern society in the school they attend, beginning with the entrance to their school being read and then rewritten as visual text by children to acknowledge the positioning of their school on traditional custodians’ land.