Australian School Library Association

Professor Barry McGaw is a Vice Chancellor's Fellow at The University of Melbourne and Chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. He had earlier been Director for Education at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris and Executive Director of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Psychological Society, and an Officer in the Order of Australia.

Keynote presentation: Resourcing and supporting the Australian Curriculum
This session addresses Australian Professional Standards for Teachers - 2.3.2

The Australian Curriculum is organised under learning areas, which reflect traditional disciplines of knowledge, and general capabilities, which some call 21st century skills. A third dimension provides for three current cross-curriculum priorities that are given special attention in the expectation that, in due course, they will become securely established in curriculum.

The curriculum is constructed with content (knowledge, understanding and skills) at its centre. All three dimensions (learning areas, general capabilities and current cross-curriculum priorities) are provided for through the one set of content descriptions, with the online curriculum making clear which elements of each dimension are served by each content description. With respect to all three dimensions, the content is sequenced developmentally through the years of schooling.

The content descriptions present students' learning entitlements. Except for a few cases where the content descriptions imply pedagogy (such as in the teaching of initial reading skills which attention to phonics), questions of pedagogy are seen as matters for teachers and schools and, in some cases, school systems.

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Dr Mandy Lupton is Senior Lecturer in Teacher Librarianship at the Queensland University of Technology. She is the author of The Learning Connection: Information Literacy and the Student Experience (2004) and Information Literacy and Learning (2008), both published by Auslib Press. Mandy’s interest in inquiry learning began when she was coordinator of an inquiry learning project in first year curriculum at the Australian National University in 2002-2003. She is currently researching teacher-librarians’ inquiry learning pedagogical practices.

  Keynote presentation: Inquiry Learning and the Australian Curriculum
This session addresses Australian Professional Standards for Teachers - 1.2.3; 2.1.3; 3.2.3

This presentation examines how inquiry learning is portrayed in the Australian Curriculum. It explores how inquiry is represented, developed and sequenced from Foundation to Year 10 in several subject areas. It compares inquiry models from a range of disciplines with the inquiry strands in the Australian Curriculum. It analyses and compares how information literacy and inquiry is represented, developed and sequenced in the inquiry strands and general capabilities.

Professor Erica McWilliam is an internationally recognised scholar in the field of pedagogy with a particular focus on workforce preparation of youth in post-compulsory schooling and in higher education. She is a Fellow of the Australian Council of Education and an Associate Fellow of the Learning and Teaching Council of Australia. Erica's research and scholarship focuses on 'low threat, high challenge' pedagogy in and for the 21st century. Her sole-authored book, The Creative Workforce: How to launch young people into high flying futures', is published by UNSW Press.

Keynote presentation: Library Pedagogy in the Era of Big Data
This session addresses Australian Professional Standards for Teachers - 1.2.3

The burgeoning volume, variety, velocity and veracity of the data that is shaping our social world means that we cannot hope to teach the next generation of young people what they need to know to live, learn and earn well. What we can and must do is to build young people's capacity to manage their own learning in such a way that they can engage meaningfully and ethically with a world replete with uncertain data and unfamiliar concepts and processes. In the era of Big Data, much of the information that young people encounter is fictitious or misleading. Given this, our pedagogy needs to assist young people to transcend a 'type and pray' approach to investigating information. Erica's presentation explores the challenges of pedagogy in the era of Big Data, and how we might respond more realistically in our libraries and classrooms.

Hamish Curry

Keynote presentation: Between a Dropbox and a hard place
This session addresses Australian Professional Standards for Teachers - 2.6.4

The digital and the physical have obviously created new challenges and opportunities for libraries and learning. The tools at our fingertips are diverse, networked, versatile, and present new ways to conceptualize content. These tools are not only changing our work, but it is still only emerging how we use physical spaces in this context; and the innovations just keep coming! This closing keynote will bring together some of the ideas from the Conference, as well as experiences from programs at the State Library of Victoria and other institutions to explore what it means to integrate technology and pedagogy effectively. This will lead into the considerations for school leadership, how it connects vision with practice, what it means to educate young people in the world of cloud computing, and the implications for the continued growth and expertise of the teaching profession.