SLAQ / IASL 2010 Conference

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre
Brisbane, Qld, Australia
27 September - 1 October 2010

Diversity Challenge Resilience
SCHOOL LIBRARIES IN ACTION

Keynote speakers

Confirmed speakers to date

Michael Hough

Dr. Michael Hough AM is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong, where he works in both the Graduate School of Business and in the Australian Centre for Educational Leadership. He is a member of an international think tank based at the University of Texas at Austin. He presents and writes on the impact of ICT on organizations, on generational differences and their impact on education and learning, and on improving ethical and moral behaviours in organisations. He has been National President of the Australian Council for Educational Administration.

Title: In schools that face the future: Libraries matter
This keynote address will provide an overview of the societal and economic pressures that are driving change in post industrial economies and their schools, review the characteristics of selected societies such as Australia, USA and Hong Kong, summarize the current trends in information and communication technologies and their impacts on learning and schooling, review the impacts of generational differences on schooling, and provide focused advice on the features of a school and its library that fully incorporate digital technologies. There will be a final section developing an example of a ‘preferred future’ for the Teacher Librarian as the Chief Information Officer of the school, and the library as the Information Network Hub, so that its school remains central to the needs of a modern Australian society and its learning community.

Dr. Nancy Everhart, President of the American Association of School Librarians, is an associate professor at the Florida State University School of Library and Information Studies where she serves as Director of the school library program and the PALM Center, an interdisciplinary school library research center. Her research focuses on the leadership role of the school library media specialist. She recently co-chaired the Standards Writing Committee for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards in Library Media.

Title: Invited guest or wedding crasher?: School librarians' involvement in national initiatives
Collaborative work between school librarians and educators leads to effective school library programs and the best integration of 21st century skills.  Although these partnerships can be welcome at the school level, they can be ignored on a national stage.  Governments and national educational groups often develop curricula, standards, and programs and set spending priorities, without inviting school librarian collaborators to the table.    A number of projects are currently underway in various parts of the world, including a push for national curricula in the U.S. and Australia. 

In Australia, school librarians have been invited guests to provide input into the integration of digital/information literacy across the curriculum areas.  Conversely, U.S., school librarians crashed the wedding by actively responding to the Common Core Standards Initiative by highlighting areas where information literacy skills, dispositions, responsibilities and assessments are integrated – even though they weren’t asked. 

This presentation will discuss successful and not so successful national school librarian involvement to infuse 21st century skills and what this means for professional practice.

Erica McWilliam

Professor Erica McWilliam is a co-leader of the Creative Workforce Program in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, based at the Queensland University of Technology. Her educational publications cover a wide spectrum, as is evidenced in her numerous publications on innovative teaching and learning, research methodology and training and leadership and management. Her latest book, The Creative Workforce: How to launch young people into high flying futures, is published with UNSW Press in Sydney.

Title: High standards or a high standard of standardness?
This presentation will explore the ways in which the professional dimensions of school librarianship are being challenged in Australia and elsewhere as we move into a second decade of a new century.

On the one hand, all who work in schools and support the learning of educational communities are being called to be innovators and collaborators in more open and fluid social learning networks. This demands, among other things, that we ‘unlearn’ many of our ‘standard’ educational practices, as well as our criteria for measuring them. This is because time-honoured educational habits do not necessarily serve students well when the bottom has fallen out of the stable social world in and for which their learning takes place. Given that we are preparing young people for jobs that don’t exist, using technology that has not been invented yet to solve problems that we don’t know are problems yet, there is much to ‘unlearn’ and ‘re-learn’ that challenges orthodox thinking about the nature and purposes of pedagogical work in general, and librarianship in particular.

On the other hand educators of all stripes find themselves working within an increasingly regulated, system and accountability-driven education environment. The ‘audit explosion’ has brought with it new accountabilities and new demands for contributing to the flows of information on which the effective management of our organizations is increasingly dependent. This threatens the collapse of ‘high standards’ into a demand to provide evidence that certain risks to the institution have been avoided – the risk of declining standards, of wastage of resources. To fail to ‘comply’ – i.e., to perform effective risk minimisation - leaves the institution open to having its resources reduced. The implications that flow from this are that school libraries, like other educational service sectors, are under greater pressure than ever to consider cutting back on certain services and functions that are not directly ‘auditable’ by means of standard quality measures. It is not that governments are ‘interfering’ directly in the internal workings of the various sectors, so much as that government funding flows to those areas of activity that are seen to be the most effective performers, with effective performance being framed by those governments through standard measures of ‘productivity’.

What does it mean to build and maintain high professional standards, given this push to pedagogical innovation and the pull to performance standardisation? How can we be educational players not pawns, given this paradoxical state of affairs?

John Marsden, Author - John comes to the conference at the age of 60 years and four days. In recent times his thoughts have been turning increasingly towards the life and death of his great aunt, who was Britain's third oldest woman when she died at the age of 107. John is hoping that her genetic code has been strongly imprinted upon him.

Of Anglo stock, John's early life was typical of middle-class 1950s Australia. Sir Robert Menzies, Perry Como, Ritchie Benaud, Enid Blyton. But something happened to him around the age of 14, and within a couple of years the major influences in his life were Bob Dylan, JD Salinger, the Mavis Bramston show and the movie "If...".

This degeneration continued at a steady rate, until he dropped out of university and drifted for a decade or so. At the age of 28 however he began a teaching course, and was energised by its content and the potential for creative expression that it offered. A couple of years after graduating he was offered a position at Geelong Grammar, and whilst holding the position of English coordinator at Timbertop he wrote his first novel for adolescents: So Much to Tell You.

Many other books followed, including Tomorrow, When the War Began, which has recently been filmed.

In 2006 John established Candlebark School, in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range just north of Melbourne. An alternative school, spanning Prep to Year nine, Candlebark enrols its maximum of 100 students in 2010, with 11 full-time teachers. John is principal of the school and teaches maths to senior students.

Keynote title: Notes from a long-term resident in the home for the perpetually bewildered.

Lord Melbourne supposedly said of the Victorian historian Macaulay, "I wish I could be as sure of one thing as Macaulay is of everything." But then Macaulay had been a politician before he became an historian. The only successful writers of literary fiction are those who live in a world of ambiguity and confusion, where the colour of truth is always grey. Ironically and paradoxically however, the fiction they write does offer answers. The answers may be limited, but they can help to guide us towards a more certain future. The more we understand fiction, the more chance there is we can gain some meaningful understanding of life.

But there are many different ways in which fiction can be understood. In this presentation I want to explore some of the truths commonly found in fiction, and to argue that their ubiquity is a message in itself, at the same time as these truths help illuminate the world for us. As well, I want to suggest that we can do important and powerful things for young people by making explicit for them some of the links between the main elements in fiction and the essential elements of our lives.

After spending most of my life in the realms of fiction, I've emerged in recent times into a more realistic world. Running a school has been a fascinating experience, especially in the opportunities it has provided to test theory against practice. To some extent, my school was designed to suit the children and adolescents I'd created in my fiction. Life imitating art?

Last updated 18 February 2010