This collection recounts the story of leaving America, where the author was born, and of arriving in Australia, where she did not plan to stay. It is a tale of unsettling and resettling, of leaving as an ongoing process. Each micro-scene is a snapshot of time and place – spanning decades and moments, continents and conversations, wars, dreams and kitchen tables – to capture the psychological and spatial tensions between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Leaving New Jersey is a lyrical re-experiencing of putting down roots and tearing them up, an extraordinary poetic account of an ordinary woman's quest for home. Barbara Kamler’s Leaving New Jersey is a captivating collection of prose poems. These lyrical, deeply moving poems work like sepia-tone postcards where family scenes are honed back to overheard talk, glimpsed expressions, streets and living rooms. The poems invite us, quietly, into the wistfulness and uncertainty that shadows moving from one country to another. Most importantly, the poems reveal a hard-won emotional depth and focus that is at the heart of these indelible, minimalist narratives. – Anthony Lawrence This story is full of pain and beauty. Readers with experiences of loss, separation, and the awful dilemmas of parenting will treasure it for its precise honesty. These are the sorts of stories it is difficult to write about, and it is even more difficult to bring to such stories the shaping sensibility of a poet. Barbara Kamler’s book is a triumph of honesty and artfulness. – Kevin Brophy
Helping Doctoral Students Write offers a proven approach to effective doctoral writing. By treating research as writing and writing as research, the authors offer pedagogical strategies for doctoral supervisors that will assist the production of well-argued and lively dissertations. It is clear that many doctoral candidates find research writing complicated and difficult, but the advice they receive often glosses over the complexities of writing and/or locates the problem in the writer. Kamler and Thomson provide a highly effective framework for scholarly work that is located in personal, institutional and cultural contexts. The pedagogical approach developed in the book is based on the notion of writing as a social practice. This approach allows supervisors to think of doctoral writers as novices who need to learn new ways with words as they enter the discursive practices of scholarly communities. This involves learning sophisticated writing practices with specific sets of conventions and textual characteristics. The authors offer supervisors practical advice on helping with commonly encountered writing tasks such as the proposal, the journal abstract, the literature review and constructing the dissertation argument. The first edition of this book has helped many academics and thousands of research students produce better written material. Now fully updated the second edition includes: Examples from a broader range of academic disciplines A new chapter on writing from the thesis for peer reviewed journals More advice on reading and note taking, performance and conferences, Further information on developing a personal academic writing style, and Advice on the use of social media (blogs, tweets and wikis) to create trans-disciplinary and trans-national networks and conversations. Their discussion of the complexities of forming a scholarly identity is illustrated throughout by stories and writings of actual doctoral students. In conclusion, they present a persuasive and proven argument that universities must move away from simply auditing supervision to supporting the development of scholarly research communities. Any supervisor keen to help their students develop as academics will find the ideas and practical solutions presented in this book fascinating and insightful reading.
There are a number of books which aim to help doctoral researchers write the PhD. This book offers something different - the scholarly detox. This is not a faddish alternative, it’s not extreme. It’s a moderate approach intended to gently interrupt old ways of doing things and establish new habits and orientations to writing the PhD. The book addresses the problems that most doctoral researchers experience at some time during their candidature – being unclear about their contribution, feeling lost in the literature, feeling like an imposter, not knowing how to write with authority, wanting to edit rather than revise. Each chapter addresses a problem, suggests an alternative framing, and then offers strategies designed to address the real issue. Detox Your Writing is intended to be a companionable work book – something doctoral researchers can use throughout their doctorate to ask questions about taken-for-granted ways of writing and reading, and to develop new and effective approaches. The authors’ distinctive approach to doctoral writing mobilises the rich traditions of linguistic scholarship, as well as the literatures on scholarly identity formation. Building on years of expertise they place their emphasis both on tools and techniques as well as the discursive practices of becoming a scholar. The authors provide a wide repertoire of strategies that doctoral researchers can select from, rather than a linear lock step progression through a set of exercises. The book is a toolkit but a far from prescriptive one. It shows that there are many routes to developing a personal academic voice and identity and a well-crafted text. With points for reflection alongside examples from a broad range of disciplines, the book offers thinking tools, writing tools, linguistic tools, and reading tools which are relevant to all stages of doctoral research. This practical text can be used in all university doctoral training and composition and writing courses. However, it is not a dry how-to-do–it manual that ignores debates or focuses solely on the mechanical at the expense of the lived experience of doctoral research. It provides a practical, theorised, real-world, guide to postgraduate writing.
Love, regardless—the second collection from Melbourne-based Barbara Kamler—is an enthralling gallery of poetic portraits celebrating love that endures. It features a unique mode of storytelling, whereby interviews with fourteen couples are poetically crafted into rhythmic, syllabic verse. For each couple, each poem explores the intimacy of first connecting and the various complications negotiated along the way – crushing pressures of sexual or racial norms, the challenge of chronic illness or disparate histories, and demands of extended family, geographic distance or migration. Yet these are sanguine stories that transcend the trials of the everyday, making real the possibility of mutual love and joy over a lifetime.
This title presents a theorized approach to writing that is crucially combined with strategies designed to assist the writer, guiding them through the various intellectual and practical phases of writing a journal article.
It’s not easy getting published, but everyone has to do it. Writing for Peer Reviewed Journals presents an insider’s perspective on the secret business of academic publishing, making explicit many of the dilemmas and struggles faced by all writers, but rarely discussed. Its unique approach is theorised and practical. It offers a set of moves for writing a journal article that is structured and doable but also attends to the identity issues that manifest on the page and in the politics of academic life. The book comprehensively assists anyone concerned about getting published; whether they are early in their career or moving from a practice base into higher education, or more experienced but still feeling in need of further information. Avoiding a ‘tips and tricks’ approach, which tends to oversimplify what is at stake in getting published, the authors emphasise the production, nurture and sustainability of scholarship through writing – a focus on both the scholar and the text or what they call text work/identity work. The chapters are ordered to develop a systematic approach to the process, including such topics as: The writer The reader What’s the contribution? Beginning work Refining the argument Engaging with reviewers and editors Writing for Peer Reviewed Journals uses a wide range of multi-disciplinary examples from the writing workshops the authors have run in universities around the world: including the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the United States. This international approach coupled with theoretically grounded strategies to guide the authoring process ensure that people at all stages of their career are addressed. This lively book uses a combination of personal stories, student texts, published journal abstracts and excerpts from interviews with journal editors and publishers. Written in an accessible style, one which does not use the patronising ‘you’ of advice books, it offers a collegial approach to a task which is difficult for most scholars, regardless of their years of experience.
There are a number of books which aim to help doctoral researchers write the PhD. This book offers something different - the scholarly detox. This is not a faddish alternative, it’s not extreme. It’s a moderate approach intended to gently interrupt old ways of doing things and establish new habits and orientations to writing the PhD. The book addresses the problems that most doctoral researchers experience at some time during their candidature – being unclear about their contribution, feeling lost in the literature, feeling like an imposter, not knowing how to write with authority, wanting to edit rather than revise. Each chapter addresses a problem, suggests an alternative framing, and then offers strategies designed to address the real issue. Detox Your Writing is intended to be a companionable work book – something doctoral researchers can use throughout their doctorate to ask questions about taken-for-granted ways of writing and reading, and to develop new and effective approaches. The authors’ distinctive approach to doctoral writing mobilises the rich traditions of linguistic scholarship, as well as the literatures on scholarly identity formation. Building on years of expertise they place their emphasis both on tools and techniques as well as the discursive practices of becoming a scholar. The authors provide a wide repertoire of strategies that doctoral researchers can select from, rather than a linear lock step progression through a set of exercises. The book is a toolkit but a far from prescriptive one. It shows that there are many routes to developing a personal academic voice and identity and a well-crafted text. With points for reflection alongside examples from a broad range of disciplines, the book offers thinking tools, writing tools, linguistic tools, and reading tools which are relevant to all stages of doctoral research. This practical text can be used in all university doctoral training and composition and writing courses. However, it is not a dry how-to-do–it manual that ignores debates or focuses solely on the mechanical at the expense of the lived experience of doctoral research. It provides a practical, theorised, real-world, guide to postgraduate writing.
Love, regardless—the second collection from Melbourne-based Barbara Kamler—is an enthralling gallery of poetic portraits celebrating love that endures. It features a unique mode of storytelling, whereby interviews with fourteen couples are poetically crafted into rhythmic, syllabic verse. For each couple, each poem explores the intimacy of first connecting and the various complications negotiated along the way – crushing pressures of sexual or racial norms, the challenge of chronic illness or disparate histories, and demands of extended family, geographic distance or migration. Yet these are sanguine stories that transcend the trials of the everyday, making real the possibility of mutual love and joy over a lifetime.
This collection recounts the story of leaving America, where the author was born, and of arriving in Australia, where she did not plan to stay. It is a tale of unsettling and resettling, of leaving as an ongoing process. Each micro-scene is a snapshot of time and place – spanning decades and moments, continents and conversations, wars, dreams and kitchen tables – to capture the psychological and spatial tensions between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Leaving New Jersey is a lyrical re-experiencing of putting down roots and tearing them up, an extraordinary poetic account of an ordinary woman's quest for home. Barbara Kamler’s Leaving New Jersey is a captivating collection of prose poems. These lyrical, deeply moving poems work like sepia-tone postcards where family scenes are honed back to overheard talk, glimpsed expressions, streets and living rooms. The poems invite us, quietly, into the wistfulness and uncertainty that shadows moving from one country to another. Most importantly, the poems reveal a hard-won emotional depth and focus that is at the heart of these indelible, minimalist narratives. – Anthony Lawrence This story is full of pain and beauty. Readers with experiences of loss, separation, and the awful dilemmas of parenting will treasure it for its precise honesty. These are the sorts of stories it is difficult to write about, and it is even more difficult to bring to such stories the shaping sensibility of a poet. Barbara Kamler’s book is a triumph of honesty and artfulness. – Kevin Brophy
This essential guide offers a new approach to doctoral writing, written specifically for doctoral supervisors. Rejecting the DIY websites and manuals that promote a privatised skills-based approach to writing research, Kamler and Thomson offer a new framework for scholarly work to help doctorate students produce clear and well-argued dissertations. Drawing on a wide range of research and hands-on experience, the authors argue that making an original contribution to scholarly knowledge requires doctoral candidates to do both text and identity work. Their discussion of the complexities of forming a scholarly identity is illustrated by the stories and writing of real doctoral students.
Addressing the current and growing interest in the personal, the self, and the autobiographical not only in the teaching of writing, but also across many disciplinary and subject fields, Relocating the Personal describes a rich array of practical approaches to teaching the personal in settings where it has been excluded. The author argues for the teaching of writing as a political project in schools and communities, and for a notion of the personal which is not simply equated with voice. The construct of narrative is preferred, because it allows teachers to examine all personal writing as a representation and not the same thing as the writer's life. Strategies are developed for examining how experience is portrayed and how it might be written differently, with material effects on both the personal text and the writer's person. The book incorporates the latest theories of critical and genre literacy as it develops four teaching cases in different education contexts (secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and adult/community).
Drawing on long-term case studies of four primary schools located in these communities, this book describes the difference between what is commonly practiced and those practices that have a greater chance of supporting young people’s literacy learning. This book aims to provide an explanatory account of these complex schooling contexts and the policy logics under which they operate.
Until now, there has been no systematic analysis or review of the research on gender and literacy. With all the media attention and research surveys surrounding gender bias and the inequities that continue to flourish in education, a synthesis of the research studies was needed to raise awareness of gender issues in learning and literacy, to provide successful interventions and recommendations to educators, and to point out the direction for future inquiries by examining the unanswered questions of the existing research. For the convenience of readers, the studies are organized by genre: gender and discussion, reading, writing, electronic text, and literacy autobiography. Published by International Reading Association
How can teachers ensure a pedagogy of possibility underpinned by social justice, and what has literacy got to do with this? This book explores the positive synergies between critical literacy and place-conscious pedagogy. Through rich classroom research it introduces and demonstrates how a synthesis of insights from theories of space and place and literacy studies can underpin the design and enactment of culturally inclusive curriculum for diverse student communities, and illustrates how making place and space the objects of study provide productive resources for teachers to design enabling pedagogical practices that extend students’ literate repertoires. The argument is that systematic study of and engagement with specific elements of place can enable students’ academic learning and literacy. Literacy, Place, and Pedagogies of Possibility is informed by critical literacy, place-conscious pedagogy and spatial theory is richly illustrated with examples from classroom research, including teacher and student artifacts provides new directions for classroom practice in critical literacy This novel combination of multidisciplinary theory and classroom research extends previous work in critical literacy pedagogy, drawing on two decades of ethnographic and collaborative inquiry in classrooms situated in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms.
Like an increasing number of educators, you recognize that girls and boys approach reading and writing differently, and that boys are lagging behind girls in many assessments of literacy learning. This book does more than describe and explain these differences. It builds on the authors' state of the art research to offer instructional strategies and classroom activities to help both girls and boys develop as readers and writers. This book is for classroom teachers in grades 3 - 8 as well as for reading specialists, instructional leaders and other educators. It provides detailed descriptions of instructional activities, accompanied by reproducible tools and materials; illustrative examples of student work; concise summaries of state-of-the-art research; and ideas for action research projects. The strategies and activities in this book have all been classroom tested with diverse student populations.
STORIES OF WOMEN AND AGEING BY GLENDA ADAMS, LILY BRETT, SARA DOWSE, ELIZABETH JOLLEY, JOANNA MURRAY-SMITH, GEORGIA SAVAGE, ROBERTA SYKES AND ELISABETH WYNHAUSEN. Eight of Australia's most celebrated women writers tackle the difficult subject of ageing, and why we as a society find it an awkward subject to broach. Each of the three editors who put this collection together share an interest in writing, gender and ageing, and two of the editors actively work in the area, one teaching creative writing to women aged 60-85, the other as Project Director at the Alma Unit on Women and Ageing at Melbourne University. The editors invited the eight eminent contributors to write about their experiences of ageing, asking them to reflect on what ageing means to them and to explore how their own stories challenge cultural understandings of women and ageing. They felt that, when it came to ageing, there were few storylines available to women outside the traditional stories of lost youth and physical deterioration. Powerful and positive images of older women in contemporary Australian literature and culture are rare. What we need, and what this collection gives us, are stories of ageing which give us more authentic, complex and diverse representations of what it means to grow old. After all, it will happen to all of us if we're lucky.
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