Tennant Creek and Australia’s Unresolved Past Winner of the 2022 Australian Political Book of the Year Award 'A drily elegant, bracing work from a pained and open heart' —Helen Garner 'Refreshing and original. A unique window on Australia's past and its barbed resonance today … Essential reading for anyone interested in the challenge of truth-telling.' —Mark McKenna 'A graceful, unostentatiously scholarly, wise (and highly readable) book on a subject of overwhelming and enduring significance for all Australians.' —Robert Manne The tale of a town, and a nation Returning after fifty years to the frontier town where he lived as a boy, Dean Ashenden finds Tennant Creek transformed, but its silence about the past still mostly intact. Provoked by a half-hidden account, Ashenden sets out to understand how the story of 'relations between two racial groups within a single field of life' has been told and not told, in this town and across the nation. In a riveting combination of memoir, reportage and political and intellectual history, Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence – from its beginnings in the first encounters of black and white, through the work of the early anthropologists, the historians and the courts in landmark cases about land rights and the Stolen Generations, to still-continuing controversy. In a moving finale, Ashenden goes back to Tennant Creek once more to meet for the first time some of his Aboriginal contemporaries, and to ask how the truths of Australia's story can best be told.
Schools are livelier and more humane places than they were a generation or two ago. But many things are going badly in the basics of school life — in behaviour, discipline, school refusal, bullying, engagement, mental health, wellbeing — as well as in learning. Too many start behind, stay behind, and then leave early, unhappy and ill-equipped. The standing and morale of teachers are at a low ebb. Repeated attempts at reform large and small, local and national, haven’t worked. The “education revolution” of the Rudd–Gillard years failed. And yet thinking and policy continue to be dominated by its language of “performance” and “accountability,” its tests, MySchool, “national approach” and “school reform agreements” and its stunted view of what schools can be. Unbeaching the Whale offers a more generous way of thinking about schools. It insists that they can and should deliver twelve safe, happy and worthwhile years for everyone. It argues compellingly for a different kind of reform — of governance, of the sector system, and above all of the daily work of students and teachers. Pungent, sober, inspiring, urgent, Unbeaching the Whale is that rare thing, a book about schooling that is lucid, jargon-free, challenging and gripping. Dean Ashenden has worked in and around schools as a teacher, academic and consultant, and in journalism. He has contributed to all major print outlets and to many professional, academic and social affairs journals. His previous book, Telling Tennant’s Story, was inaugural winner of the Australian Political Book of the Year Award. He is a Senior Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
Curriculum evaluation publication in which the issues of outcomes-based education are discussed. Demonstrates how an outcomes-based approach can improve curriculum, student assessment and reporting to parents. Suggests ways in which outcomes frameworks can be used and adapted by individual schools and teachers. Each chapter is summarised on blackline OHT masters. Also includes readings about outcomes-based education. Bill Hannan has been involved with the development of the Australian curriculum profiles. Dean Ashenden has been a teacher at primary, secondary and tertiary levels and has been a consultant to schools, school systems and governments in all states and at the national level in Australia.
Schools are livelier and more humane places than they were a generation or two ago. But many things are going badly in the basics of school life — in behaviour, discipline, school refusal, bullying, engagement, mental health, wellbeing — as well as in learning. Too many start behind, stay behind, and then leave early, unhappy and ill-equipped. The standing and morale of teachers are at a low ebb. Repeated attempts at reform large and small, local and national, haven’t worked. The “education revolution” of the Rudd–Gillard years failed. And yet thinking and policy continue to be dominated by its language of “performance” and “accountability,” its tests, MySchool, “national approach” and “school reform agreements” and its stunted view of what schools can be. Unbeaching the Whale offers a more generous way of thinking about schools. It insists that they can and should deliver twelve safe, happy and worthwhile years for everyone. It argues compellingly for a different kind of reform — of governance, of the sector system, and above all of the daily work of students and teachers. Pungent, sober, inspiring, urgent, Unbeaching the Whale is that rare thing, a book about schooling that is lucid, jargon-free, challenging and gripping. Dean Ashenden has worked in and around schools as a teacher, academic and consultant, and in journalism. He has contributed to all major print outlets and to many professional, academic and social affairs journals. His previous book, Telling Tennant’s Story, was inaugural winner of the Australian Political Book of the Year Award. He is a Senior Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
First published in 1982, Making the Difference has become a classic in the study of education and of Australian society. Hailed on publication as 'certainly the most interesting book written about Australian schools in a very long time [and] arguably the most important', it has since been recognised as one of the 10 most influential works of Australian sociology, 'not just a major argument, and a 'classic' point of reference, [but] an event, an intervention in ways of doing research and speaking to practice, a methodology, a textual style. it was designed to be read by a much wider audience than the standard sociological text, and it has succeeded'. Making the Difference draws on a detailed study of the schools and homes of the powerful and the wealthy, and of ordinary wage-earners. It allows children, parents and teachers to speak for themselves and from what they say it develops strikingly new ways of understanding 'educational inequality', of how the class and gender systems work, and of schools and their social roles. 'Equality of opportunity', co-education, and 'relevant and meaningful curriculum' are all questioned, sympathetically but incisively. Ranging across educational policy from system level to the everyday experience of kids and teachers, from the problems of schooling to the production of class and gender relations, this path-breaking combination of theory, research and politics remains engaging, thought-provoking, and relevant.
Tennant Creek and Australia’s Unresolved Past Winner of the 2022 Australian Political Book of the Year Award 'A drily elegant, bracing work from a pained and open heart' —Helen Garner 'Refreshing and original. A unique window on Australia's past and its barbed resonance today … Essential reading for anyone interested in the challenge of truth-telling.' —Mark McKenna 'A graceful, unostentatiously scholarly, wise (and highly readable) book on a subject of overwhelming and enduring significance for all Australians.' —Robert Manne The tale of a town, and a nation Returning after fifty years to the frontier town where he lived as a boy, Dean Ashenden finds Tennant Creek transformed, but its silence about the past still mostly intact. Provoked by a half-hidden account, Ashenden sets out to understand how the story of 'relations between two racial groups within a single field of life' has been told and not told, in this town and across the nation. In a riveting combination of memoir, reportage and political and intellectual history, Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence – from its beginnings in the first encounters of black and white, through the work of the early anthropologists, the historians and the courts in landmark cases about land rights and the Stolen Generations, to still-continuing controversy. In a moving finale, Ashenden goes back to Tennant Creek once more to meet for the first time some of his Aboriginal contemporaries, and to ask how the truths of Australia's story can best be told.
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