AustLit

The year 2012 is significant for English teachers in Australia, not only is it the National Year of Reading, but it is also the year when an increasing number of English teachers across the country are implementing the Australian Curriculum: English, the first national curriculum in the history of the nation. This paper addresses the ways in which Australian literature is privileged in both the National Year of Reading and in the Australian English curriculum documents, and considers what can be learnt about the challenges and rewards of teaching Australian literature through placing these two events, and their associated texts, in dialogue. This results in the recommendation that English teachers consider auditing the texts they set for study, and text selection practices more broadly, as part of their professional learning activities. In light of this, the second half of this paper is concerned with providing a rationale for a textual audit, and pragmatic suggestions for the way such an undertaking might be implemented (Author abstract).

In response to a focus on reading, this paper examines the notion of reading online; as such it uses the term 'networked reading' to describe any act of reading in an online or digital environment. In accordance with this notion of 'networked' reading, the paper provides a broad introduction to AustLit: the Australian Literature Resource. This is followed by an examination of a suite of services and digital tools (LORE) developed by the Aus-e-Lit project that extends the scope of AustLit records and facilitates links to external resources. The focus of the final section of the paper is on a collection of full-text resources located within the AustLit subset Children's Literature Digital Resources (CLDR). It proposes a number of ways in which these texts, and an accompanying anthology of critical articles, can be utilised in classrooms across the primary, middle and senior school spectrum (Author abstract).