AustLit

AECCP - AustLit Environments for Cross-Curriculum Priorities - is a space designed to support learning and teaching within the Australian Curriculum (v.9) cross-curriculum priorities for secondary education.

AECCP houses Learning Environments to provide rich curated content and resources for teachers and librarians to help them to identify texts relevant to the three cross-curriculum priorities and to support digital literacy development for students as database users. This includes Learning Environments for

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures 
• Asia and Australia’s Engagement with Asia 
• Sustainability

Explore AECCP.

BlackWords is an important resource for teachers and students. It provides access to Australian Indigenous-written and Indigenous-influenced stories in many forms alongside detailed information on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors and their works. It can be used as a professional development tool and in the classroom.

BlackWords can help teachers embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives in their teaching practices; expanding students understanding of Australia's history, and acknowledging the rich, diverse and continuing cultural heritage of Australia's first peoples.

The Teaching with BlackWords page offers ideas for

• exploring the BlackWords database
• using BlackWords short stories in the classroom
• using Leah Purcell's The Drover's Wife in Senior Secondary classrooms with lesson plans
• lesson plans with the film Brown Paper Bag
• planning activities using the BlackWords Calendar 

Explore Teaching with BlackWords

Teaching with Fantasy is the outcome of a 2018 professional development event for teachers titled Teaching with Fantasy: Australian Fantasy Writers in Conversation and in the Classroom. The event has resulted in a collection of teaching and learning resources for seven young adult fantasy texts. These resources were created by Lindsay Williams. This project delivers audio and video author interviews, and lesson plans related to the Australian Curriculum.

Explore Teaching with Fantasy resources

AustLit Subscribers will find lesson outlines for using speculative fiction in the classroom. These texts are primarily aimed at secondary students.

Explore Speculative Fiction Teaching Resources

Teaching Classic Australian Children's Fiction by Anthony Shaw

Anthony Shaw has over thirty years teaching experience, twenty three of those years as a teaching principal in small rural schools. Passionate in his support for rural education and state schools and a keen advocate for using classic fiction in the primary classroom, he has built these resources (and more) as a way of introducing learning activities that encourage creativity and curiosity. 

Now, in keeping with his support for the heritage and diversity of classic Australian children's fiction, he has kindly offered a selection of his lesson plans to AustLit, so that we can offer them to you.

These lesson plans offer a range of exercises: puzzles, comprehension tests, story mapping, artworks, creative-writing tasks, and more. These lesson plans are included in Anthony's Learning with Literature program (see blog).

Each is available in a convenient PDF that you can download and take straight into the classroom.

Click on the tile of your choice below for more information about the novel and to download the PDF lesson plans.

Explore Teaching with Classic Australian Children's Fiction

AustLit provides an opportunity for teachers and students to develop digital literacy skills and database competency through learning to search and navigate our complex search forms. 

This space provides an introduction to Using Bibliographic Data to Support Education and offers four digital literacy exercises:

• Lesson 1. David Unaipon
• Lesson 2. World War I - stories and storytelling
• Lesson 3. Post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction for teenagers
• Lesson 4. Australian films by and about Aboriginal Australians

These exercises are designed to help students use the AustLit database to return specific, targeted results. Although the lesson outlines can be used selectively or out of order, they encourage progressively more sophisticated uses of the database, beginning with lesson one, which draws primarily from a single biography, and building to lesson four, which benefits from building complex searches.

Visit Data and Digital Literacy through AustLit.

Teaching Australian Gothic Theatre with Angela Betzien

This collection of resources is focused on Australian Gothic theatre and the different ways it can be taught in Grade 7 to 12 Drama. They explore selected works by Australian playwright Angela Betzien and her involvement within the Australian Gothic landscape. The lesson plans and units of work, which can be implemented in classrooms, focus upon an array of concepts, ideas, themes, and values that were evident within Australian history.

Explore Teaching Australian Gothic Theatre

Designed to introduce teachers and readers to Australian adaptations, re-writings, and other modifications of Shakespearean plays, this exhibition explores versions of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet for young-adult readerships, as well as works where Shakespeare is studied and performed in schools, Shakespeare for younger readers, and Aboriginal versions of Shakespearean texts.

Explore Shakespeare for Australian Young Adults.

Copyright Agency has developed Reading Australia to make significant Australian literary works more readily available for teaching in schools and universities. These works are being supplemented with online teacher resources and essays about the enduring relevance of the works written by contemporary authors.

AustLit has partnered with Copyright Agency to create a series of curated information trails that provide context and supporting information relating to the included texts.

Read the Guide on 'How to use AustLit Trails: For Teachers' by Reading Australia (2018).

Explore the Reading Australia Information Trails

AustLit also curates freely available teaching resources, including publisher's teaching notes, collaborative projects with Reading Australia, or AustlLit-created content for teachers.

Browse these resources here, or click on the individual links below for different types of records with teaching resources:

The Asian-Australian Children's Literature and Publishing (AACLAP) project investigated and recorded details of Australian children’s literature published from 1970 to 2013.

These works were either set in Asia, contained Asian-Australian content or characters, represented Asian-Australian cultures and experiences, and included hundreds of Australian works that have been translated into at least one Asian language.

AACLAP project investigated and recorded details of Australian children’s literature either set in Asia, works that contain Asian-Australian content or characters, works that represent Asian-Australian cultures and experiences, as well as hundreds of Australian works that have been translated into at least one Asian language.

AACLAP is a rich, comprehensive bibliographic dataset of literature published during a 43-year period from 1970 to 2013. It comprises agent (authors or organisations) and work records related to ’Asia’, specifically ‘South and East Asia’, including East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Bay of Bengal. The collection includes autobiographical works, fiction, criticism, poetry, drama, short stories, film/tv, manga, graphic novels and picture books.

Visit AACLAP.

Children's Literature and the Environment Exhibition

The Children's Literature and the Environment Exhibition aims to identify such literature across different forms and genres in Australia where discussions of environmental waste, climate change, species endangerment, ecocitizenship, and the effects of globalisation on the environment are major concerns.

The Exhibition provides a space for researchers and students to access and engage with bibliographical data on a range of literary and critical texts that provide various environmental perspectives of contemporary Australian children’s literature. This Exhibition does not aim to be a critical examination of the genre, but rather a space to begin research into this area and a site to draw inspiration for education professionals using such literature in classrooms.

Visit Children's Literature and the Environment.

AustLit's Necessary Conversations are curated lists of picture books, children's fiction, and young-adult novels that are designed to spark important conversations for social learning.

Issues such as homelessness, domestic violence, anxiety and depression; environmental concerns such as climate change, bushfires, and floods; and awareness of the richness and diversity of Australian communities and cultures are all topics covered in this section.

The Necessary Conversations are publicly available lists that we hope will begin these conversations from the earliest age, and help teachers and parents make use of Australian stories to build social confidence and empathy in young readers.

Explore Necessary Conversations

Using Bibliographic Data to Support Education and Teaching

This guide will help users to understand the many ways to search, use and share bibliographic data through AustLit. Creating digital humanities projects with your students can aid development of 21st century skills, prepare them for tertiary study and bridge gaps between old and new texts and media.

Through AustLit advanced search, you can locate different kinds of data about author heritage, translations languages, and text type and genre. 

Explore the Guide to Using Bibliographic Data to Support Education

This page provides video guides to understanding AustLit records and using the database.

Explore the resources.

AustLit publishes original work by researchers in all aspects of Australian story-telling and print culture.

These research projects can be explored to learn more about AustLit literary history and storytelling, and as research tools to inform educational resources.

The projects cover a broad range of topics including children's and young adult fiction, disability, genre, music, print culture and more.

Visit AustLit's Research and Publications page.