Lessons Beyond Education

Imagine making a speech in parliament! Johanna Baker Dowdell was on hand to listen to high school students across Australia compete in the My First Speech competition. This event, run by the Department of  the House of Representatives, challenges students to imagine themselves as a newly elected Member of  Parliament to write and deliver a speech  on an issue that they are passionate about. 

Some of my earliest memories of reading are from the collection of Little Golden Books we had at home, along with Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, The Magic Pudding and an old musty collection of Greek myths and legends that I adored.

Reading was an activity I loved from an early age and it still gives me great pleasure now. However, it was when I went to school that my eyes were opened to the wider benefits of reading, and indeed education in general.

My new role as a federal electorate officer within the Senate necessitates regular visits to Parliament House. It was during one of these trips that I came across some high school students with very bright futures participating in the My First Speech competition. Be inspired by these young Australians and listen to their speeches.

Tasmanian entrant, Clara Kim from Taroona High School in Kingston, placed third with her passionate speech about how the government could increase access to education in Australia’s rural and regional areas. l

As Clara pointed out in her speech, “from the moment we wake up, the life of students living in rural and regional areas differs vastly”.

She went on to illustrate how Australian education is a “one-size-fits-all system, where we try to make rural students more like their urban peers, when we know their circumstances are vastly different”.

The government keeps committing to investing billions and billions of dollars into rural and regional education, but this particular homogenous fix has been around since the 1960s and “the problems with rural educational opportunities still remain unchanged”.

“Instead, we need to take a different approach – create a system where we can provide different working solutions tailored to specific communities,” Clara suggested.

Clara proposed a partnership between schools and their community that would work to overcome the unique obstacles that hindered the educational opportunities in that rural area or region.

For example, schools could collaborate with businesses to create transition plans and run career workshops to help students gain the skills they need for relevant rural careers; locally resourced scholarships to help the disadvantaged within the community; or culturally responsive strategies aligned with traditions and cultural value to bridge the disconnection between education and rural indigenous life for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

“School-community partnership allows just that. It can provide so many effective working solutions tailored to specific communities, instead of having one over-arching solution,” Clara said.

She finished by saying, “the government should develop unique ways to improve educational opportunities on the basis of community partnership because, as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to build a school”.

Tailoring education for individual communities would need an overhaul of our educational system, which cannot be taken lightly. However, I think what Clara’s thinking illustrates is that the idea of there being more beyond our own limited experience starts with the quest for knowledge that books feed.

Johanna is a media and communications officer, journalist and author of the book Business & Baby on Board.

Blog: http://johannabd.com/

Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JohannaBakerDowdell

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JohannaBD

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Storytellers: Yes, that’s you!

Inspired by her involvement in the CBCA Tasmania’s Tasmanian Authors & Illustrators in Schools program, Christina Booth prompts us all to seek the inner storyteller within us all. It is little wonder that her school visits are inspirational!

How wonderful to hear of the funding awarded to CBCA Tasmania branch to assist schools hosting authors (illustrators are authors too) for workshops and visits across the state. This is such a great opportunity, especially for those schools who have never experienced a school visit before.

Once you have had an author visit your school, you will be hooked. The difference in how your students approach writing and reading and visual narrative is immediately obvious, and it also inspires the entire school community for a long time.

It is like going on your first cruise (so I am told, not having been on one): you will become addicted because of the outstanding positive benefits across the whole school community.

I am very excited to have been one of the many authors visiting schools since early July. I gain greatly from these visits too. Being a cave dwelling creator, it is always good for the creative soul to get out into the daylight and be replenished by meeting your audience and sharing and inspiring writers and readers of all ages. One of the things I love is hearing stories from others and discussing the stories I have created.

This year, one of my focuses and passions has been to talk to students of all ages about storytelling. Not just in books, but how important it is to our families, communities and society.

Are you a storyteller?

This is where I start when talking about storytelling. Because in an era when we tend to sit and wait for others to do things for us to enjoy and experience, we often fail at seeing ourselves as storytellers. 

Everyone is a storyteller.

We talk about the importance of stories, what we gain from them, how they help us to learn about our world, ourselves and each other. We share a great list of ways we can tell stories, including books, and how every day we add to our own story by hearing other people’s stories as well.

Are you a story collector?

The collection of stories is so important. We can’t begin to be good storytellers if we can’t collect stories. We need to collect them from what we see and hear, what makes us sad and happy and everything in between. We collect stories so they stay alive, because stories are alive. Everyone is a story collector.

We are story keepers.

In order to be a good storyteller and a story collector, we must be story keepers. The protectors of stories, our own and those entrusted to us. We are all story keepers.

This all sounds like a lot of hard work!

It can sound a bit overwhelming to know that we are and need to be these things. In fact, it sounds a lot like a scene from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The good news is that it isn’t. When we realise that we are these things, nothing changes except our awareness of our role, our abilities and that we need to be aware of them and practice them. As we sit back and watch and read and listen to the stories of others, we have become a society that has forgotten our own role in this important part of our humanity.

*** Stories glue us together.

*** Stories help us not to repeat the same mistakes.

*** Stories help us to learn in a safe environment.

*** Stories help us to grow into a person with a voice.

*** Storytelling keeps stories alive through the generations.

Letting children and reminding the adults in the room that this is our role, in whatever format we can, I begin to open doors to confident storytelling and believing in what we do. This is what I try to show in my workshops and presentations at schools.

I am about to embark on an exciting month in a public Hobart primary school, funded fully by their P&F fundraising, as an artist in residence. We are focusing on these elements and growing our skills, the whole school community, not just the students, in order to create stories in different formats. For three days a week I will work alongside the students, parents and staff to create our stories, be they a picture book, a short story, a newspaper or magazine story, a visual narrative or an oral presentation.

We will all be

*** Story collectors,

*** Story keepers and ultimately,

*** Storytellers.

I wish you all well as you do the same.

Trust yourselves, make amazing discoveries and celebrate this amazing part of our humanity.

Christina Booth
Story collector, keeper and teller in her talks to readers and within her extraordinary picture books.

The Travelling Workshop

Julie Hunt and Dale Newman have been visiting schools to share their work and inspiration with Tasmanian school children. Discover some of the imaginative and engaging activities that children have participated in and the powerful  mentoring these award winning children's book creators provided.

During Book Week, artist Dale Newman and I had the rare opportunity of travelling and working closely for days on end as we visited schools around Tasmania.

If a picture book is a conversation between words, images and the spaces in between, our journey was something similar. I see it as a week-long storyboard, the roughs for a comic strip in which children and book creators collaborate to create the beginning of multiple stories.

Squint - inspired by St Helen's District School students;
illustrated by Dale Newman

Our workshops evolved along the way and included live drawing, map-making and the creation of promising characters. Here’s Squint, a pavement artist invented by Grade 4/5 students at St Helens and drawn up by Dale under their instruction. He’s either an orphan who lives on the street or else a wealthy boy with a secret life who goes home each night to his family mansion. The students continue their various versions of the story after the workshop ends.  

A highlight of the week was the CBCA High Tea at Devonport. High winds and wild weather provided us with a power outage which made for a cosy atmosphere – candles, torchlight and no powerpoint (literally!).

The days were full of talk, stories and pictures and the after-school conversation would have continued into the evening if Dale had not been busy working to meet her deadline for our next book, Shoestring – The Boy Who Walks on Air. It was lovely going to sleep to the sound of drawing, the charcoal pencil moving across the page, and exciting to wake in the morning and see another finished illustration.

Dale Newman illustration for Shoestring - The Boy Who Walks on Air

Thank you to CBCA and the schools for inviting us!

Julie Hunt

Children's Author
W: http://www.juliehunt.com.au/

Dale Newman
Children's illustrator and artist
W: http://www.dalenewman.com.au/

                                                                    

Editor's Note: I was one of the privileged and highly entertained guests at the Book Week High Tea. What a memorable and delightful candlelit evening it was with both Julie and Dale sharing their inspiration and talents.