Some Moore about me

Ok, perhaps you would like to know more about me ... perhaps not.

Last year was a busy one. My first year of teaching was excellent, tiring, and crazy. Highvale is not a bad school and I feel like I've certainly settled in well. The English faculty has been excellent and supportive and have helped me feel as though they valued my contributions. I feel like I've been able to give quite a bit to the faculty as well.

In addition to work, I also studied for an honours degree in Education (at Monash Uni). It has been a very rich experience. I was given a H1 for the effort and asked to apply for a PhD scholarship. I'd love to do some more research, but I think this will have to wait a couple of years. There have been a couple of promising outcomes from the research and from my collaboration with a number of talented colleagues, including a journal article in English Teaching: Practice and Critique, v2 n3. The article is called Reframing Beginning English Teachers as Knowledge Producers: Learning to Teach and Transgress. I co-wrote this with my colleage Katrina Mathews, who is actually studying for a Masters and teaching English and History at a local High School. This online journal is mostly the work of Terry Locke, a teacher educator and academic at the University of Waikato in NZ, who has set up a web called Critical English Online, as a way of promoting discussion and dialogue about English teaching.

Anyway to the article is a good way to understand some of the issues that some beginning teachers face as they enter the profession. We wrote it in response to the lastest International Federation for the Teaching of English (IFTE) conference, held in Melbourne during 2003 (July). Katrina and I helped organise some of the workshops at the conference as part of a teacher group we were co-opted into by our good friend Brenton Doecke. This teacher group is called the PIC group (professional identity and change). Brenton was our English Method lecturer while at Uni, and subsequently my honours supervisor (and Katrina's masters supervisor). He's all round nice guy too. The rest of the PIC group has been helpful too (Graham, Helen, Marion, Jill, Seamus)

As well as this bunch, there was also some input from Barbara Comber and Barbara Kamler, noted academics and researchers. Barbara C (Uni SA) and Barbara K (Deakin, Vic) were good enough to invite Katrina and myself to participate in a ARC funded research project that has been investigating teachers' ability to research and write about their own practices.

Anyway enough about all that.