Reinvigorate your secondary English teaching and classroom with John Marsden 2024095F

Date and time

Tuesday 19 November 2024, 9.30 am to 3.30 pm

Delivery mode

In person at ISV, 40 Rosslyn St, West Melbourne

Audience 

Secondary School Educator, Leader

Description

The line, ‘the dearest freshness deep down things’, by the 19th-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, known for his innovative use of language and imagery, sets the scene for this exclusive opportunity to join John Marsden as he challenges secondary English teachers and school leaders to reinvigorate English teaching in the classroom.

Language makes us and shapes us, but a lack of language can break us. As Jane Gardam says, ‘every child is a poet until she is eight years old’. 

But rare is the person who leaves school still able to communicate thoughts, feelings, ideas, opinions in a voice which is distinctive and true.

English teachers are exceptionally powerful agents in enabling children to retain and even increase their language skills. Without these skills, people’s lives are at risk, in tangible and intangible ways.

John Marsden will outline the basic principles upon which he believes English teachers should base their practice. Among these are the awareness that there are no rules in English... just conventions.

Learning those conventions is worthwhile: they are often an effective way to communicate. But simultaneously with the teaching of conventions should be so much more: the empowering of students to use language with verve, with emotion, with truth… to develop what we like to call 'personal voice’.

Key takeaways

• Greater understanding of how to teach students to think and feel and observe, at the same time as they talk and write
• A large number of strategies to help students experiment with language, and to be adventurous and unafraid
• Tools to take away… such as new English lessons and activities.
  
  

Presenter information

John Marsden
John Marsden was born in Melbourne in 1950. From an early age he enjoyed the journeys into the magical worlds that reading can provide. 

John’s teachers in Grade 4 and Grade 6 encouraged him to write, and at the age of nine he decided he wanted to become an author.

For seven years John attended The King's School Parramatta, a strict military school in Sydney. From there he went on to the University of Sydney, to study Arts/Law. However, he soon decided that a career in law looked stultifying, so he dropped out and drifted around for nearly 10 years, trying a remarkable variety of jobs.

At the age of 28 he began a teaching course, which he loved from the start. Embarking on a teaching career also fuelled his interest in writing. In 1987 he succeeded in getting his first book, So Much to Tell You, published. A string of hits followed, highlighted by the Tomorrow, When the War Began series. John has now sold more than six million books in Australia alone, but is an international bestseller, with many major awards to his credit.

John's interest in education has never waned. In 1998 he bought the Tye Estate, 850 acres of natural bush, near Romsey, and later added the property next door. For eight years he ran enormously popular writers' courses and camps at Tye, before starting his own school there, Candlebark, in 2006. Then in 2016 he added a second school, Alice Miller, at Macedon, for students in Years 7-12. 

In 2024, John still teaches classroom English – and loves it.

Link(s) to relevant VRQA Standards

• Curriculum and Student Learning – Student learning outcomes