Pre-conference Forum

Details of the one day pre-conference forum are now available.

Conference keynote speakers

Join them at the 2009 ACAL 32nd Annual Conference from Thursday 1st October – Saturday 3rd October 2009 to be held at the Esplanade Hotel in Fremantle, Western Australia.

'Beyond Schooling: Towards a more adult LLN curriculum'

Dr Rob McCormack
Victoria University, Melbourne

There is an inevitable temptation inherent in LLN to infantilise our students and curriculum, and to treat them both as less than adult. This must be resisted. Adults must be respected as adults: that is, as people who are responsible for their own lives, for the lives of their families, community and culture, and even more broadly, who care about the world and its future. Adulthood is an ethical responsibility, not just an age demographic. This calls for a more adult curriculum. Rob will offer some theoretical observations and practical suggestions towards this task and sketch the long history of an almost forgotten form of ‘education for adulthood’, ancient rhetoric, a pedagogy which has been overwhelmed by the rise of mass schooling for children. Rob will also suggest a number of practical strategies including public speaking, peer mentoring, and using web 2.0.

Dr Rob McCormack spent many years working to formulate some coherent theory and practices for Adult Basic Education as a rounded education for 'second chance adults'. From the mid-90s he worked at Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, Northern Territory, Australia with a strong focus on developing academic and civic literacy for Indigenous adult students. Now at Victoria University, Melbourne, he has established teams of student rovers employed as peer mentors to assist other students in the Learning Commons. His ambition now is to assist in rethinking and reworking the language and literacy pedagogy at his VU college so that it becomes more worldly and more able to meet the university community's educational, social, political and theoretical ideals.

Dr Peter Waterhouse

Workplace Learning Initiatives

The Strengths in Us All

[First attempt - synopsis for ACAL, Fremantle, October 2009]

Searching for a synopsis, aching for an abstract,

The problem is,
The writer doesn’t know, til it’s written.
The speaker doesn’t know, til it’s spoken.
The researcher doesn’t know, til it’s found.
I’m sure I’ve got something to say,
Something worthwhile
I’m sure.
I’m dead sure of it.
I’m just not sure exactly what it is
Yet
It’s about identity, personal and professional.
Who do you want me to be today?
It’s about why (still) literacy matters
And numeracy too.
It’s about bookshelves and biographies
It’s about stories of strength and inspiration.
Yes, it’s about strengths,
Finding our strengths,
Re-cognition of our strengths,
Owning our strengths,
Working from Strengths.
It’s about the research, and
It’s about the strengths in us all.

Peter Waterhouse is the Managing Director of Workplace Learning Initiatives, a specialist RTO and research company he established with colleagues in the early 1990’s. Peter is (amongst other things) an employer-manager, practitioner-researcher, VETrepreneur, adult educator, storyteller, bush-walker, photographer and poet; and (more recently) a Grandfather! All of which he tackles with great enthusiasm, passion and (he says) less ability than he would wish for. He has worked as a TAFE teacher, an ALBE consultant, teacher educator and university lecturer. He has had a lifelong interest in adult literacy and learning, particularly informal and experiential learning. His recent research projects have focussed on appreciative enquiry and strength-based practice, themes which will resonate well with our 2009 Conference.

'What counts, who counts; developing understandings of numeracy teaching from international and cross cultural experiences'

Dave Baker
London Institute of Education

Dave Baker's keynote will draw on his research over many years and in many countries, including parts of Africa. His findings have led him to argue that theoretical models arising from viewing numeracy as social practice lead to a more inclusive and equitable approach to the teaching of mathematics. These models are more likely to allow a more nuanced understandings of relationships, contrasts and tensions between adults’ everyday numeracy practices and formal educational mathematics. For the many teachers in Australia who are teaching numeracy to students from different cultures, Dave's workshops and presentations will provide useful insights into the issues for both teachers and students.

Dave Baker is based at the London Institute of Education in the UK where he is a Reader in Adult Numeracy and post-16 Mathematics. Dave is passionately interested in the issue of social justice and mathematics. His aim is to transform dominant practices in mathematics education by developing teaching models and policies based on understanding maths as social practice. He currently works with teachers in the UK, South Asia and Ethiopia, training them to use socially and culturally sensitive approaches to teaching numeracy. Dave's Keynote presentation and workshops at the Adults Learning Maths conference in Melbourne in 2005 were very popular and we are delighted to welcome him back to the ACAL conference in Perth.

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