In early 2021, in the wake of the global #MeToo movement, an online petition in Australia generated more than 500 testimonies from school students, depicting experiences of sexual assault during their time at school and asking for more emphasis to be given to consent education in secondary schools.
In response, the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA) advised that consent education would be introduced into the Australian curriculum in holistic, age-appropriate ways.
This event explores research conducted by the Literary Education Lab (University of Melbourne) in collaboration with the Stella Prize. The ‘Reading Consent’ report looks at the ways high school English curriculum can best highlight diverse perspectives on issues of consent, and demonstrates that the teaching of literature is an important site for consent education.
At this in-conversation event, young adult authors who contributed to the report – Cath Moore and Rebecca Lim – as well as high school English teacher Antony Monteleone, will join the report’s lead author Professor Larissa McLean Davies to discuss its findings. Panellists will consider the implications of this research for pre-service English teacher preparation and in-service professional learning, as well as the support that teachers need to lead conversations about consent in English classrooms.
Join us to explore the intersections of literacy and consent, and the untapped potential of high school English to shape students’ experiences of power and consent.
Rebecca Lim is an Australian writer, illustrator, editor and lawyer. She is the author of over twenty books, including The Astrologer’s Daughter (a Kirkus Best Book of 2015 and CBCA Notable Book for Older Readers), Wraith and the internationally bestselling Mercy. Her work has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, shortlisted multiple times for the Aurealis Awards and Davitt Awards, and longlisted for the Gold Inky Award and the David Gemmell Legend Award. Rebecca is a co-founder of the Voices from the Intersection initiative to support emerging young adult and children’s authors and illustrators who are First Nations, People of Colour, LGBTIQA+ or living with disability, and is a co-editor of Meet Me at the Intersection, a groundbreaking anthology of YA #OwnVoice memoir, poetry and fiction. Her most recent novel, Tiger Daughter, was published in February 2021. It is a powerful novel about growing up Asian in Australia.
Antony Monteleone is a secondary school teacher in the outer west of Melbourne. A teacher of English, Literature and History whose passion is working with students to see education as an authentic and liberating experience.
Of Afro Caribbean and Anglo Irish heritage, Cath Moore is a freelance writer, award-winning filmmaker and educator. She has written for the Age, Huffington Post Australia and SBS Life and has also worked as a story developer for screen content. Cath is a published academic with a PhD in Danish screenwriting practices. Her debut novel Metal Fish Falling Snow won the Victorian Premier’s Literary award for YA fiction. She was a contributor to the anthology Growing Up African in Australia and is currently working on her second novel. Cath teaches creative writing at The University of Melbourne.
Larissa McLean Davies is Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Melbourne. Her research is concerned with the education of teachers across the career span, and specifically with how disciplinary knowledge is understood in the context of decolonising curricula imperatives.
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