Write what you know: the COVID experience is a rich resource for year 12 English exams

Generations of students sitting exams would know what Australian poet Joanne Burns means when she writes of the fear of failure when expressing ideas.

they don’t come out of your mouth in smooth formation very often […]

you become intimidated far too easily by the prospect of that great black trapdoor under your words, that might open and tumble you down to the cavern of indefinite shame if you start to make the slightest mistake […]

In 2021, English students are not only striving to overcome the “trapdoor” under their words, they are doing so in a year that has challenged them to see their world very differently.

COVID-19 has shaped a year of uncertainty. For secondary students eyeing the finish line of their school days, the disruptions to life, and disappointments from cancelled rites of passage, have been a crash course in the vicissitudes of human experiences.

Read more: Fears loom for teens undergoing vital brain development during COVID. Telling stories might help

There is no denying the serious challenges faced by so many. But senior students writing English exams can also use their experiences from this period of turbulence as a source of inspiration.

Write what you know, but stand outside your experience

Classroom-based research has long supported the importance of “harnessing students’ own knowledge, experience, imagination and memories” in writing. Helping students to tell their own stories is a powerful way to value their experiences and support their identity.

Read more: 'I'm in another world': writing without rules lets kids find their voice, just like professional authors

Authors often use their everyday perceptions of the world as a source of inspiration. Novelist P.D. James famously observed:

You absolutely should write about what you know… [but] You have to learn to stand outside of yourself. All experience, whether it is painful or whether it is happy, is somehow stored up and sooner or later it’s used.

Drawing on lived experience doesn’t have to be explicit. Standing outside of yourself means not literally recounting a life story in boring detail. It means being original and doing what good writers do by asking questions to re-imagine personal experiences.

Questions you could ask yourself include:

• what if the personal experience was told from a different perspective?

• how could a character trait or emotion be exaggerated for comic or tragic effect?

• how could the setting be changed to become more dramatic, unfamiliar, surreal, or perhaps possible in the future?

• what if you use a flashback or flashforward to delay the action and build suspense?

• could the dominant mood be altered to take the narrative in a different direction?

Using these techniques you could write about Zoom gatherings and viral TikTok dances in a satirical way.

Or consider using the enduring tensions around individual choice and collective responsibility as an example or metaphor in a writing task or persuasive text (writing an argument).

Use the writing prompt, but be interesting

Writing tasks in English exams include prompts. These vary widely but commonly focus on human experience and are broad enough to open a wide range of possibilities you could use in your writing.

In a past senior English Queensland exam, students were asked to use a set of images and develop a narrative using the theme of “a fork in the road”.

In one of the images a man wearing a backpack is standing in a forest.

For this task, you could use the image and “fork in the road” theme to explore potential decisions that could come about from having experienced social isolation during COVID. For instance, after the pandemic is over, do you want to return to your old social life or continue spending more time by yourself?

English exams often contain excerpts from texts as a writing stimulus, like this one from the short story Underdog, by Tobias Madden, which appeared in a NSW exam.

This is my world now, and it can be yours too, if you like. A place can soak through your skin like sweat, and ooze into your heart and soul. Breathe it in, and let me tell you a story.

With a prompt like this, you could use personal experiences such as:

• a familiar location such as a disused warehouse in a local street, or the carefully styled loft apartment from an influencer’s social media post

• comparisons between two worlds – your known world (a bustling commercial landscape) and another world (a desolate, urban landscape waiting for people to re-inhabit it)

• a memoir-style description of a grandparents’ house, as told to a younger family member with use of dialogue in English and the student’s first language to construct authenticity.

Read more: Inside the story: writing trauma in Cynthia Banham's A Certain Light

It is always important for students to closely follow the task instructions because the marking criteria will assess the extent to which students are able to reflect the task parameters in their response.

Rote-learned, off-task pieces of writing will not be graded highly by markers.

English offers a unique space for students to write about their world. If students write what they know but make it interesting, their experiences during their turbulent senior year can be reshaped into meaningful and creative exam writing tasks.

Janet Dutton, Senior Lecturer, Secondary English, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Mateship might sound blokey, but our research shows women value it more highly than men

Mateship is an intrinsic part of Australian society, routinely discussed as an important national value. In 1999, Prime Minister John Howard even attempted to include mateship in the constitutional preamble.

But despite its ubiquity in Australian culture, what does mateship mean to people and how do they really feel about the term? Our new Australian Mateship Survey attempted to find out.

In a survey of over 500 respondents, we found that while support for the concept of mateship is high among Australians, many find it problematic.

And surprisingly, women supported the idea of mateship being a key feature of Australian national values more strongly than men (70% and 60%, respectively). This finding stands out since mateship has historic masculine connotations – a perception that was supported by many of our respondents.

Short history of mateship in Australia

Mateship is a common word in many countries, but it has come to have a special meaning in Australian English. The Australian National Dictionary defines it as “the bond between equal partners or close friends; comradeship; comradeship as an ideal”.

While that definition is gender-neutral, mateship has historically been seen as a male domain. One of our respondents succinctly described it as “friendship, but bloke-ier”.

There is a long mythology of mateship in Australia. Canonical bush writers such as Henry Lawson drew on the concept of mateship, enshrining it as part of the Australian bush tradition of the late 19th century.

In the first half of the 20th century, mateship came to be closely associated with the ANZAC legend – and this remains the case today.

In the 1970s, historian Miriam Dixon, among others, challenged the cultural dominance of mateship and argued it was an exclusionary concept. For Dixon, mateship was “deeply antipathetic to women”.

By the 1990s, Howard claimed the term had outgrown its masculine origins and could be regarded as an inclusive national ideal. Nevertheless, his plan to include the term in the constitutional preamble was roundly criticised and ultimately abandoned.

The purpose of our research was to test attitudes towards mateship two decades after this public debate to see how people view it today.

Positive feelings on mateship – except when used by politicians

Our survey posed a series of questions that sought to determine if and how respondents used the term “mate”, whether they believed mateship was important in Australia, and how people defined it.

A strong majority of respondents (82%) said they use the word “mate” in conversation and nearly 65% responded yes when asked, “Is mateship a key feature of Australian national identity?”. Many respondents also had positive things to say about mateship in their comments.

Our survey also showed women overall had a slightly more positive view of mateship compared to men and non-binary or gender-fluid respondents, despite the fact many women found the term to be too “blokey”.

Read more: Get yer hand off it, mate, Australian slang is not dying

While mateship is seen as a positive Australian value by most, we found there is suspicion when politicians try to gain political mileage from it.

When asked if politicians should invoke mateship in national rituals such as speeches on Australia Day and ANZAC Day, only 45% of our respondents said yes.

Without mentioning the phrase’s origin with the Howard government’s proposed addition to the constitutional preamble in 1999, respondents were asked if they supported the line, “We value excellence as well as fairness, independence as dearly as mateship”. Only 39% said yes.

Mateship and exclusion

While most of our respondents (60%) said they believed mateship includes “all Australians”, a sizeable minority said the term is exclusive on gender and racial lines.

Many of the comments associated mateship not only with men, but specifically with white men. One respondent described it as “a dog whistle for white nationalism and misogyny”. Others suggested mateship was “too white male-centric” and “mateship feels like a boy’s club, specifically for white men”.

Read more: Paul Hogan and the myth of the white Aussie bloke

This perhaps reflects a sense of distrust people feel when mateship is used in political discourse. Australia’s political leaders are predominantly white and male, and regularly use the language of mateship to speak of solidarity and political community.

Like Howard, recent leaders have attempted to harness its cultural power. In fact, then-Treasurer Scott Morrison said in parliament in late 2015 that “mateship is the Australian word for love”.

Our survey shows there are many Australians concerned with attempts to force mateship as a civic ideal, as political rhetoric often does.

The future of mateship

Although mateship is largely seen as a positive feature of Australian life, defining it is difficult and attempts to politicise it are generally frowned upon.

Our survey also found that, for a significant minority, the exclusionary connotations of mateship are too strong for it to be a unifying civic ideal. For many of our respondents – as with critics of Howard’s constitutional preamble – the term has not outgrown its sexist and exclusionary baggage.

In his history of mateship, Nick Dyrenfurth notes it has always been contested. The diverse range of responses to our survey support this.

As a result, we believe that political attempts to take ownership of mateship and enshrine a particular definition as a civic ideal are more likely to divide than unite.

Naama Carlin, Lecturer, UNSW; Amanda Laugesen, Director, Australian National Dictionary Centre, Australian National University, and Benjamin T. Jones, Senior Lecturer in History, CQUniversity Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia’s oldest dinosaur was a peaceful vegetarian, not a fierce predator

Ipswich, about 40 kilometres west of Brisbane, seems an unlikely place to find dinosaur fossils. Yet the area has produced the oldest evidence of dinosaurs in Australia.

A fresh look at these fossils now reveals they aren’t what they first seemed, and it’s prompting us to reconsider how the story of Australia’s dinosaurs began.

In research published today in Historical Biology, we reanalyse a sequence of 220-million-year-old tracks from the Ipswich Coal Measures, thought to have belonged to a carnivorous dinosaur.

We show they actually belonged to an early sauropodomorph — a distant relative of the plant-eating sauropods that roamed the planet much later, during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. This is the first time fossil evidence of early sauropodomorphs has been found in Australia.

Subterranean dinosaur tracks

The Ipswich area was once the principal source of coal for Queensland. Its suburbs including Ebbw Vale, New Chum and Swanbank were dotted with underground mines during the late 1800s and the first half of the twentieth century.

These mining operations involved the creation of deep shafts and tunnels, from which miners could access deposits of coal sandwiched between other layers of rock. Some tunnels would descend hundreds of metres below the surface.

The coal would be removed from the seam by hand, and pillars were left in its place to support the ceiling of the resulting underground “room”. It was difficult and dangerous work.

In 1964, miners working at the Rhondda colliery in New Chum made a startling discovery. As they removed the coal from a seam they were following 213 metres below the surface, a series of giant, three-toed tracks became exposed in the ceiling of the mine shaft. For the miners, it was as if a dinosaur had just walked over their heads.

These tracks remain the oldest-known dinosaur fossils in the entire continent. They’d been made by a dinosaur walking across a layer of swampy vegetation, which would be extracted as coal 220 million years later. Buried under fine silt and mud, they’d been preserved as natural casts.

It had been assumed some type of predatory dinosaur made the tracks. The only problem was the footprints were reportedly about 40–46 centimetres long. This would suggest the track-maker was just under 2m high at the hips.

This isn’t necessarily large for a theropod such as Allosaurus fragillis, which was about this size. Tyrannosaurus rex was even bigger, with a hip height of about 3.2m.

But the tracks found in Ipswich were created during the Late Triassic about 220 million years ago — 65 million years before Allosaurus and 150 million years before T. rex. And fossil evidence from around the world indicates theropods of a larger size didn’t appear until the start of the Early Jurrasic Period, 200 million years ago.

Was something unusual afoot in Australia during the Late Triassic?

As part of a broader review of Australian dinosaur tracks, we decided to take a closer look at the Rhondda colliery tracks. The mine has long been closed, so the original tracks are no longer accessible, but archival photographs and a plaster cast are held at the Queensland Museum.

Read more: Introducing Australotitan: Australia's largest dinosaur yet spanned the length of 2 buses

Dispelling the myth of the ‘Triassic terror’

Using the photos and cast, we created a 3D digital model of the track to allow a more detailed comparison with other dinosaur tracks from around the world.

Our study revealed two important things. First, the footprints were not as big as initially reported. Excluding drag marks and other unrelated surface features, they are close to 32–34cm long (not 40–46cm as previously documented).

Second, the shape of the footprints and the sequence in which they were made is more consistent with early sauropodomorphs. Sauropodomorphs were the distant relatives of the lumbering sauropods of the Late Jurassic and subsequent Cretaceous Period.

The towering Triassic terror of the Ipswich Coal Measures was no more. In its place was a peaceful plant-eater.

The remains of early sauropodomorph dinosaurs have been found in Upper Triassic rocks, aged between 220 million and 200 million years, in continental Europe, Argentina, Brazil and South Africa.

And by the start of the Jurassic, 200 million years ago, they had achieved a near global distribution, with fossils in North America, China and Antarctica. This isn’t surprising, given the continents at the time were still connected in a single landmass called Pangaea.

Our new interpretation of the Rhondda colliery tracks shows early sauropodomorphs lived in Australia, too, and that Australia’s first dinosaurs were friendlier than we thought.

Read more: The march of the titanosaurs: the Snake Creek Tracksite unveiled

Steven W. Salisbury, PhD; Senior Lecturer, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland and Anthony Romilio, PhD, Independent Researcher, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

From counting birds to speaking out: how citizen science leads us to ask crucial questions

My utopia is based on one simple idea: we should all become citizen scientists.

Why? Because citizen scientists can overturn the information inequity that plagues much of our collective decision-making. If citizens immerse themselves in gathering knowledge and asking questions, they gain power – and are far more likely to engage in participatory democracy. This is fundamental to achieving sustainable environmental change.

Let me give you an example. Over the last 25 years, I’ve been lucky enough to be an active participant in the development of marine spatial plans in many countries.

These plans aim to deliver win-win outcomes for nature, climate, the economy and equity. If you protect marine areas from fishing and other human uses, the fish and other species will bounce back, increasing the number of fish we can catch outside the parks.

But there’s a problem. To work, these plans need buy-in from everyone from artisanal fishermen to national governments. Ideally, that means people need to be able to understand fish growth, movement and population dynamics to be able to discuss the issues on a level playing field. At present, that isn’t always possible.

That’s why I have my hopes pegged on a rapid expansion and celebration of citizen science.

What is citizen science?

The Australian Citizen Science Association defines citizen science as:

public participation and collaboration in scientific research with the aim to increase scientific knowledge.

In short, it’s where lay people collect and sometimes analyse, interpret and share scientific information.

Finding out which species live where is often the first step to becoming a citizen scientist. Many people do this without realising.

Every day, thousands of birdwatchers enter data about birds they’ve seen into apps. This collective undertaking can become almost addictive for the user. On a mass scale, it allows us to produce maps showing where species are present, where they are not, and in some cases their abundance.

This citizen-collected data is exactly the kind we need for better spatial planning and environmental regulations. Collecting this data across large areas quickly would be almost impossible without the help of citizen scientists.

A huge body of scientific literature has been built around assembling, analysing and interpreting community-gathered spatial data.

Read more: Citizen scientists are filling research gaps created by the pandemic

Citizen science creates informed citizens

Citizen science also creates informed citizens who ask crucial questions.

Are there errors in the data and do they matter? How can we make distribution maps when so many parts of Australia are rarely visited by people? What does this data tell us about whether species are becoming more or less abundant, or changing their distribution?

If we collectively create and share data on species distributions, that allows communities to meaningfully discuss thorny issues such as the tension between threatened species and urban development.

Is a block of koala habitat important even if no koala has been seen in it for a couple of years? Should we be planting koala habitat in other areas?

The next fundamental question - what is changing? – is what leads citizen scientists further into engagement with science and collective decision-making.

This question has been important in improving policies for more than 50 years. Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book about environmental science, Silent Spring, was inspired in part by data collected by birdwatchers in the US showing some species were declining rapidly. That book led to changes in pesticide policy and gave rise to the modern environmental movement in the US.

To truly understand change, citizen scientists ideally collect data in the same way, at the same locations and across many years. Though this type of data requires more commitment and more attention to process, it produces the most valuable outcome: information on changes in species distribution and abundance.

For instance, the Threatened Species Index has influenced policies such as the recent review of the federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which exposed Australia’s failure to arrest the decline in listed threatened species over twenty years.

But this index would not have been possible without the data generated by citizen scientists (and researchers and governments). It was the quality of the data that made clear the alarming trends for our wildlife.

Knowing that the sky is falling is necessary, but it’s not enough. Knowing what to do about the falling sky is much more useful. This happens when a citizen scientist begins asking how our actions cause change.

Read more: Our turtle program shows citizen science isn't just great for data, it makes science feel personal

Speaking up and speaking out

In my ideal world, everybody in Australia would not only be asking questions about what causes changes to the environment but would also be involved in solving the problems we face and making the most of whatever opportunities emerge.

For example, we have found that the work of recreational fishers in monitoring species abundance and size of fish in and outside of protected areas proves powerful advocacy for more marine zoning.

When people see with their own eyes how fish increase in size in protected zones compared to fishing zones, they often become advocates for protected areas. To me, this is a clear example of the power of information and connected knowledge in locally managed ecosystems.

Any utopia requires decision-making by the people, for the people. For us to make good decisions together, we need to have equal access to information - not only consumption, but production.

That’s why I see citizen science as so important. It’s information produced by the people for everyone’s benefit. Its power lies in the opportunities it gives anyone to learn about the world, to ask questions about how it is changing, and and how our actions are affecting that change.

More and more citizen scientists are willing to speak up and speak out about matters they care about, and to question policies or decisions they disagree with. Science has given them power to speak with authority. If we were all citizen scientists, information inequities would be a thing of the past.

This piece has been adapted from Professor Possingham’s essay in Griffith Review 73: Hey, Utopia!

Hugh Possingham, Professor, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.