Questioning the Role of Indigenous Mathematics within the National Australian Curriculum

In this essay, it will be argued that the mathematics unique to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture are not appropriate for inclusion in our national mathematics curriculum. This will be argued in regard to the integrative and impartial nature of mathematics, the importance of antecedent structuring in teaching mathematics, and the limited engagement Aboriginal …

Comparing Behaviourism and Humanism in Classroom Management

Before one develops their praxis (the application of theory into practice) one should first seek to develop, as by logical antecedence, their understanding of nexus - the relationship between theory and practice (Lyon, Ford & Slee, 2014).  It is this principle that will guide the structure of this essay, beginning first with the identification and …

Hermeneutics & re-approaching the literary analysis essay

This essay concerns a case study based upon a single student's essay response to a text (Appendix A). The student has not achieved a satisfactory level of engagement with the deeper ideas of the text through the prompt. This is the main issue which underpins the several focus areas of improvement that I would set …

Educational Philosophy & Poetry

This essay concerns the teaching strategy I would employ to teach the overarching idea, or philosophy, behind poetry. This strategy will be supported by three key principles: usefulness as opposed to inertness, the scaffolding of tasks, and the philosophical essence of education. It will be aimed at a Student X, an amalgamation of many students …

Teaching Poetry as a Living Tradition

‘Poeta nascitur, non fit’ dictates the famous aphorism - poets are born, not made. And though this three-lesson plan will concern itself with writing literary criticism and not poetry proper, it will nonetheless need to accommodate the subjective and didactic-resisting nature which rightfully belongs to the tradition of poetry. In admitting this, I do not …

Asthenocracy

If a line be not directly pointed towards a point, it will go further away as it comes nearer. Conceptions 0. Good ideas are easier to hold onto than to find, so goes a popular justification for conservatism. And if considered reasonable then it’s inverse must also be considered, as a justification for progressivism, that …

Introduction to Moscaism

"God creates out of nothing, man out of ruins. We must break ourselves to pieces before we know what we are, what we can be and do! Horrible Fate!"  - Christian Dietrich Grabbe The popular task of Art in the Middle Ages was to create a unified and shared world via the spread of religious ideals. …

Environmentalism: The Distant Phenomenology of the Apocalypse

In the wake of Greta Thunberg, the vapidity of environmentalism and the associated cringing from, if you're anything like me, any pathetic attempts to adapt it to a romantic narrative (i.e the polar bears as martyrs dying for the sins of modernity) has confused me. I know full well as do you that the state …

The incomplete Heideggerian World

I would argue that Heidegger’s account of art unconcealing a world is still relevant to contemporary art and would use the example of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica to elaborate this point. Like Heidegger’s own example of the Ancient Greek Temple which “first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves”, Picasso’s Guernica …

Modernism & the Human Mosaic

The incursion of modernity upon civilisation brought along with its many benefits a crisis of identity for the human being. This crisis of identity, generally speaking, can be divided in its fragmentation of the human’s ability to perceive one’s self through introspection and extrospection. That is to say, how one harmonises oneself within the chaos …