
Shortly after landing in Sydney, I was met by my friend and native Aussie, Alan and his partner Lauren, who gave Tara and I a proper welcome to Australia. Dinner and a long walk was enough to convince me that we had arrived in a fine city: incredibly diverse, unique sights, and plenty to do. Alan and Lauren equipped us with an extensive list of essential Aussie experiences, from Mrs. Mac’s Meat Pies to Mambo T-shirts. I was especially impressed when they both mentioned Possum Magic as quintessential Australian children’s reading, written by Mem Fox who is a friend of one of our scheduled authors to meet.
After two days of sightseeing and, most notably, visiting with Brian Cambourne in Sydney, we flew to Brisbane to meet Brenda Parkes and observe classes at Sunnybanks Elementary School. I wished for more time in Sydney, but Brisbane warmed up to me after an epic night of salsa dancing at the outdoor Queen Street Mall, and an impromptu dash through downtown to catch the River Festival fireworks show. Cardboard shells from the fireworks literally rained on us from the tops of every skyscraper.
Lunch with Brian Cambourne
Brian Cambourne’s “Conditions of Learning” are widely referenced in education books, and while I was somewhat familiar with them, it wasn’t till our trip to Wollongong University that I heard the whole story. Here’s how I recall it…
Cambourne, after years of teaching children in Australia, was perplexed by his classroom experience. How is it some of his students, who are capable of highly complex thinking outside of school, struggle with reading and writing inside school? And how is it that virtually all children can learn language, an act of utmost complex thinking? What theory of learning can explain how people learn language and literacy, while reconciling the difficulty many children face in classrooms?
Thanks to a group of willing families, some wireless microphones and a pair of binoculars, Cambourne was able to research this topic by listening in on the conversations and interactions of toddlers with family, adults, children, and themselves. After collecting three years of data, he posited that seven conditions always seemed to be present when language was learned, for instance, children were immersed in spoken and written language, were provided demonstrations of language in everyday conversations, and were allowed to approximate, or “have a go” at speaking while they are learning. Wondering if these conditions could be relevant to pedagogy, he spent the next four years observing teachers who applied the conditions to literacy learning in their classrooms. They were.
For post-doctoral work, Cambourne took a Fulbright visiting-scholar fellowship at Harvard, where he furthered his work on his conditions, studied linguistics with Noam Chomsky, and was once given a bus ticket by Jeanne Chall (of all people) to visit a guy with his own theory of learning to read, another hero of mine, Ken Goodman. I can only imagine what it felt like to meet someone whose life’s work is so complementary to your own. Since then he’s been teaching, writing, and continuing to refine his conditions for various contexts of learning.
The rest of our conversation will have to be dealt with in another post, but it left me charged for the rest of the week. After our talk, we had a lovely lunch, also with Phil Phitzsimmons and Jan Turbill, another two incredibly talented researchers. The professors gave us two of their books on reading and writing, which I gladly took the responsibility of reading and annotating for our Japanese group. This trip has sent my “Books to Read” list through the roof.
Shared Reading with Brenda Parkes
I was probably least familiar with Brenda Parkes out of our four people to visit, yet most pleasantly surprised. We were given a tour of Sunnybanks Elementary school in Brisbane, before an impromptu shared-reading session with Brenda and 3 of her brand new books. She was lovely, always carried herself with a smile, was charming around children, literally on the edge of her seat ready to interact with them. She’s also a meticulous and incredibly thoughtful children’s writer, which we were able to discuss thoroughly during an after-lunch Q&A.
Brenda Parkes has rewritten several folk tales (Gingerbread Man, The Little Red Hen) into versions more suitable for shared reading. One of the most promising ideas that came out of our discussion was the possibility of our Japanese principals and teachers using her books as a model for rewriting Japanese folk tales for shared reading. Many of the teachers also shared pictures of projects done in the nursery schools using her books, and Brenda graciously invited them to send the pictures and stories to her email, where she can post them on her upcoming website devoted to teachers and students in classrooms around the world.
And I must say a few things about Sunnybanks. This was a large elementary school of students ages 5-12, representing 60 nationalities (if I remember correctly). The teachers we met were very impressive, engaging students in very rich authentic literacy activities. For example, one 1st grade teacher shared with us a reading/writing/math project that came about after reading the latest Australian children’s book award winners. The class read each book together and discussed what they liked about each one. Then after voting on their favorite, the teacher helped the children draft a letter to the 5th place book author to let her know that the class thought her book was the best. The teacher had just gotten a response from the author when we were there. The kindergarten used a play-centered curriculum, reminding me of Gretchen Owocki’s Literacy Through Play.
There was a rugged, almost summer camp quality to the whole school. When I first saw the students I thought their school clothes looked like scout uniforms. Children were often outside, even to eat lunch, and we saw several outdoor classrooms and craft centers and pagodas, one with a checkerboard painted on the floor. I even spotted some wildlife on the campus, first an ibis, then what I believed to be a large snake. I took a picture with the farthest range of my zoom lens and showed the principal, but after a closer inspection I was reassured, “Oh no worries, that’s just a big lizard.”

While we were in Sydney, a story ran in The Australian. Australia’s Prime Minister has called for an “education revolution”, one that holds schools accountable by publishing student and school performances relative to each other, labeling failing schools and even firing administrators. Sound familiar?
Another story appeared, reporting on the teacher’s union opposition to the education plan. Kevin Rudd is actually quoted saying, “We are concerned that (there is) a group of communities, a group of young Australians who are in a grave, grave danger of being left behind“. It was disheartening, to say the least, to read about this while in Australia celebrating Australian educators, not they are responsible for this. We got the inside scoop while at Wollongong from Brian and Jan Turbill. Apparently, the Education Minister, Julia Gillard, has become BFF’s with NYC school chancellor Joel Klein, and all the talk about ranking schools by performance is coming from him.
Fortunately, Australian teachers have established a very strong union that does well at combating these political stunts. Brian explained how teachers in Australia have benefited from what’s referred to in many contexts as the “tyranny of distance”. In terms of education, because Australia is just geographically too far away from the Western world for many companies, such as textbook and curriculum publishers, to have an interest in distributing to them, teachers have fostered an independent, DIY mindset to curriculum. So in general, many Aussie teachers are comfortable thinking for themselves, and raise a fuss when they feel like that right is being infringed.
Unfortunately, the Op-Eds in the papers ran the gamut on who’s to blame: parents, teachers, administrators, students… I told Brenda Parkes that Australians should just use the U.S. as the canary in the coal mine, now 7 years into NCLB, and hopefully they can just learn from our mistakes and not have to experience it themselves. It would be a shame to see any of what we saw on our trip dismantled by a misguided “revolution”.