Outdoor Education Australia
Conference Keynote Speakers
- Thursday: Noel Gough
- Friday: Margaret Somerville, Mark Collard
- Saturday: Jesse Martin, John Marsden
- Sunday: Alexis Wright
Opening Address: Thursday, 7.00pm
Noel Gough
Professor and Chair, School of Outdoor Education and Environment
La Trobe University
Noel Gough is Foundation Professor of Outdoor and Environmental Education and Head of the School of Outdoor Education and Environment at La Trobe University. He is currently President-elect of the Australian Association for Research in Education, which is the peak organisation for academic educational researchers.
Professor Gough has long-standing teaching and research interests in environmental education and in 1997 was awarded the inaugural Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Environmental Education Research. In 2005 he received a Deakin University Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching and Learning for his contribution to developing and delivering Outdoor and Environmental Education as a summer semester intensive program at Deakin’s Warrnambool campus.
Professor Gough’s other research interests include curriculum studies, science education, popular culture, and the social and cultural effects of internationalisation and globalisation. He is the author of Blueprints for Greening Schools, Laboratories in Fiction: Science Education and Popular Media, and numerous journal articles. He coedited a critically acclaimed text, Curriculum Visions, which has now been translated and published in both mainland China and Taiwan, and is the founding editor of Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, the journal of the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies. He is also a member of the editorial boards of another nine international journals. He has most recently coedited and contributed to Internationalisation and Globalisation in Mathematics and Science Education, and is currently coediting a series of books on environmental education research and practice.
In the conference Opening Address, Noel will present his perspective on the place of outdoor and environmental education in the Australian educational landscape, with particular reference to the challenges of providing opportunities for diverse learners of all ages to develop and enhance their spiritual and material relationships with the places that sustain them.
Keynote: Friday, 9.20am
Margaret Somerville
Professor of Education
Monash University
Margaret Somerville is Professor of Education (Learning and Development) at Monash University, Gippsland. She is passionate about landscape and has been researching in the area of relationship to place with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and communities for the past 20 years. Her first two books in this area, Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs, and The Sun Dancin’, were published with Aboriginal co-authors. Body/landscape journals continued the exploration with a focus on body/place connections and Wildflowering: the life and places of Kathleen McArthur is an alternative place based biography about an environmental educator and activist. Her current work, in two projects funded by the Australian Research Council, is about place pedagogies, that is, how we learn place and form communities. One of these projects, involving Indigenous artists, is about water in the Murray Darling Basin; the other about embedding place-based education across the curriculum from early childhood, to school and adult and community education.
Dinner MC: Friday, 6.00pm - 9.00pm
Mark Collard
Author and Facilitator
Mark joined Project Adventure Australia in 1990, and was employed full-time by the organisation for ten years during which he was the principal manager, one of only two Certified Trainers in Australia, training co-ordinator and some-times Challenge Course builder. During this time, Mark lectured two adventure programming subjects at Victoria University for 7 years.
Leaving PAA’s full-time employ in 1999, Mark has continued to work free-lance for Project Adventure Inc mostly worldwide now, particularly throughout Australia, the United States and south east Asia. During this time, he also managed a large residential summer camp in North Carolina for 5 summers, where he was responsible for staff training, management of staff, delivery of specialised programs and overall supervision of the daily schedule.
In 2006, Project Adventure Inc published Mark’s second book called “No Props: Great Games with No Equipment” which has quickly grown to become one of the best-selling adventure education titles in the USA and Australia.
These days, Mark is devoted to building his budding acting and voice-over career. Between gigs, he likes to MC all sorts of events including conferences, weddings, trivia programs and award ceremonies.
Mark lives with his beautiful wife in a mud-brick home in Melbourne’s outer east, and counts his time devoted to adventure programming as some of the most rewarding and funnest times of his life.
Keynote: Saturday, 9.20am
Jesse Martin
On October 31st 1999, aged 18, Jesse became the youngest person in history to circumnavigate the globe, solo nonstop and unassisted.
People from all walks of life followed Jesse’s 328 day journey. The fact that over 25,000 lined the shores at Sandringham to welcome him home is just one indication of the impact he has had on young and old alike.
Jesse filmed his entire journey, and this footage is the basis for the television documentary entitled Lionheart : The Jesse Martin Story. He has also written a captivating book Lionheart : A Journey of the Human Spirit which has subsequently sold over 110,000 copies worldwide.
Dinner Keynote : Saturday, 7.00pm - 8.00pm
John Marsden
In a sixteen-year writing career John Marsden has written and edited more than thirty books, which have sold over three million copies world-wide. His novels include 'Letters From the Inside' and 'Tomorrow, When the War Began', and his non-fiction titles include 'Secret Men's Business' and 'The Boy You Brought Home'.
John has won every major writing award in Australia for young people’s fiction. Internationally, he has twice been named among Best Books of the Year by the American Library Association and once by Publishers’ Weekly (U.S.A.), has been runner-up for Dutch Children’s Book of the Year, won the Grand Jury Prize as Austria’s Most Popular Writer for Teenagers, and won the coveted Buxtehuder Bulle in Germany.
In 2006 John started an alternative school, Candlebark, near Hanging Rock Victoria. He is now its Principal and a full-time teacher there.
Keynote conversation: Sunday, 9.20am
Alexis Wright
Alexis is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her books include Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the outback town of Tennant Creek, and the novel Plains of Promise, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize, the Age Book of the Year and the NSW Premier’s Award, and published as Les Plaines de l’espoir by the distinguished French publishing house Actes Sud.
Alexis Wright is one of Australia’s finest Aboriginal writers and winner of the 2007 Miles Franklin award for her second novel Carpentaria, a soaring epic set in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland, from where her people come. (The novel also won The Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, The Australian Book Industry Association Australian Literary Fiction Book of the Year 2007, and the Victoria Premier Literary Award Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction 2007.)
Carpentaria’s portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, whose members are the leaders of the Pricklebush people, and their battles with old Joseph Midnight’s tearaway Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other.
Wright’s storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce. The novel teems with extraordinary characters – the outcast saviour Elias Smith, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, guru of the holy Aboriginal pilgrimage, the murderous mayor Stan Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist and prodigal son Will Phantom, and above all, the rulers of the family, the queen of the rubbish-dump and the fish-embalming king of time, Angel Day and Normal Phantom – figures of such an intense imagining, they stand like giants in this storm-swept world.
Keynote Speakers at the Inaugural Outdoor Education Risk Management Conference. More