We completed work on Alexis Wright's Plains of Promise yesterday. Students seem to be genuinely interested in the concerns of this book. It is amazingly well written in parts and gives a real taste of the huge problems faced by Aboriginal communities in modern Australia. The closing pages of the book are bitter-sweet. They bring into focus the magically power of Aboriginal myth in summarizing and probing the contemporary situation, but they also leave one with a sense of the hopelessness of the situation... unless something is done about it by us!
Today's session ended with our student "Sophists" think-tank group offering their views on some of the ways forward with LiveJournal and other unit-related issues. The presence of this group is really helping to create a more democratic development of teaching materials. I am very happy with the outcome so far.
happy