The key purposes of the EdASP were to enhance the innovation in and/or the quality of higher education by establishing a support service model for beginning teachers aimed at improving teacher retention in their first five years of service. The Project used The University of England (UNE) web-based technologies, to deliver support for beginning teachers in 2005 by providing fora for sharing professionally-based and academically-based information and for social interaction. The professional significance of the project was twofold: (1) The neophyte professional has to be assisted to adjust to specific classroom situations as part of the life-long learning continuum. Broadly this has not been done well in teaching despite reports over the last 25 years calling for various forms of support to be provided. (2) Teacher supply is currently a problem as many, especially baby boomers, are leaving teaching and there is the perennial problem of hard-to-staff schools. Beginning teachers are seen as potentially vulnerable as they cross the line into their new professional world. They bring with them social, cultural and political capital to deal with this new world. Where these are ineffective then vulnerabilities will arise and such teachers, more particularly, will need support. The method was essentially a case study using UNE alumni of 2005 who were invited to take part in primary and secondary online environments divided into discussion fora perceived to be useful to them. Discussion fora were available from the first day of first term until the end of the year. Postings by mentors and beginning teachers formed the bulk of the data though a specially prepared evaluative questionnaire was sent to all 2005 alumni. Data were mainly analysed using nVIVO and thematic analysis.

The Education Alumni Support Project provides online support for UNE graduand beginning teachers. In late November 2004 we were invited to rework the HEIP project application to suit the changed timeframe. The original timeframe can be seen in Appendix 1. Our modified proposal met HEIP requirements. We are grateful to DEST colleagues, especially Mr Paul Pfluger, for swiftly assisting us in getting the formalities of the project cleared. UNE staff also assisted us greatly in the demanding process of establishing the web environment shells and the associated log on requirements for graduands. We quickly determined that the projected trials could not take place (and hence baseline data as originally planned could not be obtained). A key decision was that the project had to be ready for the first day of school in 2005. We successfully achieved that objective. Much of the preparatory work set out prior to Monday 17 January 2005 was concertinaed into the December/January period. In short, major milestones we have achieved to date are: 1. Re-worked the outcomes and budget consistent with the thrust of the project and timeframes allowed; 2. Mailed recent graduates (twice); 3. Created a WebCT environment for primary beginning teacher online mentoring (a major task); 4. Created a WebCT environment for secondary beginning teacher online mentoring (a major task); 5. Created related resource web pages; 6. Gained UNE Human Research Ethics approval; 7. Achieved participation by six additional academics covering different areas for online support (the research participants/facilitators); 8. Went ‘public’ on 17th January 2005, just before schools in NSW began; 9. Guided and facilitated online discussions responding to neophyte teachers’ needs at least weekly or more often if discussion activity demanded; 10. Developed a preliminary literature review to guide conceptualisation and action research of the project; and Education Alumni Support Project Progress Report 3 11. Conducted semi-regular EdASP team meetings to consider the direction and needs of the online discussion and collaborate on project development issues. The remainder of this progress report provides some detail, where appropriate, of the above outcomes together with an indication of early results.

'The Merchant of Venice' is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, both in the theatre and in schools, where it is often used to introduce students to the study of Shakespeare. On one level it can be seen as a romantic comedy, in which love triumphs, and also as a simple tale of good overcoming evil. However, problems soon emerge with both of these interpretations, and in this module you will be exploring different perspectives of the text. This will involve looking at some of the unspoken assumptions of the text and seeing them from different points of view.

This book deals with 'Jane Austen', cultural icon, focusing in particular on the varying ways she has been recreated in biographies, literary criticism and film. A related theme is the nature of the re-creational impulse itself - what is the nature of the fascination with Jane Austen that writers and film makers have had, and why has her work been so frequently appropriated and transformed? Wiltshire identifies two types of re-creation: that which simply attempts to re-present the original text with the priority of being 'faithful' to it, a sort of homage (such as early BBC versions of the novels); and that which attempts to create a new text out of the old, which confronts and sometimes contests the assumptions of the original and by so doing establishes itself as new, a work of art in its own right (such as 'Clueless' and Patrick Rozeme's 1995 film of 'Mansfield Park').

In 2005 the UNE Education Alumni Support Project provided online support for UNEgraduand and later graduate beginning teachers as they commenced their careers.Beginning teachers may find full-time work as permanent or contract workers, or,part-time employment as casual, relief or support teachers. EdASP was not designedto take the place of any support structures presently in place for beginning teachersbut rather to supplement these.We were aware that many beginning teachers did not get the support that theyneeded. We were aware that UNE graduates were relatively more likely to go intomarginal settings such as rural and isolated schools and also into hard-to-staff schoolsperhaps necessitating extra support. We also knew that UNE internal and externalgraduates were very familiar with online work and specifically knew how to usediscussion fora based on WebCT software. Our main motivation to develop theproject was to see if beginning teachers could be supported online.

• A support service model for beginning • Providing: - Academic support - Professional support - Social interaction - Resource sharing • Available to all UNE 2004 teacher graduates. • Aimed at improving teacher retention in the first 5 yrs of service.

Greenleaf Girls High School is a Priority Schools Funding Program (PSFP) school in a particularly disadvantaged area of Sydney. There were 680 students enrolled at the school at the time of undertaking the case study described below. 98% of the students were NESB. The largest cultural groups in the student population were: Arabic (56%), Vietnamese (12%) and Pacific Islanders (7%). There were 49 language groups represented in the school, with significant numbers of refugee children from Sierra Leone, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. The school was part of a three-year study into programs and Faculties which had achieved outstanding success in Years 7–10 in NSW DET high schools. The particular area chosen for study at Greenleaf was the school's literacy program – chosen based on 'value-added' data in the state wide English/Literacy tests and HSC English results. Even allowing for the school's high NESB population (which may gain the school good 'value-added' results simply through longer exposure to English between one test and another) the school's results were outstanding for all of the categories for which the DET keeps such results. In particular, the majority of students in the lowest band of ELLA in Year 7 are almost all removed from this band by Year 8. The school scores above the state average in the School Certificate and, in the year prior to the case study, above-state-average performances were recorded in the Extension 1, Advanced, Standard, and ESL Higher School Certificate English courses (i.e. in every English course offered). Hence, discussion of the school's literacy program needs to also acknowledge the highly important contribution of the English Faculty who navigate the perennially odd situation of teaching English in a context where state-wide testing is around 'literacy' (Years 7 and 8), 'English/literacy' (Year 10) and 'English' (Year 12). There was a strong and widespread belief in the school that strong competition from nearby selective and private schools had resulted in increasing proportions of 'needy' students in the school's student profile. At the time of our visit, half of each of the lowest two Year 7 classes were made up of students classified as IM. The school is also the local high school for students in a number of western suburbs IEC programs. Numeracy and Literacy, in particular, have been on-going whole-school priorities. The sense of struggle and of having substantial difficulties to overcome seemed to reinforce the school's sense of mission and encouraged development and continued commitment to innovation. A strong sense of social justice and equity drives the school. What contributed to the outstanding performance in literacy in this school?

This book is a refreshing antidote to the Bradley, Bloom and Brodie's Notes approaches to Shakespeare. O'Toole begins with the contention that traditional school Shakespeare began in the nineteenth century, "on the playing fields of Eton", as part of a national project designed to instil notions of correct behaviour – shades of Matthew Arnold. He moves from there to try to see Shakespeare as a product of his times, as writing in a period of ferment, upheaval and competing world views (the feudal hierarchy v science/capitalism), and then argues that the tragedies reflect this situation.

Deborah Appleman was a major hit at the combined AATE/ALEA 2002 Perth Conference. She is a teacher educator in the USA and her research has focused on the implementation of literary theory in the secondary English classroom. Her book is devoted to accounts of and strategies for the explicit teaching of reader-response theory, Marxist theory, Feminism and Deconstruction. She presents these theories as 'lenses', which offer different vantage points from which to view texts.