School of Teacher Education
Beverly Pennell
Lecturer
BA DipEd Syd, MA.Macq, MEd(Hons)WSyd, PhD, Macquarie
Beverly Pennell
Bio
Beverley Pennell has worked at Charles Sturt University since 2004. She is the Course Coordinator for the Graduate Diploma of Education for 2008 – 2009. Since 2004, Beverley has designed, taught and coordinated subjects in undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the School of Teacher Education at the Bathurst and Albury campuses. She has coordinated primary English curriculum subjects and English Curriculum Studies subjects for postgraduate secondary English pre-service teachers and for middle schooling pre-service teachers. In the primary courses, Beverley teaches very popular electives in children’s literature and film, television and digital texts for use in the classroom. She supervises Masters students in the areas of children’s literature, media education, and multiliteracies research. In pre-service teacher education Beverley’s concern is to enable students to become passionate about acquiring the best possible professional qualifications in order to promote the public good through education.
Beverley’s academic work is transdisciplinary involving four major areas of research – children`s literature, youth and popular culture, new media, and English curriculum. Her particular research strengths are in textual studies in relation to literary and film and other visual texts, and in the application of sociocultural theories to the study of texts. Beverley has authored about 20 scholarly articles and book chapters. Beverley played a major role in the preparation of John Stephens’ Ways of Being Male (2002), which was awarded the Honour Book Award by the International Research Society for Children`s Literature in 2003. Due to ongoing demand, this book has been reissued in paperback in 2008.
Beverley has delivered plenary and keynote addresses in Australia. She has presented at regional, state, national and international conferences in Australia, UK, Canada, Ireland, Sweden and New Zealand. Beverley is a regular contributor to Australia`s principal scholarly journal in research in children`s literature: Papers: Explorations into Children`s Literature. Beverley has co-authored numerous English curriculum resource books (with Helen Sykes) for use in Australian secondary schools.
Beverley holds a Master of Arts degree and a PhD from Macquarie University and a research Master of Education (Hons) degree from the University of Western Sydney. Her research for her doctoral studies was an examination of the changing representations of childhood offered in Australian children’s fiction since about 1953 - 2001. As well as offering a study of significant Australian children’s novels, this project encompassed study in areas such as Australian history and historiography, gender studies, childhood studies and in literary discourse, literary theory and postcolonial theory.
Beverley’s extensive professional experience before joining Charles Sturt University has been in a number of secondary schools that made her aware of the importance of the issues of access to quality education, equity of educational experiences and of social justice. She has been successful as a classroom practitioner and Head Teacher in schools in Sydney’s outer western suburbs and rural schools. In these educational settings she has had the great pleasure of seeing young people come to value the significance and pleasures of study in the field of English curriculum, studying language, literary, media and multimedia texts and producing texts of their own. Beverley has been a member of Board of Studies NSW’s English Syllabus Committees representing the English Teachers Association (NSW) and the NSW Department of Education, Employment and Training. She has also served on numerous HSC Examination committees.
Research
- Curriculum theory and English studies
- Literacy research and English curriculum
- Theories and Concepts of children’s literature
- Theories and concepts of childhood
- Gender and Children’s Literature: feminisms, masculinity studies and queer theory
- Literary Theory: Narratology, structuralism and poststructuralism, postmodernism, post-colonial theories, reader reception theories
- Multimodality and mulitliteracies and theories of visual literacy including textual literacies, visual literacies and ICCT Literacies and Children's Picture Book:
- Young Adult Fiction in Australia from a Cultural Studies Perspective
- Children’s Film
- 2005 Charles Sturt University School of Teacher Education Seed Grant, Project title: Literary Literacies: Investigating the role and significance of literary texts in a balanced reading program.
- 2005 Charles Sturt University School of Teacher Education Writing Up Award Semester 1. (Competitive Award)
- 1999 International Research Society for Children’s Literature Postgraduate Research Award For an outstanding research project (presented at 14th Biennial Conference of the society University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada). ($US1,000)
Educational Studies:
Textual studies:
Research Grants
Teaching
- Secondary English Curriculum Method 1 (Graduate Diploma in Education and Bachelor of Teaching Secondary) Distance Education mode and internal classes
- Secondary English Curriculum Method 2 (Graduate Diploma in Education and Bachelor of Teaching Secondary) Distance Education mode and internal classes Subject Coordinator
- Secondary English Curriculum Method 1 (Bachelor of Middle Schooling)
- EML300 Children's Literature in the Classroom (B Ed Primary) Subject Coordinator
- EML400 Classroom Implications of Children's Film and Television (B Ed Primary) Subject Coordinator
Professional Engagement
- Course Coordinator, Graduate Diploma in Education (Secondary) 2008-9
- NSW Institute of Teachers Initial Teacher Education Committee (ITEC) Panel – curriculum expert member
- 2005 Keynote Address ‘Life sentences: Creativity, Texts and Grammar’ for Catholic Education Office’s Regional Middle Years Literacy Project Conference held in Lithgow, October 2005.
- English Association, University of Sydney, HSC Lecture Days for Secondary Teachers
- HSC English Lectures (for secondary students), Macquarie University
- Asia Education Foundation – organiser and presenter
- International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL)
- Australasian Children’s Literature Association for Research (ACLAR)
- English Teacher’s Association NSW and
- Australian Association for the Teaching of English
- Primary English Teacher’s Association
- Australian Teachers of Media
Publications
- Green, B., Pennell, B., & Mackenzie, N. (2007). Literacy, Adolescence and Schooling: Literacy Challenges for the Middle Years. In Sally Knipe, (Ed.). Reframing Adolescence. Melbourne: Pearson Education.
- Pennell, B. (2003). Leaving the Men behind to Drown: Fin de siècle reconfigurations of masculinity in children’s fictions’ in Children’s Literature and the Fin de Siècle edited by Rod McGillis, West Port, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing, 2003, pp. 77-86.
- Pennell, B. (2002). Redeeming mankind at the end of the second millennium: narrative reconfigurations of masculinity in 1990s children’s fictions. In J. Stephens (Ed). Ways of Being Male. New York and London: Garland Press, pp. 55-77.
- Pennell, B. & Stephens, J. (2002). Queering Heterotopic Spaces: Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Peter Wells’ Boy Overboard. In John Stephens (Ed.). Ways of Being Male. New York & London: Garland Press, pp. 164-184.
- Pennell, B. (2007). ‘I don’t like your kind of people’: Cultural pluralism in Odo Hirsch’s Have Courage, Hazel Green (2001). Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature. Themed issue. ‘Building cultural ctizenship: Multiculturalism and children’s literature, 17(3), 50-58.
- Pennell, B. (2005). Allan Baillie’s Secrets of Walden Rising as Critical Dystopia: Problematising national mythologies. Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature, 15(2), 31-9.
- Pennell, B. (2003). Ozzie kids flee the garden of delight: reconfigurations of childhood in Australian children's fictions. Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature, 13(2), 5-14.
- Pennell, B. (2001). Shifting Versions of Masculinity in Australian Children’s Literature, 1993-1997. Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, Special Issue: Fathers and Sons, 23(2), pp. 6-11.
Book Chapters
Refereed Journal Articles