“Now, gods, stand up for bastards!” – Edmund in King Lear
The Victorian Association for the Teaching of English State Conference will be held at Deakin University on Thursday 30 November and Friday 1 December.
In 2017 VATE celebrates those individuals who take the contrary line; who will not or cannot swim in the main stream; who view the world from a different perspective; who, with Shakespeare’s Edmund, question what is legitimate. In doing so, they also celebrate and further empower the language in which we work and live. They value the bastards, the contrarians, the iconoclasts, the dissidents and the marginalised: those for whom the status quo will not do.
VATE 2017 wants to speak to and for the mavericks; they want to disrupt, challenge, experiment, innovate: like Oliver Twist, they ask for more, searching for space in the cracks of a rigid curriculum. After all, as Leonard Cohen says, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”.
Registrations for this event are now closed.