Flinders Academic Skills Adviser Dr Andrew Miller has published a new book: Raging against the Mass-Schooling Machine: An Autoethnography of a Beginning Teacher.

It is a compelling first-person account of the author’s struggle to transform his teaching identity by unpacking the bruising encounters that shaped him as a student.

These reflections started while Andrew was studying a Bachelor of Education (Honours) at Flinders in 2006.

Dr Miller is a lecturer for the Student Learning Centre and an affiliate member of the School of Humanities and Creative Arts.

The book blends autoethnographic reflections, artworks, and scholarly research to challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions of teacher training and mass-schooling.

In doing so, it also resists many of the traditional expectations of scholarly research.

It has been published by Sense Publishers in their Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education series, edited by Shirley R. Steinberg.

The book argues that if beginning teachers remain unconscious of the social and cultural discourses and practices that have shaped and defined them as students and teachers, they may unwittingly reproduce the inequalities, prejudices, and traumas they experienced or observed while growing up, or resort to transmission teaching and authoritarian control because this is the formula of schooling most of them know.

Empowering education relies on all teachers resisting these toxic scripts and becoming agents of change.

Mr Miller’s innovative approaches to teaching and learning have received national and international recognition.

In 2015 he was invited to give a keynote address on his ‘multi-literacies framework’ to over 400 literacy leaders in Sydney by the New South Wales Department of Education and Communities.

In 2017, at the Auckland University of Technology, he will present a university-wide guest lecture on his initiatives to staff and students.

In addition, AUT has invited him to review the topic they have implemented using his framework and to give a workshop to teaching staff.

Locally, at Flinders University, Andrew’s multi-literacies framework underpins the new topic COMS1002: Keys to University Success, designed to empower students by role-modelling the numerous literacies and social practices necessary for university success.

This work has been published in English in Australia (2014) and the Journal for Academic Language and Learning (2015).

Dr Andrew Miller is a lecturer for the Student Learning Centre and an affiliate member of the School of Humanities and Creative Arts.