Margaret Simons

Abstract

Music Educators often feel unprepared when making their classroom meaningful for students with disabilities. Many teachers do not feel that they have adequate resources and knowledge to teach students with special needs. This paper studies different accommodations that can be used to make the music classroom meaningful in a social, emotional, intellectual, and physical way for students with disabilities. A choir was observed, and then taught using both familiar and unfamiliar accommodations. A survey was also sent to students’ instructional aids and parents to find out which accommodations helped students the most and whether or not students had increased their social, emotional, intellectual, and physical skills. It was found that most accommodations worked in the classroom as a whole and that some students were able
to increase their social, emotional, intellectual, and physical skills.… (altro)

Wikipedia tells me that 154 women have been elected to the Australian House of Representatives since Federation, and women have had the right to both vote and sit in parliament since 1902. Four decades later, the first women were elected. It was not until 1943 that target="_top">Dame Dorothy Tangney, (1907-1985) became the first female Senator while Dame Enid Lyons (1897-1981) was the first woman elected to the House of Representatives and became the first woman to serve in federal cabinet. I have Anne Henderson's 2008 biography of Enid Lyons somewhere in the house... but if someone has written a biography of Dorothy Tangney I can't find it any trace of it, though I expect she gets a mention in A Woman's Place, Women and Politics in Australia (1984) by Marian Sawer and Marian Simms.

An article published by the ANU in 2021 was about how political biographies focus on men. Well, yes, of course, you'd expect that to be the case, but would it surprise you to learn that of 31 political biographies published since 2010 only 4 featured women? They were:

• Margaret Simon's 2019 bio of current Foreign Minister Penny Wong, see my review;


• Lekkie Hopkins' bio of May Holman (1893-1939) whose list of achievements is so long you really must click the link to my review see them all;


• Also by Lekkie Hopkins, with Lynn Roarty, a bio called Among the Chosen of Patricia Giles OA (1928-2017) who founded the WA branch of WEL and was a Senator, serving as president of the International Alliance of Women after her retirement;


• Pauline Hanson (about whom the less said the better.)

And surely it's a surprise that eight years after our first female Prime Minister had departed the scene, that there was no biography of her? The ANU article says that she and other women politicians have filled this gap by writing memoirs, but seriously, that is no substitute for a warts-and-all analysis of their contribution to public life.

So Margaret Simons' choice of Tanya Plibersek MHR as the subject of a 2023 biography is interesting. Why Plibersek, and not Gillard, eh? I think the answer to that question is partly that Simons is interested in the future not the past. But her introduction to Chapter 4 mirrors my own thoughts:

The arc of history is easier to perceive in retrospect. Looking back, Plibersek's time in parliament can be understood as a series of episodes when, if an alternative path had been taken, Labor and Australia's history might have been very different. What if Labor had kept Kim Beazley as its leader, rather than switching to Latham in 2004? What if, after the trauma of Latham losing the 2004 election, the party had again stuck with Beazley, instead of moving to Kevin Rudd? What if Julia Gillard had not deposed Rudd as prime minister in what he went on to describe as a coup? Perhaps the dysfunction in the government would in any case have led to its downfall — or perhaps the cabinet would have confronted Rudd with the consequences of his management style and the ship of government would have been brought back to an even keel. Perhaps, then, Labor would have won the election of 2010 in its own right, instead of being forced into minority government. Perhaps Labor would then have retained government at the 2013 election, instead of losing to the Coalition, led by Tony Abbott. There might have been no Abbott government, no Turnbull government, and no Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Australia would be a different nation. Within the ALP, leadership would have passed to a new generation in a more orderly, less damaging fashion. But that is not what happened. Instead, Labor's dysfunction blighted its six years in government between 2007 and 2013. (p.96)

Although I'm interested in politics, the last thing I want to do as a reader is to revisit Gillard's responsibility for some of this mess, and perhaps Margaret Simons as an author felt the same way. It's interesting to me that Simons, whose journalism I really admire, has chosen to write biographies of two women ALP politicians who are steady, unflappable, calm and methodical. Both have impressive credentials and electability: they work hard and have a cult-like fan base both within the ALP and beyond; both are thought by some to be future prime ministerial material but neither are charismatic. Although both decline to revisit that disastrous history, it is clear from Simons' account of Rudd's downfall that both think that it should never have happened. Both recognise that unity is essential to good government and electability; both are pragmatic, sometimes voting to support issues with which they don't agree, in order to remain in the tent where you may at least have some influence.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/05/16/tanya-plibersek-on-her-own-terms-2023-by-mar...… (altro)