Teaching and Assessing for Understanding at University in the South Pacific

Pacific people have their own unique ways of knowing that shape how they learn and this should be taken into account in planning curriculum and in teaching. Pacific people are more likely to want to learn by doing, seeing, collaborating and in a concrete environment whereas for Western students learning becomes formal quickly and depends more on words and theories. This assumed difference in learning preferences could present a problem for formal learning with the need to bridge the gap psychologically and epistemologically between concrete and formal modes of learning. It could be the reason why some students in the Pacific, even at the tertiary level, rely heavily on rote learning. This chapter is a discussion of learning and assessment practices that help to foster understanding as they might apply to teaching at university in the South Pacific.

Masculinity, sexuality, theology and child sexual abuse by personnel in Christian institutions

There growing recognition that a contributor to the repeat crises of child sexual abuse (CSA) by personnel in Christian institutions (PICIs), is the often gendered culture of Christian institutions themselves. This work explores theological discursive constructions of masculinity and sexuality and their implications for addressing CSA by PICIs. The perspectives discussed here are of PICIs who participated in a research project conducted in Australia. From these perspectives male gendered and sexual performance is constructed through discourse as both an explanation and solution to offending behaviour. Similarly, sexuality is viewed as God-given, heteronormative and legitimately expressed only within the bounds of marriage. This work draws on Foucault and feminist discourses as they relate to CSA by PICIs and institutional discourses. This work offers a perspective of PICIs that may not otherwise be heard in the common discourses of CSA in Christian Institutions.

Reflection on the SIA Ltd professional project and the body of knowledge

In the last five years the Safety Institute of Australia Limited (SIA) has developed and implemented a number of strategies to gain professional recognition for the ‘generalist occupational health and safety (OHS) professional’ in Australia and internationally. Despite a considerable amount of work by the SIA aimed at gaining professional status, there does not appear to have been any published debate or reflection about how the drive for professionalism (the ‘professional project’) will contribute to the prevention of occupational disease and injury. Professionalisation has been promoted as a sign of maturity for the SIA and as an unquestionably good outcome, as it has been assumed that professionalisation will provide unmitigated benefits for workplace health and safety. The aim of this paper is to critically reflect on the processes of professionalisation (the professional project) and discuss the ways in which this project may shape the field of occupational health and safety.

Utilizing micropellets as building blocks in cartilage tissue engineering

Osteoarthritis is the most common cause of pain and disability in Australia. This project describes a method where hundreds of cartilage microtissues are generated as tiny building blocks for assembly into larger tissues suitable for cartilage defect repair. Tissue engineering applications has the potential to overcome natural barriers and effectively repair damaged cartilage tissue. However, engineering few-millimeter thick cartilage, similar to human cartilage in the knee, remains a challenge. Utilizing micropellets as building blocks has the potential to overcome some of the challenges in cartilage tissue engineering.

How does the use of a reflective journal enhance students’ critical thinking about complexity?

Introduction to Youth Services is a second year Social Work and Human Services unit. In this unit a reflective writing task was introduced to assess students’ reflections on an ongoing tutorial discussion to which they contributed. The discussion was based on a fictional young person each tutorial group ‘worked with’ across eight weeks of a semester. In developing the process and the criteria for the reflective journal, the ideas raised by the Teaching and Assessing Reflective Learning (TARL) in Higher Education project (see Chap. 2) were utilised, scaffolding the work with resources and submission of a draft. The students were also invited to choose the form of reflective process they used, it could be a written journal but did not need to be. The evidence exemplified that a reflective journal is an effective tool for students to record their developing understanding regarding the concept that issues people experience are complex and compounding. Importantly, it was also a useful vehicle for students to begin to consider the impacts of their own and others’ values and beliefs on their response to the issues raised within the case discussion. The reflective journal also helped participants to consider how this learning contributes to the ongoing development of their professional practice framework.

In search of Nirvana : why Nirvana : the True Story could never be "true"

In my book Nirvana: The True Story (2006), I undertake an autoethnographical approach to biography, attempting to impart an understanding of my chosen subject - the rock band Nirvana - via discussion of my own experiences. On numerous occasions, I veer off into tangential asides, frequently using extensive footnotes to explain obscure musical references. Personal anecdotes are juxtaposed with "insider" information; at crucial points in the story (notable concerts, the first meeting of singer Kurt Cobain with his future wife Courtney Love, the news of Cobain's suicide), the linear thread of the narrative spills over into a multi-faceted approach, with several different (and sometimes opposing) voices given equal prominence. Despite my firsthand experience of the band, however, Nirvana: The True Story is not considered authoritative, even within its own field. This article considers the reasons why this may be the case.In my book Nirvana: The True Story (2006), I undertake an autoethnographical approach to biography, attempting to impart an understanding of my chosen subject - the rock band Nirvana - via discussion of my own experiences. On numerous occasions, I veer off into tangential asides, frequently using extensive footnotes to explain obscure musical references. Personal anecdotes are juxtaposed with "insider" information; at crucial points in the story (notable concerts, the first meeting of singer Kurt Cobain with his future wife Courtney Love, the news of Cobain's suicide), the linear thread of the narrative spills over into a multi-faceted approach, with several different (and sometimes opposing) voices given equal prominence. Despite my firsthand experience of the band, however, Nirvana: The True Story is not considered authoritative, even within its own field. This article considers the reasons why this may be the case.

Live from the Sydney Opera House: Remote musical interactions for teacher professional development

A significant challenge for the implementation of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts is the professional development of primary school teachers in all parts of the country. During 2012, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO) conducted a remote music professional development workshop as part of the Sydney Opera House’s Digital Education Program for teachers in New South Wales using the Department of Education’s Connected Classroom system which allows live synchronous interaction between facilitators and participants in multiple sites. In this article, we analyse observational and videotape data collected during this live professional development event to consider the opportunities and challenges presented by this type of professional learning experience in the arts. In particular, consideration is given to the impact of a remote musical interaction on embodied learning and aesthetic experience. We draw on actor-network theory to consider the ways in which a remote professional development experience differs to one in which all participants are present in the same space. Finally, we conclude that although there are significant differences in the type of learning that occurs in a remote music interaction, the online space provides a legitimate and potentially transforming experience for primary school teachers.

The first 25 years of the Queensland Rugby Football League: Claims to legitimacy in annual reports

Despite the cultural importance of sporting organisations, little academic attention has been paid to the legitimising role of their annual reports. In this paper we examine the role of annual reports in establishing the legitimacy of a new organisation, the Queensland Rugby Football League (QRFL), founded in 1908. Contextualised with media reports from newspapers of the day, twelve annual reports from QRFL’s first 25 years are analysed and interpreted using insights from legitimacy theory. Through the presentation of audited financial statements and persuasive narrative accounts of its operations and success, QRFL made claims to pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy as it sought to establish a niche as a new football code and organisation. This contextualised study situates the annual reports in their historical landscape, providing insights about how they contributed to QRFL’s efforts in overcoming the liability of newness in a competitive sports environment.

Having the last word? Will making and contestation in Australia

Increased longevity and the need to fund living and care expenses across late old age, greater proportions of blended and culturally diverse families and concerns about the increasing possibility of contestation of wills highlight the importance of understanding current will making practices and intentions. Yet, there is no current national data on the prevalence of wills, intended beneficiaries, the principles and practices surrounding will making and the patterns and outcomes of contestation. This project sought to address this gap. This report summarises the results of a four year program of research examining will making and will contestation in Australia. The project was funded by the Australian Research Council (LP10200891) in conjunction with seven Public Trustee Organisations across Australia. The interdisciplinary research team with expertise in social science, social work, law and social policy are from The University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology and Victoria University. The project comprised five research studies: a national prevalence survey, a judicial case review, a review of Public Trustee files, an online survey of will drafters and in-depth interviews with key groups of interest. The report outlines key findings. On the basis of the evidence provided recommendations are presented to support the achievement of these policy goals: increasing will making in the Australian population, ensuring that the wills of those Australians who have taken this step reflect their current situation and intentions, and reducing will contestation.

A ‘Big Data’ Approach to Mapping the Australian Twittersphere

This chapter discusses the methodological aspects and empirical findings of a large-scale, funded project investigating public communication through social media in Australia. The project concentrates on Twitter, but we approach it as representative of broader current trends toward the integration of large datasets and computational methods into media and communication studies in general, and social media scholarship in particular. The research discussed in this chapter aims to empirically describe networks of affiliation and interest in the Australian Twittersphere, while reflecting on the methodological implications and imperatives of ‘big data’ in the humanities. Using custom network crawling technology, we have conducted a snowball crawl of Twitter accounts operated by Australian users to identify more than one million users and their follower/followee relationships, and have mapped their interconnections. In itself, the map provides an overview of the major clusters of densely interlinked users, largely centred on shared topics of interest (from politics through arts to sport) and/or sociodemographic factors (geographic origins, age groups). Our map of the Twittersphere is the first of its kind for the Australian part of the global Twitter network, and also provides a first independent and scholarly estimation of the size of the total Australian Twitter population. In combination with our investigation of participation patterns in specific thematic hashtags, the map also enables us to examine which areas of the underlying follower/followee network are activated in the discussion of specific current topics – allowing new insights into the extent to which particular topics and issues are of interest to specialised niches or to the Australian public more broadly. Specifically, we examine the Twittersphere footprint of dedicated political discussion, under the #auspol hashtag, and compare it with the heightened, broader interest in Australian politics during election campaigns, using #ausvotes; we explore the different patterns of Twitter activity across the map for major television events (the popular competitive cooking show #masterchef, the British #royalwedding, and the annual #stateoforigin Rugby League sporting contest); and we investigate the circulation of links to the articles published by a number of major Australian news organisations across the network. Such analysis, which combines the ‘big data’-informed map and a close reading of individual communicative phenomena, makes it possible to trace the dynamic formation and dissolution of issue publics against the backdrop of longer-term network connections, and the circulation of information across these follower/followee links. Such research sheds light on the communicative dynamics of Twitter as a space for mediated social interaction. Our work demonstrates the possibilities inherent in the current ‘computational turn’ (Berry, 2010) in the digital humanities, as well as adding to the development and critical examination of methodologies for dealing with ‘big data’ (boyd and Crawford, 2011). Out tools and methods for doing Twitter research, released under Creative Commons licences through our project Website, provide the basis for replicable and verifiable digital humanities research on the processes of public communication which take place through this important new social network.

A rare view: Barbara Hatley’s new book documents a career-long study of, and passion for performance in Central Java

Javanese Performances on an Indonesian Stage: Contesting Culture, Embracing Change, is Barbara Hatley’s first book about the performing arts in Indonesia, a topic that piqued her interest while undergoing a masters program at Yale University in the late 1960s. In this sense, it is a landmark study, for Hatley has since become very well known in Indonesianist circles, especially among those with an interest in matters of culture, popular and elite. Until recently, her writings on Indonesian performing arts have only been available in the form of journal articles and book chapters...

Space Station Design Report 2007

Design Proposal for the Blue Lunar Support Hub The conceptual design of a space station is one of the most challenging tasks in aerospace engineering. The history of the space station Mir and the assembly of the International Space Station demonstrate that even within the assembly phase quick solutions have to be found to cope with budget and technical problems or changing objectives. This report is the outcome of the conceptual design of the Space Station Design Workshop (SSDW) 2007, which took place as an international design project from the 16th to the 21st of July 2007 at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR), University of Sydney, Australia. The participants were tasked to design a human-tended space station in low lunar orbit (LLO) focusing on supporting future missions to the moon in a programmatic context of space exploration beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). The design included incorporating elements from systems engineering to interior architecture. The customised, intuitive, rapid-turnaround software tools enabled the team to successfully tackle the complex problem of conceptual design of crewed space systems. A strong emphasis was put on improving the integration of the human crew, as it is the major contributor to mission success, while always respecting the boundary conditions imposed by the challenging environment of space. This report documents the methodology, tools and outcomes of the Space Station Design Workshop during the SSDW 2007. The design results produced by Team Blue are presented.

Queer Youth Research/ers: A reflexive account of risk and intimacy in an ethical (mine)field

In contemporary Western societies, the years between childhood and young adulthood are commonly understood to be (trans)formative in the reflexive project of sexual self-making (Russell et al. 2012). As sexual subjects in the making, youthful bodies, desires and sexual activities are often perceived as both volatile and vulnerable, thus subjected to instruction and discipline, protection and surveillance. Accordingly, young people’s sexual proximities are closely monitored by social institutions and ‘(hetero)normalising regimes’ (Warner 1999) for any signs that may compromise the end goal of development—a ‘normal’ reproductive heterosexual monogamous adult.