A Summative Evaluation of the Stronger Smarter Learning Communities Project : Vol 1 and Vol 2

This is a summative evaluation of the Stronger Smarter Learning Communities (SSLC) project that examines whether and how the SSLC project had an impact on Australian state schools which adopted its models and approaches. Drawing from qualitative and quantitative data sets, it also presents the largest scale and most comprehensive analysis of Indigenous education practices and outcomes to date. It includes empirical findings on: success in changing school ethos and community engagement; challenges in progress at closure of the 'gap' in conventionally measured achievement and performance; schools' and principals' choices in curriculum and instruction; profiles of teachers' and principals' training and views on teacher education; and a strong emphasis on community and school Indigenoous voices and views on Indigenous education.

Identity, forgiveness and power in the management of child sexual abuse by personnel in Christian Institutions

The ongoing crises of child sexual abuse by Christian institutions leaders across the Anglophone world continue to attract public attention and public inquiries. The pervasiveness of this issue lends credence to the argument that the prevailing ethos functioning within some Christian Institutions is one which exercises influence to repeatedly mismanage allegations of child sexual abuse by Church leaders. This work draws on semistructured interviews conducted with 15 Personnel in Christian Institutions (PICIs) in Australia who were identified as being pro-active in their approach to addressing child sexual abuse by PICIs. From these data, themes of power and forgiveness are explored through a Foucaultian conceptualising of pastoral power and ‘truth’ construction. Forgiveness is viewed as a discourse which can have the power effect of either silencing or empowering victim/survivors. The study concludes that individual PICIs’ understandings of the role ofpower in their praxis influences outcomes from the deployment of forgiveness.

Re-framing fashion : from original and copy to adaptation

Partington notes that clothing produced by individual consumers through adaptation of patterns is contextualised as a watered down version of original couture. In its most reductive form, this notion characterises fashion as commercial and exploitative. Descriptors such as appropriation, imitation, copy and so forth have restricted the opportunity to understand fashion as a major global cultural form and institution. Therefore exploring and understanding the concept of adaptation will shift the attention from a superficial assessment of original versus imitation or copy to adaptation as a practice that provides a better framework for the understanding of designers’ and couturiers’ innovative practices and creativity, describing also the active engagement of consumers with fashion at the micro level. Adaptation can also provide a way to understand different historical shifts in the fashion system, from individual creative agency with home dressmaking and re-making to the explosion of the mass market and the consequent abandonment of such practices. Home dressmaking has been replaced by fashion remix of mass produced garments, a practice that thrives in our environment of globalised fast fashion. Thus this chapter suggests the need for a contextual requalification of concepts such as original, copy, imitation and copyright, and argues that these categories have been played against each other, but they are in fact interdependent. Today, big labels and conglomerates try to control knowledge and innovation through copyright, but, fashion escapes copyright because, in fashion, creativity is contextual. The institutionalisation of couture from 1868 served as a way to control knowledge about production processes in fashion; on the other hand, adaptation practices, often subversive, have been fundamental to the democratisation of fashion.

The knock-on from the knock-off : recent shifts within Australian mass market fashion design practice

Australia's mass market fashion labels have traditionally benefitted from their peripheral location to the world's fashion centres. Operating a season behind, Australian mass market designers and buyers were well-placed to watch trends play out overseas before testing them in the Australian marketplace. For this reason, often a designer's role was to source and oversee the manufacture of 'knock-offs', or close copies of northern hemisphere mass market garments. Both Weller and Walsh have commented on this practice.12 The knock-on effect from this continues to be a cautious, derivative fashion sensibility within Australian mass market fashion design, where any new trend or product is first tested and proved overseas months earlier. However, there is evidence that this is changing. The rapid online dissemination of global fashion trends, coupled with the Australian consumer’s willingness to shop online, has meant that the ‘knock-off’ is less viable. For this reason, a number of mass market companies are moving away from the practice of direct sourcing and are developing product in-house under a northern hemisphere model. This shift is also witnessed in the trend for mass market companies to develop collections in partnership with independent Australian designers. This paper explores the current and potential effects of these shifts within Australian mass market design practice, and discusses how they may impact on both consumers and on the wider culture of Australian fashion.

Community response to disasters in Indonesia : Gotong Royong; a double edged-sword

Indonesia is a country spread across wide-ranging archipelago, located in South East Asia between two oceans, the Indian and the Pacific. Indonesia is well known as an active tectonic region because it lies on top of three major active tectonic plates: the Eurasian in the North, the Indian Ocean-Australian in the South, and the Pacific plate in the East. The southern and eastern part of the country features a range of volcanic arcs, volcanic mountains, and lowlands with 500 young volcanoes, of which 128 are active and thus representing 15% of the world’s active volcanoes. In the period 2002-2007, approximately 1782 disasters occurred, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost and billions of rupiah in losses incurred: (Floods - 1183 instances, cyclones - 272 instances, and landslides - 252 instances). Of these, the 2004 Aceh tsunami and the 2006 central Java earthquake (impacting predominantly city and suburbs of Yogyakarta) were the most significant. Even so, disaster management experts believe lessons learnt from the two major natural disasters needs to be formalised into laws and institutions before another disaster occurs, regardless of the type of natural disaster – i.e. Volcano eruption or landslide; as opposed to tsunami or earthquake. Following in the wake of disasters occurring in Yogyakarta, many of its community members responded by banding together as one, with the determination of rebuilding its villages and cities through the spirit of ‘gotong royong’. The idea of social interaction; in particular as a collective, consensual, and cooperative nation; has predominantly formed the ideological basis of Indonesia’s societal nature. Many Indonesian terms cohere to this ideology, such as: ‘koperasi” (cooperatives as the basis of economic interactions), ‘musyawarah’ (consensual nature in decision making), and ‘gotong royong’ (mutual assistance). ‘Gotong royong’ has become a key cultural operator in Indonesia, in particular In Jogjakarta. Appropriately so as ‘gotong royong’ is depicted from the traditional Javanese village, where labour is accomplished through reciprocal exchange and the villagers are motivated by a general ethos of selfishness and concern for the common good. The culture of ‘gotong royong’ promotes positive values such as social harmony and mutual reciprocation in disaster-affected areas provides the necessary spirit needed to endure the hardships and for all involved. While gotong royong emphasises the positive notions of mutual family support and deep community level activity there is a potential for contrast against government lead disaster response and recovery management activities especially in settings where sporadic governance mechanisms exist and transparency and accountability in the recovery process of public infrastructure assets have been questioned. This paper thus questions whether Gotong Royong is a double-edged sword, and explores the potential marriage of community values and governance mechanisms for future disaster management planning and practice.

Moving beyond traditional clinics : creating a new legal clinics through community partnerships

To overcome the challenge of finding placements for large student numbers, QUT has partnered with community organisations to enable students to work on community-based projects addressing a community need. Students work in interdisciplinary teams with the community organisation to resolve issues and identify solutions to suit the organisation and client base. This paper will describe the community engaged learning pedagogy that is employed in the subject and will consider the benefits and challenges to law students of working collaboratively and developing community relationships. Critical appraisal of the legal system and the role of lawyers and analysis of the professional and ethical responsibilities legal practitioners is a focus of the subject. Explicit emphasis is placed on developing a sense of social responsibility and inculcating a pro bono ethos. Students attend workshops on topics such as reflective practice, cultural competencies, client solutions, collaborative practice and ethical obligations. This paper will discuss the challenges in creating the new legal clinic subject, benefits to students and community partners, and the results of initial student evaluation of the subject.

Harnessing SD and CSR within corporate self-regulation of weak economies : a meta-regulation approach

The semantic of the terms “sustainable development” and “corporate social responsibility” have changed over time to a point where these concepts have become two interrelated processes for ensuring the far-reaching development of society. Their convergence has given dimension to the environmental and corporate regulation mechanisms in strong economies. This article deals with the question of how the ethos of this convergence could be incorporated into the self-regulation of businesses in weak economies where nonlegal drivers are either inadequate or inefficient. It proposes that the policies for this incorporation should be based on the precepts of meta-regulation that have the potential to hold force majeure, economic incentives, and assistance-related strategies to reach an objective from the perspective of weak economies.

Open and networked initiatives and the digital transformation of academic publishing in China

Many aspects of China's academic publishing system differ from the systems found in liberal market based economies of the United States, Western Europe and Australia. A high level of government intervention in both the publishing industry and academia and the challenges associated with attempting to make a transition from a centrally controlled towards a more market based publishing industry are two notable differences; however, as in other countries, academic communities and publishers are being transformed by digital technologies. This research explores the complex yet dynamic digital transformation of academic publishing in China, with a specific focus of the open and networked initiatives inspired by Web 2.0 and social media. The thesis draws on two case studies: Science Paper Online, a government-operated online preprint platform and open access mandate; and New Science, a social reference management website operated by a group of young PhD students. Its analysis of the innovations, business models, operating strategies, influences, and difficulties faced by these two initiatives highlights important characteristics and trends in digital publishing experiments in China. The central argument of this thesis is that the open and collaborative possibilities of Web 2.0 inspired initiatives are emerging outside the established journal and monograph publishing system in China, introducing innovative and somewhat disruptive approaches to the certification, communication and commercial exploitation of knowledge. Moreover, emerging publishing models are enabling and encouraging a new system of practising and communicating science in China, putting into practice some elements of the Open Science ethos. There is evidence of both disruptive change to old publishing structures and the adaptive modification of emergent replacements in the Chinese practice. As such, the transformation from traditional to digital and interactive modes of publishing, involves both competition and convergence between new and old publishers, as well as dynamics of co-evolution involving new technologies, business models, social norms, and government reform agendas. One key concern driving this work is whether there are new opportunities and new models for academic publishing in the Web 2.0 age and social media environment, which might allow the basic functions of communication and certification to be achieved more effectively. This thesis enriches existing knowledge of open and networked transformations of scholarly publishing by adding a Chinese story. Although the development of open and networked publishing platforms in China remains in its infancy, the lessons provided by this research are relevant to practitioners and stakeholders interested in understanding the transformative dynamics of networked technologies for publishing and advocating open access in practice, not only in China, but also internationally.

The problem of greenwash: Rhetorical elements in communicating environmental CSR practices

The field of rhetoric can be highly useful for researchers to focus on and understand the specific textual strategies used by organizations when communicating about CSR practices. To date however, while there have been studies that consider the use of rhetoric to communicate about environmental practices, there have been few studies that have used a rhetorical analysis to consider both green communication and public response to that communication as a way of understanding public issues with organizational practice. This study seeks to address this gap by using a rhetorical analysis of both environmental communication by organizations, and the claims made by a regulatory body acting on behalf of the public about why that communication was deemed ‘greenwash’ or inappropriate. In doing so, the paper applies a rhetorical analysis to understand the grounds on which environmental communication is deemed not legitimate, and suggests that whilst all three elements of ethos should be considered when communicating a CSR practice, the element of phronesis is the most crucial element, whereby organizations must ensure that they accurately justify any claims in relation to CSR.

How do Chinese fashion designers become global fashion leaders? A new perspective on legitimisation in China’s fashion system

The term fashion system describes inter-relationships between production and consumption, illustrating how the production of fashion is a collective activity. For instance, Yuniya Kawamura (2011) notes systems for the production of fashion differ around the globe and are subject to constant change, and Jennifer Craik (1994, 6) draws attention to an ‘array of competing and intermeshing systems cutting across western and non-western cultures. In China, Shanghai’s nascent fashion system seeks to emulate the Eurocentric system of Fashion Weeks and industry support groups. It promises designers a platform for global competition, yet there are tensions from within. Interaction with a fashion system inevitably means becoming validated or legitimised. Legitimisation in turn depends upon gatekeepers who make aesthetic judgments about the status, quality, and cultural value of a designers work (Becker 2008). My paper offers a new perspective on legitimisation that is drawn mainly from my PhD research. I argue that some Chinese fashion designers are on the path to becoming global fashion designers because they have embraced a global aesthetic that resonates with the human condition, rather than the manufactured authenticity of a Eurocentric fashion system that perpetuates endless consumption. In this way, they are able to ‘self-legitimise’. I contend these designers are ‘designers for humans’, because they are able to look beyond the mythology of fashion brands, and the Eurocentric fashion system, where they explore the tensions of man and culture in their practice. Furthermore, their design ethos pursues beauty, truth and harmony in the Chinese philosophical sense, as well as incorporating financial return in a process that is still enacted through a fashion system. Accordingly, cultural tradition, heritage and modernity, while still valuable, have less impact on their practice.

What’s Oprah Winfrey got to do with it? The rise and rise of restorative justice

In recent years, restorative justice has become an immensely popular criminal justice option in contemporary western societies. Restorative practices have emerged in diverse parts of the world often in total isolation from one another – that is, they have emerged without knowledge of other, similar practices. This quandary prompts us to question how it is that restorative processes have come about, and what it is that has allowed restorative justice to become such a widely acceptable way of thinking about crime and criminal justice. The research project from which this pa-per stems takes this as its central problem, and aims to explore the many dis-courses which inform the field of restorative justice, or more specifically, the “conditions of emergence” of this field. This paper focuses on one of these discourses – the discourse of the therapeutic/recovery/self-help movement, famously championed by talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. It aims to investigate the ways in which the taken-for-granted nature of this discourse has permitted restorative justice to be-come an approved way of “doing justice”.

Adding SUGAR : service user and carer collaboration in mental health nursing research

‘SUGAR: Service users and carers group advising on research’ is an exciting initiative established to develop collaborative working in mental health nursing research between mental health service users, carers, researchers and practitioners at City University London, UK. This paper will describe the background to SUGAR and how and why it was established; how the group operates; some of the achievements to date including researcher reflections; and case studies of how this collaboration influences our research. Written reflective narratives of service user and carer experiences of SUGAR were analysed using constant comparative methods by the members. Common themes are presented with illustrative quotes. The article highlights the benefits and possible limitations identified so far by members of SUGAR; outlines future plans and considers the findings in relation to literature on involvement and empowerment. This paper has been written by staff and members of SUGAR and is the first venture into collaborative writing of the group and reflects the shared ethos of collaborative working.

Chinese fashion designers in Shanghai : identifying a fresh perspective about their role in the world order of fashion

Shanghai possesses an apt legacy, once referred to as “Paris of the East”. Municipal aspirations for Shanghai to assume a position among the great fashion cities of the world have been integrated in the recent re-shaping of this modern city into a role model for Chinese creative enterprise yet China is still known primarily as centre of clothing production. Increasingly however, “Made in China” is being replaced by “Created in China” drawing attention to two distinct consumer markets for Chinese designers. Fashion designers who have entered the global fashion system for education or by showing their collections have generally adopted a design aesthetic that aligns with Western markets, allowing little competitive advantage. In contrast, Chinese designers who rest their attention on the domestic Chinese market find a disparate, highly competitive marketplace. The pillars of authenticity that for foreign fashion brands extend far into their cultural and creative histories, often for many decades in the case of Louis Vuitton, Hermes and Christian Dior do not yet exist in China in this era of rapid globalisation. Here, the cultural bedrock allows these same pillars to extend only thirty years or so into the past reaching the moments when Deng Xiaoping granted China’s creative entrepreneurs passage. To this end, interviews with fashion designers in Shanghai have been undertaken during the last twelve months for a PhD dissertation. Production of culture theory has been used to identify working methods, practices of production and the social and cultural milieu necessary for designers to achieve viability.

Screening Queensland University of Technology second year architecture student films

Research Statement: In 2011 The State Library of Queensland in collaboration with Queensland University of Technology School of Design held a screening of six student urban films shot on location in several inner-city sites under my supervision. The films are now a permanent "exhibit" on The Edge State Library electronic site. The students were directed to explore the realist film ethos, which forms a platform for the research project, in its focus on the nonrepresentational aesthetics of the street, the unfinished and the sensory. The research demonstrates that film is a powerful instrument for the urban imaginary, for screening the city.

School nurses and partnerships for health education : team teaching in the secondary school curricula

The purpose of this research is to examine School Based Youth Health Nurses experience of partnerships for health education and team teaching. The School Based Youth Health Nurse Program is a contemporary model of school nursing in Queensland, Australia. The role of the School Based Youth Health Nurse consists of individual health consultations and health promotion. This research analyses a subset of qualitative data collected for a larger project about the experience of school based youth health nursing. The Health Promoting Schools model is used as a deductive framework. The findings reveal five subthemes across the three areas of the Health Promoting Schools approach. There are two subthemes within the curriculum, teaching and learning area; We were on the same page so to speak and I can go and do my reports or whatever. There are two sub-themes within the partnerships and services area; I had a beautiful science teacher who was just delightful and really just wanted to do things in partnerships and It’s all airy fairy arty farty stuff that’s not important. There is one theme in the school organisation, ethos and environment area; I just don’t know how well the top of these organisations communicate with the bottom of those organisations. Successful partnerships for health education and team teaching between school nurses and teachers are based on personal relationships based on rapport which lead to trust and reciprocity. Partnerships are limited by teachers understanding of the role of the school nurse and engagement with school nurses in the classroom. Administrative support from the top down is fundamental.