Protection of Refugees and Displaced Persons in the Asia Pacific Region

The chapters in this book explore the impact of recent shifts in global and regional power and the subsequent development and enforcement of international refugee protection standards in the Asia Pacific region. Drawing on their expertise across a number of jurisdictions, the contributors assess the challenges confronting the implementation of international law in the region, as well as new opportunities for extending protection norms into national and regional dialogues. The case studies span key jurisdictions across the region and include a comparative analysis with China, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Australia. This topical and important book raises critical questions for the Asia Pacific region and sheds light on the challenges confronting the protection of refugees and displaced persons in this area. Interdisciplinary in its approach, it will be of interest to academics, researchers, students and policy-makers concerned with the rights and protection of refugees.

A study of Beijing‘s competitive advantage as an emergent media capital

The development of creative industries has been connected to urban development since the end of the 20th century. However, the causality of why creative industries always cluster and develop in certain cities hasn‘t been adequately demonstrated, especially as to how various resources grow, interact and nurture the creative capacity of the locality. Therefore it is vital to observe how the local institutional environment nurtures creative industries and how creative industries consequently change the environment in order to better address the connection between creative industries and localities. In Beijing, the relocation of CCTV, BTV and Phoenix to Chaoyang District raises the possibility of a new era for Chinese media, one in which the stodginess of propaganda content will give way to exciting new forms and genres. The mixing of media companies in an open commercial environment (away from the political power district of Xicheng) holds the promise of more freedom of expression and, ultimately, to a =media capital‘ (Curtin, 2003). These are the dreams of many media practitioners in Beijing. But just how realistic are their expectations? This study adopts the concept of =media capital‘ to demonstrate how participants, including state-media organisations, private media companies and international media conglomerates, are seeking out space and networks to survive in Beijing. Drawing on policy analysis, interviews and case studies, this study illustrates how different agents meet, confront and adapt in Beijing. This study identifies factors responsible for the media industries clustering in China, and argues that Beijing is very likely to be the next Chinese media capital, after enough accumulation and development, although as a lower tier version compared to other media capitals in the world. This study contributes to Curtin‘s =media capital‘ concept, develops his interpretation on the relationship of media industries and the government, and suggests that the influence over the government of media companies and professionals should be acknowledged. Therefore, empirically, this study assists media practitioners in understanding how the Chinese government perceives media industries and, consequently, how media industries are operated in China. The study also reveals that despite the government‘s aspirations, China‘s media industries are still greatly constrained by institutional obstacles. Hence Beijing really needs to speed up its pace on the path of media reform, abandon the old mindset and create more room for creativity. Policy-makers in China should keep in mind that the only choice left to them is to further the reform.

Regulating journalists? The Finkelstein Review, the Convergence Review, and News Media Regulation in Australia

This paper identifies two major forces driving change in media policy worldwide: media convergence, and renewed concerns about media ethics, with the latter seen in the U.K. Leveson Inquiry. It focuses on two major public inquiries in Australia during 2011-2012 – the Independent Media Inquiry (Finkelstein Review) and the Convergence Review – and the issues raised about future regulation of journalism and news standards. Drawing upon perspectives from media theory, it observes the strong influence of social responsibility theories of the media in the Finkelstein Review, and the adverse reaction these received from those arguing from Fourth Estate/free press perspectives, which were also consistent with the longstanding opposition of Australian newspaper proprietors to government regulation. It also discusses the approaches taken in the Convergence Review to regulating for news standards, in light of the complexities arising from media convergence. The paper concludes with consideration of the fast-changing environment in which such proposals to transform media regulation are being considered, including the crisis of news media organisation business models, as seen in Australia with major layoffs of journalists from the leading print media publications.

Urban renewal, migration and memories : the affordances of place-based pedagogies for developing immigrant students’ literate repertoires

This paper reports on the new literacy demands in the middle years of schooling project in which the affordances of placed-based pedagogy are being explored through teacher inquiries and classroom-based design experiments. The school is located within a large-scale urban renewal project in which houses are being demolished and families relocated. The original school buildings have recently been demolished and replaced by a large ‘superschool’ which serves a bigger student population from a wider area. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data, the teachers reported that the language literacy learning of students (including a majority of students learning English as a second language) involved in the project exceeded their expectations. The project provided the motivation for them to develop their oral language repertoires, by involving them in processes such as conducting interviews with adults for their oral histories, through questioning the project manager in regular meetings, and through reporting to their peers and the wider community at school assemblies. At the same time students’ written and multimodal documentation of changes in the neighbourhood and the school grounds extended their literate and semiotic repertoires as they produced books, reports, films, powerpoints, visual designs and models of structures.

Leadership for creating a thinking school at Buranda State School

This article explores the role of principal leadership in creating a thinking school. It contributes to the school leadership literature by exploring the intersection of two important areas of study in education - school leadership and education for thinking - which is a particularly apt area of study, because effective school leadership is crucial if students are to learn to be critical and creative thinkers, yet this connection has not be widely investigated. We describe how one principal, Hinton, turned around an underperforming school by using critical and creative philosophical thinking as the focus for students, staff and parents. Then, drawing on the school leadership literature, the article describes seven attributes of school leadership beginning with four articulated by Leithwood and colleagues (2006) (building vision and setting direction; redesigning the organisation; understanding and developing people; managing the teaching and learning program), and adding three others (influence; self-development; and responding to context). This framework is then used in a case study format in a collaboration between practitioner and researchers to first explore evidence from empirical studies and personal reflection about Hinton's leadership of Buranda State School, and second to illuminate how these general features of school leadership apply to creating a thinking school. Based on the case study and using the general characteristics of school leadership, a framework for leading a thinking school is described. Because the framework is based on a turnaround school, this framework has wide applicability: to schools that are doing well as an indication of how to implement a contemporary approach to curriculum and pedagogy; and to schools that are underperforming and want a rigorous, high expectation and contemporary way to improve student learning.

Framing local stories for community consumption facilitation and evaluation in narrative driven arts-based projects

Cyclone Yasi struck the Cassowary Coast of Queensland in the early hours of Feb 3, 2011, destroying many homes sand property, including the destruction of the Cardwell and district historical society’s premises. With their own homes flattened, many were forced to live in mobile accommodation, with extended family, or leave altogether. The historical society members however were more devastated by their flattened foreshore museum and loss of their collection material. A call for assistance was made through the OHAA Qld branch, who along with QUT sponsored a trip to somehow plan how they could start to pick up the pieces to start again. This presentation highlights the need for communities to gather, preserve and present their own stories, in a way that is sustainable and meaningful to them, but that good advice and support along the way is important. Two 2 day workshops were held in March and then September, augmented by plenty of email correspondence and phone calls in between. Participants learnt that if they could conduct quality oral history interviews, they could later use these in many exhibitable ways including: documentary pieces; digital stories; photographic collections; creative short stories; audio segments –while also drawing closely together a suffering community. This story is not only about the people who were interviewed about the night Yasi struck, but the amazing women (all over 50) of the historical society who were willing to try and leap the digital divide that faces older Australians, especially those in rural Australia, so that their older local stories would not be lost and so that new stories could also be remembered.

Conceptualising teachers’ assessment literacies in an era of curriculum and assessment reform

Teacher assessment literacy is a phrase that is often used but rarely defined. Yet understanding teacher assessment literacy is important in an international curriculum and assessment reform context that continues to challenge teachers’ assessment practices. In this article situated examples of classroom assessment literacies are analysed using Bernstein’s (Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research and critique, Taylor and Francis, London, 1996; Br J Sociol Educ 20(2):157–173, 1999) theoretical tools of vertical and horizontal discourses, classification and framing. Drawing on a sociocultural view of learning, the authors define teacher assessment literacies as dynamic social practices which are context dependent and which involve teachers in articulating and negotiating classroom and cultural knowledges with one another and with learners, in the initiation, development and practice of assessment to achieve the learning goals of students. This conceptualisation of assessment literacy aims to make explicit some underpinning theoretical constructs of assessment literacy to inform dialogue and decision making for policy and practice to benefit student learning and achievement.

Regulating for corporate human rights abuses : the emergence of corporate reporting on the ILO’s human rights standards within the global garment manufacturing and retail industry

Despite the ubiquitous nature of the discourse on human rights there is currently little research on the emergence of disclosure by multinational corporations on their human rights obligations or the regulatory dynamic that may lie behind this trend. In an attempt to begin to explore the extent to which, if any, the language of human rights has entered the discourse of corporate accountability, this paper investigates the adoption of the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) human rights standards by major multinational garment retail companies that source products from developing countries, as disclosed through their reporting media. The paper has three objectives. Firstly, to empirically explore the extent to which a group of multinational garment retailers invoke the language of human rights when disclosing their corporate responsibilities. The paper reviews corporate reporting media including social responsibility codes of conduct, annual reports and stand-alone social responsibility reports released by 18 major global clothing and retail companies during a period from 1990 to 2007. We find that the number of companies adopting and disclosing on the ILO's workplace human rights standards has significantly increased since 1998 – the year in which the ILO's standards were endorsed and accepted by the global community (ILO, 1998). Secondly, drawing on a combination of Responsive Regulation theory and neo-institutional theory, we tentatively seek to understand the regulatory space that may have influenced these large corporations to adopt the language of human rights obligations. In particular, we study the role that International Governmental Organisation's (IGO) such as ILO may have played in these disclosures. Finally, we provide some critical reflections on the power and potential within the corporate adoption of the language of human rights.

Stealing and “Dishonest Application” : defining the difference in Queensland

The 1st July 1997 heralded the implementation of a number of amendments to the Queensland Criminal Code including some intriguing changes affecting the principal property offences of stealing (section 398) and dishonest application (section 408C). This article discusses the impact of the changes. It examines the extent of the amendments and then aims to delineate the ambit of each offence drawing on some of the more recent judgments in the area. It concludes that the offences are moving closer together while retaining many of the complexities of proof experienced in the past.

Negotiating teacher identities : dialogic reflections on classroom interaction in a transnational context

This study investigates the development of teacher identity in a transnational context through an analysis of the voices of sixteen preservice teachers from Hong Kong who engage in interaction with primary students in an Australian classroom. The context for this research is the school-based experience undertaken by these preservice English as a second language teachers as part of their short language immersion (SLIM) program in Brisbane, Australia. Such SLIM programs are a genre of study abroad programs which have been gaining in popularity within teacher education in Australia, attended by preservice and inservice teachers from China, Hong Kong, Korea, and other Asian countries. This research is conducted at a time when the imperative to globalise higher education provision is a strategic factor in the educational policies of both Australia and Hong Kong. In Australia, international educational services now constitute the country’s third largest export with more than 400,000 students coming to Australia to study annually. In order to maintain Australia’s current global position as the third most popular Englishspeaking study destination, the government is now focusing on sustainability and the quality of the study experience being offered to international students (Bradley Review, 2008). In Hong Kong, the government sponsors both preservice and inservice English as a second language (ESL) teachers to undertake SLIM programs in Australia and other English-speaking countries, as part of their policy of promoting high levels of English proficiency in Hong Kong classrooms. Transnational teacher education is an important issue to which this study contributes insights into the affordances and constraints of a school-based experience in the transnational context. Second language teacher education has been defined as interventions designed to develop participants’ professional knowledge. In this study, it is argued that participation in a different community of practice helps to foreground tacit theories of second language pedagogy, making them visible and open to review. Questions of pedagogy are also seen as questions of teacher identity, constituting the way that one is in the classroom. I take up a sociocultural and poststructural framework, drawing on the work of James Gee and Mikhail Bakhtin, to theorise the construction of teacher identity as emerging through dialogic relations and socially situated discursive practices. From this perspective, this study investigates whether these teachers engage with different ways of representing themselves through appropriating, adapting or rejecting Discourses prevailing in the Australian classroom. Research suggests that reflecting on dilemmas encountered as lived experiences can extend professional understandings. In this study, the participants engage in a process of dialogic reflection on their intercultural classroom interactions, examining with their peers and their lecturer/researcher selected moments of dissonance that they have faced in the unfamiliar context of an Australian primary classroom. It is argued that the recursive and multivoiced nature of this process of reflection on practice allows participants opportunities to negotiate new understandings of second language teacher identity. Dialogic learning, based on the theories of Bakhtin and Vygotsky, provides the theoretic framing not only for the process of reflection instantiated in this study, but also features in the analysis of the participants’ second language classroom practices. The research design uses a combined discourse analytic and ethnographic approach as a logic-of-inquiry to explore the dialogic relationships which these second language teachers negotiate with their students and their peers in the transnational context. In this way, through discourse analysis of their classroom talk and reflective dialogues, assisted by the analytic tools of speech genres and discourse formats, I explore the participants’ ways of doing and being second language teachers. Thus, this analysis traces the process of ideological becoming of these beginner teachers as shifts in their understandings of teacher and student identities. This study also demonstrates the potential for a nontraditional stimulated recall interview to provide dialogic scaffolding for beginner teachers to reflect productively on their practice.