Introduction : Picture Books ... Then, Now and Beyond

Picture books are known and familiar objects to many children and adults. They have been variously described as art objects, cultural documents, hybrid texts and verbal-visual art forms. They have also been variously categorised according to their readership – ranging from very young children to older readers, the latter can extend through the primary years to high school and even into adulthood. Scholars and students study picture books as part of an evolving literary and cultural landscape which has given rise to new genres and trends, such as ‘multicultural picture books’, ‘environmental picture books’ and ‘postmodern picture books’, and what Cherie Allan terms, ‘postmodernesque picture books’, that is, ‘picturebooks about postmodernity’ (Allan, 2012, p. 141). Picture books are also the staple literature in many early years and primary school classrooms for literacy and literary development, thus supporting the designated strands for literacy, literature, and language in the Australian Curriculum: English.

Picture Books and Beyond

Picture books and beyond examines a wide selection of picture books, graphics novels, films, e-picture books and apps that reflects the diversity of these evolving cultural artefacts, and their opportunities for education and delight. Picture books and beyond aligns closely with the goals and directions of the Australian Curriculum: English, and considers the potential of texts for enabling students to respond critically and creatively. It also highlights links to other curricula, general capabilities, and cross-curriculum priorities.

Balancing the books : an assessment of financial stress associated with social work and human service student placements

This report presents the findings from a study of the financial impact of work-integrated learning commonly referred to as 'placement' among social work and human services students. Based on a survey of 214 respondants, 14 in-depth interviews and two focus groups, the findings indicate that two thirds of the surveyed group felt tired and anxious about their experience of balancing paid work and placement, with 2 in 5 reporting their learning experience was compromised as a result. The significant implications and potential solutions are also discussed.

Remembering the past through picture books

In anticipation of the commemorations around the centenary of World War 1 (2014-2018) this chapter examines the ways in which war and its effects have been represented in picture books for children. It looks at the ways in which these picture books create “textual monuments” as points of reference through which younger generations can “develop a narrative of the past” and “explore different points of view”. The focus of the discussion centres on a number of recent picture books and their application to aspects of the F-2 Australian History curriculum.

Knowledge unlatched: A global library consortium model for funding open access scholarly books: Full report on the Proof of Concept Pilot 2014

This special issue of Cultural Science Journal is devoted to the report of a groundbreaking experiment in re-coordinating global markets for specialist scholarly books and enabling the knowledge commons: the Knowledge Unlatched proof-of-concept pilot. The pilot took place between January 2012 and September 2014. It involved libraries, publishers, authors, readers and research funders in the process of developing and testing a global library consortium model for supporting Open Access books. The experiment established that authors, librarians, publishers and research funding agencies can work together in powerful new ways to enable open access; that doing so is cost effective; and that a global library consortium model has the potential dramatically to widen access to the knowledge and ideas contained in book-length scholarly works.

Encouraging Empathy through Picture Books about Migration

Australia has become one of the most highly multilingual and multicultural societies in the world today with people descending from 270 ancestries, who speak more than 260 languages (Commonwealth of Australia, 2011). Immigration is something that children encounter in their daily lives either through personal experience or through witnessing the lives of migrants at school, in the community, or through popular media, including children’s literature. Schools are frequently the initial interface for individuals who resettle in Australia and they ‘play a significant role in establishing meaningful connections to Australian society and a sense of belonging in Australia’ (Uptin, Wright, & Harwood, 2013, p. 1). Children's literature about cultural and ethnic diversity explores the impacts of migration and related issues creating ‘imaginary realms’ (Dudek & Ommundsen, 2007). These fictional interpretations of the migrant experience or the experience of migration are supported by distinctive “real life” cultural experiences. Picture books furnish teachers and students with an accessible means to investigate these complex issues through sensitive discussions. This chapter investigates how picture books about migration help deepen children’s perceptive understanding of migrants’ plights, and thereby nurture tolerance and empathy.

Walking and talking with living texts: Breathing life against static standardisation

Current educational reform, policy and public discourse emphasise standardisation of testing, curricula and professional practice, yet the landscape of literacy practices today is fluid, interactive, multimodal, ever-changing, adaptive and collaborative. How then can English and literacy educators negotiate these conflicting terrains? The nature of today’s literacy practices is reflected in a concept of living texts which refers to experienced events and encounters that offer meaning-making that is fluid, interactive and changing. Literacy learning possibilities with living texts are described and discussed by the authors who independently investigated the place of living texts across two distinctly different learning contexts: a young people’s community arts project and a co-taught multiliteracies project in a high school. In the community arts project, young people created living texts as guided walks of urban spaces that adapt and change to varying audiences. In the multiliteracies project, two parents and a teacher created interactive spaces through co-teaching and cogenerative dialoguing. These spaces generate living texts that yield a purposefully connected curriculum rich in community-relevant and culturally significant texts. These two studies are shared with a view of bringing living texts into literacy education to loosen rigidity in standardisation.

Now you're talking

Undergraduate medical imaging students at an urban Australian university attend their first clinical placement towards the end of Semester two in their first year. While they often have a great deal of contextual knowledge and targeted theoretical learning prior to their first clinical placement, many of them are unfamiliar with the dynamics of a hospital environment. With the increase in online communication platforms, there was a concern that face-to-face clinical communication skills were becoming a source of anxiety for students, especially prior to their first clinical placements. Given the impact of anxiety on communication, reducing communication-related apprehension was considered a programme priority. A pilot series of scenario-based tutorials was implemented in the general radiography unit for the first year students.

The artist is a thief: A book review

Stephen Gray is a writer and law lecturer who has been living in Darwin since 1989. He started out writing formal legal pieces about how copyright law had unsuccessfully sought to accommodate Aboriginal art. Such work led him to further investigate the philosophical questions underlying the legal issues affecting both traditional and urban Indigenous people. Gray has also explored matters of bioprospecting in relation to Indigenous biological resources. He has investigated the introduction of a label of authenticity into Australia. Gray has also published a number of articles about other legal issues affecting Indigenous people. He has explored such topics as native title, customary law, alternative dispute resolution, and criminal law. Gray has recently been awarded The Australian/ Vogel Literary Award for his novel The Artist is a Thief. He was inspired to write a book after being sent out to a community on a possible copyright claim as part of his job in the law faculty of Northern Territory University: "I wrote an academic article and then a more philosophical piece talking about the copyright act and the way it doesn't really protect traditional artists who have a very different view of the place of their art. The pieces were interesting, but I felt there was something more there that needed a fictional expression as well." It is ironic that such a self-conscious and sophisticated meditation upon appropriation and authenticity should win The Australian/ Vogel Literary Award. The inaugural award in 1980 was won by Paul Radley, who later revealed his books were mostly written by his uncle, and in 1993 it was won by Helen Demidenko, aka Darville, who had lied about her Ukrainian background and family history.

Talking green: From Oz to Oz

This paper is an extension of Talking Green in Red States: Stories from the Great Plains (Gibson et al., 2014) that examined the communication strategies of planners involved in sustainability planning initiatives in the U.S. Great Plains. We expand these narratives beyond the Great Plains to Queensland, Australia by interviewing planners about their experiences when communicating and deliberating about issues of sustainability. Using a semi-formal structure, interviews are conducted as casual “coffee talks” (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003). Together, these collected stories help us to understand how planners are “talking green” in conservative political atmospheres, across vastly differing geographies using an international comparative framework described by Reimer et al. (2014). The paper presents comparisons between the collected narratives, concerning similarities and differences in regard to the nuances of sustainability planning dialog. We relate the lessons learned about communication strategies of planners working in sustainability in Kansas and Queensland to the broader discourse of planning and politics, communicative planning and planning as storytelling, as they relate to sustainability planning in challenging situations. From this paper, the audience will better understand how: 1) to discuss environmental and sustainable planning in communities that have varying levels of distrust and suspicion towards these concepts; 2) to develop strategies to work around these planning communication issues, and; 3) international context affects these communication challenges.

Using children's picture books and process drama to develop students' critical literacy responses

This workshop introduces a range of process drama activities to develop students' critical literacy responses. Whilst children's picture books and process drama strategies have not traditionally been seen as sophisticated resources and strategies for developing students' critical literacy responses, this workshop shows teaching strategies that can be used in language instruction in primary classrooms with diverse student groups. The teaching activities include ‘attribute lists’, ‘sculptures’ and ‘freeze frames’.

Using children's picture books to develop students' critical literacy responses

This lecture introduces a range of children's picture books from around the world and teaching strategies that develop students' critical literacy responses. Whilst children's picture books have not traditionally been seen as sophisticated resources for developing students' critical literacy responses, this lecture presents research that shows young children as code breakers, text participants, text users and text analysts (Luke & Freebody, 1999) of written, visual, oral and gestural texts. This lecture also outlines the teaching strategies as they have been used in language instruction in primary classrooms with diverse student groups.

Multiple roles of transfer prices: One vs. two books

This paper investigates multiple roles of transfer prices for shipments of goods and services between entities of a multinational enterprise. At the center is the role of transfer pricing (TP) in tax manipulation, but other roles having to do with internal operations or strategic delegation, etc. are also considered. The interesting question is to what extent and how the different roles of TPs interfere with each other. The answer depends on whether companies use one or two books, i.e. whether they (can) apply different TPs for different purposes. We illustrate, in a stylized model, the competing aims of tax manipulation and strategic delegation. Finally, we briefly look at selected reform proposals, concluding that either TP problems are not addressed, or else new distortions will be introduced instead.

Knowledge unlatched : A global library consortium model for funding Open Access scholarly books

Specialist scholarly books, including monographs, allow researchers to present their work, pose questions and to test and extend areas of theory through long-form writing. In spite of the fact that research communities all over the world value monographs and depend heavily on them as a requirement of tenure and promotion in many disciplines, sales of this kind of book are in free fall, with some estimates suggesting declines of as much as 90% over twenty years (Willinsky 2006). Cashstrapped monograph publishers have found themselves caught in a negative cycle of increasing prices and falling sales, with few resources left to support experimentation, business model innovation or engagement with digital technology and Open Access (OA). This chapter considers an important attempt to tackle failing markets for scholarly monographs, and to enable the wider adoption of OA licenses for book-length works: the 2012 – 2014 Knowledge Unlatched pilot. Knowledge Unlatched is a bold attempt to reconfigure the market for specialist scholarly books: moving it beyond the sale of ‘content’ towards a model that supports the services valued by scholarly and wider communities in the context of digital possibility. Its success has powerful implications for the way we understand copyright’s role in the creative industries, and the potential for established institutions and infrastructure to support the open and networked dynamics of a digital age.