Teaching narrative journalism and the APN Professional Development Program

This paper extends the familiar concept of ‘journalism-as-storytelling’ into a description of some of its practical applications in a university and industry partnership resulting in a commercial training arrangement in early 2007. It describes the APN/USQ Professional Development Program for newspaper employees (with no formal journalism qualification) and exemplifies how print journalism courses may be adapted to teach narrative writing techniques. It demonstrates how foundation skills in journalistic practice may be incorporated into an adapted teaching model, suggesting that “the basics” of narrative writing should not be thought of as discrete components of journalism education. This argument is further supported by the description of a robust pedagogical approach informed by Mezirows’ transformative learning theory for a cross-disciplinary knowledge base.

Putting theory into practice : moving from student identity to teacher identity

As teaching is a highly skilled and complex profession, pre-service teachers’ need to develop a series of attributes for their practice in relation to pedagogy, content, student learning, classroom management and their ability to engage in reflection. Through reflective narrative, this article seeks to share how a tertiary music educator prepares her generalist primary pre-service teachers to engage, explore and experience music education within the Bachelor of Education (Primary) course at Unnamed University. It also presents one pre-service teacher’s experience of teaching music during her school placements in 2009 in what she calls ‘putting theory into practice’ moving from student identity to teacher identity. Although the ‘hands-on’ approach to teaching and learning on-campus and when on school placement provide pre-service teachers with knowledge, skills and understanding, the continued support of professional learning is well recognised and will be an ongoing process as pre-service teachers create their own professional identity.

Users' information requirements and narrative reporting : the case of Iranian companies

This paper investigates whether the narrative section of Iranian companies' annual reports satisfies the information requirements of financial analysts employed by institutional investors. Taking a group of stakeholders (i.e. financial analysts) as the sample, a questionnaire survey was conducted to identify their top three information needs from the narrative sections of company annual reports in each of three information categories: Present, Analytical and Prospective. Following this survey, a checklist was prepared to analyse whether Iranian companies are disclosing this information required by financial analysts. Overall, the results partially support stakeholder theory as there is a general lack of information flow on the part of Iranian listed companies in meeting their stakeholders' information needs.

Narrative structure analysis with education and training videos for e-learning

This paper deals with the problem ofstructuralizing education and training videos for high-level semantics extraction and nonlinear media presentation in e-learning applications. Drawing guidance from production knowledge in instructional media, we propose six main narrative structures employed in education and training videos for both motivation and demonstration during learning and practical training. We devise a powerful audiovisual feature set, accompanied by a hierarchical decision tree-based classification system to determine and discriminate between these structures. Based on a two-liered hierarchical model, we demonstrate that we can achieve an accuracy of 84.7% on a comprehensive set of education and training video data.

Power and discourse in information systems practice : a narrative research method

Relationships of authority and control and their effect on information systems actors has interested IS researchers since at least the 1980’s. The study of power itself has also troubled organisational and sociological theorists, from which information systems researchers have drawn various lines of attack. Our approach to power rests on an historical synchronic theory that seeks to uncover the places and operation of power through an examination of narrative ‘testaments’ which are analysed not from the perspective of the giving individual but from the structural elements of discourse that they may represent. This paper compliments previous research methods on the topic of power especially in expert reports and systems development methodologies; provides specific guidance on how to apply the notion of discourse synchronically; and reconstructs the commercial practice of information systems, not as a broad church, but as one of competing and epistemologically incommensurate discourse, where the fates of the powerful are balanced against the fearful and silent disciplined.

Is narrative identity four-dimensionalist?

The claim that selves are narratively constituted has attained considerable currency in both analytic and continental philosophy. However, a set of increasingly standard objections to narrative identity are also emerging. In this paper, I focus on metaphysically realist versions of narrative identity theory, showing how they both build on and differ from their neo-Lockean counterparts. But I also argue that narrative realism is implicitly committed to a four-dimensionalist, temporal-parts ontology of persons. That exposes narrative realism to the charge that the narratively constituted self, on the one hand, and the self that is the object of much of our everyday self-reference and self-experience, on the other, can’t be the same thing. This conclusion may well force narrativists to abandon metaphysical realism about narrative selves — which, in turn, may leave the invocation of ‘narrativity’ as identity-constituting somewhat under-motivated.