Place-related identity, texts, and transcultural meanings

The spatial turn has been marked by increasing interest in conceptions of space and place in diverse areas of research. However, the important links between place and identity have received less attention, particularly in educational research. This paper reports an 18-month research project that aimed to develop a theory of place-related identity through the textual transactions of reading and writing. The research was an in-depth qualitative study in two phases: the first phase involved the development of an interdisciplinary theory of place-related identity, which was ‘tested’ in a second empirical phase. Two contrasting primary school classes were the site for the research that included the development of a unit of work, inspired by the book My place, as a vehicle for exploring place-related identity. The data were interviews, classroom observations and outcomes from pupils’ work. The construct of transcultural meanings, established from the analytic categories of localising identity, othering identity and identity as belonging, was identified as a defining phenomenon of place-related identity. The conclusions offer reflections on the development of our initial theory as a result of the empirical work, and the implications for practice and future research.

Reading and performing abjection: Staging Joyce, A professional reflection

As one who has mounted theatrical Bloomsdays since 1994,' I well understand that the issue of Joyces radicalism on the subject of the body is a recurring crux for dramaturg, director and actors, not so much on moral grounds, as on the grounds of playability and sometimes taste. It is one thing to read with a startled chuckle a febrile passage which transgresses norms, or to enjoy hyperbole in context, but embodied enactment is an entirely different matter, because the limits of what Joyce was prepared to essay in fiction are so extreme, so strangely and transgressively unfamiliar, despite the passing of close to a century since publication. It is the difference between reading in private and reading a staged and necessarily embodied and visual event that is the focus of this article. What performing Joyces bodies has revealed to me is his particular, unsentimental and secular take on bodies as both comic and sublime, even sacred - concepts that are rarely yoked together. Resisting the impulse to sanitise Joyce and censor him takes one into the territory of outrageous, often non-naturalistic, comedy, but also into a paradoxical notion of the body as sacred, and the gendered body as potentially subversive, via the by-ways of theatricality, censorship and taste.

Beyond the workshop : doing multiliteracies with adolescents

Engaging students’ lifeworlds and the concerns of their communities in globalised, semiotic and information societies is imperative with the complexity of multimodal communication (Lemke 2006) in the ‘new media age’ (Kress 2003). As youth continue to demonstrate their multiliteracies proficiency with new literacies emerging from Internet Communication Technologies (ICTs), education - particularly curriculum and instruction - remains largely focused around monomodal, print-only literacy practices, often ignoring their multiple voices. In New Times (Hall 1996), there has been much rhetoric about the role of education in equipping students for the future. Multiliteracies pedagogy allows individual teachers to reconceptualise pedagogy and curriculum thereby addressing adolescents’ complex and demanding literacy needs (New London Group 1996). This paper presents new and emerging virtual contexts and environments for adolescent literacy instruction highlighting one teacher’s curricular interruptions where Multiliteracies pedagogies replaced the progressive monomodal reading and writing workshop. In conclusion, new perspectives on research related to the education of teachers in the education in post-typographic societies of the 21st century.

Investigation of an optimistic based concurrency control mechanism for parallel file systems

Parallel file systems offer improved performance over traditional file systems by allowing processes to access file data, stored over a number of disks, in parallel. When this file is to be accessed by many processes at the same time for reading and writing, the problem of maintaining file consistency is introduced. The general approach to maintaining file consistency is through the use locks which grant a single process exclusive access to the file. Existing studies have found parallel file systems and associated applications rarely experience conflict, resulting in unnecessary overheads from locks being acquired. This paper examines an alternate approach to maintaining file consistency, which is based on optimistic concurrency control. This approach was shown to have a much smaller overhead when compared with traditional lock-based approaches; especially in situations when there is little contention. This paper presents the design, implementation and initial testing results of an optimistic based concurrency control mechanism.

Doing multiliteracies: re-envisioning adolescent literacy in new times

In New Times (Hall, 1996), there has been much rhetoric about school’s role in equipping students for the future. Multiliteracies pedagogy allows individual teachers to reconceptualise pedagogy and curriculum thereby addressing adolescents’ complex and demanding literacy needs (New London Group, 1996). As a result of the advent of widespread computer use and Internet Communication Technologies (ICTs), this paper presents new and emerging virtual contexts and environments for adolescent literacy instruction. The paper highlights one teacher’s curricular initiatives/interruptions where Multiliteracies pedagogies and the incorporation of multimodal digital and multimedia design, replaced the progressive monomodal reading and writing workshop. In conclusion, new perspectives on research related to the education of teachers in the 21st century are presented to contribute to the public knowledge base of teacher education in post-typographic societies.

Rethinking the English pedagogy at Hope College in Taiwan

For many years Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and an English-Only approach to English teaching have characterised pedagogy at Hope College in Taiwan.

These approaches have had a significant impact on the ways in which students understand their cultural identities and develop competency in both oral and written English. Sometimes, in the EFL context in Taiwan, an English-Only policy can impact on students' learning in two ways. Firstly, it may cause students to doubt the validity of their own culture in comparison to English speaking culture. Secondly it may lead to students' resisting English culture because of enhanced feelings of nationalism. Furthermore, sometimes, students may feel disturbed when learning English in an English-Only class because the lack of cognitive understanding usually makes them misunderstand the content expressed in the target language (English) and misuse the target language.

In this paper I consider the need to reintroduce elements of the Grammar-Translation method to an EFL context and suggest an integrative pedagogy in which native English-speaking teachers, applying English only in the classes, focus on teaching listening and speaking to directly foster students' English linguistic competence, while local English teachers, applying both English and Chinese in the classes, focus on teaching reading and writing to foster students' in-depth cognitive ability of English culture and suitable written expression. The purpose of such integrative pedagogy is to keep students' cultural identity as well as advance students' understanding and correct use in English.

Second person : a point of view? The function of the second person pronoun in narrative prose fiction

This thesis looks at the functions and effects of the ‘second-person’ pronoun in narrative prose fiction, with particular focus on the fluidity and ambiguity of the mode that I will call Protean-'you.' It is a mode in which it is unclear whether the ‘you’ is a character, the narrator, a reader/narratee, or no-one in particular—or a combination of these—so that readers find ‘second-person’ utterances at once familiar and deeply strange. I regard the ‘second person’ as a special case of narrative ‘person’ that, at its most fluid, can produce an experience of reading quite unlike that of reading traditional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. Essentially, this unique experience comes about because Protean-‘you’ neglects to constitute the stable modes of subjectivity that readers expect to find within narrative textuality. These stable modes of subjectivity, modelled on what I will refer to as Cartesianism’s hegemonic notion of the self, have been thoroughly formalised and naturalised within the practices of ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. The Protean-‘you’ form of ‘second-person’ narrative, conversely, is a mode of narrative discourse that puts readers in a place of doubt and uncertainty, its unsettling equivocations forcefully disrupting accustomed, mimetic explanations of narrative and denying us access to the foundational, authorising subject of classical Cartesian thought. Rather than founding a notion of ‘second-person’ narrative and narrative ‘person’ generally on Cartesianism's ‘self-ish’ logic of unified, privatised identity, I turn to C.S, Peirce's notion of the semiotic self and to developments in post-structuralist thought. Essentially, the conception of subjectivity underpinning my arguments is Peirce's proposition that the self is to be conceived of not as a cogito, but as a sign by which the conscious entity knows itself. It is a sign, moreover, that is constantly being re-read, reinterpreted, so that identity is never self-complete. This reconception of subjectivity is necessary because 1 will argue that the effects of Protean-‘you’ arise in some part from a tension between Cartesianism's hegemony and what philosophical pragmatism and post-structuralism glimpse as the actual condition of the human subject—the subject as dispersed and contingent rather than unified and authoritative. Most discussions of ‘second-person’ narrative conceive of the mode in terms of implicit communicative relations, in some measure instituting Cartesianism's notion of the intentionalist self at the centre of literary meaning. I contrast the paradigmatic address model that arises from this conception against a model that approaches the analysis of ‘second-person’ narrative modality in terms of a referential function, that is, in terms of the object or objects referred to deictically by the ‘second-person’ pronoun. Two principal functions of ‘second-person’ textuality are identified and discussed at length. The first is generalisation, which is rarely dissipated altogether, a situation that contributes to the ambiguities of the pronoun's reference in much ‘second-person’ fiction. The second principal function is that of address, that is, the allocutionary function. Clearly, although stories that continually refer to a ‘you’ can seem quite baffling and unnatural, not all ‘second-person’ narratives unsettle the reader. In order to make the ‘second person's’ outlandish narratives knowable and stable, we bring to bear on them in our habits of reading whatever hermeneutic frames, whatever interpretive keys, come to hand, including a large number of unexceptional forms of literary and ‘natural’ discourse that employ the ‘second-person’ pronoun. These forms include letter writing and internal dialogue (i.e., talking to one's self), the language of the courtroom, the travelogue, the maxim, and so on. In looking at the ways in which the radicalising potentials of ‘second-person’ discourse are contained or recuperated, I focus on issues of vraisemblance and mimesis. Vraisemblance can be described as the ‘system of conventions and expectations which rests on/reinforces that more general system of ‘mutual knowledge’ produced within a community for the realisation and maintenance of a whole social world’. All of the forms of the vraisemblable are already instituted within social, cultural relations, so that what vraisemblance describes is the way we fit the inscriptions we read-that is, the way in which we naturalise what we read-into those given cultural and social forms. I also look at the conventionalising and naturalising work done by notions of mimesis in explaining relations between the world, our being in it, and texts, proposing that mimesis provides a principle buttress by which the good standing of the metaphor of ‘person’ is preserved in traditional and pre-critical modes of analysis. Indeed, the critic’s recourse to ‘person’ is in some measure always an engagement with mimesis. Any discussion that maintains that mimesis is in some way productive of meaning-which this thesis in fact does-must identify mimesis as a merely conventional category within practices of reading and semiosis more generally, and at the very least remove that term from its traditional position of transparent primacy and authority. Some of the most interesting and insightful arguments about ‘second-person’ narrative propose that the ‘second person’s’ most striking effects derive from the constitution of an ‘intersubjective’ experience of reading in which the subject positions of the ‘you’-protagonist, reader-narratee and narrator are combined into a fluid and indeterminate multiple subjectivity. Notions of intersubjectivity frequently position themselves as liberating the reader from Cartesianism's fixed, authoritative modes of subjectivity, Frequently, however, they tend implicitly to reinstate Cartesianism's notion of the self at the centre of textual practice and subjectivity. I look at Daniel Gunn's novel ‘Almost You’, at length in this context, illustrating the constant overdetermination of the ‘you’ and the novel's narrating voice, and demonstrating that this overdetermination leaves the origin of the narrative discourse, the identity of the narrator, and the ontological nature of both principal protagonists utterly ambiguous. The fluidity and ambiguity of Protean-‘you’ in ‘Almost You’ is discussed in terms of ‘second-person’ intersubjectivity, but with a view to demonstrating the indebtedness by the notion of intersubjectivity to Cartesianism's hegemony of ‘person’. I then turn to a discussion of what might be a more ‘old fashioned’ if perhaps ultimately more far-reaching approach to the ‘second person’s’ often startling ambiguities. This is Keats's notion of negative capability, a capacity or quality in which a person ‘is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ I suggest that Protean-‘you’ texts will license all of the readings of ambiguity and fluidity proposed in my discussion of ‘Almost You’, but conclude that the instances of indeterminacy illustrate no more than that: the fluidity and deep ambiguity, and thus, finally, the lack of coherence, of Protean-‘you’ discourse. This has particular implications for how we are to consider readers’ experiences of narrative texts. More fundamentally, it has implications for how we are to consider readers as subjects. I suggest that unstable, ambiguous instances of ‘second-person’ narrative can tear the complex and systematic embroidery of ideological suture that unifies Cretinism’s experience or sense of subjectivity, leaving the reader in a condition of epistemological and ontological havoc. I go on to argue that much of the deeply unsettling effect of Protean-‘you’ discourse anises because its utterances explicitly gesture towards Cretinism’s notion of self. Protean-‘you’ involves a sense of address that is much more pronounced than we are accustomed to facing when reading literary narrative, alerting us to the presence of inscribed anthropomorphic subjects. At the very same time, protean-‘you’ leaves its inscribed subjects indeterminate, ambiguous. This conflict generates a tension between the anticipation of the emergence of speaking and listening selves and our inability to find them. I go on to propose that Protean-‘you’ narrative's lack of coherence is also to be understood as the condition of narrative actuality generally, but a condition that is vigorously mediated against by dominant practices of reading and writing, hocusing my discussion in this respect on the issue of narrative ‘person,’ I argue that narrative ‘person’ is constituted within texts as an apparent unity, but that it is in fact, produced as unitary solely within the practice of making sense, that is, Within our habits of reading, and so is never finally unified. I propose that this is the case for ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ modes no less than for the ‘second.’ Where ‘second-person’ narrative at its most radical and Protean differs from conventional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narratives is the degree to which each has been circumscribed by practices of tantalization, containment and limit, and, in particular, Cretinism’s hegemony of ‘person.’ It may be that the most significant insights ‘second-person’ narrative has to offer are to be found within its capacity to reveal to the engaged reader the underlying condition of narrative discourse, and more generally, its capacity to reveal the actual condition of the human subject-a condition in which, exactly like its textual corollary of narrative ‘person,’ the self is glimpsed as thoroughly dispersed and contingent.

Adventurous girls of the empire : the pre-war novels of Bessie Marchant

Historically, the genre of adventure fiction most readily recalls books for boys and male heroes rather than girl readers and protagonists. These include enduringly well-known works such as H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), the early to mid-Victorian boys' stories of Frederick Marryat, W. H. G. Kingston, and R. M. Ballantyne and the late-Victorian G. A. Henty's tales (his more than one hundred adventure stories sold in excess of 25 million copies). The novel of adventure at the conclusion of the nineteenth century recounted tales of male exploration on land or sea, and quests or conquests in real or imagined lands removed from the gentility of civilized England. These generic features were aligned with masculine traits of activity and strength, and while girls could and did indeed read boys' adventure books, examples with female protagonists were uncommon in the Victorian period. Joseph Bristow argues that between 1870 and 1900, "narratives celebrating empire and techniques in teaching reading and writing gradually converged . . . [B]oth inside and outside the classroom, there was more and more emphasis on heroic adventure, and this involved a number of shifts in attitude towards juvenile publishing and curriculum design" (20–21). The works Bristow refers to were, of course, written by male authors about masculine adventurers.

The novels of Bessie Marchant—sometimes called "the girls' Henty" —began to be published as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Her girl heroines act independently in isolated areas in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South America, India, South Africa, Siberia, and Central America. From 1894 until her death in 1941, Marchant wrote more than a 130 novels, many of which celebrated the capacity of British or colonial girls to rise to any challenge set before them in rugged.

Place-related identities through texts : from interdisciplinary theory to research agenda

The implications of the transdisciplinary spatial turn are attract- ing growing interest in a broad range of areas related to education. This paper draws on a methodology for interdisciplinary thinking in order to articulate a new theoretical configuration of place-related identity, and its implications for a research agenda. The new configuration is created through an analy- sis of place-related identities in narrative theory, texts and literacy processes. The emerging research agenda focuses on the ways children perceive and rep- resent their place-related identities through reading and writing as inspired by and manifested in texts.

Beginning the search for core principles underpinning literacy development in the early years

Providing opportunities for all people to become literate is now a global imperative (World Bank 2008). There are many and varied reasons underlying this emphasis including global, national, community and personal perspectives (Friere & Macedo 2000) and countries world-wide are investing more money into their early childhood programs and the development of associated policies (Oberhuemer 2005). From a socio-cultural view, literacy development is emergent, ongoing (Cook-Gumperz 2006) and multifaceted (New London Group 1999). Literacy involves far more than reading and writing and encompasses listening, speaking and critical thinking (Department of Education, Science and Training 2005, Luke & Freebody 1997). Literacy is not merely a curricular area, but an important empowering life skill (Harrison 2012, Friere & Macedo 2000). It seems logical then, to search for and identify if there are core principles underpinning early years literacy development.In seeking to identify core principles for emergent literacy development, the study reported here adopted Wiersma & Jurs' (2005) 'Four Step' Historical Research methodological approach involving the identification of a research problem, collection and evaluation of source materials, synthesis of information from the source materials and finally, the analysis, interpretation and the formulation of conclusions. The historical research approach requires creative interpretation (Keastle 1988) and is valued for its effectiveness in sourcing ideas, enlightening current debates, empowering decision-making (Stricker 1992) and influencing policy formation (Wiersma & Jurs 2005).This study involved analysis of Early Years Language and Emergent Literacy Research from the past decade, sourced via education and social sciences databases, as well as information gathered from correspondence with Australian government departments, their websites and policies. The findings from a synthesis of these data sources led to the identification of nine core principles viewed as underpinning children's emergent literacy development. Interested in exploring the relevance and application of these principles to the field of early childhood in Australia, additionally, the researcher has embarked upon a mapping exercise that reveals how the recently introduced Early Years Learning Frameworks align with these principles. Furthermore, in recognition of the importance of the early years as a crucial time in a child's literacy development (Cook-Gumperz 2006, Raban & Nolan 2005, Hall, Larson & Marsh 2003), it is argued that these literacy principles will be valuable to the development of a range of educational tools to be used by Pre-service and practicing Early years educators.

Online dating

Communication, Digital Media and Everyday Life uses stories to explain the journey from ‘new media in communication’ to ‘digital media is communication’ and provide students with a thorough introduction to communication and media theory and practice. It recognises that for generations Y and Z, ‘digital media’ is now embedded into most aspects of everyday life and integrated into contemporary communication as much as speaking, reading and writing.

Bestiary of the virtual correspondents

This lyric sequence takes the relation of distant email correspondents as a conceit through which to explore the metamorphic, or even zoomorphic, transformations effected by reading and writing as intimate activities. Here amorous yearnings between women are celebrated for their transformative potential.

Turning the pages : adolescents, schools and reading

This study focuses on adolescents and reading. My premise is that adolescents develop a reading identity which is influenced by an existent reading culture to which they are exposed. This existent reading culture can be influenced in particular by schooling, family and the opinions of peers. One major influence is the classroom. Within the English curriculum, what criteria do English teachers use for selection of set texts and are there differences in criteria in all-boy/all girl and co-educational schools? I reflected on the prevailing perceptions that relate to gender, masculinity and popular culture which can affect what it means to be a boy, literate, and a reader of fictional texts. My first folio piece examines adolescents’ reading within five secondary schools, including an all-boy school, to ascertain whether boys in single-sex schools read more fictional texts and whether they enjoy reading more than their counterparts in co-educational schools. Authors are frequently invited to visit schools and work with students. My second folio piece investigates author visits in five secondary schools, from the perspectives of English teachers, teacher librarians and cohorts of middle school students. I wanted to find out why schools ask authors to visit and what are the expected outcomes of these visits, particularly in regard to adolescent reading identities. The third folio piece examines authors’ narratives concerning school visits. Authors have certain expectations when working with students and talking about their writing. I wanted to discover how authors think they can provide maximum impact on students through their visits, by asking a cohort of authors to recount their ‘dream school’ visits and ‘nightmare school’ visits. Interpretations of the research about boys and reading, and author visits from the schools’ perspectives are analysed using a form of content analysis. The third research project concerning authors’ narratives is interpreted using lexical networks. Prominent elements of my study explore adolescent reader identities through the influences of schooling and through author visits. In the conclusion of this study, these elements are drawn together and broad recommendations are outlined that pertain to the encouragement of positive adolescent reading identities.

Web-text : perceptions of digital reading skills in the ESL classroom

New strategies required in Web reading and digital writing cause previous notions of literacy to be reshaped and compel teachers to rethink classroom reading practice. The aim of this paper is to compare student perceptions of reading skills needed in the traditional print- text mode with the skills needed to read and gather information on the Web. Do students perceive reading as different on the Web? Are there implications for reading classroom teachers? This research was conducted in a medium-sized suburban government primary school of 580 students from 72 different countries. The participants were 48 students in two grade-six classes, with a focus on 12 English as second language (ESL) students' responses. These students came from Taiwan, China, India, Malaysia, Poland and Bhutan. The study was replicated in an adult ELICOS language centre environment with the authors own class of 18 students from China, Indonesia, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Japan. Different student expectations of Web-text compared to paper-text were evident. This research adds to our constantly evolving notions of literacy embracing technology and can be applied to primary, secondary and tertiary levels of ESL teaching practice.