Diasporic Greek-Australian writing deconstructed : challenging Europe with new voices, new perspectives

Contemporary Europe, culturally, historically and linguistically is filled with contradiction, silences and paradox.

Diasporic creative writers in Australia who are associated, either by virtue of their cultural heritage or through an intellectual engagement with Europe, can in fact provide a radical potential in contemporary European cultural analysis.

Deconstructing and interpreting narratives, prose and poetry of bilingual writers can open up unexplored areas which, up till now, have been either repressed or marginalised. This critical endeavour, drawing on recent post-colonial criticism, is a new way to interpret fiction, stories and even modern fairytales. It appears less threatening and confronting to venture into those cultural, psychological and subliminal areas which contemporary Europe perhaps wishes to forget or renounce. It is however an alternate method which can be used to compel criticism to puzzle over such areas and so open up new perspectives as well as allow for new voices.

Broken songs and ecology : writing about the Gulf of Carpentaria

Book review of Carpentaria by Alexis Wright.

Developing an interactive writing tool for business law students

Students’ performance in assessment tasks requiring logical written answers to case study problems can be adversely affected by difficulties in constructing a full length, logical written argument that demonstrates understanding to the level expected. This paper describes a teaching and learning tool developed to assist students in constructing logical full-length answers to given problems, using individual understanding of underlying concepts and their application. The tool allows students to see their thoughts and reasoning written into full-length answers of different styles. Developed initially for Business law students, this Answer Styles tool has scope to assist students’ writing in many disciplines.

The failure of dissertation advice books : toward alternative pedagogies for doctoral writing

Anxious doctoral researchers can now call on a proliferation of advice books telling them how to produce their dissertations. This article analyzes some characteristics of this self-help genre, including the ways it produces an expert–novice relationship with readers, reduces dissertation writing to a series of linear steps, reveals hidden rules, and asserts a mix of certainty and fear to position readers "correctly." The authors argue for a more complex view of doctoral writing both as text work/identity work and as a discursive social practice. They reject transmission pedagogies that normalize the power-saturated relations of protégé and master and point to alternate pedagogical approaches that position doctoral researchers as colleagues engaged in a shared, unequal, and changing practice

Rethinking doctoral publication practices : writing from and beyond the thesis

This article addresses the importance of giving greater pedagogical attention to writing for publication in higher education. It recognizes that, while doctoral research is a major source of new knowledge production in universities, most doctoral students do not receive adequate mentoring or structural support to publish from their research, with poor results. Data from a case study of graduates in science and education are examined to show how the different disciplinary and pedagogic practices of each discourse community impact on student publication. It is argued that co-authorship with supervisors is a significant pedagogic practice that can enhance the robustness and know-how of emergent scholars as well as their publication output. There is a need, however, to rethink co-authorship more explicitly as a pedagogic practice, and create more deliberate structures in subject disciplines to scaffold doctoral publication - as it is these structures that influence whether graduates publish as informed professionals in their chosen fields of practice.