Class act : Melbourne Workers Theatre, 1987-2007

Celebrates the company's artistic achievements and successes over the last two decades through interviews, essays and high quality images of key productions, and recounts its history, its evolving relationship with the embattled trade union movement, and its on-going engagement with working class, indigenous and migrant communities.

Class action

Hannie Rayson followed the success of her play Life After George (2000) with Inheritance. It is a rural family saga set in Victoria's Mallee region where two families, headed by eighty-year-old twin sisters Dibs and Girlie, battle it out for possession of the family farm. The play, directed by Simon Phillips, was performed in March 2003 to capacity audiences at the Melbourne Theatre Company, and then at the Sydney Theatre Company in April-May 2003. Rayson's most recent play, Two Brothers, opened at the Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, in April 2005.

Assessment of physical activity among primary school aged children: the Children's Leisure Activities Study (CLASS)

Overweight and obesity rates among children in Australia have increased twofold in the last decade. Physical activity is thought to play an important role in the prevention and treatment of childhood obesity. Children's physical activity data in Australia are incomplete and mainly based on parental proxy reports. One of the reasons for the lack of children's physical activity prevalence data in Australia is the difficulties of measurement. The aim of this study was to develop and examine a reliable, valid and feasible method for assessing physical activity among primary school aged children. A total of 112 grade 5 and 6 children and their parents were recruited from four state primary schools in the eastern and western suburbs of Melbourne. The test-retest reliability of a parental proxy physical activity questionnaire and a children's self report physical activity questionnaire was assessed. The criterion validity of the questionnaires was assessed using accelerometry. Findings suggest that the self report and proxy report questionnaires provided reliable measures of the type, frequency and duration of children's physical activity behaviour. Overall, the criterion validity of the questionnaires was poor. Although accelerometry as an objective measure shows promise, it does not provide the important physical activity behavioural and contextual information that is critical for the development of strategies to promote physical activity among children. We recommend that a combination of self report or proxy and objective measurement (using accelerometry or even pedometry) appears to be the current 'best buy' in the assessment of children's physical activity behaviour.

Troubling identities : teacher education students' constructions of class and ethnicity

This paper reports on a research project that explored how student teachers understand ethnic and classed difference as it relates to themselves and their students. Discourses of schooling can shape students ethnic and classed identities, frequently positioning non-mainstream students as 'other' and marginalizing them. Significant numbers of our teacher education students have limited experience of diverse educational settings, having mainly attended white middle-class schools as students and as student teachers. Working with diverse student populations productively depends on teachers recognising and valuing difference. The ways in which they engage with students whose ethnic and classed identities are different from their own is important in creating learning environments that build on and engage with diversity.

In a preliminary stage of the research we asked eight third-year teacher education students to explore their own ethnic and classed identities. The complexities of identity are foregrounded in both the assumptions we made in selecting particular students for the project and in the ways they did (not) think about themselves as having ethnic or classed identities.

In this paper we draw on these findings to interrogate how categories of identity are fluid, shifting and ongoing processes of negotiation: troubling and complex. We also consider the implications for teacher education.

Surviving suppression : no detectable impacts of Class A foam on soil invertebrates and some Australian native plants

Firefighting foams (Class A foams) are an effective and widespread firefighting tool which are frequently used in environmentally sensitive areas. Firefighting foams are known to be ecologically damaging in aquatic environments, however their impacts at the plant species or ecosystem level are relatively unknown. Reports of shoot damage to plants, suppressed flowering, and changes in plant community composition suggested that the ecological damage caused by their use may be unacceptable. However, applications of foam to seedlings of some Australian plant species from representative and widespread families, showed no detectable impacts on a range of vegetative growth characteristics. Application of 1.0% foam to heathland soils showed no detectable impacts on soil invertebrate Orders sampled over several months. The results are encouraging for the continued use of Class A foam as a fire suppression technique.

Ethnicity, social class, practice and pedagogy : a study of teacher identity

This paper draws on findings from three separate research projects to illustrate how teachers’ and student-teachers’ ethnic and social class identities shape theirrepresentations of professional self, their interactions with their students and the pedagogies they privilege in their classes. The paper raises a number of important implications for teacher education seeking to prepare teachers for culturally diverse contexts such as Australian classrooms. It concludes that a major challenge for teacher educators is to find ways of enabling their students to interrogate often taken-for-granted assumptions about their own ethnic and classed positionings.