Re-encountering Christina Stead : Why read ‘Workshop in the novel’?

Despite waves of interest in the work of Christina Stead, one aspect of her writing life has been largely neglected. From September 1943, she taught three series of extended writing workshops in New York and in the process left more than three hundred pages documenting her teaching. The question motivating this paper is: Why should we, as writers and teachers of writing, read her writing workshop notebooks nowadays? This paper will place Stead’s workshop in the context of the development of institutional teaching of novel writing and her emergence as a major writer. It will briefly examine how the notebooks have previously been understood and offer a closer analysis than has been made to date of the notebooks and their content and of the key issues raised by them. In particular, we shall explore her pedagogic focus upon workshop participants developing a rigorous, analytical approach to crafting novels and her extensive use of Georges Polti’s Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations to achieve this. That, in turn, will enable us to assess what the notebooks independently reveal about her beliefs regarding the novel and its purpose.

Salt reduction in Australia: from advocacy to action

BACKGROUND: As part of its endorsement of the World Health Organization's Global Action Plan to prevent non-communicable diseases, the Federal Government of Australia has committed to a 30% reduction in average population salt intake by 2025. Currently, mean daily salt intake levels are 8-9 g, varying by sex, region and population group. A number of salt reduction initiatives have been established over the last decade, but key elements for a co-ordinated population-level strategy are still missing. The objective of this review is to provide a comprehensive overview of existing population-level salt reduction activities in Australia and identify opportunities for further action.

METHODS: A review of the published literature and stakeholder activities was undertaken to identify and document current activities. The activities were then assessed against a pre-defined framework for salt reduction strategies.

RESULTS: A range of initiatives were identified from the review. The Australian Division of World Action on Salt and Health (AWASH) was established in 2005 and in 2007 launched its Drop the Salt! Campaign. This united non-governmental organisations (NGOs), health and medical and food industry organisations in a co-ordinated advocacy effort to encourage government to develop a national strategy to reduce salt. Subsequently, in 2010 the Federal Government launched its Food and Health Dialogue (FHD) with a remit to improve the health of the food supply in Australia through voluntary partnerships with food industry, government and non-government public health organisations. The focus of the FHD to date has been on voluntary reformulation of foods, primarily through salt reduction targets. More recently, in December 2014, the government's Health Star Rating system was launched. This front of pack labelling scheme uses stars to highlight the nutritional profile of packaged foods. Both government initiatives have clear targets or criteria for industry to meet, however, both are voluntary and the extent of industry uptake is not yet clear. There is also no parallel public awareness campaign to try and influence consumer behaviour relating to salt and no agreed mechanism for monitoring national changes in salt intake. The Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth) has recently instigated a State-level partnership to advance action and will launch its strategy in 2015.

CONCLUSIONS: In conclusion, salt reduction activities are currently being implemented through a variety of different programs but additional efforts and more robust national monitoring mechanisms are required to ensure that Australia is on track to achieve the proposed 30% reduction in salt intake within the next decade.

Gambling advocacy: lessons from tobacco, alcohol and junk food

OBJECTIVE: To explore the attitudes and opinions of public health experts in gambling and related unhealthy commodity industries towards the tactics used by the gambling industry to prevent reform and the advocacy responses to these tactics. METHODS: In-depth interviews (30-60 minutes) with a convenience sample of 15 public health experts and stakeholders with a public health approach to gambling (n=10), or other unhealthy commodity industries (food, alcohol, tobacco, n=5). RESULTS: Participants described the influences of political lobbying and donations on public policy, and industry framing of problem gambling as an issue of personal responsibility. Industry funding of, and influence over, academic research was considered to be one of the most effective industry tactics to resist reform. Participants felt there was a need to build stronger coalitions and collaborations between independent academics, and to improve the utilisation of media to more effectively shift perceptions of gambling harm away from the individual and towards the product. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Gambling industry tactics are similar to the tactics of other unhealthy commodity industries. However, advocacy initiatives to counter these tactics in gambling are less developed than in other areas. The formation of national public health coalitions, as well as a strong evidence base regarding industry tactics, will help to strengthen advocacy initiatives.

Beyond standard practice: the adaptation by design coastal communities’ workshop

The fastest regional population growth in Victoria in recent years has been in coastal areas close to Melbourne, more specifically the coastal parts of the greater Geelong region and the Great Ocean Road Coastal Region. Migration to these non-metropolitan coastal areas by city dwellers result in coastal sprawl. This coastal sprawl has devastating effects on the natural coastal environment including biodiversity and habitat loss, damage to wetlands, loss of indigenous vegetation and the introduction of developments that have no respect for ‘sense of place’, that are detrimental to the place character of these, often historical, coastal towns. Adding to these threats is the impacts of climate change and sea level rise. This paper identifies possible planning and design options reflecting community views on how to address this problem, specifically recording the outcomes of the coastal town of Port Campbell. Through a participative research process, workshops were conducted along this coast to identify the adaptation options proposed by the community members. This paper reflects the research outcomes of the Coastal Climate Change and Great Ocean Road Region research project, where an innovative Adaptation by Design Workshop process captured the views of the communities in this region and recommended future planning and design options that considered principles of sustainable design as part of adaptive planning and resilient design, thereby pushing the process of coastal planning beyond the current standard practice.

Family physician preceptors' conceptualizations of health advocacy: implications for medical education

PURPOSE: Despite its official acceptance as an important physician responsibility, health advocacy remains difficult to define, teach, role model, and assess. The aim of the current study was to explore physicians' conceptions of health advocacy based on their experience with health-advocacy-related activities. METHOD: In 2012, the authors conducted 11 semistructured interviews with family physician clinical preceptors and analyzed the interviews in the tradition of phenomenography. RESULTS: The authors identified three distinct but related ways of understanding health advocacy: (1) Clinical: Health advocacy as support of individual patients in addressing health care needs related to the immediate clinical problem within the health care system, (2) Paraclinical: Health advocacy as support of individual patients in addressing needs that the physician preceptors viewed as peripheral yet parallel to both the health care system and the immediate clinical problem, and (3) Supraclinical: Health advocacy as population-based activities aimed at practice- and system-level changes that address the social determinants of health. CONCLUSIONS: The qualitatively different understandings of health advocacy shed light on why current approaches to defining, teaching, role modeling, and assessing health advocacy competencies in medical education appear idiosyncratic. The authors suggest the development of an inclusive and extensive conceptual framework that may allow the medical education community to imagine novel ways of understanding and engaging in health advocacy.