Game-centred models and teaching in culturally diverse settings

This presentation draws on the observations and experiences that we, as teacher educators, have had using Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) as a pedagogical tool with generalist pre-service teachers in two different sites: Malaysia and Australia. TGfU is a game-centred pedagogy in which students learn the „Why‟ of game playing before the „How‟ of the skills associated with the game. This concept is based on a student-centred approach to learning. The benefit of this pedagogy to generalist teachers is the notion that they are not required to be a master of many sports. This narrative relates the observations and experiences of teacher educators of Malaysian and Australian generalist pre-service teachers confronted with teaching and learning TGfU for the first time in their culturally specific contexts. The two key issues arising from teaching the TGfU model were: the disparity in the cohorts‟ experiences arising from institutionalised conceptions by the pre-service teachers of what and how learning occurs in physical education; and the pre-service teachers‟ difficulty with implementing the TGfU model in a practical situation. Crossing the cultural divide for the Malaysian and Australian pre-service teachers required them to explore more fully the range of approaches to teaching and to recognise a more student-centred approach as a valid and authentic tool. As both teachers and observers of this process, our intention was to examine the two cohorts‟ learning and subsequent teaching with the aim of developing better understandings of the challenges when teaching TGfU in tertiary settings.

Dialogue with Hans-Georg Gadamer : the contribution of hermeneutics to understanding what a person is saying

This thesis reviews the development of philosophy of interpretation since the nineteenth century exemplified in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, It recognizes Gadamer as the foremost philosopher of hermeneutics in the twentieth century, who draws together the contributions of his predecessors into a major new development. The theme upon which this thesis engages in dialogue with Gadamer is concentrated on the problem of making experience the sole object of hermeneutics to the exclusion of persons and what they say, considered objectively. The problem with this is to express the role of interpretative practices philosophically if non-objectifying thinking is normative for hermeneutics. A solution is found by following up Gadamer’s insight into the influence of tradition on understanding, I show that tradition and its truth, as well as not being separable from the understanding subject's thinking, are also not detached from an author's intentions and are shared by human beings understanding one another. The transmissive nature of tradition discloses its own method for understanding what a person is saying and the ethical requirements of truth are forwarded by following that method.

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.

Perceptions and personality : a viewer-centred approach to film violence research

This thesis took a viewer-centred approach to the study of media violence. The findings indicated that viewer perceptions and personality mediate the affective, cognitive and arousal responses of viewers. The importance of the viewer perception and personality examined in this thesis also differed as a function of gender and age. The portfolio focused on the current Victorian correctional system's response to, and attempts to rehabilitate, convicted sexual offenders. It presents four case studies to demonstrate how the Victorian Sexual Offender Treatment Program attempts to apply empirically validated "best practice" principles of offender rehabilitation.

RCT of a client-centred, caseworker-delivered smoking cessation intervention for a socially disadvantaged population

Background: Disadvantaged groups are an important target for smoking cessation intervention. Smoking rates are markedly higher among severely socially disadvantaged groups such as indigenous people, the homeless, people with a mental illness or drug and alcohol addiction, and the unemployed than in the general population. This proposal aims to evaluate the efficacy of a client-centred, caseworker delivered cessation support intervention at increasing validated self reported smoking cessation rates in a socially disadvantaged population.
Methods/Design: A block randomised controlled trial will be conducted. The setting will be a non-government organisation, Community Care Centre located in New South Wales, Australia which provides emergency relief and counselling services to predominantly government income assistance recipients. Eligible clients identified as smokers during a baseline touch screen computer survey will be recruited and randomised by a trained research assistant located in the waiting area. Allocation to intervention or control groups will be determined by time periods with clients randomised in one-week blocks. Intervention group clients will receive an intensive client centred smoking cessation intervention offered by the caseworker over two face-to-face and two telephone contacts. There will be two primary outcome measures obtained at one, six, and 12 month follow-up: 1) 24-hour expired air CO validated self-reported smoking cessation and 2) 7-day self-reported smoking cessation. Continuous abstinence will also be measured at six and 12 months follow up.
Discussion: This study will generate new knowledge in an area where the current information regarding the most effective smoking cessation approaches with disadvantaged groups is limited.

A good lives model of clinical and community rehabilitation

Aims of the paper. The aim of this paper was to introduce the Good Lives Model, originally developed for offender rehabilitation, to the clinical rehabilitation community. We argue that this model has considerable promise, both as a ‘thinking tool’ and as an integrative framework emphasizing the centrality of the person in clinical and community rehabilitation for complex and chronic health conditions.

Key findings and implications. The essential features of a good rehabilitation theory are first outlined. These are the general principles and assumptions that underpin a theory, the aetiological assumptions and the intervention implications. The Good Lives Model for clinical rehabilitation is then described in terms of these three components of a good rehabilitation theory.

Conclusions and recommendations. The Good Lives Model has considerable promise as a tool for integrating many diverse aspects of current best practice in rehabilitation while maintaining the individual client as the central focus. At the same time it is provisional and further theoretical development and empirical support is required.

Person - organisation fit : value congruence in attraction and selection decisions

ASA theory is one of the most important explanations of behaviour in organisations. Developed by Professor Ben Schneider, it is the idea that organisations contain similar types of people because they attract, select and retain people similar to those already employed by the organisation. This homogeneity explains why organisations are different to each other. Although a lot is known about attrition, little is known about the attraction and selection phases. This book contains a series of empirical studies that explore whether organisations attract and select people who hold the values of the people already employed by the organisation. The results of these studies cast doubt on how universal ASA theory might be and suggest that the initial employment decisions that people make are more about choosing their vocation than their employer.