Water's edge : And the water's edge writing

Water's Edge, and The Water's Edge Writing, is a work of practice-led research in the field of creative writing. Practice-led research, which refers to research undertaken in the process of making a creative artwork, has become a significant and innovative type of research particularly in the disciplines of the creative arts. This book consists of two parts in dialogue with one another. These include Water's Edge, a novel, and The Water's Edge Writing, an exegetical component. Water's Edge is the story of Serena, a midnight-to-dawn radio announcer, who discovers information about her family's past and future via the act of creative writing. The Water's Edge Writing addresses issues of practice-led research, including a teasing out of the nexus between creative arts practice and higher research in universities. This book represents an important example of how creative arts practice can constitute the discovery of new knowledge, in the form of practice-led research.

Social identities and law students' writing

This paper argues that social identities, discursively speaking, consist of ‘positions’ that are individuated by distinctive linguistic features. These include distinctive patterns of representation indicated by clause structure and type, a set of priorities for attending to what is important indicated by thematic structure, and an orientation to the represented world and to self as indicated by modality, propositional attitudes and tense. A social identity comprises an array of these often contradictory ‘positions’ associated with a social or professional role. A person’s identity is constituted dynamically by the way they ‘reconcile’ the various positions that make up the social identity, and also, as Archer and Ivanic argue, by the way they reconcile a social with a personal or autobiographical identity. It is argued that this process of reconciliation gives clues about identity formation in the traces it leaves in grammatical texture.

This paper uses a simulated letter of advice to a client written by a group of first year law students to explore the discursive construction of social or professional identity. This letter is poorly written and full of grammatical mistakes and infelicities. It is argued that the mistakes provide a linguistic trace of the students’ struggle to reconcile the conflicting roles and positions they occupy as authors of the letter. In particular the students’ problems result from a struggle to reconcile their multiple positions as: students writing for assessment by a tutor about a legal problem, as a simulated firm of solicitors advising to a client, and as potential litigators anticipating the future course of events in their simulated moot court appearance.

Beyond the road : Beat writing and its socio-cultural contexts

This study looks at the contribution of Beat Generation writers to the post-World-War II reinvigoration of the American literary tradition. It challenges the reductive judgements of many critics and demonstrates that the Beat phenomenon was as much an expression of its historical moment as a rebellion against it.

Cross talk : collaborative indigenous life writing in Australia and Canada

This thesis argues that the critical reading of Indigenous life writing needs to move beyond its concern for power relations operating between the narrators and editors of collaboratively produced texts. It discusses the role of Indigenous families and communities in both the production and the reading of Indigenous texts.

Writing across boundaries

This thesis examines a range of recent Australian fiction written in a magical realist mode. It uses the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to foreground the cross-cultural dialogues represented in these narratives, and it reads these dialogues in the context of contemporary negotiations of cultural difference in Australia.

Eleven seasons : a creative writing journey through modern Australian football

This thesis offers a novel, 'Eleven seasons', that traces the physical and emotional journey of a young male footballer through the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. It also offers a comparative review of creative writing about Australian football, and a critical analysis of the book's creative gestation from idea to completed text.

Papers from Marrakech : a post-colonial reading of western women's travel writing in North Africa and the Middle East

This thesis takes the form of a collection of theoretical and fictional documents comprising a journal, letters and essays sent home to Australia by a woman travelling in Morocco. In different modes, these papers examine issues of colonialism, gender and desire in western women's travel writing about North Africa and the Middle East.

First-year law students’ construction of professional identity through writing

While there is a considerable body of research on law student identity construction based on interviews and transcripts of classroom talk, there is very little work based on student written texts. In this article two letters of advice written by beginning law students are analysed, using Ivanic and Camps’s (2001) framework, as an example of identity formation. Legal identity is argued to be formed by students’ attempts to accommodate a dynamic, partial, practitioner role of provider of advice to the traditional analytic focus of the law student. The process of accommodation is evident in the language of the letters, which show disfluencies resulting from attempts to combine different roles into a coherent legal identity. Comparison with a professionally written letter suggests that, rather than seeking to shape a coherent position, lawyers are able simultaneously to hold incompatible perspectives, concealing the tensions by foregrounding some perspectives and backgrounding others.

Benzodiazepine and pharmaceutical opioid misuse and their relationship to crime : an examination of illicit prescription drug markets in Melbourne, Hobart and Darwin : Victorian report

This report presents the findings of the major research project 'benzodiazepine and pharmaceutical opioid misuse and their relationship to crime', and is an examination of illicit prescription drug markets in Melbourne.

Creative pedagogies : "art-full" reading and writing

This paper reports on a small-scale research inquiry, designed to support teachers in a Melbourne primary school to bring together the arts, reading and writing in their classrooms in ways that create possibilities for "art-full" teaching and learning. The principal, concerned by underperformance on State literacy tests of the school’s largely working-class and NESB population, requested David Hornsby and other members of the project team from the Education Faculty at La Trobe University to offer whole-school professional development. The focus was on developing oral language as a foundation for literacy learning, enacting Britton’s claim that “reading and writing float on a sea of talk”. The project team introduced the teachers to a range of innovative classroom practices for using visual and performance arts, literature, music and crafts. Drawing on video, interviews and writing samples, a number of teachers worked collaboratively with the research team to develop case studies of individual students with a range of literacy aptitudes and social skills. A key research question was: "What do children take from their engagement in arts-based activities into reading of literary texts, and potentially into writing from the perspective of another character?" In this paper we ponder this from three vantage points: by outlining the informing principles in our research project; confirming insights from current interdisciplinary work about children learning to see, do, act and say in play; and analysing the research data from the initial phase.

Taking risks- experiential learning and the writing student

The role of a professional and creative writing degree is to provide resources, structured workshops, professional interactions - and the potential for creative risk. Opportunities for risk, within the structured environment of the university, challenge the individual's perspectives and judgements, as well as their ability to analyse and to reflect on their writing and creative practices.

From this starting point the authors, both writing industry practitioners and academics, have developed experiential projects with the aim of transforming their teaching practice from a model of narrative hierarchies of knowledge to learning through performativity, social correctedness and immersive workplace learning.

As the case studies illustrate, this transitional approach has enabled our millennial learners more confidently to take risks, accept challenges and transform their understanding of their own knowledge, skills and identities.