Ambivalent relations : the 'tricky footwork' of parental involvement in school communities

Parental involvement in schools, generally seen to be a good thing, is now closely linked through policy to the educational achievement of their children. In this Victorian case study, teacher and parent responses to policies advocating parental involvement are examined. It explores the intersections of gender and class in the context of changing home/school relationships characterised by policies and processes of institutionalisation, familialisation and individualisation that are shaping parental involvement. It suggests that the current discursive construction of parent/school relationships around partnerships for student learning fail to recognise the complexity of parent/teacher relations and its gendered nature. Feminist critical policy analysis framed by the sociology of the family inform our understandings of the ways changing discourses and practices currently are informing parental involvement in a culturally and socio-economically diverse school.

Public relations campaigns

Designed to guide current and aspiring Public Relations professionals through the campaign development and implementation process. It illustrates the application of planning theory to real life scenarios to provide a practical approach for planning a successful campaign. M. Sheehan, Deakin University; R. Xavier, QUT.

Identity and autonomy of the indigenous community within Christianity

[No Abstract]

Language, power and ruling relations in vocational education and training

This thesis uses institutional ethnography to explore the text-based regulatory framework of the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector. Training Packages are national competency standards used to assess local workplace practice. The Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF) is a national compliance framework used to audit local learning and assessment practice. These texts operate in a ‘symbiotic relationship’ to achieve a policy goal of national consistency. The researcher explicates the social relations of VET starting from her disquiet as a practitioner. The thesis argues that Training Packages and the AQTF socially organise the content and delivery of local learning and assessment activities. VET practitioners struggle to use these texts to support good practice, and their hidden work maintains an unstable VET system. Yet the extralocal mode of ruling offers no room to challenge VET policy. The thesis explicates three themes. Interview data is used to explore the contrast between the institutional language of Training Packages and the vernacular of workplaces in which these texts are activated. Many practitioners and participants simply do not understand Training Package competency standards. Using these texts to judge employee performance shifts the policing of workplace practice from local sites to external VET authorities. A second theme emerges as the analysis explores why VET practitioners use this excluding language in their work with participants. Interview data reveals that local training organisations achieve different readings as they engage with ruling VET texts. Some organisations use the national texts as broad frameworks, allowing practitioners to create spaces for meaningful learning. Other organisations adopt a narrow and rule-bound reading of national texts, displacing practitioners’ authority over their own practice. A third theme is explored through examination of a sequence of VET texts. The review and redevelopment of the mandatory qualifications for VET practitioners identified the language of the competency standards as a significant accessibility issue. These concerns were reshaped and subsumed in an official response that established the use of this language as a compulsory assessable requirement and a language and literacy benchmark. The thesis presents a new understanding of VET as a regulatory framework established through multiple levels of ruling texts that connect local sites to national government agendas. While some individual practitioners are able to navigate through this system, there is an urgent need for practitioners as a profession to challenge national hegemony.

Admissible Christianity : a study of Christian fundamentalism in the writings of James Barr

An attempt to set forth the essential nature of a theology is a notoriously difficult task. This thesis addresses two questions to a contemporary study of fundamentalism. It asks to what extent has James Barr been able to describe the theology of fundamentalism and to what extent his critical analysis of that theology is philosophically valid? The first chapter identifies the inherent difficulties in a phenomenology of fundamentalism and includes an historical survey of the theology of the movement. This chapter is supported by appendix one which identifies the philosophical culture associated with fundamentalist thought. Barr's description of the theological and religious character of fundamentalism is accepted within the identified limitations. The second and third chapters give an account of Barr's theological evaluation of fundamentalism. He argues the fundamentalists espouse an aberrant form of Christianity. Their religion represents a projection onto the biblical text of a religion foreign to the theological character of the Old and New Testaments. This projection is achieved by an intellectually sophisticated hermeneutical procedure. The doctrines of inerrancy, verbal inspiration and infallibility establish an understanding of Christianity which does not represent the essential character of the Christian faith. Fundamentalist hermeneutics, Barr concludes, allows for a theology indigenous neither to the biblical text nor to the Christian tradition. It attempts to afford biblical justification to the doctrines of a human religion extraneous to the biblical text. The fourth chapter considers the philosophical basis of Barr's understanding of the Bible. He takes the idealist view that the biblical text possesses a theological meaning whose boundaries can be delineated and whose essential content defined. This chapter is supported by appendix two which locates Barr's writings on fundamentalism within his wider concerns about the hermeneutical problems raised by the biblical text and the religious authority of the Bible. The penultimate chapter surveys the insights of contemporary literary theory concerning the perception of written texts. The philosophical validity of an idealist view of the biblical text is questioned. Two major conclusions are drawn. Barr's assessment of fundamentalism is philosophically dependent upon his idealist perception of the biblical text. This conclusion leads to the more general conclusion that the biblical text contains no essential description of Christianity but is capable of being read according to a range of theological interpretations some of which are more defensible than others.

Public relations & the media : a new influence in "agenda-setting" and content

Not available

Study in Roman-Maccabaean relations

[No Abstract]

The original bailout of US corporations : the public relations bailout

More than a trillion of taxpayer dollars are currently being used to bail out the US banking, mortgage and car industries. This invokes an interesting connection to public relations the last time drastic US government involvement with corporations was contemplated. This pre-First World War crisis of the free enterprise system involved a deficit not of money but of favourable public opinion. The requirement was for vast amounts of public opinion and public policy work by a reported at least 1200 – what were at that time called – press agents. This was the period when public relations emerged as a fundamental plank of US and ultimately of global culture. The thesis of this article is that many aspects of the world we live in cannot be properly understood without a better analysis of the first bailout of US corporations—the public relations bailout.