Archipelago: a journey across poetic islands of the self

 Paul Venzo's thesis is a poetic response to the author's relationship with Venice and the Veneto. It comprises a manuscript of poetry in English and Italian and an exegesis exploring aspects of the poet's creative practice, including translation, writing in place and intersections with literary history and form.

Constructing knowledge

The most popular model of how students learn is known as the constructivist model of learning. There are variants of this model, but the main features are that learning occurs in the context of pre-existing experiences and ideas, that new concepts are transformed to fit or build on those existing ideas, and that learning occurs in a social or cultural context. Learners are not empty vessels, into which new knowledge can be injected. New concepts, which are consistent with and extend pre-existing experiences and ideas, are easily and effectively assimilated. Learning is difficult, when learners have pre-existing incorrect ideas or alternative conceptions, as they must first unlearn the misconceptions in order to incorporate the new information. In a different context, it is usually much harder and more expensive to retrofit an existing house than to build from scratch. Similarly, it is very hard to overcome bad habits. A previous column in Chemistry in Australia [July 2013, page 35], noted that we simplify ideas when teaching chemistry to younger students, but warned that over-simplication often results in misconceptions that will hinder future learning. Most chemistry educators favour constructivism, because there are similarities with the process of discovery in science. Firstly, the advancement of scientific knowledge builds on past experiences and knowledge: Isaac Newton famously acknowledged, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. Secondly, observations and data of themselves are not meaningful, until that information has been transformed to extend existing ideas: Nobel Laureate Lawrence Bragg wrote, “the important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them”. Science as a Human Endeavour (SHE) is one of the strands in the Australian Curriculum. Similarly, one of the learning outcomes in the Draft Chemistry Academic Standards is that graduates will be able to recognise the creative endeavour involved in the acquiring knowledge and to recognise the testable and contestable nature of chemistry. Science is practiced individually and collectively by people. Human beings, who have human virtues and fallibilities, are responsible for scientific advancements. New knowledge is constructed in the minds of learners and scientists. Just as discussions in work teams, workshops, conferences, and the scientific literature, help scientists to extend and improve scientific understanding, the important role of teachers is to guide students to refine, alter and improve their scientific understanding when extending their scientific boundaries.

What about us? We have careers too! The career experiences of Australian sport scientists

 he professionalisation of sport has provided career opportunities for athletes, coaches and sport scientists alike. The career development literature for athletes is well established and the empirical career literature for coaches is growing, but little is known about the careers of sport scientists. The purpose of this investigation was to explore and examine the career experiences of Australian sport scientists. In-depth interviews were conducted with six practicing Australian sport scientists at different career stages. Several themes emerged from the data on careers of sport scientists that are unique to sport. Sport scientists identify strongly with their role in sport success and yet they receive little recognition for what they do. All participants experienced career dissonance as they transitioned from practitioner to another career such as academia or sport management. Feelings of loss were identified by participants as their applied work diminished when they moved away from their early career service roles. All six participants believed that in order to advance their career in sport their options were moving overseas, working in academia, or retraining for a career in sports management. It is recommended that sport scientists be provided with better career education and more structured professional development.

Giving solidity to pure wind: temporising as transformation

Jared Diamond asked the acclaimed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr (1904-2005) why Aristotle didn’t come up with the theory of evolution. Mayr’s answer was ‘Frage stellen’ which Diamond translates as ‘a way of asking questions [sic]’ (Byrne 2013). The idea that a particular way-of-asking might generate a particular way-of-knowing and, indeed, a particular branch-of-knowledge, is utterly intriguing, especially when we frame the practice of creative writing in those terms: as a way of asking questions.Drusilla Modjeska unpacks the concept of ‘temporising’ in her article ‘Writing Poppy’ (Modjeska 2002: 75). This discussion invites us to consider the generative capabilities of the temporising space – as an imaginative space for writers, as an alternate way of asking questions … of seeing, being, knowing. In narrative, the questions that underpin the work do not necessarily appear in the surface-content of the text. In this way, the story is a metaphorical representation of the questions that lie beneath. As Aristotle suggests, metaphor relies on ‘an intuitive perception of the similarity [to homoion theorein] in dissimilars’ (Ricoeur 1977: 23). In narrative we contemplate a question, or an idea, within the context of a metaphorical other. This is a form of temporising: of ‘slip[ping] into other time frames’ as a means of ‘retreat[ing] and consider[ing]’ (Modjeska 2002: 75, 76). In narrative time, we consider one thing through an alternate temporal lens. We prevaricate in otherness.Fiction-making represents a very particular way of asking questions. With reference to the process of writing the short story – ‘Everything that matters is silvery white’ – it is clear that ‘making’ narrative is a way of asking questions that is assisted by the transformative temporising space.

School-community collaborations: bringing authentic science into schools

There is increasing interest in collaborative arrangements between schools and community scientists to enhance student engagement with learning. We describe research in which we identify a wide range of such collaborations in Australia, and investigate through interviews with community participants their perspectives on the purposes of collaborations, on the outcomes, and the factors affecting success. We identify challenges with communication, with curriculum and with organisational arrangements that need to be considered in setting up collaborative partnerships, and argue the importance of having a teacher acting as a broker to bridge between the school and scientific communities of practice, if these challenges are to be met.

Problematic identities in women's fiction of the Sri Lankan diaspora

Watkins’ Problematic Identities examines nine novels by women writers of the Sri Lankan diaspora.

Uncanny suburbia and Australian fiction

 The thesis consisted of both short stories and analysis of Patrick White, Peter Carey and Helen Hodgman. Researching how everyday life can be rendered unhomely and unsettling; and focusing on the representation of women, particularly mothers, resulted in new insights into Australia’s literary relationship with suburbia.

Everything that matters is silvery white

When Jared Diamond asked acclaimed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr why Aristotle didn’t come up with the theory of evolution, Mays answered frage stellen or ‘a way of asking questions’ (ABC 2013). The idea that a particular way-of-asking might generate a particular way-of-knowing is applicable to the practice of creative writing. Modjeska unpacks the concept of ‘temporising’ (2002: 75), inviting us to consider the generative possibilities of the temporising space – as an imaginative space for writers – a way of asking questions.Research contributionThis work enacts the concept of temporising at the level of form and content, interrogating the connection between language and imagery, and the work of association and similarity and, following Aristotle, recognises the temporising space as a metaphorical playground. This method of asking questions involves alogical processes of association: supporting Freud’s ‘reciprocal relations’ between dissimilars (1900: 404) and Froeschels’ observation that ‘the subconscious [mind] considers similarity identical with identity’ (qtd. in Mavromatis 1987: 178).Research significanceThis work uses Modjeska’s analysis, and theories of subconscious processes of association, to enact an inquiry in the performative narrative space of the short story. It has been longlisted for the Australian Book Review’s Elizabeth Jolley Prize (2014) and the Séan Ó Faoláin International Short Story Competition (Ireland) (2015), and was also a finalist in the Glimmer Train International Fiction Open Contest (USA) (2015).

Creative and literary responses to Australian middle-class experiences of financial upheaval

This thesis—comprising a novel, The Company He Keeps, and exegesis—explores the near absence of literary fiction written about the Australian Middle Class and their responses to financial stress (1980 – 2008), finding that the language of global economic reform has triumphed over political discourse and, in particular, silenced women.

Community-school collaborations in science: towards improved outcomes through better understanding of boundary issues

There is growing interest, worldwide, in collaboration between schools and community organisations in contributing to and enriching school science programs, yet such collaborations are inadequately understood. This paper reports data from an Australian study designed to probe the views of members of the community who have participated in a broad range of such collaborations in school science programmes in order to better understand the issues which impact on their operation. The data were collected by interviews with the community participants selected by opportunistic sampling. The analysis reveals a number of issues—purposes, communication, organisational structures and curriculum—which can be seen as impacting on the collaborations. These are examined through the concepts of communities of practice, boundaries and boundary crossing, associated with people from scientific communities of practice interacting with school communities. The paper reflects on the implications of these findings for constructing effective school-community collaboration in school science programs.