Injecting early years teaching with a strong dose of multiliteracies

Tech-savvy children elaborately dance through a myriad of informal and formal school and out-of-school literacy practices, sometimes leaving the adults who teach and care for them feeling like relics of yesterday. How can we harness what students bring to learning and reconcile that with what we have traditionally taught this age group? How do we leave our comfort zones and design meaningful experiences which transform learners (both young and not so young)?

Pappadums in paradise? : journeys of Indian migrant women to Australia

The blue glass is always the hardest to find. On the beach you catch the waves bringing back the glass from forgotten tossed bottles, frosted green, clear, or mottled pale brown. But the blue glass - that's the real thing. I search for days without finding any. Sometimes there are slivers; other days, small chunks. Like a beachcomber, I comb the sands for it. I take the glass home and make some into jewellery and touchstones for people to hang on to; pour essential oils on others so the scents waft heavenward and meld together with the glass to form a bond. Words are like that. They can fuse with each other and ignite, or just quietly combine, On sunny days, I take my books with me to the beach. I toss words back and forth in my mind, like churning waves. I cobble them together, A phrase here. A sentence there. The water. The sun. The sand. The glass. The words. The paper. The Connection. I find myself enveloped in it all. The glass is from bottles tossed into the surf by unthinking people - picnickers, vacationers, those who don't have to return here and live with the remnants of their actions. Over time, the broken glass is ground and moulded by the action of the waves; the sharp edges are softened and etched by the sand and water, The sea glass is washed up on shore and picked up by beachcombers. Some recycle it for other uses like me; others just keep it as a reminder of a day at the beach. The words I sift through as I sit on the sand are measured in the sea glass. I pick each word up and look through it to see how much light shines through. What use do 1 have for it? A poem? An essay? A fragment of a sentence, for something to be said in the future? I watch the sun rest uneasily on its bed of water and slide slowly, farther down. I know the hot summer is coming to a close and I am loath to let go of the closeness I feel with nature. I live to find the blue glass, and sometimes it just happens. My search for Indian migrant women was like my quest for the blue glass. It was not an easy task. It became a process of rummaging through other people's lives, searching for fragments and relics. Eventually I was able to fit pieces together to form a mosaic of their lives in that other time, that other place. And also in this present time, in this place they now call home, Australia.

Health-related religious rituals of the Greek Orthodox Church : their uptake and meanings

Aim
To examine the uptake of religious rituals of the Greek Orthodox Church by relatives of patients in critical condition in Greece and to explore their symbolic representations and spiritual meanings.
Background
Patients and their relatives want to be treated with respect and be supported for their beliefs, practices, customs and rituals. However nurses may not be ready to meet the spiritual needs of relatives of patients, while the health-related religious beliefs, practices and rituals of the Greek Orthodox Christian denomination have not been explored.
Method
This study was part of a large study encompassing 19 interviews with 25 informants, relatives of patients in intensive care units of three large hospitals in Athens, Greece, between 2000 and 2005. In this paper data were derived from personal accounts of religious rituals given by six participants.
Results
Relatives used a series of religious rituals, namely blessed oil and holy water, use of relics of saints, holy icons, offering names for pleas and pilgrimage.
Conclusion
Through the rituals, relatives experience a sense of connectedness with the divine and use the sacred powers to promote healing of their patients.
Implications for nursing management
Nurse managers should recognize, respect and facilitate the expression of spirituality through the practice of religious rituals by patients and their relatives.

Souvenirs of the senses

Like a porcupine or hedgehog?: The prose poem as post-romantic fragment

Prose poems are frequently characterised as fragmentary or incomplete in the way that they gesture to a larger, often unnamed, frame of reference; present small, sometimes unfinished narratives which are implied to be parts of larger narrative structures; and are often characterised by considerable indeterminacy. In this respect, it may be argued that prose poetry traces part of its lineage back to Romantic fragment poems—indeed, at least as far back as James Macpherson’s Ossian “translations”. In the Romantic period, fragments were understood as reflecting the idea of the imperfectability of contemporary human existence, aided by the antiquarian attraction of many Romantic writers to the ruins and relics of the classical past and an associated preference for the evocation of notions of infinitude and boundlessness. This paper argues that prose poems gesture to this Romantic genealogy in their concern with openness and diversity, and the reshaping of literary-aesthetic boundaries to metonymically explore incompleteness. The paper takes its name from Friedrich Schelgel’s Igel. Schlegel famously described the fragment as an Igel, or hedgehog, because of its autonomy and isolation from the wider world. One way of understanding the renaissance of the prose poem in the last 35 years, is to apply the Schlegelian metaphor of a hedgehog to contemporary prose poems in order to argue that this hybrid genre remains in dialogue with the fragmented literary works of the past. This paper argues that as prose poetry continues to explore fissured identity and plurality in a postmodern society, it owes a significant debt to postmodernism’s Romantic and fragmented inheritance.