A critical regionalist approach to housing design in Vietnam : socio-environmental organisation of living spaces in pre- and post-reform houses

Vietnam has a unique culture which is revealed in the way that people have built and designed their traditional housing. Vietnamese dwellings reflect occupants’ activities in their everyday lives, while adapting to tropical climatic conditions impacted by seasoning monsoons. It is said that these characteristics of Vietnamese dwellings have remained unchanged until the economic reform in 1986, when Vietnam experienced an accelerated development based on the market-oriented economy. New housing types, including modern shop-houses, detached houses, and apartments, have been designed in many places, especially satisfying dwellers’ new lifestyles in Vietnamese cities. The contemporary housing, which has been mostly designed by architects, has reflected rules of spatial organisation so that occupants’ social activities are carried out. However, contemporary housing spaces seem unsustainable in relation to socio-cultural values because they has been influenced by globalism that advocates the use of homogeneous spatial patterns, modern technologies, materials and construction methods. This study investigates the rules of spaces in Vietnamese houses that were built before and after the reform to define the socio-cultural implications in Vietnamese housing design. Firstly, it describes occupants’ views of their current dwellings in terms of indoor comfort conditions and social activities in spaces. Then, it examines the use of spaces in pre-reform Vietnamese housing through occupants’ activities and material applications. Finally, it discusses the organisation of spaces in both pre- and post-reform housing to understand how Vietnamese housing has been designed for occupants to live, act, work, and conduct traditional activities. Understanding spatial organisation is a way to identify characteristics of the lived spaces of the occupants created from the conceived space, which is designed by designers. The characteristics of the housing spaces will inform the designers the way to design future Vietnamese housing in response to cultural contexts. The study applied an abductive approach for the investigation of housing spaces. It used a conceptual framework in relation to Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) theory to understand space as the main factor constituting the language of design, and the principles of semiotics to examine spatial structure in housing as a language used in the everyday life. The study involved a door-knocking survey to 350 households in four regional cities of Vietnam for interpretation of occupancy conditions and levels of occupants’ comfort. A statistical analysis was applied to interpret the survey data. The study also required a process of data selection and collection of fourteen cases of housing in three main climatic regions of the country for analysing spatial organisation and housing characteristics. The study found that there has been a shift in the relationship of spaces from the pre- to post-reform Vietnamese housing. It also indentified that the space for guest welcoming and family activity has been the central space of the Vietnamese housing. Based on the relationships of the central space with the others, theoretical models were proposed for three types of contemporary Vietnamese housing. The models will be significant in adapting to Vietnamese conditions to achieve socioenvironmental characteristics for housing design because it was developed from the occupants’ requirements for their social activities. Another contribution of the study is the use of methodological concepts to understand the language of living spaces. Further work will be needed to test future Vietnamese housing designs from the applications of the models.

Embedding information and communication technologies in the early childhood classroom

New technologies and the pace of change in modern society mean changes for classroom teaching and learning. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) feature in everyday life and provide ample opportunities for enhancing classroom programs. This article outlines how ICTs complement curriculum implementation in one year two classroom. It suggests practical strategies demonstrating how teachers can make ICTs work for them and progressively teach children how to make ICTs work for them.

Relationship between emotional climate and the fluency of classroom interactions

This study examined emotional climate in relation to the teaching and learning of grade 7 science. A multi-method and multi-theoretic approach used sociocultural frameworks as a foundation for interpretive research, conversation analysis, prosody analysis, and studies of nonverbal conduct. Emotional climate varied continuously throughout a lesson. Dialogues occurred and afforded learning when interactions between the teacher and students were fluent and included humour and collective effervescence. Emotional climate was negatively valenced when the teacher and/or students endeavoured to establish and maintain power by restricting others’ participation to spectator roles. The teacher’s endeavours to maintain and establish control over students were potentially detrimental to teaching and learning, teachers and learners. This type of teaching gradually evolved into a form we referred to as cranky teaching, whereby the teacher and her students showed signs of frustration and the enacted teaching and learning roles lacked fluency. The methods we pioneered in the present study might be helpful for other teachers who wish to participate in research on their classes to ascertain what works and should be strengthened, and identify practices and rituals that are deleterious and in need of change.

Motivations for an organisation within a developing country to report social responsibility information : evidence from Bangladesh

Purpose – The aim of the paper is to describe and explain, using a combination of interviews and content analysis, the social and environmental reporting practices of a major garment export organisation within a developing country. Design/methodology/approach – Senior executives from a major organisation in Bangladesh are interviewed to determine the pressures being exerted on them in terms of their social and environmental performance. The perceptions of pressures are then used to explain – via content analysis – changing social and environmental disclosure practices. Findings – The results show that particular stakeholder groups have, since the early 1990s, placed pressure on the Bangladeshi clothing industry in terms of its social performance. This pressure, which is also directly related to the expectations of the global community, in turn drives the industry's social policies and related disclosure practices. Research limitations/implications – The findings show that, within the context of a developing country, unless we consider the managers' perceptions about the social and environmental expectations being imposed upon them by powerful stakeholder groups then we will be unable to understand organisational disclosure practices. Originality/value – This paper is the first known paper to interview managers from a large organisation in a developing country about changing stakeholder expectations and then link these changing expectations to annual report disclosures across an extended period of analysis.

Negotiating teacher identities : dialogic reflections on classroom interaction in a transnational context

This study investigates the development of teacher identity in a transnational context through an analysis of the voices of sixteen preservice teachers from Hong Kong who engage in interaction with primary students in an Australian classroom. The context for this research is the school-based experience undertaken by these preservice English as a second language teachers as part of their short language immersion (SLIM) program in Brisbane, Australia. Such SLIM programs are a genre of study abroad programs which have been gaining in popularity within teacher education in Australia, attended by preservice and inservice teachers from China, Hong Kong, Korea, and other Asian countries. This research is conducted at a time when the imperative to globalise higher education provision is a strategic factor in the educational policies of both Australia and Hong Kong. In Australia, international educational services now constitute the country’s third largest export with more than 400,000 students coming to Australia to study annually. In order to maintain Australia’s current global position as the third most popular Englishspeaking study destination, the government is now focusing on sustainability and the quality of the study experience being offered to international students (Bradley Review, 2008). In Hong Kong, the government sponsors both preservice and inservice English as a second language (ESL) teachers to undertake SLIM programs in Australia and other English-speaking countries, as part of their policy of promoting high levels of English proficiency in Hong Kong classrooms. Transnational teacher education is an important issue to which this study contributes insights into the affordances and constraints of a school-based experience in the transnational context. Second language teacher education has been defined as interventions designed to develop participants’ professional knowledge. In this study, it is argued that participation in a different community of practice helps to foreground tacit theories of second language pedagogy, making them visible and open to review. Questions of pedagogy are also seen as questions of teacher identity, constituting the way that one is in the classroom. I take up a sociocultural and poststructural framework, drawing on the work of James Gee and Mikhail Bakhtin, to theorise the construction of teacher identity as emerging through dialogic relations and socially situated discursive practices. From this perspective, this study investigates whether these teachers engage with different ways of representing themselves through appropriating, adapting or rejecting Discourses prevailing in the Australian classroom. Research suggests that reflecting on dilemmas encountered as lived experiences can extend professional understandings. In this study, the participants engage in a process of dialogic reflection on their intercultural classroom interactions, examining with their peers and their lecturer/researcher selected moments of dissonance that they have faced in the unfamiliar context of an Australian primary classroom. It is argued that the recursive and multivoiced nature of this process of reflection on practice allows participants opportunities to negotiate new understandings of second language teacher identity. Dialogic learning, based on the theories of Bakhtin and Vygotsky, provides the theoretic framing not only for the process of reflection instantiated in this study, but also features in the analysis of the participants’ second language classroom practices. The research design uses a combined discourse analytic and ethnographic approach as a logic-of-inquiry to explore the dialogic relationships which these second language teachers negotiate with their students and their peers in the transnational context. In this way, through discourse analysis of their classroom talk and reflective dialogues, assisted by the analytic tools of speech genres and discourse formats, I explore the participants’ ways of doing and being second language teachers. Thus, this analysis traces the process of ideological becoming of these beginner teachers as shifts in their understandings of teacher and student identities. This study also demonstrates the potential for a nontraditional stimulated recall interview to provide dialogic scaffolding for beginner teachers to reflect productively on their practice.

Attitudes, Ideologies and Self-Organisation : Information Load Minimisation in Multi-Agent Decision Making

Sophisticated models of human social behaviour are fast becoming highly desirable in an increasingly complex and interrelated world. Here, we propose that rather than taking established theories from the physical sciences and naively mapping them into the social world, the advanced concepts and theories of social psychology should be taken as a starting point, and used to develop a new modelling methodology. In order to illustrate how such an approach might be carried out, we attempt to model the low elaboration attitude changes of a society of agents in an evolving social context. We propose a geometric model of an agent in context, where individual agent attitudes are seen to self-organise to form ideologies, which then serve to guide further agent-based attitude changes. A computational implementation of the model is shown to exhibit a number of interesting phenomena, including a tendency for a measure of the entropy in the system to decrease, and a potential for externally guiding a population of agents towards a new desired ideology.

Learning to use information : informed learning in the undergraduate classroom

“Informed learning” is a pedagogy that focuses on learning subject content through engaging with academic or professional information practices. Adopting the position that more powerful learning is achieved where students are taught how to use information and subject content simultaneously, the research reported here investigated an informed learning lesson. Using phenomenographic methods, student’s experiences of the lesson were compared to what the teacher enacted in the classroom. Based on an analysis of student interviews using variation theory, three ways of experiencing the informed learning lesson emerged. Some students understood the lesson to be about learning to use information, i.e., researching and writing an academic paper, while others understood it as focusing on understanding both subject content and information use simultaneously. Although the results of this study are highly contextualized, the findings suggest criteria to consider when designing informed learning lessons.

Primary classroom teachers' use of social and emotional wellbeing programs and the factors influencing program use

There has been a rapid escalation in the development and evaluation of social and emotional well-being (SEW) programs in primary schools over the last few decades. Despite the plethora of programs available, primary teachers’ use of SEW programs is not well documented in Australian schools, with even less consideration of the factors influencing program use. A cross-sectional survey was undertaken with primary classroom teachers across twelve schools in the Brisbane and Sunshine Coast Education Districts in Queensland, Australia, during 2005. A checklist of SEW programs and an audit of SEW practices in schools were employed to investigate the number, range and types of SEW programs used by primary classroom teachers and the contextual factors influencing program use. Whilst the majority of implementation studies have been conducted under intervention conditions, this study was designed to capture primary classroom teachers’ day-to-day use of SEW programs and the factors influencing program use under real-world conditions. The findings of this research indicate that almost three quarters of the primary classroom teachers involved in the study reported using at least one SEW program during 2005. Wide variation in the number and range of programs used was evident, suggesting that teachers are autonomous in their use of SEW programs. Evidence-based SEW programs were used by a similar proportion of teachers to non-evidence-based programs. However, irrespective of the type of program used, primary teachers overwhelmingly reported using part of a SEW program rather than the whole program. This raises some issues about the quality of teachers’ program implementation in real-world practice, especially with respect to programs that are evidence-based. A content analysis revealed that a wide range of factors have been examined as potential influences on teachers’ implementation of health promotion programs in schools, including SEW programs, despite the limited number of studies undertaken to date. However, variation in the factors examined and study designs employed both within and across health promotion fields limited the extent to which studies could be compared. A methodological and statistical review also revealed substantial variation in the quality of reporting of studies. A variety of factors were examined as potential influences on primary classroom teachers’ use of SEW programs across multiple social-ecological levels of influence (ranging from community to school and individual levels). In this study, parent or caregiver involvement in class activities and the availability of wellbeing-related policies in primary schools were found to be influential in primary classroom teachers’ use of SEW programs. Teachers who often or always involve parents or caregivers in class activities were at a higher odds of program use relative to teachers who never or rarely involved parents or caregivers in class activities. However, teachers employed in schools with the highest number of wellbeing-related policies available were at a lower odds of program use relative to teachers employed in schools with fewer wellbeing-related policies available. Future research should investigate primary classroom teachers’ autonomy and motivations for using SEW programs and the reasons behind the selection and use of particular types of programs. A larger emphasis should also be placed upon teachers not using SEW programs to identify valid reasons for non-use. This would provide another step towards bridging the gap between the expectations of program developers and the needs of teachers who implement programs in practice. Additionally, the availability of wellbeing-related school policies and the types of activities that parents and caregivers are involved with in the classroom warrant more in-depth investigation. This will help to ascertain how and why these factors influence primary classroom teachers’ use of SEW programs on a day-to-day basis in schools.

Effects of introducing an interactive teaching and learning activity (TLA) in the engineering classroom

This research study examines qualitatively and quantitatively the influence of introducing an activity in the traditional engineering classroom. It studies instances of active learning and its relationship with the student learning outcomes. The primary purpose of this study was to compare the learning outcomes of students who were involved in an active TLA with those students who were not, instead they learned under traditional teaching and studying approaches. I present the argument that the introduction of a TLA in class stimulates student engagement bringing enormous benefits to student learning. The outcomes of this study were measured using qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate the levels of student engagement, achievement and satisfaction in the terms of Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs). Results indicate that students held positive attitude towards the activities in class and also, that a positive link between TLA, learning approach and learning outcome exist. It also provides insights about the potential benefits of active learning when compared with traditional, passive and teacher-centred methods of teaching & learning.

Yarning circles in the literacy classroom

This article explains how the speaking and listening practice of yarning circles can be used in the literacy classroom. The article opens with an account of a live enactment of yarning circles with elementary students in a mainstream classroom in Australia. It explains the purpose and origin of yarning circles in Indigenous communities, and provides steps for establishing and implementing the practice in classrooms.

Developing media production skills for literacy in a primary school classroom : digital materials, embodied knowledge and material contexts

This chapter investigates the relationship between technical and operational skills and the development of conceptual knowledge and literacy in Media Arts learning. It argues that there is a relationship between the stories, expressions and ideas that students aim to produce with communications media, and their ability to realise these in material form through technical processes in specific material contexts. Our claim is that there is a relationship between the technical and the operational, along with material relations and the development of conceptual knowledge and literacy in media arts learning. We place more emphasis on the material aspects of literacy than is usually the case in socio-cultural accounts of media literacy. We provide examples from a current project to demonstrate that it is just as important to address the material as it is the discursive and conceptual when considering how students develop media literacy in classroom spaces.

Towards positive organisation austerity : combining austerity measures with Positive Organisational Scholarship (POS)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential and value of positive management practices to address the pain and suffering that frequently accompanies periods of large-scale austerity in public sectors. Public managers are increasingly asked to implement severe austerity measures and at the same time to build service delivery capacity; contradictory tasks. We draw on and further develop Cameron’s (2012) model of Positive Leadership to identify seven positive shared leadership practices that, while not eliminating the pain and suffering associated with austerity measures at least offer some scope, compared to traditional public management practices, for managing the austerity-build capacity duality in ways that respond to those affected with compassion and respect. We draw on published reports of a large-scale austerity program to highlight the potential and value of positive shared leadership practices for creating what we refer to as positive organisational austerity. The paper contributes to the literature on public management response to crises in two main ways. First, the paper introduces and develops the concept of shared positive leadership (Cameron, 2012; Carson et al. 2007) as a way of managing in austerity. Second, the paper introduces the concept of positive organisational austerity as a means of highlighting a reorientation in thinking about austerity measures and their implementation.

The Australian clean energy package and the law of the world trade organisation : an analysis of compliance issues

This thesis is a study of whether the Australian Clean Energy Package complies with the rules of the World Trade Organization. It examines the legal framework for the Australian carbon pricing mechanism and related arrangements, using World Trade Organization law as the framework for analysis. In doing so, this thesis deconstructs the Clean Energy Package by considering the legal properties of eligible emissions units, the assistance measures introduced by the Package and the liabilities created by the carbon pricing mechanism.

Planning to Manage My Teaching in a Democratic Classroom

Preservice teachers consistently report that managing student behaviour is one of their major concerns prior to and during practicum (Capel, 1997; Kyriacou & Stephens, 1999). Not surprisingly, preservice teachers are keen to gain knowledge and understanding of effective classroom management approaches that facilitate the development of positive learning environments in which students are engaged in learning. Establishing democratic teaching practices that allow student choice, communicating in a positive, helpful manner, ensuring the right to teach and the right to learn without disruptions is upheld, and promoting self-discipline are important steps in preventing misbehavior and developing a democratic community of learners.

Information organisation behaviours within everyday life : an exploration using the diary method

This paper presents the results from a study of information behaviours (IB), with specific focus on information- organisation-related behaviours conducted as part of a larger daily diary study with 40 participants. The findings indicate that organisation of information in everyday life is problematic due to various factors, specifically temporal and spatial ones, i.e., the passage of time, along with the difference in the physical environment between when the information was organised and when the information is retrieved. These have implications for information organisation schemas, and point toward the need for a context-sensitive model of information organisation that reflects the relation between information objects, information representation, and information users.