International students in the private VET sector in Melbourne, Australia: rethinking their characteristics and aspirations outside the deficit model

The reconstruction of the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector into a competitive training market, which led to the participation of international students and commercial for-profit private VET providers, has until
recently focused on the importance of international students to the national economy whilst ignoring the students ’important educational characteristics and the other benefits that accrue to Australia. Drawing on views and perspectives of students, teachers, training managers and quality assurance auditors, this article presents an analysis of the VET provider-level processes, which have contributed tolimited discursive constructions of the identities of international students in private VET providers in Melbourne. It argues that there is an urgent need for a rethinking of the way international students are conceptualised and represented in the competitive training market environment.

Dissolving views, memory and sensory experience: The Cosmopoligraphicon or the ‘World in Many Pictures’ in Melbourne, Australia, in 1855

While magic lanterns and dissolving views were a global phenomenon in the nineteenth century, scholars are only starting to examine in depth their social dimensions. This article seeks to extend our understanding of dissolving views by analysing the audience sensory experience in a specific historical context – gold rush Melbourne in 1855. It argues that while a Melbourne audience admired the technological wonder of the magic lantern and the dissolving views, their sensory experience was informed by the colonial social context. The audiences appear to have delighted in immersing themselves in the dissolving views, both learning about the world and reacquainting themselves with parts of the (old) world they had left behind. This article further argues that dissolving views were more than a visual spectacle: they actively engaged the senses in ways that gave emotional meanings to the dissolving views and linked a Melbourne gold rush audience with the world left behind, yet still accessible remotely through memory and sensory imagination.

Perspectives on the geography of intolerance: racist attitudes and experience of racism in Melbourne, Australia

Given the challenge presented by worsening racial and religious relations in many western countries around the world, a closer look at the interplay between racist attitudes among potential perpetrators and experiences of racism among likely targets, focusing on out-group status, can better inform the dynamics of culturally diverse societies. Melbourne, Australia is ideal for such an analysis given its highly diverse population. Building on recent scholarship detailing a new approach to examining the attitude-experience relationship, we add an important spatial dimension by investigating how patterns of association vary spatially within specific localities over and above citywide effects. Findings indicate significant associations between racist attitudes and experience of discrimination at the citywide and, in distinct ways, at the local (Local Government Area) level. Such relationships are shaped by socio-demographic and ethnic diversity profiles, embodying attribution and degree of out-group status, in complex and nuanced ways.

Health beliefs and practices in three generations of Greek Australian women in Melbourne.

This research explores the health beliefs of three generations of Greek Australian women in Melbourne. It describes their experience of illness and wellbeing in the context of a culture-specific understanding of health with strong cultural, religious, and linguistic bases that derive from the community’s Greek heritage.

Copper comes of age in Melbourne

When we were asked to produce articles for this volume, it seemed appropriate to us to co-author an article on the history and impact of copper research in Melbourne. It is appropriate because over many years, decades in fact, we worked closely together and with Professor David Danks to identify the molecular defect in Menkes disease. This work was always carried out with the intention of understanding the nature of the copper homeostatic mechanisms and a "copper pathway" in the cell, that David had the prescience to predict must exist despite scepticism from granting agencies! He indeed inspired us to pursue research careers in this field. This article outlines some of this history.

Fuschias, pivots, same olds, and gorillas

This article describes the inception and evolution of Australian football in Melbourne in the mid nineteenth century. It discusses the venues where the game was played, the occupational status of early players, and the inclusion of working class players and spectators. It also refers to the more successful football clubs at that time, such as Melbourne, Carlton, Geelong, South Melbourne, and Essendon.

A victory for the fans? Melbourne's new football club in recent historical perspective

A new Association football team, Melbourne Victory, was created in Melbourne in 2005 as a founding member of the Australian A-League. Within little more than a year it was drawing peak crowds of 50,000 to matches and averaged over 30,000. It was forced to move from an 18,000 capacity stadium to one holding 55,000. Previous new club foundations in the 1990s had not been successful, despite being associated with popular Australian Rules football teams, Collingwood and Carlton. The Victory, however, seems to have attracted a different and wider demographic to the game. For the first time the growth of the code in Australia in based on the domestic population, not waves of inward migration as was the case in the 1880s, 1920s and the post-Second World War period. Preliminary studies of the fan base suggest that the future for the Victory is likely to be different from the recent past.

Coaching knowledge, learning and mentoring in the Australian Football League

Understanding the work of Senior and Assistant Coaches in the AFL is important to better develop the next generation of performance coaches. Hence the focus of this research was to examine the knowledge, competences and learning of senior and assistant coaches in the Australian Football League. Specifically, the research sought to understand the ways in which Senior and Assistant Coaches in the AFL have come to know their “craft” with the particular aim of enhancing future coaching practice. Performance coaching is generally regarded as a cognitive activity and therefore “getting inside the heads” of AFL coaches will assist in our understanding of the complex coaching work in which they are engaged. In-depth interviews provided coaches an opportunity to reflect on their practices and how they learned their craft. Fundamental to this research was an understanding that the AFL and each club within the league be regarded as learning organizations and workplaces where learning takes place. Moreover the process of mentoring is regarded as a central learning process and a significant factor contributing to improved professional coaching practice. This applied research aims to inform coach development in Australian football, the annual review process (quality of performance) of employed coaches, and the recruitment of coaches in the AFL. Improving the quality of coaching in the AFL will, in turn, improve the performance of the players and teams, and subsequently enhance the continued development and sustainability of the game.

Origins of Australian Football: Victoria's Early History. Volume 1 Amateur Heroes and the Rise of the Clubs, 1858 to 1876

This is volume 1 in a series of four volumes about the origins of Australian football as it evolved in Victoria between 1858 and 1896. This volume addresses its very beginnings as an amateur sport and the rise of the first clubs. Invented by a group of Melbourne cricketers and sports enthusiasts, Australian Rules football was developed through games played on Melbourne's park lands and was originally known as "Melbourne Football Club Rules". This formative period of the game saw the birth of the first 'amateur heroes' of the game. Players such as T.W. Wills, H.C.A. Harrison, Jack Conway, George O'Mullane and Robert Murray Smith emerged as warriors engaged in individual rugby-type scrimmages. The introduction of Challenge Cups was an important spur for this burgeoning sport. Intense competition and growing rivalries between clubs such as Melbourne, South Yarra, Royal Park, and Geelong began to flourish and the game developed as a result. By the 1870s the game "Victorian Rules" had become the most popular outdoor winter sport across the state. In subsequent decades, rapid growth in club football occurred and the game attracted increasing media attention.

The Corio Oval Tribe : a prosopographical perspective of the Geelong Football Club in the nineteenth century

This article analyses the occupational and class status of Geelong footballers in the nineteenth century via the methodology of prosopography. Prosopography is an empirical group biography approach to historical research. The article argues that during the period 1859-78 Geelong's playing group was largely derived from the squattocracy and urban middle class. In the later period 1878-96 the Geelong club recruited more widely from the working class, as in keeping with the increased participation of this class in football from the late 1870s. It can be argued that this more diverse group helped establish Geelong as a footballing power.

Journalism, gender, feminist theory and news reporting on the Australian Football League

This article reports on a review of selected theory and practice in sports journalism to determine if the prominence of female journalists reporting the news of a major sporting movement, and industry, the Australian Football League (AFL) could be attributed to a feminist response to the traditional domination of male values in the sports media complex. The article reviews selected literature to establish that, on the evidence presented, male values have traditionally dominated the news. It then considers feminist theory and alternative feminist responses to the domination of male values in the newsroom. Consideration is also given to Australian research on the ‘seriousness’ of sports news and its coverage (or lack thereof) of more ‘feminine’ news values including human interest stories, stories about culture and those on serious social issues. Interviews with a select group of female journalists who write about the AFL for The Age newspaper in Melbourne are recounted, with a focus on the journalists’ work experiences. The article concludes by drawing together the research findings to demonstrate that, although feminine news values are represented in only a small proportion of AFL news stories, there is evidence to suggest they are afforded a high degree of presentational prominence which reflects the needs and expectations of a female audience. It shows that female journalists do play a meaningful role in the AFL media and that, given the evidence presented, a feminist response to the traditional domination of male values in the sports media complex could indeed be applicable, and taking place.

Investigative trends in understanding penalty-kick performance in association football: An ecological dynamics perspective

There have been different approaches to studying penalty-kick performance in association football. In this paper, the authors synthesize key findings within an ecological dynamics theoretical framework. According to this theoretical perspective, information is the cornerstone for understanding the dynamics of action regulation in penalty-kick performance. Research suggests that investigators need to identify the information sources that are most relevant to penalty-kick performance. An important task is to understand how constraints can channel (i.e. change, emphasize or mask) information sources used to regulate upcoming actions and how the influence of these constraints is expressed in players' behavioural dynamics. Due to the broad range of constraints influencing penalty-kick performance, it is recommended that future research adopts an interdisciplinary focus on performance assessment to overcome the current lack of representativeness in penalty-kick experimental designs. Such an approach would serve to capture the information-based control of action of both players as components of this dyadic system in competitive sport.

Origins of Australian Football: Victoria's Early History. Volume 3: Covert 'Professionalism': The Power of the Wealthy Clubs 1886 to 1890

This volume continues the story of football in Marvellous Melbourne during the 1880s. At this time the VFA continued to expand as Melbourne’s boom continued apace. In 1886 Port Melbourne, Prahran, St Kilda, Footscray and South Williamstown joined the competition, and the Ballarat clubs Ballarat, Ballarat Imperial and South Ballarat were also contending for the VFA premiership. In 1886 matches were divided into four quarters, goal umpires waved two flags to announce a goal, and time clocks and bells were employed to mark the end of quarters. Victoria also played inter-colonial matches against New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia. VFA secretary T.S. Marshall was at the forefront of fighting the game’s turn towards professionalism, but although it was illegal to pay players, the practice continued. The period 1886 to 1890 also set the stage for the eventual formation of the Victorian Football League, for by the end of the 1880s the Victorian Football Association had become in effect a two-tier competition. The most popular clubs in the VFA, South Melbourne, Geelong, Carlton and Essendon collected the lion’s share of the gate money, which they used to build their wealth and entrench their position as the dominant Victorian teams. The lower tier clubs had to make do with paltry gate money and season fixtures that advantaged the strong clubs. In these fixtures the strong clubs elected to play each other first to increase their gate money, and only deemed to play the poorer clubs at the start of the season. This led to an increasing divide between the VFA’s rich and poor, and by 1890 South Williamstown and Prahran merged with Williamstown and St Kilda respectively, University dropped out of senior ranks, and the Ballarat clubs were excluded from competing for the VFA premiership, which left 12 senior clubs until Collingwood’s emergence in 1892. At this time, no team was as powerful as South Melbourne, which experienced the greatest success in the club’s VFA and VFL history when it collected triple premiership crowns in 1888, 1889, and 1890. South Melbourne was a most ambitious club and spearheaded the move towards professionalism, although this could not be made public. The fine teams it produced at this time contained some of the greatest players of the era, such as Peter Burns, “Sonny” Elms and “Dinny” McKay, and it looked after players with health insurance, jobs, inter-colonial trips, and other incentives. Geelong’s premiership in 1886 was perhaps its greatest triumph, but this success was followed by a premiership drought that would last for 39 years. Carlton remained one of Victorian football’s power clubs, and after securing the premiership in 1887 continued to compete for top honours. As always, the game became ever more popular and world record crowds of over 30,000 attended matches between South Melbourne, Carlton, Geelong and Essendon.

In pursuit of becoming a senior coach: The learning culture for Australian Football League coaches

- Background and Purpose Given the turbulent and highly contested environment in which professional coaches work, a prime concern to coach developers is how coaches learn their craft. Understanding the learning and development of senior coaches (SCs) and assistant coaches (ACs) in the Australian Football League (AFL – the peak organisation for Australian Rules Football) is important to better develop the next generation of performance coaches. Hence the focus of this research was to examine the learning of SC and AC in the AFL. Fundamental to this research was an understanding that the AFL and each club within the league be regarded as learning organisations and workplaces with their own learning cultures where learning takes place. The purpose of this paper was to examine the learning culture for AFL coaches. - Method Five SCs, 6 ACs, and 5 administrators (4 of whom were former coaches) at 11 of the 16 AFL clubs were recruited for the research project. First, demographic data were collected for each participant (e.g. age, playing and coaching experience, development and coach development activities). Second, all participants were involved in one semi-structured interview of between 45 and 90 minutes duration. An interpretative (hierarchical content) analysis of the interview data was conducted to identify key emergent themes. - Results Learning was central to AFL coaches becoming a SC. Nevertheless, coaches reported a sense of isolation and a lack of support in developing their craft within their particular learning culture. These coaches developed a unique dynamic social network (DSN) that involved episodic contact with a number of respected confidantes often from diverse fields (used here in the Bourdieuian sense) in developing their coaching craft. Although there were some opportunities in their workplace, much of their learning was unmediated by others, underscoring the importance of their agentic engagement in limited workplace affordances. - Conclusion The variety of people accessed for the purposes of learning (often beyond the immediate workplace) and the long time taken to establish networks of supporters meant that a new way of describing the social networks of AFL coaches was needed; DSN. However, despite the acknowledged utility of learning from others, all coaches reported some sense of isolation in their learning. The sense of isolation brought about by professional volatility in high-performance Australian Football offers an alternative view on Hodkinson, Biesta and James' attempt in overcoming dualisms in learning.