7 questions with award-winning writer and poet Maria Takolander

 Maria Takolander is interviewed by Danielle Williams.

SCOPE Galleries Art Award: Art Concerning Environment

Curated by Liza McCosh, a major exhibition of pre-selected artwork that includes painting, drawing and sculpture. The exhibition included fifty five preselected artists/artworks from across Australia.The Art Concerning Environment Award is a national biennial award and the exhibition attempts to provide a platform that facilitates debate and promotes art as a catalyst for change.  The exhibition was supported by a public lecture on Climate Change (June 2, Warrnambool Art gallery) and facilitated by Guy Abrahams (guest judge).

See:  
www.scopegalleries.com
www.warrnambool.vic.gov.au/index.php?q=node/1266
Ziegeler, Bonnie, "Artworks with a green hue vie for %5000 award in Warrnambool", The Standard, June 3, 2012.

Betwixt And between – Practical legal training practitioners – Scholarship of (which) practice?

I am interested in how Australian lawyers who teach lawyers’ skills at the post-graduate pre-admission stage (“PLT practitioners) engage in scholarly activities regarding their teaching practice. This presentation will relate Bourdieu’s ‘reflexive sociology of law’ to my doctoral research in which I focus on how PLT practitioners engage in scholarly activities around their teaching work. Drawing on Kemmis’s ‘practice table’, Bourdieu and Passeron’s theory of ‘reproduction’ in education and culture, and de Certeau’s theory of ‘practice in everyday life’, I will describe how PLT practitioners’ professional identity, as lawyers, constrains scholarship around teaching and mentoring practice.

O where are you going? O do you imagine? Reproduction and response : a reflexive sociology of scholarship of teaching and learning in practical legal training

My doctoral research studies Australian PLT practitioners’ engagement with scholarship of teaching and learning. I argue that many PLT practitioners are motivated to engage with scholarship of teaching and learning in their work. There are, however, individual and extra-individual impediments.
PLT practitioners are lawyers that teach in institutional practical legal training (“PLT”). Satisfactory completion of mandatory PLT is an eligibility requirement for admission to the Australian legal profession. The PLT requirement is additional to academic legal qualifications. PLT is undertaken at a post-graduate level with, or after, the academic law degree.
My study investigates PLT practitioners’ motivations and capabilities to engage with scholarship of teaching and learning (“SoTL”). I study organisational symbolic support for SoTL in PLT, and organisational allocation of resources to SoTL in PLT.
The study involves individual and extra-individual domains of PLT practitioners’ work. It considers how social structures (e.g. “the juridical”) are inscribed into individuals’ practices (“teaching”) and, conversely, whether practices influence social structures.
My research adopts qualitative methodologies. These involve inter-disciplinary exchanges between law, legal education, practice research, sociology of law, cultural theory, and theory and practice of teaching and learning. My theoretical framework draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s “reflexive sociology”, and Michel de Certeau’s “heterological science”.
I sourced data from documents, and semi-structured interviews with 36 Australian PLT practitioners. Documentary sources include statutory instruments, speeches, reports, practice directions, histories, and scholarly publications.
To analyse the data I adopted Kelle’s characterisation of “theoretical sensitivity”, drawing on “explicit” and “emergent” analysis strategies derived from “grounded theory”. The explicit strategies were based on my theoretical framework. The emergent strategy involved sensitivity to non-explicit concepts and theories that emerged from the data. Computer-aided qualitative data analysis software expedited these methods.
My findings to date question dominant legal structures’ readiness for change, the implications of this for teaching and learning in PLT, and in particular for PLT practitioners’ engagement with SoTL in PLT.
The espoused rationale for mandatory PLT (in statutes) is improvement for the protection of clients, the administration of justice, and to assure quality legal services. The tacit rationale is improved quality of legal education, and experiences, for lawyers-to-be. My thesis argues dominant structures in legal education impede the espoused and tacit objectives, and impede PLT practitioners’ engagement with scholarship of teaching and learning.

Evaluation of the medium-term outcomes and impact of the Rowan Nicks Scholarship Programme

Rowan Nicks was a cardiothoracic surgeon in Sydney. He endowed the Rowan Nicks Scholarship Programme of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, which was initiated in 1991 to provide opportunities for clinicians from developing countries so that they return to their countries as leaders and teachers. This paper's objective was to evaluate the outcomes and impact of the scholarship on individuals and their communities.