Financial aid and the persistence of associate of arts graduates transferring to a senior university

This study examined the effects of financial aid on the persistence of associate of arts graduates transferring to a senior university in one of four consecutive fall semesters (1998-2001). Situated in an international metropolitan area in the southeastern United States, the institution where the study was conducted is a large public research university identified as a Hispanic Serving Institution. Archival databases served as the source of information on the academic and social background of the 4,669 participants in the study. Data from institutional financial aid records were pooled with the data in the student administrative system.^ For purposes of this study, persistence was defined as ongoing progress until completing the baccalaureate degree. Student social background variables used in the study were gender, ethnicity, age, and income, with GPA and part-time or full-time enrollment status being the academic variables. Amount and type of aid, including grants, loans, scholarships, and work study were incorporated in the models to determine the effect of financial aid on the persistence of these transfer students. Because the dependent variable persistence had three possible outcomes (graduated, still enrolled, dropped out) multinomial logistic regression was the appropriate technique for analyzing the data; four multinomial models were employed in the analysis.^ Findings suggest that grants awarded based on the financial need of students and loans were effective in encouraging the persistence of students, but scholarships and work study were not effective.^

Women demonstrate against sexual harassment in the arts and theatre

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

British Romantic Criticism and the Fine Arts: A Study in Philosophical Theories of Literary Unity

This dissertation is an exploration of how a small but important group of Romantic critics, finding fault in the ideal of three unities developed by neoclassical Academicians and wrongly attributed to Aristotle, turned to the terminology and practices of the fine arts to emphasize their conception of organic unity in literature. The Romantic analogy to painting in particular enables a philosophical criticism of literature to present the aesthetic semblance of painting, the comprehension of a multitude of details in a harmonious whole that is a natural unity to its medium, as a paradigm of modern-romantic poetry and its aspirations to similar complexity, particularity, and imaginative colour. Further, in extension of the French Querelle des anciens et des modernes of the seventeenth century, the division of ancient and romantic art by Romantic critics like August Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt not only establishes an ethnological and historical difference between the artistic productions of these two cultural periods but also allows, unlike the neoclassical unities, a non-anachronistic philosophical vocabulary of whole and parts or of the general and particular in the criticism of poetry, which involution provides a “rule” more consonant with the laws of the imagination rather than with the rhetorical and absolutist dicta that were thither available in the literary canon.

The Arts in Basic Curriculum Project : Looking at the Past and Preparing for the Future

The primary findings of this evaluation are (1) that the ABC Project has built and supported a strong network that measurably strengthens arts education, and (2) for the reform to continue, there must be new initiatives. The Project has made a significant first step toward providing quality opportunities for all children in South Carolina, but the gap between the current state of arts education and the stated goal of the Project is very wide. Therefore, these new initiatives must be bold, innovative, strongly funded, and backed with the energies and passions of those in the core arts education network. The basic recommendation that subsumes all the specific recommendations in this report is to develop a data-informed strategic plan for arts education, then determine funding priorities based on this plan.

Ethos and Ideology of Knowledge Organization: Toward Precepts for and Engaged Knowledge Organization Drawing on The Arts and Crafts Movement, Critical Theory, and Žižek

Ethos is the spirit that motivates ideas and practices. When we talk casually about the ethos of a town, state, or country we are describing the fundamental or at least underlying rationale for action, as we see it. Ideology is a way of looking at things.It is the set of ideas that constitute one’s goals, expectations, and actions. In this brief essay I want to create a space where we might talk about the ethos and ideology in knowledge organization from a particular point of view; combining ideas and inspiration from the Arts and Crafts movement of the early Twentieth Century, critical theory in extant knowledge organization work, the work of Slavoj Žižek, and the work of Thich Nhat Hahn on Engaged Buddhism.I will expand more below, but we can say here and now that there are many open questions about ethos and ideology in and of knowledge organization, both its practice and products. Many of them in classification, positioned as they are around identity politics of race, gender, and other marginalized groups, ask the classificationist to be mindful of the choice of terms and relationships between terms. From this work we understand that race and gender requires special consideration, which manifests as a particular concern for the form of representation inside extant schemes. Even with these advances in our understanding there are still other categories about which we must make decisions and take action. For example, there are ethical decisions about fiduciary resource allocation, political decisions about standards adoption, and even broader zeitgeist considerations like the question of Fordist conceptions (Day, 2001; Tennis 2006) of the mechanics of description and representation present in much of today’s practice.Just as taking action in a particular way is an ethical concern, so too is avoiding a lack of action. Scholars in Knowledge Organization have also looked at the absence of what we might call right action in the context of cataloguing and classification. This leads to some problems above, and hints at larger ethical concerns of watching a subtle semantic violence go on without intervention (Bowker and Star, 2001; Bade 2006).The problem is not to act or not act, but how to act or not act in an ethical way, or at least with ethical considerations. The action advocated by an ethical consideration for knowledge organization is an engaged one, and it is here where we can take a nod from contemporary ethical theory advanced by Engaged Buddhism. In this context we can see the manifestation of fourteen precepts that guide ethical action, and warn against lack of action.

Positioning the Arts in the Australian National Curriculum

In 2008 the Australian Government embarked on the development of a National Curriculum. To date, announcements about development of learning areas in Phase 1 (English, mathematics, science and history) and Phase 2 (geography and languages) have been released. But where are the arts positioned? This article traces the advocacy strategy employed by Drama Australia and the National Advocates for Arts Education (NAAE) in the fight for the arts to be included in National Curriculum Board (NCB) timeline for development, trial and implementation.

Citizen journalism and political participation : the youdecide project and the 2007 Australian Federal Election

The 2007 Australian Federal election not only saw the election of a Labor government after 11 years of John Howard’s conservative Coalition government. It also saw new levels of political engagement through the Internet, including the rise of citizen journalism as an alternative outlet and mode of reporting on the election. This paper reports on the You Decide 2007 project, an initiative undertaken by a QUT-based research team to facilitate online news reporting on the election on a ‘hyper-local’, electorate-based model. We evaluate the You Decide initiative on the basis of: promoting greater citizen participation in Australian politics; new ways of engaging citizens and key stakeholders in policy deliberation; establishing new links between mainstream media and independent online media; and broadening the base of political participation to include a wider range of citizen and groups.

Bullish creative industries and the bear market

The creative industries idea is better than even its original perpetrators might have imagined, judging from the original mapping documents. By throwing the heavy duty copyright industries into the same basket as public service broadcasting, the arts and a lot of not-for-profit activity (public goods) and commercial but non-copyright-based sectors (architecture, design, increasingly software), it really messed with the minds of economic and cultural traditionalists. And, perhaps unwittingly, it prepared the way for understanding the dynamics of contemporary cultural ‘prosumption’ or ‘playbour’ in an increasingly networked social and economic space.

Wrapped fragments : Drapery, the eighteenth century portrait bust and the male subject

The depiction of drapery (generalised cloth as opposed to clothing) is a well-established convention of Neo-Classical sculpture and is often downplayed by art historians as of purely rhetorical value. It can be argued however that sculpted drapery has served a spectrum of expressive ends, the variety and complexity of which are well illustrated by a study of its use in portrait sculpture. For the Neo-Classical portrait bust, drapery had substantial iconographic and political meaning, signifying the new Enlightenment notions of masculine authority. Within the portrait bust, drapery also served highly strategic aesthetic purposes, alleviating the abruptness of the truncated format and the compromising visual consequences of the “cropped” body. With reference to Joseph Nollekens’ portraits of English statesman Charles James Fox and the author’s own sculptural practice, this paper analyses the Neo-Classical use of drapery to propose that rendered fabric, far from mere stylistic flourish, is a highly charged visual signifier with much scope for exploration in contemporary sculptural practice.

Great adaptations : China's creative clusters and the new social contract

The transformation of China's urban landscape has witnessed a boom in cultural adaptation, namely the adaptation of a Western idea, the creative cluster. This chapter examines the formatting of hundreds of creative clusters-art centres, animation bases, cultural zones, and incubators. The cluster has important implications for how we understand China going forward into the second decade of the 21st century. The cluster phenomenon has resulted in to a substantive remaking of the social contract, between officials, entrepreneurs, local residents, academics-and most significantly cultural producers. However, these processes of adaption are mostly driven by real estate developers working in partnership with local government officials. Cut and paste design is the fast road to completion. In this sense, the description 'creative' may well be redundant.

The effective and the evocative : reflecting on practice-led research approaches in art and design

Early in the practice-led research debate, Steven Scrivener (2000, 2002) identified some general differences in the approach of artists and designers undertaking postgraduate research. His distinctions centered on the role of the artefact in problem-based research (associated with design) and creative-production research (associated with artistic practice). Nonetheless, in broader discussions on practice-led research, 'art and design' often continues to be conflated within a single term. In particular, marked differences between art and design methodologies, theoretical framing, research goals and research claims have been underestimated. This paper revisits Scrivener's work and establishes further distinctions between art and design research. It is informed by our own experiences of postgraduate supervision and research methods training, and an empirical study of over sixty postgraduate, practice-led projects completed at the Creative Industries Faculty of QUT between 2002 and 2008. Our reflections have led us to propose that artists and designers work with differing research goals (the evocative and the effective, respectively), which are played out in the questions asked, the creative process, the role of the artefact and the way new knowledge is evidenced. Of course, research projects will have their own idiosyncrasies but, we argue, marking out the poles at each end of the spectrum of art and design provides useful insights for postgraduate candidates, supervisors and methodologists alike.