One small difference after another : stories of grassroots leaders

Grassroots groups – autonomous, not-for-profit groups made up of volunteers – and grassroots initiatives play an invaluable, yet often invisible, role in our communities. The informal processes and collective efforts of grassroots associations, social movements, self-help groups and local action collectives are central to civil society and community building. Grassroots leaders are critical to such initiatives, yet little is known about their influences, motivations, successes and challenges. This study aims to address this dearth in the research literature by noting the experiences of a sample of grassroots community leaders to help gain a greater knowledge about community leadership in action. In-depth semi-structured interviews were held with nine grassroots leaders from a broad cross-section of sectors of interest. The criteria for selection were that these leaders were not in a formal non-profit organisation, were not paid for their work yet were leading grassroots groups or initiatives involved in active community building, campaigning or self-help. The paper reflects on findings in regard to the formative experiences that impacted upon the community leaders’ direction in life, their beliefs and ideas about what it means to be a leader, the strategies they use to lead and challenges they continue to face, and the role of learning and support in maintaining and developing their roles. Finally, the key themes relating to grassroots leadership and how these leaders enhance their own effectiveness and resilience are explored.

Presentations in English : find your voice as a presenter

With estimates of more than thirty million given each day, presentations have become an integral part of modern society. They can signify the difference between gaining or losing a job, or being successful or unsuccessful at university and a future career. Presentations in English, combining a 128-page book and DVD, is an innovative and complete course aimed specifically at non-native speakers of English.

Medienvermittelte transnationale Öffentlichkeiten im Zeitalter praktischer Hybridisierung (English title: Mediated transnational publics in environments of practical hybridisation)

This article is concerned with the repercussions of societal change on transnational media. It offers a new understanding of multilingual programming strategies by examining “Radio MultiKulti” (RM), a public service radio station discontinued from 1/1/2009 by Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg. In its fourteen years of existence, “RM” had to implement a well-intended and politically-motivated logic of ‘multiethnic, intercultural service station’. However, as we demonstrate, such a direction, despite some achievements, has resulted in the constraints to RM’s journalistic activities and language policy, drawing criticism for the station’s economic viability. This paper proposes that multilingual media services are to be framed by the concept of practical hybridity that allows a necessary responsiveness towards an ever-changing media environment, at the moment within digital culture. Our approach draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Yuri Lotman’s theoretical approaches to hybridity, as well as in-depth interviews conducted with “RM” staff from 2005 onwards, further interviews with key agents outside RM and a continuous monitoring of the public debate which culminated at the end of 2008 in the controversial decision to close the radio station. Against this background, the concluding remarks are meant to contribute to the scholarly debate on hybridization as well as to inform multilingual media policy in the 21st century.

Reading fictions

Each of the six chapters, which offer a cumulative course of study, begins with a concise overview of the concepts to be explored through the students’ reading of selected stories. The first chapter, 'Texts and readings', tries to make reading seem 'strange' through a series of de-familiarising activities that ask students to consider not only what particular stories might mean, but also how they are made to mean in different, and often quite contradictory, ways. This is explored further in the second chapter which introduces the idea of 'reading positions' and investigates the idea that in some senses, stories are always 'already read'. The next two chapters, called 'Intertextuality' and 'Re-readings?', invite students to consider how they produce particular readings and how they might choose among quite different readings or interpretations of the same story. The fifth chapter explores ideas about texts and their relationship to 'reality' through readings of racism, while the final chapter, 'Real people?' asks students to consider how they produce often rich and detailed readings of characters from minimal textual information. Terms and concepts which may be new to some students are highlighted in the text and indexed for easy reference. The short stories in this collection are by writers from different parts of the world and will appeal to students. They range from 'expressive realist' texts to less conventional narrative forms. Those teachers who have enjoyed using Reading Stories with their students will have a lot to look forward to in this collection of surefire 'winners' - by writers as varied as Bessie Head, Kristin Hunter, Tim Winton, Joyce Carol Oates, John Wain and Patricia Grace - each of which is accompanied by imaginative, enjoyable and thought-provoking activities.

Questions of English : ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, and the formation of the subject in England, Australia and the United States

The impact and content of English as a subject on the curriculum is once more the subject of lively debate. Questions of English sets out to map the development of English as a subject and how it has come to encompass the diversity of ideas that currently characterise it. Drawing on a combination of historical analysis and recent research findings Robin Peel, Annette Patterson and Jeanne Gerlach bring together and compare important new insights on curriculum development and teaching practice from England, Australia and the United States. They also discuss the development of teacher training, highlighting the variety of ways in which teachers build their own beliefs and knowledge about English.

Investigating Texts

The first chapter called 'Investigating texts' asks students to investigate the concept of text and what it might mean to 'behave like a reader'. After reading and comparing two short stories, the question, 'what is a story?' is posed. Students are then asked to distinguish a fiction text from a number of non-fiction texts and to identify the sources of the latter. It is suggested that although it is quite easy to perform these tasks, it is not so easy to describe texts in terms only of their features or ingredients; that it is necessary to talk about how texts are read, and what is more, how they are read on particular occasions. 'Making texts', the second chapter, asks students via a series of activities to consider what they expect of texts, and to investigate the conventions of fiction and non-fiction. They are given the opportunity to manipulate the 'ingredients' of texts, to read in terms of commonalities and to speculate about the rules by which both the composition and consumption of texts are organised. The ways in which particular kinds of reading and writing activities assume the text as a certain kind of object - as a model, for example, or as an object of criticism or as an occasion for self-questioning - is made explicit, and students are encouraged to investigate a range of uses of texts and the implications of these for reading and writing. Chapter three, 'Changing texts' asks students to consider, through a number of fascinating examples, how both fiction and non-fiction texts have changed over time, and how the ways in which readers read texts can change too. The 'retelling' of texts in terms of changing norms is considered via an 'updated' version of 'Scheherazade'; a student's feminist adaptation of her own text (initially written using a romance as a model), and an encyclopedia entry. 'Reading practices', the fourth chapter, poses further questions about different ways of reading. Through reading a number of didactic texts alongside three stories from a genre that is not usually read for morally improving lessons, students are asked to consider how different their reading practices can be.

The trouble with English

So much has been made over the crisis in English literature as field, as corpus, and as canon in recent years, that some of it undoubtedly has spilled over into English education. This has been the case in predominantly English-speaking Anglo-American and Commonwealth nations, as well as in those postcolonial states where English remains the medium of instruction and lingua franca of economic and cultural elites. Yet to attribute the pressures for change in pedagogic practice to academic paradigm shift per se would prop up the shaky axiom that English education is forever caught in some kind of perverse evolutionary time-lag, parasitic of university literary studies. I, too, believe that English education has reached a crucial moment in its history, but that this moment is contingent upon the changing demographics, cultural knowledges, and practices of economic globalization.

From Sydney and Shanghai : Australian and Chinese women writing modernism

In the 1930s and 1940s, Australian women writers published novels, poems, and short stories that pushed the boundaries of their national literary culture. From their position in the Pacific, they entered into a dialogue with a European modernism that they reworked to invigorate their own writing and to make cross-continental connections. My interest in the work of Australian women prose writers of this period stems from an appreciation of the extent of their engagement with interwar modernism (an engagement that is generally under-acknowledged) and the realization that there are commonalities of approach with the ways in which contemporaneous Chinese authors negotiated this transnational cultural traffic. China and Australia, it has been argued, share an imaginative and literal association of many centuries, and this psychic history produces a situation in which ‘Australians feel drawn towards China: they cannot leave it alone.’1 Equally, Chinese exploration of the great southern land began in the fifteenth century, prior to European contact. In recent times, the intensity of Australia’s cultural and commercial connections with Asia has led to a repositioning of the Australian sense of regionalism in general and, in particular, has activated yet another stage in the history of its relationship with China. In this context, the association of Australian and Chinese writing is instructive because the commonalities of approach and areas of interest between certain authors indicate that Australian writers were not alone in either the content or style of their response to European modernism. This recognition, in turn, advances discussions of modernism in Australia and reveals an alternative way of looking at the world from the Pacific Rim through literature. The intent is to examine selective Australian and Chinese authors who are part of this continuous history and whose writing demonstrates common thematic and stylistic features via the vector of modernism. I focus on the 1930s and 1940s because these are the decades in which Australia and China experienced wideranging conflict in the Pacific, and it is significant that war, both forthcoming and actual, features as an ominous soundtrack in the writing of Chinese and Australian women. I argue that, given the immensity of cultural difference between Australia and China, there is an especially interesting juncture in the ways in which the authors interrogate modernist practices and the challenge of modernism. The process in which writing from the Pacific Rim jointly negotiates the twin desires of engaging with European literary form and representing one’s own culture may be seen as what Jessica Berman identifies as a geomodernism, one of the ‘new possible geographies’ of modernism.2 My discussion centres on the work of the Australian women, to which the Chinese material serves as a point of reference, albeit a critical one. The Chinese writing examined here is restricted to authors who wrote at least some material in English and whose work is available in translation.

Scaffolding an EFL (English as a foreign language) ‘effective writing’ class in a hybrid learning community

This study sought to establish and develop innovative instructional procedures, in which scaffolding can be expanded and applied, in order to enhance learning of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing skills in an effective hybrid learning community (a combination of face-to-face and online modes of learning) at the university where the researcher is working. Many educational experts still believe that technology has not been harnessed to its potential to meet the new online characteristics and trends. There is also an urgency to reconsider the pedagogical perspectives involved in the utilisation of online learning systems in general and the social interactions within online courses in particular that have been neglected to date. An action research design, conducted in two cycles within a duration of four months, was utilised throughout this study. It was intended not only to achieve a paradigm shift from transmission-absorption to socio-constructivist teaching/learning methodologies but also to inform practice in these technology-rich environments. Five major findings emerged from the study. First, the scaffolding theory has been extended. Two new scaffolding types (i.e., quasi-transcendental scaffolding and transcendental scafolding), two scaffolding aspects (i.e., receptive and productive) and some scaffolding actions (e.g., providing a stimulus, awareness, reminder, or remedy) for EFL writing skills in an effective hybrid learning community have been identified and elaborated on. Second, the EFL ‘Effective Writing’ students used the scaffolds implemented in a hybrid environment to enhance and enrich their learning of writing of English essays. The online activities, conducted after the F2F sessions most of the time, gave students greater opportunities to both reinforce and expand the knowledge they had acquired in the F2F mode. Third, a variety of teaching techniques, different online tasks and discussion topics utilised in the two modes bolstered the students’ interests and engagement in their knowledge construction of how to compose English-language essays. Fourth, through the scaffolded activities, the students learned how to scaffold themselves and thus became independent learners in their future endeavours of constructing knowledge. Fifth, the scaffolding-to-scaffold activities provided the students with knowledge on how to effectively engage in transcendental scaffolding actions and facilitate the learning of English writing skills by less able peers within the learning community. Thus, the findings of this current study extended earlier understandings of scaffolding in an EFL hybrid learning environment and will contribute to the advancement of future ICT-mediated courses in terms of their scaffolding pedagogical aspects.

Listening to late discovery adoption and donor offspring stories : adoption, ethics and implications for contemporary donor insemination practices

For most of the 20th Century a ‘closed’ system of adoption was practised throughout Australia and other modern Western societies. This ‘closed’ system was characterised by sealed records; amended birth certificates to conceal the adoption, and prohibited contact with all biological family. Despite claims that these measures protected these children from the taint of illegitimacy the central motivations were far more complex, involving a desire to protect couples from the stigma of infertility and to provide a socially acceptable family structure (Triseliotis, Feast, & Kyle, 2005; Marshall & McDonald, 2001). From the 1960s significant evidence began to emerge that many adopted children and adults were experiencing higher incidences of psychological difficulties, characterised by problems with psychological adjustment, building self-esteem and forming a secure personal identity. These difficulties became grouped under the term ‘genealogical bewilderment’. As a result, new policies and practices were introduced to try to place the best interests of the child at the forefront. These changes reflected new understandings of adoption; as not only an individual process but also as a social and relational process that continues throughout life. Secrecy and the withholding of birth information are now prohibited in the overwhelming majority of all domestic adoptions processed in Australia (Marshall & McDonald, 2001). One little known consequence of this ‘closed’ system of adoption was the significant number of children who were never told of their adoptive status. As a consequence, some have discovered or had this information disclosed to them, as adults. The first study that looked at the late discovery of genetic origins experiences was conducted by the Post Adoption Resource Centre in New South Wales in 1999. This report found that the participants in their study expressed feelings of disbelief, confusion, anger, sorrow and loss. Further, the majority of participants continued to struggle with issues arising from this intentional concealment of their genetic origins (Perl & Markham, 1999). A second and more recent study (Passmore, Feeney & Foulstone, 2007) looked at the issue of secrecy in adoptive families as part of a broader study of 144 adult adoptees. This study found that secrecy and/or lies or misinformation on the part of adoptive parents had negative effects on both personal identity and relationships with others. The authors noted that those adoptees who found out about their adoption as adults were ‘especially likely to feel a sense of betrayal’ (p.4). Over recent years, stories of secrecy and late discovery have also started to emerge from sperm donor conceived adults (Spencer, 2007; Turner & Coyle, 2000). Current research evidence shows that although a majority of couples during the donor assisted conception process indicate that they intend to tell the offspring about their origins, as many as two-thirds or more of couples continue to withhold this information from their children (Akker, 2006; Gottlieb, A. McWhinnie, 2001; Salter-Ling, Hunter, & Glover, 2001). Why do they keep this secret? Infertility involves a range of complex factors that are often left unresolved or poorly understood by those choosing insemination by donor as a form of family building (Schaffer, J. A., & Diamond, R., 1993). These factors may only impact after the child is born, when resemblance talk becomes most pronounced. Resemblance talk is an accepted form of public discourse and a social convention that legitimises the child as part of the family and is part of the process of constructing the child’s identity within the family. Couples tend to become focused on resemblance as this is where they feel most vulnerable, and the lack of resemblance to the parenting father may trigger his sense of loss (Becker, Butler, & Nachtigall, 2005).

Do research thesis examiners need training? : practitioner stories

We are thesis examiners within the Australian academic system who formed a “community of practice” to try to resolve some of the issues we were facing. Stories of examiners reflecting on and examining their own practice are a notable silence in the higher degree research literature. In this study we have adopted a storytelling inquiry method that involved telling our practitioner stories, firstly to each other and then to a wider audience through this paper. We then identified issues that we believe are relevant to other thesis examiners. We have also found that engaging in a “community of practice” is itself a valuable form of examiner professional development. Key Words: Thesis Examiner Training, Storytelling, and Practitioner Research

Traveller’s Tales : The Expatriate English Language Teacher in the New Global Culture

Most of the research into ELT has focused on its linguistic and methodological aspects, which are based on Western scientific traditions. The contributions and experiences of English language teachers themselves, especially their work in overseas contexts, have frequently been overlooked. This volume aims to document the complexity of ELT as ‘work’ in new global economic and cultural conditions, and to explore how this complexity is realised in the everyday experiences of ELT teachers. The development of ELT from the colonial experience to its current status as a global commodity is explored; ELT is then situated in the discourses of globalisation, specifically within Appadurai’s theorisation of global flows of people, images, ideas, technology and money, or scapes. Within this framework, narratives are constructed from the experiences of Native-speaking English teachers. These reveal much about the personal, pedagogical and cultural dimensions of ELT work in non-Centre countries, and will contribute to a greater understanding of the intercultural dimensions of ELT for all those who work in it, and in related educational fields.

Teaching English as an additional language in senior high school : critical discourses in critical times

This paper presents a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of four policy documents currently offering ‘sets of possibilities’ for the teaching of English as an additional or second language (hereafter EAL/ESL) in senior classrooms in Queensland, Australia. The aim is to identify the ways in which each document re-presents the notion of critical literacy. Leximancer software, and Fairclough’s textually-oriented discourse analysis method (2001, 2003) are used to interrogate the relevant sections of the documents for the ways in which they re-present (sic) and construct the discourses around critical language study. This paper presents the description, interpretation and explanation of the discourses in these documents which constitute part of a larger project in which teacher interviews and classroom teaching are also investigated for the ways in which ‘the critical’ is constructed and contested in knowledge and practice.

Artful shaping : the ethics of fictionalising oral history

The paper documents the development of an ethical framework for my current PhD project. I am a practice-led researcher with a background in creative writing. My project invovles conducting a number of oral history interviews with individuals living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. I use the interviews to inform a novel set in Brisbane. In doing so, I hope to provide a lens into a cultural and historical space by creating a rich, textured and vivid narrative while still retaining some of the essential aspects of the oral history. While developing a methodology for fictionalising these oral histories, I have encountered a derserve range of ethical issues. In particular I have had to confront my role as a writer and researcher working with other people’s stories. In order to grapple with the complex ethics of such an engagment, I examine the devices and stratedgies employed by other creative practioners working in similar fields. I focus chielfy on Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave (published in English in 1968) Dave Eggers’What is the what: The autobiography of Valentino Achek Deng, a novel (2005) in order to understand the complex processes of mediation invloved in the artful shaping of oral histories. The paper explores how I have confronted and resolved ethical considerations in my theoretical and creative work.