Justice in Society

Australia has always made claims to being a just and fair society. It is a land of opportunity, where anyone can make it, and where mateship rather than class underpins social relations. Why is it, then, that our criminal justice system is host to the most disadvantaged and disenfranchised in our community? Why do certain groups of people continue to experience the worst forms of injustice in our society? And why do these injustices continue, despite numerous attempts by researchers and activists to address them? By exploring the ways in which we think about justice in the wider Australian society, this book considers these questions. As disciplines that have the most to say about justice and injustice, it analyses the contributions of political philosophy and sociology, and examines how their ideas have come to dominate discussion on issues ranging from asylum seeking to homophobic violence. By examining the shared assumptions about justice and injustice that underpin these discussions, this book also charts a course between and beyond these debates, and seeks to engage, challenge, and offer new possibilities for justice in Australian society. Relevant contemporary social issues like sex trafficking, homelessness, mental illness and Indigenous policing are examined throughout, placed in their historical, social and cultural context, and linked to local, national and global debates. Such analyses examine the broader implications of these criminological, social and legal issues for those excluded from justice in Australian society.

Child, Adolescent and Family Development [3rd ed.]

"This book explores the foundations of modern developmental thought, incorporating the latest in international research set within a cultural and historical context. Richly illustrated and enhanced by a range of practical teaching resources, this clear and engaging text is intended to reach students across a range of teaching, psychology, social science and health science disciplines. By employing a thematic approach within the chronologically ordered chapters, this text offers a systematic and intuitive structure for both learning and teaching. This new edition features a set of fully updated case studies that consider current trends and issues in developmental theory and practice, as well as end-of-chapter sections that address important stages in the family life cycle."--publisher website

Multimodal approaches to reflective teaching and assessment in higher education

Reflection is not a new concept in the teaching of higher education and is often an important component of many disciplinary courses. Despite this, past research shows that whilst there are examples of rich reflective strategies used in some areas of higher education, most approaches to and conceptualisations of reflective learning and assessment have been perfunctory and inconsistent. In many disciplinary areas reflection is often assessed as a written activity ‘tagged onto’ assessment practices. In creative disciplines however, reflective practice is an integral and cumulative form of learning and is often expressed in ways other than in the written form. This paper will present three case studies of reflective practice in the area of Creative Industries in higher education – Dance, Fashion and Music. It will discuss the ways in which higher education teachers and students use multi-modal approaches to expressing knowledge and reflective practice in context. The paper will argue that unless students are encouraged to participate in deep reflective disciplinary discourse via multi-modes then reflection will remain superficial in the higher education context.

Practical considerations for integrating alternate reality gaming into science education

In this article, I present my experience with integrating an alternate reality gaming (ARG) framework into a pre-service science teacher education course. My goal is to provide an account of my experiences that can inform other science education practitioners at the tertiary and secondary levels that wish to adopt a similar approach in their classes. A game was designed to engage pre-service teachers with issues surrounding the declining enrolments in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines (i.e., the STEM crisis; Tytler, 2007) and ways of re-engaging learners with STEM subjects. The use of ARG in science education is highly innovative. Literature on the use of ARG for educational purposes is scarce so in the article I have drawn on a range of available literature on gaming and ARG to define what it is and to suggest how it can be included in school science classrooms.

Environmental rights or a right to the environment? Exploring the nexus between human rights and environmental protection.

The importance of the environment to the fulfilment of human rights is widely accepted at international law. What is less well-accepted is the proposition that we, as humans, possess rights to the environment beyond what is necessary to support our basic human needs. The suggestion that a human right to a healthy environment may be emerging at international law raises a number of theoretical and practical challenges for human rights law, with such challenges coming from both within and outside the human rights discourse. It is argued that human rights law can make a positive contribution to environmental protection, but the precise nature of the connection between the environment and human rights warrants more critical analysis. This short paper considers the different ways that the environment is conceptualised in international human rights law and analyses the proposition that a right to a healthy environment is emerging. It identifies some of the challenges which would need to be overcome before such a right could be recognised, including those which draw on the disciplines of deep ecology and earth jurisprudence.

Supporting research at QUT : a tale of three librarians and a Creative Industries super-faculty

In 2012 the existing eight disciplines of Creative Industries Faculty, QUT combined with the School of Design (formerly a component of the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering) to create a super faculty that includes the following disciplines: Architecture, Creative Writing & Literary Studies, Dance, Drama, Fashion, Film & Television, Industrial Design, Interior Design, Journalism, Media & Communication, Landscape Architecture, Music & Sound and Urban Design. The university’s research training unit AIRS (Advanced Information Retrieval Skills) is a systematic introduction to research level information literacies. It is currently being redesigned to reflect today’s new data intensive research environment and facilitate the capacity for life-long learning. Upon completion participants are expected to be able to: 1. Demonstrate an understanding of the theory of advanced search and evaluative strategies to efficiently yield appropriate resources to create original research. 2. Apply appropriate data management strategies to organise and utilize your information proficiently, ethically and legally. 3. Identify strategies to ensure best practice in the use of information sources, information technologies, information access tools and investigative methods. All Creative Industries Faculty research students must complete this unit into which CI Librarians teach discipline specific material. The library employs a team of research specific experts as well as Liaison Librarians for each faculty. Together they develop and deliver a generic research training program that provides researcher training in the following areas: Managing Research Data, QUT ePrints: New features for tracking your research impact, Tracking Research Impact, Research Students and the Library: Overview of Library Research Support Services, Technologies for Research Collaboration, Open Access Publishing, Greater Impact via Creative Commons Licence, CAMBIA - Navigating the patent literature, Uploading Publications to QUT ePrints Workshop, AIRS for supervisors, Finding Existing Research Data, Keeping up to date:Discovering and managing current awareness information and Getting Published. In 2011 Creative Industries initiated a new faculty specific research training program to promote capacity building for research within their Faculty, with workshops designed and developed with Faculty Research Leaders, The Office of Research and Liaison Librarians. “Show me the money” which assists staff to pursue alternative funding sources was one such session that was well attended and generated much discussion and interest. Drop in support sessions for ePrints, EndNote referencing software and Tracking Research Impact for the Creative Industries were also popular options on the menu. Liaison Librarians continue to provide one-on-one consultations with individual researchers as requested. This service assists Librarians greatly with getting to know and monitoring their researchers’ changing needs. The CI Faculty has enlisted two Research Leaders, one for each of the two Schools (Design and Media, Entertainment & Creative Arts) whose role it is to mentor newer research staff. Similarly within the CI library liaison team one librarian is assigned the role of Research Coordinator, whose responsibility it is to be the primary liaison with the Assistant Dean, Research and other key Faculty research managers and is the one most likely to attend Faculty committees and meetings relating to research support.

The relationship between firm survival and innovation : an introduction to the literature

The rapid growth in use of the Internet as a business tool provides a new perspective in the study of the organizational challenges of new technologies. The innovation literature has grown vastly since its establishment in the 1920s, covering a broad range of disciplines (Foxall 1984) and measures a wide variety of variables (Rogers 1995). At first glance, studies that look at the relationship between innovation and firm survival appear contradictory. However, the results appear compatible when additional factors, such as industry type, organizational age, company size or the duration of the study are taken into account.

From the Editor

The five articles appearing in this issue of the journal reflect the breadth of project management research and the cross-fertilization of ideas from other management disciplines with project management. These articles focus on the evolution of project management theory (“A Bibliometric View on the Use of Contingency Theory in Project Management Research” by Hanisch and Wald), interfirm knowledge management and learning in project networks (“Exploring Negotiation Through Boundary Objects in Global Design Project Networks” by Di Marco, Alin, and Taylor), learning within one project organization (“Organizational Learning in Project-Based Companies: A Process Thinking Approach” by Koskinen), identifying the factors affecting project performance (“Factors Causing Design Schedule Delays in Turnkey Projects in Taiwan: An Empirical Study of Power Distribution Substation Projects” by Yau and Yang), and considering the antecedents of negative employee behavior and its consequences for project team performance (“Counteracting Free-Riding With Team Morale—An Experimental Study” by He).

Project 27 : insights into a production-centred study on art direction and love

This paper offers insight into the development of a PhD in advertising art direction. For over half a century art directors within the advertising industry have been adapting to the changes occurring in media, culture and the corporate sector, toward enhancing professional performance and competitiveness. These professionals seldom offer explicit justification about the role images play in effective communication. It is uncertain how this situation affects advertising performance, because advertising has, nevertheless, evolved in parallel to this as an industry able to fabricate new opportunities for itself. However, uncertainties in the formalization of art direction knowledge restrict the possibilities of knowledge transfer in higher education. The theoretical knowledge supporting advertising art direction has been adapted spontaneously from disciplines that rarely focus on specific aspects related to the production of advertising content, like, for example: marketing communication, design, visual communication, or visual art. Meanwhile, in scholarly research, vast empirical knowledge has been generated about advertising images, but often with limited insight into production expertise. Because art direction is understood as an industry practice and not as an academic discipline, an art direction perspective in scholarly contributions is rare. Scholarly research that is relevant to art direction seldom offers viewpoints to help understand how it is that research outputs may specifically contribute to art direction practices. There is a need to formally understanding the knowledge underlying art direction and using it to explore models for visual analysis and knowledge transfer in higher education. This paper provides insight into the development of a thesis that explored this need. The PhD thesis to which this paper refers is Strategic Aesthetics in Advertising Campaigns: Implications for Art Direction Education.

Employment opportunities in Australia for educational researchers: A review of recent advertisements

The Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) by promoting the conference theme has identified a need to be more proactive to ensure growth in the number of educational researchers. Within the Higher Education sector there are a number of methods used to encourage interest in a particular area, and these include policy, funding, sponsorship, employment and scholarships. There are three types of employment for academics: Research, Lecturing and Teaching and Learning and two types of scholarships: either students self-identify the topic or topics are targeted with associated funding. The aim of this study is to review the academic positions and targeted scholarships of Australian Universities and research organisations gathered from advertisements in a national newspaper. This will establish a baseline of recent practice from July to December, 2006 and identify opportunities for researchers in all Disciplines and specifically in education. Results reveal the two main groups for academics are Research and Lecturing, with a small number in Teaching and Learning. Although the Education Discipline is well represented overall (3rd in 12 Disciplines after Health and Science) in terms of research opportunities education then moves to 10th position. A further significant finding is the highly contractual nature of research versus the more stable, tenured environment for lecturing. There are a number of implications arising from this short study. Firstly, the Discipline of Education as a targeted area for research alone is significantly under-represented in the advertised positions but is well represented in lecturing where the role always requires teaching and research. Thus it seems the amount of time devoted to research by academics in the education Discipline is significantly lower than for health or science. Secondly, there are few industry/Government targeted scholarships in the education Discipline therefore any growth in numbers of educational researchers through postgraduate study is not expanded by funding to meet identified needs. In conclusion AARE, an association interested in promoting the growth of educational research, has an obvious need to encourage and review the outcomes of this study and perhaps adopt some of the successful strategies employed by other Disciplines to improve the opportunities for educational researchers in the future.

Book Review : Bellanta, Melissa (2012) Larrikins : A History. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

This book has been painstakingly researched by a scholar whose intellectual competencies span several disciplines: history, sociology, criminology, culture, drama and film studies. It is theoretically sophisticated and yet not dense as it reads like a novel with an abundance of interesting complex characters.

Performing design: game design, practice, praxis and the theatre of the impressed

This paper is a reflection on a design teaching project that endeavours to establish a culture of critical design thinking in a tertiary game design course. In the first instance, the ‘performing design’ project arose as a response to contemporary issues and tensions in the Australian games industry and game design education, in essence, the problem of how to scaffold undergraduate students from their entry point as ‘players’ (the impressed) into becoming designers. The performing design project therefore started as a small-scale intervention to inspire reflection in a wider debate that includes: the potential evolution of the contemporary games industry; the purpose of game design education; and the positioning of game design as a design discipline. Our position is that designing interactive playful works or games is victim of a tendency to simplify the discipline and view it from either the perspective of science or art. In this paper we look at some of the historical discussions on the distinct identity of games. Then we present an overview of the typical state of play in contemporary game design education which inspires the performing design project as an intervention or teaching technique. This leads us to question understandings of education and training and creativity and innovation. Finally we reflect on insights arising from the performing design project which lead us to support Archer’s call for a ‘third area’ that balances the monolithic practices of the two major academic disciplines.

A visual language for the collaborative visualization of integrated conceptual models in product development scenarios

In various industrial and scientific fields, conceptual models are derived from real world problem spaces to understand and communicate containing entities and coherencies. Abstracted models mirror the common understanding and information demand of engineers, who apply conceptual models for performing their daily tasks. However, most standardized models in Process Management, Product Lifecycle Management and Enterprise Resource Planning lack of a scientific foundation for their notation. In collaboration scenarios with stakeholders from several disciplines, tailored conceptual models complicate communication processes, as a common understanding is not shared or implemented in specific models. To support direct communication between experts from several disciplines, a visual language is developed which allows a common visualization of discipline-specific conceptual models. For visual discrimination and to overcome visual complexity issues, conceptual models are arranged in a three-dimensional space. The visual language introduced here follows and extends established principles of Visual Language science.

Problem-based learning : does accounting education need it?

Problem-based learning (PBL) has been used successfully in disciplines such as medicine, nursing, law and engineering. However a review of the literature shows that there has been little use of this approach to learning in accounting. This paper extends the research in accounting education by reporting the findings of a case study of the development and implementation of PBL at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in a new Accountancy Capstone unit that began in 2006. The fundamentals of the PBL approach were adhered to. However, one of the essential elements of the approach adopted was to highlight the importance of questioning as a means of gathering the necessary information upon which decisions are made. This approach can be contrasted with the typical ‘give all the facts’ case studies that are commonly used. Another feature was that students worked together in the same group for an entire semester (similar to how teams in the workplace operate) so there was an intended focus on teamwork in solving unstructured, real-world accounting problems presented to students. Based on quantitative and qualitative data collected from student questionnaires over seven semesters, it was found that students perceived PBL to be effective, especially in terms of developing the skills of questioning, teamwork, and problem solving. The effectiveness of questioning is very important as this is a skill that is rarely the focus of development in accounting education. The successful implementation of PBL in accounting through ‘learning by doing’ could be the catalyst for change to bring about better learning outcomes for accounting graduates.

Productivity and time use during occupational therapy and nutrition/dietetics clinical education : a cohort study

Background: Currently in the Australian higher education sector higher productivity from allied health clinical education placements are a contested issue. This paper will report results of a study that investigated output changes associated with occupational therapy and nutrition/dietetics clinical education placements in Queensland, Australia. Supervisors’ and students’ time use during placements and how this changes for supervisors compared to when students are not present in the workplace is also presented. Methodology/Principal Findings: A cohort design was used with students from four Queensland universities, and their supervisors employed by Queensland Health. There was an increasing trend in the number of occasions of service delivered when the students were present, and a statistically significant increase in the daily mean length of occasions of service delivered during the placement compared to pre-placement levels. For project-based placements that were not directly involved in patient care, supervisors’ project activity time decreased during placements, with students undertaking considerably more time in project activities. Conclusions/Significance: A novel method for estimating productivity and time use changes during clinical education programs for allied health disciplines has been applied. During clinical education placements there was a net increase in outputs, suggesting supervisors engage in longer consultations with patients for the purpose of training students, while maintaining patient numbers. Other activities are reduced. This paper is the first time these data have been shown and form a good basis for future assessments of the economic impact of student placements for allied health disciplines.