Making sense of an everyday science text : linguistic, visual and spatial design

In this article, we take a close look at the literacy demands of one task from the ‘Marvellous Micro-organisms Stage 3 Life and Living’ Primary Connections unit (Australian Academy of Science, 2005). One lesson from the unit, ‘Exploring Bread’, (pp 4-8) asks students to ‘use bread labels to locate ingredient information and synthesise understanding of bread ingredients’. We draw upon a framework offered by the New London Group (2000), that of linguistic, visual and spatial design, to consider in more detail three bread wrappers and from there the complex literacies that students need to interrelate to undertake the required task. Our findings are that although bread wrappers are an example of an everyday science text, their linguistic, visual and spatial designs and their interrelationship are not trivial. We conclude by reinforcing the need for teachers of science to also consider how the complex design elements of everyday science texts and their interrelated literacies are made visible through instructional practice.

Children's Fiction About 9/11: Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities

In this study, Lampert examines how cultural identities are constructed within fictional texts for young people written about the attacks on the Twin Towers. It identifi es three significant identity categories encoded in 9/11 books for children:ethnic identities, national identities, and heroic identities,arguing that the identities formed within the selected children’s texts are in flux, privileging performances of identities that are contingent on post-9/11 politics. Looking at texts including picture books, young adult fiction, and a selection of DC Comics, Lampert finds in post-9/11 children’s literature a co-mingling of xenophobia and tolerance; a binaried competition between good and evil and global harmony and national insularity; and a lauding of both the commonplace hero and the super-human. The shifting identities evident in texts that are being produced for children about 9/11 offer implicit and explicit accounts of what constitutes good citizenship, loyalty to nation and community, and desirable attributes in a Western post-9/11 context. This book makes an original contribution to the field of children’s literature by providing a focused and sustained analysis of how texts for children about 9/11 contribute to formations of identity in these complex times of cultural unease and global unrest.

Seeing music performance : visual influences on perception and experience

Drawing from ethnographic, empirical, and historical / cultural perspectives, we examine the extent to which visual aspects of music contribute to the communication that takes place between performers and their listeners. First, we introduce a framework for understanding how media and genres shape aural and visual experiences of music. Second, we present case studies of two performances, and describe the relation between visual and aural aspects of performance. Third, we report empirical evidence that visual aspects of performance reliably influence perceptions of musical structure (pitch related features) and affective interpretations of music. Finally, we trace new and old media trajectories of aural and visual dimensions of music, and highlight how our conceptions, perceptions and appreciation of music are intertwined with technological innovation and media deployment strategies.

Regulating roles of the use of the balanced scorecard in shaping corporate identities

The literature on corporate identity management suggests that managing corporate identity is a strategically complex task embracing the shaping of a range of dimensions of organisational life. The performance measurement literature and its applications likewise now also emphasise organisational ability to incorporate various dimensions considering both financial and non-financial performance measures when assessing success. The inclusion of these soft non-financial measures challenges organisations to quantify intangible aspects of performance such as corporate identity, transforming unmeasurables into measurables. This paper explores the regulatory roles of the use of the balanced scorecard in shaping key dimensions of corporate identities in a public sector shared service provider in Australia. This case study employs qualitative interviews of senior managers and employees, secondary data and participant observation. The findings suggest that the use of the balanced scorecard has potential to support identity construction, as an organisational symbol, a communication tool of vision, and as strategy, through creating conversations that self-regulate behaviour. The development of an integrated performance measurement system, the balanced scorecard, becomes an expression of a desired corporate identity, and the performance measures and continuous process provide the resource for interpreting actual corporate identities. Through this process of understanding and mobilising the interaction, it may be possible to create a less obtrusive and more subtle way to control “what an organisation is”. This case study also suggests that the theoretical and practical fusion of the disciplinary knowledge around corporate identities and performance measurement systems could make a contribution to understanding and shaping corporate identities.

Negotiating multiple identities between school and the outside world : A critical discourse analysis

This article examines interview talk of three students in an Australian high school to show how they negotiate their young adult identities between school and the outside world. It draws on Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia to argue that identities are linguistically and corporeally constituted. A critical discourse analysis of segments of transcribed interviews and student-related public documents finds a mismatch between a social justice curriculum at school and its transfer into students’ accounts of outside school lived realities. The article concludes that a productive social justice pedagogy must use its key principles of (con)textual interrogation to engage students in reflexive practice about their positioning within and against discourses of social justice in their student and civic lives. An impending national curriculum must decide whether or not it negotiates the discursive divide any better.

Young children’s experience of visual displays of their artwork

The practice of displaying children's artwork in early childhood classrooms poses a number of questions about the child and his or her visual artwork. This paper focuses on young children’s experiences with the display of their own visual artwork. Following Giorgi's (1985a; 1985b) approach to conducting phenomenological psychological research, 13 children between the ages of 4 and 6 years attending an independent school outside metropolitan Detroit, Michigan (USA) participated in semi-structured interviews as a way of uncovering their lived experiences of seeing their artwork displayed. The study yielded 12 essential themes and from these three key issues and their implications for early childhood art education are explored.

Certainties and uncertainties : ethics and professional identities of early childhood educators

This study is an inquiry into the professional identity constructions of early childhood educators, where identity is conceptualised as social and contextual. Through a genealogical analysis of narratives of four Queensland early childhood teachers, the thesis renders as problematic universal and fixed notions of what it is to be an early childhood professional. The data are the four teachers’ professional life history narratives recounted through a series of conversational interviews with each participant. As they spoke about professionalism and ethics, these teachers struggled to locate themselves as professionals, as they drew on a number of dominant discourses available to them. These dominant discourses were located and mapped through analysis of the participants’ talk about relationships with parents, colleagues and authorities. Genealogical analysis enabled multiple readings of the ways in which the participants’ talk held together certainties and uncertainties, as they recounted their experiences and spoke of early childhood expertise, relational engagement and ethics. The thesis concludes with suggestions for ways to support early childhood teachers and pre-service teachers to both engage with and resist normative processes and expectations of professional identity construction. In so doing, multiple and contextual opportunities can be made available when it comes to being professional and ‘doing’ ethics. The thesis makes an argument for new possibilities for thinking and speaking professional identities that include both certainty and uncertainty, comfort and discomfort, and these seemingly oppositional terms are held together in tension, with an insistence that both are necessary and true. The use of provocations offers tools through which pre-service teachers, teachers and teacher educators can access new positions associated with certainties and uncertainties in professional identities. These new positions call for work that supports experiences of ‘de-comfort’ – that is, experiences that encourage early childhood educators to step away from the comfort zones that can become part of expertise, professional relationships and ethics embedded within normative representations of what it is to be an early childhood professional.

Mid-level concept learning with visual contextual ontologies and probabilistic inference for image annotation

To date, automatic recognition of semantic information such as salient objects and mid-level concepts from images is a challenging task. Since real-world objects tend to exist in a context within their environment, the computer vision researchers have increasingly incorporated contextual information for improving object recognition. In this paper, we present a method to build a visual contextual ontology from salient objects descriptions for image annotation. The ontologies include not only partOf/kindOf relations, but also spatial and co-occurrence relations. A two-step image annotation algorithm is also proposed based on ontology relations and probabilistic inference. Different from most of the existing work, we specially exploit how to combine representation of ontology, contextual knowledge and probabilistic inference. The experiments show that image annotation results are improved in the LabelMe dataset.