The logics of good teaching in an audit culture: A Deleuzian analysis

This article examines the attempted reform of education within an emerging audit culture in Australia that has led to the implementation of a high-stakes testing regime known as NAPLAN. NAPLAN represents a machine of auditing, which creates and accounts for data that are used to measure, amongst other things, good teaching. In particular, we address the logics of a policy intervention that aims to improve the quality of education through returning ‘good teaching’. Using Deleuze’s concepts of series, events, copies and simulacra, we suggest that an attempt to return past commonsense logics of ‘good teaching’ as a result of NAPLAN is not possible. In an audit culture as exemplified by NAPLAN, ‘good teaching’ is being reconceptualized through those practices and becomes unrecognizable. Whilst policy claims to improved equity and quality are admirable, this article suggests that the simulacral change to logics of good teaching may actualize something very different.

The importance of connexin hemichannels during chondroprogenitor cell differentiation in hydrogel versus microtissue culture models

Appropriate selection of scaffold architecture is a key challenge in cartilage tissue engineering. Gap junction-mediated intercellular contacts play important roles in precartilage condensation of mesenchymal cells. However, scaffold architecture could potentially restrict cell-cell communication and differentiation. This is particularly important when choosing the appropriate culture platform as well as scaffold-based strategy for clinical translation, that is, hydrogel or microtissues, for investigating differentiation of chondroprogenitor cells in cartilage tissue engineering. We, therefore, studied the influence of gap junction-mediated cell-cell communication on chondrogenesis of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stromal cells (BM-MSCs) and articular chondrocytes. Expanded human chondrocytes and BM-MSCs were either (re-) differentiated in micromass cell pellets or encapsulated as isolated cells in alginate hydrogels. Samples were treated with and without the gap junction inhibitor 18-α glycyrrhetinic acid (18αGCA). DNA and glycosaminoglycan (GAG) content and gene expression levels (collagen I/II/X, aggrecan, and connexin 43) were quantified at various time points. Protein localization was determined using immunofluorescence, and adenosine-5'-triphosphate (ATP) was measured in conditioned media. While GAG/DNA was higher in alginate compared with pellets for chondrocytes, there were no differences in chondrogenic gene expression between culture models. Gap junction blocking reduced collagen II and extracellular ATP in all chondrocyte cultures and in BM-MSC hydrogels. However, differentiation capacity was not abolished completely by 18αGCA. Connexin 43 levels were high throughout chondrocyte cultures and peaked only later during BM-MSC differentiation, consistent with the delayed response of BM-MSCs to 18αGCA. Alginate hydrogels and microtissues are equally suited culture platforms for the chondrogenic (re-)differentiation of expanded human articular chondrocytes and BM-MSCs. Therefore, reducing direct cell-cell contacts does not affect in vitro chondrogenesis. However, blocking gap junctions compromises cell differentiation, pointing to a prominent role for hemichannel function in this process. Therefore, scaffold design strategies that promote an increasing distance between single chondroprogenitor cells do not restrict their differentiation potential in tissue-engineered constructs.

Incident reporting culture in recreational hot air ballooning

Hot air ballooning incidents are relatively rare; however, they have a high potential to be fatal. In order to inform appropriate safety interventions it is first necessary to understand the causal factors which lead to incidents and near-misses, which requires a formal incident report database. The Australian Balloon Federation (ABF) advocates the reporting of recreational hot air ballooning incidents, by reporting directly to the ABF safety officer or by completing an online incident report form. The objective of this paper is to understand how widely used the reporting system is and whether there are any perceived barriers to reporting. Sixty-nine balloonists participated in an online survey about their experience of incident reporting. Survey respondents were mostly male (11 female), experienced balloonists (mean years’ experience ballooning 19.51y with a SD 11.19). Sixty respondents (87%) held a pilot license. The majority (82.6%) of respondents were aware of the ABF incident reporting system. Over half (62.3%) had been involved in a ballooning incident or near-miss in Australia. However, 40% of those who had an incident or near-miss did not report it to the ABF and only 15.9% of all those surveyed had used the online incident report form. There was some disagreement regarding when it was appropriate to report an incident or near miss. Some respondents felt an incident or near miss should only be reported if it resulted in injury or damage, while others said near-misses should also be reported. The most frequent barriers identified were: a lack of understanding of when to report to the ABF; trivializing of incidents; and concerns about the system itself Steps should be taken to increase understanding of the system purpose and long term benefits. Specifically, reporting near-misses should be encouraged. This study is significant because it is the first to examine reporting practices in non-motorised recreational aviation.

An exploration of The Virtues Project: Ontological, educational and cross-cultural inquiries into a moral education program within a Mongolian school setting

This thesis explores The Virtues Project's ontological, educational and cross-cultural dimensions taking Charles Taylor's philosophical perspective of an anthropological account of the self and a phenomenological account of moral life and engagement. The experience of Mongolian schoolteachers implementing this moral education program is analyzed using a narrative inquiry method. The globally attractive project appears in moral education and virtues ethics research and surveys, yet no critical evaluation has been undertaken. Its conceptual features are appraised from a Taylorean perspective. The Listening Guide analysis of teacher experiences is presented in two narratives. The first is about the teachers' implementation experiences of moral flourishing as selves, in relationships and in community. The second is about their experience of becoming Mongolian in their modern day context. In conclusion, the project is coherent, constructive and potentially suitable cross-culturally.

Cultural factors: Understanding culture to design organisation structures and systems to optimise safety

Safety culture is a term with numerous definitions in the literature. Many authors advocate a prescriptive approach to safety culture in which if an organisation has certain levels of externally prescribed systems and structures in place it has a “good safety culture”. Conversely, other researchers suggest an anthropological approach of exploring deep meanings and understandings present within an organisation’s workforce. In a recent published review, the authors presented an alternative view to safety culture, in which the anthropological aspects of safety culture interact with the structures and systems in place within an organisation to result in behavioural patterns. This can be viewed as a human factors approach to safety culture in which, through understanding the specific interactions between the culture of a workforce and external organisational elements, organisational structures and systems can be optimised in order to shape worker behaviour and improve safety. This paper presents findings from a recent investigation of safety culture in the Australian heavy vehicle (transport) industry. Selected results are discussed to explore how understanding culture can provide direction to the optimisation of organisational structures and systems to match worker culture and thus improve safety. Specifically the value placed on personal experience and stories, as well as on both time and money are discussed, and interventions that are suited to these aspects of the culture are discussed. These findings demonstrate the importance of shifting beyond mere prescriptive and interpretive approaches to safety culture and instead to focus on the interaction between cultural and contextual elements to optimise organisational structures and systems.

Damned to fame: The moral rights of the Beckett estate

The Company B production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot raises important questions about copyright law, moral rights, and dramatic works. The playwright's nephew and executor, Edward Beckett, threatened to bring a legal action against the Sydney company for breach of contract on the grounds that unauthorised music appeared in the production. The Company B production denied that the contract made any such express provisions. The director Neil Armfield complained: 'In coming here with its narrow prescriptions, its dead controlling hand, the Beckett estate seems to me to be the enemy of art'. In the biography Damned to fame, James Knowlson documents a number of other proceedings taken by Beckett and his agents to control the productions of his work: 'He was often represented as a tyrannical figure, an arch-controller of his work, ready to unleash fiery thunderbolts onto the head of any bold, innovative director, unwilling to follow his text and stage directions to the last counted dot and precisely timed pause.' However, Knowlson notes that Beckett was inconsistent in his willingness to use legal action: 'It made a tremendous difference if he liked and respected the persons involved or if he had been able to listen to their reasons for wanting to attempt something highly innovative or even slightly different'. Famously, in 1988, Beckett brought legal action against a Dutch theatre company, which wanted to stage a production of Waiting for Godot, with women acting all the roles. His lawyer argued that the integrity of the text was violated because actresses were substituted for the male actors asked for in the text. The judge in the Haarlem court ruled that the integrity of the play had not been violated, because the performance showed fidelity to the dialogue and the stage directions of the play. By contrast, in 1992, a French court held a stage director was liable for an infringement of Beckett's moral right of integrity because the director had staged Waiting for Godot with the two lead roles played by women. In 1998, a United States production of Waiting for Godot with a racially mixed cast attracted legal threats amid accusations it had 'injected race into the play'. In the 2000 New York Fringe Festival, a company made light of this ongoing conflict between the Beckett estate and artistic directors. The work was entitled: The complete lost works of Samuel Beckett as found in an envelope (partially burned) in a dustbin in Paris labelled 'Never to be performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I'll sue! I'LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!'. The plot concerned a fight between three producers and the Beckett estate. In the wake of such disputes, Beckett and later his estate sought to tighten production contracts to state that no additions, omissions or alterations should be made to the text of the play or the stage directions and that no music, special effects or other supplements should be added without prior consent.

Moral rights and their application in Australia: a book review

In Moral Rights and Their Application in Australia, Maree Sainsbury offers a summary of the new moral rights regime established in Australia in 2000. It is a decent guide and handbook to moral rights for legal practitioners, the authors of copyright work, and the users of copyright material. As the author notes: "The Australian moral rights legislation impacts on the rights and obligations of many people in diverse circumstances, from the creator of a highly unique work of art to the designer of a web site incorporating factual information or graphics which someone else has created. Any person creating or dealing with copyright material should be aware of the moral rights implications. This book provides a detailed analysis of the moral rights legislation, while stressing the fundamental provisions. It also provides some useful practical guidance for those who are affected, both in general terms and with respect to the more specific situations outlined above." Maree Sainsbury provides an enjoyable account of the history and nature of moral rights. She charts the romantic, Continental origins of moral rights, and explains their translation to countries, such as Australia and the United States.

Public Policy for the Creative Industries

The cultural and creative industries are closely intertwined with government. This chapter reviews key economic rationales for public policy interventions for the arts, cultural and creative industries. Market failure justifications depend on the status of arts and culture as non-rival public goods, as ‘merit goods’, or the need to moderate the effects of up-front investment costs or monopoly, and the inherent uncertainty of creative production. ‘Systems failure’ too is a regular rationale for policy intervention. Using the United Kingdom as an example, the chapter shows how emphasis on these rationales has shifted over the last three decades, first in the context of industrial policies for traditional aims such as exports and job growth, which have been joined in recent years by the need for investment in intangibles, knowledge exchange, and spillover effects in the wider economy.

A candidate gene association study for growth performance in an improved Giant Freshwater Prawn (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) culture line

A candidate gene approach using type I single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers can provide an effective method for detecting genes and gene regions that underlie phenotypic variation in adaptively significant traits. In the absence of available genomic data resources, transcriptomes were recently generated in Macrobrachium rosenbergii to identify candidate genes and markers potentially associated with growth. The characterisation of 47 candidate loci by ABI re-sequencing of four cultured and eight wild samples revealed 342 putative SNPs. Among these, 28 SNPs were selected in 23 growth-related candidate genes to genotype in 200 animals selected for improved growth performance in an experimental GFP culture line in Vietnam. The associations between SNP markers and individual growth performance were then examined. For additive and dominant effects, a total of three exonic SNPs in glycogen phosphorylase (additive), heat shock protein 90 (additive and dominant) and peroxidasin (additive), and a total of six intronic SNPs in ankyrin repeats-like protein (additive and dominant), rolling pebbles (dominant), transforming growth factor-β induced precursor (dominant), and UTP-glucose-1-phosphate uridylyltransferase 2 (dominant) genes showed significant associations with the estimated breeding values in the experimental animals (P =0.001−0.031). Individually, they explained 2.6−4.8 % of the genetic variance (R2=0.026−0.048). This is the first large set of SNP markers reported for M. rosenbergii and will be useful for confirmation of associations in other samples or culture lines as well as having applications in marker-assisted selection in future breeding programs.

Measuring impact: Positioning evaluation in the Australian arts and culture landscape

Arts culture organisations and funding authorities increasingly need to evaluate the impact of festivals, events and performances. Economic impacts are often privileged over 'soft data' about community experience and engagement. This new book offers a timely and scholarly demonstration of how cultural value and impact can be evaluated. It offers an innovative approach whereby the relationship developed between the researchers/evaluator and the commissioning arts and cultural producer provides an opportunity to rethink the traditional process of reporting back on value and impact through the singular entity of funds acquittal. Using three commissioned evaluations undertaken at an Australian university as an extended case study, the book investigates the two positions most often adopted by researchers/evaluators - embedded and collaborative, or external and distanced - and argues the merits and deficiencies of the two approaches. Offering an examination of how arts evaluation 'works' in theory and practice and more importantly, why it is needed now and in the future to demonstrate the reach and cultural gains from arts and cultural projects, this will be essential reading for students in arts management, professionals working in arts and cultural organisations, scholars working in association with creative industries and cultural development.

In vitro pre-vascularisation of tissue-engineered constructs: A co-culture perspective

In vitro pre-vascularization is one of the main vascularization strategies in the tissue engineering field. Culturing cells within a tissue-engineered construct (TEC) prior to implantation provides researchers with a greater degree of control over the fate of the cells. However, balancing the diverse range of different cell culture parameters in vitro is seldom easy and in most cases, especially in highly vascularized tissues, more than one cell type will reside within the cell culture system. Culturing multiple cell types in the same construct presents its own unique challenges and pitfalls. The following review examines endothelial-driven vascularization and evaluates the direct and indirect role other cell types have in vessel and capillary formation. The article then analyses the different parameters researchers can modulate in a co-culture system in order to design optimal tissue-engineered constructs to match desired clinical applications.

Framing pandemic management: New governance, science or culture?

Management of a pandemic engages multiple sites where previously settled or uncontroversial understandings may be transformed by global and domestic forces. This article examines the iconography of social distancing implicated in the discourses of ‘quarantine’ and ‘risk control’ in public health, and the tension between scientific and popular media readings of the contours of acceptable public health models for managing particular pandemics. The role of culture in shaping and reshaping borders at an operational level is explored as a basis for explaining the apparent paradoxes in the way historic and contemporary pandemics are actually managed, and the different ways particular pandemics are framed. The article argues that a rational-scientific approach to pandemic management is insufficient and that a more nuanced socio-political blend of science, culture and public perceptions offers a more substantial basis for public health policy.

Kissing fish: Rex Hunt, popular culture, sustainability and fishing practices

Natural resource managers and scientists focus on the behaviour of individual recreational fishers to understand environmental problems associated with this leisure activity. They do this in an effort to identify ways to change attitudes in order to facilitate environmentally friendly choices. This applied use of ABC psychology (attitude, behaviour, choice) has not delivered the expected results. This article offers a different approach by investigating an emergent practice in diverse fishing communities, rather than looking to the responsibility of the individual recreational fisher. Using practice theory, I trace the change from take-all to catch-and-release fishing in Australia by analysing the texts of celebrity fisher Rex Hunt, who is an advocate for releasing fish. I combine this with oral history testimony from a sample of recreational fishers from the broader Australian community to show how change happened. The practice of catch-and-release fishing emerged through the combination of sociotechnical and historically specific elements present in popular culture, including the media. Paying attention to the way different elements catalyse provides a rich account of the changing modes of sustainability in recreational fishing communities.