Crisis Communication in Natural Disasters : The Queensland Floods and Christchurch Earthquakes

Over the past decade, social media have gone through a process of legitimation and official adoption, and they are now becoming embedded as part of the official communications apparatus of many commercial and public-sector organisations— in turn, providing platforms like Twitter with their own sources of legitimacy. Arguably, the demonstrated utility of social media platforms and tools in times of crisis—from civil unrest and violent crime through to natural disasters like bushfires, earthquakes, and floods—has been a crucial driver of this newfound legitimacy. In the mid-2000s, user-created content and ‘Web 2.0’ platforms were known to play a role in crisis communication; back then, the involvement of extra-institutional actors in providing and sharing information around such events involved distributed, ad hoc, or niche platforms (like Flickr), and was more likely to be framed as ‘citizen journalism’ or ‘crowdsourcing’ (see, for example, Liu, Palen, Sutton, Hughes, & Vieweg, 2008, on the then-emerging role of photo-sharing in disasters). Since then, the dramatically increased take-up of mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter means that the pool of potential participants in online crisis communication has broadened to include a much larger proportion of the general population, as well as traditional media and official emergency response organisations.

The relationship between teachers' perceptions of school leadership and their perceptions of the implementation of the National Curriculum

The National Curriculum is an innovation in Australian schooling history and is likely to have a widespread and long-term impact on schools, teachers and students. This research used theoretical frameworks informed by Leithwood (1994) and Fullan (2007), and concepts related to innovation, to contribute to an understanding that may support a better understanding of teachers' perceptions when leading curriculum change such as a National Curriculum in schools. This research concludes that teachers who participated in the research demonstrated that their perceptions of a National Curriculum implementation are influenced by their perceptions of school leadership. Specifically, teachers with positive perceptions of their Principal's leadership also had positive perceptions of their capacity to implement the new National Curriculum.

Reimagining school libraries : emerging teacher pedagogic practices

Agile learning spaces have the potential to afford flexible and innovative pedagogic practice. However there is little known about the experiences of teachers and learners in newly designed learning spaces, and whether the potential for reimagined pedagogies is being realised. This paper uses data from a recent study into the experiences of teacher-librarians, teachers, students and leaders of seven Queensland school libraries built with Building the Education Revolution (BER) funding, to explore the question, “how does the physical environment of school libraries influence pedagogic practices?” This paper proposes that teachers explored new pedagogies within the spaces when there was opportunity for flexibility and experimentation and the spaces sufficiently supported their beliefs about student learning. The perspectives of a range of library users were gathered through an innovative research design incorporating student drawings, videoed library tours and reflections, and interviews. The research team collected qualitative data from school libraries throughout 2012. The libraries represented a variety of geographic locations, socioeconomic conditions and both primary and secondary campuses. The use of multiple data sources, and also the perspectives of the multiple researchers who visited the sites and then coded the data, enabled complementary insights and synergies to emerge. Principles of effective teacher learning that can underpin school wide learning about the potential for agile learning spaces to enhance student learning, are identified. The paper concludes that widespread innovative use of the new library spaces was significantly enhanced when the school leadership fostered whole school discussions about the type of learning the spaces might provoke. This research has the potential to inform school designers, teachers and teacher-librarians to make the most of the transformative potential of next generation learning spaces.

'In the Room' and 'School Chemistry Class'

Two poems in journal Axon. 2013 Issue 4.

Physical activity promotion as a school priority : what do parents think?

The demands and responsibilities placed on schools in contemporary education systems are vast. However, with growing obesity levels and physical inactivity, the prevention of chronic disease has focused on youth populations, with schools playing the focal educative asset in this strategy. Parents play a decisive role in their child’s educational setting, and as fee and tax payers, are ultimately a consumer. Parents (82 males and 208 females) of secondary school children were recruited from three private (n=151) and two government schools (n=150) in Brisbane, Australia. The mean (standard deviation) age was 44.57 (6.21) years. Participants responded to a series of questions about physical activity at their child’s school, in addition to completing the International Physical Activity Questionnaire. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, frequency distributions and logistic regressions. Parents were deemed sufficiently physically active if they participated in at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week. Overall, 83 (59.7%) parents from private and 60 (50.8%) parents from government schools were deemed sufficiently physically active. Concerning whether physical activity promotion should be a priority at their child’s school, 111 (73.5%) parents from private schools either agreed or strongly agreed, as opposed to 97 (64.7%) parents from government schools. Logistic regressions indicated that the concept of physical activity promotion being prioritised at schools was dependent on whether the child attended a private school (OR =1.34, z = 2.30, p = 0.02), and whether the participant was sufficiently active (OR =.71, z = -2.48, p = 0.01). Physical activity promotion within schools may provide substantial future benefits on a population scale. The demands on schools may need to be addressed to meet the needs of students and the desires of their parents.

Social and cultural borders in Rio de Janeiro : the everyday life of community and mainstream photojournalists

This paper takes a multimethod approach which combines ethnographic techniques and discourse studies to investigate two contrasting professional groups: community photographers, who are favela dwellers who have developed photographic projects in Brazil‘s favelas, and photojournalists of the mainstream media. Its purpose is to determine how a cultural and social divide in the city of Rio de Janeiro shapes both community photographers and mainstream photojournalists’ practices, discourses, and identities. While community photographers strive to establish a humane and positive view about favelas and their residents by shifting the focus from poverty, shortages, violence, and criminality to images of the ordinary life, mainstream photojournalists express the view that their role is of primary importance for the defence of human rights in the favelas by helping to prevent, for instance, police abuses and violations. As the data analysis indicated the existence of socio-spatial borders all over Rio de Janeiro, this study adopted the idea of a divided city without denying interconnections between favelas and the city’s political life. Through the analysis of categories which emerged from the data, the complex world of documenting favela life is explored. The major themes touched upon are: the breakdown between the mainstream media and the favela communities; the different kinds of relationships which arise in Rio’s low income suburbs; and the gradual return of mainstream news workers to favelas.

Business Innovation and Disruption in Publishing

This is the first volume in a book series examining how organizations in the creative industries respond to disruptive change and how they themselves generate business innovations. The aspiration of this book series is to understand some of the common forces behind the disruptions occurring in so many creative industries today and identifying the most promising strategies and responses by organizations to create new value propositions, business models and business practices that can enable these industry participants to cope with and eventually thrive as their industries and sectors are transformed. The chapters included in the volume examine the processes of disruption and transformation due to the technology of the Internet, social forces driven by social media, the development of new portable digital devices with greater capabilities and smaller size, the decreasing costs of new information, and the creation of new business models and forms of intellectual property ownership rights for a digitized industry. The context for this volume is the publishing industries, understood as the industries for the publishing of fiction and non-fiction books, academic literature, consumer as well as trade magazines, and daily newspapers. This volume includes chapters by an internationally diverse array of media scholars whose chapters provide insights into these phenomena in Eastern Europe, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Russia, and the United States, using different methodological frameworks including, but not limited to, surveys, in-depth interviews and multiple-case studies. One gap that this book series seeks to fill is that between the study of business innovation and disruption by innovation scholars largely based in business school settings and similar studies by scholarly experts from non-business school disciplines, including the broader social sciences (e.g. sociology, political science, economic geography) and creative industry based professional school disciplines (e.g. architecture, communications, design, film making, journalism, media studies, performing arts, photography and television). Future volumes of this book series will examine disruption and business innovation in the film, video and photography sectors (volume two), the music sector (volume three) and interactive entertainment (volume four), with subsequent volumes focusing on the most relevant developments in creative industry business innovation and disruption that emerge.

The construction of parents as learners about pre-school children’s development

The concept of the lifelong learner—the idea that people should be active learners throughout the lifespan—has since the 1990s gained importance in public policy. Governments in relatively wealthy countries have made the argument that the economic future of nations is tied to the ongoing participation of citizens in learning opportunities that will assist them to participate fully in society and increase their chances of employment in changing workforce conditions. More recently, policy attention has focused on the other end of the lifespan, the first years of life. With the early years now recognised as crucial for later educational success, policy attention has also focused on the importance of parenting in the early years. In the UK and Australia, for example, the effects of state interventions to facilitate ‘good parenting’ and pre-school children’s ‘readiness’ for formal schooling have been felt in a range of settings including community health services, the home and the pre-school (Gillies, 2005; Nichols & Jurvansuu, 2008; Millei & Lee, 2007; Vincent, Ball & Braun, 2010). In Australia, government policy has explicitly proposed a model of parenting as a learning process, and has urged people to cultivate their identities as learners in order to carry out their responsibilities as parents. In part the policy objectives have been to support parents to ensure that all children get a healthy and successful start to life...

Pedagogies of inclusive transition to school

Teachers in inclusive early education classrooms face competing pressures that are highlighted as children transition from play-based settings into formal school. Their challenge is to engage in pedagogical practice that caters for the complex range of school entrants. Yet the existing literature reports on transition challenges for separate groups of children rather than on shared needs or processes within diverse class populations. This study addressed this gap by investigating practices that supported transition in three Australian sites in which the populations represented different types of pedagogic challenge. Four themes regarding inclusion and transition were identified from a synthesis of the literature and applied to three cases. Results indicated that teachers adopted a range of approaches framed by the visibility of diversity, by classroom and school context and by the teachers’ professional transition in enacting changing policies. The results suggest that competing demands are balanced through dynamic, contextually framed strategies of relevance to both ECEC and schools.

Indigenous cultural values and journalism in the Asia-Pacific region : a brief history of Māori journalism

A number of scholars in the Asia-Pacific region have in recent years pointed to the importance that cultural values play in influencing journalistic practices. The Asian values debate was followed up with empirical studies showing actual differences in news content when comparing Asian and Western journalism. At the same time, such studies have focused on national cultures only. This paper instead examines the issue against the background of an Indigenous culture in the Asia-Pacific region. It explores the way in which cultural values may have played a role in the journalistic practice of Māori journalists in Aotearoa New Zealand over the past nearly 200 years and finds numerous examples that demonstrate the significance of taking cultural values into account. The paper argues that the role played by cultural values is important to examine further, particularly in relation to journalistic practices amongst sub-national news cultures across the Asia-Pacific region.

Orienting preservice teachers towards gifted education : School university partnerships

Addressing the needs of gifted students is predicated on an understanding of many factors not least the nature of giftedness, appropriate curriculum design and specialist pedagogical practices. Knowledge needs to be acquired in context. Preservice teacher education programs tend to focus on pedagogical practices and present preservice teachers with content related to inclusive philosophies, strategies for teaching, and assessment techniques. Many preservice teachers do not have an awareness of the nature of giftedness or understandings around models of curriculum advocated for gifted education, despite practicum experiences and university education. This paper presents two case studies that describe interventions constructed through partnerships with schools to raise awareness of the nature of giftedness and provide concrete experiences for preservice teachers’ interactions with gifted students. It will report strategies through which preservice teachers become engaged with gifted students in regular classrooms. Qualitative and quantitative evidence will be presented on the effectiveness of these models.

Getting there, being there, staying and belonging: a case study of two indigenous Australian children’s transition to school

Indigenous Australians are among the most unhealthy populations in the world and yet they reside in a country where the non-Indigenous population enjoys high standards of well-being. Education has been identified as the key mechanism for closing this equity gap. At school commencement many Indigenous children are already at risk of disengagement. This four-year longitudinal study of two Indigenous boys from a socially marginalised community examined key factors affecting transitional trajectories into school. While child characteristics affected level of achievement the critical factors in sustaining positive educational engagement were social support, school practices, inclusion of family and positive expectation.

Bonding and bridging : transition to school and social capital formation among a community of Indigenous Australian children

This study reports on an intervention program designed to facilitate transition to school of a whole community of Indigenous Australian children who had previously not been attending. The children were from families displaced from their traditional lands and experienced on-going social marginalisation and transience. A social capital framework was employed to track change in the children’s social inclusion and family-school engagement for two years, from school entry. Sociometric measurement and interview techniques were applied to assess the children’s social connectedness and peer relationship quality. Using these data, analyses examined whether bonding within the group supported or inhibited formation of new social relationships. Although transience disrupted attendance, there was a group trend towards increased social inclusion with some evidence that group bonds supported bridging to new social relationships. Change in family-school engagement was tracked using multi-informant interviews. Limited engagement between school and families presented an on-going challenge to sustained educational engagement.

The Deleuze Spray, New York 1977 : an Interview with Sanford Kwinter, Professor of Architectural Theory and Criticism at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, on the Architectural Reception of Gilles Deleuze in America

So what do you want to know? I was in Paris between ‘75 and ‘78. But about half way through, Sylvère published the Anti-Oedipus issue of Semiotext(e) and, actually, that was for me one of the deciding events that made me decide to come to the United States, to come study at Columbia University. There appeared to be this little group working at Columbia working around these issues. In 1970, in Paris even, Deleuze was a cult – there was an incredibly small number of people following Deleuze... A transcript of my Interview with Kwinter about the Architectural Reception of Deleuze in America, which took place at Jerry’s,' Soho, New York, 15 January 2003. The transcript appeared as an Appendix at the back of my Masters Thesis undertaken at Yale School of Architecture, printed May 2003.