Contradictions regarding teaching and writing (or writing to learn) in the disciplines : what we have learned in the USA

Resumen basado en el de la publicaci??n

Does experience in creative art influence the written self-expression of the deaf child?

This paper discusses whether participation in creative art affects the hearing impaired child's self expression in written language.

Internationalizing the MFA in Creative Writing

is article explores the prospects for internationalizing the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing, a degree that has gained considerable popularity in the United States in the past half century but has yet to gain much of a foothold in other countries. As part of this exploration, we describe the experiences of estab- lishing the first low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in Asia at City University of Hong Kong, explaining the justification for setting up such a program with reference to the history of teaching creative writing and the current conditions for literary writing in English in Asia and globally. We also reflect upon the processes of planning, curriculum design, and administrative negotiation and that went into setting up the program and report on feedback from the first cohort of students. e experience of setting up this program is used as the basis for raising a number of more general issues regarding the teaching of creative writing in English in interna- tional contexts.

Critical reflection in social work: a response to globalisation?

This article presents a reflective theoretical deconstruction of my practice with disempowered human service workers. Specifically, it presents a case study of how critical reflection was fostered amongst a group of practitioners in Geelong, a regional Victorian town in Australia. This models how a critical postmodern analysis provided a framework for overcoming entrenched power dynamics and structural barriers in a particular context and at a particular point in time. It describes and analyses the content of this work in terms of its significance and implications for responding to the impact of globalisation on this group, which was undermining the effectiveness of their social work practice.

Capturing the ephemeral : reflection-in-action as research

This paper considers two different methodological approaches to 'capturing' and analysing reflection-in-action in process drama teaching. Reflection-in-action, the 'thinking on your feet' that drama teachers constantly do, is ephemeral and difficult to record. In the first project discussed here, a teacher researcher study, examines the problem of representing the reflection-in-action, working around the central question of 'How can I as a researcher describe and document my reflection-in- action when working as a teacher in process drama?' The second project, an interview-based research project', developed some of the findings of the first study through a series of interviews with drama practitioners. This paper considers these methodological approaches in terms of the possibilities they provide, the limitations for the study of reflection-in- action in process drama and some possible applications of the approaches investigated for future drama research

A brief review of PhDs in creative and performing arts in Australia

This paper reports on an aspect of a pilot project conducted in 2003 by the authors comprising a bibliographic analysis of all (approximately 51,000) Australian PhDs. The pilot work is both a data and methodological basis for a larger project that investigates the nature and development of PhDs in Australia as they evolved in the context of national economic, social and educational changes. This paper reviews the evidence from the bibliographic data held in library catalogues of PhDs in each Australian university. After considering the definitional properties and their operationalisation, the paper provides an overview of the first instances, locations and frequencies of PhDs in the creative and performing arts in Australia, fields which are relatively new to doctoral study and which pose challenges in terms of doctoral pedagogy and scholarship. This is contextualised in terms of the development of the contemporary university sector during the 1990s, including the growth in the creative and performing arts therein.

Community resilience, climate change, sustainability & engagement : adventures in creative project-based education on the Eyre Peninsula

Teaching sustainability ethics and creative practical technological applications holistically, in a multi-disciplinary ethos, with real community engagement is fraught with pedagogical and logistical issues. This paper reviews a highly community-acclaimed tertiary course/project, offered at the School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture & Urban Design at the University of Adelaide, undertaken on the Eyre Peninsula in 1st semester 2009. The course successfully enhanced student appreciation of rural community capacity building and economic fragility issues while undertaking a project-based approach to interrogating and working with rural communities to devise and demonstrate potential micro-relevant design and planning initiatives that could strengthen community resilience, climate change adaptiveness, and validate natural resource management aims within townships. The project involved some 120 students in 6 host communities through 6 local municipalities with the full support of the Natural Resource Management (NRM) Board and Local Government Association (LGA).

The paper reviews the project, its historical evolution, aims, objectives, learning strategies, community aspirations and outcomes, and positions such against various professional education accreditation frameworks. The methodological learning process, including its philosophical, pedagogical and instruments outcomes are reviewed and interrogated. The student learning outcomes, University reputation impact, and community impact, professional practice knowledge and skill attributes, and instrumental outcomes are also reviewed drawing upon evidence derived from extensive meetings, questionnaire surveys, synergistic NRM-sponsored research projects, student evaluation of teachings (SELTS), and local media coverage of the project.

The project has received applause from the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA) and Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA), and preliminary endorsement from the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA), as being integral to the School’s curriculum that achieves their professional accreditation expectations of key learning experiences relevant to climate change, master planning and design, and community engagement. The project offers a possible educational model that enriches student experience and learning and addresses recent generic university community engagement policy expectations.

Research methodologies in creative practice : literacy in the digital age of the twenty first century - learning from computer games

Literacy remains one of the central goals of schooling, but the ways in which it is understood are changing. The growth of the networked society, and the spread of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), has brought about significant changes to traditional forms of literacy. Older, print based forms now take their place alongside a mix of newer multi-modal forms, where a wide range of elements such as image, sound, movement, light, colour and interactivity often supplant the printed word and contribute to the ways in which meaning is made. For young people to be fully literate in the twenty-first century, they need to have clear understandings about the ways in which these forms of literacy combine to persuade, present a point of view, argue a case or win the viewers’ sympathies. They need to know how to use them themselves, and to be aware of the ways in which others use them. They need to understand how digital texts organise and prioritise knowledge and information, and to recognise and be critically informed about the global context in which this occurs. That is, to be effective members of society, students need to become critical and capable users of both print and multimodal literacy, and be able to bring informed and analytic perspectives to bear on all texts, both print and digital, that they encounter in everyday life.

This is part of schools’ larger challenge to build robust connections between school and the world beyond, to meet the needs of all students, and to counter problems of alienation and marginalisation, particularly amongst students in the middle years. This means finding ways to be relevant and useful for all students, and to provide them with the skills and knowledge they will need in the ICT-based world of the Twentyfirst century. With respect to literacy education, engagement and technology, we urgently need more information as to how this might be best achieved.

Borrowings; or ways of making poetry by taking, working and returning: a study in creative practice

The collaborative poetry project ‘Borrowings’ investigates and theorises some of the processes of poetic composition. Two collaborators, by making use of incepts from each other's work, have generated new poems by exploring the nature of intertextual genesis. This paper presents key ideas generated by this activity and, in doing so, applies Deleuze's analysis of games to its consideration of the nature of poetic composition, along with his contention that ‘[t]o pass to the other side of the mirror is to pass from the relation of denotation to the relation of expression … It is to reach a region where language no longer has any relation to that which it denotes’. The project explores some of the ways in which poetry makes ‘sense’, both to the writer and reader; as well as questioning the extent to which poetry depends on its author's ‘decision’ about what to write. It also teases out some of the implications for how we understand authorship if authorial decisions may be generated by incepts of one kind or another that occur to the poet apparently randomly, or may be given to them by a line or phrase that they encounter while reading. This paper's ultimate wager, and one put to the test in the project itself, is that limitation has an expansive effect on the generation of creative work.

Rich stuff : review of Jeri Kroll and Graeme Harper (eds), Research methods in creative writing

A review of a cutting-edge collection of scholarly articles engaging with contemporary theories of creativity and a gamut of valid and often exhilarating research methods in contemporary creative writing practice.