'Which is the best Doctor Who story?' : a case study in value judgements outside the academy'

One of Cultural Studies' most important contributions to academic thinking about culture is the acceptance as axiomatic that we must not simply accept traditional value hierarchies in relation to cultural objects (see, for example, McGuigan, 1992: 157; Brunsdon, 1997: 5; Wark, 2001). Since Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams took popular culture as a worthy object of study, Cultural Studies practitioners have accepted that the terms in which cultural debate had previously been conducted involved a category error. Opera is not 'better' than pop music, we believe in Cultural Studies - 'better for what?', we would ask. Similarly, Shakespeare is not 'better' than Mills and Boon, unless you can specify the purpose for which you want to use the texts. Shakespeare is indeed better than Mills and Boon for understanding seventeenth century ideas about social organisation; but Mills and Boon is unquestionably better than Shakespeare if you want slightly scandalous, but ultimately reassuring representations of sexual intercourse. The reason that we do not accept traditional hierarchies of cultural value is that we know that the culture that is commonly understood to be 'best' also happens to be that which is preferred by the most educated and most materially well-off people in any given culture (Bourdieu, 1984: 1- 2; Ross, 1989: 211). We can interpret this information in at least two ways. On the one hand, it can be read as proving that the poorer and less well-educated members of a society do indeed have tastes which are innately less worthwhile than those of the material and educational elite. On the other hand, this information can be interpreted as demonstrating that the cultural and material elite publicly represent their own tastes as being the only correct ones. In Cultural Studies, we tend to favour the latter interpretation. We reject the idea that cultural objects have innate value, in terms of beauty, truth, excellence, simply 'there' in the object. That is, we reject 'aesthetic' approaches to culture (Bourdieu, 1984: 6; 485; Hartley, 1994: 6)1. In this, Cultural Studies is similar to other postmodern institutions, where high and popular culture can be mixed in ways unfamiliar to modernist culture (Sim, 1992: 1; Jameson, 1998: 100). So far, so familiar.

"I’m making it different to the book” : transmediation in young children’s print and digital texts

Young children shift meanings across multiple modes long before they have mastered formal writing skills. In a digital age, children are socialised into a wide range of new digital media conventions in the home, at school, and in community-based settings. This article draws on longitudinal classroom research with a culturally diverse cohort of eight-year old children, to advance new understandings about children’s engagement in transmediation in the context of digital media creation. The author illuminates three key principles of transmediation using multimodal snapshots of storyboard images, digital movie frames, and online comics. Insights about transmediation are developed through dialogue with the children about their thought processes and intentions for their multimedia creations.

Redesigning school spaces : creating possibilities for learning

This chapter reports on a project in which university researchers’ expertise in architecture, literacy and communications enabled two teachers in one school to expand the forms of literacy that primary school children engaged in. Starting from the school community’s concerns about an urban renewal project in their neighbourhood, participants collaborated to develop a curriculum of spatial literacies with real-world goals and outcomes. We describe how the creative re-design of curriculum and pedagogy by classroom teachers, in collaboration with university academics and students, allowed students aged 8 to 12 years to appropriate semiotic resources from their local neighbourhood, home communities, and popular culture to make a difference to their material surrounds. We argue that there are productive possibilities for educators who integrate critical and place-based approaches to the design and teaching of the literacy curriculum with work in other learning areas such as society and environment, technology and design and the arts. The student production of expansive and socially significant texts enabled by such approaches may be especially necessary in contemporary neoconservative policy contexts that tend to limit and constrain what is possible in schools.

A Virtual Evaluation Track for Cross Language Link Discovery

The Wikipedia has become the most popular online source of encyclopedic information. The English Wikipedia collection, as well as some other languages collections, is extensively linked. However, as a multilingual collection the Wikipedia is only very weakly linked. There are few cross-language links or cross-dialect links (see, for example, Chinese dialects). In order to link the multilingual-Wikipedia as a single collection, automated cross language link discovery systems are needed – systems that identify anchor-texts in one language and targets in another. The evaluation of Link Discovery approaches within the English version of the Wikipedia has been examined in the INEX Link the-Wiki track since 2007, whilst both CLEF and NTCIR emphasized the investigation and the evaluation of cross-language information retrieval. In this position paper we propose a new virtual evaluation track: Cross Language Link Discovery (CLLD). The track will initially examine cross language linking of Wikipedia articles. This virtual track will not be tied to any one forum; instead we hope it can be connected to each of (at least): CLEF, NTCIR, and INEX as it will cover ground currently studied by each. The aim is to establish a virtual evaluation environment supporting continuous assessment and evaluation, and a forum for the exchange of research ideas. It will be free from the difficulties of scheduling and synchronizing groups of collaborating researchers and alleviate the necessity to travel across the globe in order to share knowledge. We aim to electronically publish peer-reviewed publications arising from CLLD in a similar fashion: online, with open access, and without fixed submission deadlines.

Doing new things with texts : multimodality and Mao’s Last Dancer

This paper describes a senior, multimodal task developed by Shauna O’Connor and the English staff at Brigidine College after consultation in the form of media workshops with Anita Jetnikoff. Gunther Kress (2006) suggested recently that due to the affordances of media platforms such as Web 2.0, “we need to be doing new things with texts”. The year 11 unit’s Finding a Voice parent text was the memoir, Mao’s last Dancer. The summative assessment task morphed over time from an ‘identity portrait’, into ‘a multimodal, first person narrative’.

Parsing the Australian curriculum English : grammar, multimodality and cross-cultural texts

The release of the Australian Curriculum English (ACE) by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has revived debates about the role of grammar as English content knowledge. We consider some of the discussion circulating in the mainstream media vis-à-vis the intent of the ACE. We conclude that this curriculum draws upon the complementary tenets of traditional Latin-based grammar and systemic functional linguistics across the three strands of Language, Literature and Literacy in innovative ways. We argue that such an approach is necessary for working with contemporary multimodal and cross-cultural texts. To demonstrate the utility of this new approach, we draw out a set of learning outcomes from Year 6 and then map out a framework for relating the outcomes to the form and function of multimodal language. As a case in point, our analysis is of two online Coca-Cola advertising texts, one each from South Korea and Australia.

Sound thinking : tips and tools for understanding popular music

Sound Thinking provides techniques and approaches to critically listen, think, talk and write about music you hear or make. It provides tips on making music and it encourages regular and deep thinking about music activities, which helps build a musical dialog that leads to deeper understanding.

Cinematic hooks for Korean studies: using the 'Apache' framework for inspiring students about Korea in and through film

Developing awareness of and maintaining interest in Korea and Korean culture for non-language secondary and tertiary students continues to challenge educators in Australia. A lack of appropriate and accessible creative and cultural materials is a key factor contributing to this challenge. In light of changes made to 'fair use' guidelines for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States in July 2010, and in order to prepare for a time in the near future when Australian copyright regulations might follow suit, this article offers a framework for utilizing film and digital media contents in the classroom. Case studies of the short digital animation film 'Birthday Boy' (2004) and the feature film The Divine Weapon (2008) are presented in order to illustrate new educational approaches to popular Korean films---the cinematic component of the 'Korean Wave' ('Hanryu' or 'Hallyu' in Korean). It is hoped that this work-in-progress will enable teachers to inspire students with limited language skills to learn more about Korean popular culture, history, and tradition as well as media, politics, and genre studies in dynamic ways through the use of films as cultural texts in the classroom.

Strolling through the (post)modern city: Modes of being a flaneur in picture books

The city and the urban condition, popular subjects of art, literature, and film, have been commonly represented as fragmented, isolating, violent, with silent crowds moving through the hustle and bustle of a noisy, polluted cityspace. Included in this diverse artistic field is children’s literature—an area of creative and critical inquiry that continues to play a central role in illuminating and shaping perceptions of the city, of city lifestyles, and of the people who traverse the urban landscape. Fiction’s textual representations of cities, its sites and sights, lifestyles and characters have drawn on traditions of realist, satirical, and fantastic writing to produce the protean urban story—utopian, dystopian, visionary, satirical—with the goal of offering an account or critique of the contemporary city and the urban condition. In writing about cities and urban life, children’s literature variously locates the child in relation to the social (urban) space. This dialogic relation between subject and social space has been at the heart of writings about/of the flâneur: a figure who experiences modes of being in the city as it transforms under the influences of modernism and postmodernism. Within this context of a changing urban ontology brought about by (post)modern styles and practices, this article examines five contemporary picture books: The Cows Are Going to Paris by David Kirby and Allen Woodman; Ooh-la-la (Max in love) by Maira Kalman; Mr Chicken Goes to Paris and Old Tom’s Holiday by Leigh Hobbs; and The Empty City by David Megarrity. I investigate the possibility of these texts reviving the act of flânerie, but in a way that enables different modes of being a flâneur, a neo-flâneur. I suggest that the neo-flâneur retains some of the characteristics of the original flâneur, but incorporates others that take account of the changes wrought by postmodernity and globalization, particularly tourism and consumption. The dual issue at the heart of the discussion is that tourism and consumption as agents of cultural globalization offer a different way of thinking about the phenomenon of flânerie. While the flâneur can be regarded as the precursor to the tourist, the discussion considers how different modes of flânerie, such as the tourist-flâneur, are an inevitable outcome of commodification of the activities that accompany strolling through the (post)modern urban space.

Reading in the Australian curriculum English : describing the effects of structure and organisation on multimodal texts

The recently introduced Australian Curriculum: English Version 3.0 (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2012) requires students to ‘read’ multimodal text and describe the effects of structure and organisation. We begin this article by tracing the variable understandings of what reading multimodal text might entail through the Framing Paper (National Curriculum Board, 2008), the Framing Paper Consultation Report (National Curriculum Board, 2009a), the Shaping Paper (National Curriculum Board, 2009b) and Version 3.0 of the Australian Curriculum English (ACARA, 2012). Our findings show that the theoretical and descriptive framework for doing so is implicit. Drawing together multiple but internally coherent theories from the field of semiotics, we suggest one way to work towards three Year 5 learning outcomes from the reading/writing mode. The affordances of assembling a broad but explicit technical metalanguage for an informed reading of the integrated design elements of multimodal texts are noted.

The Cyndi Lauper affect: Bodies, girlhood and popular culture through the collective biography process

Using a collective biography method informed by a Deleuzian theoretical approach (Davies & Gannon, 2009), this paper analyses embodied memories of girlhood becomings through affective engagements with resonating images in media and popular culture.

Australian television, popular memory and suburbia

Different archives of television material construct different versions of Australian national identity. There exists a Pro-Am archive of Australian television history materials consisting of many individual collections. This archive is not centrally located nor clearly bounded. The collections are not all linked to each other, nor are they aware of each other, and they do not claim to have a single common project. Pro-Am collections tend not to address Australian television as a whole, rather addressing particular genres, programs or production companies. Their vision of Australia is 'ordinary' and everyday. The boundaries of 'Australia' in the Pro-Am archive are porous, allowing non-Australians to contribute material, and also including non-Australian material and this causes little sense of anxiety.

Paranoid prizing : the facts and fictions of Australia’s Eve Pownall Award for Information Books, 2001-2010

Ghassan Hage asserts the “core element of Australia’s colonial paranoia is a fear of loss of Europeanness or Whiteness and the lifestyle and privileges that are seen to emanate directly from them. This is a combination of the fragility of White European colonial identity in general and the specificity of the Australian situation” (419). This ‘White paranoia’ can be traced through a range of popular cultural formations, including contemporary Australian children’s literature. The Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) awards an annual prize for “outstanding books which have the prime intention of documenting factual material with consideration given to imaginative presentation, interpretation and variation of style” (“Awards”) published in the preceding year. Although not often included in critical debates, non-fictional texts overtly seek to shape young readers’ understandings of their national context and their own location as national subjects. Thus, the books named as winners and honours of this prize from 2001-2010 provide a snapshot of which facts and whose fictions are salient in shaping the Australian nation in the twenty-first century. Using Hage’s concept of Australian colonial paranoia, this paper considers the relationship between ‘factual material’ and ‘imaginative presentation’ in the ongoing revision and renewal of national myths in award-winning Australian non-fiction for children.