Dis-lodging literature from English: Challenging linguistic hegemonies

This paper problematises the location of literature "teaching" within the English (L1) curriculum, as is the case in New Zealand and other settings. It defamiliarises this arrangement by drawing attention to official New Zealand policies of biculturalism and to the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in many New Zealand classrooms. It identifies a number of social justice issues arising from the current arrangement, and also raises issues in respect of educational policy and ways in which canonical subjects become constructed in practice. It then discusses ways in which a new qualifications template developed at the University of Waikato might provide a vehicle for establishing a new arrangement, in terms of which literature study is dislodged from English and reshaped as a course of study entitled Literature in Society. It indicates ways in which Comparative Literature, as a predominantly university-constituted discipline, might contribute to the theorisation of this new arrangement

Teaching and learning of performance measurement in OR/MS degrees

A review of existing UK MS/OR undergraduate programmes was completed to assess the extent and nature of performance measurement teaching. In addition, a survey of performance measurement practitioners was undertaken to obtain views on what should be taught in relation to performance measurement. A survey of 23 undergraduate MS/OR degrees in the UK revealed that all the academic respondents supported the inclusion of PM teaching. However, only four distinct PM classes could be found amongst these degrees. The PM techniques taught were broadly similar although the wider context of PM was taught in only 2 of the classes. A survey of a small number of PM practitioners revealed that the Balanced Scorecard and Benchmarking were the two most commonly applied PM techniques with the majority of respondents learning about PM from personal experience and reading rather than through formal education. It appears that there is an opportunity for MS/OR teaching to make a major contribution to the development of PM as a discipline. However, academic respondents whose MS/OR degree course did not teach PM indicated that lack of staff expertise in PM combined with an already full syllabus were the main barriers to introducing a PM class

African-Born Immigrants in U.S. Schools: An Intercultural Perspective on Schooling and Diversity

Despite the significant increase of African-born immigrants in the United States of America, the education system does not recognize their presence and does little to facilitate their integration through the implementation of necessary curricular adjustments. The purpose of this article is to call on multicultural education advocates to endorse the argument for the distinctness of African-born immigrants as a complex cultural group with unique vulnerabilities requiring sensitivity. Organizationally, the paper develops four key points: the current demographic representation of the African population; the absence of African voices in multicultural education scholarship; the salience of multicultural education advocacy in recognizing the essence of African cultures in the western world; and the minimal coverage of African topics in the U.S. curriculum. Two sets of recommendations, curricular and culture-oriented, conclude the argument

Entrepreneurship: Can the Jack-of-All-Trades Attitude be Aquired?

Entrepreneurs are believed to be the ultimate engine of modern economic systems. Yet, the study ofentrepreneurship suffers from the lack of consensus on the most crucial question: what makes anentrepreneur? A recent theory developed by Edward Lazear suggests that individuals mastering abalanced set of talents across different fields, i.e. the Jacks-of-All-Trades (JATs), have a highprobability of becoming entrepreneurs. In this paper, I investigate whether the JAT Attitude is just aninnate ability or a skill that can be trained to enhance individuals' chances of becoming entrepreneurs.Using panel techniques, I show that changes in the spread of knowledge across different fields do notincrease the probability of becoming an entrepreneur. This suggests that, if the JAT Attitude mattersfor entrepreneurship, it is an innate and time-invariant individual attribute, rather than a skill that canbe acquired.Entrepreneurship, Occupational Choice, Skills

50 years of educational progress and challenge in Ghana

In 2007 Ghana celebrated 50 years of independence from British colonial rule. The golden jubilee offered an opportunity to take stock of how the country had progressed in expanding education and the challenges for the future. This paper offers a critique of the journey, highlighting the challenges and progress. What reforms in education has taught Ghana is that it is much easier to fix the ‘hardware’ than the ‘software’ problems of education. With huge investments from internal and external sources structural and infrastructural problems of education can be fixed. With expanded facilities access can improve. However, completion rates remain the problem, especially at junior and senior secondary where low completion rates deprive the country of much needed educated youth prepared for work and for further education and training. TVET development plans faces the challenge of ensuring that sustainable capital and recurrent investment is available to improve infrastructural facilities and thereby improve the quality of products. Fifty years after independence, although Ghana has made good progress in expanding education provision, it is still faced with the problem of securing an education system that delivers on quality and provides equitable access for all, especially the poor and disadvantaged. Until and unless significant gains are made here, the goal of producing a workforce with the knowledge and skills for development would be hard to achieve. This is the task for the next fifty years

The Creative Act Revisited: New ways of working - New challenges

The Creative Act Revisited: New ways of working - New challenges * are creative practitioners 'above the law'? * can they do anything they like in the name of art? * how do you persuade legislators and bureaucrats to allow the extraordinary? * to what extent can an artist appropriate another person's image? * is it acceptable for an artist to rework social history? * how can you make a living out of non-conventional creative work? * can the conventional art market be changed/subverted? Professor Henry Lydiate has over 35 years experience of working with creative artists of all disciplines, helping them to address the business aspects of carrying out their work. He established the UK's only dedicated service to address the special legal needs of artists, Artlaw Services, and was instrumental in setting up the related operation in Australia, Arts Law Services. He lectures internationally and writes regularly about art and the law; his work can be viewed at www.artquest.org, where there is a free access archive of his regular articles for the UK publication, Art Monthly. As a result of his ongoing engagement with artists, Henry has become a passionate supporter of Marcel Duchamp's proposition that a work of art only achieves its final completion through the engagement of the viewer. His professorial platform lecture pays homage to Duchamp and reworks his original 1957 US lecture title, The Creative Act, in order to look at the working situation of creative practitioners today. Henry Lydiate observes that as art practice changes and diversifies, artists are engaging with an ever widening range of different media and working practices. This brings new challenges and requirements - for example, managing creative processes, organising working relationships, understanding ownership of rights, and even establishing what is and is not acceptable in terms of public display and censorship. Using examples drawn from his wide-ranging experience of helping creative practitioners, Henry Lydiate will explain why he believes that the working practice of a contemporary artist is now more diverse and challenging than in previous times and requires a broader skill base. Those attending the lecture will learn from an engaging range of case study examples and also have the opportunity to ask questions

A sweetspot for innovation:developing games with purpose through student-staff collaboration

Within industry as well as academia, developing games that have wider impact on society has been of particular interest in the last decade. The increasing use of terms such as ‘games with purpose’, ‘serious games’ and gamification’ has been mirrored in a flurry of activity in games research. Broader applications of games beyond entertainment are now well-understood and accepted, with universities and companies excelling in creating games to serve particular needs. However, it is not explicitly clear how undergraduates of game design and development courses can be directly involved in serious game creation. With most undergraduates inspired by commercial games development, and the games industry requiring that universities teach specific technical skills in their courses, balancing the research aspirations of academics with the educational requirements of an appropriate undergraduate course can be a difficult balancing act. In this paper, the authors present three case studies of games with purpose developed through collaboration between undergraduate students and academic staff. In all cases, the educational value of the projects for the students is considered in relation to the research value for the academics, who face increasing demands to develop research outcomes despite a necessity to provide a first-rate learning experience and nurture future game developers

Developing theoretical rigour in inter professional education

In this chapter, the author explores the meaning of theory and the role it plays in the development of interprofessional education. The chapter explores specifically the utility of the theory of social capital in the field and uses this as a case theory to present the dimensions of theoretical quality that is proposed as essential to the advancement of research, evaluation and curriculum development in this arena