“Boadicea Onstage before 1800, a Theatrical and Colonial History.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 49.3 (Summer 2009): 595-614.

This essay examines the theatrical legacy of Boadicea, the British warrior queen defeated by the Romans around 61 AD, in three plays: John Fletcher\u27s The Tragedy of Bonduca, or the British Heroine and two unrelated dramas titled Boadicea by Charles Hopkins and Richard Glover. Performance histories attempt to explain why audiences respond to Boadicea with ambivalence. Each production underplays the defeated queen and gives starring roles to one or more of her daughters and a male lead, who contrast with Boadicea\u27s supposed brutality and provide British audiences with lessons about ways to rule in an ostensibly civilized fashion

“Goethe, Faust, and Motherless Creations.” Goethe Yearbook 23 (2016): 59-75.

“Goethe, Faust, and Motherless Creations” reads the life and work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe alongside the material culture of motherless creations, the automata, androids, and golems that his contemporaries imagined and created. Automata and androids are motherless in the sense that men create them, and they represent an attempt to usurp women’s primary role in reproduction. The manufacture of automata and androids and the pursuit of natural philosophy put male inventors and scientists in reproductive roles, for they sought to overturn the boundary between life and death. Examining Goethe’s relationship to the artificial life forms of his period sheds light not only on the role parentage plays in Faust, a text replete with references to rebirth and reproduction, but also the author’s relationship to discursive debates around what contemporaries called Erzeugung or generation. Homunculus in Faust II satirizes the idea of surrogacy; surrogate motherhood dominates discussions about obstetrics and gynecology in the Goethezeit, when men increasingly took control over these advancing fields. The essay argues finally for a link between the pseudo-science of Faust and discursive debates around women’s ostensibly ancillary roles in procreation, even if the author himself seems to prefer organic to mechanical processes in building life

“A Tragic Farce: Revolutionary Women in Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Massacre and European Drama.” European Romantic Review 17.3 (Summer 2006): 275-88.

This essay examines Elizabeth Inchbald’s treatment of French Revolutionary women and relationship to European drama in order to appreciate the implications of tragic writing for British women playwrights. Focusing on Inchbald’s connections to French culture and English theater in late 1792 and early 1793 elucidates the self‐censoring and generic conventions of her only tragedy, The Massacre. Events in France like the September Massacres unsettled Burkean notions of femininity and raised the possibility of female violence. This mixing of traditional gender characteristics resembles discourse about Inchbald’s dramas as neither tragic, comic, nor tragicomic. The genre of tragic farce describes Inchbald’s revisions of French sentimental comedy (comédie larmoyante) and experimentations with the evolving form of drama (drame). Inchbald’s adaptation of Gresset’s The Villain (Le Méchant) into a farce, Young Men and Old Women, demonstrates techniques applied to The Massacre and Every One Has His Fault. The paper concludes with a comparison of The Massacre to its source, Louis‐Sébastien Mercier’s drama, Jean Hennuyer, or the Bishop of Lizieux (1773), the first documentation of this once‐uncertain genealogy. This comparative analysis shows that Inchbald’s tragedy critiques the comic improbability that women stand to lose their femininity if they involve themselves in public issues

REFLECTIONS ON RUNNING A FREE ONLINE CONFERENCE: ASERA CONFERENCE ONLINE 2020

The Australasian Science Education Research Association’s (ASERA) annual conference, like most other large (or small) gatherings around the world, was not able to take place this year in a face-to-face manner in a physical location due to COVID-19. The online conference format was a first for ASERA, and in fact, is a relatively new idea in science education, and science, more broadly (Reshef et al., 2020). Thus, the aim of this paper is to share reflections from the organising committee of this year’s ASERA conference, comprising of the first and second authors and the president of the ASERA Board, the third author. The reflections focus on the initial decision to go online, the justification for the design of the online conference (including the decision to run it at no/little expense) and how it went on the day. These reflections will contribute to our understanding of running large online research-related events, an occurrence which might be more frequent or likely as we adapt to the ‘new norm’ post-pandemic. REFERENCE Reshef, O., Aharonovich, I., Armani, A. M., Gigan, S., Grange, R., Kats, M. A., and Sapienza, R. (2020). How to organize an online conference. Nature Reviews Material 5(4) 253-6

Digital explanation as assessment in university science

Assessments in tertiary science subjects typically assess content knowledge, and there is current need to both develop and assess different forms of knowledge and skills, such as communications and digital literacies. A digital explanation is a multimodal artefact created by students to explain science to a specified audience, which is an alternate form of assessment that has potential to develop and assess these other important forms of knowledge and skills. This research draws from perspectives in multimodality, educational semiotics and science education to gain a better understanding of digital explanation as a form of assessment in university science. Data sources include digital artefacts (n = 42), task descriptions and rubrics and pre-/post-interviews (n = 21) with students who created them as a task in a university science subject. Analysis involved identifying the range of media resources used across the data set, seeking patterns in how multiple resources were used and exploring students’ perspectives on the task, including their design decisions. A more detailed look at artefacts from three different science learning contexts illustrates that students base their design decisions on the content knowledge being represented, their technical capabilities to generate them and how to engage the audience. Students enjoy this form of assessment and feel that the tasks allowed them to demonstrate different sorts of capabilities than are normally assessed in their subjects. Recommendations for instructors provide guidance for considering this sort of task in tertiary science contexts

The teacher education conversation: A network of cooperating teachers

This study investigated a professional learning community of cooperating teachers and university‐based teacher educators. To examine our roles and perspectives as colleagues in teacher education, we drew on frameworks in teacher learning and complexity science. Monthly group meetings of this inquiry community were held over two school years in a suburban school district in British Columbia. Participants’ current and prior experiences in the role of cooperating teacher provided rich topics for conversation. Our analysis illustrates how aspects of complexity thinking both enable and promote teacher learning, in this instance, the professional development of cooperating teachers. The study highlights (a) key tensions that allow for deeper exploration of issues, (b) the need for flexibility that is open to contingency, (c) the importance of reducing hierarchical structures to enable networks to develop, and (d) improvisation as a key ingredient for teacher learning

Built during construction of a multimodal product

BACKGROUND Recent research has revealed that new forms of assessment, including multimodal assessment, may be able to develop conceptual understanding more holistically than existing or traditional forms of assessment, however, there is minimal information detailing how or why this learning might occur. AIMS In this study, we aimed to explore how students built their scientific understanding during the construction of a multimedia product like those given as university assessments. DESCRIPTION OF INTERVENTION The study was exploratory in order to capture and describe the construction of scientific knowledge that took place. DESIGN AND METHODS We utilized a multiple case study design where data was collected in the form of: the products that the two participants created, video recording of the construction process, pre- and post- interviews and a collection of artefacts of interest, such as images of the creation process/set up. RESULTS Analysis of the knowledge represented across the various data sources for the two cases show that they differ in degrees of coherence and abstraction profiles for the scientific concept represented: transparency. CONCLUSIONS The results show that learning is variable in the construction of such tasks and that the use of appropriate descriptive frameworks such as the one used in this study are necessary if these forms of assessment are to be more widely used to successfully assess learning

A rapid motor task-based screening tool for parkinsonism in community-based studies

The prevalence of parkinsonism in developing countries is largely unknown due to difficulty in ascertainment because access to neurologists is often limited. Develop and validate a parkinsonism screening tool using objective motor task-based tests that can be administered by non-clinicians. In a cross-sectional population-based sample from South Africa, we evaluated 315 adults, age \u3e40, from an Mn-exposed (smelter) community, using the Unified Parkinson Disease Rating Scale motor subsection 3 (UPDRS3), Purdue grooved pegboard, and kinematic-UPDRS3-based motor tasks. In 275 participants (training dataset), we constructed a linear regression model to predict UPDRS3. We selected motor task summary measures independently associated with UPDRS3 ( \u3c 0.05). We validated the model internally in the remaining 40 participants from the manganese-exposed community (test dataset) using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), and externally in another population-based sample of 90 participants from another South African community with only background levels of environmental Mn exposure. The mean UPDRS3 score in participants from the Mn-exposed community was 9.1 in both the training and test datasets (standard deviation = 6.4 and 6.1, respectively). Together, 57 (18.1%) participants in this community had a UPDRS3 ≥ 15, including three with Parkinson\u27s disease. In the non-exposed community, the mean UPDRS3 was 3.9 (standard deviation = 4.3). Three (3.3%) had a UPDRS3 ≥ 15. Grooved pegboard time and mean velocity for hand rotation and finger tapping tasks were strongly associated with UPDRS3. Using these motor task summary measures and age, the UPDRS3 predictive model performed very well. In the test dataset, AUCs were 0.81 (95% CI 0.68, 0.94) and 0.91 (95% CI 0.81, 1.00) for cut points for neurologist-assessed UPDRS3 ≥ 10 and UPDRS3 ≥ 15, respectively. In the external validation dataset, the AUC was 0.85 (95% CI 0.73, 0.97) for UPDRS3 ≥ 10. AUCs were 0.76-0.82 when excluding age. A predictive model based on a series of objective motor tasks performs very well in assessing severity of parkinsonism in both Mn-exposed and non-exposed population-based cohorts

Engaging students in explaining and representing pharmacology by creating blended media

Pharmacology is a challenging subject in a science degree that requires students to engage with complicated chemical reactions. Typical assessment tasks involve exams, lab reports and presentations. The aim of this study was to trial a new form of assessment task by getting students to analyse a journal article on a disease related to Pharmacology and then to explain key aspects of the article in a 4-5 minute digital media product that they create. The students had a choice of narrated media forms to represent their journal article — podcasts, digital story, video, slowmation (slow animation) or blended media. This presentation focuses on examples of blended media, which is a form that encourages students to integrate any combination of media such as video with animation and static images that students create and combine with expert-generated media from YouTube or Google Images to complement a narration to explain the science. There were 24 students enrolled in the subject Chem350 Principles of Pharmacology and each one was allocated a different journal article to summarise by making a media product. A one hour lecture was provided to students to explain how to make the different media forms supported by instructional resources on a website www.digiexplanations.com. The students then used their own technology such as mobile phones, digital still cameras and free movie making software on their own computers to create the blended media. The aim of this pilot study was to ascertain the students’ perceptions of making a blended media and how their allocated disease was represented. Data collected included observation of the students’ presentations, the blended media artifact and an interview with each student after the subject was completed. Results showed that all 24 students successfully made a 3-5 minute media product in their own time with minimal technological concerns. A wide variety of media to explain the disease in their allocated journal article were submitted including one podcast, five digital stories, 10 videos, three animations and 5 blended media. Three of the students who volunteered to be interviewed about the process of making their blended media product stated that the process was highly engaging and helped them to learn science in a new way and it was the first time they had made a narrated media product in their degree. Whilst this pilot study indicated that the students were engaged in re-representing the science content by creating a digital media product, further studies will need to be conducted to research the quality of science learning claimed by students. Blended media is a new form of student-generated media, which enables students to use their own technology to construct a narrated media product integrating many different media forms and is a multimodal representation to explain a science concept