Towards professional responsibility for language and literacy: exploring vocational teachers’ emerging language and literacy understandings and identities

The role of vocational teachers is complex and evolving (Moodie & Wheelahan 2012). The imperative to also attend to students’ language literacy and numeracy (LLN) skills adds to this complexity. Using data from interviews with eight teachers, this paper explores this emergent space in relation to impacts on their sense of capacity and confidence to attend to LLN, and ways this is being incorporated into a renewed, but often still fragile sense of professional identity (Brookfield 2000). Where the focus of discussion is often on LLN requirements, we concentrate here on the perceptions and experiences of the teachers themselves, and how these insights may inform our approach as LLN specialists. We conclude that vocational teachers appear willing travellers on this journey, but often feel they have a distance to go. We make a case for a collaborative dialogic approach to this shared challenge

Homer's footnotes: storytelling and the presentation of the past in the Iliad

© 2014 Dr. James O'MaleyThis thesis argues that the Iliad’s attitude to mythic narratives from outside the broader story of the Trojan War is neither overtly competitive nor consistently modest. Instead, the poem works to introduce a more subtle form of differentiation between itself and these other external mythic traditions. The poem promotes a sense of itself as the ultimate epic, which incorporates other narratives even as it subordinates them to its own particular purposes. In order to make this argument, the thesis will concentrate on two poetic levels to create an overall picture of the Iliad’s attitude towards pre-Iliadic epic stories. Parts I and II will be focussed on the intra-poetic use to which characters and the poem’s external narrator put these stories, and the range of meanings that they are able to convey, while Part III will deal with the metapoetic impact of addressing what could be viewed as rival poetic traditions. This will provide a more complete picture of the poem’s relationship to non-Iliadic traditions, and by doing so will help to show the ways in which both the Iliad’s characters and the poem itself not only contextualise themselves within a broader mythic tradition, but differentiate themselves from it, and by doing so present the past as something that is not simply unpredictably protean, and difficult to recover with any certainty, but as material that can be appropriated by members of its own narrative present, and therefore as material that is liable to be distorted. The Iliad does not dismiss external mythic narratives, but it appropriates, frames, and adapts them, making itself the filter through which such narratives must pass, and reducing them, ultimately, to little more than Homer’s footnotes

The role of the adult literacy initial assessment interview process within a regime of performativity

This thesis is a qualitative case study of adult literacy initial assessment interviews conducted under the Australian Government's Literacy and Numeracy Training (LANT) programme. The aim of the study is to understand the practices and articulated beliefs of the prospective students and assessors, in the initial assessment interview process. To achieve this, the assessment interview is examined in context; the micro context of the interview itself is analysed as are the broader macrocontextualising imperatives. The complex inter-relationship between the political, economic, social, cultural and moral impacts of what are often called 'new times' (Hall 1996) impact on how these interviews can be enacted in early twenty-first century Australia. Under LANT, and its successor, the Language, Literacy and Numeracy Programme (LLNP), the choice to attend class is no longer with the prospective student. Those who are identified as in need of literacy assistance are obligated to attend an assessment interview and, if deemed appropriate, must attend an adult literacy class to fulfil their Mutual Obligation requirements. If they do not comply with this they may lose some of their unemployment benefits. The investigation employs an evaluative case study design, with the initial assessment interview being the case. Data was by observation or tape recording of seventeen initial assessment interviews followed by semi-structured interviews with seventeen prospective students, ten assessors and three verifiers. The scope of this study encompassed private and Tertiary and Further Education (TAFE) providers in five locations across two states, Queensland and Victoria. Three different methods were used to analyse the data: a coding analysis (Strauss and Corbin 1990); an ethnographic analysis based on the work of Spradley (1979, 1980); and, for the documents, critical discourse analysis of pertinent documents (Fairclough 1989, 1992a, 1992b, 1995). The outcomes of the study show the initial assessment interview within the Mutual Obligation programme is driven by performative measures. While it is an increasingly stressful experience for both prospective students and assessors, the interview does not elicit anything more about prospective students' literacy practices, strengths and networks than informal interviews have done in the past. The discourse of Mutual Obligation, with its focus on compliance and accountability, puts pressure on the interview process and is at odds with beliefs expressed by assessors that the assessment interview should be low key and student focused instead of what has now become a high stakes and inevitably partial assessment. Choices for prospective students have been eroded and literacy, as it is conceptualised in the interviews, is a narrow and impoverished concept, having little relevance to the stated goal of the interview which is to enhance jobseekers' employability

"Like-mindedness"? Intra-familial relations in the Iliad and the Odyssey

© 2009 James O'MaleyThis thesis argues that the defining characteristic of intra-familial relationships in both the Iliad and the Odyssey is inequality. Homeric relationship pairs that are presented positively are strongly marked by an uneven distribution of power and authority, and when family members do not subscribe to this ideology, the result is a dysfunctional relationship that is condemned by the poet and used as a negative paradigm for his characters. Moreover, the inequality favoured by the epics proceeds according to strict role-based rules with little scope for innovation according to personality, meaning that determination of authority is simple in the majority of cases. Wives are expected to submit themselves to their husbands, sons to their fathers, and less powerful brothers to their more dominant siblings. This rigid hierarchy does create the potential for problems in some general categories of relationship, and relations between mothers and sons in particular are strained in both epics, both because of the shifting power dynamic between them caused by the son’s increasing maturity and independence from his mother and her world, and because of Homeric epic’s persistent conjunction of motherhood with death. This category of familial relationships is portrayed in the epics as doomed to failure, but others are able to be depicted positively through adhering to the inequality that is portrayed in the epics as both natural and laudable. I will also argue that this systemic pattern of inequality can be understood as equivalent to the Homeric concept of homophrosyne (“like-mindedness”), a term which, despite its appearance of equality, in fact refers to a persistent inequality. Accordingly, for a Homeric relationship to be portrayed as successful, one partner must submit to the other, adapting themselves to the other’s outlook and aims, and subordinating their own ideals and desires. Through this, they are able to become “like-minded” with their partners, achieving something like the homophrosyne recommended for husbands and wives in the Odyssey

Development and utilization of the patient knowledge questionnaire on Botulinum toxin use in movement disorders

Following a Pilot Study, the 28-item Patient Knowledge Questionnaire on Botulinum Toxin Use in Movement Disorders (PKQ-BMD),vas utilized to assess efficacy of Current educational tools by comparing scoring of patients to that of the general population, as well as to identify information resources, target demographics for education, and key counseling topics. Of the 109 participants, the number of correct answers was higher in the patient group, while the number of incorrect answers was low in both groups. Education was the only demographic factor which affected the total score. The primary source of patient information was their neurologist, and adverse effects" was perceived as the most important educational topic. We conclude that the PKQ-BMD is a valuable instrument for knowledge assessment, as well as a tool for developing more effective patient resources. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved