Sex Education, Hollywood Style: Gender, Sexuality and Identity in The Girl Next Door

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article: Commentators as diverse as Henry Giroux (1989; 1994; 1997; 2002), David Buckingham (2003), Cameron McCarthy (1998; 1999) and Peter McLaren (1994; 1995) have contributed towards an understanding of how popular cultural texts such as films, television, music and magazines help to shape young people’s worlds, and how they exist as pedagogical sites where youth learn about the world. The respected ethnographer and cultural theorist Paul Willis, for example, argued some time ago that popular culture is a more significant, penetrating cultural force in young people’s lives than schooling: The field of education ... will be further marginalised in most young people’s experience by common (i.e. popular) culture. In so far as the educational practitioners are still predicated on traditional liberal humanist lines and on the assumed superiority of high art, they will become almost totally irrelevant to the real energies and interests of most young people and have no part in their identity formation. Common culture will, increasingly, undertake, in its own ways, the roles that education has vacated. (Willis 1990, p.147) More recently still, Nadine Dolby has claimed that popular culture is not simply fluff that can be dismissed as irrelevant and insignificant; on the contrary, ‘it has the capacity to intervene in the most critical issues and to shape public opinion’ (Dolby 2003, p.259)

Literature, Mythmaking and National Identity: the Case for Seven Little Australians

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‘Does My Bomb Look Big in This?’ Representing Muslim Girls in Recent Australian Cultural Texts

Since 9/11 there has been a spate of cultural texts for young people which attempt to move away from the sensationalised connotation and reductive stereotyping of the Muslim as the homogenised, dehumanised, violent and/or exoticised pariah/other, and to represent Muslim characters sympathetically instead of as potential terrorists (see, for example, Nadia Jamal and Taghred Chandrab's 'The Glory Garage' (2005), and Morris Gleitzman's 'Boy Overboard' (2002) and 'Girl Underground' (2004)). One of the first of these was John Doyle's 'Marking' Time, which was shown on ABC television in 2003, and which the promotion material describes as 'a Romeo and Juliet story set in a rural Australian town. Told with warmth, humour and acute observation, 'Marking Time' traces Hal Flemming's journey from boy to man [It] is the coming of age of a boy and a nation' (http://www.abc.net.au/markingtime/). 'Marking Time' shows a changing Australian society, with the innocent euphoria brought about by the Sydney Olympics distorted into fear and distrust following the Tampa incident. Literally Hal is 'marking time' until he goes to uni, spending an aimless gap year in the company of lowlife friends. Indeed, the text's strength lies in the comic depiction of young Australians like Hal's friends Bullet, Shane and Belinda, whose rowdy, raucous, partying behaviour is also a response to terminal boredom; in this case it seems to be the only recourse of those not bright enough to make their way out of this small town

When Australia Calls: The English Immigrant in Australian Children's Literature

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‘It’s all about context’: Building school capacity to implement a whole-school approach to bullying

Student bullying behaviours are a significant social issue in schools worldwide. Whilst school staff have access to quality bullying prevention interventions, schools can face significant challenges implementing the whole-school approach required to address the complexity of these behaviours. This study aimed to understand how schools’ capacity to implement whole-school bullying prevention interventions could be strengthened to promote sustainability and improve student outcomes. Qualitative methods were used to observe schools over time to gain insight into their implementation capacity to improve student social and emotional wellbeing and prevent and ameliorate harm from bullying. A four-year longitudinal, multi-site case study intensively followed eight schools’ implementation of Friendly Schools, an Australian evidenced-based whole-school bullying prevention intervention. Regular in-depth interviews with school leaders and implementation teams over four years led to the refinement of a staged-implementation process and capacity building tools and revealed four common drivers of implementation quality: (1) strong, committed leadership; (2) organisational structures, processes and resources; (3) staff competencies and commitment; and (4) translating evidence into local school policy and practice. This paper considers the strengths of qualitative data in understanding how and why bullying prevention interventions work as well as actions schools can take to enhance their implementation and sustainability of complex social interventions

Sex and the Cinema: What American Pie Teaches the Young

This paper focuses upon the wildly successful blockbuster American Pie teenpics, especially American Pie 3 – the Wedding. I argue that these films, which are sited so securely within the visual and pedagogical machinery of Hollywood culture, are specifically designed to appeal to teenage male audiences, and to provide lessons in sex and romance. Movies like this are especially important as they are experienced by far more teenagers than, for example, instructional films or other classroom materials; indeed, as Henry Giroux has observed, "teens and youth learn how to define themselves outside of the traditional sites of instruction, such as the home and the school… Learning in the postmodern age is located elsewhere – in popular spheres that shape their identities, through forms of knowledge and desires that appear absent from what is taught in schools" (Giroux, 1997, p.49). In this paper I discuss whether the American Pie series is actually a "new age" effort which, via insubordinate performances of gender, contests the hegemonic field of signification which regulates the production of sex, gender and desire, or whether it is more accurately described as a retrogressive hetero-conservative opus with a veneer of sexual radicalism. In short, I intend to probe whether this filmic vector for sex education is all about the shaping of responsible, caring, vulnerable men, or is it guiding them to become just like their heterosexual, middle-class fathers? And whether, despite its riotous and raunchy advertising, American Pie really dishes up something spicy or something terribly wholesome instead

Habitat and Scale Shape the Demographic Fate of the Keystone Sea Urchin Paracentrotus lividus in Mediterranean Macrophyte Communities

Demographic processes exert different degrees of control as individuals grow, and in species that span several habitats and spatial scales, this can influence our ability to predict their population at a particular life-history stage given the previous life stage. In particular, when keystone species are involved, this relative coupling between demographic stages can have significant implications for the functioning of ecosystems. We examined benthic and pelagic abundances of the sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus in order to: 1) understand the main life-history bottlenecks by observing the degree of coupling between demographic stages; and 2) explore the processes driving these linkages. P. lividus is the dominant invertebrate herbivore in the Mediterranean Sea, and has been repeatedly observed to overgraze shallow beds of the seagrass Posidonia oceanica and rocky macroalgal communities. We used a hierarchical sampling design at different spatial scales (100 s, 10 s and <1 km) and habitats (seagrass and rocky macroalgae) to describe the spatial patterns in the abundance of different demographic stages (larvae, settlers, recruits and adults). Our results indicate that large-scale factors (potentially currents, nutrients, temperature, etc.) determine larval availability and settlement in the pelagic stages of urchin life history. In rocky macroalgal habitats, benthic processes (like predation) acting at large or medium scales drive adult abundances. In contrast, adult numbers in seagrass meadows are most likely influenced by factors like local migration (from adjoining rocky habitats) functioning at much smaller scales. The complexity of spatial and habitat-dependent processes shaping urchin populations demands a multiplicity of approaches when addressing habitat conservation actions, yet such actions are currently mostly aimed at managing predation processes and fish numbers. We argue that a more holistic ecosystem management also needs to incorporate the landscape and habitat-quality level processes (eutrophication, fragmentation, etc.) that together regulate the populations of this keystone herbivore