Negotiating national identity through loss: Australian newspaper coverage of the 2010 FIFA World Cup

Sport and the media have long served as arenas for the development of national identity, both of which are examined in this study of the newspaper coverage of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. This article reports on the findings of a content analysis of newspaper coverage of the FIFA World Cup; the newspaper data collected included all major daily Australian newspapers. Following an in-depth analysis, five themes emerged: patriotism; dealing with loss; celebrity; national identity; and ethnicity. This paper examines the related themes of dealing with loss and national identity. Analysis revealed that during the pre-event phase, a clearly articulated national identity was constructed through the media; this was then used as a reference point for subsequent media coverage following Australia’s loss to Germany, a significant turning point for the Australian team. The aim of this article is to investigate the role played by the mass media in the representation, production and construction of Australian national identity within the context of sporting loss in an international competition. Media representation of Australian sporting nationalism is used as a lens through which to examine how elements of Australian national identity were represented, reproduced and reinforced by the media following the Australian soccer team’s poor performance.     

Understanding Imaginative Thinking During Childhood: Sociocultural Conceptions of Creativity and Imaginative Thought

Understanding imagination as both a cognitive and affective endeavor is crucial in order for educators to promote creative and imaginative thinking in informal and formal learning environments. It is the primary aim of this paper to develop the theoretical discussion of Vygotsky’s writings on young children’s imaginative abilities launched by Gajdamaschko (Teach Educ 16(1):13–22, 2005) and Lindqvist (Res J 15(2&3):245–251, 2003). This paper illustrates Vygotsky’s writings on the cognitive processes involved in children’s imagination and creativity and concludes with a discussion focused on the components of an educational environment that can either support or stifle children’s imaginative abilities. It is through this continuing discussion that, as researchers, we hope to extend and challenge current conceptions of the role of imaginative thinking in early education.     

Children's Counterfactual Reasoning About Causally Overdetermined Events

In two experiments, one hundred and sixty-two 6- to 8-year-olds were asked to reason counterfactually about events with different causal structures. All events involved overdetermined outcomes in which two different causal events led to the same outcome. In Experiment 1, children heard stories with either an ambiguous causal relation between events or causally unrelated events. Children in the causally unrelated version performed better than chance and better than those in the ambiguous condition. In Experiment 2, children heard stories in which antecedent events were causally connected or causally disconnected. Eight-year-olds performed above chance in both conditions, whereas 6-year-olds performed above chance only in the connected condition. This work provides the first evidence that children can reason counterfactually in causally overdetermined contexts by age 8.