Reflective Teachers and Teacher Educators in the Pacific Region: Conversations with us not about us

This article reports on a study of Pacific primary school teachers’ and university lecturers’ reflections on their involvement in the in-service Bachelor of Education degree programme offered at the regional University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji. Two rich sets of data have emerged from this study. Firstly, there are a number of critical reflections by ourselves as teacher educators concerning levels of equitable student access and participation in our degree as it is reconceptualised for distance and flexible delivery to increase levels of teacher professionalism across the Pacific region. Secondly, there has emerged a set of statements from teachers themselves about: teaching and learning; professional development opportunities; and what it means to be a professional educator in the Pacific region. This later data suggests an alternative set of voices in what has largely been a “conversation between us about them” conducted by Ministries of Education, Curriculum Development Units, USP, other educational bodies and the media in the Pacific, but particularly Fiji, about teachers and teachers’ work. Critical reflection upon our own practice as teacher educators and the voices of experienced teachers are particularly pertinent not only as we seek to reshape a degree programme to suit the needs of the region’s primary school teachers but also as “rethinking” debates about the purposes of education in the Pacific region are on-going yet exclusive.     

Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum

Boasting over 6000 objects, including replicas of a western hardware store, a frontier stage stop, and a late nineteenth-century industrial factory, the Cody Firearms Museum, located at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, is “the largest and most important collection of American firearms in the world.” 1 1. Treasures from Our West (Cody, WY: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1992), 44. The museum, which creates a decidedly visual space through its near-exclusive engagement with looking, employs an aesthetic of domestication and sterility to frame firearms for museumgoers. Even as it transforms guns into inert objects of visual pleasure, the museum cannot fully erase the history of violence and colonial conquering in which guns played a starring role. The museum's rhetorical effectivity/affectivity, then, turns upon the unique play of presence and absence.     

Radiating Emergency: The Perils and Promise of the Broadcast Signal in the Atomic Age

This essay argues that the development of CONELRAD marked a pivotal—and often overlooked—moment in the history of media and communications in the United States. As the nation's first coast-to-coast emergency broadcast system, CONELRAD established a new paradigm of networked communications for a new world order. Through close critical examination of the institutional events and discursive controversies surrounding CONELRAD's development, I show how those events and controversies were inflected by both contemporaneous atomic anxieties and older hopes and fears associated with over-the-air communications. I also suggest how they articulated, in the domain of electronic mass media, the politico-legal theory and practice of the state of exception.     

Tensions in Community Health Improvement Initiatives: Communication and Collaboration in a Managed Care Environment

Between the years 1993 and 2000, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation sponsored the Comprehensive Community Health Models (CCHMs) Initiative in three Michigan counties. CCHMs was comprised of three closely related community initiatives carried out in the midst of a failed national health care reform effort and the continued penetration of managed care arrangements into many health care systems. This experimental initiative set out to test the hypothesis that traditional healthcare system animosities and exclusionary practices could be overcome by stakeholder participation in an ongoing, structured, collaborative dialogue about improving access to health services. In the process of collecting data through surveys, interviews, content analysis, and observation, we were struck by the occurrence of several overarching tensions that we perceive to exist in our data. The present article elucidates five such tensions and suggests how third parties such as communication researchers, evaluators, and practitioners can facilitate community health improvement initiatives and better their own data interpretation by acknowledging and understanding these tensions.     

Mapping the Cyber-Stakeholders: U.S. Energy Policy on the Web

This article looks to decentered hyperlinking patterns on the worldwide web as a site where media researchers can investigate the treatment of social issues by websites. Such “issue networks” are offered in contrast to the increasingly portalized and commercial nature of information architecture and interfaces on the worldwide web. The article searches for commonly linked sites on the issue of the Bush-Cheney energy policy in an attempt to uncover the hyperlink patterns and debate among the most interconnected sites.     

Fostering Community College Leaders: An Examination of Leadership Development Programs

The study reported in this paper identifies leadership development practices within community colleges by surveying North Carolina community college presidents and evaluating an individual North Carolina community college's leadership institute. The results of the study indicate these community colleges indeed have an interest in leadership development activities for its employees, and the examined leadership institutes are quite effective and beneficial for its participants. Based upon these findings, two sets of recommendations are offered for fostering leadership initiatives within community colleges, namely, a focus on more significant topics for community college employees and developing a leadership learning community within a community college.     

Seeing Silence: Filmic and Acoustic Convergences in the Work of Thierry Knauff and Francisco López

Analysing the work of Spanish composer Francisco López and the Belgian film maker Thierry Knauff's 2000 production, Wild Blue: notes à quelques voix, this paper aims to go beyond the Deleuzean methodology that it employs. Deleuze argues, in Difference and Repetition, that artistic production deploys an active form of repetition that creates difference in itself and not a banal Platonic form of repetition based on an originary identity. Finding this process at work in the texts studied, we argue that of vital importance in these works and (although it is not explicitly stated) in Deleuze's own theory here is a reflection on the concept of texture. In deploying an artistic form of repetition that is infused with a deep sense of texture, both López and Knauff distance their works from the documentary realm in which they appear to be grounded. This, however, only increases their potential political efficacy which, rather than working according to extensive and limited, therefore, principles, is transmitted via an intensive mode.     

Effects of time of day and distance upon accuracy and consistency of throwing darts

Abstract

We examined variations in dart-throwing performance during the daytime in 12 participants. Two distances from the dartboard were investigated – the normal distance (short throws) and another 50% further away than this (long throws). Intra-aural temperature and subjective fatigue were measured, and errors in performance were assessed as the radial distances of throws from the bulls-eye and the standard deviation of these distances. Long-distance throws improved significantly throughout the daytime and correlated positively with intra-aural temperature (r = ?0.49, P = 0.002 and r = ?0.49, P = 0.002 for errors and standard deviation of errors, respectively), but not with subjective fatigue (r = ?0.10, P = 0.56 and r = ?0.05, P = 0.74 for errors and standard deviation of errors, respectively). Short-distance throws were associated less with intra-aural temperature (r = ?0.46, P = 0.005 and r = ?0.17, P = 0.31 for errors and standard deviation of errors, respectively), and worsened with fatigue (r = +0.34, P = 0.040 for errors). Compared with the short-distance throws, the long-distance throws were performed significantly less well than could be accounted for by the increased distance (mean errors were increased 1.67 – 2.78 times and standard deviation of errors of errors 1.58 – 3.68 times), supporting the concept of a trade-off between force of contraction and accuracy of performance. Throwing darts can be used as a model for investigating factors that influence motor performance, and our results indicate that the effects of time of day upon performance depend upon the relative importance of force and accuracy.