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Editorial: Teaching and learning English in the age of COVID-19: Reflecting on the state of TESOL in a changed world
Get PDFAs this issue of TESOL in context goes to press, we are looking back on a period of close to 18 months since the COVID-19 pandemic became a reality for Australia. The immediate, farreaching and ongoing impact of the pandemic on education has been captured and documented in much academic and professional debate to date (Kenley, 2020; Zentrum für Lehrerinnen- und Lehrerbildung Bamberg (ZLB), 2020). Restrictions on travel resulting from the pandemic have severely impacted teachers, students and teacher educators all over the world (Tran, 2020)
EDITORIAL
Get PDFA: So, Hayley, we’ve decided on a particularly gentle strategy for putting together the editorial for Issue 3 of cinder, which has fallen across the COVID-19 pandemic moment, in Naarm (Melbourne) where we both live. I’m sitting outside at the back of my house, and the light is a kind of translucent grey, which makes the purple flowers on one of the garden plants really pop. We’ve decided to compose together, somehow, and to converse while we read back over the articles that our authors have intrepidly put together despite the strange times. I’m starting with Daniel Juckes’ work, ‘A straight track through a dark valley’. An apt-enough title, one could say, for an issue at this time. Daniel’s piece is our featured fiction work for this issue. It’s specifically about writing, as well as our loving people, whom we may lose, and the situations we can contrive in order to be with them, and to hold onto them. These efforts, of course, are never a ‘straight track’. The work manages to say some of the complications that our urge for this and its very contrivance generate. I love the fact that there is a train in this story (since we can’t travel so much right now), a cherished older woman, as well as the image of her hands around a cup of tea. The writer here is an ambiguous figure. Present, but also not, with his notebook. Writing about an intensive encounter that he is aware he might be sabotaging via the very attempt to archive it. Slightly monstrous like writers can be, but staring that in the face, too. Or am I being too dark?
H: I miss travelling somewhere with someone, rather than sitting still (awkwardly speaking over each other on a video platform), or walking in circles around the man-made lake near my house. Sharing that kind of time felt intimate, and I miss the ‘doing-with’ that happened during long distance travel. The writing, the listening to music, the reading, the sleeping.Is it dangerous to speak about the writer as monstrous? I wonder if it doesn’t slip in a kind of permission. I am a writer and therefore I can be...but there’s always something monstrous about a writer acknowledging what they do, even if it is part of the craft. Writers who don’t observe life and use it probably aren’t very good. But conversations around the ethics of writing in general are difficult to have. I recently had someone ask me never to write about them. I had to say I was sorry, but I couldn’t promise that.
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From Individual Wellbeing to Collective Welfare: A New Perspective of Being and Becoming in a Post-Pandemic World
Get PDFThis article gives an overview of the twice four-dimensional logic that underpins the POZE paradigm at the individual and collective level. It is based on the understanding that human existence is a composition of four dimensions—soul, heart, mind and body, expressed as aspirations, emotions, thoughts and sensations. This individual multidimensionality reflects the collective arena, which is composed of micro, meso, macro and meta dimensions, in the form of individuals, communities, countries and planet earth.
Individual wellbeing is the cause and consequence of collective welfare, due to four principles that influence the individual and the collective sphere: change, connection, continuity and complementarity. One without the other is not sustainable. Aid must be designed and delivered with the ambition of holistic support that considers not only each dimension but contributes to the optimisation of their mutual interplay, the ultimate ambition being to lift individuals everywhere to fulfill their potential
Making Mischief: David Hare and the Celebrity Playwright’s Political Persona
Get PDFThis article examines the fashioning of the authorial persona of British playwright, screenwriter, and director David Hare through autobiographically inflected extra-theatrical interventions. Both exploratory and explanatory companion pieces that frame his artistic work, Hare’s lectures, essays, and memoir capture and stage the field migrations between art and activism that lie at the heart of his public profile as a politically engaged celebrity playwright and astute social commentator. It will be shown how Hare exploits the generic properties of non-fictional life-writing formats that raise, and ostensibly meet, audience expectations of sincerity and authenticity and therefore become ideal vehicles for Hare’s ‘autobiomyth’ of the prophetic writer-propagandist who strives to appeal to the moral conscience of his readership. Hare’s conception of the authorial persona is informed by a Romantic tradition of strong authorship that is intimately connected with truth-telling discourses and that relies on the author’s combined identities of artist and politically engaged commentator. This contribution argues that Hare’s proclivity for non-fictional life-writing formats ties in with a sense of discomfort about his position as a playwright between establishment recognition and self-declared radicalism
The Institutional Persona: When Theatres Become Personas and the Case of Bristol Old Vic
Get PDFThis article proposes a definition and terminology for identifying and analysing a concept of institutional persona in relation to theatre. The essay posits the theatre institution as an example of a ‘composite persona’, whereby cultural value is produced through the interplay between theatre as building, theatre as organisation, and theatre as event. Using the case-study of Bristol Old Vic, I examine how executives and practitioners involved in a specific historic theatre ensured its post-war survival in the 1940s by connecting the prestigious heritage of a local landmark with the national reputation of two London-based organisations. I suggest that theatre institutions offer a particularly rich investigative ground for the application of persona study theory in their need to mobilise individual and organisational personas for the purposes of reinventing a ‘good story’ and brand over time
Hannah Gadsby: Celebrity Stand Up, Trauma, and the Meta Theatrics of Persona Construction
Get PDFThis essay examines the work of stand-up performer Hannah Gadsby in relation to persona, extending the conventional reach of persona studies to the realm of live performance and comedy. The author analyses Hannah Gadsby’s risky decision to kill off her widely adored comic persona in her 2017 show Nanette, replacing it with a persona that shot her to global celebrity and changed the power dynamics with her audiences. The essay investigates Gadsby’s contention that stand-up is bad for her mental health and is predicated on an abusive relationship with audiences. It considers her strategies of comic unmaking and remaking in the contexts of women working in a sexist industry within misogynist societies. It also interrogates Gadsby’s dramaturgies of foregrounding persona creation and the performative dialogic of ‘face’ or ‘mask.’ Gadsby’s postmodern deconstruction of her own comic artistry and her exposure of the limits of stand-up as a form are examined through a new concept of meta-persona
Editorial
Get PDFWelcome to Volume 11 of the Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability.2020 promises to be a significant year for the Journal. In the coming months we will launch a new look for the Journal as we update to the newest version of OJS. This is a timely development as the Journal, now indexed in the SCOPUS, Informit, ERIC and Crossref databases, continues to provide a scholarly forum for research which furthers our understanding of the issues surrounding graduate employability. We are also pleased to announce that a second Volume for this year will be a Special Issue on Micro-credentials and qualifications for future work and learning. For more information please see the Announcements section on the Journal Home Page
Graduate Work-Readiness in Mauritius: A multi-stakeholder approach
Get PDFCharacterised by strong human capital dependency, Small Island Development States (SIDS) such as Mauritius depend largely on work-ready graduates to boost their economy. Yet, Graduate Work Readiness (GWR) and graduate unemployment feature prominently on the Mauritian government agenda. This paper investigates the previously unexplored issue of GWR in Mauritius through four key stakeholder lenses – those of the government, employers, universities, and undergraduates – before suggesting collaborative strategies to enhance graduate employability. The paper findings build on government and parastatal body interviews and qualitative survey responses from the Top 100 companies, higher education institution directors and final year undergraduates in Mauritius. Study results and recommendations are derived from a thematic content analysis of interview transcripts and qualitative survey data. Results indicate that there is a strong need to (1) strengthen stakeholder links, (2) enforce industry-centric university curricula, (4) improve graduate work experience, (4) hone graduate soft skills, and (5) their attitude to work. A Graduate Work Readiness Integrated Stakeholder Framework (GWRISF) supported by a National Work Integrated Learning Committee (NWILC) is then recommended. It is envisaged that proposed strategies will not only assist Mauritian stakeholders in better joining forces for GWR improvement but can also be useful to other comparable SIDS
Humanitarian Disaster Response: Understanding Aid Rejection
Get PDFCommunities the world over continue to be alarmingly vulnerable to natural hazards, leading to no shortage of devastating consequences. Whether or not climate change brings forth an increasingly ferocious variety of hazards, actors involved in disaster response will still face a multiplicity of challenges to delivering lifesaving aid. For instance, humanitarian organizations sometimes face the challenge of overcoming the reluctance of disaster affected states to accept their assistance. When disasters extensively overwhelm state capacity the refusal of external assistance can have serious ramifications for those affected. Despite the stakes, research surrounding aid rejection in these contexts is limited. This analysis sheds more light on why aid rejection occurs and highlights to humanitarian organizations and other researchers the fundamental considerations to develop an understanding on this subject.
A synthesis of existing research on disaster response reveals the very tangible political risk that disaster affected states face when engaging with international offers of assistance. It is in the effort to mitigate this political risk to their legitimacy that states may ultimately decide to reject aid. A few key state characteristics such as response capacity, level of external intervention and domestic politics may also amplify this risk, resulting in a higher likelihood that external aid is rejected. This analysis engages with these factors to determine their validity and relevancy to humanitarian practitioners seeking to develop the appropriateorganizational strategies.
In an effort to better understand aid rejection a disaster dataset was developed based on the concept that disasters with higher visibility on the international scene present a higher level of political risk for an affected state, and therefore have the highest likelihood of resulting in cases of aid rejection. However, in analysing disasters that met this criterion over a 10 year period the research found no instances whereexternal aid was universally and indiscriminately rejected. This is not to say that there were no cases where an affected state rejected assistance from a particular party but that even in these instances those states did accept aid from some other source.
The implication of these findings is that states affected by natural borne disasters are likely to accept external offers of assistance so long as those offers carry a manageable level of political risk. Humanitarian organizations should therefore consider how they can mitigate the political risk they might present to an affected state as part of their disaster response strategy