Skilled migration to Australia depends on a good command of English. Where skilled migrants lack English -- like the participants in this study -- yet fulfil the vocational-skill employment requirement, they are granted temporary visas and provisionally employed but expected to improve their English on the job. They are assumed by mainstream…

This paper explores the transitional experiences and challenges faced by girls from the Torres Strait Islands when they leave individual communities to attend boarding school in regional Queensland. The paper presents original ethnographic research using a narrative enquiry approach, capturing stories as narrated by a broad cohort of girls from…

I am a Chinese-Australian musician-educator of over three decades. In this autoethnography, I act as an agent of change by presenting my life as a social project. This assists understanding of a larger relational, communal and political world that moves us to critical engagement, social action and change. Evolutionary psychology asserts that…

Research analysing the operation of power within sport and physical activity has exposed the marginalisation and exclusion of women's sport in explicit and institutionalised ways. However, for women in recreational and alternative physical activities like surfing, sporting experiences lie outside institutionalised structures, thus requiring…

Efforts to address attrition rates at universities have been driven by Tinto's (1975) model of student engagement with its focus on student: (a) pre entry attributes; (b) academic engagement; and (c) social engagement. Using an ethnographic approach, the study involves interviews with business students to explore the links between these aspects…

In this paper I explore how my musical background, teaching skills, understanding and knowledge as well as music-making abilities and skills, have formed my current self as musician, teacher and researcher. An autoethnographical method is used to investigate my background, including the different modes of music education I received. From this…

This paper contributes to studies on sociology and the body by exploring my bodily experiences as an Australian elite swimmer in an autoethnographic framework. More specifically, it focuses on the relationship between the regulatory practices of others on my body and my development of self-regulatory practices. The stories in this paper reveal…

This paper uses an auto-ethnographic storytelling approach to connect an individual's experience in leadership with the literature on women in leadership as a way of further exposing and understanding gendered organisational practices. Whilst the paper details only one women's experience it was through the connection to the literature that most…

In this classroom narrative article I discuss some of my experiences as a teacher in an Australian government-funded English language development aid project during the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). The program formed part of an emergency response to the devastating violence that accompanied the Indonesian…

The last decade has seen, in the policy arena, a broad global push for children to be treated as active participants in society rather than as the passive recipients of adult decisions and interventions. The topic of literacy learning and teaching has, however, been absent from much of the policy and literature on children's social participation.…

Learners' spontaneous speech beyond interaction patterns such as teacher's initiation-learner's response-teacher's evaluation (I-R-E/F) (Heap, 1988; Mehan, 1979; Ohta, 1999) helps lead them to negotiated interaction (Boulima, 1999), which is effective for foreign language learning. This study examines both an instructor's and a learner's…

This paper draws on a recent theory-driven critical case study that uses ethnographic methods to examine data on the stated needs for literacy of adult literacy learners. It is argued that the literacy needs of adult learners are social constructions. (14 references) (LB)

This paper is concerned with the relationships between students' social identities, their experiences of schooling and educational exclusion. Drawing on data generated through an ethnographic study in a comprehensive public high school in outer-Western Sydney, the paper demonstrates the nuanced institutional and interpersonal processes through…

A case study was made of the implementation of an innovative measurement program. In this instance, curriculum implementation was seen as a process in pedagogical, occupational, and sociocultural contexts in which social groups with unequal power, and in contradictory ways, contended for control. "Beyond academic achievement" emerged as…

Summarizes the responses of 311 Australian and 250 Nepalese university students to the Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. Discovers a moderate inverse relationship between depressive symptoms and life satisfaction among the Australian students. Discusses possible reasons for this. (MJP)