Martin Kerby

Selling the dream: marketing an education

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to investigate the manner in which a Christian Brothers boarding school, founded in 1891 as an altruistic response to the socio/economic distress of Queensland’s Irish Catholics, undertakes the marketing of its educational product in a contemporary setting. St Joseph’s Nudgee College has displayed a remarkable capacity for compromise, balancing from its first year of operation the philosophical heritage of Irish Catholicism with the pragmatic aim of promoting social mobility amongst a group conscious of its outsider status. It is this inheritance of compromise that has ensured that there has been no perception that marketing an education in a religious institution raises any ethical dilemmas. This is even more remarkable given the evolution of the College into one of the State’s elite educational institutions, yet one still publically committed to education serving as an agent of social change. The challenge for the Development and Communications Department of the College is far more pedestrian than a clash of world views. For they operate in a milieu divorced from the traditional core business of the College and must therefore operate as promoters rather than producers of the institution’s core product of teaching.

Collaboration as metaphoric construct and guiding practice in art-making and teaching: A multimodal rendering

We examine in this article how the construction of a metaphor for collaborative practice can be used as a navigational tool to assist teachers in making meaningful connections between artists and teaching practices. Exploring collaboration in practice as a metaphor can help teachers expand their problem-solving capacities and allow them to cultivate authentic interaction between their artmaking and teaching practices. We also illustrate how collaborative practices, when enacted in both teaching and artmaking and conceived as a metaphorical construct can guide teachers toward identifying synergies between their artmaking and art teaching. To achieve this, we have drawn together a hybridized qualitative methodology to generate a multimodal rendering of intricately layered stories toward cultivating the inter-relationship between artist and teacher.

Implementing a New Doctor of Creative Arts Program in the Chinese Year of the Fire Monkey.

This article explores the development and implementation of a new Doctor of Creative Arts program in a regional university. The experiences of key leadership staff and Doctor of Creative Arts candidates enrolled in the foundation year of the program are contextualised within the current landscape of practice-based arts research in the higher education sector. The process was shaped by the tension between financial imperatives and the possibilities, ambiguity and ambivalence inherent in the arts. The implementation of the Doctor of Creative Arts in 2016, the Chinese Year of the Fire Monkey with its emphasis on intelligent, flexible and creative leadership, was one that offered the most relevant metaphorical framework within which the challenges were best articulated and explored. The findings revealed significant institutional awareness of the new program’s potential to facilitate innovative, creative and traditional research outputs, the importance of communicating the value of creative practice-led research for artists and the university, and leadership and support throughout planning and implementation.

How to practically help non-specialist teachers to implement various ways to better integrate art education in ordinary classroom practices: the French program AlfeArt, between research and resource

This paper explores the AlfeaRT project, a research network supported by a research initiative of the University of Lyon and the CNRS (French national science agency). AlfeArt means Arts, langages, formation, education, apprentissages: recherche et transfert (Arts, language, training, education, learning: research and transfer) and has two related objectives. The first consists of identifying and understanding the inseparable theoretical and practical issues encountered by teachers who seek to give arts education and education through the arts their rightful place by developing their intrinsic contribution in achieving key competencies (EU, Official Journal of the European Union 394:2006) and combining this with their extrinsic impact on non-art outcomes. This research project uses methods of field observations, video elicitations and interviews. The second objective, linked to the first, is to design a multi-user multimedia resource that can be used for research and teacher education purposes, based on the needs formulated in real settings by the stakeholders. In turn, both the process of designing this resource and the feedback resulting from its use will generate new research questions.

Remembrance of Things Past: Historical Commemoration in an Educational Setting

This chapter explores how an Australian day and boarding college for male students between the ages of 10 and 17 partnered with a regional university to explore the Centenary commemoration of WWI through an Australian Government Arts and Culture Public Fund grant. The respective institutions eschewed traditional commemorative options such as statues, honour rolls and community histories and instead utilized a range of arts forms including music, visual art, multimedia and literature to commemorate the Anzac Centenary. This approach allowed for an alternative vision with major outputs including four large-scale dioramas, a six-panel textile artwork, a children’s picture book, a museum display and a sound and light show projected onto the heritage listed main building of the college.

A Shared Rhetoric: The Western Front in 1914/15 as reported by Harry Gullett and Philip Gibbs:

The newspaper articles written by the Australian Harry Gullett and his English counterpart Philip Gibbs during the opening months of the First World War provide important insights into the nature of war reporting, propaganda, censorship, and the relationship between the press and the military. Despite differences in background and temperament, their reports, which were written prior to official accreditation, were remarkably similar in tone and content for Gullett and Gibbs shared the belief that war was a regenerative force that would purify and strengthen a degenerate pre-war Britain. Both writers adopted a rhetoric in their initial wartime correspondence that emphasized traditional martial and patriotic values that they believed were an antidote to the weakness and disunity of a pre-war Britain beset by industrial, social and political upheaval. Battles would therefore be best presented as extended heroic narratives in which there was order, honour and greatness. This approach exerted an influence as pervasive as censorship itself.

Free Lance War Correspondent: 1912–1915

This chapter investigates the attempts by the British government to censor news reports and to curtail the movement of journalists during the early months of the First World War. It raises important questions about the nature of a free press and the danger of too close an alliance with government. Newspaper owners such as Northcliffe and their editors were part of the ruling elite and regularly mixed socially and professionally with leading politicians. Members of the same clubs, guests at the same dinner parties, and active members of the same political parties offered their support freely without need of coercion. Beyond even this limitation, Kerby explores the impact of self-censorship, the changing role of the foreign correspondent, and the failure of traditional language to accurately describe modern word.

The Pageant of the Years: 1939–1962

This chapter covers the period from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 until the death of Sir Philip Gibbs in 1962. It discusses his support for Appeasement and his despair at the outbreak of another war. Gibbs worked as a correspondent in France before Dunkirk but then remained in England for the majority of the remainder of the conflict. He wrote about the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, V-1 and V-2 attacks, and the defeat of Germany, and then his writings ranged widely over the state of post-war Britain, fear of Communism, the National Health Service, rising taxation, West Indian immigration, and the impact of technology.

The New Journalism: 1895–1912

Kerby provides an insight into ‘The New Journalism’ in Britain prior to the First World War by documenting the career of journalist Sir Philip Gibbs. Working first in the field of literary syndication, Gibbs entered Fleet Street in 1902 where he worked in turn for the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the Daily Chronicle. As a journalist, he reported on the important issues facing Britain such as the suffragettes, Industrial unrest, Ireland, and the lead-up to war. Gibbs also covered events as diverse as the fraudulent discovery of the North Pole by Dr Cook, the death of King Edward VII, King George V’s Coronation, Bleriot’s flight across the Channel, the trial of Doctor Crippen, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Battle of Sidney Street.

Victorian Childhood: 1877–1895

Kerby explores the impact on Sir Philip Gibbs wrought by a childhood which, in his words, was spent in ‘the England of Dickens’. Born in 1877, Gibbs’ family assumed both the outward signs of middle-class life, such as the idealization of family, cultural pursuits, and family entertainments, and the pervasive belief in the values of hard work, sexual morality, and individual responsibility. Ideologically, he was also profoundly influenced by the work of Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle with the work of both writers doing much to shape his support of nineteenth-century liberalism, his belief in the power of Christian virtue, and his abhorrence of radical politics.