Mia Lindgren

Portal pedagogy : from interdisciplinarity and internationalization to transdisciplinarity and transnationalization

Education in the twenty-first century is characterized by narratives of global connectivity. Opportunities offered by digital technologies, connectivity through mobile platforms, and social media, reinforced by changing expectations of students and parents, have put pressure on universities to reimagine global learning and flexible delivery contained in a modern higher degree. The higher education sector has sought to address these developments in a number of ways: through intensified student exchange and recruitment, the establishment of off-shore campuses, an expanding online delivery presence, and by increasing flexibility of delivery for on-campus students. While each of the current options taken up by universities addresses different aspects of these trends in the sector, all have inherent problems and imbalances in their approach. In this paper we reflect on the effectiveness of the current trends in international education and propose that the innovative ‘Portal Pedagogy’ approach outlined here makes a significant contribution to higher education. The pedagogy connects geographically distant students through technology and curriculum to create a student-centred community of inquiry neither bound by disciplines nor countries. Bringing together cross-disciplinary interaction, studentdriven learning, and technological solutions to pedagogical and logistical challenges, Portal Pedagogy offers a hybrid model that seeks to go beyond the limitations of online delivery and student exchange programmes in order to offer a flexible, meaningful, and globalized learning experience.

Understanding media publics and the antimicrobial resistance crisis

ABSTRACT Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) imperils health for people across the world. This enormous challenge is being met with the rationalisation of prescription, dispensing and consumption of antimicrobials in clinical settings and in the everyday lives of members of the general population. Individuals need to be reached outside clinical settings to prepare them for the necessary changes to the pharmaceutical management of infections; efforts that depend on media and communications and, therefore, how the AMR message is mediated, received and applied. In 2016, the UK Review on Antimicrobial Resistance called on governments to support intense, worldwide media activity to promote public awareness and to further efforts to rationalise the use of antimicrobial pharmaceuticals. In this article, we consider this communications challenge in light of contemporary currents of thought on media publics, including: the tendency of health communications to cast experts and lay individuals in opposition; the blaming of individuals who appear to ‘resist’ expert advice; the challenges presented by negative stories of AMR and their circulation in public life, and; the problems of public trust tied to the construction and mediation of expert knowledge on the effective management of AMR.

Asbestos Memories: Journalistic ‘Mediation’ in Mediated Prospective Memory

Margaret Page and Ted Grant grew up in the blue asbestos mining town of Wittenoom in Western Australia in the 1950s. Both died from mesothelioma decades later. They remembered playing in the asbestos tailings that were everywhere and spoke about the betrayal they felt later when they realized the impact of that exposure: … we used to climb up on the piles of tailings and slide down… and find the little bits of asbestos fibres in the tailings and…peeling the fibres to see how many fibres we could get out of this. If we had known the danger or our parents were told of the dangers, no way would they have let us children do those things. (Page, 2008) There was nothing ever said, nobody knew. And then I find out in later years that in 1898 they knew about it, in 1926 they had a symposium, in 1936 they also had another one. So they knew in 1956 the dangers of asbestos and they were still mining it.(Grant, 2008)

Outro: The Future of Radio Studies

Radio has long been an invisible medium, unseen but ever present in our lives. Despite the increased visibility and materiality conferred on radio and soundwork via emergent digital platforms, radio studies as a discipline has continued to share something of the medium’s invisibility within the scholarly universe, either missing completely from media studies curricula, scattered widely among different departments – communication, journalism, music, art, literature, and more – or subsumed into more generalized explorations into sound and the sonic environment. However, the digital revolution has affected radio studies as it has other media, not only opening up the field to new forms of soundwork – podcasts, streaming radio, digital music services, online audio – but providing new sites and sources for radio and sound scholarship, as well, including online journals, newsletters and blogs1, radio curation sites2, research databases3, permanent web interfaces for traditional radio outlets, and last but not least, audio archives. These proliferating digital platforms with their global reach have the potential to make radio studies truly transnational for the first time since Rudolf Arnheim celebrated the medium’s boundary-transcending potential in 1936 – before the nationalist fervors of the twentieth-century worked to confine and control it (Arnheim 1936). Now, as radio scholar Kate Lacey has written, we can not only “listen in” but “listen out,” forming new connections and potential

Autoethnographic Journalism: Subjectivity and Emotionality in Audio Storytelling

There is a growing trend in journalism to focus on personal storytelling. Interviewees and journalists alike are sharing their real-life experiences, especially suited for the more intimate environments of online media. The audience’s appetite for everyday life stories is driving this mode of journalism, which Rosalind Coward (Journal Pract 4(2): 224–233, 2010) argues can be described as a “new cultural form, a media of personal revelation”. In this chapter, Lindgren examines the role of personal journalism, with a focus on audio storytelling as part of articulating identity. Using a case study, this chapter considers the many pitfalls of autobiographical storytelling, focusing on the need for carefully considered production practices as well as examining the benefits and challenges of journalists putting themselves in the frame.

For the lifestyle and a love of creativity: Australian students’ motivations for studying journalism

A number of studies have examined why students choose to study journalism at university, but overall, this area is still relatively underexplored. Yet, understanding why students choose journalism, and what career expectations they hold, is important not only for educators but also for wider society and public debates about the future of journalism and the value of tertiary journalism education. This article examines the motivations of 1884 Australian journalism students enrolled across 10 universities. It finds that hopes for a varied lifestyle and opportunities to express their creativity are the most dominant motivations among students. Public service ideals are somewhat less important, while financial concerns and fame are least important. These motivations also find expression in students’ preferred areas of specialisation (referred to in Australia as rounds): lifestyle rounds are far more popular than politics and business rounds or science and development rounds.