Will Letts

Putting it into practice: Infection control professionals’ perspectives on early career nursing graduates’ microbiology and infection control knowledge and practice

Abstract Background: The microbiology component of Australian undergraduate nursing programmes varies considerably. Any actual or potential impact of this variation on infection control practice, as a nursing graduate, is relatively unknown. Aims: The aim of this study was to explore infection control professionals’ perceptions of the importance of microbiology and infection control training in undergraduate nursing curricula and the perceived retention of that knowledge and its transferability to practice. Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight infection control professionals from a range of hospital settings in Australia. Findings: Four main themes emerged: Theory versus practice, importance of role modelling, disjunction between university curricula and ‘the real world,’ and learning in context. Conclusion: As the underpinning element of infection control practice, the role of microbiology education and training in nursing education will benefit from review. Further discussions about the nature and timing of theoretical microbiology content and assessment of undergraduate students’ microbiology knowledge to ensure retention and appropriate application of that knowledge in practice are urgently needed.

Developing Indigenous perspectives in practice-based education

The term “exemplary practice” may be contested since decisions regarding authority to judge the exemplary nature of practice, and the basis on which such judgements are made, are open to question. Its use alongside the phrase ‘indigenous perspectives’ becomes even more challenging, especially when the narrative voices are outside the indigenous group of interest. Cognisant of these issues, our intention in this chapter is to describe an evolving set of exemplary practices in developing indigenous perspectives in a practice-based, teacher education course.

Editors' Introduction: Glass Walls, Cages, and Paws—A “Brood of Researchers” Engages a Posthumanist Politics of Sight

In his sobering and compelling ethnography of the work of the modern industrialized slaughterhouse Timothy Pachirat (2011) articulates a politics of sight whereby surveillance and sequestration both obscure and render visible the killing work of meat production. He conceptualizes this politics of sight as “organized, concerted attempts to make visible what is hidden and to breach, literally or figuratively, zones of confinement in order to bring about social and political transformation” (p. 236). These attempts to bring the hidden into view and to effect social change rely on “the assumption that simply making the repugnant visible is sufficient to generate a transformational politics: for who could stand the sight?” (p. 247). This assumption, for example, undergirds Paul McCartney’s now-famous statement, recently taken up as a slogan for PETA, that “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.” The work of killing that Pachirat describes, however, complicates the implied or assumed relationship between the act of making the repugnant visible and transformative social change, and troubles the clean boundaries between the simple binaries of “visible/invisible, plain/hidden, and open/confined” (p. 253). For as Pachirat argues, “Even when intended as a tactic of social and political transformation, the act of making the hidden visible may be equally likely to generate other, more effective ways of confining it” (p. 253). He further states, “The logic of ‘who can stand the sight?’ is as likely to be the basis for making a profit off the pleasure of feeling pity for the less fortunate as it is for the transformation of their plight” (p. 254). In this issue of the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, we are engaging in a politics of sight of sorts as we focus in a sustained way on

Reclaiming glitch in/for curriculum studies

Last summer I (Jenny) was fortunate enough to spend some time in Australia, including a few days in Bathurst where I got to visit Will (Letts) and explore the place he now calls home. One afternoon, our outing took us to the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, where we experienced the exhibit “Soft Core,” which showcased work by 13 contemporary artists that problematized, expanded, and rejected traditional conceptualizations of what a sculpture is (Gurich, 2017). Wandering through the engaging exhibit, I almost literally stumbled into a huge 11-foot high inflatable cartoonish rabbit sitting in the middle of one of the otherwise empty gallery rooms. I was initially drawn to the piece because it was highly reminiscent of Thumper, Bambi’s humorous, energetic, and mischievous sidekick in Disney’s 1942 film. While Thumper is benevolent and kind, I found this giant rabbit inviting and playful, but also, because of its size, texture, and expression, grotesque and menacing. Experiencing the giant rabbit was strange and unsettling; the mixture of cute, cuddly, monstrous, and vaguely threatening was disturbing. Two days later I found myself at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Sydney. I turned a corner and entered a massive room in the Australian galleries, and was caught off guard by a giant, almost 9-foot tall, shiny polished steel sculpture of a man sitting on a table, legs dangling, not quite touching the floor. The sculpture was positioned so that it was facing the floor to ceiling windows that provide a view of Sydney harbor. The surface of the sculpture looked almost like chrome, polished so shiny that it reflected everything around it as if it were a mirror. The clothing (topcoat and buckle shoes) and hairstyle signalled that despite its ultra modern appearance, this sculpture depicted someone from the 18th century, perhaps a famous British explorer, someone (white) Australia (or, more locally, Sydney?) claims as a “founding father”? This didn’t look like other such figures, however. I was struck at how this man was depicted differently, as typically British historical figures are portrayed in heroic and powerful stances. The downcast head gave this man a look of defeat or contemplation, the legs dangling above the ground almost made him look childlike. I read the gallery sign and learned this was British “navigator” Captain James Cook. Just a week earlier I had visited Cooks’ Cottage in what the City of Melbourne tourist website calls “beautiful heritage-listed Fitzroy Gardens” (City of Melbourne, Cooks Cottage, n.d., para. 1). The website also describes Cooks’ Cottage as “the oldest building in Australia” (para. 2). It was built by the parents of Captain James Cook and hosts a “delightful English cottage garden and volunteers dressed in 18th century costumes” (para. 4).

Surviving, healing, and thriving in a traumatic world by turning to curriculum studies

How does one survive in a traumatic world? How does one navigate categories and normative ideas that are no longer (or that have never been) helpful? How does one cross borders that harm, or move beyond binaries that divide? Nina Asher’s (2003) article, “Engaging Difference: Towards a Pedagogy of Interbeing,” is as relevant today as it was fifteen years ago, and provides some guidance as we think through some of these questions that are taken up in various ways by the authors in this issue of Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. Asher’s overarching goal in this piece is to help educators and students “heal from the wounds of oppression” (p. 235) by engaging concepts and practices of mindfulness, contemplation, interbeing, and engaged pedagogy. Asher (2003) criticizes multicultural education for focusing too much on “the marginalized ‘other’” and paying too little attention to the “examination of the ‘self’ at the center of the dominant culture” (p. 235). She takes up postcolonial and postcolonial feminist discourses to think in more complex and relational ways about the self and other, and to develop critical pedagogies that can be “useful in deconstructing essentialist representations, interrogating how forces such as colonization and Eurocentrism shape identity and culture, and forging discourses about difference more attuned to the nuances and complexities of present-day classroom contexts” (p. 236). Learning to situate oneself in spaces in-between and to think in terms of hybridity is decidedly not just a task for those who are “othered/marginalized”, as she argues that individuals within dominant cultures especially have a great deal to learn through encounters with difference, an insight that perhaps might provide a sliver of hope in a world where people are increasingly embracing white supremacist ideologies. She states that

Exposing the limits of our vision: Unsettling sedimented understandings of curriculum and pedagogy

Just a short ferry ride up the Derwent River from downtown Hobart, Tasmania sits the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). Opened in 2011, the museum is built into the shoreline and seems to disappear into the landscape as you approach it, with growth covering the top of it. The museum is the brainchild of David Walsh: “mathematician, bibliophile, gambler, winemaker, autodidact, Darwin obsessive and founder of Australia’s largest private art museum” (Verghis, 2016, para. 4). In bringing his vision for a museum to life, Walsh has insisted that “I want MONA to be a ship afloat on a sea of chance, a deliverer of the alternate idea ... an antidote to certainty” (Walsh, quoted in Verghis, 2016, para. 49). The MONA website describes the museum as, “one man’s ‘megaphone’ as he put it at the outset: and what he wants to say almost invariably revolves around the place of art and creativity within the definition of humanity” (MONA, 2017a, para. 23). One current exhibition—On the Origin of Art—has been garnering a lot of attention. The rationale for the exhibition, whose name intentionally mimics Darwin’s (1859) On the Origin of Species, is articulated as follows:

Grappling with curricular and pedagogical entanglements

In re-reading the pieces that comprise this issue of the journal we were struck by the ways each piece grapples with, enacts, and/or navigates issues of entanglement. On a recent road trip to the far western New South Wales town of Menindee for a week-long indigenous cultural immersion trip (Hill & Mills, 2013), I (Will) was confronted with and thought deeply about my own entanglement in the enduring white settler colonial project, how it persists to the present, and how it continues to manifest. These issues were invoked, rehearsed, and challenged throughout a week that included whole-group yarning circles (dialogue circles), small group and one-on-one conversations with elders, excursions to significant cultural sites, chats around the campfire in the mornings and evenings, and plenty of time for solo contemplation and reflection. These challenges were not only historical and cultural, but fundamentally ontological and epistemological (Nolan, Hill, & Harris, 2010). The immediate effects of this experience were deeply personal, enabling me to be at ease with different paradigms for making sense of the world and accepting that there are some things that can’t or don’t need to be articulated in words, they just need to be experienced. In reflective conversation with a colleague on the twelve-and-a-half hour car journey home, we talked about how our own changed understandings could be manifest in our work. We thought of a range of ways that the spirit and intention of this cultural immersion trip could live on—encouraging colleagues to experience the trip, sharing how our conceptions of Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous ways of knowing have evolved as a result of the experience, conceptualizing the indigenization of the curriculum as about something much more than merely adding particular bits of content, and acknowledging that this is a journey that will never have an end, and that’s the joy of it! I came to understand my challenge as not being about trying to un-knot the complexities of these intertwined issues, but rather to honor the entanglement of thoughts, emotions and issues and strive to learn more about and from it. For as Nathan Snaza (this issue) states, “We are, at every moment, caught up in—and indeed, made by—entanglements with others that are aleatory, contingent, and shifting. Education, for me, names any practice where different bodies—some of them will be human—come together in order to collectively attend or attune to these entanglements.” Each of the pieces in this issue focuses in some way on a moment or process of educational practice where individuals—human and nonhuman—come together to contend with their mutually constituted entanglements.

Dis/orienting experiences: Itinerant explorations and peripatetic sense-making

Earlier in the year, as part of the On the Origin of Art exhibition showing at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, I (Will) was gripped by Yayoi Kusama’s Dots Obsession Tasmania (2016). Commissioned for this exhibition, the 87-yearold Japanese artist’s installation features the bold colors and patterning so characteristic of her work. A self-described avant garde sculptor, painter and novelist, Kusama is renowned for her use of pattern, eye-popping color combinations, and repetition. As MoNA senior research curator Jane Clark notes, “Humans respond with their eyes and brains with pleasure from patterns and illusions–this work is fun, it’s physical and it’s visually appealing and I’m sure the giggles from people will also make it aurally appealing” (Crawley, 2016, para. 11). As I entered the room engulfed by this work I found it at once enchanting and disorienting. The bubbled surfaces, themselves covered in dots, and strategically placed mirrors literally made establishing equilibrium in that space a challenge. Although paths across the floor were flat, most of the room was filled with yellow curving surfaces covered in black dots–an evocative feature of Kusama’s work. Such was the allure of these dot-covered surfaces that a museum security officer was stationed in the room to ensure that patrons didn’t touch the artwork, and were able to safely enter and exit the room without incident. In subsequent discussions about the work, and Kusama’s oeuvre more broadly, we were fascinated by the ‘doubleness’ whereby the installation itself instantiated wandering while patrons wandered through it. That is, it wandered and/as we wandered through it, roaming through space to experience the piece. We marvelled at how Kusama’s work appears to be at once orienting and dis-orienting, and how it creates a productive tension between the two. There is an order, a familiarity to them, as Kusama employs the use of patterned repetition as a prominent feature of her work. The works are also unexpected and playful, and often catch the viewer off guard. Scholars and cultural critics have commented on how this tension between order and dis-order is an integral part of Kusama’s work, and have discussed the role that Kusama’s mental illness, and particularly her obsessive-compulsive disorder, plays in her artistic expression. Ferrell (2015), for example, has discussed how Kusama uses patterning and repetition in order to “exercise control over her own mental illness” (Ferrell, 2015, p. 3). Ferrell, herself an artist with OCD, describes having OCD as both an ordered and disordered experience. As she states, in describing her own OCD-informed artistic practices, “OCD is

“I'm not a woman. I'm not a man. I'm something that you'll never understand”: On navigating and resisting social and educational strictures

We have lost some gender-complex heroes recently. Glam rocker David Bowie’s passing refocused public discussion on his celebration of non-normative gender expressions and his refusal to be pigeonholed, or even defined—leaving an indelible mark on popular culture. Rather than push against the boundaries that boxed him in, he seemed to ignore them: Instead crafting personas that were not directly connected to reality. And in doing so, he moved boundaries for others and validated configurations of sex and gender heretofore silenced, or even punished. Continuing in this vein, but much more obviously inflected with class and racialized politics, Prince too broke all of the rules and flaunted well-guarded orthodoxies, fashioning an androgynous gender-fluid persona that was also hypersexualized. Because “Prince presented a living case study in the glorious freedom a world without stringent labels might offer” (Cauterucci, 2016, para. 1), he offered a glimpse of what could be—how one could make their way in this world unconstrained, or at least less restrained, by normative insistences that handcuff us to narrowly conceptualized “rules” about gender and sexual conformity. Both Bowie and Prince refused to be framed or understood within gender binaries, simultaneously embodying maleness and femaleness in a celebration of ambiguity. Eschewing how one was supposed to act, to self-present, and to move through the world, both icons offered visions and versions for what else could be. But they could not be fixed or pinned down either, which was part of the example they set and lesson they offered. Still, in all of their personas and various manifestations, the clarion call they issued was about a more expansive and inclusive vision for ways of being in the world, an anti-establishment stance to gender and sexuality that redrew borders, demolished boundaries, and celebrated what had long been silenced. In a similarly resistant spirit, Halberstam (2011) offered useful resources in their explication of ways to refuse various kinds of hegemonic constructions that define and frame “success” in current capitalist societies. In a move that refuses to embrace traditional strictures that define success, Halberstam (2011), instead, saw productive possibilities in failure, as they attempt to reclaim failure as something that provides opportunities for different, non-normative ways of being in the world. Halberstam explained that “under certain circumstances failing, losing,

More than just skin and bones: The cultural materiality of bodies and embodiment

In September 2016, for the 32nd Kaldor Public Art Project, the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney, Australia hosted Wiradjuri-Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones’ sitespecific installation titled “Barrangal Dyara” (Skin and Bones). This installation consists of 15,000 white gypsum replicas of Aboriginal hand-held shields that were used by Gadigal men in the 1870s who inhabited the land where the Royal Botanic Garden now stands (Westwood, 2016). In the installation, the shields are arranged across 20,000 square meters to create a haunting outline of the 19th century Garden Palace building that was built on that land in 1879. The Garden Palace, which was the largest building in the Southern Hemisphere when it was constructed (McDonald, 2016), originally had been built to host the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879—which was the first World’s Fair in the Southern Hemisphere—and thus acted as the kind of “cultural showcase” that Willinsky (1998, p. 55) called a site of an “imperial show-and-tell,” much like London’s Crystal Palace that housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Sydney Exhibition was designed to showcase Australia’s newly emerging national identity and to highlight the colony’s wealth, success, and “civilized” sophistication (Piggott, 2016). While this new national identity was built upon the backs of Australia’s indigenous peoples, they were excluded from the new official narrative of Australia’s wealth and success. Instead, indigenous peoples and perspectives were relegated to the “Ethnological Court” of the Garden Palace, where indigenous material culture was represented in ways that reinforced Social Darwinism and showcased the colonial mission to “civilize” indigenous peoples (Piggott, 2016). Displays of indigenous shields, spears, and other aspects of material culture were used to create a narrative that positioned European Australia’s “material wealth and progress” as more highly evolved and civilized than the “relics of ‘prehistoric’ Aboriginal Australia” (Westwood, 2016, para. 20). As one cultural commentator stated, in exhibits such as the Garden Palace, Aboriginal material culture was “contained in an anachronistic space to tell at a glance a story of progress on the one hand and of extinction and dispossession on the other” (Accarigi, cited in Westwood, 2016, para. 21). Moreover, the kinds of material culture collected and displayed were those that helped position “indigenous people as primitive and savage, depicting a masculine, violent race with no suggestion of a cultural life” (Westwood, 2016, para. 22), with little to nothing representing Aboriginal women or children. Just 3 years after it was built, the Garden Palace building burned to the ground.