Cognate Discipline Research Articles

Developing the education research capability of education-focused academics: building skills, identities and communities

ABSTRACT This article critically investigates the impact of a program of professional learning for education-focused academics (EFAs) in an Australian university, focused on developing their education research capability. The ‘Higher Education Research’ (HER) program employed a three-pronged strategy: skills development workshops; sustained small group mentoring; and a small-scale education research study. The aim of the program was to support the university to improve the quality of education by fostering the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). The program was completed by two cohorts of EFAs, in 2014 and 2017. The design of the program was informed by literature showing the value of SoTL in developing the quality of university teaching and the importance of collaborative peer learning structures in supporting SoTL activities. Using Engeström’s activity theory and Lave and Wenger’s conception of peripheral participation in communities of practice, the study analysed quantitative and qualitative data collected immediately after the HER program and focus group interview data collected at least two years later, to examine the impact over time of the HER program on the participants’ careers and identities. This article focuses on five major themes that emerged from the data: struggle – personal-professional struggles experienced by academics in negotiating a shift from their cognate discipline to education as a discipline; identity – changes in identity that academics experienced through participating in the HER program; social relations – factors that contributed to the social experience of learning and developing as a researcher in a complex socio-cultural context; leadership – ways in which the HER program helped participants to develop as leaders; and criticality in educational practice – ways in which academics came to see their work as university educators in more critical terms. The article concludes with recommendations for cross-faculty programs that build higher education educators’ skills and knowledge through researching teaching and learning.

To "Hamlet" or Not to "Hamlet: Notes on an Arts Secondary School Students’ "Hamlet"

This article discusses a 2018 theatrical production of Hamlet with Romanian teenage arts students, directed by one of the article’s authors, actress and academic Dana Trifan Enache. As an artist, she believes that the art of theatre spectacle depends pre-eminently on the actors’ enactment, and hones her students’ acting skills and technique accordingly. The other voice in the article comes from an academic in a cognate discipline within the broad field of arts and humanities. As a feminist and medievalist, the latter has investigated the political underside of representations of the body in religious drama, amongst others. The analytic duo reflects as much the authors’ different professional formation and academic interests as their asymmetrical positioning vis-à-vis the show as respectively the play’s director and one of its spectators. Their shared occupational investment, teaching to form and hone highly specialized professional skills, and shared object of professional interest (broadly conceived), text interpretation, account nevertheless for the possibility of fruitful interdisciplinary reflection on the 2018 Hamlet. This in-depth analysis of the circumstances of the performance and technical solutions it sought challenges stereotyped dismissals of a students’ Hamlet as superannuated, flimsy or gratuitously provocative. Furthermore, a gender-aware examination of the adaptation’s original handling of characters and scenes indicates unexpected cross-cultural and diachronic commonalities between the dramatic world of the 2018 Romanian production of Hamlet and socio-cultural developments emergent in pre-Shakespearean England.

To be or not to be (embodied): That is not the question

Two articles in a recent special issue on Information and the Body published in the journal Library Trends stand out because of the way they are identifying, albeit indirectly, a formidable challenge to library information science (LIS). In her contribution, Bates warns that understanding information behavior demands recognizing and studying “any one important element of the ecology [in which humans are embedded].” Hartel, on the other hand, suggests that LIS would not lose much but would have lots to gain by focusing on core LIS themes instead of embodied information, since the latter may be unproductive, as LIS scholars are “latecomer[s] to a mature research domain.” I would argue that LIS as a discipline cannot avoid dealing with those pesky mammals aka patrons or users; like the cognate discipline and “community of communities” human computer interaction (HCI), LIS needs the interdisciplinarity to succeed. LIS researchers are uniquely positioned to help bring together LIS's deep understanding of “information” and embodiment perspectives that may or may not have been developed in other disciplines. LIS researchers need to be more explicit about what their original contribution is, though, and what may have been appropriated from other disciplines.

Cultural conceptualizations of gender and homosexuality in BrE, IndE, and NigE

AbstractWith the spread of English in many parts of the world, numerous local varieties have emerged, shaped by the sociocultural contexts in which they are embedded. Hence, although English is a unifying element, these varieties express different conceptualizations that are deeply rooted in culture. For the most part, these conceptualizations come in the form of conceptual metaphors, which not only influence our perception of the world (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), but also reveal cultural specifics of a particular society.One of the latest approaches in the field of conceptual metaphor research suggests that conceptual metaphors are actually multimodal, i.e., that they are expressed not only in language, but also, e.g., in gestures, facial expressions, sounds or images (Forceville 2009). Films are an ideal source of data for such multimodal metaphors.In the form of a pilot study, this paper applies this novel approach to metaphor to the field of World Englishes. While adding to the range of research that has already used the methodological toolbox of Cognitive Linguistics or its cognate discipline Cultural Linguistics in the investigation of the cultural dimension of varieties of English (e.g.,Kövecses 1995;Liu 2002;Malcolm & Rochecouste 2000;Sharifian 2006;Wolf 2001;Wolf & Polzenhagen 2009), we provide a new exploratory angle to that investigation by using cinematic material for the analysis. Specifically, this study focuses on conceptualizations pertaining to the target domainswomanandhomosexuality. The data we have selected are from Great Britain, India and Nigeria, because these countries have important film industries, and British English, Indian English and Nigerian English constitute culturally distinct varieties.

Editorial: One hundred and fiftieth issue

Editorial: One hundred and fiftieth issue

Effects of the performance management context on Australian academics’ engagement with the scholarship of teaching and learning: a pilot study

In the context of increased demands for excellence in all areas, academic promotion and tenure is now directly linked to achievement of measurable outputs in all areas of performance. In a work environment characterised by high workloads, competing expectations and reduced resources, academics must increasingly demonstrate active engagement with the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). For many, this may mean adopting new cultures, methodologies, theories, languages and modes of enquiry outside their home or cognate discipline. In the context of performance management, academics must reconceptualise and articulate notions of ‘good academic practice’, often in parallel with the practical requirement to continue to teach in the culture and practices of their cognate discipline. We need to better understand the implications, for institutions and individuals, of approaching SoTL through the lens of performance evaluation. This paper reports the key themes from a pilot study examining how academics at an Australian university are responding to the emergence of SoTL in the performance management context.

Research degrees in journalism: What is an exegesis?

This article addresses the question of what might constitute an exegesis for a higher degree by research in journalism, and briefly canvasses issues for journalism as a disciplinary research practice. It starts by considering the craft/profession/discipline dichotomies to clarify the sort of journalism that might qualify as research, typically but not necessarily long form and/or investigative. It identifies the three core elements of the exegesis as a literature review, an exposition of the methodology and an evaluation of the success of the journalism component of the project in answering the research question. It notes that all journalism, like history and other humanities disciplines, is necessarily interdisciplinary, and therefore the journalistic methodology should interface with that of the cognate discipline. It argues that the singularity and value of journalism as a research practice lie in its combination of a reflexive empirical focus, a focus on contemporary phenomena and an intense engagement with the politics of knowledge. It suggests that meta-theoretical debates about reflexivity, space, time and fields are strongly applicable to methodological debates in journalism.

Rethinking Jurisdiction in International Law

Jurisdiction has traditionally been considered in international law as purely a question of the rights and powers of states. Conceived in this way, the rules on jurisdiction serve the important function of delimiting (while accepting some overlap of) state regulatory authority – the question of when a person or event may be subject to national regulation – a function which is shared with the cognate discipline of private international law. This article suggests that the idea and the rules of jurisdiction in international law require reconceptualisation in light of three developments. The first is the growing recognition that in a range of circumstances the exercise of national jurisdiction may, under international law, be a question of duty or obligation rather than right. The second development is the increased acceptance that such jurisdictional duties may in some circumstances be owed not only to other states but also to private parties, particularly through the emergence and strengthening of the doctrines of denial of justice and access to justice. The third development is the widely recognised phenomenon known as party autonomy, under which private parties in civil disputes have the power to confer jurisdiction on national courts and to determine themselves which law governs their relationships. In combination, these developments suggest the necessity of rethinking the concept of jurisdiction in international law, to reflect the more complex realities of an international legal order under which states possess both jurisdictional rights and obligations and are no longer the exclusive actors.

ANDRÉE LAJOIE, LA VIE INTELLECTUELLE DE RODERICK MACDONALD: UN ENGAGEMENT (Montréal: Les Éditions Thémis, 2014)

For roughly three and a half decades before his passing on June 13, 2014, Roderick Macdonald was a maverick on the Canadian legal education scene. As a law teacher, scholar, dean and reformer, Macdonald inspired generations of jurists, including this reviewer. La vie intellectuelle de Roderick Macdonald is a short biographical sketch of Macdonald written by Andree Lajoie, Professor Emeritus at the Universite de Montreal and sometime collaborator with her subject. I think it is fair to surmise that Lajoie wrote the book in some haste. The book has typographical errors and it sometimes seems written as a near-final draft. However, given the state of Macdonald’s health –he was in advanced stages of throat cancer at the time of publicationand the desire to honour Macdonald in a timely way (the book was launched at a symposium in Macdonald’s honour held at McGill University in 2014) this is entirely forgivable. Furthermore, any stylistic flaws are more than compensated by the compelling sketch of Macdonald’s career, scholarship and ideas. Chapter One provides the biographical bones to the rest of the book. It details Macdonald’s youth (a middle child with inconsistent grades, raised in a “WASPish” environment near Toronto), his growing commitment to social justice during the Vietnam era, his studies (a B.A. at York, an LL.B. at Osgoode Hall, an LL.L. at Ottawa for a dose of Civil Law, and an LL.M. at Toronto under the tutelage of John, now Angela, Swan). It also touchingly describes his marriage to Shelley Freeman, an artist on whom he drew for inspiration throughout his adult life. Chapter Two is entitled “Avant tout professeur” and portrays Macdonald’s primary commitment to law teaching and mentorship. For Macdonald, teaching was not something to “get in the way” of scholarship or service to a wider legal and non-legal public; rather, law teaching was a vocation and, to use his words, “a way of being alive”. At the same time, Lajoie suggests, Macdonald was a professor above being a jurist; his commitment to law teaching was anti-instrumentalist and he could as easily have been a professor in a cognate discipline. Rather than trying to train lawyers, Macdonald consistently trained law students to think, to challenge dogma, and to seek social justice and virtue. Perhaps particularly of interest to readers of this journal, Chapter Two details Macdonald’s hiring at the University of Windsor when, after a string of rejections, this was the first university to offer him an interview:

Medical physiology education in South Africa: what are the educators’ perspectives?

Context. Most South African medical schools have, in the past decade, introduced changes in their curricula. In our experience we have found that such changes can affect students’ knowledge and understanding of physiology. Aim. The current study was undertaken to determine the perceptions of educators regarding the impact of curricular change on the knowledge and understanding of physiology by medical students in South Africa. Methods. A survey of physiologists teaching medical students in South African medical schools was undertaken by means of a questionnaire. Results. There were 20 participants in the current study. Demographic data revealed that they came from 6 out the 8 South African medical schools; 80% had PhDs; 70% had been teaching physiology for more than 10 years and that a similar percentage (80%) were experienced in teaching three or more physiological systems. In addition, 20% of the current participants had additional educational qualifications. In the opinion of the physiologist educators surveyed, 60% felt that although current medical students found it more difficult to understand basic physiology concepts and that, compared with students 5 - 10 years ago, their knowledge of physiology was more limited, the students nevertheless were better able to integrate their physiology knowledge with clinical subject knowledge. The respondents were divided as to whether or not current medical students found it more difficult to understand pathophysiology than those students 5 - 10 years ago. In addition, nearly 60% of the staff surveyed were concerned that physiology, as a cognate discipline in South Africa, was under threat due to medical curricular change. Discussion and conclusion. The results of the survey provide a snapshot of the current state of medical students’ knowledge and understanding of physiology in South Africa from the educators’ perspective. It would be interesting to know whether the concerns raised by the participants reflect an international trend. Physiologists and curriculum planners/organisers need to take cognizance of the issues highlighted in the current study.

New metacognitive model for human performance technology

Addressing metacognitive functions has been shown to improve performance at the individual, team, group, and organizational levels. Metacognition is beginning to surface as an added cognate discipline for the field of human performance technology (HPT). Advances from research in the fields of cognition and metacognition offer a place for HPT to expand its theoretical base. This article summarizes current theories of metacognition and presents a new metacognitive model for HPT.

All Together Now? Building Disciplinary and Inter-Disciplinary Research Capacity in Social Work and Social Care

Amidst calls for a ‘step change’ in the quality of social work and social care research come contrasting claims for inter-disciplinarity on the one hand and disciplinarity on the other. Drawing on the findings of a UK-based consultation, this paper situates the challenges of research capacity development in contexts of wider preoccupations with research impact and inter-disciplinarity, and the problematic distinction between social work as a research discipline and social care as a discipline-transgressing research field. Arguing that both disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity are best examined as epistemic and social phenomena, both are considered in terms of claims to knowledge, developmental trajectories, forms of social organisation and cultural practice, and contributions to contemporary knowledge markets. This analytic framework is used to scrutinise the diverse understandings of disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity, along with their opportunities and threats, brought by UK social work academics and cognate discipline representatives to the challenges of research capacity development. Contrasts and commonalities with wider contexts are highlighted. The argument concludes that disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity are co-dependent. Strategies for building social work and social care research excellence and impact will best succeed if they pay heed both to distinctive disciplinary needs and to enhancing cross-fertilisation, integration and collaboration.

Perspectives on higher education after a quarter of a century

Higher education is a field of study. It does not have an integral cognate discipline that defines its extent and borders. Contributions to understanding higher education come from, among others, sociologists, historians, political theorists, economists and students of science policy and cultural studies. These were the disciplines whose exponents were assembled by Burton Clark in UCLA to summarise for a wider audience the contributions their disciplines were making to scholarship and research into higher education in the early 1980s. This paper reviews these disciplinary approaches and Clark's reactions to them in the light of later developments in higher education and its study. It concludes by claiming that the contributors showed remarkable prescience in identifying many of the main developments in higher education studies over the following quarter of a century. It also asserts that although there has been a huge expansion in higher education studies since then, and they now have all the attributes of an academically respectable field of study throughout the world, they remain dependent on their foundation disciplines for their intellectual rigour.

Local Bimusicality among London’s Freelance Musicians

In his famous article titled The Challenge of Bi-Musicality,1 Mantle Hood set out case for a performance-based engagement with other music cultures. Suggesting that basic study and training which develops musical ity could not be achieved through more theoretical perspectives offered by musical analysis or criticism, he declared that the training of ears, eyes, hands and voice and fluency gained in these skills assure a real comprehen sion of theoretical studies (Hood 1960:55). Hood's perspective was reflective of more participatory approach towards understanding insider's view, which both ethnomusicology and its cognate discipline anthropology were developing at that time. This emphasis on a practical, hands-on immersion in other music cul tures has profoundly influenced a number of ethnomusicological studies, some of which will surface below.Yet, as I shall argue later, it would be wrong to construe bimusicality as being only preserve of ethnomusicologists: ability to move between different performance traditions has long been a necessary skill required of musical specialists, particularly those working in urban contexts, in a variety of traditions around globe. In this article I explore multifaceted relationship between ethno musicological concept of bimusicality and practical experience of musi cians working in urban contexts, particularly those working in and among various traditions frequently, if problematically, construed as Western. Delimiting such musicians concisely is difficult since differentiated urban environments in which they work, and wide range of styles with which they have opportunity to engage, inevitably give rise to a heterogeneous rather than homogenous group. My focus here is on those who I would de scribe as classically trained, freelance, professional musicians, notwithstanding

Business discourse: Old debates, new horizons

The aim of this introductory article is twofold: (1) to locate business discourse in the context of some of the most salient debates within its cognate discipline, i.e., business communication, thus acknowledging epistemological and methodological indebtedness; and (2) to encourage the discussion around a distinct paradigm for business discourse as a new Þeld of study by sketching out a Þrst analytical framework that draws on multidisciplinary research and promotes multimethod research. The article argues that the Þrst step towards a future multidisciplinary identity for business discourse depends on the operationalization of partnership research, i.e., collaborative research across associated disciplines. 1. Old debates: A Þeld in search of identity? In our earlier work, we deÞned business discourse as “talk and writing between individuals whose main work activities and interests are in the domain of business and who come together for the purpose of doing business” (BargielaChiappini and Nickerson 1999a: 2). We further pointed out that the interactants’ status was the decisive element that distinguishes professional from business discourse, in that the former but not the latter, would involve a lay person. Moreover, business discourse refers to spoken and written communication that usually takes place within a corporate setting, whether physical (e.g., a manufacturing organization) or virtual (e.g., telework). Within the remit (and word limit) of a position article, it is our intention to discuss the relevance of a business discourse approach to the analysis of communication in business settings. The signiÞcance of this move is best understood against the background of some of the ongoing debates within the broad Þeld of business communication, such as the related issues of disciplinary deÞnition and disciplinary boundaries and the discussions surrounding the plethora of methodological approaches that characterize the Þeld. We will be arguing

PSYCHOENDOCRINOLOGY: A Commentary

This article provides an outline of both the descriptive and the therapeutic sides of human psychoendocrinology. Attention is given to both the history and future prospects of the discipline. Examples are chosen from both basic and clinical science to illustrate the accomplishments and promise of the field as well as its relationship to its cognate discipline psychopharmacology and the dependence of both on progress in psychiatric nosology.