Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which digital storytelling can be utilised as an autoethnographic practice to develop the confidence of young Indigenous people. It explores the link between self-expression through creative practice and social and emotional wellbeing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will investigate the ways in which autoethnography can develop the confidence of young Indigenous people through self-expression. This paper will present the first outcomes of a digital storytelling project implemented in a local high school in urban Australia, working with Indigenous students. Armed with handheld digital cameras and equipped with basic skills in storyboarding and filmmaking, the students will participate in a guided digital storytelling program over 18 weeks from July to November 2008. Building on previous research undertaken with youth at risk in Vietnam, the project adopts and expands on creative development practices such as PhotoVoice utilised by development practitioners in the Asia-Pacific region. Through the presentation of digital stories created by Indigenous students participating in the project, this paper aims to explore the ways in which creative practice can be utilised to foster the social and emotional wellbeing of young people.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines theoretical and pedagogical issues affecting Indigenous Australian education. It also analyses comparative dimensions, mostly Melanesian. The major objective is to analyse issues of education and pedagogy and to suggest forms of reconciliation between Western and Indigenous forms of education.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines theoretical and pedagogical issues affecting Indigenous Australian education. It also analyses comparative dimensions, mostly Melanesian. The major objective is to analyse issues of education and pedagogy and to suggest forms of reconciliation between the dominant Western or mainstream education and Indigenous forms of education. The work is grounded in ethnographic case studies, Australian and Papua New Guinean, and wide-ranging interaction and consultation with Indigenous people and their community organisations.

We can learn a great deal from Indigenous cultures, however their knowledge and methodologies are often ignored or discounted by metropolitan, industrial societies. Conversely, a theoretically and methodologically ethical and inclusive anthropology is increasingly vital as Indigenous people are often suspicious of, even opposed to, anthropological research (L.T. Smith, 1999).

The provision of the most appropriate education for Indigenous students is extraordinarily complex and presents an enormous analytical and professional challenge. The implications are profound; continued ignorance and arrogance from dominant cultures will lead to even greater resentment, social alienation, poverty and divisiveness. The presentation and paper explore and analyse these issues in broad historical and localized forms, each informing the other.

Paper short abstract:

Using critical reflection, this paper investigates the nature of teaching and learning social anthropology in the context of empowering senior students to become excellent tutors. It draws on autobiographical experience, student evaluations, colleagues' opinions and the tertiary teaching literature.

Paper long abstract:

This paper uses the tool of critical reflection to analyse my previous five years of working with senior students to enhance the quality of first year tutorials for both my first year students and their tutors (my senior students). As Brookfield (1995) notes, the possible sources of reflection for such a study are fourfold. They are formed from my autobiographical experience and also my student's eyes (through an analysis of five years of feedback forms collected for the last three years after each tutorial). It also includes my colleague's experiences (drawing on the results of targeted quality improvement intervention into tutoring with a selected first year course) and the theoretical literature on tertiary teaching. This large body of data is analysed within the historical context of changing tertiary teaching fashions in New Zealand (Robertson and Bond, 2004). It also considers the nature of social anthropology as a distinctive disciplinary context of anthropological knowledge and how this affects learning outcomes for tutorials. In doing so I take a critical view of Neumann, Parry and Becher's (2002) characterisation of anthropology as a 'soft, pure' knowledge system in their typology of teaching and learning in disciplinary concepts. My findings suggest the importance of including a political economy perspective into any critical reflection on course design, the value of including individual teacher ideologies into any tutorial teaching programme and a summary of the most successful initiatives produced from teaching and learning with my tutors.

Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork conducted among expert clinical listeners at a London Hospital, and following the recent burgeoning of anthropological work on auditory culture, this paper explores listening as an ethnographic methodology. It examines the implications which an acoustic ethnography might have for anthropological theory more generally.

Paper long abstract:

The paper is the product of a year of ethnographic fieldwork carried out at the cardiology unit of a London Hospital. The research involved participant observation with a group of expert stethoscopic listeners or 'auscultators', following them as they went about their work and taught the subtleties of their skill to medical students. The aim of the research was to examine the value of auditory knowledge and acoustic skill within the sensory economy of a modern Western hospital - an environment which theorists have tended to characterise as being pervaded by visual methods of clinical gazing. The research methodology involved an experiment in turning a medical technique of investigation into an ethnographic one. It took the stethoscope as a model, and organised brief moments of focused listening to structure an engagement with hospital life. Stethoscopic listening also provided the key juncture at which social interactions between doctors, patients and students were analysed. The resulting written ethnography was informed by a growing body of research in social anthropology which concerns itself with sensory perception and, in particular, with auditory culture. The proposed paper thus uses ethnographic material to inform and shape a discussion of listening as an ethnographic technique, and to raise questions about the sensory underpinnings of anthropological fieldwork and theory. As anthropologists become increasingly conscious of and sensitive to sensory politics, what will be the consequences for forms of anthropological knowledge? This paper seeks to turn the stethoscope back on the body of anthropological theory itself.