http://hdl.handle.net/11343/159 Mon, 14 Oct 2019 21:28:27 GMT 2019-10-14T21:28:27Z http://hdl.handle.net/11343/228901 Teachers’ perceptions and experiences of a performance and development process as a mechanism to support teacher development Elliott, Kerry Louise Despite policies and guidelines introducing teacher performance and development systems at a local, national and international level, current findings would suggest there is limited evidence that existing systems support teacher performance and development or that the major intentions of performance and development are the reality for some teachers. In 2012, the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership introduced the Australian Teacher Performance and Development Framework, to be used alongside national teacher standards, to support the development of teachers in all schools across Australia. As a process for identifying, measuring, and developing an individual's performance, the Australian Performance and Development Framework outline a cyclical process for teacher performance and development which included professional practice and learning, reflection and goal setting, and, feedback and a review. Fuelled by the introduction of the Australian Teacher Performance and Development Framework and a new mandatory performance and development process in Victorian schools, this study examined the perceptions and experiences of teachers at three government primary schools as they participated in an annual performance and development cycle. This study applied a mixed methodology and suggested that leaders perform a crucial role to the success fo performance and development and that there are several critical factors which promoted an effective performance and development process for supporting teacher development. The findings showed that effective performance and development helped construct a sense of professional identity for these teachers. A culture of learning and development with a focus on individual and collective improvement helped teachers feel connected and empowered, as learners, and to the process. These findings have implications for research, for the individual and collective nature of performance and development and for how processes may be designed that engage teachers in meaningful development. © 2019 Kerry Louise Elliott Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11343/228901 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11343/228899 Sonic recipes from a public kitchen: participatory Feminist performance art Espana Keller, Juliana This research proposes to explore and transform the kitchen as a sonic performative work and public site for art and social practice. A Public Kitchen is formed by recreating the private and domestic space of a kitchen into a public space through a sonic performance artwork as a series of creative propositions. The kitchen table is a platform for exploring, repositioning and amplifying kitchen tools through electronic and manual manipulation. In my research practice, this platform becomes a collaborative social space, where I investigate the somatic movement and sensory, sonic power of the repositioned kitchen tools. Through engaging the participants in deep listening methods for sonic awareness and in feminist participatory practices, I form a relational, resonant and communicative site, where new sonic techniques of existence are created and experiences shared. This thesis is built on a relational architecture of iterative sound performances that position the art historical, the sociopolitical, transforming disciplinary interpretations of the body and technology as something that is not specifically exclusively human but post-human. The thesis speaks through a creative practice that unfolds as a sharing of experiences through these propositions. I am also channeling the intra-personal; through the entanglement of my own personal cultural experience and diverse background, where language, meaning and subjectivity is relational to what it means to be human and to what is felt from the social, what has informed me from a multi-cultural nomadic existence and perspective. Through the medium of sound, I am investigating, emphasizing entities, ethics, social class and social political intervention in the process. This subjectivity illuminates how we move through the world, react to surroundings and respond to everything. It also proposes how the normative and hierarchical relations amongst human groups based on race, sexuality, social class and ability are always intimately entangled with the broader political economies/ecologies of which we are a part. The performance work establishes a scaffold for thinking about a range of ideas of what is felt through encounters with philosophy, sonic arts, feminist thought. It highlights labored bodies entangled with posthuman contingencies of food preparation, family and social history, ritual, tradition, social geography, local politics and women’s oppression. The human and non-human relation to machines and machine learning is enacted through intra-active entanglement; it represents an active pedagogy practice for organising and responding collectively to, the local. A noisy kitchen is felt as a musical sounding in the everyday rhythm of lived intensities. Agency is conjured through the doing-cooking of the kitchen to create a sonic recipe as the becoming of the human-machine relationship to uncover the paradigms that shape-shift performance, cross-fertilizing with technology and futurities of social robotics by finding ways forward in untangling the discourse surrounding robotic machines, humanoids and AI. This thesis focuses on an unpacking of a creative practice where resonating with agency and amplifying where the experiential is intensely experienced. A Public Kitchen is embedded in socio-cultural research where the artwork allows for human slippages, failures that form part of the work. A sonic recipe is a creative act that actively works as a strategy to cut across pre-established dichotomies and transverse hierarchies of power relations that organize diverse forms of life. In particular, it considers how feminist new materialism can be “put to work”, creating daring dissonant narratives that feed posthuman ethical practices and feminist genealogies. This research reveals what matters—a feminist struggle invaluable in highlighting and responding collectively to the local with a systemic understanding material phenomena in an immersive sonic performative installation. This research practice proposes to ignite and transform our social imagination and deactivate pervasive and dominating patriarchal ethico-politics. © 2019 Juliana Espana Keller Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11343/228899 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11343/228887 Screening for breath: identifying Aurkb as a novel regulator of lung development Ah-Cann, Casey Jordan The development of the lung is a highly regulated and complex process that is not fully characterised. Although there have been many studies into the development of the lung many of the mechanisms regulating lung organogenesis are still unclear. In recent years, the importance of epigenetic regulators in embryogenesis has been established but epigenetic control of lung morphogenesis is largely underexplored. I have developed a novel in vitro assay to grow embryonic lung stem cells. These cells, called pneumospheres express the early lung progenitor factor Sox9 and recapitulate the E11.5 lung throughout their time in culture. Pneumospheres can be genetically and chemically manipulated to assess the role of signalling pathways and genes-of-interest on lung progenitor cell self-renewal or differentiation. Using pneumospheres I performed a shRNA knockdown screen, targeting 130 genes involved in epigenetic regulation. Nineteen genes were identified in the screen and validated using in vitro and ex vivo culture systems to determine their role lung stem cells and branching morphogenesis. These experiments identified Aurora kinase B (Aurkb) as an interesting candidate gene. Aurkb exerts a dual role as a regulator of cell cycle and epigenetic control through phosphorylation of histones. Disruption of Aurkb either by short-hairpin RNA or by chemical inhibition in vitro abrogates growth of lung epithelial progenitor cells and causes defects in cell cycle, leading to an accumulation of cells in G2/M of the cell cycle. Conditional deletion of Aurkb in the embryonic lung, leads to a complete lack of lung tissue at birth and severe epithelial growth retardation can be seen as early as midgestation. Understanding the regulation of lung development will provide a better understanding of the lung organogenesis and how disruptions in normal biology can cause early lung diseases such as bronchopulmonary dysplasia or can have an impact on lung disorders later in life such as COPD or lung cancer. © 2019 Casey Jordan Ah-Cann Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11343/228887 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11343/228885 Performances of alkali-activated materials exposed to sewage aggressive environments rich in phosphoric acid Ren, Jie The acidic aggressive environments in sewage system constitute a severe chemical threat to alkaline cementitious concrete, which is one of the major construction materials. It is known that acids especially sulphuric acid, organic and phosphoric acid as well as their mixtures in sewage systems can result in severe corrosion of concrete, ultimately leading to reduced service life of these systems. As a promising alternative to ordinary Portland cement based materials, alkaline activated materials have become an increasingly popular construction material which have attracted considerable attention from both academia and industry. This is mainly due to their comparable mechanical properties, low carbon footprint, low creep and high corrosion resistance capability under acidic and sulphate attacks. However, the fundamental degradation resistance mechanism of alkaline activated materials, especially for alkaline activated ground granulated blast furnace slag and fly ash binders under phosphoric acid has been barely studied. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to conduct a series of experimental studies in conjunction with theoretical modelling to systematically investigate the fundamental degradation behaviors of alkaline activated materials with various slag to fly ash ratios under different phosphoric acid concentrations. The results from this study demonstrate that the degradation of alkaline activated materials under phosphoric acid conditions can be divided into two stages, including an early stage and a later stage. During the early stage, the degradation kinetic is mainly controlled by chemical reactions which can be theoretically modelled using Hill function, while the later stage degradation is dominated by diffusion process which can be modelled by using Fick second law as well as empirical power law functions. Further, during the early stage, there is an obvious induction phase during which there is no noticeable degradation depth, which is not present in OPC based samples. At this stage, alkaline activated materials are equipped with a high alkalinity capacity which seems to prevent a significant drop in the pH of pore solutions. This is evidenced by the microstructural measurements such as the leaching behaviors, the alkalinity capacity and scanning electron microscopic analysis. The delayed release of aluminum could lead to a higher structural stability which enables the precipitations of insoluble phosphates in the internal binder matrix, ultimately a delayed degradation in comparison to OPC based binders containing less aluminum rich phases. Furthermore, the experimental studies on the later stage of degradation of alkaline activated materials reveal that alkaline activated materials have better degradation resistance performance than that of OPC based binders in terms of mass loss, reduction in compressive strength and increment in degradation depth. In addition, experimental results reveal two optimum ratios at 50 to 50 or 60 to 40, slag to fly ash, in alkaline activated materials which display a better degradation performance than the other slag to fly ash ratios when exposed to the phosphoric rich environments. Finally, the developed theoretical model predicts that alkaline activated materials with a slag to fly ash ratio of 60 to 40 or 50 to 50 could potentially reduce the long term, such as 50 years, degradation depth by more than 70 percent under a strong phosphoric acid condition, such as pH at 2.0, as compared to their OPC based counterparts. © 2019 Jie Ren Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11343/228885 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z