title: Investigating the relationships between student well-being and perceived environmental sustainability: Student environmental attitudes as a moderator

authors: Sheeran, Zane

subjects: sustainability

abstract: Purpose: Higher education institutes (HEIs) face two key challenges: low levels of environmental sustainability and students with low levels of well-being. This paper suggests that, because of the interconnectedness of sustainable development goals, there may be a single solution to meet both these challenges, namely, increased sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to test whether higher perceived sustainability is associated with higher well-being, moderated by student attitudes towards the environment.
 
Design/methodology/approach: This study followed a quantitative design. Students enrolled at a New Zealand university completed an online questionnaire (n = 292) measuring student perceptions of their HEI’s environmental sustainability, their attitudes towards the environment and their well-being. Regression and moderation analyses were conducted to test hypothesised relationships. 

Findings: Students’ sustainability perceptions positively predicted student well-being. However, student attitudes towards the environment did not moderate this relationship. 

Originality/value: This study contributes to an emerging field by investigating the relationship between sustainability and well-being. The findings suggest HEIs may be able to improve their performance in multiple ranking criteria (student well-being and environmental sustainability) by focusing on sustainable practices and supporting students in their personal sustainability efforts.

text: Investigating the relationships between student well-being and perceived environmental sustainability: Student environmental attitudes as a moderator Purpose: Higher education institutes (HEIs) face two key challenges: low levels of environmental sustainability and students with low levels of well-being. This paper suggests that, because of the interconnectedness of sustainable development goals, there may be a single solution to meet both these challenges, namely, increased sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to test whether higher perceived sustainability is associated with higher well-being, moderated by student attitudes towards the environment.
 
Design/methodology/approach: This study followed a quantitative design. Students enrolled at a New Zealand university completed an online questionnaire (n = 292) measuring student perceptions of their HEI’s environmental sustainability, their attitudes towards the environment and their well-being. Regression and moderation analyses were conducted to test hypothesised relationships. 

Findings: Students’ sustainability perceptions positively predicted student well-being. However, student attitudes towards the environment did not moderate this relationship. 

Originality/value: This study contributes to an emerging field by investigating the relationship between sustainability and well-being. The findings suggest HEIs may be able to improve their performance in multiple ranking criteria (student well-being and environmental sustainability) by focusing on sustainable practices and supporting students in their personal sustainability efforts.

year: 2025

title: Inscribing traumatic experience: Allusion and satire in poetry

authors: Rose, Brittany Melinda

abstract: That rape trauma is unspeakable is a damaging myth for those who experience sexual assault. The work of poets Pascale Petit, Fiona Benson, Vanessa Place and Patricia Lockwood showcases the broad range of strategies that women can employ in poetry to speak about rape and rape trauma within a rape culture. This thesis asserts that poetry is a particularly effective mode through which to express, possibly convey, and definitely inscribe the traumatic experience.

One aspect of the difficulty of speaking or writing about rape is the constraints of language, the grammatical bind of subject and object; the impossibility of the phrase “When I was raped,” as though “I” was the one actively making decisions. What makes it difficult is the bitterness of the phrases “victim” and “survivor”, particularly given these labels apply directly to the event itself, rather than the aftermath in which this thesis is interested. Thus, the use of phrases with high lexical density such as “those who have experienced rape,” or the neologism “endurer” which turns the verb into noun.

This thesis begins with reference to the body of theoretical and scientific knowledge which asserts a connection between mind, body and self in the experience of trauma, and draws attention to the social framework within which rape poetry is written. Throughout, there is a discussion of the personal biography of the studied poets, and the ways in which raped bodies speak through fragmented, figurative and imagery-rich language. In this thesis, it is not the event of rape itself that is of interest, rather the experience of subsequent trauma which seeps into the mind and body of a rape victimised woman, the wounded body.

As a literary device, the wound as metaphor for pain and trauma is well established. Chapter One extends the wound image in order to explore the distancing effect of allusion employed by Pascale Petit in The Wounded Deer: Fourteen poems after Frida Kahlo, and Fiona Benson’s Vertigo & Ghost. While Petit relies on the biographical detail of Frida Kahlo to create an analogous inscription of the experience of trauma, Benson draws on mythological allegory to convey the specific experience of rape trauma, and the fear that trauma endurers embody in the wake of such an event. In continuing the wound imagery, Petit’s approach is considered comparable with the idea of the callous as there is a thick layer of hardened skin between writer and audience. In the callous approach to writing the rape experience, Petit opts for a masking of the personal, while Benson’s approach is categorised as one that blisters after the burn—it is confessional. Throughout this chapter, and the thesis as a whole, there is an exploration of the ways in which poetry can mimic the disruption to temporality which is experienced during a trauma flashback, and the ways in which sensory-rich imagery is bound to any expression of the experience.

Chapter Two surveys the landscape in which we laugh at rape. From the misogynist, to the feminist, the rape joke acts a site of subversion, particularly for poets. Rape culture is explored in reference to popular culture and stand up comedy, before a critical lens is applied to a close reading of the symbolic violence inherent in the format and content of rape jokes in Vanessa Place’s You Had To Be There: Rape Jokes. The internet, and online culture is an ever present thread in the work of Place (as this is where she drew her material from), and in Patricia Lockwood’s Rape Joke. The ways in which rape culture at large plays into personal and individual confession or disclosure of rape is evident in the responses to Lockwood’s “viral” Rape Joke poem, as well as in the content itself where the damaging psychological impact of victim blaming is evident. While Lockwood’s tone lends itself to satirising victim blaming, it also exists within the framework whereby women who are raped are subsequently silenced and disbelieved, complicating notions of subversion and perpetuation of the patriarchy. The voice of the patriarchy is illustrated throughout Place’s onslaught of hate speech rape jokes, and a discussion of the role of the reader/listener/audience in participating in making meaning of rape culture follows.

This thesis is closed with a sequence of poems entitled & therefore bodies. The sequence is written from the raped body using similar techniques of allusion and humour as discussed in reference to Petit, Benson, Place and Lockwood. The techniques are employed in order to inscribe a version of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of rape. The sequence of poems seeks to speak an individual rape trauma as experienced amongst misogynistic social messaging in the context of contemporary New Zealand rape culture.

text: Inscribing traumatic experience: Allusion and satire in poetry That rape trauma is unspeakable is a damaging myth for those who experience sexual assault. The work of poets Pascale Petit, Fiona Benson, Vanessa Place and Patricia Lockwood showcases the broad range of strategies that women can employ in poetry to speak about rape and rape trauma within a rape culture. This thesis asserts that poetry is a particularly effective mode through which to express, possibly convey, and definitely inscribe the traumatic experience.

One aspect of the difficulty of speaking or writing about rape is the constraints of language, the grammatical bind of subject and object; the impossibility of the phrase “When I was raped,” as though “I” was the one actively making decisions. What makes it difficult is the bitterness of the phrases “victim” and “survivor”, particularly given these labels apply directly to the event itself, rather than the aftermath in which this thesis is interested. Thus, the use of phrases with high lexical density such as “those who have experienced rape,” or the neologism “endurer” which turns the verb into noun.

This thesis begins with reference to the body of theoretical and scientific knowledge which asserts a connection between mind, body and self in the experience of trauma, and draws attention to the social framework within which rape poetry is written. Throughout, there is a discussion of the personal biography of the studied poets, and the ways in which raped bodies speak through fragmented, figurative and imagery-rich language. In this thesis, it is not the event of rape itself that is of interest, rather the experience of subsequent trauma which seeps into the mind and body of a rape victimised woman, the wounded body.

As a literary device, the wound as metaphor for pain and trauma is well established. Chapter One extends the wound image in order to explore the distancing effect of allusion employed by Pascale Petit in The Wounded Deer: Fourteen poems after Frida Kahlo, and Fiona Benson’s Vertigo & Ghost. While Petit relies on the biographical detail of Frida Kahlo to create an analogous inscription of the experience of trauma, Benson draws on mythological allegory to convey the specific experience of rape trauma, and the fear that trauma endurers embody in the wake of such an event. In continuing the wound imagery, Petit’s approach is considered comparable with the idea of the callous as there is a thick layer of hardened skin between writer and audience. In the callous approach to writing the rape experience, Petit opts for a masking of the personal, while Benson’s approach is categorised as one that blisters after the burn—it is confessional. Throughout this chapter, and the thesis as a whole, there is an exploration of the ways in which poetry can mimic the disruption to temporality which is experienced during a trauma flashback, and the ways in which sensory-rich imagery is bound to any expression of the experience.

Chapter Two surveys the landscape in which we laugh at rape. From the misogynist, to the feminist, the rape joke acts a site of subversion, particularly for poets. Rape culture is explored in reference to popular culture and stand up comedy, before a critical lens is applied to a close reading of the symbolic violence inherent in the format and content of rape jokes in Vanessa Place’s You Had To Be There: Rape Jokes. The internet, and online culture is an ever present thread in the work of Place (as this is where she drew her material from), and in Patricia Lockwood’s Rape Joke. The ways in which rape culture at large plays into personal and individual confession or disclosure of rape is evident in the responses to Lockwood’s “viral” Rape Joke poem, as well as in the content itself where the damaging psychological impact of victim blaming is evident. While Lockwood’s tone lends itself to satirising victim blaming, it also exists within the framework whereby women who are raped are subsequently silenced and disbelieved, complicating notions of subversion and perpetuation of the patriarchy. The voice of the patriarchy is illustrated throughout Place’s onslaught of hate speech rape jokes, and a discussion of the role of the reader/listener/audience in participating in making meaning of rape culture follows.

This thesis is closed with a sequence of poems entitled & therefore bodies. The sequence is written from the raped body using similar techniques of allusion and humour as discussed in reference to Petit, Benson, Place and Lockwood. The techniques are employed in order to inscribe a version of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of rape. The sequence of poems seeks to speak an individual rape trauma as experienced amongst misogynistic social messaging in the context of contemporary New Zealand rape culture.

year: 2021

title: Cultural diversity and identity discourses in the design and implementation of the New Zealand curriculum key competencies: a Bernsteinian analysis

authors: Glogowski, Sonia Theresa

subjects: Culture

abstract: The key competencies as a curriculum construct have appeared in several national curricula from the early 2000s. Many have their origins in the Definition and Selection of Key Competencies Project (DeSeCo), commissioned by the supra-national Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A number of international critiques have highlighted tensions between neoliberal ideologies that underpin the key competencies, and broader socio-cultural and social justice issues within their respective countries (e.g., Crick, 2008; Sjøberg, 2016; Takayama, 2013).
This research investigated who and what influenced the design and implementation of the key competencies in the 2007 New Zealand Curriculum, and how students’ cultural diversity and identities were considered as part of this. Data for this case study were collected from three sources: interviews with key policy officials and academic consultants six years after the launch of the official curriculum; analysis of policy documents and discussion papers from government archives, and focus group interviews with teachers from two schools seven years into implementation. Bernstein’s (2000) theory of the pedagogical device, was used to focus analysis on the agents, influences, debates and events that impacted on the design and implementation of the curriculum. Fraser’s (1989) needs’ discourse theory was used to examine interpretations of cultural diversity and identity, and the implications of implicit valued attitudes and behaviours of the key competencies.
Findings indicated that in the New Zealand educational policy context, the roles and interactions between agents and processes in the fields of production and reproduction were more ‘fluid’ and consultative than Bernstein’s (2000) structuralist model would suggest. This may be reflective of New Zealand’s small population and more informal collaboration between agents in different fields. The development of this curriculum prioritised the ‘process’ of understanding curriculum through consultation and feedback, compared to previous curricula which were more focussed on curriculum as a ‘product’.
New Zealand’s socio-political climate, and its bicultural Treaty of Waitangi, appeared to impact on how the key competencies were conceived, and how student diversity and identity were interpreted at different points in the curriculum design and implementation process. Interviews with key policy officials and academic consultants revealed that cultural diversity was largely associated with ethnicity, and in particular, differences between indigenous Māori and Pākehā (New Zealand European). Less attention was given to the concept of multiple identities and intersections between ethnicity, socio economic class, gender and so on, and how these might influence interpretations of the key competencies. This was despite evidence of early discussion papers highlighting these complexities.
At the curriculum implementation level, Bernstein (2000) argues that schools and teachers can often ‘reproduce’ middle class values and expected behaviours through ‘invisible’ pedagogical practices, with little awareness of potential disjuncts for disadvantaged groups. Yet he also states that this is not necessarily deterministic, and the finding for the two school focus groups demonstrated this. Despite no evidence that student diversity was a specific aspect of their professional development on key competencies, the teachers discussed some complexities of student diversity in their schools and how the key competencies might be interpreted in different ways. However, given the case study schools were considered to be particularly ‘diverse’, this type of discussion and consideration may not be typical of other New Zealand schools.
The findings support the notion that the New Zealand curriculum key competencies were ‘weakly classified’ and ‘strongly framed’ (Bernstein, 2000). This means a high level of interpretation was located with school leaders and teachers, within the context of a permissive curriculum and thus presents both opportunities and risks.
This case study highlights the importance of agents in every field understanding the complexities and implications of diversity in education. In addition, if the key competencies genuinely seek to enhance both vocational and social justice outcomes for a more cohesive and equitable society, then education for diversity would seem to be important.
This research contributes new knowledge in relation to the process of curriculum design, highlighting the impact of a unique socio-political context on the interpretation of a curriculum construct, and the implications of ‘valued’ attitudes and behaviours of the key competencies on diverse students. It provides an example of how Bernstein’s (2000) theory of the pedagogical device can be used to identify important influences and processes that impact on the different stages of a curriculum design and implementation process. It also illustrates how the device can be usefully complemented by another theory, in this case Fraser’s (1989) needs discourse theory, to examine more closely the discourse that relates to a particular lens of the research.

text: Cultural diversity and identity discourses in the design and implementation of the New Zealand curriculum key competencies: a Bernsteinian analysis The key competencies as a curriculum construct have appeared in several national curricula from the early 2000s. Many have their origins in the Definition and Selection of Key Competencies Project (DeSeCo), commissioned by the supra-national Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A number of international critiques have highlighted tensions between neoliberal ideologies that underpin the key competencies, and broader socio-cultural and social justice issues within their respective countries (e.g., Crick, 2008; Sjøberg, 2016; Takayama, 2013).
This research investigated who and what influenced the design and implementation of the key competencies in the 2007 New Zealand Curriculum, and how students’ cultural diversity and identities were considered as part of this. Data for this case study were collected from three sources: interviews with key policy officials and academic consultants six years after the launch of the official curriculum; analysis of policy documents and discussion papers from government archives, and focus group interviews with teachers from two schools seven years into implementation. Bernstein’s (2000) theory of the pedagogical device, was used to focus analysis on the agents, influences, debates and events that impacted on the design and implementation of the curriculum. Fraser’s (1989) needs’ discourse theory was used to examine interpretations of cultural diversity and identity, and the implications of implicit valued attitudes and behaviours of the key competencies.
Findings indicated that in the New Zealand educational policy context, the roles and interactions between agents and processes in the fields of production and reproduction were more ‘fluid’ and consultative than Bernstein’s (2000) structuralist model would suggest. This may be reflective of New Zealand’s small population and more informal collaboration between agents in different fields. The development of this curriculum prioritised the ‘process’ of understanding curriculum through consultation and feedback, compared to previous curricula which were more focussed on curriculum as a ‘product’.
New Zealand’s socio-political climate, and its bicultural Treaty of Waitangi, appeared to impact on how the key competencies were conceived, and how student diversity and identity were interpreted at different points in the curriculum design and implementation process. Interviews with key policy officials and academic consultants revealed that cultural diversity was largely associated with ethnicity, and in particular, differences between indigenous Māori and Pākehā (New Zealand European). Less attention was given to the concept of multiple identities and intersections between ethnicity, socio economic class, gender and so on, and how these might influence interpretations of the key competencies. This was despite evidence of early discussion papers highlighting these complexities.
At the curriculum implementation level, Bernstein (2000) argues that schools and teachers can often ‘reproduce’ middle class values and expected behaviours through ‘invisible’ pedagogical practices, with little awareness of potential disjuncts for disadvantaged groups. Yet he also states that this is not necessarily deterministic, and the finding for the two school focus groups demonstrated this. Despite no evidence that student diversity was a specific aspect of their professional development on key competencies, the teachers discussed some complexities of student diversity in their schools and how the key competencies might be interpreted in different ways. However, given the case study schools were considered to be particularly ‘diverse’, this type of discussion and consideration may not be typical of other New Zealand schools.
The findings support the notion that the New Zealand curriculum key competencies were ‘weakly classified’ and ‘strongly framed’ (Bernstein, 2000). This means a high level of interpretation was located with school leaders and teachers, within the context of a permissive curriculum and thus presents both opportunities and risks.
This case study highlights the importance of agents in every field understanding the complexities and implications of diversity in education. In addition, if the key competencies genuinely seek to enhance both vocational and social justice outcomes for a more cohesive and equitable society, then education for diversity would seem to be important.
This research contributes new knowledge in relation to the process of curriculum design, highlighting the impact of a unique socio-political context on the interpretation of a curriculum construct, and the implications of ‘valued’ attitudes and behaviours of the key competencies on diverse students. It provides an example of how Bernstein’s (2000) theory of the pedagogical device can be used to identify important influences and processes that impact on the different stages of a curriculum design and implementation process. It also illustrates how the device can be usefully complemented by another theory, in this case Fraser’s (1989) needs discourse theory, to examine more closely the discourse that relates to a particular lens of the research.

year: 2020