Books published by Common Ground Publishing

In the midst of an epochal shift in the communications environment, rapid cultural change and transformations in knowledge, there is an urgent need for bold educational responses. While responsibility for educational resourcing belongs to the broader community, the extent and quality of pedagogical change ultimately rests with teachers. Student learning is dependent on teachers developing knowledge and pedagogical practices. Central to our educational response to the changed environment is teacher professional learning.This scholarly book draws on research which investigated the impact on teachers of their engagement with the New London Group's multiliteracies theory. Four Australian teachers of primary school students committed themselves to exploring multiliteracies theory and to putting their learning into practice in diverse classroom settings.Anne Cloonan, then a literacy policy and project officer at a state Education Department, explores the context, processes and impact of film-driven participatory action research action learning, in which the teachers researched their learning and practice over a period of eight months. She describes new ways of working shoulder to shoulder with teachers to develop resources and policy advice while deepening their professionalism. She offers contextualised examples of teachers extending their print-based literacy pedagogies to incorporate multimodal literacy practices.This book will be of interest to teachers, educational consultants, policy makers, and researchers concerned with: agentive collaborative teacher learning; innovative policy and resource development; enhancing teachers' professionalism; and the operationalisation of multiliteracies theory.

The social arrangements with which we are familiar work fairly well for most of us most of the time. We work, we earn, we pay taxes. We engage professionals when we need their advice. We expect that there will be doctors whose expertise can be relied upon if we are ill, that there will be schools staffed with knowledgeable teachers and courts presided over by fair judges. We vote for politicians who offer policies we favour. We require government to provide us with security, protect our freedom and assist those of us who cannot help themselves.These social arrangements rest on some shared assumptions and values. They assume that people are, by and large, free, self-determining persons who respect each other's rights and independence, and co-operate rationally and productively with each other. Our social arrangements are challenged when this assumption does not hold. What policies should government have in place for people who are not independent, or not rational, or not co-operative, or not productive? If, by some catastrophe, through accident, disability or mental illness, you became such a person, how should you be dealt with by professionals and government services? If, on the other hand, you are a professional, how should you go about making decisions for clients who are not well placed to make decisions for themselves? Are there standards of professional ethics that can deal with this situation? Are there ethical standards that can be applied by managers of service organizations, or by policy writers, or by government officials? Are there ethical standards that concerned citizens should demand of government, of service organizations and of professionals who provide for vulnerable people?Drawing on the stories of people with disabilities and their service providers, Paul Jewell explores ethical theories, tests their practical application, and offers strategies essential to practitioners, managers, policy-makers and professionals who provide services to people with disabilities.

This edited book is the result of collaboration between five countries in the Asia Pacific Region. It is auspiced by Childwatch International, a global research network.It explores the socio-cultural context of children's participation in the five countries, in response to the obligations on these countries, as signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. While the legal mandating of participation has significant implications for children's lives and adult-child relations, research in this area has been limited, particularly cross culturally.

This book provides students and scholars with a collection of thought provoking contributions focusing on the nexus of globalization and responsibility. With a concise introduction to the globalization debate and an overview of business corporations' role in globalization's multifaceted processes, the essays in the volume address a wide range of pressing issues concerning challenges and opportunities for responsible business and management. Some provocative arguments in the essays touch upon the dimension of morality and the issue of potential and actual (in)justice resulting from the global economic development. Incorporating respect for human rights into corporate governance and making it a worldwide standard practice is of pivotal importance. To this end, contributors in this book argue that corporate governance should be made more transparent by expanding accountants' roles to include a report on corporate activities relating to human rights protection. But despite the various fundamental challenges for business and management, such as addressing how to combat poverty and injustice, it is also argued with reference to Spinoza's Ethics that profit-seeking in business should not be regarded as inherently immoral or unethical. Other essays in the book further explore the complex social-psychological foundation and conditions for responsible individual behavior in relation to business ethics. Drawing on Maslow's famous "Hierarchy of Needs" the psycho-moral foundation of self-transcendent behaviour is further explored as the difficulty of taking the perspective of "Others" is discussed. The book ends with a positive note suggesting that the egoistic utility maximization seeking motive, the bedrock of the conceptualization of the homo oeconomicus, may in fact provide the key for ensuring responsible individual behavior if it is embedded in the idea of love.

Our interdependence with plants entails symbiosis that is not only biological but also cultural, social, and linguistic. Posthuman Plants addresses our diverse entanglements with plants in everyday life through the prisms of posthumanist, multispecies, ecocritical, and ecocultural theory. This volume asks: how does the reconfiguration of human "being" as inherently permeable affect our perceptions of and relationships to plants-those "others" that have been regarded historically as passive elements of the landscape and constructed as the mute foils of animality? This book contributes to the ever-increasing debate about how we perceive plants and their influence on what it means to be human, more-than-human, and other-than-human. It argues that reconceptualizing the botanical world requires seeing, feeling, and understanding plants as intelligent, active, and sentient agents. Posthuman Plants is divided into five sections: Affect and Reciprocity, Heritage and Digitality, Art and Vegetality, Poetry and Vegetality, and Plants and the Senses. Although some of its content is strongly focused on the vegetal life of the southwest of Australia where the author resides, other countries, bioregions, places, and contexts figure into the analysis. The chapters are presented as essays on diverse subjects, all organized around the common strand of rethinking plants through culture, art, and poetry. In re-imagining the vegetal, Posthuman Plants draws from ethnographic, auto-ethnographic, historical, and literary sources and develops plant-based theoretical models that blur disciplinary boundaries. This broadly-ranging work will be of interest to international audiences, especially researchers in the fields of environmental studies and ecological humanities.