In brief
Drawing
out kids’ feelings and ideas
An international drawing conference, Drawing is Everything, hosted a group local junior primary students from Gilles Street Primary this month in what was possibly the most active part of the conference. Scores of children transformed UniSA’s Kuarna Building studios into a hive of expressive activities using everything from wool, sparkles, glue, paint, and textas to communicate in big pictures something about their day. The Drawing your Day event, where children were asked to focus on special and everyday activities in their lives, was designed to let kids know how drawing can become a vibrant form of communication and creative expression.
Words
on Words
When was the last time you really thought about the language most of us use: English? Many of us take it for granted, but students of Dr Mia Stephens and Dr Ioana Petrescu have delved into what we say and write and come up with Fuse or Fracture: English as a world lingua franca, a collection of essays about English. For the students involved – Karen Bath, Ann Reu, Christopher Franks, Gabrielle Gutsche, Amie Horner, Michael Noble, Benjamin Pitman, EL Benn, Robert Bloomfield, Jodie Duffield, Terry Glouftsis, Andrew Graue, Linda Jarrett, Fleur Lewis, Joanna Morandin, Justin Meldrum, Amanda Murphy, Mark O’Grady, John Pike, Karl Quaas, Gill Ratcliff, Iain Spalding, and Mary-Anne Virgara – the exercise covered the entire publishing process including research and writing, editing, collaboration and joint production. Fuse or Fracture is an internal UniSA publication used as a reader in Dr Mia Stephens’s linguistics courses.
Work recovery – more than a rest on the couch
With figures just out that indicate Australians now work the second
longest hours in the OECD, PhD researcher in psychology, Dr Peter Winwood,
could not have picked a better time to study the effects of work stress and
which factors may help our recovery and avoid burn-out. Dr Winwood is taking
a closer look at work, recovery from work fatigue between shifts, and which
behavioural factors may help people to minimise work stress. He says work
fatigue can lead people to give up some activities that could be much more
valuable to them in the long term than they realise. Dr Winwood believes
hobbies, exercise, or any activity that is personally satisfying may help
people to relax much more than TV and a lie on the couch.
You can contribute
to his study by completing this survey at
www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/TellUS2/SurveyForm.asp?ID=2344.