Amy Clarke

This study investigated the impacts of integrating AI-generated podcasts into counselling education, examining both student and faculty experiences through a qualitatively-driven mixed-methods design. Early review of recent survey responses indicate that while faculty reported significant benefits, including drastic time savings and a positive shift in their role from content creator to curator, the student response was overwhelmingly negative. A qualitative analysis of survey data from eight students and three educators revealed a potential critical disconnect.
Faculty responses suggest that the AI tool improved the efficiency and quality of the pedagogical learning materials. Conversely, student responses suggest that they found the AI-generated voices to be “alienating” and “fake,” thereby hindering their comprehension and engagement. These early qualitative findings appear to corroborate with quantitative institutional data, which showed a marked decline in students’ overall satisfaction and their satisfaction with learning experiences and materials after the introduction of the podcasts. Implications of these findings will be discussed.

Open air museums (or living history museums, or outdoor museums) originated in the late nineteenth century out of the fear that folk architecture and traditional crafts were being lost to modernisation. These museums, which were typically created by transporting historic buildings and equipment from around a region or nation, were seen as a solution to this threat. The popularity of this museum type has not waned, and there are now a few thousand museums of this kind globally. Many received buildings donated by private individuals, as well as from local authorities needing to relocate structures to make way for new infrastructure or development. Though sometimes anachronous and spatially inaccurate, there is value in such buildings being grouped together, as it allows people to experience a region’s geography and history in one place. As with traditional museums, there is an assumption that the structures and artefacts at open air museums are ‘safe’, and will remain accessible to the public in perpetuity. 

This paper questions this assumption by looking to numerous global examples of open air museums that have either closed indefinitely or been dismantled and demolished, beginning with the Abbey Folk Museum (England, closed 1930s) and extending through to sites closed in the past decade. This paper reflects on the responsibilities of museum curators, and the (perhaps unreasonable) expectations of donors and the visiting public. The small-scale, volunteer-driven and not-for- profit nature of many of these institutions is highlighted, as are their precarious operating budgets. Finally, the future of structures held by defunct or at-risk museums is considered: should ‘authentic’ heritage structures relocated to these sites be treated differently than their reconstructed/replica structures? In raising these questions, this paper calls for a rethink of the open air museum model, and argues it was perhaps never the ‘solution’ it seemed to be. 

School sports houses have been a feature of the Australian school system for over a century, spreading from private boarding colleges and universities in the 1910s-1920s into the public system (both primary and secondary) to become nearly universal in the present day. While some schools implemented ‘houses’ as a way to encourage cohort bonding and to facilitate pastoral care, this approach—sorting students of all year levels into rival houses and using a points system to encourage competition—has also created an atmosphere of tribalism that now permeates the Australian schooling experience.

Since their inception, school sports houses in Australia have typically been named after prominent historical figures (local, national, sporting, religious and cultural), geographic features, native flora and fauna, mythical figures from the Ancient world, indigenous places and words, and the four elements (earth, water, air, fire). Many schools allocate a colour to each house, and since the 1970s it has become increasingly common to see the use of mascots (typically animals, but sometimes weaponry, meteorology or more abstract ideas like ‘courage’ and ‘determination’). Most Australians born in the post-war era have experienced sports houses themselves, or have seen this tribalism through the eyes of their children and grandchildren. It is a national and increasingly inter-generational phenomenon, and yet at its core the house system relies upon and encourages a kind of hyperlocalism that is triggered by specific combinations of names and figures, colours, and mascots.

This paper examines the cultural history of school sports houses in Australia (and particularly Queensland), and reflects on local, regional and national patterns of socio-cultural identity as expressed through what is essentially a modern form of heraldry. Data collected from over 450 Queensland public and private high schools reveals geographic and generational trends in house name selection and associated identity narratives and values. This research builds upon existing discourses regarding sporting and cultural identities in Australian history, and in doing so highlights the way local communities come to embody or adopt aspects of broader historical narratives through school sports. While of limited significance in isolation, these local performances of identity can be understood as parts of an Australia-wide network that has expanded with and reacted to socio-cultural developments over time. This allows new facets of debates concerning postcolonialism and sovereignty, globalism, environmentalism, gender, race, and Australia’s preoccupation with sporting ‘heroes’ to emerge.