Our study addresses a systemic issue facing higher education – a lack of rigorous educational research alongside new technology-assisted ways of teaching and learning. The issue highlights the disciplinary disconnect as many academics do not research outside their discipline, yet are tasked with educational modernisation through trying out new educational technology. Addressing this issue, we present our conceptual framework, the course transaction space (CT-space), and use it to analyse the impact of an intervention we designed that involved the use of regular online pre-lecture quizzes in a university mathematics course. The aim of the intervention was to optimise the effect of distributed (spaced) practice on long-term retention. Our findings suggest that a relatively small change in course instruction can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of educational exchange. Our analyses of data from multiple sources provide evidence that our intervention resulted in a sustained increase in the frequency of students’ engagement with the content, increased attendance of lectures, and improved grades. Additionally, we discuss the impact of our intervention on the quality of student engagement with reference to competence related beliefs and self-efficacy. Finally, we discuss how our intervention can be used in other contexts for supporting an evidence-based approach to teaching and learning. Implications for practice or policy For teachers designing an intervention with the aim of improving students’ learning engagement during a course of tertiary study, we advise incorporating a series of frequent low stakes online quizzes with low level of difficulty. For students, these will act as an incentive, enabling improvement in the frequency of their learning engagement and its quality. The course transaction space (CT-space) model can be used to explore and analyse the impact of a variety of interventions introduced in tertiary courses through the lens of engagement.
Other people's life stories fascinate us, and we seem to have an urgent need to record these stories. As writers continue to experiment with the formal and aesthetic possibilities of rendering their subjects' lives in ever new ways, the modes of writing about historical lives have diversified enormously, and continue to do so. The proliferation of public interest in accounts of historical lives in recent decades-captured by such buzzwords as "biography boom" or "memoir craze"-is reflected in the similarly expanding field of life-writing studies, as scholars regularly re-conceptualise their object of study to keep pace with the rapid evolution of life-writing forms and to incorporate the new insights their discipline has yielded. Within this context, the term "life-writing" itself has emerged to reflect the diverse work conducted in the field. It has now come to stand for a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but also letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, court proceedings, . . . marginalia, nonce writings, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms. 1
The introduction to this special issue on 'Life Writing and Celebrity' outlines the numerous shared concerns of life-writing scholarship and celebrity studies as two of the currently most vibrant fields of cross-disciplinary Humanities research. Providing summaries of the individual contributions and highlighting the connections between them, it points towards the valuable insights to be gained from initiating a more rigorous theoretical and methodological dialogue between the two fields.
Biographical novels about historical women artists have been experiencing a veritable boom in recent years. Written mostly by women, they can be understood as women authors’ attempts to reach out across time (and often, space) to other “artistic” women whose lives “speak to us” today. It has long been a key insight of historical fiction research that a historical novel reveals more about the time in which it was written than the time in which it is set. As such, it can be assumed that contemporary novels about historical women speak as much to twenty-first-century conceptions of femininity as to particular historical moments of female subjectivity. This paper will compare two novels about historical women artists: Janice Galloway’s Clara (2002) about nineteenth-century German pianist Clara Wieck-Schumann and Priya Parmar’s Exit the Actress (2011) about Restoration actress Nell Gwyn. While based on historical facts, both these novels use the greater freedom of fiction to depart from biographical conventions. It will be demonstrated that although they resemble each other on the discourse level, employing shifts in the narrative perspective, conspicuous typography, and graphic elements, they differ markedly in the biographical and fictional subgenres in which they participate and, hence, in their gender politics.
Drawing on gender-sensitive approaches to biographical fiction, this paper examines fictional representations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Carola Oman's Miss Barrett's Elopement to Laura Fish's Strange Music. With a focus on their depiction of her profession, the novels are read as part of the poet's afterlife and reception history. This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under Grant T 589-G23."Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously," Virginia Woolf wrote in her review essay "The New Biography." 1 While her observation was addressed to the biographer, Woolf herself demonstrated that for the novelist it was quite permissible, as well as profitable, to mingle fact and fiction in the same work. Her biographical novella of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, Flush: A Biography, provides an imaginative account of not only the dog's experiences and perceptions but also, indirectly, those of its famous poet-owner, whom critic Marjorie Stone introduces as "England's first unequivocally major female poet" (3). Elizabeth Barrett Browning's professional achievements as well as her personal history secured her public status as a literary celebrity, which lasted, in varying forms, well beyond the nineteenth century and inspired several other biographical fictions before and after Woolf's canine biography.Fictions about "notable" historical women abound in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and have attained particular prominence since the 1990s, with the critical and commercial success of novels such as Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde. 2 Their hybrid nature renders them a fascinating field of critical inquiry from a biographical angle as well as from a gender studies point of view. Adopting a gender-sensitive approach to biographical fiction, this essay will examine six novels about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and locate them in the context of the poet's reception in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries: C.
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