Papers

Edited Volumes

Asia Pacific Media Educator, Issue 18 December 2007, Narrative and Literary Journalism Special Issue

Narrative or literary journalism has often been treated in journalism courses as either a speciality or an historic oddity. However, with the changing nature of journalism innovative narrative approaches to both news and features must be taken more seriously. An early 1990s research project at the St Petersburg Times in Florida showed that readers preferred news in narrative style and today’s newspapers and magazines present an array of different news and feature styles that have taken journalism away from the traditional inverted pyramid approach that is still the mainstay of many journalism courses.This special issue of APME aims to explore both traditional approaches to the practice and teaching of literary or narrative journalism as well as the narrative impulse in daily news journalism.

Available online

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles & Book Chapters

O’Donnell, M & Schulz, L 2020, ‘Learning design meets service design for innovation in online learning at scale’, in S McKenzie, M Mundy, F Garivaldis & K Dyer (eds), The Tertiary Online Teaching and Learning (TOTAL) Guide, Springer (in press)

ABSTRACT: Carvalho and Goodyear (2018) have recently argued that design work in higher education has fragmented between administrative macro-level planning and the micro level work of learning design. They call for a new approach that connects “macro, meso and micro levels” of design thinking for educational change. This paper describes a series of macro, meso and micro design strategies that have been developed during the formative development of Deakin University’s “Cloud Campus” which delivers 160-degree programs to more than 15,000 students. This process has been informed by insights from design thinking with its specific focus on the user experience and involvement, and iterative, agile practices. This approach has allowed the development of a more in-depth appreciation of the experiences, expectations and “pain points” encountered by students at each stage in their learning journey. This case study will focus on the work to develop a number of specific postgraduate degrees using an open course platform, FutureLearn. The case study explores a four-part framework that integrates learning design, service design, team design, and portfolio design combining institutional, academic and professional approaches to the delivery of premium online learning. Evaluation of this approach has shown an improvement in student retention and is significantly impacting on teaching and learning practices at Deakin more broadly.

O’Donnell, M 2020, ‘Assessment as and of digital practice: building productive digital literacies’, in M Bearman, P, Dawson, & D Boud (eds) New Opportunities: Re-imagining Assessment in a Digital World, Springer 

ABSTRACT: Most modes of assessment in higher education, apart from paper-based exams, use some form of digital technology. However, assessments that scaffold, develop and assess integrated digital practices are much rarer. Even when using newer digital modes such as blogging, assessments often only replicate traditional textual practices with little attention paid to the specific multimodal, networked affordances of the medium. This paper will frame an approach to sustainable and productive digital assessment through integrated digital practice that emphasizes the reflexivity necessary for participatory networked communication. Such a framework seeks to move from the textual/compositional bias which governs much assessment practice in higher education towards genuine digital assessments which engage students as designers and assess their digital design literacies as well as their critical encounters with discipline knowledge.

Link to book

Bearman, M, Lambert, S, & O’Donnell, M 2020, ‘How a centralised approach to learning design influences students: a mixed methods study’, Higher Education Research & Development 

ABSTRACT: In online education, learning design has a significant role in mediating student experience. Centralised approaches to learning design provide students with a coherent teaching approach across online units but little is known about their impact on the student. Understanding the influence of these overarching learning design features may be a significant piece in improving online coursework at scale. In the context of this study, a central learning design team created learning design patterns within the FutureLearn platform, which teaching teams subsequently used to develop student-facing unit learning materials. A mixed methods investigation sought to understand how the learning design patterns influenced (1) student outcomes and (2) student experiences across units. We collected enrolment and institutional satisfaction data, conducted a qualitative survey (39 respondents) and interviewed 14 students. Quantitative analysis suggested that the approach may have improved retention although satisfaction appeared unchanged. The qualitative data indicated that, in general, learning design elements such as social media style discussion enable and constrain the student learning experience simultaneously. For example, stepwise approaches to learning help orient and guide students but may also be overly atomistic. This suggests both software choice and learning design patterns can have a mixed effect on the student experience. Course teams may wish to consider how teaching materials can maximise the benefits and mitigate against the foreseeable drawbacks of centralised learning designs and software platforms.

Link to journal

O’Donnell, M. 2015, ‘David Marr’s The Prince: faith, sex-abuse and narrative authority in literary journalism,’ Australian Journalism Review, 37:2

ABSTRACT: David Marr has worked as a journalist across television, radio, print and online media. Although this impressive body of work is necessarily varied, Marr has said his recent work was governed by three underlying purposes: “Making sense of complex events, turning evidence into narrative, tracking power in Australia” (Eisenhuth and McDonald, 2007, p. 35). This article looks at one of the recurring themes in Marr’s work: the role of religion in Australia. It examines the way Marr tracks the complex relationships of religious power by turning evidence into narrative, and the complex strategies that he employs to ensure narrative authority in a complex and controversial area. It focuses on The prince (2014), a biographical investigation of Cardinal George Pell and the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis. As both a broadcaster and an author, Marr’s work is performative and investigative. The paper argues that this strong performative voice in Marr’s work is a critical part of its success and an intrinsic part of the way he turns evidence into narrative, and provides a case study for the way narrative authority is exercised in literary journalism.

Download PDF

O’Donnell, M., Wallace, M., Melano, A., Lawson, R., & Leinonen, E., 2015, Putting transition at the centre of whole-of-curriculum transformation. Student Success, 6(2), 73-79.

ABSTRACT: This paper describes the development of a model for institution-wide curriculum transformation at the University of Wollongong (UOW). Transition – a curriculum-integrated approach that enables a smooth, supported shift into and through higher education and a successful transition from the university to the world of work and lifelong learning – is one of three key principles at the heart of the UOW Curriculum Model. This paper focuses on transition as a whole-of-curriculum design principle and the way this principle informs the other elements of the UOW Curriculum Model. It aims to extend the concept of “transition pedagogy” developed by Kift and colleagues  and to show how it has been used to inform our larger project of curriculum renewal.

Download PDF

O’Donnell, M. 2014, ‘Walking, writing and dreaming: Rebecca Solnit’s polyphonic voices,’ Journalism (Online First Version) 

American writer Rebecca Solnit has published 17 books since 1990, ranging from biography to cultural histories and art criticism to personal essays. Because her work is not easily classified and because she sits at the intersection of a number of different fields, her work provides a particularly interesting case study of hybrid practices in contemporary non-fiction. This article argues that her work is a form of literary journalism: polyphonic open journalism. Solnit’s work demonstrates traces and practices arising from her training as a journalist that she has combined them with writerly and activist practices that produce a distinctive open form of literary journalism. This article develops a detailed case study of Solnit’s Savage Dreams, her book-length investigation of the Nevada Test Site and Yosemite National Park, in order to show how her writing pursues a range of open-ended, associative strategies that create a choral effect: she moves from evocative to proclamatory to exegetical modes of writing as part of this multivoiced strategy.

Link to Journal

Link to Pre-Pub version

O’Donnell, Marcus (2014) “”If you can hold on…”: counter-apocalyptic play in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales,” Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 18: Iss. 2, Article 10.

Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006) presents a dystopic, post-apocalyptic, near-future through an aesthetic, which fuses contemporary postmodern screens with the phantasmagorical of traditional apocalyptic visions. This article argues that Southland Tales is an example of what feminist theologian Catherine Keller calls the “counter-apocalyptic” (Keller 1996:19-20). Through strategies of ironic parody Kelly both describes and questions the apocalyptic and its easy polarities. In situating the film as counter-apocalyptic the paper argues that the film both resists the apocalyptic impulse however it is also located within it. In this sense it produces a unique take on the genre of the post-apocalyptic film and a powerful fluid critique of the post 9/11 security state.

Available online

Latukefu, Lotte; Burns, Shawn; O’Donnell, Marcus; and Whelan, Andrew, Enabling Music and Journalism Students To Respond Positively To Adversity In Work After Graduation: A Reconsideration Of Conventional Pedagogies, Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 11(1), 2014.

ABSTRACT: Elite classical music programs continue to focus teaching in Western Classical traditions where the emphasis is on technical virtuosity in instrumental or vocal performance. In this paper we discuss group activities and assessments used in two Creative Arts disciplines (Performance and Journalism), at an Australian regional university, as examples of subjects which provide ‘real world’ experience in order to promote resilience and tenacity in students. We incorporate narratives collected from students in performance and journalism to illustrate the value of recreating the complex division of labour of real world art practice, famously described by Becker (1982), as part of the musical learning experience. The paper concludes with reflections on how collaborative assessments/teaching activities can be developed to ensure the delivery of resilience and tenacity as a threshold learning outcome in a classical music course.

Available online

Lotte Latukefu, Marcus O’Donnell, Shawn Burns, Janys Hayes, Grant Ellmers and Joanna Stirling, 2013, “Fire in the belly: Building resilience in creative practitioners through experiential, practice-led and authentically designed learning environments,” in Holmes, Jonathan (ed) The CALTN Papers Creative Arts Learning and Teaching Network, Australia, 2013. iBooks. https://itun.es/au/MSrzP.l

ABSTRACT This paper presents part of a study carried out in 2011 by researchers in the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. The purpose of the project was to customise nationally developed Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLO) for the Bachelor of Creative Arts degree in the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong (UOW). The participants in the study included both full and part-time faculty staff from the Performance, Graphic Design and Journalism programs at UOW. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were carried out to determine what each participant understood by the terms Standards and Graduate Qualities in relation to discipline and course specific outcomes. A common theme that emerged during interviews and focus group discussions was the need for graduates of the creative and performing arts to be resilient. A return to the literature on resilience showed a strong congruence between the principles of experiential and practice-based learning which, underlie programs in the Faculty of Creative Arts, and parts of the literature on building resilient professionals. This similarity in key elements in the literature on resilience and the literature on experiential, practice based learning would seem to support the argument of this paper that approaches to teaching described in this paper have potential to produce informed and creative students who will become seasoned, flexible resilient practitioners ready to contribute to their communities.

Download free conference iBook

O’Donnell, Marcus, 2009, Gay‑hate, journalism and compassionate questioning: journalism’s response to the Matthew Shepard case, Asia Pacific Media Educator, 19, pp. 112-125.

ABSTRACT The longevity of the media’s interest in the 1998 murder of gay Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard and the diverse ways in which the story has been approached and appropriated provides a unique window into some of the dynamics of the media coverage of both gay people and gay and lesbian hate crimes. In this article I will analyse two extended pieces of journalism, both of which attempt to go beyond the standard Shepard story. I will suggest that the literary style of layered juxtaposition and compassionate questioning adopted by JoAnn Wypijewski’s 1999 Harper’s feature is a more appropriate response to a complex, sensitive situation than Elizabeth Vargas’ investigative toughness in her 2004 20/20 report.

Available online

O’Donnell, M., 2008, “Stories of Jack: myth, media and the law,” Law, Text, Culture, 12, pp 188-213.

ABSTRACT This paper identifies three interacting narrative strands in the Australian media coverage of “Jihad” Jack Thomas. The character story of Jack interacts with a broader story of law and the story of the war on terror. Secondly it argues that a set of mythic motifs emerge in the texts and these are read against a set of news and popular culture events and figures. This second part of the paper focuses on the figure of the “sleeper” which became one of the key ways of describing Jack Thomas during the trial. This figure of the sleeper is linked to an ongoing set of figures in popular culture and to traditional mythic motifs such as the trickster.

Download pdf

O’Donnell M 2008 ‘Jack Bauer: The Smart Warrior’s Faustian Gift,’ Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, No. 128.

Abstract:Jack Bauer of the television series 24 is a highly charged contemporary mythic character who exists in powerful relationship to past and present real world and fictional figures. If Rambo was a classic Reagan era cinematic “hard body” (Jeffords 1994) Jack is the archetypal Bush “smart warrior,” in a post-Patriot-Act-era. However like Rambo, Reagan’s displays of bravado were decisive and successfully staged but George Bush has faced a multiplying set of uncertainties. This sets up a more complex set of relations between Jack, George W. Bush and contemporary masculinities than those presented by the Reagan era. Jack is both an emblem of unimpeded presidential will and a parable of its Faustian consequences.

Download pdf

O’Donnell, M., 2006, Blogging as pedagogic practice: artefact and ecology, Asia Pacific Media Educator, 17, 5-19.

ABSTRACT Much of the published discussion and research on blogs and teaching and learning in higher education focuses on evaluation of blogging as a communicative technique. This type of discussion largely assumes that successful integration of blogging into course delivery should be judged against a pre-existing and unchallenged pedagogical model. This paper argues that to leverage its full educational potential blogging must be understood not just as an isolated phenomena, but as part of a broad palette of “cybercultural” practices which provide us with both new ways of doing and new ways of thinking. The paper looks at the ways broader theoretical models associated with the development of the blogsphere might challenge or enhance current theories of teaching and learning. Spatial metaphors inherent in network models of blogging will be contrasted with the surface/depth model of student learning. The paper will argue that blogs should not be seen merely as a technological tool for teaching and learning but as a situated practice that must be brought into appropriate alignment with particular pedagogical and disciplinary practices. A model of blogging as a networked approach to learning suggests that blogging might achieve best results across the curriculum not through isolated use in individual units.

Available online

O’Donnell, M., 2004, “Going to the chapel media narratives of same sex marriage,” Pacific Journalism Review, 10(1).

ABSTRACT: The public discourse about marriage oscillates between a story of the ideal and a story of the everyday. A range of symbolic references or myths are mobilised in media stories about marriage, this is particularly evident in the polarised debate around same-sex marriage. The article identifies and explores three of the myths that underlie the rhetoric in same-sex marriage stories: 1) the evolution/revolution myth; 2) the apocalypse myth and 3) the myth of the child. It also argues that the production of such stories has effects on the realm of “intimate citizenship” (Plummer 1995) and that it is through this contested storytelling that new identities and their attendant rights become possible.

Download pdf

O’Donnell, M., 2004, “Star Wars: Patterns of change in community journalism at the Sydney Star Observer,”Australian Studies in Journalism, Issue 13

ABSTRACT This article traces the dynamics of change in Australia’s oldest surviving gay and lesbian publication, The Sydney Star Observer. It does not pretend to be a complete history of the publication but is a thematic study 0f change and self-definition, particularly interested in tracing the connections between visions of community, politics and market that have driven the Star. I have situated this analysis of the Star within the context of key works in the media studies literature on the gay and lesbian press. At different points in this study I will return to American examples in order to chart the sometimes contrasting, sometimes parallel trajectory of local and U.S. publications. I will argue that the Star has gone through regular cycles oriented to community access journalism and other cycles of pursuing traditional journalistic standards and conventions. Although much of the debate in the queer studies literature points to issues around commodification of gay identity through the gay and lesbian press I will argue that McKee’s (2002) notion of gay citizenship is a more satisfactory way of understanding the interactions of commercial and political gay and lesbian cultures.

Download pdf

O’Donnell, M., 2004, ““Bring it on”: the apocalypse of George W. Bush,” Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, No 113.

ABSTRACT: This article examines a number of cinematic, literary and journalistic texts in the context of what film maker Tom Tykwer calls the “aesthetic memory” of September 11. In particular it explores the way these narratives relate to deeply embedded Western cultural myths of the apocalyptic. The apocalyptic language of American Christian fundamentalism and the heroic narratives of Hollywood film are explored as twin influences on a powerful civil religion dubbed by Jewett and Lawrence (2003) “The Captain America complex”.

Download pdf

O’Donnell, M., 2003, “Preposterous Trickster: myth, news, the law and John Marsden,” Media Arts Law Review 2003/4

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship has explored the mythical function of news reporting. A diverse set of studies has shown that when news takes mythic shape it can perform both a community-building cultural role and/or a boundary-setting ideological role. This article looks at theories of myth and the way it functions in both journalism and law. This mythical understanding is contrasted with the widely held views of journalism and law as truth-seeking and fact-based institutions. The public identity of any plaintiff in a defamation case will necessarily come under challenge. The adversarial system necessitates the construction of competing tales of who that person is and how he or she customarily behaves. This process seems to have been exacerbated in the case of Sydney solicitor John Marsden, the longest running defamation case in Australian legal history. Powerful archetypal patterns shaped the telling of the Marsden story, which takes it well beyond the realm of the controversial and into the realm of the mythical. Mythical images of hero, villain, martyr and initiate are identified as operating in the Marsden trial and its reporting. But the image of the mercurial Trickster is identified as a key myth in understanding the Marsden story.

Download pdf

O’Donnell, M., 2003, “Hate Speech, freedom, rights and political cultures,”UTS Law Review, Issue 5

ABSTRACT Much of the international debate about the regulation of hate speech has been dominated by American first amendment jurisprudence. However a broad human rights approach, such as that emerging in Canada, allows due recognition to be awarded to concerns regarding both freedom of speech and the rights of minorities to live with full equality before the law. Australian jurisprudence has neither a strong freedom of speech nor a strong general human rights tradition although aspects of both have been developed in our common law. However Australia does have a strong set of commonwealth and state statutory laws which proscribe hate based vilification. Although the earliest of these laws is now over 20 years old, there is still a simmering public debate that questions both the need and wisdom of such provisions. Ironically given the strong freedom of speech values underlying much of the opposition to anti-vilification legislation one of the most striking contributions of the broader legal discourse created by anti-vilification decisions is in fact a significant contribution to an Australian jurisprudence on expressive rights.

Available online