Conference Presentations by Dr Zita Unger
While re-accreditation cycles place an administrative and financial burden on universities; the t... more While re-accreditation cycles place an administrative and financial burden on universities; the time and administrative costs to non self accrediting private providers are multiplied by the additional requirement to accredit courses in compliance with TEQSA's Threshold Standards. The challenge for private providers' internal governance bodies is to determine whether the administrative and financial costs of cyclic review and re-accreditation with multiple professional bodies and standards provide value for investment. This paper examines the ramifications of review and re-accreditation cycles for non self accrediting higher education providers and the learning curve facing their internal governance bodies.
Papers by Dr Zita Unger
Qualitative Research Journal, 2005
Mainstreaming Evaluation in Corporate Environments - Online
Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis: A Comparative and Critical Introduction – R. Wooffitt
The British Journal of Sociology, 2006
Ideology critique and the production of meaning : a critical approach to selected urban education material
Ideology critique, when applied by educational research to the ideational content of curriculum m... more Ideology critique, when applied by educational research to the ideational content of curriculum materials, has evoked negative connotations of partiality and bias, mis-representation of social reality, and ultimately, of untruth. This thesis attempts to assert a more positive sense of "meaning production" for curriculum critique and shift emphasis away from representation towards signification. Part 1 reviews the management of questions of ideology and education by the sociology of school knowledge and curriculum research. I argue in Chapter 1 that strategies of ideology critique, along structuralist and culturalist lines of difference, have inadequately addressed issues of critical subjectivity, hegemony, and social transformation that is posed by radical education. Four curriculum studies of text book analysis are discussed in detail, in terms of their attachment to the sociology of school knowledge and in terms of the "bias and balance" discourses that they produce. Meaning production is used to enhance, rather than displace, practices of ideology critique, in ways that the case study analysis seeks to develop. The urbanism kit that is analysed in Part 2 is undertaken as a means to ground these issues, rather than to render a consummate curriculum analysis. Critical reading of the case study materials in Chapter 2 is enabled by the urban theory of Manual Castells. His ideology critique of urbanism and reformulations of urban system, urban planning, and urban social movements, are utilised to the extent that theoretic productions of the case study materials in Chapter 3 are analysed in terms of their constitutive discourses, rather than in terms of determinations about whether they are biased or ideological. Chapter 4 examines this process of signification further. Our inquiry shows that not only are understandings about "the city" produced, but, discourses about knowledge-production and about individual subjects are set up at the same time. Analysis of the case study material also indicates that balance is not necessarily built-in as a result of a commitment to provide diverse expert opinion. This has implications for those practices of curriculum criticism and curriculum construction which attempt to locate and redress bias as well as promote critical thinking. The directions suggested here are disposed towards problematising categories of analysis, especially categories such as "society" and the "individual", and towards opening up questions about what is produced as knowledge
Book Review: Discourse Analysis
Evaluation Journal of Australasia, 2010
B o o k r e v i e w s 57 Discourse Analysis is the second edition of an introductory textbook tha... more B o o k r e v i e w s 57 Discourse Analysis is the second edition of an introductory textbook that forms part of Blackwell’s Introducing Linguistics series. It has been extensively revised and updated from its 2002 edition, with expanded discussion and new material (including new sections on metaphor, framing, stance and style, multimodal discourse and Gricean pragmatics). The approach taken in the book is that discourse analysis is not a discipline, or subdiscipline of linguistics, but an interdisciplinary research method that sets out to answer many kinds of questions about language, about speakers, and about society and culture. Non-linguists can be drawn into the study of language through discourse analysis, and linguists can be drawn into interdisciplinary work. Johnstone considers a variety of approaches, including critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, interactional and variationist sociolinguistics, ethnography, corpus linguistics, and other qualitative and quantitative methods. The book retains and expands useful student features, including discussion questions, exercises, and ideas for small research projects, which will be well appreciated by readers. Each chapter ends with an excellent summary and set of suggested supplementary readings. Most importantly, there are abundant practical examples and detailed descriptions of the results of discourse analysts’ work throughout the book, which makes the concepts accessible and engaging in what otherwise is an often-dense narrative. The first chapter, ‘Introduction’, approaches discourse analysis as a set of methods of inquiry, not as a sub-field of linguistics or literary/ cultural studies. Calling on ‘discourse analysis’ rather than ‘language analysis’ underscores an interest in what happens when people draw on the knowledge they have about language, instead of focusing on language itself as an abstract system, and an interest in systematically taking things apart or answering questions from multiple perspectives. The book is thus framed around the presentation of discourse analysis as a heuristic comprising six problem areas:
Strategic training evaluation
Assessment, evaluation and improvement of university council performance
... Zita Unger (bottom) is an evaluation consultant and is founder and Director of Evaluation Sol... more ... Zita Unger (bottom) is an evaluation consultant and is founder and Director of Evaluation Solutions, Melbourne. ... terms of structures and functions was an original approach to evaluation of boards in higher education institutions in the US taken by Chait, Holland and Taylor (1996 ...
Evaluation plus: Beyond conventional evaluation
Performance Improvement, 2003
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Conference Presentations by Dr Zita Unger
Papers by Dr Zita Unger