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The purpose of this paper is to explore US students’ experience in for-credit, unpaid internships overseas with particular reference to their personal development, how they mobilised their knowledge across contexts, their learning as acquisition and as participation, and what they contributed. Students were thought likely to encounter three forms of cultural differences: national, workplace and academic.

In total, 17 students in communication, marketing or related fields from the USA were placed in four-week internships in Wellington, New Zealand. Outcomes for them were assessed first, via weekly discussions in which they described what they had encountered that week, second, via the presentations they gave at the end of the course to internship hosts and university staff on the subject of what they had found challenging and what they had learned and contributed, and third, through assessment of students’ formal written assignments to discover what they said they had learned and what they had contributed.

Students were surprised at how proactive their internship hosts expected them to be and at how little overt direction they received. While they valued their opportunity to make a contribution to their workplace, they found this challenging. Students gave instances of their learning both as individuals and in groups. No mention was made of academic cultural differences being an issue, but they often described the demanding nature of the national and workplace cultural differences that they encountered.

The study reports on only one cohort of students in one year, so a longitudinal study of further cohorts might provide different findings.

Insights are provided into how students saw themselves as changing from their involvement. Students described the challenges they faced, how they reacted to those challenges and their most important forms of learning.

This study aims to examine how well print‐literacy support being provided to New Zealand Modern Apprentices (MAs) is supporting their study and practical work.

The authors undertook a qualitative analysis of a database of 191 MAs in the literacy programme, then in 14 case studies completed 46 interviews with MAs, their employers, industry coordinators and adult literacy tutors to obtain triangulated insights into each MA's learning.

A strong sense of disjunction appeared between the work culture and the norms of being print literate which adult literacy tutors worked to draw apprentices into. Interviewees perceived a divide between practice and theory, or “doing the job” and “doing bookwork”, so that MAs were faced with trying to be two different kinds of people to succeed in their apprenticeship.

Future research may explore the ways in which differing value‐sets that apprentices encounter can compete with and undermine creation of knowledge and skills.

Desirably, apprentices' literacy tutors should possess sufficient familiarity with trade terminology and practices to help bridge the divide between trade and print‐literate assumptions and values to the extent possible.

This study questions Lave and Wenger's assumption that mastering knowledge and skill requires newcomers to participate fully within their community of practice. It proposes instead that varying values, which apprentices must come to grips with need to be better aligned with one another.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges faced by tutors who were providing remedial literacy support to New Zealand apprentices.

As part of a wider, triangulated study of employers, tutors, apprentices, and industry training coordinators, the author undertook a qualitative analysis of ten in‐depth interviews with apprentices’ literacy tutors.

It was found that three issues strongly affected what tutors could achieve for their students. First, tutors experienced substantial role ambiguity; second, apprentices were working in oral and experiential modes more than in print‐literate modes; and third, tutors found they had to employ an instrumental approach to their teaching in response to the situation they encountered. For example, this often meant serving as a scribe for their student rather than being able to focus on building the apprentice's print literacy.

It is possible that the difficult situation faced by these literacy tutors may be replicated in similar situations where funding is insufficient to build competence in literacy.

The constraints on what the tutors could actually achieve within tight funding limits meant that most students, while on track to successfully complete their apprenticeship, still remained of low print literacy.

The study reveals how tutors’ instrumental approach ran counter to their traditional ethical stance associated with building empowered, competent citizens who could participate fully in their civic, social and economic settings. It also shows how this literacy support enhanced the apprentices’ confidence, yet they probably became further reinforced in their little‐changed, oral work culture.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how student learning materials, such as textbooks, are becoming more oriented toward multi-modal approaches using visuality and orality. While such approaches may help students to understand and then to reproduce taught materials, the objective of this paper is to question whether they are serving to promote students’ critical literacy.

The paper assesses the character of current textbooks and other means of student support, such as online learning management systems, and assesses how well they seem able to promote the critical literacy that requires ability in “reading against” and “writing back”. The paper goes on to identify ways in which some parts of the university see orality as preliminary and subordinate to literacy-focused communication, but elsewhere, the pinnacle of students’ work is artistic or creative attainments with lesser need to write complexly literate textual works.

As a means of trying to resolve inherent tensions between differing pedagogical assumptions and methods in the university, the paper proposes ways in which Ong’s (1982, p. 36) nine communication characteristics of “orally based thought and expression” may be able to offer insights into challenges of improving students’ critical literacy.

The inherent academic tensions within the university still remain insufficiently theorized. For example, the humanities and social sciences (still) place much store on developing students’ abilities in critical writing, while disciplines such as design or creative arts are much more focused on students’ creative outputs. The paper contributes to a better understanding of such scholars talking past one another.

Scholars in different academic camps often note the discrepancies in how their relative pedagogical tasks are to be understood, but typically, it is not clear to them how they might better relate to other parts of the university. The paper aims to elucidate the nature of academic differences that often appear to exist to provide insights into possibly new ways of seeing everyday teaching and learning.

Ong’s insights into literacy and orality when viewed through a prism of tertiary teaching and learning provide a practical means whereby students and other university stakeholders can develop a better appreciation of the character of the modern university.

The novel use of Walter Ong’s model of literacy and orality provides fresh ways of seeing challenges and disputes within the academic community and suggests new ways of seeing students’ work and their teachers’ expectations of them.

Immigration by Pacific Island people into New Zealand has raised issues of equal access to a range of government and social services, including health information. This study reports on an investigation of access to information by women in Pacific Island cultures resident in Palmerston North. The New Zealand health environment is quickly changing and features market‐style reforms, greater accent on privately‐funded health schemes and an ideological shift in the direction of individual responsibility for one’s health. We describe what we found to be the major impediments to quality of health information accessible by Pacific Island women and conclude with proposals for changes and developments in public health communications.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the application of the diary‐interview method in the context of research on technological learning in the New Zealand dairy industry. Design/methodology/approach – The diary‐interview method was used to collect data from 8 farmers operating small or medium sized farms. The data gathered supplemented that collected through other means and was an important component of the case studies. Findings – The diary‐interview method was found to be highly appropriate for this project context because it allowed the researchers access to data that would not otherwise have been available (due to project constraints) and to a deeper degree of reflection from the interviewees. Research limitations/implications – The use of the diary interview method is time consuming and can result in complex data to be analysed. The method was only applied to 8 cases and while the experiences in each were positive there may be instances where its application would be inappropriate. Originality/value – The paper contributes to the literature on effective qualitative research and provides a detailed guide to the use of the method, as well as its limitations.

This paper outlines the process and context in which the Clinical Risk Modification Project at Sligo Hospital, Ireland was established and focuses on the issues encountered from conception to implementation. The project is based in the emergency and orthopaedic departments and is of two years duration. The stated aim of this project is to design and test a framework incorporating the core components of a workable Clinical Risk Modification programme in the context of an Irish general hospital. This involved making an explicit commitment to the principles of a learning organisation including blame free risk reporting, providing education and awareness training to promote understanding of clinical risk management locally, and developing a clinical incident/near miss reporting system to address clinical risk in both a proactive and reactive way.

Children comprise a significant component of developing countries’ populations, but are rarely present in a substantive way in urban decision-making. The first step toward changing the exclusion of children in urban planning is through analyzing the roots of the problem. Applying a critical approach, this research aimed to explore and challenge the structural patterns of society that exclude children and marginalize them in the case of Iran. The present study interviewed Iranian urban planning professionals in a range of roles, to explore the roots of the persistent failure to incorporate children’s voices. The findings revealed various obstacles to including children: on the one hand, these impediments consisted of broad macro-level barriers derived from the cultural context; on the other, obstacles included micro-level barriers associated with planning processes and the urban management system. Together these embedded sociocultural roots provide insights into mechanisms maintaining a top-down approach and preventing it from shifting to a more inclusive and child-friendly approach in planning modern Iranian cities.