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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether mandatory disclosure of information accompanying the sale of real estate achieves its aim of informed purchasers.

Using a case study approach focused on mandatory disclosure in South Australia data was collected from interviews and focus groups with key personnel in the property industry involved in the production of information required to fulfil vendors’ disclosure obligations.

The authors found that purchasers are ill-served by a long and complex form of mandatory disclosure with a short time frame that prevents the use of the information provided. Without good form design and increased digital affordances provided by the cadastral and conveyancing systems, mandatory disclosure is insufficient to ensure minimisation of information asymmetry between vendor and purchaser.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first Australian qualitative study that examines the utility of mandatory vendor disclosure in real estate sales and the first to consider the impact of the digitalisation of cadastral and conveyancing systems upon the efficacy of mandatory disclosure regimes.

This study aims to explore students’ interests in multimodal texts by focusing on videos of social issues.

Data from 50 students in a first-year multilingual composition course were analyzed in two phases. Phase One examined 14 students’ reasons for self-selecting videos for multimodal analysis essays in one section of the course. Phase Two explored 50 students’ selected videos in four sections of the course across four semesters. The videos were classified as either problem- or solution-oriented to examine the students’ interests.

Analyzing the students’ responses in Phase One revealed that most of the selected videos included solutions to a social problem, and the students advocated the compelling ways in which the characters therein dealt with those problems. The findings for Phase Two revealed that the students’ selections were equally divided between problem- and solution-oriented videos. Nevertheless, a gradual increase in the selection of solution-oriented videos was observed over time.

A significant implication of this study is that it can help teachers expand their understanding of interesting and meaningful texts and make more engaging and effective instructional decisions.

The study contributes to the literature on text selection as it highlights students’ inclination toward what type of learning content interests them.

This chapter describes the Bornlearning ^® Academy (BLA), a school-based family engagement program predicated on the notion that families come to the table with knowledge and skills and can support children’s learning by building on what they are already doing. It takes place in a school building within the families’ school district, and it is a six-workshop series that utilizes materials available for free at bornlearning.org, a United Way Worldwide public engagement campaign. The goal of the BLA is to increase parents’/caregivers’ understanding of their role in the education process of their children and to facilitate familiarization and establishment of positive experiences with the school personnel and the school district for the children and their families. Survey data demonstrated that parents/caregivers from a range of backgrounds enjoyed and learned from various BLA workshops. Gains on content questions indicated the BLA attendees learned, and responses indicated that attendees both intended to use what they learned at the workshops in their own interactions with their children and actually followed through on those intentions.

The physical health of patients with severe mental illness is often neglected or managed poorly, and regular review of physical health is now being strongly advised. The study described here explored the feasibility of such reviews in a community mental health care setting. A small group of patients was invited to attend for blood tests and a brief physical examination. The findings from the study suggest that the monitoring of patients with severe enduring mental illness is an important but difficult task. It will require careful planning and the engagement of patients, general practitioners and community mental health teams.

The criminal justice system uses oversimplified stock narratives that place women who kill into limiting categories of ‘bad’, ‘mad’ and/or ‘victim’. These narratives deny women's agency by portraying their actions as lacking humanity, rationality and/or intentionality. Many feminist scholars argue that new narratives are needed to recognise women who kill as fully human, volitional subjects. This chapter uses the case of Maria Barberi to examine why and how defences founded on a victim-based agency fail. In 1895, Barberi killed Domenico Cataldo in a Manhattan barroom after enduring months of psychological, physical and sexual abuse. Her defence was grounded in the unwritten law – a widely held belief that people had the right to avenge their honour (when impugned by infidelity, seduction or sexual assault) with lethal violence. The case went through four stages: the initial trial, resulting in a murder conviction and death sentence; a nation-wide clemency campaign; an appeal; and a retrial, resulting in an acquittal. Throughout this process, Barberi's agency was undermined by negative stereotypes of gender and ethnicity, the political goals of women's rights activists, and Barberi's own self-interests. Ultimately, this case demonstrates that agency-based narratives are both difficult to deploy and desperately needed.

Using survey data from the 1993 Wilson Task Force on Gender and Equality in the Legal Profession and qualitative data from in-depth interviews with female law professors, we examine the social basis of professional authority in Canadian law school classrooms. Our quantitative and qualitative findings are consistent with classic sociological work and contemporary anecdotal accounts that suggest women experience greater difficulties achieving professional authority. In the law school classroom, however, we find that stratification within the profession and stratification within the knowledge base further undermine the professional authority of female law professors.