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In this paper I address educational matters that challenge academic and scholarly "givens" so as to enrich knowledge. This acts in two ways to alert educators to the Eurowestern enculturization of knowledge and to propose some useful insights. Firstly, I make a personal scholarly narrative about the situation of the un-named native informant in postcolonial times. I call this a "subjective academic narrative" to highlight that cultural stories are all subjective and personal narratives even when (maybe especially when) they claim to be scholarship that arises from disinterested data collection. Through the stories that are told we come to a view of the native informant that needs reconsideration. Secondly, this paper looks at such stories, at postcolonialism and at decolonization of knowledge, asking us to look anew at what we think of as black and white. Throughout I interpolate quotes from relevant narratives that admit their fictional genre. This paper considers how it is very startling to question the givens of Eurowestern knowledge structures when we see anew the foundations upon which they lie. In surveying this, I suggest that it is not sufficient merely to identify the colonised mind in the workings of the academy: it is also necessary to do something about introducing change. There is no way to recover an unchanged idealised past once colonisation has occurred. Today postcolonialism issues a challenge to the once geographically and now electronically colonised as well as the colonisers. It is to see how they can transform themselves into a culture that can reinstitute elements of the past in a culture that has been both traumatised and enriched by colonisation. This is a massive challenge as cybercolonisation occurs with its inevitable globalisation of cultures into EuroAmerican ways of being, thinking and knowing.

By focussing on PhD supervision as well as creativity, this paper explores how the artefact and exegesis PhD offers an opportunity to bring creative activity together with academic debate and intellectual rigour. In this context, the latter does not justify the former nor interpret it in an academic and theoretical way. Rather, acting together, the artefact and exegesis bridge the Cartesian binary, offer new models of knowledge to the academy, and enrich the artistic practices of the practitioners themselves. The creative practitioner thus brings to the academy new dimensions of what knowledge itself consists of and how this contributes to learning. Because this disputes the regular academic templates, it challenges the academy itself. The methodology I employ in this paper is one of narrativity that I call the "subjective academic narrative", it practices the theory of academic knowledge as personal and draws together the Cartesian binary of the personal and the intellectual.

This paper proposes that the WWW is able to be fruitfully understood as a research tool when we utilise the metaphor of the cabinet of curiosities, the wunderkammer. It unpeels some of the research attributes of the metaphor as it reveals the multiplicity of connectivity on the web that provides serendipitous interactions between unexpected materials thus bringing new ways of thinking about a given research topic. It explores how the singular research journeys may express themselves so differently that they find a comfortable space for a definition only within an academic cabinet of curiosities. Yet these differences are also made available through utilising an academic search engine in the WWW because it doesn't literally obey the instruction you have given it. I give examples of methodologies and theories that I have found to be apposite for such serendipity. I show that the narrative of the research journey is a significant contribution to knowledge through explicating a subjective academic narrative in an auto-ethnographic methodological framework.

Teaching and the student experience are interlocked. This paper takes a personal look at the pleasures and pressures of teaching in contemporary higher education. In doing so it adds to the definition of teachers' work in higher education, surveys some of the creative and positive sides of University teaching and shines a light upon the impact of increased commercialisation and managerial approaches upon academic work. It focuses upon the teaching and learning activities that academics undertake in the service of the university, including the research that adds to and updates their own knowledge, and hence underpins their teaching, so as to enable and enrich the learning journeys of their students. This paper has been written as a personal narrative, as what I have come to call a "subjective academic narrative". The "subjective" refers to acknowledgement of the inevitability of the personal being an integral part of research; the "academic" refers to the analytical and the intellectual ambience in which university research takes place; and the "narrative" refers to the story, that is, the way in which we re-tell all of our research. Above all, this paper contributes to a sense of understanding some of the elements of teaching that are involved in student engagement.

This paper explores some of the ways in which our insights into the pedagogy of postgraduate supervision may benefit from understanding some of the attributes of psychotherapy. It proposes that psychotherapy involves teaching and learning processes that can be fruitfully compared with the idealised pedagogical model of the dialectic. It develops insights into postgraduate supervision as pedagogy by interrogating the intersection of teaching and learning with some aspects of psychotherapy. In doing so, it shows how those pedagogical aspects of psychotherapy can enable a deeper understanding and richer practising of postgraduate supervision. This paper works within a model postulated by Gregory Ulmer. In his development of an idea that there is in academic writing the self and the researched, the conscious intellectual semiotic and that arising from storytelling, Gregory Ulmer surveys the idea of "mystories." This word encompasses the self, the story and the mystery of this. I propose my own version of this as the "subjective academic narrative." (A bibliography is included.)

The position of this paper is to further the discussion on what constitutes academic assessment in the PhD by artefact and exegesis. In doing so, it explores some of the ideas that arose in setting up the PhD in creative writing at Swinburne University of Technology. Thus, I: (1) survey some of the questions that arise about the journeys made by the candidate, supervisor and examiner of the PhD in creative writing; (2) introduce discussion about what constitutes academic knowledge with particular reference to the PhD in writing at Swinburne University of Technology, Lilydale Campus; (3) bring to the fore multiple possibilities in understanding possible conceptualizations of legitimate scholarly, intellectual and cultural research; and (4) survey some ideas about research and/as creativity. In doing so, I provide the basis for discussion of the dynamic nature of research, and situate this discussion within the framework of assessment.

Six generations ago, my Celtic forebears came to Australia as convicts and invaders displacing Indigenous peoples. As a scholar today, I am interested in how Indigenous knowledge remains a challenge in Australian Universities even in this postmodern and postcolonial moment. This paper recognises the need to extend discussion about how Indigenous people might be facilitated within the academy to bring their knowledge models into the university and its traditional dominant knowledge systems. This paper looks at Practice-Led Research (PLR) as a way of supporting the transition of Indigenous community scholars into university postgraduate courses. It explores how PLR may contribute to an appropriate entry point into postgraduate studies for some Indigenous practitioner-candidates who have significant life experiences and narratives and/or productions of artefacts that act to replace the breadth of undergraduate credentials. Indigenous people are facilitated in bringing their knowledge models into the university and the academy when we act upon being inclusive rather than exclusive regarding the explication and definition of knowledge within the academy. In accepting and acting upon the concept that traditional forms of knowledge are extended by non-traditional Indigenous forms of knowledge, we also enrich the scholarly conversation about how alternative forms of knowledge can add dynamism to the academy.