Suchergebnisse

Purpose
– The teaching of English and academic writing in universities has largely been explored in western higher education settings by native English speakers from the UK, USA or Anglo-countries. The purpose of this paper is to use action research as a methodology to unravel local complexities in power relations within and beyond her ESL academic writing classroom, in a British Malaysian university setting.


Design/methodology/approach
– Power relations are examined in conjunction with the lens of Academic Literacies as a theory to think about teaching academic writing. The author's action research cycles allow her to gain an insider perspective on her students' academic writing and learning problems.


Findings
– Through the use of stories collected from diaries, interviews and letters, the author is able to make sense of their learning experiences in a way that connects the individual with the social.


Research limitations/implications
– Although time-consuming, the action research cycles helped the author to gauge what does or does not work in the classroom and how she can best improve her practice and the students learning, once she reflected on the findings. However, given the oppressive nature of hierarchical institutions that can deter the raising of issues, the limits of action research in making more widespread changes to teaching and English language usage in a former colony's institution are explored.


Originality/value
– It appears that the internal power relations between teacher and student can alter somewhat, although not massively, within the confines of one classroom, but there is less potential for effecting broader institutional change from the positioning of one junior lecturer.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of the participant in narrative research. Rather than a passive and static element, the participant often adds a vibrant, evolving and independent dimension to the process.


Design/methodology/approach
– The focus of this type of methodology is creative and unpredictable. Featured in the paper is the use of ethnographic fiction to examine and represent themes emerging from the data.


Findings
– The participant's contribution to narrative research introduces an unexpected quantity to the findings, which can redefine how questions, perspectives and direction of the research are framed.


Research limitations/implications
– The research process can be viewed as a reciprocal event, a space where both researcher and participant co-exist, redefine understandings and contribute to findings in collaboration. This process relies heavily on relationships, and may be impaired if participant and researcher do not develop a suitable rapport.


Practical implications
– This particular methodology can be unpredictable. As a creative process that depends on the development of sound personal relationships between participant and researcher, reliance on the researcher's insight, ingenuity and resourcefulness is essential.


Social implications
– This paper focuses on the participant as equal protagonist in the research process. It seeks to view the research process differently, highlighting how and why narrative research can be a significant journey of growth and discovery for the participant as well as for the researcher.


Originality/value
– Arts-based methodologies in qualitative research are still in a phase of exploration. The use of fiction writing in narrative research is a powerful way to explore issues in a way that connects researcher, participant and audience in meaningful discourse.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of doing more with writing and autoethnography as ethical, response-able and decolonizing practice.Design/methodology/approach– This paper is written in a playful, performative and poetic way and engages with the writings and ideas of Helene Cixous and Virginia Woolf as a conversation between them and the author.Findings– This paper suggests that an autoethnographic writing practice which is at once affective, critical and performative, holds the possibilities to engage in decoloniality.Originality/value– Engagement with the past and present legacy of colonial practice in education and ethnography is crucial if the author want to move beyond social justice and decoloniality as metaphor. The writing practice put forward is new and challenging in its push to do this.

Purpose
– Art-based research is about so much more than producing interesting, confronting, or pretty visuals: it is about the stories beneath, attached to, and elicited through the image. It is also about the experience of thinking about, capturing, and producing that visual. The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of participant-driven photo-elicitation interviews with six women working in sex work in Victoria, Australia.


Design/methodology/approach
– The author does this both through the women's narratives and through a researcher autoethnography. From her current position, the author (re)writes her experiences of undertaking this research in 2009, in order to highlight the uncertainty and confusion that can accompany visual research methods.


Findings
– The multiple places that photos can take participants, researchers, and readers is explored including empathy and understandings of how a single phenomenon (such as sex work) intersects with all other aspects of people's lives and cannot be explained through theory that does not take account of intersectionality.


Originality/value
– This paper is a unique exploration of two methods, one layered over the other. It contributes to learnings obtained through participant-driven photo-elicitation while also treating the researcher's experience of using this interview technique as data as well.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to gather research-stories, that is, the stories of the researcher themselves. The authors gather stories that situate researchers in their social, political, personal and professional contexts to learn about being a researcher in a University at this particular historical moment.


Design/methodology/approach
– The authors' stories began with the naive question – "What is it like to be a researcher in a University right now?". The authors asked this question of Julie White's (2012) "disposable academics" (p. 50); short-term and casualised staff with insecure teaching or research contracts. They asked White's (2012, p. 48) "academic infantry" the mid-career researchers who have felt the labour intensification of recent times. They also asked senior academics, established professors with established research histories and the security (they hope) of a steady track record and a list of external grants.


Findings
– The answers were not simple. They were stories of the pragmatics of managing the new academic scene; maintaining a research passion despite the pressures of new managerialism's focus on certain forms of efficiency, external accountability and monitoring; resolving the apparent losses of autonomy, academic freedom, support, security and academic dignity. The authors heard emotional and vulnerable stories, stories of personal investment and emotionally and physically risky and dangerous encounters. The authors learnt something of the complex business of negotiating personal and professional subjectivities.


Originality/value
– The authors heard emotional and vulnerable stories, stories of personal investment and emotionally and physically risky and dangerous encounters. They learnt something of the complex business of negotiating personal and professional subjectivities.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to provide a view of gender discrimination in Vietnam via the lens of thê diên – the Vietnamese face concept.


Design/methodology/approach
– The paper reports on results of a PhD exploratory study of the Vietnamese face concept thê diên. Semi-structured indepth interviews were conducted with 15 Vietnamese college teachers about the notion of thê diên in relation with several areas including gender.


Findings
– There are two ways in which gender discrimination is reflected in the participants' perceptions of thê diên. First, there is discrimination in terms of the different language used for men and women in terms of face. Second, there are different social expectations for men and women in terms of thê diên. Specifically, in order to maintain thê diên, men are expected to prove themselves as sources of the family income and social status. Meanwhile, women are only supposed to maintain their men's face.


Originality/value
– While the gender situation in Vietnam has been examined via various social, economical, and political perspectives, it has never been filtered through the lens of face, a cultural concept that deeply reflects living and behaving principles of a cultural community in a certain time.

Purpose
– Critical discussion of the social conditions that shape educational thinking and practice is now embedded in accredited teacher education programmes. Beneath beliefs that critique of educational inequality is desirable, however, lie more problematic questions around critical pedagogies, ethics and power. Emotional investments can work to protect habituated ways of thinking, despite attempts to move students beyond their comfort zone. This strategic process can shift attitudes and promote intellectual and emotional growth, but can also produce defensive reactions. This paper, a self-study in relation to an incident in a tertiary education programme, examines how student feedback on content and pedagogy positions teachers and learners. The purpose of this paper is to frame and reframe ways in which learner feedback to critical approaches might be read. The argument examines, through dialogue, the potential of disruptive teaching approaches for recontextualising both learner and teacher response. Such exploration articulates particular tensions and challenges inherent in critical teacher education pedagogies.


Design/methodology/approach
– This is a reflective practitioner piece – involving journaling and the use of dialogue – to explore a critical incident.


Findings
– This is an exploratory piece – the authors explore the workings of tension in critical/poststructural pedagogical work.


Originality/value
– The deployment of dialogue as a method and as a way of presenting key issues is somewhat novel. The paper works through quite complex terrain in an accessible and reasonably clear fashion.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore their experiences as singers in a community choir called Arrkula (a Yanyuwa word meaning "one voice") based in the School of Education at the University of Queensland as performance of song, self, social justice and seeing beyond boundaries. Performing at "gigs" inside and outside the university, Arrkula has been singing together since 2011, and despite an environment replete with neo-liberal ideals of individualism, competitiveness and capitalist driven research agendas, at the centre of their song remains a yearning for social connection, equality and renewed consciousness.Design/methodology/approach– The authors take an autoethnographic creative approach and bring performance of song together with their stories and interviews with choir members to link the "secret space" of the rehearsal with the "public space" of staged performances.Findings– The authors' aim is to think and perform the potential the voice and voices of Arrkula hold in terms of heightening senses of agency, provoking and empowering a pursuit of freedom and transforming lived worlds through song.Originality/value– The value of this paper is the authors' take up of Maxine Greene's (2005, p. 38) question, "if we can link imagination to our sense of possibility and our ability to respond to other human beings, can we link it to the making of community as well?" to consider what singing for democracy and difference might mean individually and collectively in the current climate of higher education.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to discuss the usefulness of Halliday's linguistic theory known as Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) in analysing qualitative data. In order to do this, it initially presents an overview of SFL, and then explains how and why four linguistic features namely, nominalisation, grammatical metaphor, thematic structure and lexical density are useful in examining qualitative data. The paper also discusses three social metafunctions of language known as the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual metafunctions which are significant for understanding and interpreting texts.Design/methodology/approach– This paper employs SFL as the main theoretical framework to discussing the usefulness of this linguistics theory in qualitative data analysis.Findings– SFL can be seen as a paradigm shift in linguistic theory moving away from the traditional focus on syntax to the inclusion of the interface between language and pragmatics. The focus of SFL is language in use. It deals with texts in social contexts, which is the main focus in qualitative data analysis. Thus, SFL provides both research tools and theoretical insights for understanding and interpreting texts.Originality/value– This paper provides significant insights into language which are crucial for understanding and interpreting texts in social contexts.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to discuss that in 2012, a small group of teaching staff in a new diploma of Education Studies program came together to critically reflect on teaching approaches that either hindered or encouraged learners to thrive in the transition environment in higher education (HE).


Design/methodology/approach
– This paper reports on the use of case writing as a methodological tool for engaging in reflexive inquiry in a HE cross-faculty setting; it also adds a further dimension to the work of (Burridge et al., 2010). The team used a systematic coding activity, known as "threading," to unpack over-arching themes that were embedded in each other's narratives.


Findings
– Throughout the two years of the project, 12 cases were presented on key critical teaching moments that the researchers had experienced. The themes varied and included topics like student reflections on why they found learning challenging, teachers' mixed emotions about failing students, difficulties for teachers in having to persuade students to read academic texts, teacher/student confrontations and student resilience amidst challenges linked to their personal and student lives.


Social implications
– A central theme to emerge from the research was that complexities arise for teachers when they are faced with learners who are apparently not suited to the career pathway they have signed up for.


Originality/value
– Through using a collaborative practitioner research framework, enunciating concerns were raised and different interpretations of the same incident were shared. The paper concludes that case writing can assist academics to be more informed of teaching approaches that lead to successful learning outcomes.

Purpose
– The purpose this paper is to consider festivals as sites for inquiry and learning.


Design/methodology/approach
– The research employed a pluralistic approach to the inquiry drawing on critical African-centred pedagogy, participatory action research, and performance as research inquiry. These arts-based research methods allowed insights to be gained in ways that were congruent to the arts and participants who enacted them. In total, 12 young people and six elders of diverse African heritage as well as two artists were participants in the research.


Findings
– The research revealed that the festival as a research methodology was both dialogic and performative and a rich site for the exploration of identity negotiation. Through these arts-based approaches the aesthetic elements often missed by traditional social science methods were highlighted as key in exploring acculturation socialistaion experiences and deconstructing exclusionist discourses emanating from the dominant culture.


Research limitations/implications
– The research affirmed the power of multi-modal approaches to research and the importance of evocative discourses in identity exploration and development.


Originality/value
– This research is the first known attempt to theorise an arts-based festival as a research approach in reference to enculturation and cultural memory.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to understand, more deeply, what the field of citizenship education stands for, in both theory and practice, historically and currently, and especially, in relation to the new Australian Curriculum: Civics and Citizenship. The authors have drawn on the backgrounds in social studies/social education, multicultural education, democracy education and Indigenous studies, in order to more deeply and profoundly understand "civics and citizenship education" and what it represents today in Australia.


Design/methodology/approach
– Methodologically, the authors see epistemological spaces as discursive productions from post-structural/post-modern and critical perspectives. These positions draw upon the notion of discourse as an absent power that can validate/legitimize vs negate/de-legitimize. The authors employ a meta-level analysis that historicizes the spaces made possible/impossible for those in deviant subject positions through a critique of the current literature juxtaposed with a presentation and analysis of "citizenship snapshots" of the authors. In this way, the authors attempt to move beyond conceptions of deviant citizenship based on curricular content and instructional method, and explore the realms of epistemology through the study of exclusion/inclusion.


Findings
– Reflecting the highly personal and individualized nature of the type of research required to be conducted in this aspect of national and personal identity, each of the authors draws here on personal experiences with aspects of citizenship that are not noticeably present in the current national curriculum. Specifically, the three "citizenship snapshots" at the heart of this paper's discussion and analysis – snapshots constructed by academics who both understand and resist the racialised/classed privilege bestowed upon them by nation states – are: "The boomerang citizen", "privileged and non-privileged citizen immigrants", and "Indigenous citizenship, sovereignty & colonialism".


Originality/value
– Drawing both on the current international scholarship on citizenship, power and social changes and the critical/post-structuralist qualitative methodology set forth by the authors, this work describes and problematizes the evolving "citizenship identities" in an attempt to critically assess the new civics and citizenship component of the Australian curriculum; understand the ongoing development of national, regional and global "trans/international" citizenship youth identities; and make connections between citizenship education, identity development and the global youth "occupy"/liberation movements.