Prospective elementary science teachers and biomythographies: An exploratory approach to autobiographical research

This study explores an approach to autobiographical research based on a notion of “outlaw genre” autobiography referred to as biomythography. Outlaw genres of autobiography resist the tendency of western autobiography to craft narratives that will ultimately link the life of an individual to a universalised person—someone to whom all readers can relate. In this study, photo essays are used to learn about prospective elementary teachers' stories of science and science education. The photo essays and the theoretical framework of “biomythography” helped us reflect on layers mediating teaching and learning in our courses. Implications of the study call for us to examine hegemonies extending from our students' personal histories as science learners, and through mythologies of teacher education. Alternative research frameworks and approaches, such as those represented in this study, might help science teacher educators explore myths undermining the preparation of future science teachers and learners.     

Boundaries and selves in the making of ‘science’

Relying on ideas from practice theory and critical autobiography, I use this article first to tell, and then to analyse, a story about trying to publish a book whose contents are in some ways marginal to what is normally considered science or science education. During the publishing process, what counts as science got tangled up with what counts as “credible” science, “marketable” literature, and academic competence. As a result, a book and a person (me) dedicated to expanding the boundaries of science also became contributors to those very same boundaries.     

Researching adult transformation as autobiography

Literature on adult learning research generally underplays imagination in its explanations of how meaning perspectives and life‐worlds are transformed. The use of autobiographical accounts, telling the story of stability and change, is proposed here as a promising source for research into adult learning. As literary texts, they make the investigation of imaginative forms such as metaphor, image and symbol both possible and warranted. This article raises the question about appropriate methods for this autobiographical approach to the study of adult transformation. An interpretive approach to the texts of research conversations in a co‐operative inquiry is appropriate for researching both their content as literature and the processes by which the narrators construct meaningful accounts of their adult transformation. Some proposals about research into autobiographical learning are presented on the basis of this writer's work in progress.     

Philosophically correct science stories? Examining the implications of heroic science stories for school science

Some people think that science is a set of facts that can be presented in plain and unadorned language. This fosters a belief that science has few stories. Actually, stories are very important in school science. In an examination of science textbooks, I have identified four different types of science stories which I call (a) heroic, (b) discovery, (c) declarative, and (d) politically correct. Each of these types of story promotes a particular set of philosophical assumptions about science. These assumptions are presented implicitly within the framework of the story as truths of science. This article specifically examines the philosophical assumptions that underpin heroic science stories and the implications of these stories in the discursive practices of the school science classroom. As teachers, we need to be critically aware of these assumptions, since they may be at odds with our beliefs about knowledge and our preferred teaching practices. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 35: 175–187, 1998.     

论林白《一个人的战争》的自传性

林白的《一个人的战争》是20世纪90年代女性写作的代表作之一,“自传性写作”是作品的重要特色之一。作者打破小说和自传的体裁疆界,把生活真实的自传事实纳入虚构的小说框架。互文性、私人性、身体性、真实性四个维度,体现了小说的自传性特点及自传性在该小说文本中的具体表现。     

‘I haven’t lost hope of reaching out … ’: exposing racism in sport by elevating counternarratives

ABSTRACT

This paper tells the ‘back story’ to the development of a local soccer hub, which focuses on the experiences of a predominantly South Sudanese team called the Western Tigers. We use a counter-story telling approach anchored in critical race theory, to develop a composite story that brings together biographical and autobiographical accounts gathered during an ethnographic study. These accounts are narrated from the vantage point of David, a player/coach, whose experiences expose everyday racism and its effects, while also illuminating responses to racism in the context of sport. This composite story challenges dominant narratives about sport in Australian society particularly those that position sport as the great equaliser and a pathway to ‘integration’ and belonging. Our analysis sheds light onto how the dynamics of racialisation and exclusion take the form of a slow violence for young people of refugee background, shaping their experiences and trajectories on and off the field. We discuss the paradoxical role of settings such as the Western Tigers and the Community Soccer Hub as important ‘public homeplaces’, that can also be understood as marginalised and marginalising for young people of refugee background.     

Storying Joanne, 1 an undergraduate mathematician

In this article two different accounts are juxtaposed. In one, we use a variety of texts to narrate the story of Joanne, a woman undergraduate student of mathematics. Like many of our mature students Joanne came to the university with a ‘non‐traditional’ academic background. We describe how Joanne developed as a learner of mathematics and connect this to our ways of working in the undergraduate mathematics classroom. We believe that our pedagogy is unusual outside (some) school classrooms and suggest it allows our students to develop positive ‘disciplinary relationships’. In the other, we grapple with the issues raised by telling other people’s stories especially when we are also characters within it. Our intention has been that, in interweaving these two threads, each helps us understand more about the other.     

自传文学关键词

论文尝试从关键词的角度,旨在探讨自传文学的概念、范围、属性及其文类规范和审美特性,着重剖析了自传、自传与传记、自传与自传小说的区分以及自传记忆和忏悔等关键词,以期促进当代自传诗学的构建。     

Towards an understanding of the role of language in the science classroom and its association with cultural identity development in the context of Mozambique

I am reflecting here my struggle to understand the issue of language in the science classroom and in our lives from three different perspectives: before and after Mozambican independence and after completion of my doctoral research. The main method used is auto|ethnographic inquiry in which I use the events in my life to question what is happening in my society. I have used Maria Rivera Maulucci’s paper, Language experience narratives and the role of autobiographical reasoning in becoming an urban science teacher as a reference. This paper helps me to show how isolated and generalized is the Mozambican situation and the value of our struggle in giving value to local languages.     

Autobiography and the paradox of change: (Dis)locating ourselves in the process

As researchers, we often seek to change science education practices that have become outdated. Throughout such change processes we are faced with the dilemma of embodying relationships of power or discourse that we are trying to transform. A situated cognition framework would suggest that this conundrum is inevitable because a community of practitioners is fundamentally bound by the institution and its resources, concerns and ways of being. If we cannot step outside the institution we are trying to change how can we change something which defines who we, as agents of change, are? We reframe the issue as one of cultural production, where we locate ourselves within a cultural field, struggling to change it. This paper embodies some of the tensions involved in cultural re/production of science education. These tensions are played out both in our autobiographical accounts that are part of this article and in the relationship of the authors as graduate student and supervisor. Through a conversational hermeneutic analysis of the authors' autobiographical writings, we examine some of the salient features of bringing about change in science education.     

Phantom traces: exploring a hermeneutical approach to autobiography in curriculum studies

Autobiography presently occupies a beleaguered place in education, not unlike teachers, whose lives have been diminished through the current emphasis on testing outcomes. This paper uses WG Sebald’s writings as a place from which to relook at the relationship between writing and a life lived. Sebald was a German writer born in the shadow of WWII who wrestled with his difficult inheritance. The paper considers the ‘phantom traces’ of the author in Sebald’s creative writing, using the example of the story he tells of Paul Bereyter, Sebald’s elementary teacher. Paul committed suicide by laying himself on the railroad tracks of the town that first denied him the opportunity to teach during WWII yet accepted him back to the classroom after the war. Apparent in the telling of Paul’s story is Sebald’s interest in an ‘invisible subject’—the prolonged effect of the past, especially traumatic events, on thinking, feeling human beings. The paper draws on Sebald’s particular way of writing about his subject ‘at a slant’ so as to argue for a hermeneutical approach to currere, or autobiography in education.     

PEDAGOGICAL DESIRE AND THE CRISIS OF KNOWLEDGE

Every voice speaks to particular ways of knowing as it positions the speaker within an epistemological community. Each of our images of what constitutes knowing, and hence knowledge, is part of what structures one's subjectivity: what is valued as truth or discarded as fiction... Views of knowing tell individuals which accounts count and likewise which accounts do not count. Knowledge then, is not so much about immutable truths as it is about “historical products of certain practices.” (Britzman, 1991, p.23‐23)     

Telling Truths: Wounded Truths and the Activity of Truth Telling

It appears that being young and queer seems to be all about woundedness: it means experiencing suffering, including the risk of suicide, increased drug use, homelessness and violence. Yet how are these wounded truths told, and further, why is it that people in education seem to tell them "unproblematically"? This paper considers these questions by analysing wounded truth telling in the recent debate over the Western Australia Lesbian and Gay Law Reform Bill. Using <citeref rid="b7">Foucault's (2001)</citeref> discussion of Greek parrhesia (truth telling), the Western Australian debate is analysed in terms of its problematisation of wounded truth telling. Questions are raised regarding the implications of unproblematised educational practices that engage in the telling of wounded truths.     

回归事实:用故事讲述新闻

新闻学的本质是故事,用故事讲述新闻是新闻回归事实的新取向。本文首先分析了新闻的本质是故事,然后阐释了用故事讲述新闻的意义,并从新闻采访和新闻写作两个层面论述了用故事讲述新闻的途径。应该说,用故事讲述新闻,在娱乐化的基础上提升了新闻的内涵,拓展了新闻的影响力,使新闻更具有魅力。     

Teacher Vulnerability: understanding its moral and political roots

Many teachers experience a seme of vulnerability in their work. Analysing primary school teachers’ professional biographies, the author reconstructed the main sources of this vulnerability: administrative or policy measures; professional relationships in the school; limits to teachers’ efficacy. Further analysis of the meaning this vulnerability has for teachers revealed its moral and political roots. Vulnerability implies the feeling that one's professional identity and moral integrity are questioned. Coping with it therefore implies political action in order to (re)gain the social recognition of one's professional self and restore the necessary workplace conditions for good job performance. Finally, autobiographical reflection and story telling are suggested as effective strategies to deal successfully with the sense of vulnerability     

原来自传还有另一种写法——简评《我的上世纪》

《我的上世纪》是一部图文并茂的手绘本自传,但是它与传统的自传作品以及图传有着很大不同,似乎不能称为自传。文章从人的记忆特点以及优秀自传品格上论证了它是一部较好的“小人物”自传。同时,又从它的叙述结构特点和手绘图配文字的叙述方式,论证了该作品是不同以往的很有特点的自传作品。     

Art and Science: The Aesthetic Education of the Emotions and Reason

This paper explores the link between science and art in Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). More specifically, its aim is to clarify the relations between science as the investigation of ‘truths’ that people hold at a particular time, on the one hand, and art as carrier of these truths into the ‘emotional’ realm of the people, on the other. The goal is simple; as is the method. The goal is to provide a way of teaching the humanities based on the aesthetic.[1] The method uses the figures chosen to act as a foil to each other, so that what seems to be a parallel of contrasts between Darwin and Gauguin, is, in fact, an equilibrium of the sensual and the rational. [2] The specific point that the paper argues is this: if teaching the humanities is tied pedagogically to art, then science, as well as the other disciplines, will join the curriculum in an integral way so as to contribute to the complete education of the student: physical, intellectual, moral, and spiritual. The first section of the paper develops the education of reason or mind in the life and thoughts of Charles Darwin. My remarks here will be limited primarily, but not exclusively, to his autobiography. The second part clarifies the education of the senses in the thoughts of Paul Gauguin.