Leadership training: A lesson in living

Programs for gifted girls should not be reinforcing existing stereotypes. The academic, social and counseling approaches used for gifted girls must broaden values, needs and interests with programs that encourage and motivate.     

The discursive construction of the ‘competent’ learner-worker: from key competencies to ‘employability skills’1

Australian unions have adopted new organizing methods to rebuild and develop their organizations. This represents a change in direction from the commitment to partnership and tripartite planning that characterized the Accord period under the Labor governments of the 1980s and 1990s to a new focus on capacity building. A serious decline in union density along with shifts in the labour process has led unions to focus on recruiting and organizing new members. The vitality involved is tempered by a hostile legal climate that supports workplace flexibility, casualization, fragmentation and low-wage work, while curtailing the rights of unions to recruit and organize. This paper explores the common heritage between the new organizing and theories of popular education, radical history and social movement experience. The paper suggests that contemporary efforts to regenerate unions as assertive organizations that rely on developing and educating new activists and leaders can benefit from drawing on emancipatory traditions of popular education, radical history and community organizing, and in so doing avoid an uncritical adoption of what might become simply a new set of organizing techniques.     

“Do you want an idea of what they’re doing?” Transgressive data generation and analysis within a bilingual writers workshop

We consider how research participants engage alongside researchers as choreographers of data generation and highlight the everyday practices of researchers and participants in motion within and across time and space. Data for this case analysis were generated during a two-year qualitative study investigating multimodal literacies, multilingualism, and literacy teacher development. We utilized microethnographic discourse analysis to analyze a video excerpt from a classroom observation during writers workshop in a fourth-grade bilingual classroom. We sought to understand how the teacher’s and students’ discursive moves during the event tactically disrupted the researchers’ agenda in the moment and complicated attempts at data analysis. Our analyses illustrate how the teacher multiply situated herself in ways that trouble dichotomous framings of teachers’ work, such as traditional or nontraditional, as well as dominant conceptualizations of qualitative research, such as data “collection.” We end with implications for interpreting and representing research findings.