The work of illiteracy in the rhetorical curriculum

It is conventionally held that illiteracy is simply the absence of literacy, however the latter term happens to be defined. As such, illiteracy is nothing more than failure to achieve the literate foundation upon which success in the rhetorical curriculum depends. I challenge convention by arguing that literacy is fundamentally a rhetorical construct and that the idea of illiteracy, integral to compelling identification with literacy, is an intentional product of the rhetorical curriculum. This relationship of illiteracy to the rhetorical curriculum can be glimpsed in narratives of literacy, especially those that circulate to mass audiences in popular films. Scholars have looked to such films for evidence to illustrate academic theories about literacy. By analysing several films and their reception, I show that non-academics are actively engaged in re-theorizing illiteracy. This engagement illuminates the rhetorical dimensions of illiteracy in a way that has the potential to revise the informal rhetorical curriculum, thereby changing conventional understandings of illiteracy.     

Knowledge of love: narratives of romance told by 12-year-old children

This article reports research on young people's conceptualisations of love and romance through a gender perspective. The data are stories written by 12-year-old girls and boys in Norway who were asked to fantasise about their future love life. Their narratives are explored through discourse analysis and semiotics and analysed within a sociological framework. The article has two major aims. The first is to contribute to the methodology of collecting essays written by young people to gain knowledge of their conceptions of adult life. The second aim is to offer new findings on the specific subject of romantic love in contemporary society, by describing how to do love in young people's fiction.     

Journalists in times of crisis: Experiences and practices of Palestinian journalists during the 2014 Gaza war

This study explores the experiences and practices of Palestinian journalists working for Palestinian media outlets during the 2014 Gaza war. Our findings, based on data gathered from 10 in-depth interviews, indicate that the practices of Palestinian reporters and editors who covered the 2014 Gaza war were shaped by their personal experiences during the war and by a strong motivation to represent the Palestinian narrative, perspective, and suffering in the conflict with Israel.     

源于叙事理论:浅析叙事探究

叙事以传述事件为主,经验成为传述的内容。叙事作为人类研究生活的基本手段,随着时代发展而不断获得新的功能,并应用于不同领域。在“范式转换”中叙事应用于教育研究领域,形成叙事探究这一新的研究方法。叙事探究将参与者与研究者结合,把生活性质的理论思想引入到教育经验中,促进人们对于教育及其意义的理解。     

Counter engagement: parents refusing high stakes testing and questioning policy in the era of the common core

This study is a critical discourse analysis of the New Jersey Opt-Out Movement. In 2015, and in response to the increasing standardization of US public school instruction, and over-use of high-stakes testing, NJ parents began to refuse to allow their children to take a key end-of-the year exam, the PARCC. We employ the concepts of master and counter narratives to exam the qualitative data that was collected in an online-questionnaire, a focus group, and refusal letters. We argue that these parents have refused this exam for their children based on differing reasons, that parents effectively changed the master narrative of the PARCC to grow their movement, and their refusal letters were key in promoting a new counter narrative.     

Using email interviews in qualitative educational research: creating space to think and time to talk

The article explores how the Internet and email offer space for participants to think and make sense of their experiences in the qualitative research encounter. It draws on a research study that used email interviewing to generate online narratives to understand academic lives and identities through research encounters in virtual space. The article discusses how the asynchronous nature of email helps to facilitate this by allowing research participants to contribute to research in their space and according to their own preference in time, and engage in a process of reflection and interaction. However, it also argues for the construction of more collaborative approaches to research that acknowledge their right to use the temporal nature of space and time that email offers to construct, reflect upon, and learn from their stories of experience in their own manner, and not merely to the researcher’s agenda. It concludes by recognizing the importance of email as a research tool for capturing the complexity of social interaction online.     

You've got mail … ! Using email interviews to gather academics' narratives of their working lives

The paper explores how computer-mediated communication offers space for academics to think and make sense of their experiences in the qualitative research encounter. It draws on a research study that used email interviewing to generate online narratives to understand academic lives and identities through research encounters in virtual space. The paper discusses how email can provide a site where the self can be viewed reflexively and re-negotiated through a process of interaction. The paper demonstrates that the asynchronous nature of email helps to facilitate this, by allowing participants to contribute to research in their space and according to their own preference in time. However, it also argues for the construction of more collaborative approaches to research that acknowledge the right of participants to use the temporal nature of space and time that email offers to construct, reflect upon and learn from their stories of experience in their own manner, and not merely to the researcher's agenda. It concludes by recognizing the importance of email as a research tool for capturing the complexity of social interaction online.     

从“观察者”到“参与者”——外语教师教育研究的新视角

近年来,外语教师教育研究已经开始认识到了外语教师在推动和理解外语教学中的核心作用。为了更全面地理解外语教学过程,笔认为：应该将教师置于外语教师教育研究的中心。因为外语教学过程的复杂性以及如何学会教学是很难以外在旁观的角度来体认的。故而,用叙事学方法探索外语教师对教学的所知,对于探索教师如何理解她们在课堂中的教学有十分重要的意义。