Writing and Reading Subjects: Fixing and Unfixing Identity through Close Literary Practices

For a number of years, Rebecca Luce‐Kapler and Dennis Sumara have been investigating the ways in which literary practices of close reading can help change how we think and how we remember. They have also considered how such practices might help make us more critical of normative representations of remembered experience. More recently, they have been joined by Claire Robson, who works with and investigates memoir writing. In 2009, Robson and Sumara were joined by their six older lesbian research participants at a conference held at the University of British Columbia entitled ‘Queerly Canadian: Changing Narratives’. The six women performed extracts from memoirs they had written as part of the research data and joined the researchers in offering theories and insights about the writing processes in which the group had engaged. That presentation and this paper represent the evolution of a two‐year collaboration between these researchers and the six women, who are listed as co‐authors on both the presentation and this paper.     

Understanding school districts as learning systems: Some lessons from three cases of complex transformation

We report on a study of three school jurisdictions in the province of Alberta. The original premise for the research on which this report is based was to investigate the diverse ways that school districts had administered resources that were provided through a major initiative to improve learning in the province. This account is not centrally concerned with how funds were utilized; rather, we report on how districts?? strategies and emphases within the initiative offer windows into the their systemic characters. The range of manifest characters, we argue, is a useful construct to inform policy, ensure the presence of necessary supports and structures, implement appropriate accountability measures, and set reasonable goals for large-scale initiatives in education.     

Conviction,Confrontation, and Risk in New Teachers' Advocating for Equity

Through several collaborative inquiries with teachers in elementary and middle schools, we have noticed a troublesome trend: teachers have become familiar with many of the key terms and catchphrases of various constructivist discourses, yet they tend to be relatively unfamiliar with the developments in epistemology that have driven the rapid emergence of these vocabularies. In consequence, our efforts to invite teachers into current discussions of cognition have often been frustrated and frustrating. We argue that this situation is in large part due to two circumstances. First, the vocabularies chosen by constructivists are often too readily aligned with commonsense understandings of personal knowing and collective knowledge. Second, and closely related, educational theorists and researchers have not always been sufficiently attentive to the contexts of their work. As such, rather than prompting a break from deeply entrenched habits of thinking, constructivist discourses have often been co-opted to support renewed and regressive embraces of Platonic and Cartesian assumptions. Somewhat ironically, then, the work of many educational theorists and researchers appears to be carried out in ignorance of the tentative and participatory dynamics that are argued to be at the root of cognitive processes.     

Rhythms of knowing: toward an ecological theory of learning in action research

This article describes the culmination of a 2-year research study, where the researchers used writing practices with participants to structure interpretations of gay, lesbian and transgendered teachers' experiences. The researchers were interested in learning how such work might help the teachers interpret the ways in which they negotiated minority identities within public school teaching. For the final aspect of the study, the researchers decided to move the group from an urban setting to a seaside location, and chose to move more definitively into a participatory role by inviting a colleague to lead the group in interpretive research activities through the use of writing techniques and practices. The three-day writing workshop yielded new insights about the nature of writing and human cognition and, more specifically, revealed how events of collaborative research reflect an ecological complexity, where the outcomes of such work co-emerge and are co-specified by a particular group of individuals working in a particular place and time. As such, these research events develop their own patterns and rhythms of insight.     

In memory of all the broken ones: catalytic validity through critical arts research for social change

The authors of this article use data produced in a collaborative community arts group in BC Canada as a way to think about validation in arts-based educational research (ABER). As Lather attempted to find middle ground between ‘rampant subjectivity’ and ‘pointless precision’ in research, she (1986) suggested that studies with an ideological or critical agenda might be validated by their catalytic potential – the ability to generate change. She has further argued that such work must be both conceptually and methodologically rigorous. With this charge in mind, the authors describe and discuss a memory box made by one participant in a two-year federally funded postdoctoral research project. They consider the catalytic validity of this artefact and reflect upon research methodology in ABER, in terms of triangulation, face and construct validities and member checks. They conclude with a challenge: What new and imaginative research methodologies might be invented for critical research in arts-based education?     

Action Research as a Postmodern Practice

This essay explores the author's experiences as a teacher, a reader, and a researcher in terms of some now-conventional knowledge about postmodernity. Using the term "postmodern research landscape," the author explains how the commonplaces of interactions among readers, teachers, and researchers co-emerge with ongoing senses of socio-spatial identity, and how these identities, in turn, shape the contexts in which persons experience personal and professional aspects of their lives. These ideas are used to map a more specific and particular understanding of postmodern action research practice.     

Learning to Create Insight: Literary engagements as purposeful pedagogy

This article explains how literary engagements can function as archives for interpretation. Drawing on hermeneutic and pragmatist philosophy, and Iser's discussions of 'literary anthropology', argues that engagements with literary fiction, when supported with what it describes as a 'Commonplace Book' interpretative structure, can develop personal and collective insight. In addition, the article suggests that these Commonplace Book practices and products show how philosophical, theoretical and literary engagements can create events of pedagogy that are experienced by students and teachers as surprising and purposeful.     

A REPLY Listening to How You're Heard: On translations,mistranslations, and really bad mistranslations

This study explored the use of video cases to teach literacy instruction to special education pre‐service teachers. One class of pre‐service teachers was examined for knowledge gains and attitudes towards video cases as an instructional medium. Results suggest that video cases did not result in greater learning of phonemic awareness or reading comprehension topics than traditional lectures with discussion teaching. They also provided comparative data on student teachers’ responses to video versus traditional face‐to‐face instruction. Further implications for special education teacher preparation and future research directions are discussed.