Dirty secrets and silent conversations: Exploring radical listening through embodied autoethnographic teaching.

In this article I explore the idea of radical listening as embodied pedagogy. I highlight the ways that radical listening can include listening to our bodies and their histories, explore the type of listening is that needed when the insights that are offered from the body are deeply personal, and question how embodied teaching might require rethinking student listening. Using my own experiences (and the context of patriarchy) as an example, I offer for analysis layered narratives and theater metaphors in order to push radical listening into personal experience. Along the way I highlight the challenges and benefits of combining radical listening, teaching and autoethnographic knowledge

How to be an Avatar: Reflections on the Affordances of Virtual Flesh

Avatars are problematic in higher education in that they are a new and unknown medium. What is the role of avatars in higher education? What might an avatar student be able to do that a “real” flesh and blood student could not? Why use avatars? Why shy away from their unreal meanderings? In this 5-minute pitch I examine how the avatar space of Second Life has been used to encouraged students and teachers to communicate in new ways. I explore the different uses of avatars in virtual educational settings and highlight a number of common issues and problems that teachers and students have faced in cyberspace. Ultimately I present for analysis some food for thought about the joys and perils of jumping down the edu-cyber-wormhole. Keywords Second Life, Avatar, Virtual Classroom

Building a community of practice: shifting an M.Ed. program to a PDS school-based cohort model

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine how participants experienced and perceived an M.Ed. program that had a school-based design. In particular, the authors sought to understand: (1) how participants experienced being in a school-based cohort and (2) whether and how participants experienced the three designated tenets of the M.Ed. program: teacher inquiry, social justice and student engagement and motivation. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative study used semi-structured focus group interviews (n = 7) to examine teachers’ perceptions, using a constant comparative method (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) of open coding to analyze the data and determine emergent themes. Findings The findings indicate the design of this school-based M.Ed. program provided both social and academic benefits including strengthening teachers’ working relationships and their understanding of students outside their own classroom and a transfer from individual learning to organizational benefit. Teachers positively perceived the three tenets that guided the first year of the program, especially the ability to study social justice and student motivation in depth. Practical implications This study has implications for teacher education and retention as well as how boundary spanning roles in PDS schools can impact graduate students’ experiences in schools. Given the current teacher shortage concerns, it is important to understand how M.Ed. programs can be designed with teacher needs at the forefront so learning is relevant and rewarding, both to the individual and the school. Originality/value While there are many studies that examine the use of cohorts in education, particularly in doctoral programs, few, if any, studies examine a school-based cohort M.Ed. program for practicing teachers. This study also puts a unique spotlight on how boundary-spanning roles can benefit not only teacher candidates but also practicing teachers in their M.Ed. program

Postmodern Metaphor

Metaphors invite. They contribute to our ability to makes sense of experience as they beacon us to make new (and sometimes playful) connections. In this text, I have created a postmodern metaphor, one willing to joyfully transgress disciplinary boundaries. Melding interviews, iconic images, snippets of academic text, poetry, and the power of metaphor, this festschrift “text” is at once visual, verbal, academic, accessible, and full of motion. Like the scholar whose work it honors (Ken Tobin), it gently pushes us into new questions about the lines we can draw between science and art

Sharing seeing: Exploring photo-elicitation with children in two different cultural contexts

This work uses text and photos to explore research into visual methods with children in Pakistan and Luxembourg. Children are typically positioned as unable to participate as actors in the knowledge economy. Their insights and voices are seldom heard in educational spaces. Using image-based research the authors solicited the voices of children by encouraging them to speak to adults though multiple mediums. The children in this research responded by creating and analyzing images and communicating to adults across difference in new ways. In addition they were able to use images as a base from which to re-see their worlds

Writing we: Collaborative text in educational research

In this chapter we examine the critical possibilities of collaborative writing, as multiple layers of voices intertwine to produce and understand collaborative authorship. We seek to challenge the politics and epistemological assumptions of the do-your-own-work mentality pervasive throughout education. Through a theoretical, methodological and ethnographically thick exploration of collaboratively produced text, we offer a different paradigm for understanding and producing knowledge. Cowriting is examined as an unfolding, polyvocal, and necessarily multifaceted journey toward a new critical pedagogy of working “with.

Between hope and despair: Teacher education in the age of Trump

We are teacher educators trying to recalibrate to the world of Trump. As we search to find our new bearings, we recognize that the markers of meaning that we relied on (such as civility and truth) have been washed away, and we must now redefine how to create meaning in our work, and hope in our worlds. In this article, we combine examples of student interactions from our classes with inner dialogue to chronicle our search for hope. Working in the context of the US South, we highlight how drawing from critical theory allowed us to reach for moments of hope in dark times

Political engagement as a child: Rethinking, reseeing and reinvesting youth in political participation

This chapter explores political involvement of youth through the perspectives of the third author, Dylan. We reflexively consider Dylan’s involvement in politics to extend his perspectives on political participation and analyze the ways in which politics impact children, and in turn, how children impact politics. Pushing back on the popular notion that children are not able to be ‘political’ because they are too young, we weave Dylan’s voice throughout a discussion of the role of young people in politics grounded in critical theoretical perspectives

Ethische und methodologische Implikationen kooperativer Forschung

This paper explores ethical and methodological implications of collaborative research, and we discuss our examination of ways to work towards participatory, ethical relationships in research. Our core concerns pertain to the experiential, lived and qualitative relations within emergent research communities. Questions that have guided us include: What does "we" mean in research practice? How do we become a community of researchers? What forms of relations are shaped in the continuous process of inquiry? Whose interests are served? How can a community of researchers and their participants, formed and sustained by reciprocal, ethical relations, of trust, shared knowledges, curiosity and friendship, emerge? Key to approaching these is examining the contingent epistemological goals of research. We discuss four essential elements in the ethical qualities of research as a community of practice that stand out for "us." URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1102245Este artículo explora las implicaciones éticas y metodológicas de la investigación colaborativa. Además, discutimos nuestro análisis de los modos de trabajar para crear relaciones participativas y éticas en la investigación.Nuestras metas principales se enlazan con las relaciones experienciales, vividas y cualitativas en las comunidades que emergen de la investigación. Preguntas que nos han guiado incluyen: ¿Qué significa "nosotros" en la práctica de la investigación? ¿Como nos volvemos una comunidad de investigadores? ¿Qué formas de relación se crean en el proceso continuo de la investigación? ¿A los intereses de quién se sirve? ¿Cómo puede emerger una comunidad de investigadores y sus participantes que se forme y sostenga por relaciones recíprocas, éticas, de confianza, de saberes compartidos, de curiosidad y de amistad? La clave para acercarse a estas preguntas es analizar las contingentes metas epistemológicas de investigación. Discutimos cuatro elementos esenciales en las cualidades éticas de la investigación como una comunidad de práctica que destaca para "nosotros". URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1102245Dieser Aufsatz untersucht ethische und methodologische Aspekte kooperativer Forschungspraxis. Es werden Möglichkeiten diskutiert, wie partizipative und ethische Verhältnisse in unserer Forschungsarbeit hergestellt werden können. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf den erfahrenen und gelebten Beziehungen innerhalb entstehender, sich entwickelnder Forschungsgemeinschaften. Unsere Analyse wird von folgenden Fragen geleitet: Was bedeutet der Ausdruck "Wir" in der Forschungspraxis? Wie können wir zu einer Gemeinschaft von Forschenden werden? Welche Beziehungsqualitäten werden im Verlauf eines Untersuchungsprojekts unter den Beteiligten herausgebildet? Wessen Interessen wird gefolgt? Wie kann eine Gemeinschaftlichkeit unter Forschenden und Forschungspartner/innen zustande kommen, die von ethischen Prinzipien geprägt und getragen ist – von Vertrauen, geteiltem Wissen, Wissbegier und Freundschaft? Die Analyse der Erkenntnisziele eines Forschungsprojekts stellt den Schlüssel zur Annäherung an diese Prinzipien dar. Wir diskutierten vier für uns und unser Selbstverständnis als Akteure einer gemeinschaftlichen Forschungspraxis wesentliche ethische Elemente. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs110224