Autoethnography and teacher development

Autoethnography has largely been deployed in formal therapeutic situations, with its potential for application in general personal and professional development only now emerging. Autoethnography presents valuable opportunities for application in situations requiring a connection between self-understanding and broader socialization processes. This paper explores the nature of autoethnographic approaches to research, including various methodological issues pertaining to Self as data-source, and describes initial outcomes of a research project aimed at illuminating procedural and epistemological issues attached to the use of autoethnography in teacher education and professional development situations. The importance of excavating Self and identity through the autoethnographic process is highlighted with the paper drawing upon examples from practice to illustrate possibilities for the deployment of agency through critical analyses of Self

Repatriating race: exorcising ethno-exclusion

Race is widely acknowledged as one of humankind's most pernicious and enduring myths, and its contemporary ideological doppelganger – ethnicity – presents as arguably the single most divisive, oppressive and dangerous axis of identity at work in the world today. Attempts to develop more racially/ethnically harmonious communities have typically looked to education programs, usually conducted through the formal mechanisms of schooling, as a primary vehicle for the development of greater understanding and 'naturalizing' of difference. Focusing almost exclusively on the effects of racism and marginalization on the typically located victims of such oppression, these programs have largely ignored the importance of turning the focus of attention on to those positioned as beneficiaries of racism. That such programs have been largely unsuccessful in any broad societal sense has led to the exploration of alternative approaches to developing racial and ethnic awareness. This paper derives from a long-term project that has been anchored by two key political imperatives: making whiteness visible and effecting conscientization through autoethnographic work. Research on this project with pre-service teachers, most of it funded over several years, and more recently with middle (secondary) school students has provided valuable insights into more effective possibilities for the development of anti-racist pedagogies and for the decentring of the WWW (White Western Ways) that the authors see as crucial to a genuine move towards ethnic harmony. The first part of this paper exposes and justifies the ideological and procedural underpinnings of the program design and operation, and the second section reports on the outcomes to date. The authors conclude with a set of implications and possibilities for further, future activity

Becoming racially aware: explorations of identity and whiteness with pre-service teachers

[Abstract]: This dissertation reports on the use of dialogic forms of engagement with white pre-service teachers in exploring the processes and events that led to self-awareness of the racialised aspects of their personal identities. The nature of whiteness as a structural system of privilege and of white racial identity as an individual dimension of identity in the Australian context forms a major part of the contextual background to this study. The study concludes that white racial self-awareness is a necessary pre-requisite to white identity reconstruction and that certain types of experiences seem to provoke and promote this awareness. Giroux’s notion of identity trauma and Spivak’s ‘moments of bafflement’ provide major planks of the conceptual framework here. Based in life history techniques, the main evidentiary material was elicited by the use of learning conversations and was analysed with the assistance of the NUD•IST 4 software package. Considerable attention is paid to methodological issues of transcription, the role of the researcher and the incorporation of researcher presence into the study and the report thereof

The effects of impurities in papain on triarylmethane photochromism

The effects of the enzyme papain on triarylmethane photochromism were investigated. The interaction between papain solutions and triarylmethane dyes was measured using difference spectroscopy and relative equilibrium constants were calculated. The effects of papain on Malachite Green photochromic solutions were also measured. Both crude and commercially available purified papain were tested. Crude papain bleached triarylmethane dyes and reduced fatigue in triarylmethane photochromic solutions. Purified papain did not bleach the dyes and did not have a significant effect on fatigue in photochromic solutions. It was not as soluble in the alcohol based solvent as the crude enzyme was. It is believed that an impurity is responsible for bleaching triarylmethane dyes and reducing fatigue in triarylmethane photochromic systems