Relational work and identity negotiation in critical post observation teacher feedback

This article responds to the call for more empirical research to further our understanding of how identities are produced and performed in discourse. Data extracts from dyadic post observation feedback meetings between an experienced teacher and two supervisors are analysed. Analysis focuses on the relational work participants do to achieve identities in interaction. Analysis reveals delicate and complex negotiation processes as participants claim, ascribe, challenge, and relinquish local identities. Analysis shows that identities are emergent, relational and co-constructed, and that (im)politeness is an interactional resource used to construct identities. This article extends previous research by comparing interactants’ relational work. Analysis of data extracts from two different meetings in which a supervisor points out the same teaching problem (poor instructions) with the same teacher enables a comparison of how identities are achieved. One supervisor uses politeness strategies while the other adopts aggressive and critical behaviour to claim and ascribe the same identities. In both instances the teacher resists but then co-constructs his negative ascribed identity. Within a linguistic ethnographic framework, micro analysis of feedback talk is supplemented with ethnographic interview data to enable a contextualised examination. Ethnographic data reveal the influence of institutional goals on local identity construction and relational work

Recent progress on the chiral unitary approach to meson meson and meson baryon interactions

We report on recent progress on the chiral unitary approach, analogous to the effective range expansion in Quantum Mechanics, which is shown to have a much larger convergence radius than ordinary chiral perturbation theory, allowing one to reproduce data for meson meson interaction up to 1.2 GeV. Applications to physical processes so far unsuited for a standard chiral perturbative approach are presented. Results for the extension of these ideas to the meson baryon sector are discussed, together with applications to kaons in a nuclear medium and $K^-$ atoms.Comment: Contribution to the KEK Tanashi Symposium on Physics of Hadrons and Nuclei, Tokyo, December 1998, 10 pages, 3 postscript figures. To be published as a special issue of Nuclear Physics

Teachers and supervisors negotiating identities of experience and power in feedback talk

This article focuses on the identities constructed and negotiated during work-based talk between in-service English language teachers and a supervisor during dyadic post observation feedback meetings. Meetings were recorded with participants working in a tertiary institution in a Gulf state. Microanalysis of discourse extracts shows how both participants (i.e. supervisor and teacher) negotiate identities of power and experience. Analysis reveals that identities are fluid and co-constructed, and that power can shift between interactants, regardless of institutional status. Analysis is framed within the ambiguous but influential role of feedback and aims to understand how identities shape and are shaped by the goal of the meeting. In this context, identities of experience and power are prioritized, so feedback is primarily evaluative, despite institutional requirements that a focus on teacher development should be included. This compromises the ultimate aim of improving teaching and learning within the institution. Implications of this study include practical recommendations for supervisor training and critical review of institutional observation forms as well as a call for more language teacher identity research to focus on in-service teachers and on situated work-based talk

The construction and negotiation of identity and face in post observation feedback

Identity influences the practice of English language teachers and supervisors, their professional development and their ability to incorporate innovation and change. Talk during post observation feedback meetings provides participants with opportunities to articulate, construct, verify, contest and negotiate identities, processes which often engender issues of face. This study examines the construction and negotiation of identity and face in post observation feedback meetings between in-service English language teachers and supervisors at a tertiary institution in the United Arab Emirates. Within a linguistic ethnography framework, this study combined linguistic microanalysis of audio recorded feedback meetings with ethnographic data gathered from participant researcher knowledge, pre-analysis interviews and post-analysis participant interpretation interviews. Through a detailed, empirical description of situated ‘real life’ institutional talk, this study shows that supervisors construct identities involving authority, power, expertise, knowledge and experience while teachers index identities involving experience, knowledge and reflection. As well as these positive valued identities, other negative, disvalued identities are constructed. Identities are shown to be discursively claimed, verified, contested and negotiated through linguistic actions. This study also shows a link between identity and face. Analysis demonstrates that identity claims verified by an interactional partner can lead to face maintenance or support. However, a contested identity claim can lead to face threat which is usually managed by facework. Face, like identity, is found to be interactionally achieved and endogenous to situated discourse. Teachers and supervisors frequently risk face threat to protect their own identities, to contest their interactional partner’s identities or to achieve the feedback meeting goal i.e. improved teaching. Both identity and face are found to be consequential to feedback talk and therefore influence teacher development, teacher/supervisor relationships and the acceptance of feedback. Analysis highlights the evaluative and conforming nature of feedback in this context which may be hindering opportunities for teacher development

Transborder Flows: Its Implications in Canada-United States Relations

Canada-United States Economic Ties: The Technology Context and transborder data flow

Resilience, apps and reluctant individualism: Technologies of self in the neoliberal academy

This paper is concerned with the deep crisis affecting universities, as large scale institutional and structural transformations produce a psychosocial and somatic catastrophe amongst academics (and other university workers) that manifests in experiences of chronic stress, anxiety, exhaustion, insomnia and spiralling rates of physical and mental illness. Elsewhere these have been discussed as the 'hidden injuries of the neoliberal university' (Gill, 2010), highlighting the ways in which such experiences are simultaneously acknowledged and recognised by university staff, yet silenced and exorcised from formal spaces of the contemporary academy and without 'proper channels' of expression - being the subject of conference coffee breaks but not keynotes, of after seminar drinks but not departmental meetings, committee minutes or Senate or Council documentation. For future historians seeking to understand through such official records something about the texture of experience of current academic life, the archives will offer no insights.However, in the last few years, this paper suggests, such injuries have moved from being almost completely silenced within universities to becoming the subject of a variety of new spaces and services designed with 'academics in crisis' at their heart. These include the rolling out of 'well-being' services within universities of programmes for stress management, mindfulness and resilience, the development of new 'apps' designed for busy or overworked people, and the rapidly expanding blogosphere which has become a key site for 'naming' and sharing such experiences of distress/injury. The paper looks critically at these three sites. It argues that whilst they recognise at least some aspects of the subjective experience of contemporary academic labouring, they remain locked into a profoundly individualist framework that turns away from systemic or collective politics to offer instead a set of individualised tools by which to 'cope' with the strains of the neoliberal academy

“You Get the Baby You Need”: Negotiating the Use of Assisted Reproductive Technology for Social Sex Selection in Online Discussion Forums

As a result of developments in assisted reproductive technology (ART), it is now possible to choose the sex of a baby. However, the procedures are currently not allowed for this purpose in Australia. This article explores how the positions for and against the use of ART for social sex selection are constructed by parents and parents-to-be in online discussion forums. Critical Discourse Analysis is employed to identify the arguments, evidence and experience drawn upon in the negotiation of the topic. We identify an important distinction between the legitimacy of using ART procedures for social sex selection, and the appropriateness of individuals actually wanting to use the procedures. We further show that expectations about the parent/child relationship, the nature of parental love and implications for society are mobilized in the debate, much of which is underscored by traditional gender constructions

'Against the World': Michael Field, female marriage and the aura of amateurism'

This article considers the case of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, an aunt and niece who lived and wrote together as ‘Michael Field’ in the fin-de-siècle Aesthetic movement. Bradley’s bold statement that she and Cooper were ‘closer married’ than the Brownings forms the basis for a discussion of their partnership in terms of a ‘female marriage’, a union that is reflected, as I will argue, in the pages of their writings. However, Michael Field’s exclusively collaborative output, though extensive, was no guarantee for success. On the contrary, their case illustrates the notion, valid for most products of co-authorship, that the jointly written work is always surrounded by an aura of amateurism. Since collaboration defied the ingrained notion of the author as the solitary producer of his or her work, critics and readers have time and again attempted to ‘parse’ the collaboration by dissecting the co-authored work into its constituent halves, a treatment that the Fields too failed to escape

Working hard on the outside: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of The Biggest Loser Australia

The Biggest Loser (TBL) is a reality television weight-loss programme that positions itself as a response to the so-called “obesity crisis”. Research on TBL has thus far focussed on audience responses and its effect on viewers’ beliefs about weight loss. This article focuses instead on how meaning is constructed in TBL. We conducted a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a key episode of TBL (the 2012 Australian season finale) to examine how the textual, visual and auditory elements combine to construct meanings beyond the ostensible health messages. Although the overt message is that all contestants have worked hard, turned their lives around and been “successful”, examination of editing choices, lighting and colour, clothing and time spent on contestants allows us to see that the programme constructs varying degrees of success between contestants and provides accounts for these differences in outcomes. In this way the programme is able to present itself as a putative celebration of all contestants while prescribing narrow limits around what constitutes success. TBL reinforces an ideology in which “success” is a direct result of “the work” of weight loss (both physical and emotional), which can apparently be read straightforwardly off the body. TBL’s “celebration” of weight loss thus reproduces and strengthens the widespread view of fat bodies as physical manifestations of individual (ir)responsibility and psychological dysfunction, and contributes to the ongoing stigmatisation of obesity