Down the rabbit hole: Professional identities, professional learning, and change in one Australian school

This study takes researcher and reader down the rabbit hole of story with its unique approach to the phenomena of professional identity, professional learning, and school change. It examines the perspectives of 14 educators: a range of teachers and leaders in one independent Australian school and in the context of a teacher growth intervention. Set against the backdrop of the global push for teacher quality, and consequent worldwide initiatives in the arenas of teacher professional learning and school change, the study generates context-specific connections between lived critical moments of identity formation, learning, and leading. A bricolaged paradigmatic stance weaves together a social constructionist, phenomenological approach to narrative inquiry. Data were generated primarily from individual narrative-eliciting interviews, of the researcher, two teachers, and 11 school leaders. Extended literary metaphor and known literary characters operate as a symbolic and structural frame. Alice, the White Rabbit, and the Cheshire Cat, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, are analytical tools for the presentation and analysis of the perspectives of researcher, teacher, and leader participants. While the study set out to explore the ways in which educators’ experiences of professional learning (trans)form their senses of professional identity, it found that it is not just professional learning, but epiphanic life experiences, which shape professional selves and practices. School context, and the alignment of the individual with the collective, emerged as key factors for individual and school change. Transformation of educators’ identities and practices was evident in environments which were supportive, challenging, and growth focused, rather than evaluation driven. Identity formation, individual professional growth, and collective school change were revealed to be unpredictable, fluid processes in which small, unexpected moments can have far-reaching effects. The findings have implications for the theorisation of identities, and the research and implementation of professional learning and school change

The record-breaking rotational braking of the He strong CP star HD 37776

We study the long-term light and spectral variations in the He-strong magnetic chemically peculiar star HD 37776 (V901 Ori) to search for changes of its 1.5387 d period in 1976-2007. We analyze all published photometric observations and spectrophotometry in the HeI 4026 A line. The data were supplmented with 506 new (U)VB observations obtained during the last 2 observing seasons, 66 estimates of HeI equivalent widths on 23 CFHT spectrograms and 35 of the 6-m Zeeman spectrograms. All the 1895 particular observations heve been processed simultaneously. We confirm the previously suspected increase of the period in HD 37776 which is a record-breaking among CP stars. The mean rate of the period increase during the last 31 years is 0.541+-0.020 s per year. We interpret this ongoing period increase as the slowing down of the star's surface rotation due to momentum loss through events and processes in its magnetosphere.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of the "CP#AP Workshop", Vienna, 10.-14.Sept.2007, eds.J.Ziznovsky, J.Zverko, E.Paunzen, M.Netopil, will be published in Contrib. Astron. Obs. Skalnate Ples

Scholarship of the cyborg:Productivities and undercurrents

Changed and changing media are transforming the ways that educators and education researchers interact with knowledge and with the world. Journalists and researchers are no longer the guardians of social truths, but part of the democratised sphere of knowledge that Bunz (2014) calls the digital public. Social media, in particular, provides communication that is viral, digital, and immediate, encompassing voices that are at once plural and that come together with a sameness of experience (Bunz, 2014). Academics are being increasingly drawn into the polyphonic global mediascape, which brings with it both possibilities and challenges. Oakes (2018) challenges education researchers to engage in public scholarship in collaboration with policymakers, education professionals, activists, and community organisations. She notes the importance for researchers to translate their research for non-scholarly audiences and to utilise traditional and emerging media as ways to move research into the mainstream. Crandall (2010) contends that academic research has been transformed by networked and computing systems and by mobile devices. On the one hand, the fast immediacy of new media, in which anyone can have a say on a digital platform, provides possibilities for the academic: increased readership, amplified engagement with scholarship, and new professional connections. It also, however, produces noise, a constant media cycle of blame and crisis, and a relentless stream of contradictory and sometimes aggressive or abusive voices clamouring for relevancy and audience