Sharing a different voice: Attending to stories in collaborative writing

Through three stories, we hope to reveal how sometimes contradictory or unrecognizable aspects of our lives, selves, and stories can create tensions in the collaborative writing endeavor. We begin with a story that illuminates some of the narrative tensions that surface during a decade of writing collaboratively. In an effort to navigate these tensions, we explore two further stories in dialogue as a way to reveal how dominant narratives shape our lives and the stories we might tell. One aim of sharing these stories is to reveal how problematic ways of being are often inseparable from one’s cultural legacy. Making previously obscured narratives visible paves the way for imaginary leaps that are necessary for change. We hope these insights are useful for other writers and collaborators and those who seek caring, responsive, and nurturing writing relationships yet realize this journey can be problematic

Mobile Virtual Realities and Portable Magic Circles

Hybrid reality games such as Pokémon GO enable new approaches to embodied space that problematise traditional understandings of play. More recently, smartphones have again become involved in the provision of a new kind of relationship with space: the space of virtual reality. It is the intention of this exploratory chapter to examine mobile virtual reality as part of the continuum of mobile media in the context of two related themes: (1) physical distraction and (2) embodied space. The chapter will consider how this reassessment might provide new understandings of play’s connection to the ordinary space of daily life before expanding upon these issues within the broader context of the “smartphone movement” and concluding with suggested directions for future research within the field

Embodied Knowledge: Writing Researchers’ Bodies Into Qualitative Health Research

After more than a decade of postpositivist health care research and an increase in narrative writing practices, social scientific, qualitative health research remains largely disembodied. The erasure of researchers’ bodies from conventional accounts of research obscures the complexities of knowledge production and yields deceptively tidy accounts of research. Qualitative health research could benefit significantly from embodied writing that explores the discursive relationship between the body and the self and the semantic challenges of writing the body by incorporating bodily details and experiences into research accounts. Researchers can represent their bodies by incorporating autoethnographic narratives, drawing on all of their senses, interrogating the connections between their bodily signifiers and research processes, and experimenting with the semantics of self and body. The author illustrates opportunities for embodiment with excerpts from an ethnography of a geriatric oncology team and explores implications of embodied writing for the practice of qualitative health research

Revans reversed: focusing on the positive for a change

The classical principles of action learning, based on the work of Revans, usually include working with problems as the core. This article aims, by contrast, to show how a recent project of change has incorporated principles of appreciative inquiry (AI) based on social constructionism and positive psychology into an action learning process involving a wide range of participants. The concern for problems is considered showing that the process of diagnosing a problem can reinforce a deficit orientation. The key ideas of AI are presented, highlighting the purpose of finding out what is going on in terms of what is working well, and in doing so, it becomes possible to build a picture of the strengths and virtues of what is happening at work. Based on findings from a recent project of culture shift in a design and production company, a process of positive action learning is considered

Q methodology and a Delphi poll: a useful approach to researching a narrative approach to therapy

Q methodology and a Delphi poll combined qualitative and quantitative methods to explore definitions of White and Epston's (1990) narrative approach to therapy among a group of UK practitioners. A Delphi poll was used to generate statements about narrative therapy. The piloting of statements by the Delphi panel identified agreement about theoretical ideas underpinning narrative therapy and certain key practices. A wider group of practitioners ranked the statements in a Q sort and made qualitative comments about their sorting. Quantitative methods (principal components analysis) were used to extract eight accounts of narrative therapy, five of which are qualitatively analysed in this paper. Agreement and differences were identified across a range of issues, including the social construction of narratives, privileging a political stance or narrative techniques and the relationship with other therapies, specifically systemic psychotherapy. Q methodology, combined with the Delphi poll, was a unique and innovative feature of this study

Unravelling social constructionism

Social constructionist research is an area of rapidly expanding influence that has brought together theorists from a range of different disciplines. At the same time, however, it has fuelled the development of a new set of divisions. There would appear to be an increasing uneasiness about the implications of a thoroughgoing constructionism, with some regarding it as both theoretically parasitic and politically paralysing. In this paper I review these debates and clarify some of the issues involved. My main argument is that social constructionism is not best understood as a unitary paradigm and that one very important difference is between what Edwards (1997) calls its ontological and epistemic forms. I argue that an appreciation of this distinction not only exhausts many of the disputes that currently divide the constructionist community, but also takes away from the apparent radicalism of much of this work

Markers of assimilation of problematic experiences in dementia within the LivDem project

© 2015, © The Author(s) 2015. This study aimed to determine whether the Markers of Assimilation of Problematic Experiences in Dementia scale (MAPED) can be used to identify whether the way in which participants talk about dementia changed during the group. All eight sessions of a LivDem group, which were attended by participants were recorded and transcribed. An initial analysis identified 160 extracts, which were then rated using the MAPED system. Inter-rater reliability was 61% and following a resolution meeting, 35 extracts were discarded, leaving 125 extracts with an agreed marker code. All of the participants were identified as producing a speech marker relating to dementia, and these varied between 0 (warding off) to 6 (problem solution). Examples of these markers are provided. The proportion of emergence markers (indicating the initial stages of assimilation) compared to later markers changed significantly between the first four sessions and the final sessions. This difference was still significant even when the markers produced by the most verbal participant, Graham, were excluded. The use of process measures within psychotherapy complements more conventional outcome measures and has both theoretical and clinical implications

Teachers as leaders in a knowledge society: encouraging signs of a new professionalism

[Abstract]: Challenges confronting schools worldwide are greater than ever,and, likewise, many teachers possess capabilities, talents, and formal credentials more sophisticated than ever. However, the responsibility and authority accorded to teachers have not grown significantly, nor has the image of teaching as a profession advanced significantly. The question becomes, what are the implications for the image and status of the teaching profession as the concept of knowledge society takes a firm hold in the industrialized world? This article addresses the philosophical underpinnings of teacher leadership manifested in case studies where schools sought to achieve the generation of new knowledge as part of a process of whole-school revitalization. Specifically, this article reports on Australian research that has illuminated the work of teacher leaders engaged in the IDEAS project, a joint school revitalization initiative of the University of Southern Queensland and the Queensland Department of Education and the Arts

Experiencing mindfulness meditation—a client narrative perspective

The study was based on the non-participant involvement of the researcher in four six-to-eight weeks' mindfulness meditation training courses led by chartered psychologists. The participants suffered from stress/sleeplessness, depression or agoraphobia in the presented cases. They were selected on the basis of recommendations by the psychologist who was the course instructor, who described them as positive and suitable. The participants wrote diaries on a weekly basis, and they were interviewed at the beginning, middle and end of the course. An in-depth analysis of three individual cases will be presented in the form of narratives constructed from their own words. The narratives demonstrate the unique and embodied changes of the individual participant's experiences during the training course. The purpose was to illustrate richly what happens and how changes happen during these weeks of learning and practicing mindfulness meditation. It is not the intention to give evidence about the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation in general, but to present the whats and hows of cases where mindfulness meditation appears to improve quality of life, health and well-being