No description available.

Thesis (doctoral)--Lärarhögskolan i Stockholm, 2006. / "Doctoral dissertation 2006"--Half title verso. Includes bibliographical references (p. 256-269).

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:24:58Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2008-02-01Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:13:31Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 zakir_ma_me_mar.pdf: 916376 bytes, checksum: e1bfb771305fd8bb079e40004da3e888 (MD5) / Esta pesquisa trata de reflexões acerca da formação de alunos de Letras de uma universidade pública paulista e de meu primeiro ano de exercício profissional como professora de língua portuguesa em uma escola estadual. A partir da observação de minha prática de ensino, constatei que minha ação como professora era direcionada por vivências que havia tido como aluna e não por uma concepção de ensino que estivesse fundamentada teoricamente. Comecei, então, a questionar o fato de uma professora recém-formada ingressar no magistério sem ter uma fundamentação teórica consciente acerca do trabalho que desenvolveria com os alunos. Desta forma, decidi investigar como as dificuldades que tive ao ingressar no magistério eram também sentidas entre os alunos do quarto ano do curso de Letras que participaram da pesquisa. Por meio da análise do material produzido por eles (portfolios elaborados na disciplina Prática de Ensino de Língua Portuguesa e Estágio Supervisionado) seria, então, possível ter uma percepção mais ampla de meu próprio processo de formação, uma vez que investigaria as questões que me afetavam como professora recém-formada. Assim, escrevendo textos de pesquisa a partir das narrativas dos participantes, conforme propõe a Pesquisa Narrativa (CLANDININ & CONNELLY, 2000), produzi sentidos sobre os excertos que tratavam das expectativas dos futuros professores acerca da profissão docente e da relação que eles estabeleciam ou não entre teoria e prática de ensino. Um resultado central deste estudo indica que há uma diferença significativa entre a compreensão de uma teoria quando dela nos apropriamos e quando essa apropriação não existe. Desta forma, narro como se deu o processo de apropriação de uma perspectiva teórica que se tornou essencial para compreender e pensar em transformar minha própria prática docente. / The research reported in this dissertation is about reflection during the pre-service education of future language teachers of a public university in the state of São Paulo. The study also includes my own process of reflection on my first year as a teacher of Portuguese in a public junior high school. As I reflected on my own teaching practice as a beginning teacher, I noticed that my classroom action was being guided by the experience I had as a student, instead of a theoretically based concept of teaching. Then, I started questioning how a teacher who had just graduated could begin her work without having theoretically conscious bases about the work that was to be developed with her students. Therefore, I decided to investigate how the difficulties I had when I started teaching could also be noticed by the pre-service teachers who participated in this study. Through the analysis of these participants’ narratives (portfolios developed in the course Teaching Practicum of Portuguese), I believed that I could reach a broader perception of my own process of professional development if I focused on the matters that were affecting myself as a novice teacher. By writing research texts about the participants’ narratives, as proposed by Narrative Inquiry (CLANDININ & CONNELLY, 2000), I have produced meanings from excerpts of my participants’ stories about their expectations regarding their profession and the relationship between theory and their novice teaching practice. The first result of this study shows meaningful differences between understanding a theory when it is appropriated by us and when it is not. The second result illustrates my process of appropriation of a theory and how central it became in the process of transforming my novice teaching practice. My contact with Vygotski’s Historical-Cultural Perspective allowed me to understand the complexity of the educational process.

Indigenous Peoples in Canada experience mental health concerns at unbalanced rates compared to non-Indigenous Canadians, but Indigenous Peoples reportedly “underuse” mainstream (i.e., Western) mental health services, like psychotherapy. Understanding how to “best” attend to the mental health needs of Indigenous Peoples with psychotherapy has largely been hypothetical and theoretical, with little input from Indigenous clients themselves. The current study used a narrative inquiry methodology approach to gain insight into perspectives and experiences of Western conventional psychotherapy among Indigenous Peoples (i.e., clients) in Turtle Island (aka Canada and the United States). The research question framing the current research was: What are Indigenous clients’ narratives of Western psychotherapy? Three Indigenous individuals from urban areas in Quebec and Ontario participated in in-depth interviews. In an endeavour to contribute to social justice aims, such as social change in the context of psychotherapy with Indigenous Peoples, I used a theoretical framing that embraced a social justice and decolonizing lens. The findings conveyed the following main themes: perceptions about therapy, significance of the therapeutic connection, role of power dynamics, role of Indigenous culture, and impacts from research participation. Implications for psychotherapy as it relates to power dynamics are discussed, and potential contributions are offered in the hopes that the psychotherapy field may continue to better address the mental health needs of Indigenous Peoples in Canada through a decolonizing approach.

This autoethnographic study presents a narrative of my lifelong yearning to pursue the practice of magic while concurrently managing the frustrations of being a public elementary school teacher. This study also presents sets of facilitating factors that enabled me to surmount personal, professional, and sociocultural challenges to rekindle my direction and purpose in life. The research questions guiding this study include the following: 1) What are the multiple levels of influence that have contributed to my desire to be a magician and leave the teaching profession? ; and 2) In the interrelation of the above context, how do I reignite my artistic passion and purpose? Using the Bronfenbrenner model of human ecology, this study explores multiple levels of influence spanning those from a sociocultural perspective to those of an inter- and intrapersonal nature.

Abstract: My inquiry, involving participant-observation and self-study, explores the stories of four older women through verbal and visual narratives. Showing how two specific types of visual narratives—sandpictures and collages—stimulate experiential story-telling and promote understanding about life experiences, I also illustrate how engagement with images extends learning and meaning-making. Effective in carrying life stories and integrating experience, the visual narratives also reveal archetypal imagery that is sustained and sustaining. Considering how visual narratives may be understood independently, I describe multiple strategies that worked for me for entering deeply into the images. I also elaborate on the relationship of visual narratives to accompanying verbal narratives, describing how tacit knowing may evolve. Through this process, I offer a framework for a curricular approach to visual narratives that involves feeling and seeing aesthetically and associatively and that provides a space for learners to express their individual stories and make meaning of significant life events. Salient narrative themes include confrontation with life-death issues, the experience of “creating a new life,” an avid early interest in books and learning, and a vital connection to the natural world. New professions after mid-life, creative expression, and volunteerism provide fulfillment and challenge as life changes promote attempts to marry relationships with self and others to work and service. My therapy practice room was the setting for five sessions, including an introduction, three experiential sandplay sessions, and a conclusion. Data derive from transcripts from free-flowing conversations, written narratives, photographs of sandpictures, and field notes written throughout the various phases of my doctoral process. This study of older women, with its emphasis on lifelong learning, visual narratives, and development of tacit knowing, will contribute to the field of narrative inquiry already strongly grounded in verbal narrative and teacher education/development. It may also promote in-depth investigations of male learners at a life stage of making meaning of, and integrating, their life experiences. New inquirers may note what I did and how it worked for me, and find their unique ways of extending the study of visual narratives while venturing into the broad field of diverse narrative forms.

This thesis documents the everyday experiences of adults with disabilities living in a rural area of South Africa. Given South Africa’s tumultuous history, characterised by human rights violations incurred through cultural, political and racial disputes, and the country’s current state of socio-economic and political turmoil, violence has come to represent a core feature in the lives of many South Africans. This, together with the impact of unemployment, food insecurity and unequal power distribution, has significantly affected the ways in which many people make sense of their life experiences. Despite the fact that exposure to unequal power dynamics, violence, marginalisation and exclusion are documented to dominate the life experiences of people with disabilities, little is understood about the ways in which these aspects manifest in the interpretation and reconstruction of experiences. Previous research into the field of disability studies has depended primarily on quantitative measures, or on the reports of family members and caregivers as proxies, perpetuating the cycle of voicelessness and marginalization amongst adults with disabilities. Those studies which have adopted qualitative measures in order to explore the psychosocial experiences of disability have focussed largely on the limitations imposed by physical access, and have relied predominantly on the medical and social models of disability, or on the World Health Organisation’s International Classification on Functioning, Disability and Health (WHO ICF, 2001). These models consider the psychosocial experience of disability to be universal, and do not adequately take into account the impact of cultural and contextual variables. This has negatively impacted on the establishment of a research repository upon which evidence-based practice has been developed. This thesis aimed to explore and document the lived experiences of 30 adults with a variety of disabilities, living in 12 rural villages in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa. A combination of narrative inquiry and participant observation was employed in order to examine the relationship between personal and social interpretations of experience. Data analysis was conducted using a combination of Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) Three Dimensional Narrative Inquiry Space, Harré’s Positioning Theory (1990, 1993, & 2009), and Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Results revealed that narratives were plurivocal in nature, giving rise to a complex relationship between personal and social interpretations of experience. The findings highlighted the impact of cultural norms, values and roles on making sense of experiences associated with disability. Four new types of narrative emerged, none of which conformed to the current interpretations of lived experience as reported in the literature. All of the narratives were pervaded by the embodied experience of violence, including evidence of structural, physical, psychological and sexual violence, as well as violence by means of deprivation. This gave rise to a sense of moral decay and highlighted the ways in which abuse of power has become woven into lived experience. In this way insight was gained into the complex interplay between impairment, exclusion, high mortality rates, violence, and poverty in rural areas. Narrative inquiry proved to be a particularly useful tool for providing insight into disability as a socio-cultural construct, drawing attention to a variety of clinical, policy and theoretical implications. These gave rise to a number of broader philosophical questions pertaining to the role of memory, vulnerability and responsibility, and the ways in which all citizens have the potential to be complicit in denying the reality of lived experience amongst vulnerable members of society. These findings demand attention to the ways in which governments, communities and individuals conceive of what it means to be human, and consequently how the ethics of care is embraced within society.

This thesis seeks to elaborate the inner qualities of integrity and presence in professional practice. It is offered as a contribution to the growing body of literature that shifts the emphasis in professional development from the transfer of skills and knowledge to the transformation of practice. Professional education has been viewed as the acquisition of the knowledge and skills required to address the presenting problems of daily practice. It has been assumed that the answers to these problems can be identified, codified and passed on to others, resulting in a kind of professionalism by protocol. But, as Dreyfus & Dreyfus (2005) have pointed out, there is a qualitative shift in the practice of experts when compared to novices and beginners. The expert evidences a deliberative skill that does not rely on the application of protocols but on extensive case by case experience. Indeed professionalism may be understood as the quality of practice that is evident at the very moment when protocols no longer apply (Coles 2002).Professional practice is not a simple concept as Kemmis (2006) has shown. The thesis contributes to this field by suggesting that professionalism is acquired through prolonged inquiry into the contingencies of quotidian practice and that this shapes the inner qualities the practitioner brings to their practice. It is offered as a first person inquiry (Reason 2001) that probes fractals of my own professional practice over a five year period. In telling my personal story, I give an account of an emergent methodology that engages with action research and narrative inquiry. A narrative mode of knowing (Bruner 1986) notices the complex, many sided and sometimes conflicting stories of professional life resulting, not in a set of propositional claims, but in an account that provides the reader with the imaginal space to enter the process and participate, with me, in making sense of professional practice.

Orientador: João Antonio Telles / Banca: Stela Miller / Banca: Solange Teresinha Ricardo de Castro / Resumo: Esta pesquisa trata de reflexões acerca da formação de alunos de Letras de uma universidade pública paulista e de meu primeiro ano de exercício profissional como professora de língua portuguesa em uma escola estadual. A partir da observação de minha prática de ensino, constatei que minha ação como professora era direcionada por vivências que havia tido como aluna e não por uma concepção de ensino que estivesse fundamentada teoricamente. Comecei, então, a questionar o fato de uma professora recém-formada ingressar no magistério sem ter uma fundamentação teórica consciente acerca do trabalho que desenvolveria com os alunos. Desta forma, decidi investigar como as dificuldades que tive ao ingressar no magistério eram também sentidas entre os alunos do quarto ano do curso de Letras que participaram da pesquisa. Por meio da análise do material produzido por eles (portfolios elaborados na disciplina Prática de Ensino de Língua Portuguesa e Estágio Supervisionado) seria, então, possível ter uma percepção mais ampla de meu próprio processo de formação, uma vez que investigaria as questões que me afetavam como professora recém-formada. Assim, escrevendo textos de pesquisa a partir das narrativas dos participantes, conforme propõe a Pesquisa Narrativa (CLANDININ & CONNELLY, 2000), produzi sentidos sobre os excertos que tratavam das expectativas dos futuros professores acerca da profissão docente e da relação que eles estabeleciam ou não entre teoria e prática de ensino. Um resultado central deste estudo indica que há uma diferença significativa entre a compreensão de uma teoria quando dela nos apropriamos e quando essa apropriação não existe. Desta forma, narro como se deu o processo de apropriação de uma perspectiva teórica que se tornou essencial para compreender e pensar em transformar minha própria prática docente. / Abstract: The research reported in this dissertation is about reflection during the pre-service education of future language teachers of a public university in the state of São Paulo. The study also includes my own process of reflection on my first year as a teacher of Portuguese in a public junior high school. As I reflected on my own teaching practice as a beginning teacher, I noticed that my classroom action was being guided by the experience I had as a student, instead of a theoretically based concept of teaching. Then, I started questioning how a teacher who had just graduated could begin her work without having theoretically conscious bases about the work that was to be developed with her students. Therefore, I decided to investigate how the difficulties I had when I started teaching could also be noticed by the pre-service teachers who participated in this study. Through the analysis of these participants' narratives (portfolios developed in the course Teaching Practicum of Portuguese), I believed that I could reach a broader perception of my own process of professional development if I focused on the matters that were affecting myself as a novice teacher. By writing research texts about the participants' narratives, as proposed by Narrative Inquiry (CLANDININ & CONNELLY, 2000), I have produced meanings from excerpts of my participants' stories about their expectations regarding their profession and the relationship between theory and their novice teaching practice. The first result of this study shows meaningful differences between understanding a theory when it is appropriated by us and when it is not. The second result illustrates my process of appropriation of a theory and how central it became in the process of transforming my novice teaching practice. My contact with Vygotski's Historical-Cultural Perspective allowed me to understand the complexity of the educational process. / Mestre

The book of 1-2 Samuel, originally one scroll, is an episodic narrative recounting how the ancient Israelite monarchy was established around 1000 BC by the prophet Samuel and the kings Saul and David. For well over a century historical critics have sought to discern the process of its composition, proposing various conclusions with little consensus. Presently it is generally believed that several blocks of traditional material on common themes (e.g. the History of David's Rise) were brought together in the later pre-exilic period as part of the so-called Deuteronomistic History. This thesis chooses to begin with the present limits of 1-2 Samuel (without including, for example, 1Kgs 1-2), and undertakes to apply rhetorical analysis to all fifty-five chapters, episode by episode, each in its final-form position. The particular structural technique that has been discerned throughout this book is inverted parallelism with an unparalleled centre, here termed 'concentrism'. The unique contributions of this thesis are firstly a careful methodology for concentrism in Hebrew narrative, based on Hebrew poetic and oral composition and proposing specific criteria for identifying and verifying such structures. Secondly, the thesis attempts to account for the current position of every episode in the book, discerning how each contributes to the larger work as regards literary structure and rhetorical message. The resulting arrangement demonstrates an overall unity of technique and authorial perspective, focused on the themes of prophecy (hence the thesis title), deliverance from military attack, religious devotion and dynastic succession. The centre of this thesis therefore provides a detailed description of the discovered structure, one chapter for each of the book's two primary segments (1Sam 1 - 2Sam 6; 2Sam 7-24). A lengthy preceding chapter addresses various theoretical issues often raised relating to such concentric patterns (often inadequately labelled 'chiasmus'/'chiastic'). A summary chapter likewise follows the central chapters, revisiting themes of the methodology and drawing conclusions together. An initial chapter outlines past and present compositional theories, and a concluding chapter suggests further avenues of future research.