The literature and research investigating why people choose social work as a career has tended to focus on motivational traits rather than on the choice experience itself. Whereas the vocational sector has moved to include a focus on the narrative processes involved with selecting a career, much of the social work research fails to capture the meaning-making processes individuals engage in to make sense of their career choices within their personal and social contexts. This research project describes the meaning-making processes two students participating in the social work program at Central Queensland University and I employ to understand our career choice experiences. Over a period of four years, using a research approach that combines Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) narrative inquiry with Riessman’s (2003) emphasis on social positioning within narratives, Geraldine, John and I explore the interplay between individual, community and professional agendas in our past, present and imagined career choice experiences – particularly focusing on the impact of gender. Identifying the importance of caring as a hallmark of the profession and what draws us to social work, this co-constructed research text highlights the agendas that predominantly support women’s entrance into the profession and challenge men’s participation. Drawing on the metaphor of a quilt to describe our career choice experience, this project draws attention to the importance for aspiring social workers to carefully choose, cut and join together bits of gendered narrative material to create a professional story that both legitimises their entrance into the profession and to position them within the larger career sector.

Abstract For All My Relations is a narrative representation of an autobiographical narrative inquiry into my experiences as an Aboriginal graduate student negotiating the complexities of learning about, and engaging in, Indigenous research. The research puzzle centers on my wonders about the responsibilities of an Aboriginal graduate student choosing to engage in research with Aboriginal peoples in ethically responsible ways. The field texts for the inquiry are my writings over two years: final papers, response journals, assignments, and life writings. Using a narrative inquiry methodology, I identify tensions and bumping points in coming to understand Indigenous research, and in doing so, I have come to a deeper understanding of the impact of these moments on my identity as researcher in the making and on my sense of belonging. I also attend to the social and institutional narratives about Aboriginal people in which my storied experiences are nested. Issues of ethical obligations, relationship, and responsibility are central in my inquiry, and speak to the complexities of wrestling with the questions of researchers right to tell and viewing people through a lens. The findings of my inquiry add to the emerging literature of Indigenous research and narrative inquiry, and their connections. The findings also present insights into the experiences of an Aboriginal graduate, and the notion of identity and belonging. Most importantly, this narrative inquiry enabled me to work through my lived tensions, discomforts, and unease, and to restory my experiences; this process allowed me to grow more confident in my ability to continue to engage in Indigenous research in ethically and relationally responsible ways. My inquiry begins with my experiences of not belonging and feeling less than, and concludes, in the midst, with a counterstory to tell. Counterstories are saving stories for me and for all my relations, past, present, and future. / Indigenous Peoples Education

The key postulation of the research is: learning an additional language should go together with learning its culture. Through personal experience as an EAL learner and EFL teacher, the researcher examines the interconnected system of the learner’s motivations, premising that language cognition could engage a meta-cognitive search for L, as a symbol of the researcher’s inner world, and arising from L such concepts as Language, Learning, Life, Love, and Led Zeppelin. Quest and examination of those concepts analyze sense-data, the researcher’s short literary works written in Russian and translated into English. The canvas of the author’s writing is presented in a symbolic form of literary and musical Islands with which she creates her arts-informed research of new learning-teaching interactions with the learning component as dominating in this interaction. The researcher looks for new perspectives on education as a lifelong process that takes place between I-world and They-world through internalization-externalization. / May 2008

The majority of the existing studies on the entrepreneurship tend to adopt the quantitative approaches to explore the effect of the preset variables and/or to examine the relationships between different variables. However, such an approach is too static and neglects the dynamics and complexity of the environment. Therefore this research tempts to analyze the entrepreneurship story by the narrative inquiry method in the hope to explain a different landscape of entrepreneurship researches and entrepreneurial organizations. The case of this research is a chain cram school. Based on the experiences and stories from the cram school¡¦s founder, managers and teachers, accompanying with the points of view adopted from ¡§Human Playful Entrepreneuning¡¨ as well as the explanation and introspection of the author, five features of an entrepreneurial organization are uncovered. That is, an entrepreneurial organization is an ever-changing organization; an organization playing with boundaries; a changing organization with regularity; a ¡§Gong-ho¡¨ organization; and an organization with a group of knowledge workers who are organizationally assimilated. An entrepreneurial organization could only survive and accommodate to a dynamic environment by attracting new employees with various knowledge, by accumulating and exploiting internal resources, and by continuous interaction with the external environment. An entrepreneurial organization is able to keep some principles despite of its continuous changes, and to keep its entrepreneurship from the faculty¡¦s partnership. When it assimilates the faculty it helps them attract each other but still maintain an innovative thinking and the ability of execution at the same time.

A manager¡¦s growth can reflect the type of culture, environment, and institution of an organization. In addition, great career progresses contribute to a positive growth of both the company and the manager. In the past, most research focuses on how to build up a succession planning and some studies investigate how a manager¡¦s behavior, personnel traits, and style of leadership can influence the organization. With Narrative Inquiry, this article focuses on career development of some senior managers to investigate their learning progress to help researchers remodel (review) the managers¡¦ career experiences. This research expects to reveal the managers¡¦ roles and styles. Besides, the findings will lay bare their behavior and cognition with the organization through their own narratives. The environment and opportunities created by the organization motivate the managers to keep learning in their careers. Furthermore, the managers usually make good use of the challenges they have faced to experiment their concepts in action so as to obtain experiences for transforming their opinions and action. The managers¡¦ learning progresses, which have a great impact on their cognition and construction of the roles they play, also shows that learning behavior and construction of role will be interactive. The research purports to illustrate the forces and factors that will impact the managers in their careers in the organization and help the organization to build an appropriate environment beneficial both to the managers and the companies they work for.

Now, companies all around the world are facing growing and fierce business competition. In order to save costs and raise revenues, companies adopt more flexible and temporary strategy to hire employees, which called ¡§atypical employment¡¨. This research applied the methodology of ¡§narrative inquiry¡¨ to discuss my experience as atypical worker. As both a story-teller and a student, I want to write down what I had experienced, what I had observed and what I had been inspired. Hope what I learned could bring something new and different to the industry and the academic circle. Before entering NSYSU, I had worked at Acer Incorporated as a business assistant for two years and it was also my first job. At that time, the concept of dispatched worker was not well-known and I took the job ignorantly. In Acer, I had been through two different positions and it allowed me to have varied views and know better about atypical employment in Acer. Through pondering my past experience and writing my thesis, here are my research goals and findings. First, reexamine what I had learned and discovered as an atypical worker, employ ¡§narrative inquiry¡¨ to record the story and try to gain some valuable introspection. Second, provide companies and dispatched agencies which were interested in ¡§atypical employment¡¨ with details, obstacles and problems that might happened in atypical employment. Last but not least, as an exploratory study, supply first-hand materials for the academic circle to discover more useful and worthy phenomenon or information to peruse.

This study is an exploration of the lived experiences of three secondary teachers who have developed innovative approaches to English education in response to the needs of diverse, multi-literate urban students. The research marries multiliteracies pedagogy with narrative inquiry, and explores themes and discourses in the teachers’ narrations of their practices. From the new perspective developed from this pairing emerge two significant findings. First, the study contributes to teacher development by synthesizing concepts of design in multiliteracies pedagogy and personal practical knowledge in narrative inquiry. From this synthesis arises the notion of the intentional design of personal practical knowledge occurring through self-directed professional learning that leads to innovation in teaching. Second, the study develops the concepts of interacting narratives and professional knowledge landscape, offering a method of analyzing the multifaceted interactions of Self and Other narratives in the context of a professional knowledge ecosystem. This method provides a specific framework for contextualizing interacting narratives and provides a new clarity of focus in narrative research texts.

This study is an exploration of the lived experiences of three secondary teachers who have developed innovative approaches to English education in response to the needs of diverse, multi-literate urban students. The research marries multiliteracies pedagogy with narrative inquiry, and explores themes and discourses in the teachers’ narrations of their practices. From the new perspective developed from this pairing emerge two significant findings. First, the study contributes to teacher development by synthesizing concepts of design in multiliteracies pedagogy and personal practical knowledge in narrative inquiry. From this synthesis arises the notion of the intentional design of personal practical knowledge occurring through self-directed professional learning that leads to innovation in teaching. Second, the study develops the concepts of interacting narratives and professional knowledge landscape, offering a method of analyzing the multifaceted interactions of Self and Other narratives in the context of a professional knowledge ecosystem. This method provides a specific framework for contextualizing interacting narratives and provides a new clarity of focus in narrative research texts.

No description available.

No description available.