This narrative inquiry study explores the past and present relationships between the personal and professional experiences of teachers and their evolving teacher identities. In this study, I take on the role of participant-researcher to work together with two other teachers in my school to share and study our personal and professional stories of lived experience in order to better understand how our teacher identities might be evolving in response to the South African educational context. The diverse contexts from which we have journeyed frame the different experiences that we share. In considering the question of how teachers’ past lived experiences might have shaped our teacher identities, I identify political, social, educational and economic forces as well as teacher and family legacies that have emerged from our personal and professional narratives. In looking at the question of how teachers’ current professional experiences might be affecting our evolving teacher identities, I highlight the daily lives of the teachers in this study, their influences and experiences, their inter-personal relationships, their passion for their subject and finally their future expectations that may or may not bring about change. Overall, this study draws attention to the value of teachers examining the personal and professional experiences that they have had in order to understand why they take on and project the identities that they do and how these identities might evolve and change in response to new situations and challenges. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Edgewood, 2010.

Diagnosis with HIV disease is associated with a negative life event which impacts on health, longevity, reproduction and sexuality. Given the impact of disease stigma on prevailing constructions of masculinity and femininity, gender expectations are found to play an increasingly important role in prevention. In contexts in which increasingly more young people are living with HIV there is a need for appropriate sex-education, support for dealing with sexuality and self-identity with HIV. This calls for a prevention approach that gives a voice to those who have previously been marginalised and necessitates a move away from prevention approaches that are didactic and use top-down shifts in policy and regulation as a means of encouraging risk reduction. This study explores DramAidE’s Health Promotion project which locates young people who live openly with HIV in the centre of an HIV/AIDS mitigation project so that they can provide leadership and engage campus communities in HIV/AIDS related activities and events. Unlike most higher education stigma reduction efforts which draw on a model of "liberal enlightenment" in which communications experts design projects with the intention of correcting inappropriate thoughts and actions, this project avoids, what Paulo Freire (1972a) calls a ‘banking’ approach to health (Maluwa, Aggleton, and Parker, 2002). Participatory action research is associated with democratic struggles and is used in this dissertation to encourage resistance to stigmatising attitudes which are encoded within current prevention approaches. The findings suggest that peers exposed to the Health Promotion project engage with gender and prevention issues in a highly critical way. Peers living and affected by HIV have developed a context specific set of norms which encourage testing. An innovative approach to prevention has been adopted in which peer leaders living with HIV provide an alternative model of care and support which is community supported. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

This dissertation explores how written discourses of Drum editors' and readers' letters linguistically construct social identities of the Drum audience, and how this identity construction is intimately linked with socio-historical, socio-cultural and socio-political contexts in which Drum appears in 1951 and 2001. Basically, this study is a contrastive analysis of the audience construction at two significant dates in the life of a South African publication, Drum magazine: March 1951, when the magazine was first published, and 7 June 2001, fifty years later when the magazine is read in a vastly changed socio-politico-cultural context. Data collection was based on the "Readers' Page" in two copies of Drum, one published in March 1951 and the other in 7 June 2001. In each copy of the magazine, the focus is on the editor's letter which asks for the readers' contributions and gives recommendations on the types of letters he is hoping to attract, and one reader's letter from each of the same chosen copies of Drum which the editor publishes. The cover pages of both copies of Drum are used to investigate whether they foreground or reinforce the images of Drum readers. Another set of data comes from an unstructured interview of the current Drum magazine editor. Findings in this study indicate that the ideal Drum audience in 1951 is the African middle class scholar who is a good writer, whereas in 2001, good quality writing is compromised for an advertising community of consumers. In addition, the black educated, urban Drum audience in 1951 see themselves as having power to resist the education system which is characterised by racial segregation. In 2001, the young people regard the attainment of higher education in institutions of higher learning as valuable for black economic empowerment. Educators/therefore, need to teach learners the skills of reading a text critically, so that the learners are able to identify ways in which language choices channel their interpretation, and also the ways in which texts are linked to their socio-historical contexts. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2002.

The goal of this descriptive/exploratory study was to examine the behavior and attitudes of eleven white and five non-white mothers involved in raising multiracial, preschool-aged, biological children. A theoretical framework based on research carried out with multiracial individuals was used to define interracial parenting strategies that promoted strong racial and personal identities in their children. Through individual interviews, using a questionnaire, an opinion survey, and four vignettes that described racially complex situations, two areas of parenting were examined: contact maintained by mothers with the child's minority background, and the mothers capacity to effectively problem-solve. / Little difference was found between the responses of white and non-white mothers. However, among white mothers, the younger, less educated mothers had considerably more contact with the minority culture than did the older, highly educated mothers. The latter, however, performed significantly better than their younger counterparts in providing responses that displayed more of the attitudes and parenting strategies recommended in previous research.

This dissertation examines the unique history of Native Hawaiians and the literature on the sociology of mental health. It examines the role of Hawaiian culture, along with other structural and explanatory variables, in understanding the internalizing symptoms of depression and anxiety in a sample of Native Hawaiian adolescents. This study reviews theories regarding rapid social change, and models that aid our understanding of cultural loss and presents a theoretical model of how Hawaiian culture is affected by structural variables and where culture was learned and how culture, in turn, affects major life events and support, and how these variables are linked to internalizing symptoms. Existing data from the Native Hawaiian Mental Health Research Development Program (NHMHRDP) was used. These data included information from five high schools on three islands from the state of Hawaiʻi. Only Native Hawaiian students with complete information on the study's variables were included in the analyses (N=2142). Group comparisons and structural equation models were used to examine the role of Hawaiian culture in internalizing symptoms. There were significant differences found in categories of gender, socioeconomic status, and in the combination of the two. Univariate and multiple regression models indicated that major life events and family support accounted for the most variation in depression and anxiety. Hawaiian culture was significantly related, both directly and indirectly, to depression and anxiety, although it explained a small amount of variation on both outcomes. When the relationship between the variables was examined with structural equation modeling, the model for Native Hawaiian females had the best overall fit for the data and the variables used. Despite this, only small amounts of variance were accounted for in depression (12%) and anxiety (6%). Exploring other sociological concepts of anomie, social integration, alienation, and the subtle effects of racism and discrimination could be fruitful areas of further research in how Hawaiian culture affects not only psychopathology, but also overall health and wellness. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-170). / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / xi, 170 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

In his Dialogue on the State of a Christian Man (1597), William Perkins articulated the popular early-modern understanding that the individual is a "double person" organised under "spiritual" and "temporal" regiments. In the one, he is a person "under Christ" and must endeavour to become Christ-like; in the other, he is a person "in respect of" others and bound to fulfil his duties towards them. This early-modern self, governed by relationships and the obligations they entail, was profoundly vulnerable to the formative influence of speech, for relationships themselves were in part created and sustained through social dialogue. Similarly, the individual could hope to become "a person...under Christ" only by hearing spiritual speech - Scripture preached or read, or the "secret soule-whisperings" of the Spirit. The capacity of speech to effect real and lasting change in the auditor was a commonplace in seventeenth-century England: the conscious crafting of identity, dramatised by Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, occurred daily in domestic and social transactions, in the exchange of civilities, the use of apostrophe, and strategies of praise. It happened when friends or strangers met, when host greeted guest, or the signatory to a letter penned vocatives that defined his addressee. It lacked a sense of high drama but was nonetheless calculated and effective. Speaking Selves proposes that examining the impact of speech upon the "double person" not only contributes to our understanding of selfhood in the seventeenth century, but also, and more importantly, leads to new insights into some of that century�s greatest literary artefacts: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. The first chapter turns to conduct manuals and conversion narratives, to speech-act theory and discourse analysis, and draws out those verbal strategies that contributed to the organisation of social and spiritual selves. Chapter 2 turns to Paradise Lost and traces the Father�s gradual revelation to the Son, through apostrophe, how he is to reflect, how enact the divine being whose visible and verbal expression he is. Chapter 3 discusses advice on address behaviour in seventeenth-century marriage treatises; it reveals the positive contribution of generous apostrophe and verbal mirroring to Adam and Eve�s Edenic marriage. The conversational dyads in heaven and prelapsarian Eden enact positive identities for their collocutors. Satan, however, begetting himself by diabolical speech-act, discovers the ability of words to dismantle the identity of others. Chapter 4 traces the development of his deceptive strategies, drawing attention to his wilful misrepresentation of social identity as a means to pervert the spiritual identity of his collocutor. The final chapter explores the reorganisation of the complex social-spiritual person in the postlapsarian world. We watch the protagonist of Samson discriminate between the many voices that attempt to impose upon him their own understanding of selfhood. Drawing on spiritual autobiographies as structurally and thematically analogous to Milton�s drama, this final chapter traces the inward plot of Samson as its fallen hero redefines identity and rediscovers the "intimate impulse" of the Spirit that alone can complete the reorganisation of the spiritual self.

Consumers tell stories every day: stories about the products they buy, the experiences they consume, even their friends� and families� consumption experiences - in fact, stories about most aspects of their lives. People live �storied� lives. Consumption experiences are understood and related to others through stories (2003). These stories are loaded with personal, social and cultural meaning that varies significantly dependent upon the intended audience and effect (Bruner 1987) Stories are everywhere and understanding these narratives in relation to consumer experience is a challenge that consumer research must embrace (Stern 1998b). The study of such narratives must address issues such as the content of the story, how it is told, who is actually doing the telling and for what purpose. All these stories exist in context. These contexts are not a means in themselves; rather, they are a means to understand a particular aspect of a consumer phenomenon. In this case, the research presented in this thesis seeks to understand the purpose and function of consumers� narratives about commercial adventure experiences. Hence the context of this research is commercial adventure experiences consumed in Queenstown, New Zealand, billed in promotional tourist literature as �the adventure capital of the world� (Smitz et al. 2004). This specific focus on commercial adventure therefore defines the sample group as consumers of commercial adventure experiences in Queenstown. Hence, the scope of this research is limited to understanding the phenomenon under investigation (consumer narratives) in relation to members of Generation Y, as they are the primary consumers of commercial adventure experiences in New Zealand. This research adopts an interpretive, inductive approach utilising qualitative tools to frame and develop an evolving research question. The primary data collection has an initial framing of the research question phase and then three main phases utilising a variety of qualitative tools including observation, in-depth interviewing and videography. The research addressed many issues, including the preference of consumers to narrate these adventure consumption experiences to their most valued community, their home community, and how they intended to tell their stories to their home community when removed from that community. Additionally, consumers� perceptions of �cool� were investigated, together with the reactions they anticipated receiving from their audiences. This research investigated �cool� as a more meaningful term than status, used by the members of Generation Y to describe the most desired outcome for the narration of their consumption experiences. Several key themes emerged from this research. They were the use of these consumer experience narratives in the identity-construction process, both collectively and individually, and how this related to the classic hero myth identity construction (Campbell 1972) and how �cool� was acquired by these consumers through their narrations. Implications of the findings are presented for consumer research with specific reference to a model of community formation based on consumption practices and Generation Y as a community sharing a consciousness of kind.

Bibliogrpahy: leaves 288-306. / xvi, 325 leaves : ill., maps ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Psychology, 2000

In Australia, family storytelling and religion, the traditional sources of shared stories, are in decline. Stories are increasingly sourced from books, television, film and the internet. But the research suggests that whilst the sources of stories have changed over time, from family and bible stories to books, radio, television and film, the role of those stories has been constant. It has been argued that there is an important connection between an individual?s perception of their own place in the world, their understanding of what constitutes a good life and how to live it, and their ability to empathise with the lives and problems of others (MacIntyre, 1981; Taylor, 1989; Aristotle, 1996; Kearney, 2002). The research indicates that this core bundle of values, attitudes and beliefs is commonly derived from the stories to which individuals are exposed from an early age. Access to stories with which the individual can personally identify and which are familiar to and shared with those around them is crucial in establishing a satisfactory self-narrative (Polkinghorne, 1988), and to the individual's ability to communicate it successfully through the process of triple mimesis (Ricoeur, 1991/1980). Of crucial importance is access to sharable stories which resemble significant aspects of the recipient's own life and circumstances. Respondents who had endured personal difficulties were more likely to accept their circumstances and live successful lives when they had been able to identify with a story describing a similar problem and its credible resolution. However, individuals who had been unable to identify with a public story and establish a satisfactory self-narrative were more likely to be socially dysfunctional. The research also indicates a correlation between exposure to word-based stories at an early age, and the later development of imagination and ambition. People who only experienced visual stories in their early years appeared less articulate, less able to imagine things beyond their own experience, and were less ambitious in their career aspirations. Australia is an increasingly diverse nation, with a wide and growing variety of cultures, beliefs and circumstances represented in the population. It is argued that to maintain the social health of such a diverse community Australia requires an equally wide variety of public stories to ensure that all sections of the community can find a suitable reflection of their lives and circumstances. / thesis (PhDBusinessandManagement)--University of South Australia, 2005.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2007. / Title from 1st page of PDF file (viewed Mar. 5, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references: P. 164-176.