Stories from high school and prisons rattle institutional cages

AbstractThis paper is based on two research projects. One considered ‘unsettling’Aboriginal prisoner education and the other ‘troubling’ education in high school.Juxtaposed are two critical research methodologies; critical ethnography and arelational critical allied methodology. Whilst these may at first appear very similar,on closer scrutiny it becomes clearer that independently, the place of the researcherbecomes situated in a somewhat different relationship with participants. Inworking through these layers of difference, what emerges are the entwined voicesof participants who are clearly telling us what ‘bars hold them in their cages’ andwhat spaces between could be transformational.

Stories: a common currency

This article offers an account of a series of writing workshops involving English teachers in Victoria, Australia, known as the stella2.0 project. It argues that storytelling can potentially provide a valuable counterpoint to the ‘knowledge’ underpinning standards-based reforms. The argument serves to introduce two other essays published in this issue of Changing English: ‘Storytelling and Professional Learning’, in which Brenton Doecke articulates a standpoint about storytelling that helped to shape the workshops, and ‘Professional Learning and the Unfinalizable: English Educators Writing and Telling Stories Together…’, by Graham Parr and Scott Bulfin, in which they inquire into the conceptual foundations of the stella2.0 project and discuss some of the writing generated by teachers in the workshops.

Telling tales: the value of storytelling for early career teachers

This article examines how early career teachers, participants in a research project, make sense of their experiences through storytelling. The teachers’ stories provide a significant counterpoint to the way standards-based reforms construct their professional development, prompting us as teacher educators to think again about what it means for our students to make the transition from initial teacher education into the institutional setting of a school. We draw on Ricoeur’s understanding of narrative to show the complexity of the identity work they perform and how their stories position them as authorities when it comes to the experience of beginning teaching and of negotiating a pathway within existing policy environments. Close attention to the language of these narratives produces rich insights into early career teachers’ experiences and raises questions as to how researchers might solicit and respond to such narratives.

Risky business: stories from the field of rural community nurses' work in domestic violence.

This paper reports on a descriptive study into family violence in rural Victoria. Focus groups were held in a number of areas across rural Victoria with a total of 24 community nurse participants. The focus groups were audio-taped and the tapes transcribed to enable the clustering of themes. The dominant themes were: picking up cues, helping and helplessness, holding secrets and quiet resistance. Underpinning all these themes however, was the notion of 'risky business'. All nurses in the study gave examples of situations that they encountered; their ways of helping; of working sensitively; of working around a system that is unhelpful; and the ways in which their work while skilled, thoughtful and wise, is also costly in terms of the emotional wounds they carry. Rural nurses work with considerable risk and courage as they engage in the care and support of women experiencing family violence.

Speculative fictions for understanding global change environments: two thought experiments

The purpose of a thought experiment, as the term was used by quantum and relativity physicists in the early part of the twentieth century, was not prediction (as is the goal of classical experimental science), but more defensible representations of present ‘realities’. Speculative fictions, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the Star Wars cinema saga, can be read as sociotechnical thought experiments that produce alternative representations of present circumstances and uncertainties, and anticipate and critique possible futures. In this essay I demonstrate how two examples of popular speculative fictions, Frank Herbert's Dune (1965) and Ursula Le Guin's The Telling (2000), function as thought experiments that problematise global transitions in their respective eras. I argue that critical readings of such stories can help us to anticipate, critique, and respond constructively to social and cultural changes and change environments within nation-states that constitute, and are constituted by, global change processes and their effects.

Anecdotes and antidotes: stories as balms, storytelling as healing

The following article refers to a performed presentation, from the Double Dialogues Conference, Art & Pain, at The University of Melbourne, May 10, 2003. The presentation involved an audio-visual configuration in which I was speaking whilst simultaneously vision-mixing ‘live’ images from a camera and images from a pre-recorded videotape. The pre-recorded images were from the creative video practice at the centre of my higher degree research. The ‘live’ mixing was projected on a video screen. A separate video camera recorded the images that act as parentheses to the following text. The images that accompany the text are from the performed presentation.

Crime stories: posnerian pragmatism, Rawlsian pure procedural justice, and the fictional problem

There are many different ways in which law and truth may be said to be related. It is perhaps in the criminal trial that connections between them are of most significance. An orthodox way of describing a criminal trial is that the criminal procedure is seeking to establish the truth concerning some past event, and that success of the procedure is measured by how close its outcome converges with that truth. Criminal justice presents the community with challenging dilemmas in this regard, such as those arising from the notion of double jeopardy. This paper discusses the Rawlsian notions of 'imperfect', 'perfect' and 'pure' procedural justice, and suggests against Rawls that it is pure procedural justice that best represents what we want from a criminal justice system. Good procedure makes good criminal law. A comparison is made with the writings of Habermas and Posner, and given that pure procedural justice eschews transcendental truths, some brief comments are made on the convergence of that position with the realm of the fictional.

Stories from beyond the frame dilemas and contradictions of photojournalism in a digitized and globalized world

To engage in the practice of photojournalism is to occupy a position of privilege, because the practice involves entering, albeit for a short while, the lives of others. But with this privilege comes the burden of representation. In this sense I believe that photojournalism is currently in crisis. This crisis concerns the decontextualization of the image in media outlets and the relegation of the photojournalist to the role of merely a hunter/gatherer rather than a storyteller. In other words, photojournalists have become alienated from the process of re-presentation of their own stories. To some extent it has always been thus.

Global education: stories from Australia

Students today are living in a global world There is a need for schools to educate students about this world This world needs to be seen through a range of perspectives - social, cultural, environmental,political, economic and spiritual In order to educate about this 'world', 'new' curriculum policy needs to reflect this globalised world This proposal will give an insight into the curriculum designed to prepare students for the future worlds they are entering with specific reference to Victoria, Australia.