Weaving textual tapestries: weaving the 'Italian woman-writer' into the social fabric

A tapestry is a fabric in which multicoloured threads are interwoven to produce a pictorial design. The design of a tapestry often seems three-dimensional with layers of interwoven images of people and events from various times past and present. I use the tapastry as a motif or metaphor to describe the bordering and interweaving of my 'multiple lifeworlds' (Cope & Kalantzis 8) as an Italian Australian woman, academic, writer and social activist. Within and between each .of these worlds are points of tension and confluence, questions and emotions that motivate my own research and writing, and motivate my work with young people to articulate their own 'multiple lifeworlds' through writing
and art.

(Im)plausibilities: a rhizo-textual analysis of policy texts and teachers' work

In this paper I argue for the use of Deleuzian theories in educational contexts. In particular, I am interested in the use of the concept of rhizomes, and the analysis of texts as rhizomes, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's work in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). I discuss the possibilities for using rhizomatics in educational contexts through an exploration of the construction of an 'apparatus of social critique' (Buchanan, 2000). I then describe a rhizomatic understanding of the relationships between teachers and policy texts, which can disrupt commonsense understandings of these relations. I provide examples from my own research (Honan, 2001) of a rhizo-textual analysis of policy texts. This rhizo-textual analysis involved an exploration of the construction of the subject position, teacher, within one policy text, as well as a mapping of two teachers' readings of this text. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for using Deleuzian theory in educational contexts, implications for both policy developers and educational researchers.

Rhizo-textual analyses of educational policy documents

In this paper, I describe methodological applications of Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) understanding of rhizomatic knowledge systems. I draw on rhizo-textual analyses of two different policy documents used in Australia to direct teachers in their teaching of English in primary (elementary) schools.

A rhizo-textual analysis is not concerned with following traditional, scientifically rigorous channels through a study; from data collection, through analysis, to findings that report some objectively discovered truth. Rather, a rhizo-textual analysis is a mapping of connections, of the fleshy tubers that are the rhizome. The mapping draws on various, and often contradictory work, ideas and concepts. What would seem to be "disparate phenomena" enables me to "connect diverse fragments of data in ways that produce new linkages and reveal discontinuities" (Alvermann, 2000, p. 118).

As Deleuze and Guattari point out, "A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, social sciences, and social struggles" (1987, p. 7). This ceaselessness of the connections between rhizomes shifts attention away from the construction of a particular reading of any text towards a new careful attendance to the multiplicity of linkages that can be mapped between any text and other texts, other readings, other assemblages of meaning. Elizabeth Grosz describes rhizomatic texts as "a process of scattering thoughts, scrambling terms, concepts and practices, forging linkages, becoming a form of action" (1995, p. 126)

Within the policy texts I have analysed, this scrambling and scattered process establishes connections between disparate discursive systems, about literacy, about texts, about students and how students learn, and about teaching so that the version of literacy teaching that is produced seems to be normative, to be unquestionably rational, and therefore to be beyond critique.

Feminine transports and transformations : textual performances of Australian women convicts and emigrants from 1788 to 1850

While scholars have critiqued early representations of the white colonial female in the form of the novel, short story, or historical narrative, analyses of poetry tend to be located only on that produced in Australia and often in light of a nascent national identity. This article examines how poetic renditions of the desolate woman might be viewed as part of imperialism's mythologising process, displacing more worrying versions of womanhood in relation to the new colonies. While social anxieties over the identity of the white colonial female would result in highly controlled productions of the female convict and female emigrant, this article demonstrates how they also prove unstable and point to a disruptive reality beyond language.

Postmodernist-feminism and education : a textual performance

This dissertation is performed as a self-reflexive postmodernist-feminist text that is rather like a work in progress. The relationship between feminismS and postmodernismS is investigated to reveal some of the possibilities that might result from their conjunction, whilst some critical disjunctions which may need to be bridged are recognised. Throughout this dissertation, I have explored how, as well as challenging traditional paradigms of gender, postmodernist-feminism acts to challenge traditional views of meaning, knowledge and text, and, further, how this challenge opens up possibilities for all those entrapped by the paradigms of power, whether outside or Inside. When 'reality' and 'knowledge' are revealed as constructions (not unlike fiction), new possibilities of/for postmodernist-feminist multilinearity emerge. This text practises, then, what I have nominated as three important areas of postmodernist-feminism: jouissance (pleasure and playfulness as in feminist poetics); bricolage (making the text work as a one-off); and deconstruction (an admission that the text is neither seamless nor AUTHORitative). In doing so, it emphasises the practice of what Roland Barthes calls 'writerly-reading', in which the reader is revealed as having power over the text according to the way(s) s/he enters it. In this praxis I suggest that the writer may also abdicate AUTHORity over the text by what I have called 'readerly-writing'. Taking up Gregory Ulmer's challenge to construct a 'mystory', it is my story of my journey as a woman, parent, writer mid teacher who is becoming a certified scholar. My lifelong practical interest in education thus reaches a theoretical self-understanding in this text, which is itself a praxis. Thus I introduce the practice of a non-seamless horizontality in which reflections and stories show themselves to be temporal and cultural constructions. The implications of this for school/educational experiences are central to this praxis.

Developing the textual turn : tracking the grammar of research case records

During action research projects a great deal of written material is produced. Some of this is data generated about the project, some about the process of the research and some is reflective writing about the researcher(s). In this article I propose that a deliberate focus on the tracking of texts might be helpful in action research, particularly if the inquiry is working within significant constraints. Working with a range of documents and informed by the work of Dorothy Smith on the texting of ruling relations, I show how a multiagency project based in one school slipped away from its original community development goals into a more 'professional service' model. I also show how the project was able to resist partially the requirement by the funding body to use a rational strategic planning model through the production of taped conversations and meta-analytic papers. Although this is a single case, I contend that this example points to the potential utility of an explicit focus on the textual practices of action research.

Inclusive schooling : representation and textual practice

This paper reports on a larger study carried out in the island state of Tasmania, Australia, between 1996 and 1998. The research reviewed the impact of the Inclusion of Students with Disabilities Policy (ISDP) within the government school system. The qualitative study describes the interpretations of five key informants: a parent; two teachers—a support teacher and a class teacher—a policy-maker and a university academic, during the early period of the implementation of the ISDP. The visual and literary ‘data stories’ of the research are woven together to narrate inclusive schooling in the Tasmanian context as a ‘detective story’ of the special education knowledge tradition. Drawing from poststructuralist methodology and narrative theory the multi-voiced text is a deliberate attempt to enter into conversations with the reader rather than tell the story. Researching inclusive schooling policy through representation and textual practice, I question dominant research practices in the special education field and populist slogans of ‘inclusion’.

Exploring girl power : gender, literacy and the textual practices of young women attending an elite school

Popular discourses concerning the relationship between gender and academic literacies have suggested that boys are lacking in particular, school-based literacy competencies compared with girls. Such discourses construct “gender” according to a binary framework and they obscure the way in which literacy and textual practices operate as a site in which gendered identities are constituted and negotiated by young people in multiple sites including schooling, which academic inquiry has often emphasized. In this paper I consider the school-based textual practices of young women attending an elite school, in order to explore how these practices construct “femininities”. Feminist education researchers have shown how young women negotiate discourses of feminine passivity and heterosexuality through their reading and writing practices. Yet discourses of girlhood and femininity have undergone important transformations in times of ‘girl power’ in which young women are increasingly constructed as successful, autonomous and sexually agentic. Thus young women’s reading and writing practices may well operate as a space in which new discourses around girlhood and femininity are constituted. Throughout the paper, I utilize the notion of “performativity”, understood through the work of Judith Butler, to show how textual practices variously inscribe and negotiate discourses of gender. Thus the importance of textual work in inscribing and challenging notions of gender is asserted. I argue that critical literacy is just as important, but perhaps no more guaranteed, within elite girls’ education as it is within boys’ education.

'Go Grrrl!' : constructions of femininity in the textual practices of elite girls' schooling

In this paper I consider the utility of discourses of ‘girl power’ for understanding, and complicating, the way youthful femininities are produced in schooling. The paper is concerned with expanding the possibilities for how queer theoretical resources might be utilized within studies of girls and schooling. Existing studies have drawn upon Judith Butler’s notion of a ‘heterosexual matrix’ for understanding, and attending to, the way normative discourses of heterosexuality underpin the school-based production of youthful femininities. The term ‘heterofemininities’ has been used in order to label these school-produced intersections of sex/gender/sexuality. Drawing on discourses of ‘girl power’ that gather around ‘voice’ and responsibility, I propose that the production of ‘hetero-femininities’ within educational contexts might be further explored, and thus complicated, when the significance of discourses of ‘girl power’ is considered. I analyse young women’s discussions of key ‘girl power’ icons in popular culture, generated through fieldwork in an elite girls’ school in Australia. In this analysis I explore the intersections of gender/sexuality/girl power that are produced in the young women’s textual practices.

Evoked emotions : textual analysis within the context of pilgrimage tourism to Gallipoli

This chapter focuses on tourism from Australia to Gallipoli to attend Anzac Day commemorations. The research examines diary excerpts of tourists to Gallipoli using theory on emotions to gain insights into the consumption experience. We describe this tourist experience as a pilgrimage, as it is purposeful and is aimed at reaching a specific destination that has spiritual meaning for the consumer. We found that this tourist experience elicits both positively and negatively valanced emotions. The findings highlight that not all tourism experiences elicit hedonically related emotions; however, the outcome of the experience can be positive. Further research on emotions that explores this paradox between emotions in consumption and emotions in post-consumption will assist to understand the ways in which consumers process their emotions within this context.