Stop telling me stories (she said)

I remember when I was young, an advertising billboard poster proudly proclaimed: Coke Adds Life. An anti-advertising group were always at the ready to delete a D and graffiti a cross over the F to create the more believable slogan: Coke Ads Lie. Take the ‘f’ out of Life and we are left with a lie. This ad-busting was not only a reminder that Coke ads lie, but that all advertisements lie.

Teachers talking difference: teacher education and the poetics of anti-racism

This paper reports on a case study which explores the experiences of two teachers of ethnic difference working in secondary schools in rural Australia. In seeking an alternative way of telling their stories, transcript poems have been constructed from data obtained through semi-structured interviews with the teachers. The poems highlight the teachers' experiences of marginalisation and racism and their responses to their positioning in mainly white Anglo-Australian school communities. The study raises particular concerns about the effects of professional and cultural isolation on young and inexperienced teachers of ethnic difference as well as the need to view teacher education as an important site for the development of greater cultural awareness in "mainstream" teacher education students.

People living with ALS/MND tell the diagnosis story : what happened before they knew

Background: Being told that one has a life threatening disease is shattering, but for some people it comes as a relief, following as it does the years of uncertainty and traumatic experiences that lead to diagnosis. The need to debrief the experience is paramount before the story of living with the disease can be told.
Objectives: The purpose of this paper is to describe the extended and often demoralising process of diagnosis for people with ALS/MND.
Methods: Grounded theory methodology was used to explore the life and world of people diagnosed and living with ALS/MND. Data were collected via in-depth interviews with 25 people with the disease, their stories and photographs, poems and books they identified as important, and field notes. The textual data were analysed using constant comparative analysis. All people who volunteered were included in the study. Many participants with communication challenges worked with the researcher to tell their stories.
Results: Participants recounted the processes they experienced prior to the time when they were finally given a reason for the perplexing behaviour of their bodies. The diagnosis story was revealed as a sequence of: ‘recognizing a problem’, ‘seeking medical help’, ‘being on the diagnostic roundabout’, ‘confirming ALS/MND’, ‘reevaluating life and the future’, then ‘living with ALS/MND’. Consequences included a loss of trust in the competence of the health care system, which had implications for seeking help later when living with the disease.
Discussion: Participant distress seemed to have more in common with the stress linked to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Participants continued to relive the diagnosis experience in their dreams and daily lives many months after diagnosis, which impacted negatively on their well-being. For this group of people, the diagnostic process itself was the traumatic stressor. It seemed that telling their stories gave them the opportunity to debrief and have their words recorded. Debrief support is recommended whenthe ALS/MND diagnosis is finalized, and continued, to prevent long-term reliving of the diagnostic process.
Conclusion: Health professionals continue to address the issues around the process of giving the ‘bad news’ of ALS/MND. This ‘diagnosis story’ may provide additional guidance in addressing the process so as to limit potential harm and promote well-being for people with the disease and their families.

Not the "other" mother : how language constructs lesbian co-parenting relationships

This paper presents findings from recent Australian qualitative research with lesbian co-parents where study participants' fluid narrative identities are  deconstructed in order to better understand how language constructs relationships within private and public domains. Language used to define, describe and give meaning to roles and relationships of lesbian co-parents within social and kinship networks and wider community is explored. Through claiming language and telling their stories lesbian co-parents give meaning to their lives; affirm their identity; and present their relationships as visible and valid.

Dorothy Gordon

Perhaps due to her later fame as the newspaper columnist and controversial radio personality known as “Andrea,” the early film career of Dorothy Gordon has been largely overlooked. Certainly her significant celebrity in Australia in the 1 960s overshadowed her comparatively lesser achievements as a silent cinema extra, actor, screenwriter, and art director. The recognition of her contribution to the Australian film industry is further diminished by the loss of her major work as star of Raymond Longford’s Hills of Hate (1926). In addition, her reputation as an entertaining raconteur fond of telling tall stories, especially about herself, leav es much room for doubt about the recorded detail of her early career in both Holly wood and Australian silent films.

Affect and the politics of testimony in Holocaust museums

In 2010, the Jewish Holocaust Centre (JHC) in Melbourne unveiled its new permanent exhibition, replacing one that had remained, mostly unchanged, for the past twenty years since a major redevelopment in 1990. The former exhibition had received many plaudits from visitors and reviewers for its homespun, intimate aesthetics and display techniques, largely based on photographs (Light, 2002). Central to the JHC’s role as a site of mourning and education, the exhibition included the use of personal testimony from Melbourne’s Holocaust survivors, both in the exhibition displays and through the survivors who ran the museum and shared their stories with individuals and groups. A continuing anxiety over the thirty-year history of the JHC has been the passing of Holocaust survivors. These survivor guides were central to the discourse of a “living museum,” seen as giving the organization its uniqueness compared to other Holocaust institutions as well as other museums generally. Oral survivor testimony was perceived as a key aspect of the museum’s pedagogic potential: The affective encounter with survivors telling their stories while the visitor was viewing the exhibition was identified as having a transformative function, particularly for school-age students who comprised the majority of the visitors. The exhibition redevelopment in 2010 was, in part, a manifestation of that anxiety, with the urgency to incorporate survivor video-testimony increasing as the survivors aged and their memories faded. However, replacing a much-loved exhibition was fraught with difficulties, as the survivors were still very much part of the museum decision-making process. As the JHC had gradually moved from a survivor-volunteer based place of mourning to a professionally run museum with paid employees, there was a need to preserve the voices of the survivors who had been guides at the museum since its opening. Approaching a time when the survivors are not bodily present to share their stories, how might their testimonies still have transformative potential and inform interpretive techniques?

Storytelling for ordinary, practical purposes (Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’)

This essay explores the role that storytelling can play in teachers’ learning. Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ provides a theoretical framework that enables us to highlight the complexity of the professional learning of teachers when they share stories about their everyday lives. We develop our argument by presenting two instances of teachers representing their professional experiences through storytelling, using these examples (which are drawn from two distinct research projects) to reflect on the learning they accomplish by telling their stories. In the first example, Portuguese teachers involved in a professional learning programme use storytelling to develop their understanding of their practice as literacy educators. In the second example, Australian teachers who participated in a research project tell stories that challenge the way standardised literacy testing devalues their experience as educators. The lesson we draw from these examples affirms the socially grounded character of storytelling for the professional learning and renewal of teachers vis-à-vis a policy environment that privileges other forms of knowledge.

Telling stories: my work as a literacy intervention teacher

This text is a “narrative inquiry” (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) in which the author presents an account of her experiences as an English teacher working in an Australian public secondary school. The author explores the ways in which her beliefs as an English teacher conflicted with her role as a Literacy Co-ordinator/teacher and how — even though she may have consciously questioned and resisted performing certain ideological work, such as administering standardised tests and sorting students into remedial groups — there was still a sense in which government policies mediated her professional practice, transforming it into something with which she remained deeply at odds. The author's aim was not just to provide an empirical account of how students and teachers experienced these literacy initiatives, but to capture the dominant ideology that is shaping education at the current moment. This is done by examining the Victorian government school publication, Education Times, specifically to demonstrate how the rhetoric of this official publication shaped the author's professional practices and knowledge as an English teacher. Through this narrative the author interrogates taken-for-granted understandings about what counts as “knowledge” in an age of increasing accountability.

Telling it how it really is?

Heideggerian phenomenology is expounded here as a qualitative methodology of value in researching "how things really are" in organizational life. It is a methodology, and a philosophy, that recognizes a priori the value of the subjective, lived experience of the individual, and the physical, sociological, and psychological phenomena that come together to create a life-world. In this paper, the authors present three cases where this methodology successfully revealed the employee's reality. Stories about working in teams, being downsized, and having an unseen chronic illness at work are shared to demonstrate the ability of Heideggerian phenomenology to reveal how life really is in organizations. The benefit for HR practitioners and managers is an increased understanding of and, hence, ability to address these sensitive and often unspoken aspects of organizational life.

Telling it how it really is? : life in organisations revealed using Heideggerian phenomenology

Heideggerian phenomenology is expounded here as a qualitative methodology of value in researching "how things really are" in organisational life. It is a methodology, and a philosophy, which recognises a priori the value ofthe subjective, lived experience of the informant, and the physical, sociological and psychological phenomena that come together to create their life-world. In this paper, the authors present cases where this methodology successfully revealed the respondents' reality. Stories about working in teams and being downsized are shared to demonstrate the ability of Heideggerian phenomenology to reveal how life really is in organisations.

Story-telling and policy making : the construction of university entrance problems in Australia

This paper is a study of the politics of policy making within the context of Australian university entrance policy. It argues that policy making is more concerned with the social construction of policy problems than with their resolution and that in this respect the problem-solving image of policy making is flawed. Additionally, the paper explores the ways in which policy problems are constructed and how competing stories are resolved within policy making. The paper concludes that in this case such stories of university entrance were absorbed within the government's agenda for reform through the use of participative processes restricted to the consideration of best solutions rather than particular problems.