Prioritizing Purposes: Two American History Teachers' Choices Among Subject Matter and Classroom-Related Purposes

This study explores how two American history teachers - one novice and one experienced – make in-the-moment choices among their history subject matter and classroom-related purposes during the teaching of an American history unit. Using classroom observations, lesson artifacts, student work products, and deep, retrospective interviews with the teachers as they watched videos of their teaching, this study maps out in detail the teachers’ purposes, both within and across different lesson activity structures. This study finds that the novice and the experienced teacher navigated among their purposes differently from each other, and that the characteristics of each teacher’s purposes navigation aligned with student outcomes in that teacher’s class. The novice teacher acted more like a juggler, with visible, reactive navigation among each purpose operational throughout his teaching; student outcomes in his class were similarly fragmented and discrete. The experienced teacher presented more like an orchestra conductor, interweaving his purposes and anticipating the navigation decisions that would create a more seamless whole; student outcomes in his class were aligned with his holistic navigation of purposes. Findings from this study have important implications for education research and teacher practice, including the relationship between teachers’ navigation among purposes and desired student outcomes, the integral role of classroom-related purposes interwoven with history subject matter purposes in teachers’ decision-making, and the differences in purposes navigation between a novice and an experienced history teacher.

Life Stories, Cultural Metissage, and Personal Identities

This article encompasses an underlying notion of personal identities and processes of interaction, which distinguish essentialist identity from relational identity in contexts involving subjects, fields of possibilities, and cultural metamorphosis. It addresses the idea of the individual and her/his transformations: “I am who I want to be if I can be that person.” Any one of us could hypothetically have been someone else. The question of the reconstruction of individual identities is a vital aspect in the relationship between objective social conditions and what each person subjectively does with them, in terms of auto-construction. The complexity of this question reflects the idea of a cultural kaleidoscope, in which similar social conditions experienced by different individuals can produce differentiated identities. The title and structure of this text also seek to encompass the idea that in a personal life story, the subject lives between various spheres and sociocultural contexts, with a composite, mestizo, and superimposed or displaced identity, in each context. This occurs as the result of a cultural metamorphosis, which is constructed both by the individual as well as by heterogeneous influences between the context of the starting and finishing points at a given moment. This complex process of cultural metamorphosis—the fruit of interweaving subjective and objective forces—reveals a new dimension: the truly composite nature of personal identities.

The Great Irish Famine in history-writing and prose fiction : "the mutual interplay of two narrative genres"

Denna tvärvetenskapliga studie kontextualiserar den skönlitterära framställningen av hungersnöden i Irland i mitten av 1800-talet i förhållande till tre olika faser av irländsk historieskrivning ‒ den nationalistiska, den revisionistiska, och den postrevisionistiska ‒ med syfte att granska i vilken mån prosafiktionen antingen återspeglar eller motsäger historikernas tolkningar. År 1845 drabbades landet av en dittills okänd potatispest som förstörde skörden helt eller delvis under de följande fem åren. Missväxten ledde till utbredd svält och epidemiska sjukdomar som dödade åtminstone en miljon människor, medan ytterligare en och en halv miljon flydde, huvudsakligen till Förenta Staterna, England, och Kanada. I sina försök att hitta en rationell förklaring till hur potatispesten kunde utvecklas till den värsta svältkatastrofen i Europa under modern tid, har historiker påvisat ett antal bidragande faktorer, till exempel överbefolkning, de fattigaste jordlösa småbrukarnas och lantarbetarnas beroende av potatisen som sitt baslivsmedel, underutveckling inom jordbruket, det rådande jordegendomssystemet, och den dåvarande brittiska regeringens misslyckande att tillhandahålla effektiv och tillräcklig nödhjälp. Historiska förklaringar är naturligtvis nödvändiga för att vi skall kunna bilda oss en uppfattning om hungersnödens orsaker och konsekvenser, men svårigheten med att skildra offrens situation i en historiografisk analys baserad på fakta är uppenbar då deras egna vittnesmål till största delen saknas i källmaterialet. Följaktligen finns det en risk att historieskrivningen förmörkar det som onekligen var centrala realiteter för de värst drabbade, nämligen svält, vräkning, sjukdom och död. Här kan skönlitteraturen bidra till att komplettera historien. Genom att fokusera på ett specifikt (fiktivt) samhälle och dess (fiktiva) individer, kan skönlitterära verk ge en inblick i hur hungersnöden inverkade på olika samhällsskikt, vad människorna gjorde för att överleva, hur nöden och fasorna påverkade deras psyke, och vad eller vem de höll ansvariga för katastrofen. Å andra sidan kan denna fokusering innebära att författaren misslyckas med att ge en helhetsbild av hungersnödens enorma omfattning och att redogöra för alla faktorer som orsakade och förlängde den. Paul Ricoeurs teori om samspelet mellan historia och fiktion (the interweaving of history and fiction) är därför ett nyckelbegrepp för att bättre förstå denna traumatiska period i Irlands historia. Avhandlingen omfattar en textanalytisk, komparativ kritik av ett antal historiska och skönlitterära verk. Genom närläsning av dessa texter granskar jag vilka aspekter av hungersnöden (politiska, ekonomiska, sociala) de olika författarna valt att behandla, och på vilket sätt, samt hur deras synvinklar har format tolkningarna i sin helhet. I detta sammanhang tar jag också upp skillnaderna mella fakta och fiktion, och speciellt de etiska problem som är förknippade med skildringen av traumatiska händelser och mänskligt lidande. Samtidigt undersöker jag, med hänvisning till Roger D. Sells kommunikationsteori, huruvida vissa författare anslår en påstridig ton i sina verk och hur detta påverkar dialogen mellan författare och läsare. Med utgångspunkt i Ricoeurs teori argumenterar jag för att historia och fiktion inte bör ses som ömsesidigt antitetiska diskurser i skildringen och tolkningen av det förflutna, och att skönlitteraturen genom fokuseringen på offren, som ofta tenderar att reduceras till statistik i historieskrivningen, kan förmedla en bättre förståelse och en djupare känsla för den mänskliga dimensionen av den tragedi som utspelades under hungeråren.

Collaborative Systems in Crisis Management: A Proposal for a Conceptual Framework

Part 11: Reference and Conceptual Models

Da promessa à realidade: a cidade potiguar do século XIX, a partir do olhar da elite

The purpose of this research is to apprehend the perception that the ruling elite, especially the Presidents of the province of Rio Grande do Norte/Brazil, had about the potiguar city, that is, the urban localities existing in the province along the 19th century. By interweaving political, administrative, socioeconomic and spatial aspects, the study of this perception involves two distinct moments, which are also linked: a moment of apprehension of the city, that is, how the elite seizes, describes and criticizes the city; and, a second moment, which occurs simultaneously or after the first moment, of intervention in the city, in which the elite exposes its vision and projects for the city and for the territory. Rather than describing the potiguar city in itself, the research is an attempt to reveal how it was perceived along this process from a particular standpoint or discourse, official and elitist, which did not correspond necessarily or completely to what it was in reality. We tried to understand, always through the lens of the discourse, how the ruling elite perceived the potiguar city based on what their members thought about other urban realities, particularly of the advanced countries; how, within an integrated vision, this city was characterized in political, administrative, socioeconomic and spatial terms and how it consolidated itself along the period established for the research. Qualitative and historical in nature, this study was also methodologically developed based upon bibliographical and documental research. Given the fact that this research works with descriptions, comparisons and interpretations, it was necessary to make use of tools such as the discourse analysis in order to apprehend, as much as possible, what lay behind the words of the elite. The primary sources used were essentially the official documents produced by the Presidents of the province, as well as other documents written by top government officials and other members of the administration staff, all of them composing the so-called ruling elite of Rio Grande do Norte. Secondary sources were books and other publications, theses and dissertations, among others. The research made possible the identification of a certain perception of the potiguar city in the 19th century, which is certainly limited because it is grounded on a specific discourse - that of the political and administrative elite, but which, in spite of such a limitation, is still useful to understand the city and its evolution along the period established, among other noteworthy remarks

Dios y la dama como referentes en la poesía amorosa española (siglos XV-XVII). A propósito de la hipérbole sacroprofana

In this dissertation I will study the phenomenon of the hipérbole sacroprofana in different Castillian writers of the 15th to the 17th centuries, in order to show in what does this fact consists, and how it has to be sorted out. Thus, I will also show how this tendency unfolds and how the use of either one or another resource leads the hipérbole towards different expressive horizons. Although the hipérbole sacroprofana is usually detected by most of scholars, it has never met proper attention, so that it has turned into a jumble in which the most disparate instances of a lady’s praise. Yet, an accurate analysis of this phenomenon reveals that this is not the case, and that this resource has manifold aspects and varying intentions and expressive ways as well. In this dissertation, where some five thousand hipérboles are analysed, I point out the various kinds of instances, and I classify them according to their expression and their literary-intellectual interweaving. Besides I monitor this fact to explain how hipérbole varies with the passage of times. By so doing a deficiency in the history of literary criticism, which mistook and likened all sorts of hipérboles in poetical texts, is eased. So we can see that, in its origins, hipérbole was confined to using sacred terms in profane poems out of their context (which I call hipérbole léxica o de inserción terminológica). This resource was effectual insofar as the use of words religiously connoted carried along devout attitudes towards poems of earthly love so that the lady and the feeling that the author professed became “adulterated” by Christian attitudes...