Weaving Words : Personal and Professional Transformation through Writing as Research [1 ed.] 9781443862806, 9781443854528

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Weaving Words

Weaving Words: Personal and Professional Transformation through Writing as Research

Edited by

Janice K. Jones

Weaving Words: Personal and Professional Transformation through Writing as Research, Edited by Janice K. Jones This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Janice K. Jones and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5452-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5452-8

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Foreword .................................................................................................... xi Lesley Saunders Preface ..................................................................................................... xvii Nita Temmerman Acknowledgments .................................................................................... xix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 The Purpose of this Book Part I: Identity and Voice Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11 The Challenge to Write: The Warp, The Weft and The Space Between Janice K. Jones with Jenny Hoang, Renee Lockwood, Miyuki Kruse, Pauline Dobbie, Jaclyn Fitzgerald and Nicole Hargreaves Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 37 Uisge Beatha: The Ebb and Flow of Four Tides Yvonne Stewart Findlay and Janice K. Jones Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 55 Beginnings, Endings and the Journey Between Erin-Pearl Buchner, Melissa Andrews, Melissa Crawford and Cameron Feith Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 63 Finding my Voice Anne Jasman

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Table of Contents

Part II: Writing the Wor(l)d Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 81 Dinawan Dreaming: Seeing the Darkness or the Stars Janice K. Jones and Donna Moodie with Nicole Hobson Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 103 Conflict, Adversity and Reconciliation Kirra O’Brien, Leanne Hubbert, Catherine Somerfield and Julia Grieve Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 117 Understanding and Acting through Conversational Spaces Erin Christensen, Benjamin Williams and Joseph Occhino Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 137 Relationships: Darkness, Light and Shades in Between Claire D’Arcy, Lorrae Charles, Jaclyn Fitzgerald, Kathleen Parkes and Natalie Romanet Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 159 Writers’ Journeys: Ways of Being, Knowing and Doing Robyn Henderson Part III: Writing for Personal and Professional Transformation Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 173 Constraints, Creativity and Challenges: Educators and Students Writing Together Janice K. Jones with Pauline Dobbie, Kim Fox, Natalie Kersnovske, Jaclyn Fitzgerald, Sophie Fitzgerald, Jenny Hoang, Tommy Ha and Melanie Harris Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 203 Seeming, Being and Becoming Melissa Andrews, Kim Fox, Melanie Harris, Matthew Hunt, John Mulroney, Stephanie Rex and Natalie Romanet

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Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 221 Seeming, Being and Becoming: Lifelong Learning and Teacher Transformation Patrick. A. Danaher Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 237 Reconceptualising Meaning-Making and Embracing Disruptive Inquiry Alison L. Black Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 267 The Writer’s Journey: Research and Transformation Roberta. E. Harreveld Afterword ................................................................................................ 283 Patrick Blessinger Contributors ............................................................................................. 285 Index ........................................................................................................ 291

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

2-1 2-2 2-3 2-4 2-5 2-6 5-1 5-2 10-1 10-2 10-3 10-4 10-5 10-6 10-7

Uisge Beatha as a metaphor: the water of life Extract from original birth certificate Extract from the front page of ‘Bulletin’ Labels used in Auschwitz Tattoos used to label prisoners, Auschwitz Writing as research: A reflective process Indigenous research and teaching approach Dinawan Dreaming by Donna Moodie First layout (A4 canvas size on Photoshop CS5) Simplified layout Diagonal panel creates a more dynamic feel The map The character ageing Reversing stereotypes – 8 year old student’s writing Year 2 student’s poem

FOREWORD

At the heart of all imaginative writing – and all writing makes demands on the imagination to a certain extent – is a mystery: whatever it is that the writer is trying to reach or touch in herself/himself in the process of writing. One way of naming this mystery is to call it ‘voice’ – the voice of the writer that is making itself heard in the world, or is already a powerful presence, or whose small utterances are all but stifled, or are audible mostly as the echoes of other voices; but nonetheless possessing the idiosyncratic rhythms and timbre of its owner-maker, what the poet and novelist Helen Dunmore calls each writer’s ‘linguistic register’, more vital in establishing his or her distinctiveness than content (Dunmore 2012). Think how a baby’s cry, devoid of any words, is instantly recognisable to the baby’s mother. Writers, unlike other artists, Dunmore reminds us, use the common or garden medium of language, a doughty work-horse of an instrument, pressed into service by everybody for everything from shopping lists to car manuals, news bulletins, protestations of love, of rage. Despite the instantaneousness of digital communication, ours remains a text-based, in the old sense, society – in our education systems, credentials are still awarded on the basis of discursive text in forms like the one-hour essay composed under examination conditions or a doctoral thesis painstakingly put together over several years. For those employed in higher education, in the civil service and in most professions, the authored text – journal article, ministerial speech, application for grant-funding, end-of-project report, edited book, counsel’s brief, detailed lesson plan – continues to serve as a principal marker of status attained or credibility sought. Because such discourses are by and large instrumental, people may experience writing within them as imposed, performative, straitening, even as they become adept at (re)producing the desired texts, and even as they undoubtedly take pleasure in doing so. They are joining a club, learning to speak the language; they are becoming authors, acquiring authority. Perhaps inevitably, then, people often assume that it is only in ‘personal’ or ‘creative’ writing that one’s own voice can be truly, authentically expressed – the still small voice above the thunder of the crowd, the chatter of the club. Myself, I’ve come – over many years of

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writing for academic and policy audiences, as well writing poetry, sometimes both at the same time – to doubt that, or at least not to take it for granted. First, there is no guarantee that ‘personal’ or ‘creative’ writing per se will be fresh and new, uncontaminated by received ideas or ingrained habits of thought. The spontaneous, untutored self can find it all too easy to reproduce clichés of emotion as well as of linguistic expression. The cultivation of a true, truthful ‘voice’ takes hard work, practice, trial and error, deliberate immersion in the best of what has been written in a diversity of traditions, the ability to take and use criticism. Richard Sennett reckons that it takes 10,000 hours of disciplined practice to become proficient in a skill, however brilliant one’s initial talent (Sennett 2008). Secondly, a good place to learn some of the craft of writing is in wrestling with that funding proposal or briefing paper. Having to convince other people that you have a sound rationale and a sense of logical progression, that you can put complex facts or ideas into comprehensible, persuasive language within restrictions of word-length or time-frame, that you have a story to tell in your own words, is a really useful discipline. So I think we should beware of polarising ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ writing, and allow ourselves the little wriggle of satisfaction that comes from finishing a well-structured, cogently-expressed school policy or student handbook – it’s qualitatively no different from the gift of realising, as we read it aloud, that our poem has, at last, on the nth draft, come out ‘right’… This means, of course, that we must also learn to listen. But what does all this have to do with the business of teaching and teaching teachers? Well, on the most superficial level, teachers have to get on with the production of routine ‘educational’ texts like the abovementioned lesson plans, student reports, academic assignments, and so forth; exerting ownership over even these fairly routine pieces of writing contributes to professional satisfaction. On another level, it’s obvious that if young people in schools are being expected or invited to spend time and effort on ‘creative writing’ then their teachers should have some direct experience of what this entails – at the very least, so as to avoid putting students in the emotional or intellectual impasse of feeling that they ‘have nothing to say’ or that the words they’ve managed to type are ‘pathetic’ because the preparation, context, environment, support and/or feedback have been inadequate. This much we should take as read. But the book raises some deeper and very challenging questions about the role of imaginative writing in teaching and teacher education, including:

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x if (as I’m inclined to think) the aesthetic criteria for assessing a poem (or short story) within the discourse of literary criticism are different from – even contrary to – the developmental criteria for assessing the self-same poem (or story) within the discourse of professional learning, can we make those differences explicit and meaningful? what are the implications for how tutors and students approach imaginative writing? x similarly, what are the assessment criteria for deploying ‘creative’ writing as a mode of investigation and/or data representation within the discourse of research? and what are the implications for how people can and should approach imaginative writing in this context? x what are teachers trying to achieve when they invite children to write poems (or stories)? Are they, for example, teaching elements of literature through direct experience of the genre; introducing and supporting the disciplined practice of imaginative work; encouraging ‘self-expression’ – and for what educational purpose? the current ‘creativity agenda’ is not sufficient justification, as I’ve argued elsewhere (Saunders 2011). There aren’t easy answers to these questions, naturally, but I’d like to spend just a few moments thinking about other possible kinds of connection between teaching and writing. The writer and radical educator Peter Abbs has laid out what he sees as the four tasks of the poet (Abbs 2006) – the existential, linguistic, cultural and metaphysical tasks, respectively. Applying poetic licence to his notion of ‘poet’, let’s use it here to mean ‘writer’. In summary, the first task of the writer is to be existentially grounded – the writer’s work is to understand and make manifest his/her own vision, give cognitive shape and expressive form to a particular human state of being. The second task is to be hyper-aware of language. A poem is something made in language, for the love of language. But because our language is polluted and impotent, says Abbs, a poet’s task is also to cleanse the language – which may be achieved as much through silences and stutterings as through articulation and articulacy. Silence has a power, a presence, from which every poem arises and into which it passes; a poem is cleansed by the silence on either side of it, it does not seek to occupy or colonise the silence. The third task of the poet/writer is to engage with the cultural dimension, the collective tradition, ‘the ancestors’, whoever they may be. Poets are archaeologists of the imagination, where all poems co-exist in a

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Foreword

simultaneous present. A writer therefore lives in a vast echo-chamber of multiple cadences, an entire symbolic world, which gives her/him freedom from the politics of oppression or the hegemonies of fashion. The fourth and final writerly task is to be unashamedly metaphysical: poetry is the evocation of forms of life and ways of living offered for our shared contemplation. Writers are ecologists, they keep alive species of creative consciousness in a confused, sad, diminished, trammelled world. If ‘philosophy begins in shipwreck’, poetry can help us find rescue and meaning; poetry helps us bear witness to ourselves and each other. Having taken enormous liberties in summarising Abbs’ four tasks so baldly, I now want to go even further and add a fifth task to the list, based on what the poet Seamus Heaney says in his essays about the function of poetry (Heaney 1988, 1995). Heaney too believes in the ‘poet as witness’, emphasising ‘poetry’s solidarity with the doomed, the deprived, the victimised, the under-privileged’. So we could call this the ethical task of the writer. Taking the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam as exemplar, Heaney reads his work as liberating the spirit: The essential thing about lyric poetry, Mandelstam maintained, was its unlooked-for joy in being itself… Mandelstam implied that it was the poet’s responsibility to allow poems to form in language inside him, the way crystals formed in a chemical solution… Mandelstam’s witness [was] … to the art of poetry as an unharnessed, non-didactic, non-party-dictated, inspired act (Heaney 1988, page xix.) And all those negatives – the ‘uns’ and ‘nons’ – are themselves, perhaps, an echo of what the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’: the pulsating, receptive, resolving silence that always surrounds the thing that is made of, in, words. So my proposition about the relationship between teaching and writing is this: in a world full of the noise of militancy – aims, targets, impact, wars on low standards, and all the rest of the battle-talk and derring-do – the ability to be open and stilled, to practise the interior disciplines of the imagination and to convey these things to young people by example as well as by precept, might be what the moral purpose of education looks and sounds like. If that is the case, then imaginative writing is not only not a luxury, but is integral to the enactment of human existential, aesthetic and ethical values. This book shows us how such an educational environment might come into being. Lesley Saunders

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Lesley Saunders is Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education, London, and Research Fellow at the Oxford University Department of Education. She is also an award-winning and published poet. www.lesleysaunders.org.uk

References Abbs, P. (2006). The four tasks of the contemporary poet. Agenda, 42(2), 123-121. Dunmore, H. (2012). Foreword. In S. Norgate & E. Piddington (Eds.) Poetry and Voice: A Book of Essays (xi-xiii). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Heaney, S. (1988). The Government of the Tongue. The 1986 T.S. Eliot Lectures and Other Critical Writings 165, 168. London: Faber. Heaney, S. (1995). The Redress of Poetry. Oxford Lectures. London: Faber. Saunders, L. (2012). Silence and silences in ‘creativity’, London Review of Education, 10(2), 215–25. Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press.

PREFACE

A preface is usually written by the author. In this case, however, the editor Dr Janice K. Jones, who is also a contributor to four of the book chapters has asked me to write this brief introduction, which I am hugely delighted to do. I have celebrated with Janice over the years her own personal and professional transformation brought about through her powerful, reflexive and charming creative writing. She is a passionate advocate for the importance of creating a space for writing as transformative practice in education, a theme which features extensively in her teaching and scholarship. Janice is an engaging and gifted writer who has gathered together in this book a diverse and exciting mix of very experienced and neophyte writers. In so doing, she admirably embodies the book’s intent to talk to and invite academic researchers and practitioners as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students to consider and question the privilege and value usually attributed to different forms of writing in a host of multifarious ways – as a tool for inquiry, as a product of research, as a reflexive device in professional development and as a creative endeavour. As educators, we must never lose sight of the importance of writing for personal expression, storytelling and creativity. There is room in the curriculum for both the development of an understanding of the ‘mechanics’ of writing as well as the practice of writing as a personal transformative learning process. Weaving Words is an attention-grabbing book that will definitely stimulate and maybe reshape your thinking as it traverses contemporary philosophies, practices and products of writing for teaching, professional development and research in education. It compliments and furthers the evolving discussion about the position of creative and reflective writing within 21st century epistemologies and practices of research, in education, and most especially within teacher education. At the same time it brings fresh viewpoints to this discussion. Each chapter addresses aspects to do with personal and professional beliefs and understandings about the construct, purposes and forms of writing including as a creative process, as a means for self-knowledge and as a means for research. The writers’ conversations are framed within contemporary critical perspectives about creativity, language, culture, identity, power and authority. While most exemplars are Australia based, the arguments put and challenges raised

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Preface

transcend geographical boundaries. This is a book equally relevant to university academics and postgraduate students in Australia, the UK, the USA and beyond. I encourage all educators who read this well-crafted book to embrace the questions and issues raised within Weaving Words and to maybe rethink the role that writing in all its forms has in your classroom, and how it is represented in teacher education and in research. Nita Temmerman

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As authors we acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands where this writing and research was conducted: the Gaibal, Jarowair, Ugarapul and Butchulla peoples of Queensland. We honour the wisdom of Elders past, present and future, seeking to walk together in the spirit of reconciliation. The editor and authors also express their gratitude to the many individuals whose support and advice has made this book possible. Particular thanks go to:  Carol Koulikourdi, Amanda Millar and colleagues at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their support and encouragement in facilitating the publication of this book.  The authors, researchers and pre-service teachers who have contributed their fine works to the book’s chapters.  Nita Temmerman for writing the preface to this book, and for her encouragement and support during its planning and production.  Lesley Saunders Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education, London, and Research Fellow at the Oxford University Department of Education, for her advice and for her writing of the foreword to this book.  Patrick Blessinger, executive director of the International Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association and co-founder of the Center for Meaning-Centered Education for writing the afterword to this book.  The Faculty of Education, and the newly formed School of Linguistics, Adult and Specialist Education at the University of Southern Queensland for their funding and support of this publication.  Dr Lindy Abawi of the School of Teacher Education and Early Childhood, University of Southern Queensland, Australia for her advice on final edits.

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Acknowledgments

The authors express thanks to the scholars each of whom provided doubleblind peer-reviews for one or more of the research chapters in this book:  Dr Margaret Baguley, University of Southern Queensland, Australia  Dr Sharon Bickle, University of Queensland, Australia  Susan Carter, School of Linguistics, Adult and Specialist Education. University of Southern Queensland, Australia  Patrick Blessinger, Fulbright Scholar and Research Fellow St John’s University, N.Y.  Dr Jenny Grenfell, Higher Education Research Group, Deakin University, Australia  Dr Andrew Hickey, School of Linguistics, Adult and Specialist Education University of Southern Queensland, Australia  Dr Warren Midgley, School of Linguistics, Adult and Specialist Education. University of Southern Queensland, Australia  Dr Shirley O’Neill, School of Linguistics, Adult and Specialist Education, University of Southern Queensland, Australia  Dr Stewart Riddle, School of Teacher Education and Early Childhood, University of Southern Queensland, Australia  Dr Rebecca Scollen, Artsworx, University of Southern Queensland, Australia For her care and skill in typesetting the book:  Jodie Gunders of the University of Southern Queensland, Australia

INTRODUCTION: THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

Weaving Words: Personal and Professional Transformation through Writing as Research brings together the writings of researchers in education and pre-service teachers to engage with emerging debates around what forms of writing are valued and supported within 21st century teaching and research. It focuses upon the importance of writing for personal expression, for finding a voice, for storytelling and for personal and professional transformation. The book’s chapters elaborate one or more of the following organising questions: x What are researchers’ and educators’ beliefs and understandings of the purposes and forms of writing as a creative process, for self-knowledge and for research? x How are pre-service teachers’ and researchers’ personal and professional understandings and beliefs about writing constructed, shared and challenged? x What connections, gaps and contradictions occur at the intersections between the written words of researchers in this text and those of pre-service teachers? x What are the implications of those intersections, and the gaps and silences between the voices of the authors, for practices of education more broadly, and for research in education in particular? In addressing these questions, the book interweaves contributions by researchers in education with chapters where poems, plays and short stories created by undergraduate pre-service teachers are presented with the writers’ reflections on their experience. Further, accounts by preservice teachers of the challenges they experienced in transferring their learning to working with younger students as writers, and their reflections on those experiences raise challenging questions about the impact of professional habitus: effecting change is increasingly difficult within systemic processes of curriculum and pedagogy.

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Introduction: The Purpose of this Book

Weaving: the metaphor for this book Kathryn Kruger (2001) portrays the fine threads of history and practice that connect spinning, weaving, storytelling and writing as means by which personal and cultural narratives have been, and continue to be preserved and shared by ancient and modern cultures worldwide. Weaving, according to Kruger (20001) is “akin to speaking” (p.28), for the Dogon people of Africa, and for the Dine people of the Southwest United States the great mother, Spider Woman weaves the world into being. Weaving and spinning have ancient connections with oral storytelling and, much later, with writing for cultural and spiritual exchange, although the earliest written texts had a commercial rather than a narrative or reflective purpose. Twist-method weaving has been found in clay fragments, predating the neolithic era (Adovasio, Soffer, & Page, 2007; Carr & Adovasio, 2012). Against these historical contexts, the authors have sought to create a layered textual fabric where writing weaves ideas and the world into being.

Cultural context This book includes contributions from pre-service teachers studying in Australia and from educational researchers and writers based in Australia, the USA and the UK. While the writers acknowledge that their voices emerge from a personal history, place and culture, their values and ideas, networked affiliations, personal connections and life-experiences represent the “fluid world” of intercultural and mobile learners discussed by Kovbasyuk and Blessinger (2013, pp. 4-5). For Yvonne Findlay in Chapter 2, concepts of identity are relational, liquid and contextual as discussed by Dervin (2011) who cites Jack (2009) in his rejection of “fixed categories of analysis that essentialize culture” (p.38) in relation to heritage. Yet, for Findlay, as for author Donna Moodie in Chapter 5, and for several of the pre-service teachers in this work, speaking from a place of belonging in the land is fundamental to making meaning. Their writings interweave across real and imagined borders of belonging, acculturation, delegitimisation and assimilation (Dervin, 2013, p. 368).

Writing in education – contested territory Weaving Words contributes to emerging debates concerning the nature of graduate attributes and professional skills for educators in transnational contexts (Australian Insitute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2011),

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and in relation to how current practices of teacher education impact upon future educators’ understandings, experiences of, and ability to support writing as a creative process. This is of particular importance in the light of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reports of a seeming decline in performance on tests of literacies in Australia (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2009, p. 21) and a similar turn in the United Kingdom (Office for Standards in Education Children’s Services and Skills, 2012). Weaving Words raises important questions about the impact of 21st century practices of education upon human creativity and joy in learning (MCEETYA, 2008) in and through writing. It questions how writing is experienced and valued as a process and product of research; as a means for personal and professional learning; and how it is taught and experienced in the classroom. In doing so, it brings together a range of critical perspectives upon writing within global agendas for international competitiveness in education and research, and the capacity for writing and reflection to disrupt and transform personal and professional understandings (Ellis, Bochner, Denzin et al., 2008). Finally, this work considers the power of writing for greater personal and professional understanding of self and the world, and for making meaning

Writing for teachers and researchers Weaving Words’ contribution to knowledge and practice is in the neglected but important area of teachers as creators of writing, and more specifically of forms of writing where the intent is literary rather than academic. In this text, the works of pre-service teachers are shared in Chapters 3, 6, 8 and 11, with their reflections upon learning and teaching interwoven into research Chapters 1 and 10. Writing for teachers is important. There has long been a focus upon developing future educators’ skills and knowledge for supporting others’ writing skills (Cremin & Myhill, 2012). However, a wealth of evidence from research and from established practices such as those of Montessori and Reggio Emilia (Gutek, 2004; New, 1993) suggests that for educators to create spaces for others’ imaginative and creative works, this requires a “pedagogy of risk” (Wilson, 2009, p. 398) by which they engage in the lived experience of creative writing. Increasingly, government curricula and internet sources for educators include model lesson plans for the teaching of writing through step-by-step approaches. Research suggests that where teachers are not themselves confident as writers, this encourages conservative approaches (Myhill & Wilson, 2013). There is a scarcity of research into

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Introduction: The Purpose of this Book

teachers and pre-service teachers’ learning of the craftand art of writing. The works created and shared by pre-service teachers as authors in this book initiate a conversation that seeks to redress that gap. Pre-service teachers and the younger authors with whom they have worked are named as authors, and their writings are presented without any commentary in four chapters of this book. In Chapters 1 and 10 pre-service teachers are named as supporting writers or co-authors. The research chapters in this text (Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13 and 14) examine epistemologies that appear to shape pre-service teachers’, university educators’ and researchers’ beliefs about the forms of writing that are privileged and valued, in teacher education and in educational research, in theory and in practice. They consider questions around an ethics of voice, agency, authenticity and authority in reflexive writing for teaching, personal and professional development and research. In doing so, they engage with issues of disclosure, representation and knowledge of the self and others in and through writing. In addressing those questions, the authors contend with the contradictory and troubling values and judgements writers and readers bring to works whose original purpose may have been to disrupt rather than to meet accepted standards of form and aesthetics. Beyond this, the writers in all chapters consider whether and how reflection may be attendant upon the processes of shaping, editing and presenting the written word, and how far writing as reflection may be transformative of the writer’s understandings and practice, creating rather than representing the known. Within that exploration they engage with issues relating to voice, culture and identity. The reader is a third strand in this interweaving of ideas, making meaning within and between the works of authors in the book.

Pre-service teacher writings – the context The writings and reflections of pre-service teachers were created during an elective study (a course chosen by undergraduates seeking to enhance their skills and knowledges in that subject area). The course synopsis describes its intent: Pre-service teachers will focus upon poetry, prose and drama from a range of traditional and contemporary contexts, so as to enhance their personal repertoires of practice and knowledge of literature and language. Through reading, creating and sharing literary texts participants will have opportunities to enhance their personal understanding, skills and knowledge of grammar and literacy for teaching in Australian contexts,

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bringing the potential for learning to be transferred to global contexts (University of Southern Queensland, 2013).

Where other courses in the Bachelor of Education program brought a literacies and multiliteracies focus to the teaching of English this course emphasised the reading of works of literature from diverse cultural and historical contexts, and the creation of written works for adult readers. The first part of the assessment task was to create a portfolio of works including a poem, a short story or scene from a play in any style or genre. The teaching team encouraged writers to consider performative approaches and the use of digital technologies, but few authors chose this option. The assessment task also required participants to transfer their knowledge and experience to working with a younger writer, (discussed in Chapter 10), and to reflect upon how their personal learning in writing may have informed their practice of teaching. Students in the fourth year of a Primary Years specialism were the largest cohort in the course. Those taking the course in their third year did so as part of the Early Childhood specialism. A small number undertook the course during their first year of study within the Secondary Years specialism (Table 1). Writings are drawn from three offers of the elective where participants who passed the course (n=145/147) were invited to consider publishing their work after the release of final grades. Many did not respond (n=97). Students were seeking employment and may have stopped accessing university emails. Others responded (n=22) indicating that although they had enjoyed the course they did not wish to share their work. Online students were encouraged to share draft works and to provide feedback to one another in discussion forums. On-campus students were encouraged to share their works online, but most preferred to work in pairs and not to share their works with the group. As course examiner I shared my own draft works, and adjusted these in line with undergraduate feedback. Although the power difference between examiner/student could not be reduced, my intent was to model the generative processes of writing, listening to feedback and building trust. Virtual classroom sessions allowed small groups of online students to discuss issues and challenges. To encourage the giving of feedback, I adjusted the assessment for the second offer of the course to require authors to include examples of feedback they had given and received from a colleague or trusted peer, and to discuss how and whether this feedback had been used.

Introduction: The Purpose of this Book

6

Year

Mode

Enrol

Year

Domestic/ Int’nl

2011

On campus

25

25 Dom

Web

25

On campus

13

Web

39

Web

43

4 (17) 3 (7) 2 (1) 5 (2) 4 (16) 3 (7) 4 (9) 3 (3) 1 (1) 4 (25) 3 (11) 2 (1) 1 (2) 4 (24) 3 (15) 2 (2) 1 (2)

2012

2013

Nil response/ Rejected Nil: 8 Reject: 3

Agreed to publish 14

25 Dom

Nil: 21 Reject: 3

1

13 Dom

Nil: 8 Reject: 4

1

39 Dom

Nil: 26 Reject: 8

5

41 Dom 2 Intn’l

Nil: 34 Reject: 4

5

Table 1: Student numbers and mode of study over three offers of the course

The structure of this book The book is structured in three parts, each including writings by researchers and pre-service teachers upon a theme. x Four chapters constitute Part 1, under the theme Identity and voice. Pre-service teachers’ creative writings focus upon on beginnings, endings and the journey between, and researcher writings explore the writing as a means of discovering and developing personal and professional identity. x Part 2, Writing the wor(l)d includes five chapters, three of which have been written by researchers bringing a close focus upon writing as generative process, and as a way of negotiating complex issues of identity and culture, power and agency. Two

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chapters are composed of pre-service teachers’ literary works: poems, short stories and plays through which they engage with issues of relationships and power. x Part 3, Writing for personal and professional transformation engages with the troubling and transformative power of writing as research and as reflection, transferring personal learning into practice, and the challenge of writing as a way of becoming. Each of the three parts is preceded by an introduction.

References Adovasio, J., Soffer, O., & Page, J. (2007). The invisible sex: uncovering the true roles of women in pre-history. New York: Smithsonian Books. Carr, K., & Adovasio, J. (2012). Shades of gray redux: The Planeoindian/Early Archaic "Transition" in the Northeast. In C. B. Bousman & B. J. Vierra (Eds.), From the Pleistocene to the Holocene: Human organization and cultural transformations in prehistoric North America (pp. 273-318). Texas: A & M University Press. Cremin, T., & Myhill, D. (2012). Writing voices: Creating communities of writers. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Dervin, F. (2011). A plea for change in research on intercultural discourses: A ‘liquid’ approach to the study of the acculturation of Chinese students. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 6(1), 37-52. doi: 10.1080/17447143.2010.532218 —. (2013). Rethinking the acculturation and assimilation of ‘others’ in a ‘monocultural’ country: forms of intercultural pygmalionism in two Finnish novels. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 34(4), 356-370. doi: 10.1080/07256868.2013.807229 Gutek, G. (Ed.). (2004). The Montessori Method - The origins of an educational innovation: Including an abridged and annotated edition of Maria Montessori's The Montessori Method. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Kovbasyuk, O., & Blessinger, P. (2013). Meaning-centered education: International perspectives and explorations in higher education. New York: Routledge. Kruger, K. (2001). Weaving the word: the metaphorics of weaving and female textual production. London: Associated University Press. Myhill, D., & Wilson, A. (2013). Playing it safe: Teachers’ views of creativity in poetry writing. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 10(0), 101111. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2013.07.002

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Introduction: The Purpose of this Book

New, R. (1993). Reggio Emilia: New ways to think about schooling (Vol. 60): Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Office for Standards in Education Children’s Services and Skills. (2012). Moving English forward (110118). Retrieved from http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/moving-english-forward. Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. (2009). PISA 2009 Results: Overcoming social background: equity in learning opportunities and outcomes, (Vol. 2, pp. 220). Paris, France: Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). University of Southern Queensland. (2013). EDU3377 Teaching English The National Curriculum: Course specification. Wilson, A. (2009). Creativity confidence and challenge: The Write Team research report. In R. Beard, D. Myhill, M. Nystrand & J. Riley (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Writing Development (pp. 387-402). London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

PART I: IDENTITY AND VOICE

Introduction The chapters that constitute Part 1 of this text share a focus upon processes and practices of writing as a means of forming, making meaning and speaking from a unique personal and professional voice. Chapter 1 The Challenge to Write: The warp, the weft and the space between is co-authored by Janice Jones and undergraduate pre-service teachers. It considers the experience of teachers as writers, attending to issues of power, agency, disclosure and safety in the experience of writing. This chapter is counterbalanced by Chapter 10 in the last section of this book, where pre-service teachers consider their personal and professional practices as teachers of writing In Chapter 2 Uisge Beatha: The ebb and flow of four tides researchers Yvonne Findlay and Janice Jones employ narrative autoethnographic methods, and a phenomenological theoretical framework to deconstruct Yvonne’s life story and its potential meanings. Using the metaphor of the cycle of water from its starting point in the highlands of Scotland the authors interweave Yvonne’s texts and transcripts of their critical conversations to explore the power of labelling. Chapter 3 brings together poems, short stories and reflections created by pre-service teachers, under the title Beginnings, endings and the journey between, and with unifying themes of love, loss and forgiveness. Chapter 4 Finding my voice concludes the first part of this book. Reprising the metaphor of a river of life, Anne Jasman draws upon writings created across her academic career to critically evaluate writing as a means of generating a unique and authentic voice. The chapter engages with the physical, emotional, social and cultural contexts of writing as research.

CHAPTER ONE THE CHALLENGE TO WRITE: THE WARP, THE WEFT AND THE SPACE BETWEEN JANICE K. JONES WITH JENNY HOANG, RENEE LOCKWOOD, MIYUKI KRUSE, PAULINE DOBBIE, JACLYN FITZGERALD AND NICOLE HARGREAVES

Abstract Weaving storytelling and writing share a long and parallel history. As a metaphor, weaving suggests the active and complex layering of practices and products of writing in research and in education. Its strands represent the coming together of diverse identities, cultures and ways of knowing and understanding the world. At the points of intersection and in the spaces between those representations, writers and readers generate new ways of understanding of what it is to be human, to learn, to teach and to discover and share knowledge. Through an interweaving of writings created by undergraduate pre-service teachers with the writings of researchers in education, this chapter and others in this text generate interconnecting narratives to consider how writing functions as a means of knowing discovering and reflecting the world and the self, but also as a means by which we co-generate the world.

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Introduction: The Warp, the weft and the space between “Historically, woven artefacts have had a function way beyond the decorative; they have been channels for transmitting higher forms of knowledge” (Azadeh, Ramkalawon, & Simonsson, 2010, p. 47)

In this text, the writings of researcher-educators form the structuring warp: a series of theoretical strands across which the creative writings and reflections of pre-service educators create a counterbalancing and meaningmaking weft. While the criss-crossing of warp and weft creates an impression of solidity, the threads remain separate. Thus, the fabric remains fluid, allowing the reader to make meaning through his or her interpretation of the narrative fibres, their intersections and the spaces between. As an educator, my motivation in opening up a space for undergraduate pre-service teachers to create and share poetry, short stories and plays was dual. With Teresa Cremin (nee Grainger) (Grainger, 2005), I share a concern that newly qualified teachers are embarking on careers where they ask students to become writers of poems, stories and plays, yet they themselves lack practice in the craft and art of writing across a range of literary forms (Cremin, 2006). Hence, I sought to challenge and stimulate pre-service teachers’ reflexive thinking in and through writing through processes similar to those used in drama-in-education: “to develop the self as writer and through writing, and to open up a performative space” (Stephen & Muriel, 2013, p. 215) where social learning supports critical pedagogy. A further intent was that this experience would support undergraduates’ learning. In becoming writers this would bring awareness of their own practices as teachers of writing. Using social and constructivist methods that reproduced and extended practices gained from my research in play-based and child-emergent curricula (Jones, 2011), my intent was that this experience would support undergraduates’ learning through head, heart and hands, and that this in turn would inform their own practices of teaching. Alison Phipps and Lesley Saunders (2010) express that experience as …inductive, intuitive, spiralling in approach, poetic methods - if we may speak of assembling words and the wide white spaces around them and using them in such a way as to create a ‘how’ - may provide a choreography, something of the spin and grace of dance (p.362)

In asking undergraduates to create and share their works, my pedagogical intent was to model a move away from the risk-averse approaches noted

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by British researchers Debra Myhill and Anthony Wilson in the teaching of writing in schools (2013, pp. 102-103), and the potentially limiting impact of ‘playing safe’(p.101) upon learners’ creativity. The authors report teachers’ perceptions that writing poetry can be experimental and playful - an opportunity to break the rules of English (2013, p.107), but also that powerful and skilled poetry is an expression of giftedness, rather than of deep learning, practice and craft. In Australia, principals (Cranston, Reid, Keating, & Mulford, 2011) have raised concerns that are consistent with those findings, citing a need for schools to value and support pedagogical practices for the development of students’ creativity and skills. Concerns have been raised by researchers in the United States (Mishook & Kornhaber, 2006; West, 2012) that students’ experiences of the arts more broadly, and of creative thinking and practices in particular, are being limited by the pressure that accrues from high-stakes testing. Shaping their ideas for expression through literary modes was a challenging experience for pre-service teachers, but they reported the experience was also enjoyable and fulfilling. However, the process of preservice teachers’ becoming writers was subversive in its capacity to reveal hidden discourses of power, and to make transparent educators’ perceptions of self and others as writers and readers. By engaging preservice teachers in the “diverse writing strategies that account for other pedagogical and research practices…(as) ways to resist or confront, in order to subvert dominant practices in education” (Larrain, 2013, pp. 140141), I sought to create a safe and respectful communal space for learning and research, where we could enact and share creative pedagogical practices. For Veronica Larrain (2013), context and culture are critical to narrative research. Similarly, the physical and virtual contexts and the culture within which undergraduates were encouraged to share, read and advise on enhancements for one-another’s works were constructed to create a sense of intimacy, respect and safety. Sharing of works and feedback was optional, and several students who did not share or comment on others’ work reported that they had gained in confidence and selfefficacy from the vicarious experience of watching peers and the tutor doing so. This finding is consistent with those of studies in language teacher education where a sense of safety in community and context are pivotal to the development of cultural awareness (Lastrapes & Negishi, 2012, p. 41). As tutor, I found the beauty of Miyuki Kruse’s draft versions and the decisions she made as author in selecting some ideas and leaving out others fascinating. Her lengthy meditation on the challenge to write, and Miyuki’s decision to write indirectly of her love of home and grandparents

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was affecting. As author, Miyuki’s gentle acknowledgement of the overwhelming call to respond to her personal loss and deep love for her grandfather, was balanced by her understanding that for her as author, the time was not yet right to do so. This allowed Miyuki to write of her love for her grandmother and of her home in a way that is illuminated with longing, thus indirectly voicing Miyuki’s love for her grandfather. Miyuki Kruse writes: I created my first poem when I was about 6 or 7. As I enjoyed writing a poem in my native language, (Japanese), I wanted to see if I could fully express my emotion and at the same time enjoy the creative process in my second language in the same way. Then I started to search the feeling and emotion in me to decide the topic. This process brought me a painful memory of loss of my grandfather who recently passed away. It was too emotional and too painful to dig deeper, so I had to stop thinking about my grandfather. I rested a few days to search for another topic; however the same memory, emotion, feeling and vision of my grandfather and his country kept popping up in my head...I could see, smell, feel, almost touch and hear as if I was standing right in the middle of the country. I still wanted to avoid my painful feeling, so I tried to ignore my pain and started to write down the positive memory and about my grandmother. At the end, I decide to hide my negative feelings and melancholy behind some lines to express my feelings honestly but indirectly. This made it more comfortable to share the piece with others. First draft Sound of the river Singing of cicadas Smell of the rice field Steps of wooden floor Slides of slippers Smell of miso soup Damp in the air Dribble of the sweat Drinking a glass of water I feel alive

The Challenge to Write: The Warp, The Weft and The Space Between Cook, eat, rest, Cook, eat, rest and Cook, eat, rest Here I live to live There, flow of the time is so simple I want to live to live That is my dream Time flow with the stream of the river The sound, colour, smell remains the same in the memory of my grandma’s village She waved me good-bye on the door step The posture of her brings me back the memory of great grandma who lived 103 years. Suddenly, the sound, colour are squeezed leaving me melancholy Second draft I call you Are you there in present? I feel you as a spirits of the spirits of ancestors in the presence of the nature I feel you in the wind life a waving silk (soft silky scarf) that slips out of my hands I feel you on the land (in the soil) Warm as the sun I feel you standing here on the land (hollow) of ancestors

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16 with the history of fear, happiness and peace I feel you in me reminder of you cast off skin of cicadas in the hollow

Final: 'Memory of my country' I call you the voice of love responding in me I hear you the spirits of ancestors echoing in the valley I feel you the wind like a soft silky scarf slipping out of my hands I smell you the land of my people plowing the rice field I see you the memoryof my country tightening my heart

Janice writes: By giving feedback that responded positively to the intent of the writers and by including tentative questions, my intent was to model the use of these approaches for teacher-writers. Student feedback to Miyuki Kruse on her poem combined powerfully affirmative and affective responses in line with that modelling, “Your poem is very powerful” with specific reference to the importance for teaching and learning of the writer’s poetic evocation through the senses. “Your use of alliteration (e.g. soft, silky, scarf) aides in soothing the reader- is this also a tool to soothe yourself, the poet? This poem also appeals to me as a Montessori teacher, as I'm sure you too may have seen the parallels? The Montessori philosophy focuses on developing the child's sensorial skills and your poem has appealed to all five senses”. Educator-writer-researchers Sheila Trahar (2013) and Anthony Wilson (2009, 2013) suggest that writing is contested territory in terms of theory

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and practice. For pre-service teachers their reflection in and upon the writing choices they made in creating literary works emerged as a way of transforming understandings of self and the world, as described by Trahar (2013).

The challenge to write Writing is a complex and demanding process, and the challenges of what to write, and how to shape the raw materials of words into meaningful forms can be confronting even for experienced authors (Cremin & Myhill, 2012, p. 10). For undergraduate pre-service teachers the space to create a poem, a story or a play was perceived differently from that given to academic writing. Miyuki reflects: “Freedom of choice can give the power to the writer to create a personally meaningful piece”. While responding to academic tasks presents intellectual challenges, this apprenticeship in the rigours of writing for academic and professional purposes, as suggested by Lesley Saunders in her foreword to this text, gives way to other choices and challenges during an academic career. For teachers to support learners in advancing their understandings and skills in the craft of writing within literary forms, this suggests that they too need an understanding of, and an apprenticeship in the craft and art of writing. This is particularly important where self-reflexive writing has become a means for professional and personal development and also for undertaking and sharing research (e.g. Richardson, 2013; Richardson & Adams St. Pierre, 2005). The online environment allowed students to learn from personal feedback from course tutors, and also to use tutors’ and peers’ postings to guide one another in making choices about the style, form, voice and editing of texts. Rather than the highly structured approach of explicit teaching, a ‘just in time’ approach allowed contextual and individual teaching about the craft of writing: the use of speech in short stories the conventions governing scripts for theatre and film, ways of achieving consistency of voice in narrative pieces, and the merits and uses of different poetic forms. My hope was that participants in the course would transfer these communal, respectful, contextual and dialogic practices to their teaching of writing. As Chapter 10 indicates, however, institutional and professional habitus (Bourdieu, 1992; Maton, 2008) may present barriers to the transfer of personal knowledge and creative practices of writing into formal teaching contexts. Literary forms, and particularly poetry as a framing device for telling the deeper narratives of human stories (e.g. McIntosh & Warren, 2013), elicited a powerful response from undergraduates. Engaging as adult

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writers with poetic forms brought a shift in thinking from that of teacher and students ‘playing with language’ (Myhill & Wilson, 2013, p. 107) to a wrestling with meaning, message, theme, voice, tone and symbol. Most authors chose to use rhyme and metre in spite of their awareness of the disciplines imposed by those forms. Without exception, pre-service teachers as authors strove to articulate the power and fragility of what it is to be human, as shown by works in Chapter 3, and to speak of the importance of love, family and the land as shown by their works in Chapter 6. In their reflections several writers described their struggle, not so much in finding a topic for their writing, but in holding back stories that were longing to be told. The creative space is powerful: it gives life to stories, and in the telling we honour what is important. Nicole Hargreaves writes: Having not produced any type of creative writing since I was in high school more than 15 years ago, this was quite a challenge for me. I chose very personal topics because I knew that my feelings and emotions would shine through in my work if I was able to speak from my heart. I chose to write a poem about my children, as this style of writing allowed me to convey my feelings for them in a clear and concise manner. I was able to convey my message through the use of rhythm, rhyme and figurative language. These poetic devices provided a guide, allowing for my words to flow as I composed, making the final piece pleasing to the ear. My World I look, I stare, I can’t believe That I am Mum to three of these. Gorgeous creatures, inside and out They are my world without a doubt. A boy, a girl, another boy! I’m proud as punch, I jump for joy! The pain I have endured is gone The moment my gorgeous babe is born. I watch them learn, flourish and grow. I love them more than life, I know. First days of school, first football game… My life will never be the same! They make me laugh, they make me cry. They drive me up the wall, “Oh my!”

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But most of all, they make me see The lovely gift of family. The gift I must give more is time. A little more would be divine. My busy life gets in the way. Still, my love grows stronger every day. The day will come that they will leave. My heart will break, but I believe The love and care that we provided Will be what helps to keep them guided. I hope they understand that we Work hard to live life comfortably. I hope they know, I hope they see Just how they mean the world to me!

An ethics of care: disclosure and risk James Williams, a professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics noted to me as editor and author of this work his concerns about the risks of “writing from the self” in teacher education courses. We have considerable research showing that self-expressive writing has therapeutic benefits for those who are experiencing mental, emotional, and physical trauma. ‘Writing from the self,’ to use your expression, appears to serve as a form of self-reflection that many people in these situations have never engaged in previously. Such writing is understandably private, and it appears to help people in these circumstances better deal with their traumas. When self-expressive writing is used in an educational setting, the parameters are substantially different from what we find in clinical settings (Williams, 2013).

Williams makes the important point that educators are rarely qualified psychologists or psychotherapists and that there are risks attendant to opening spaces for writing from personal experience. He also notes that in the United States “an entire strand of writing pedagogy embraces the notion of ‘writing as psychotherapy’ with the teacher serving as counselor and therapist”. As educators, we have a duty of care for our students. How best can we navigate the tensions between the safety of more constrained practices (such as giving topics on which to write) and opening spaces for creative thinking and practice? This challenge confronts educators at every level, but it is particularly pertinent to our practices of teaching and

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learning in the arts and in writing. Having created a space for a story to emerge, what processes do educators put in place for listening to, responding to and supporting or arranging support for individuals whose narratives may reveal trauma? Importantly, in our choices of topics, and in opening spaces for sharing stories, we as educators need to have a clear understanding of what those approaches intend to achieve, and what support systems are there for authors who may need them. Children in schools also experience profound disruptions in their lives. Hence, for educators of writers at every age, our opening of a space in which to write has potential to bring joy and achievement for students, but brings also a moral and ethical burden. In striving to retain a supportive but professional approach I focused mainly upon the form rather than the content of what was written, although it was vital that I honoured the writers’ experiences and original voices, and the deeper meanings of their narratives. Thus began a restrained dance: stepping back to allow space for freedom of expression, and forward to gently suggest modifications or sources of support. In working creatively, educators and researchers balance risk against the perceived and measurable benefits observed in the connection with arts-based learning by researchers over several decades (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997; McIntosh & Warren, 2013): the experience of writing as a creative practice initiated mixed feelings of vulnerability, agency and pride in preservice teachers. Their anonymous feedback to the university over three offers of the course indicated pre-service teachers’ sense of achievement in creating works that affirmed their unique voices and experiences, and reaffirmed connectedness with self, community and the land. Renee Lockwood writes: My ideas came from personal experiences. I have lived on a sheep, cattle and crop property in Northern New South Wales all my life and have experienced and witnessed many of the physical and emotional trials and tribulations which come from daily life on the land. My family has been through many hardships, and in particular the droughts which Australia has experienced until two years ago when the rain has fallen and the seasons have changed. I have seen members of my family going through depression and I recall helplines such as Beyond Blue ringing to offer Australian farmers the opportunity to speak with counsellors. I included this within my story. It is a numbing experience to fight for something with nothing in return. I wanted to ensure the readers were able to develop an understanding of life on the land:

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Tom gazed through the kitchen window looking towards the bland and undisturbed sky. For weeks now he had been listening to the weather report in hope he would hear the breaking news of rainfall. The last five seasons had been an unwelcome gift from hell which had left the farming community of Greyson in despair and damaging drought. The clear sky and increasing morning heat would bring another day of hard work and gut-wrenching stock losses. Tom prepared himself daily for what he would find when he checked and fed the little amount of livestock he now owned. Turning towards the backdoor, he grudgingly pulled on his high top work boots and headed for his truck stopping only to hear the calves’ desperate calls coming from the cattle yards as they searched for their mothers. Yesterday he had to sell each and every one of his heifers to help buy more feed and pay the increasing bills which lay unopened on the kitchen table. Driving out of the house paddock and into the hills, Tom scanned the barren landscape only to see brown grass and the image of two wedge tail eagles in the distance. They would be lingering above something that had recently died. Tom scanned the bony silhouettes of his once prized sheep which were known district wide for their soft rolling fleece and broad structure. He remembered the times he had once won so many prizes for their fine wool. Feeling the ever present sadness grow within him he began to idle the vehicle out of the paddock and onto the next to check the one thing which held some positive hope. Driving towards the little specks of lush green pasture the feeling of dread began to lift from his body and hope was replaced by the prospect that maybe this crop would help to lift the cloud of depression and provide a positive link to a clearer future. Tom had sown the crop of oats a month prior and had continued to water it through irrigation, moistening the cracked and dusted soil.

For Renee, as for Miyuki, love of family and the land are intimately connected. As an educator, and over a decade of arts practice I had connected with pre-service teachers as adults with busy lives, Facebook and Twitter accounts, delicately balancing work, family and study in their determination to become teachers. The stories I did not hear as we painted, danced and explored myths through drama were of individuals’ personal relationships with a situated history and the land. This revelation was both humbling and illuminating for me as an educator: writing created a space for the telling of those narratives. Jaclyn Fitzgerald writes: Before my husband (Pete) left for Afghanistan, I knew this would be a testing time for all of us. As a husband, father and combat soldier on the front line Pete faces innumerable challenges, both emotionally and physically. The storiesof Australian soldiers throughout history are widely

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represented in literature, and in modern times these experiences are also shared widely and made available through the media. Through this collection of writing, what I seek to portray is a candid, honest and very real account of the stories of an Army wife and her children. Being such a deeply personal exploration into a theme I am very familiar with, creating this portfolio has been a challenging and, at times, emotionally overwhelming experience. However, it has also been a thoroughly rewarding and empowering journey, in which I feel I have developed a sense of renewed strength. I am reminded of the power of the written word to heal transform and reveal individuals as they explore, revisit and appreciate traumatic experiences, and of the nurture writing can provide. These pieces have enabled me to share my burden, and in doing so I feel I have gained a better sense of how these experiences have helped shape my understandings of myself, my husband and our children, and of course, our extended Defence family. Like my future students, our unique histories have, do and will continue to define us as they are moulded, shaped and re-shaped, much like the writing itself. Jaclyn’s poem and short storyare shared in Chapter 8.

Writing as catharsis: the affective domain and teaching writing For a small number of pre-service teachers the opportunity to write initiated a re-visiting of loss and grief. Over the three years of the course offering, four authors (each of whom had lost a child or children in tragic circumstances or in the break-up of a marriage) chose to write about, or to draft letters to their lost children. Inevitably, this gave rise to feelings of overwhelming grief and anger. As teachers who were ready to enter the field, the authors acknowledged my concern and the burden of my duty of care for their wellbeing. Counsellors at the university offered to work with any student who sought help, but the four authors noted that they had not found counselling helpful in the past. All four completed the course. Two chose to share their works in this book and another two wrote a year later to say that the experience had brought greater understanding, if not acceptance: the experience of writing had transformed their lives. As lecturer I had not planned for the joy and shared feelings of grief as I read works that were profoundly moving, and that spoke of love, family and home. At times, overwhelmed, I would emerge from my office redeyed to debrief with good-humoured colleagues. I was grateful for the rubrics that focused on form, genre, style and structure, but the affective domain impacted upon me and transformed my thinking as an educator.

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Marking works required two responses: the first was a clear-eyed and critical review of form and craft, and I was comfortable to allocate a mark on that basis. The second imperative was to respond as a human being: my written comments responded to the writers’ intents, their voices, and their courage in daring to engage with the craftof telling. Marking became, like writing itself, an art and a craft – a means to share meaning-making. At the outset of each offer of the course participants challenged the requirement to write for adult readers, suggesting that it was ‘so much easier to write for children’ than for adults. This brought about critical discussions relating to future educators’ beliefs about children’s needs and interests, and of children as critical consumers and creators of texts. Writing in schools was often conceived as something ‘children do’, not as something the teacher may engage in with students. Teaching writing involved explicit instruction, keeping children on-task, skilful time and resource management and assessment and reporting of performance. Many pre-service teachers’ imagined futures anticipated government requirements: their wishes at the start of the course were to have a predictable experience of study (Phipps & Guilherme, 2004, p. 44) that attended to those demands. They sought confidence in operating within curriculum frameworks. Fortunately, student feedback at the end of the course attested to participants’ recognition of the value of the experience for their practice both within and also beyond curriculum frameworks. In transferring their experience of being and becoming writers to teaching, there were challenges for pre-service teachers, as discussed in Chapter 10. However, these existed also for me as an educator. There was evidence of a gap between undergraduates’ seeming grasp of functional grammar, and their ability to transfer that knowledge to their own writing. Beverley Derewianka (2012), cites her own findings and those of Richard Andrews (2005), to indicate that further research is required to establish the evidence, if any “for the effective use of grammar teaching of any kind in the development of writing” (p.144). Further, many undergraduates seemed unable to make the connection between their own challenging and creative experience of writing, and how they engaged in working with younger writers. These gaps are important. They invite educators to test the personal and professional constraints upon our transferring knowledge and understanding into practice.

Acknowledging the silent author – the reader The knowledge that one may return to read one’s earlier words, or that others may do so creates a dialectic between one’s knowledge of self and

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practice framed by time, place and social relationships, and what is recorded within the text. Hence Jean Clandinin (2010) discusses teachers’ writing in terms of an exploration of professional landscapes where concepts of identity and praxis are fluid, “embodied, relational and context specific” (p. 863). In this complex territory, the act of writing carries with it the shadow of an unknown future reader, and this in turn gives life to the writer’s consciousness of her current and future identity. Hence writing in the present is burdened by our imagining of a future reader. Recognising that the ‘truth’ of what we write is always partial, contextual, and informed by time, the written word shimmers under the light of doubt and the limits of our prescience. The act of writing is foreshadowed by the author’s recognition that his or her understanding of the now is limited, and that the backward shadow of the future makes the seeming truths of the present less certain. Thus the reader, in bringing to the text his or her own experiences, values, interpretations and judgements becomes an-other author. Ann-Marie Bathmaker and Penelope Harnett (2010), refer to the power of writing for meaning-making in an era where life trajectories are multiple, to suggest that while writing is an act of creation where we “construct our identities” (p.5) within uncertain temporal perspectives, it is also an adventure whereby our craft in the telling can “restore meaning to (our) lives” (Bettelheim, 1988, p. 4).

Teachers as writers Why is the experience of writing poems, plays and short stories important for educators? As educators we author many documents: this labour requires finely honed skills in planning and reporting, reflection for continuous professional development, and establishing credibility through the discourses of teaching and learning, policy-making and implementation as discussed in Chapter 4 by Anne Jasman. However, there is another and vital aspect of writing for teachers that is largely neglected in curriculum guidelines: when educators become collaborators with students in creating and evaluating the meaning and forms of texts (Kalantzis & Cope, 2008), we become partners in research. This shift to partnership confronts and reveals aspects of professional habitus so that power and distance give way to creative energy. Creating original works in traditional and new media for our own or for students’ enjoyment (Wilson, 2013), we become writer-researchers (Cremin & Myhill, 2012). Teresa Cremin observes that “Artistry and creativity have not been at the forefront of writing pedagogy in recent years” (2006, p. 415). Prior to their study in this course, pre-service educators indicated that they had

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limited experience of thinking about, crafting or editing a work beyond the frameworks of academic writing. Planning lessons to support younger writers in creating poems, stories and plays was unthreatening, but preservice teachers were fearful of the challenge of creating such works themselves. Yet, evidence suggests that there are benefits where teachers become creators of knowledge with their students, embracing the same learning challenges. Reporting from a two-year study of writing in British schools, Cremin (2006) notes the importance of teachers modelling writing processes for and with their students: “Risk-taking is a characteristic of successful literacy teachers who…engage artistically, experiment with possibilities and remain open to ideas and strategies which may benefit learners” (p.418). So should teachers engage in creative writing programs?

Creative writing or writing within education programs? While a burgeoning interest in creative writing has spawned the growth of courses for writers seeking publication in the United Kingdom (Morrison, 2013) and in Australia, where Jen Webb estimated enrolments at “3,000 to 5,000 people…a significant number in a nation of 21 million people” (2009, p. 64), creative writing courses appear to be informed by participants’ desire to focus upon publication. In creative writing courses, Pelletier and Jarvis suggest that a focus upon publication may lead to an “over-emphasis on craft” (2013, p. 1) noting that pedagogical approaches used in creative writing courses are rarely reflexive in nature. It is these two dimensions that differentiate between creative writing courses that are offered at university (rather than community) level, and in courses within programs for pre-service teacher education where writing is central. This focus on publication and on craft, rather than upon reflection differentiates the former from the latter. Writing in teacher education is underpinned by reflection upon learning for professional practice (Clandinin, 2012; Pack, 2011). Pauline Dobbie writes: Reflecting upon the creative process of developing three original creative works, I found it quite difficult at the onset, as my first barrier was deciding the topic for each genre. Considering a topic for my poem I allowed myself time to consider a stimulus, in this case my loves and what I enjoy doing - hence the topic of the beach. I sat with my eyes closed and imagined myself lying on the beach and recalled my innermost thoughts and feelings. When I started to write them down I felt the words came quite smoothly; referring to my dictionary and thesaurus for ideas of richer

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and deeper vocabulary. As I did doubt my abilities to write a meaningful piece of poetry reading the end product was very fulfilling. I truly felt I was able to capture the essence of what the beach means to me. My Beach I lie abandoned on the sun-drenched sand, Eyes closed from the glare, yet all other senses dance The raining warmth of the sun beats down on my skin. A deeply permeating warm embrace I breathe in the ocean’s perfume and let it fill my lungs. Reluctantly I let it go, and fall into a trance. The unspoiled aroma of sand and sea abounds. A lifesaving ambience enfolding I hear the thunderous disturbance of every wave, A violent betrayal and destruction of stance Yet after the spray the peacefulness drifts in. A pervading tranquillity embedding I sense the changes as the cooling winds steal in, The sting on my skin as the sands start to prance The releasing of the warm embrace. An intimate discovery emergent.

Janice observes: A balanced expression of the human factor in teaching and research would be expected to attend to the affective and spiritual dimensions of life (Adu-Febiri, 2011), as well as to the dimensions of cognitive learning and skills development. The reflections of pre-service teachers who chose to share works in this book, and also of those who chose not publish, show that the affective domain may be known and expressed through writing that is creative. However, this domain is largely silenced within institutional planning and processes for teaching and learning, and within the academy, as Ali Black suggests in Chapter 13. Is this the case also for research, that other discipline wherein we interweave words and worlds?

Writing as research: Weaving words Historically, the written word and the woven fibre have offered parallel evidential narratives of human craft and social cohesion. The earliest evidence of weaving (Kruger, 2001), has been found as impressions of

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fibres in clay shards. This predates known records of writing but not of other forms of narrative and symbolic mark-making. Writing’s earliest function was in the form of mark-making for the recording of stock (Robinson, 2007, pp. 11-14), but the purpose of that coding began to change, according to Michel Foucualt (1983), at some time during the second century (BCE) of the Greco-Roman empire, when ascetics began to use writing as a means of recording thoughts and actions within their broader disciplines of meditation. Shortly after this, because of the fixed nature of the written word, writing soon took on another valuable quality. It became ethopoietic in function: “an agent of the transformation of truth into ethos” (Foucault, 1983, p. 415). In its ability to express intent and action in time, writing makes transparent any deviation from the author’s stated plans. Both author and reader may look back on a fixed point to evaluate the writers’ stated intent and integrity in action, thus revealing self-deception or bad faith (Sartre, 1969). In this way, recursive writing in relation to reflexive thinking for personal development was born – and from there evolved our 21st century trust in the power of reflection to enhance professional understanding and practice (van Manen, 1995). Similarly, writing reveals relationships of power and positionality in research so that Denzin (2009) describes as the ethical requirement for the researcher to build “collaborative, reciprocal, trusting, mutually accountable relationships with those studied” (p.49). Integrity in participatory research (Ellis et al., 2008; Richardson, 2001) hinges upon co-constructed narratives, and complex, nuanced readings. Hence, for beginning researchers and particularly for those using narrative methods, the processes of doctoral study demand a rigorous apprenticeship in writing as research (Clandinin & Connelly, 1991; Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Richardson, 1997) and in making a contribution to knowledge: our writing choices position us as researchers within opposing discourses and practices, and impact upon reputation and authority. Self-reflexive writing (Mittapalli & Samaras, 2008) allows personal and professional lives to be contextualised within cultural and temporal ethics and practices (Dressel & Langreiter, 2003; Schon, 1987), so that it acts as a spur for educators’ and researcher’s critical self-evaluation. In Chapter 2 of this book, Yvonne Findlay’s autoethnographic journey portrays identity as socially constructed and context-dependent (Alvermann, 2000). Yet, although such narrative and autoethnographic research methods are long established, their value for social, cultural and educational research remains contested (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). This is particularly so in a political climate that values positivism over the complex human dimension (Torres, 2013), and where neoliberal research

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agendas privilege quantitative research methods over those where complex human dimensions are voiced in terms of uncertainty, complexity and interculturality (Dervin, 2013; Lipman, 2013; Patrick, 2013). In particular, narrative, autoethnographic and self-reflexive writing (Butz & Besio, 2004; Ellis, 2004; Ellis et al., 2011; Foucault, 1983) in research has been criticised on the grounds that it is solipsistic (Alvermann, 2000; Ellis et al., 2011; Ellis & Bochner, 2000) because of authors’ focus upon the personal, affective and subjective domains (Davies, 2012; Goodson, 2012). As writer-researchers in this contested field, the challenge to write calls on our critical judgement of the performative aspects of our own and others’ writing as research: theory and voice must align (Lincoln & Denzin, 2003; Richardson & Adams St. Pierre, 2005).

Emerging issues for writing Evidence from government inspectors’ reports on the teaching of English in British schools suggests that the most successful teachers “identified the particular needs of their pupils and then designed a distinctive curriculum” (Office for Standards in Education Children’s Services and Skills, 2012, p. 6) rather than adhering to a proscribed curriculum. This epistemology and practice is supported by the findings of researcher-practitioners in global contexts and particularly in relation to learning that is supported by situated writing from place and community (Goodyear-Ka'ǀpua, 2013; Trahar, 2013). Robert Allen Warrior (1995) reports benefits for Canada’s First Nations from educational practices that embrace indigenous pedagogies (as discussed in Chapter 5), and similar studies in the United States (Amerman, 2011; Verbos, Gladstone, & Kennedy, 2011), Mexico (Urrieta, 2013) Hawaii (Goodyear-Ka'ǀpua, 2013), and with the Indigenous peoples of Australia (Kapitzke et al., 2000) attest to the value of curriculum that is place and community-emergent, and supported by technologies and enhanced infrastructure (Hillhouse, 2014). In line with these findings, and those of Chapter 5, the opportunity to write from familiar and important places for family, culture and personal experience appears to have benefits for writers and researchers from indigenous and settler cultures alike, as demonstrated in Chapters 3, 6, 8 and 11 of this book, and in this chapter where pre-service teachers’ writings attest to the power of family, place and belonging as starting points for knowledge generation.

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Process or discovery writing? Cremin and Myhill (2012) describe the impact of early studies by Emig (1971) and Britton et al (1975) as having shaped present-day pedagogical processes that many teachers use with students in planning, drafting and revising their work. The effectiveness of process writing for many writers and teachers has led to its dominance as a method so that four decades on, process writing continues to framing teachers’ imagination and practices. Process writing continues to inform teacher-facilitated “writing conferences” (Cremin & Myhill, 2012, pp. 19-20) with students, and while Russell Jones and Dominic Wyse (2013) attest to the lasting value of these approaches, particularly where these are supported by focused conversations and a clear sense of purpose and audience (pp. 22-23) they note also the “value of open-ended talk (for) building on real language choices and children’s editorial control over their own writing” (p.11). Cremin and Myhill (2013) suggest that an over-reliance on process approaches may restrict the writing experience for “discovery writers” (p.21) as shown in Chapter 10 of this book. They echo concerns raised by Jones and Wyse (2013) that a focus on testing and reporting encourages risk-averse approaches to the teaching of writing and this in turn impacts upon learners’ enjoyment of English, and of writing in particular. Hence, Cremin (2006) urges classroom practitioners to nurture their own skills and to “tolerate uncertainty, take risks and engage artistically” (p. 415) so as to become writers with their students. It is fitting that this chapter concludes with the words of Jenny Hoang, whose work with a peer is featured in Chapter 10: writing is a challenge, but it brings many rewards. Jenny Hoang writes: In order for students to create a creative piece of writing they need to have self-confidence, a safe learning space and knowledge and skills related to literacy. I wanted to experience writing different types of texts, texts that I have never tried creating before. Through this creative journey I developed my self-confidence in these two genres. Writing a Haiku and creating a comic was difficult, (so) I approached this assessment very cautiously and researched and looked at various examples before creating my draft. From experiencing the thinking process I have gained an understanding of the challenges that my students may encounter and the skills that my students will need to have.

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References Adu-Febiri, F. (2011). Inviting emotions, morals and spirit into our classrooms: A sociological perspective on the human factor model of education. Review of Human Factor Studies, 17(1), 40-89. Alvermann, D. E. (2000). Narrative approaches Vol. 3. M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (pp. 47 - 64). Retrieved from http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/h andbook/alvermann/index.html Amerman, S. (2011). Education beyond the Mesas: Hopi students at Sherman Institute, 1902-1929. Western Historical Quarterly, 42(4), 535-535. Andrews, R. (2005). Knowledge about the teaching of [sentence] grammar: The state of play. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 4(3), 69-76. Azadeh, A., Ramkalawon, D., & Simonsson, L. (2010). Being woven: the transformation of the self within woven spaces. Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 8(1), 36-49. doi: 10.2752/175183510X12580391270065 Bathmaker, A., & Harnett, P. (2010). Exploring learning, identity and power through life history and narrative. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Bettelheim, B. (1988). The uses of enchantment: The meaning and importance of fairy tales. London: Penguin Books. Bourdieu, P. (1992). Structures, habitus, practice (R. Nice, Trans.) The Logic of Practice (pp. 52 - 65). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butz, D, & Besio, K. (2004). The value of autoethnography for field research in transcultural settings. Professional Geographer, 56(3), 350360. Clandinin, J. (2010). teacher knowledge. In C. Kridel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies (pp. 863-864). Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc. Retrieved from http://knowledge.sagepub.com/view/curriculumstudies/n455.xml. —. (2012). Afterword: Reflections on narrative inquiries into teacher education identity making. In Elaine Chan, Dixie Keyes & V. Ross (Eds.), Narrative inquirers in the midst of meaning-making: interpretive acts of teacher educators. In D. S. Pinnegar (Series Ed.) Advances in Research on Teaching (Vol. 16, pp. 143-148). New York: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. doi: 10.1108/S1479-3687(2012)00000160011

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Clandinin, J., & Connelly, M. (1991). Narrative and story in practice and research. New York: Teachers College Press. Cranston, N., Reid, A., Keating, J., & Mulford, B. (2011). The forces and dynamics shaping education. Retrieved from http://www.agppa.asn.au/content/view/11/15/ Cremin, T. (2006). Creativity, uncertaintyand discomfort: teachers as writersCambridge Journal of Education, 36(3), 415-433. Cremin, T., & Myhill, D. (2012). Writing voices: Creating communities of writers. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Finding flow. Psychology Today, 30(4), 5. Davies, P. (2012). ‘Me’, ‘Me’, ‘Me’: The use of the first person in academic writing and some reflections on subjective analyses of personal experiences. Sociology, 46(4), 744-752. doi: 10.1177/0038038512437897 Derewianka, B. (2012). Knowledge about language in the Australian curriculum: English. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 35(2), 127-146. Dervin, F. (2013). Rethinking the acculturation and assimilation of ‘others’ in a ‘monocultural’ country: forms of intercultural pygmalionism in two Finnish novels. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 34(4), 356-370. doi: 10.1080/07256868.2013.807229 Dressel, G. , & Langreiter, N. (2003). When "We Ourselves" become our own field of research. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 4(2), 27. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1), 1-18. Ellis, C, & Bochner, A. P. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: researcher as subject. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. Ellis, C., Bochner, A. P., Denzin, N. K., Goodall, H.L. Jr., Pelias, R. J., & Richardson, L. (2008). Let's Get personal: First-generation autoethnographers reflect on writing personal narratives. In N. K. Denzin & M. D. Giardina (Eds.), Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Evidence (pp. 309-333). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press inc. Foucault, M. (1983). Self writing - hupomnemata [L'écriture de soi]. Dits et Ecrits, 4, 415-430. Goodson, I. F. (2012). Developing narrative theory: life histories and personal representation. London, UK: Routledge.

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Goodyear-Ka'ǀpua, N. (2013). The seeds we planted: Portraits of a native Hawaiian charter school. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Grainger, T. (2005). Teachers as writers: learning together. English in Education,, 39(1), 75-87. Hillhouse, J. (2014). Wadadli Pen and young writers in the Caribbean. Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature, 51(4), 6367. Jones, J. K. (2011). Re-framing Education as a thirdspace: Neonarratives of pedagogy, power and transformation. (Doctoral Thesis), University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba. Retrieved from http://eprints.usq.edu.au/21065/2/Jones_2011_whole.pdf Jones, R., & Wyse, D. (Eds.). (2013). Creativity in the primary curriculum (2 ed.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2008). New Learning: Elements of a science of education. Port Melbourne, Victoria: Cambridge University Press. Kapitzke, C., Bogitini, S., Chen, M., MacNeill, G., Mayer, D., Muirhead, B., & Renshaw, P. (2000). Weaving words with the Dreamweaver: Literacy, indigeneity, and technology. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 44(4), 336. Kruger, K. (2001). Weaving the word: the metaphorics of weaving and female textual production. Missisauga Ontario: Associated University Press. Larrain, V. (2013). Catalan teacher meets Chilean researcher: (De)constructing subjectivities through the interplay of textual narratives. In S. Trahar (Ed.), Contextualising narrative inquiry: Developing methodological approaches for local contexts (pp. 140 -157). Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge. Lastrapes, W., & Negishi, M. (2012). Foundational field experiences: a window into preservice teachers’ cultural consciousness and selfefficacy for teaching diverse learners. Journal of the Southeast Regional Association of Teacher Educators, Winter(1), 37-43. Lincoln, Y., & Denzin, N. (2003). Turning points in qualitative research: Tying knots in a handkerchief. Crossroads in Qualitative Inquiry Series (pp. 450). Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Alta Mira Press. Lipman, P. (2013). The new political economy of urban education: Neoliberalism, race, and the right to the city. London: Routledge. Maton, K. (2008). Habitus. In M. Grenfell (Ed.), Pierre Bourdieu: Key concepts (pp. 49 - 65). Stocksfield, UK: Acumen.

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McIntosh, P., & Warren, D. (2013). Creativity in the classroom: case studies in using the arts in teaching and learning in higher education. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books. Mishook, J. & Kornhaber, M. (2006). Arts integration in an era of accountability. Arts Education Policy Review, 107(4), 3-11. Mittapalli, K., & Samaras, A. (2008). Madhubani Art: A journey of an education researcher seeking self-development answers through art and self-study. Qualitative Report, 13(2), 244-261. Morrison, B. (2013). The rise of creative writing programmes. Changing English, 20(1), 23-28. doi: 10.1080/1358684X.2012.757057 Myhill, D., & Wilson, A. (2013). Playing it safe: Teachers’ views of creativity in poetrywriting. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 10(0), 101111. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2013.07.002 Office for Standards in Education Children’s Services and Skills. (2012). Moving English forward (110118). Retrieved from http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/moving-english-forward. Pack, M. (2011). More than you know: critically reflecting on learning experiences by attuning to the 'community of learners'. Reflective Practice, 12(1), 115-125. doi: 10.1080/14623943.2011.542080 Patrick, F. (2013). Neoliberalism, the knowledge economy, and the learner: Challenging the inevitability of the commodified self as an outcome of education. International Scholarly Research Network: Education, 2013, 8. doi:10.1155/2013/108705 Pelletier, C., & Jarvis, T. (2013). The paradoxical pedagogy of creative writing: The disembodied Word inscribed in the flesh of things. In O.Davies (Ed), Jacques Ranciere Now. London: Polity Press. Phipps, A. & Guilherme, M. (2004). Critical pedagogy: Political approaches to language and intercultural communication. Bristol: Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications. Phipps, A., & Saunders, L. (2010). The sound of violets: The ethnographic potency of poetry? Ethnography and Education 4(3), 357–387. Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of play: Constructing an academic life: Rutgers University Press. —. (2001). Getting personal: Writing-stories International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE), 14(1), 33-38. doi: 10.1080/09518390010007647 —. (2013). Twelve uneasy pieces on research and therapy. Qualitative Inquiry, 19(1), 20-26. doi: 10.1177/1077800412462979 Richardson, L., & Adams St. Pierre, E. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage Handbook

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of Qualitative Research (3 ed., pp. 959 - 978). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Robinson, A. (2007). The story of writing: Alphabets, hieroglyphs and pictograms. London: Thames and Hudson. Sartre, J-P. (1969). Being and nothingness (8 ed.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Schon, D. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Towards a new design for teaching and learning in the professions (First ed.). San Francisco, CA. Stephen, C., & Muriel, L. (2013). Narrative and performative acts in cultural education: the teaching of writing as critical communication. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 14(2), 213-227. doi: 10.1080/14649373.2013.769747 Torres, C. (2013). Neoliberalism as a new historical bloc: a Gramscian analysis of neoliberalism’s common sense in education. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 23(2), 80-106. Trahar, S. (2013). Contextualising narrative inquiry: Developing methodological approaches for local contexts. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge. Urrieta, L. (2013). Familia and comunidadǦbased saberes: Learning in an indigenous heritage community. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 44(3), 320-335. doi: 10.1111/aeq.12028 van Manen, M. (1995). On the epistemology of reflective practice. Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 1(1), 17. Verbos, A., Gladstone, J., & Kennedy, D. (2011). Native American values and management education: Envisioning an inclusive virtuous circle. Journal of Management Education, 35(1), 10-26. doi: 10.1177/1052562910384364 Warrior, R. (1995). Tribal secrets: recovering American Indian intellectual traditions: University of Minnesota Press,. Webb, J. (2009). Finding a fit: University writing courses and the publishing sector. Creative Writing: Teaching Theory and Practice, 1(1), 63 - 84. West, C. (2012). Teaching music in an era of high-stakes testing and budget reductions. Arts Education Policy Review, 113(2), 75-79. doi: 10.1080/10632913.2012.656503 Williams, J. (2013, 5th October, 2013). [I can describe anything through functional grammar- but don't ask me to write a poem! ]. Wilson, A. (2009). Creativity and constraint: Developing as a writer of poetry. In R. Beard, D. Myhill, M. Nystrand & J. Riley (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Writing Development. (Vol. Chapter 26: Creativity

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and constraint: Developing as a writer of poetry, pp. 387-402). London: SAGE Publications Ltd. —. (2013). A joyous lifeline in a target-driven job: teachers' metaphors of teaching poetry writing. Cambridge journal of education, 43(1), 69.

CHAPTER TWO UISGE BEATHA: THE EBB AND FLOW OF FOUR TIDES YVONNE STEWART FINDLAY AND JANICE K. JONES

Abstract Life-stories explore who we are and how others view us, allowing critical insights into the nature of belonging and place, acceptance and othering in the development of a hybrid and postcolonial identity. Drawing upon the seminal works of authoethnographers Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner, the identity and border theories of Homi Bhabha and the phenomenological inquiry of Max Van Manen the authors as migrants, educators and researchers create a 4 dimensional framework across which the trajectory of one researcher’s life from foundling child to mature adult is explored. Interweaving autobiographic narratives, transcripts of oral history, and symbolic representations of displacement and disempowerment from one author’s life, the researchers subject that thick data to critical conversations. This critical exploration of narratives of displacement, labelling and othering creates a space out of which counter narratives of agency, resilience and transformation emerge, suggesting the subtlety and power of storytelling and writing for professionals in diasporic and transnational contexts of education. Uisge Beatha: This final destination is both an end and a beginning. The wind whispers and sighs across the waters. The surface is disturbed and tiny droplets are sucked into the air to become moisture soaked clouds which deposit their water on the land. The water that began its life seeping through the moss of a highland plateau now brings new life to areas far from Cairngorm. The cycle of life has no beginning and no end but is transmuted into a fresh form in a different environment. The water seeps from the earth and begins its journey...

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Chapter Two There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. —Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218-224

Yvonne speaks: I am currently a Doctor of Education student exploring phenomenology through the medium of narrative inquiry. My topic is the lived experience of experienced teacher educators. Early in my research journey, I wrote a brief autobiography, ‘My story’. This experience helped me to understand the nature of the task which I am inviting participants to undertake in telling their personal and professional stories: as a phenomenologist, it is important for me to reflect on my own experience before starting data collection from participants. The reflection is important because it helps the researcher “enter the world of their participants and become more aware of their own biases and assumptions (Lodico, Spaulding & Voegtle, 2010, p. 149). In this chapter, I interweave that autoethnographic text with reference to underpinning theories of phenomenology (van Manen, 1995) and narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 1991; Foucault, 1983). My personal voice and those of experts in the field are interspersed with excerpts from a meditation on the mystery of my origins and the turbulent tides of life as I have experienced it. This chapter is couched in the form of an extended metaphor, reflecting my Celtic heritage and love of the highlands, the burns and the mists of my country of origin. The water of life, or Uisge Beatha in Scottish Gaelic, has no absolute beginnings or endings: it is cyclic in nature. Figure 2-1 encapsulates that metaphor. Cohler (1982) contends that personal narratives are “the most internally consistent interpretation of presently constructed past, experienced present, and anticipated future” (p. 207). Phenomenologists consider that experiences are “situated in a particular social, historical and cultural context” (Lodico, Spaulding & Voegtle, 2010, p. 150). In accord with this understanding, Mishler (1986) refers to the telling of experiences through narrative as having “context-bound shades of meaning (p. 53). These writers are in assent that temporality of experience, the social and cultural environment in which it happens, and our interpretation of that experience are interwoven within narratives of experience.

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Figure: 2-1: U Uisge Beatha ass metaphor: the water of life

The process of writinng my autobiography starrted with my thinking about the keey memories I have of my earlier years iin particular. Thinking turned into w writing: the “lived “ through hness” (van M Manen, 2011, para.1) p of the revocatiive turn; andd then thinking-as-writingg, an epistem mology of practice whhere the reseaarcher creates “knowledge as text” (van n Manen, 2011, para..3). I found myself deco onstructing pparts of my life and interpreting them in the narrative n that is i my story. T The end result surprised me: it includded strong em motions about labelling andd the effect off labelling on individuaals. Thus, I experienced e “knowledge “ aas being” (van n Manen, 2011, para. 3), moving beyond b the infformational aaspect of text to a new understandinng of self and history. I wass also surpriseed to find thatt although I had spent 43 years in the education n workforce, this rated litttle or no mention in my narrative. The why off this point iss explored latter in the chapter. The wateer of the burn begins its visiible life as it sseeps from thee moss covered eearth on a high plateau of the Cairngorm. C Its actual beginnin ngs are unknown but the tricklee makes its way y through indenntations in the soggy earth andd meanders dow wn the gentle slope of the hiillside, swelling g with moisture gathered from the t earth, rain and a snow on its way.

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My story: Where and when does my story start? At the beginning I suppose. But when was that beginning? That is a mystery. I was born sometime in the second half of 1949. My birth certificate (Figure 2-2) states the date as 29 October but further reading reveals this as a guesstimate. And here is the mystery:

Figure 2-2: Extract from original birth certificate

As recorded in my first birth certificate (Figure 2-2), and in the ‘Bulletin’ newspaper (Figure 2-3), I was found on the first floor of a tenement block at 24 Adelphi Street, Glasgow. No one knew who I was and so I spent the next year in Castlemilk Children’s Home – an experience of which I have little or no memory although to this day the sound of a screaming infant causes a deep reflex action in my innermost being, a memory perhaps. I was thought to have been about six months old and my date of birth was set at 29 October, 1949. However, as I had been found on 29 March, 1950 the numeracy of the person who worked this out might be challenged! On 28 March, 1951, I was taken into the care of Peter and Agnes Findlay of Motherwell and was formally adopted by them on 20 February, 1952. This event is the first major ‘tide’ in my life. Becoming part of the landscape the burn is now able to provide life by giving hydration to the flora and fauna, and the immediate area, of which it is a part, begins to change. The moss carpet gradually gives way to reveal underlying rocks and the ground becomes precipitous. Now three or four

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feet wide and ankle deep, the water is cleansed as it tumbles over rocks and stones to become a moderate waterfall and can provide fresh, clear spring water to weary hill walkers making their way to the summit.

Figure 2-3: Extract from the front page of ‘Bulletin’

One can speculate on many ways in which my life would have been different had I not been abandoned or adopted. Speculation, however, is not fact and the tide certainly came at the flood and led me, if not to fortune in the monetary sense, most certainly to fortune in the life sense. The use of narrative as a form of data collection is considered problematic in the scientific paradigm where data is quantifiable and easily presented in numeric form. However, although the “study of the realm of meaning requires the use of linguistic data” (Polkinghorne, 1988, p.7) the value of narrative methods for exploring and articulating the complexity of lived experience has been presented as a means by which researchers may explore what is said, but also what is unsaid. (Clandinin & Connelly, 1991; Schon, 1991; van Maanen, 1990). Increasingly, narrative theory now focuses not only upon what is written or spoken in participants’ life narratives, but also upon the spaces between. Narrative research has become a powerful means by which individuals in postcolonial personal and professional contexts grapple with the gaps and the silences in their own and others’ stories, so that shared understandings of personal and

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cultural identity become liquid (Dervin, 2011, 2013; Dervin & Layne, 2013). Making meaning of my personal life experience necessitated that I find words to express recollections and reflection on past events. However, mapping those events was a challenge. Research into the National Archives of Scotland before my migration to Australia in 2001 was helpful in that process: in early 2001 I managed to obtain a copy of my original birth certificate and some copy from local newspapers in which I figured: until then I had not been aware of the existence of these documents. It was quite a revelation, and I have wondered since who gave me my name, and why the surname of Stewart. I was finding my way through processes that Polkinghorne (1988) expresses as making “an integrated ensemble of connections among images and ideas that appear in various modes of presentation, such as perception, remembrance, and imagination” (p.8). The interesting synergy of my first given last name and the family who adopted me is that Stewart was the middle name of my adopted father and some other members of the wider Findlay family. Ancestors of the family had been Stewarts. The second major tide in my life was an inundation. Life seemed normal in my world: Agnes and Peter Findlay were my mum and dad, as I knew no other. My dad was full of life; an impish spirit, a scratch golfer and prize winning amateur photographer. An extremely fit man, he could run cross country races with ease and put many hours of effort into his ‘wee girl’ whom he dubbed ‘the best boy in Motherwell’. From him, I inherited a love of golf and photography – the latter of which is still a passion for me to this day. Continuing its journey across a meadow, the burn settles into a quieter phase and trees, bushes and animals take up residence by its banks which become overgrown with accumulated growth from seeds that birds have dropped. Some tree branches stretch across to meet their counterparts on the other side. The burn is truly “uisge beatha” (water of life).

Life was simple until in March 1959, my mum died from tuberculosis. It was a rocky time for a nine year old but life picked up again with the arrival of a house keeper who, in 1960, married my dad so that our shared lives were full of fun and vigour again. Thus began the best two years of my young life. This happy period was brought to a shuddering and lifechanging stop when my father suddenly took ill and died just three weeks later from an inoperable brain tumour. I had never known him to be ill except for a cold one winter. The same week, a cousin was killed in a car accident in North Africa. Within another six weeks, two very close uncles

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died in quick succession; one of those uncles lived in our home. He died in my arms. As is the way with nature, storms sweep across the landscape signalling both destruction and rebirth. Plants and trees with shallow root systems lose vigour and health over the years, and are swept away by strong winds and flood waters. The same destructive forces however, bring new life as seeds, borne by the winds, are deposited on soggy banks. The sun bringing heat replaces the wind and wet and new life begins. Fresh, green shoots appear and the burn, now cleansed by the rains, breathes new life and continues on its course towards its final destination.

In the space of two months, the people with whom I had grown up and been close to as a young child were swept away from my life: I was left in the care of my second mum. We were both numb in our own ways. The same year I started secondary school and, for the first time in my life, I buried myself in school work. This brought its own rewards in the form of school prizes. I had spent almost all of my primary schooling battling for the bottom place in class with another girl whose name I cannot remember. My mum died in 1991after a twenty year battle with a rare form of blood cancer. Those years were spent with many months in hospital and regular visits for treatment in between. We had to stay within easy reach of the hospital and moving house was not an option for someone in my mum’s condition. At the time I didn’t think anything of it: that was just the way our lives were. It was only after mum died that I realised I could move about. I no longer needed to rely on long school holidays and short working days as a teacher to be her carer. This point in time coincided with the fall of communism and the dismantling of the European Eastern Bloc. Access to countries previously behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ became much freer. The needs of the populace in countries such as Romania became painfully obvious to me. Along with some church community friends, I became involved with relief work taking much needed medical, clothing, educational and other supplies to Cluj Napocca, a university town about two hundred kilometres east of the Hungarian border. Eventually reaching the loch, the burn will meld with all the other burns which have taken their own journeys towards the same destination. Together they settle as part of the deeper waters reaching out to the sea and the rest of the world.

The third tide was my appointment as adviser with Glasgow department of education in 1994. In this capacity, I also had pastoral/support responsibility

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for forty-five primary schools. One particular school was in Drumchapel, at that time having the reputation of having the lowest socio-economic grading in Europe. The school had a very poor inspectorate report and I was charged with working alongside the head teacher and staff to bring the school up to an acceptable standard in areas of curriculum planning, learning and teaching and whole school management. I became a frequent visitor to the school. In January, 1995, an Australian teacher arrived on exchange. I did not believe that anyone could have allowed that to happen. I am very glad they did. The Australian teacher has become my life partner. Thus the tide turned and opened the path to Australia. My emigration to Australia with Eleanor opened the path to a family life which I would otherwise not have experienced. I have become a presence in the lives of Eleanor’s three adult children to whom I relate in various ways – not quite pseudo parent but at least another senior adult family member. The eldest of the three shares our home and has an eleven year old boy to whom I am simply ‘Grumps’. I was present at his birth and watching him grow into the boy he is at this point in time has been a great privilege. Quite a tide. Reflecting on the first 30 years or so of my life experience has brought home to me why I have a deep loathing of labelling, and the labelling of children in particular. For most of my earlier life I had lived with the labels of ‘foundling’ and ‘adoptee’. These titles gave adults the opportunity to comment on me without thought as to the person. I was a label and I was categorised by a label and not by my name. Even as an adult, gaining my first passport as a marker of identity and being, and as a right to travel was extremely difficult: there was extra paperwork to complete and specific evidence to be provided to verify my identity. Once an individual is categorised as disabled, socially disadvantaged (Hollomotz, 2013; Smyth & McInerney, 2011), or as presenting behavioural challenges the labelled individual is more likely to be subject to pharmaceutical or other forms of violence (Mercogliano, 1998; Timimi, 2010) with the aim of ensuring compliance. The ultimate outcome of that dehumanising process can be found in places such as Auschwitz, which Eleanor and I visited in 2006 (Figures 2-4; 2-5). When a person is labelled subaltern this opens the space in which binary positions of power and powerlessness may operate: others can do what they like to the othered without burden of conscience: the person is no longer ‘like me’, but other. When schools label students as ADHD, physically disabled or a slow learner, there is danger of forgetting that the student is a real person, albeit with some specific needs, but a person with a name and a unique personality and a future.

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Figure 2-4: Labels used in Auschwitz

Figure 2-5: Tattoos used to label prisoners, Auschwitz

There are still times when I wonder who I really am and from what patch in Scotland I sprang to life in 1949. About one year ago, I had a DNA sample for ethnicity. The sample revealed that I am roughly 92% Celt and 8% Arab. I have always known I am a Celt. It is something deep

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in the psyche which cannot be explained. Scotland has my roots. The old saying, “You can take a girl out of Scotland but never Scotland out the girl” is most certainly true in my case. It is interesting to find myself almost back to where I started in 1970, at the lowest rung of the ladder. My post is lecturer level A and I have no management responsibilities for the first time in twenty-five years. I am able to concentrate on my job and have time built-in to my schedule for research. It is expected that I will progress through my doctoral studies in the first three years. I may not finish it in that time but I expect to make good progress and have the end in sight. To say that I am back where I started is not quite true. I come to this post with the accumulation of knowledge and experience gained in and out of the classroom over the preceding forty years in the education world. I might even be bold enough to suggest that there might be some wisdom drawn from the knowledge and experience, but that could stretch credulity a bit far. I do know that I expect the next tide to be successful completion of my doctorate, followed by contemplation and enactment of retirement. Where that tide will take us, I can’t say. I do know that as long as we are fit, Eleanor and I will continue to enjoy life to the full, travelling and exploring places we have not managed to fit in because of work and family commitments. That will be truly our time. This final destination is both an end and a beginning. The wind whispers and sighs across the waters. The surface is disturbed and tiny droplets are sucked into the air to become moisture soaked clouds which deposit their water on the land. The water that began its life seeping through the moss of a highland plateau now brings new life to areas far from Cairngorm. The cycle of life has no beginning and no end but is transmuted into a fresh form in a different environment. The water seeps from the earth and begins its journey....

Metaphor is a useful tool in assisting with the reflective process and van Manen (1990) considers that “language can take us beyond the content of the metaphor toward the original region where language speaks through silence” (p. 49). The metaphor of “Uisge Beatha” represents the gestalt, the essence of my life experience. I wrote the piece as a way of expressing how I came into the world: appearing like the small trickle of water from the Cairngorms and developing through life’s journey. The accumulation of life experiences have caused me to morph into the person I am. It has been an organic process with unnoticed beginnings and no end. I will hopefully continue to develop as life experiences occur on a daily basis.

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Some experiences are scarcely noticed while others have a profound, life changing effect. ... metaphor is not merely a matter of language. It is a matter of conceptual structure. And conceptual structure is not merely a matter of the intellect— it involves all the natural dimensions of our experience, including aspects of our sense experiences: colour, shape, texture, sound (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 235)

Golombek and Johnson (2004, p. 324) described teacher-authored narratives as “not simply a device used to story one’s experience, but a semiotic tool that facilitates teacher development and can document how teachers participate in and constitute their social reality.” Cacciari (1998, p. 125) contends that “Many metaphors use the expressive properties of events and things that surround us for giving names to mental contents otherwise difficult to shape linguistically.” For me, the image of the river as expressed in “Uisge Beatha” powerfully represents the shape of my lived experience. Being a foundling, I feel as though I have emerged into the world from an unknown source but have grown physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually over the intervening sixty plus years. From introspection came the words and images of “Uisge Beatha” which I have used as a motif throughout the chapter. The use of the Gaelic Uisge Beatha and the Scots ‘burn’ are deliberate: they reflect what I feel and know of my genetic cultural heritage. According to psychologists, our memories seem to work best when we can see things as part of a recognised pattern, when our imaginations are aroused, when we can make natural associations between one idea and another, and when the information appeals strongly to our senses. An imaginative story, rich in vocabulary, that appeals to the senses, which works as a metaphor, and is cumulative in nature, clearly fulfils all these criteria (Berman & Brown, 2000, p. 4).

“Uisge Beatha” (Figure 2-1), fulfils these criteria as an integral part of my personal reflection. The beginning of life is probably clearly defined for most people and then we grow and become part of the landscape. As we mature, we think, work and act with others in the sharing of tasks and supporting one other’s efforts. Life experiences accumulate—some positive and some negative. Most people reach adulthood and settle into a pattern of life with family and career. Changes happen, however, and these cause us to review our lives. Storms, in the form of personal or professional shifts can cause us to discard some of our accumulated life structures and make room for new growth. At our journey’s end our

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legacy—for good or ill— —lives on. As A teacher edducators, we hope our legacy will bbe evident in the t classroom ms of tomorrow w. In writinng this chapterr I have work ked collaboratiively with a colleague, c Dr Janice K K. Jones, who is an experien nced writer annd encouragerr to those of us still nnew to the artt. The process has provideed us both wiith added insight into the narrative inquiry metho odology. Figuure 2-6 gives a graphic interpretatioon of the experience, rep plicating Figuure 2-1 but including academic, raather than the personal, aspects of this chhapter.

Figure: 2-6: W Writing as reseaarch: A reflectiv ve process

Janice speaaks: What follow ws is a writingg story (Alverrmann, 2000)) where I endeeavour to give voice too the processees (Figure 2-6 6) and interacttions that supp ported the creation of this chapter. Importantly, Figure 2.6 dooes not suggeest a oneway flow, aas these iterattive and re-iteerative processses may be nested in multiple waays, allowing writing upon n writing; andd further enhanced by talking abouut, reflecting and critically y evaluating what is said, what is unsaid and tthe meaning(ss) of both. Yv vonne and I m met twice to ex xplore the meanings aand connectioons between two texts: hher life story and the metaphoricaal piece, “Uissge Beatha”. In those connversations we walked through the two texts toggether, bringiing close conssideration to gaps and silences in the texts andd asking clarifying questioons. Our conv versations were recordded. After seveeral weeks wee returned to tthe transcriptss of those conversationns, so that ourr re-visiting of o what was saaid was manaaged from a critical distancing. Durring our revieew of the trannscripts, Yvon nne and I

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employed our respective theoretical frameworks as ‘windows’ onto the data and their meanings. A further challenge was negotiating between us the selection and positioning of narratives within in the chapter: the task of bringing together several texts, and agreeing a theoretical lens from which to read and re-construct a meaningful chapter was complex. Moreover, we became aware of a changing dynamic: was I still the lead author? Yvonne’s story had become central to the chapter, and this required that we honour Yvonne’s creation of the central narrative and that I take the role of midwife to that birthing. Moving around a large table, on which 4 A1 sheets formed a backdrop for the chapter, we cut and pasted important sections from Yvonne’s life story, “Uisge Beatha”, transcripts of interviews and Yvonne’s literature review. We were literally ‘weaving words’ as we negotiated their positions, their relative importance and their connections with the other texts. This kinaesthetic approach allowed an egalitarian, creative and nuanced process for selecting elements to be foregrounded, and how their juxtaposition made meaning Yvonne and I drafted an introduction to the chapter with this framework in mind. However, our approaches to reading the meaning and positioning the chapter were subtly different. Yvonne’s life-narrative and the “Uisge Beatha” metaphor had drawn from me a strong affective response, and I had applied a postcolonial theoretical lens to the texts, focusing upon identity, power and symbolic violence. This aligned comfortably with Yvonne’s approach. However, I had applied another metaphor to Yvonne’s texts. In Celtic folk tales an infant may be stolen by earth or sea spirits to become a changeling, or a child may be persistent and clever enough to find a way between worlds, as in the story of Andrew Mor and the Sea People (Moray, 1966). The representationof children as hybrid beings who are able to move where adults cannot, across the boundaries of earth, air and water, was consistent with border theory. However, what I considered to be a powerful metaphor for re-presenting Yvonne’s experience of being, belonging, becoming, and the symbolic violence of cultural norms did not sit well with Yvonne’s purpose. Yvonne considered that the discourse of Changeling folk tales served to further inscribe patterns by which children are labelled ‘other’. For this reason, her own experience of the systemic violence of labelling is embodied as a silence in Yvonne’s narratives: perhaps to give voice to the unspeakable is to breathe into it a dangerous new life through our telling? Yvonne’s words confirm this: I don’t know that I ever could write about [things] which are so deeply embedded that to share the way my mother and I were treated, would be to diminish myself (Transcript 2 [21.02.2013]).

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My re-casting of Yvonne’s story therefore risked re-inscribing the very processes of labelling and disempowerment that she sought to reject. By re-framing Yvonne’s story through a metaphor other than her own, I had unconsciously privileged my voice and agency over her own as storyteller. Yvonne’s tactful rejection of that approach allowed internal coherence: her voice and story were foregrounded.

Conclusion Liquidity of identity and voice During this narrative process it emerged that how we narrate identity is liquid (Dervin, 2011, 2013) and positional. In choosing the term Celt or Scot, Yvonne self-presented aspects of identity that spoke to her own and others’ understanding of what it is to be of Celtic background. However, while positioning herself as a member of a very broad genetic and diasporic group wherein there are multiple languages, cultures and histories, Yvonne’s intent and the potential meanings of applying a label to herself was different from being labelled by another (Dervin & Layne, 2013), both in terms of personal agency, and the impact of labelling.

Metaphor is a powerful tool for researchers Writing that is poetic or narrative in form gives voice to ideas and experiences that may not find expression in other ways. For Yvonne, metaphor allowed her to understand and voice her identity in terms of a connection with the land. That’s the Celt in me coming out. I’ve spent so many years cumulatively, in the highlands, climbing, touring round. It’s a miracle to me, the way the water just seeps out, feeds the earth, and becomes the beautiful rivers and the lochs that we have in Scotland, teeming with life, with beautiful Salmon and Trout, and provides the very rich water for the whisky, where Uisge Beatha, the water of life and the peaty taste [comes from] (Transcript 3 [21.02.2013]). Metaphor gives shape and form to what is said, what is unsaid, and what cannot be told, (Figure 2-1). After many years of seeming dormancy, as described by Yvonne, her chosen metaphor gives life to a particular way of understanding and telling: through our choice of metaphor we write self-and-the-world (Figure 2-1). Our processes of writing, reading and then talking about the narratives revealed a range of meanings and possible interpretations: a crystallized representation. My initial reading of Yvonne’s two texts was as separate entities. However, read as parallel

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narratives the texts afforded more than two ways of knowing and understanding Yvonne’s life, and the power of writing for her as a researcher. For Yvonne, the same experience of reading and discussing her life narrative and its accompanying metaphor of Uisge Beatha, generated wonder at the source of her own voice. In our discussions we questioned why Yvonne’s professional life was not present in her life-texts. As educators, that silence brought into close focus the central message of her writing. Janice: Transcript 4 [21.02.2013]: There’s a kind of mystery at the heart of this [story] for me. Perhaps the reason why you did this writing about yourself, [is] about the self being central to you as a teacher? Yvonne: With your belief system, with all the things that make you the person [you are]. I don’t see how it cannot impact on how you treat your students. Through our conversations about Yvonne’s writing, it emerged that a driving motivation in her career as an educator has been to counteract the destructive force of labelling in the lives of vulnerable children.

Life-writing is an organic and relational process Co-authoring a chapter around a life story presents challenges relating to the narrators’ positionality, voices and contexts, as discussed by Bignold and Su (2013, p. 412), first in relation to the role of researcher as narrator of her own, or others’ texts, and also in relation to which aspects of narratives, and whose telling of those tales is privileged within the final text. Yvonne expressed wonder in our conversations that her story “seemed to write itself”, echoing the reflections of pre-service teachers in this book. This suggests that when a narrative has value for identityconstruction the lengthy gestation of that story is not always recognised by the author, for whom the story emerges fully-formed. Janice observes: I am touched that Yvonne considers me an ‘experienced writer’. This extended process of co-authoring and analysis of our conversations has taught me the importance of listening, and opening space for others’ stories and unique voices to emerge. Because the process highlighted differences in our ways of making meaning, it allowed our mutual recognition of how agency and power is expressed through writing choices. For Yvonne and the research participants who share their life stories in her doctoral study becoming an attentive listener will be as important as ‘finding a voice’.

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Life history writing for personal and professional development is a well-established practice in teacher education, according to Goodson and Choi (2008, pp. 7-8). The power of life-writing emerges when it moves beyond the ‘telling’ of life experience, to become an active process in the construction and interpretation of identity (Clandinin, 2012), as it has in Yvonne’s experience. Clandinin reminds us “how deeply grounded narrative inquiry is as a relational methodology (2013, p.135). For Yvonne and for me as co-author, the writing of this chapter has engaged us in a ‘relational methodology’. It has highlighted the power of metaphor in research, and the importance of careful listening and the giving of a respectful space for our own and others’ story-telling.

References Alvermann, D. (2000). Narrative approaches. In M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (Vol. 3.pp. 47-64). Bignold, W., & Su, F. (2013). The role of the narrator in narrative inquiryin education: construction and co-construction in two case studies. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 36(4), 400-414. doi: 10.1080/1743727X.2013.773508 Clandinin, J. & Connelly, M.. (1991). Narrative and story in practice and research. New York: Teachers College Press. Clandinin, J. (2012). Afterword: Reflections on narrative inquiries into teacher education identity making. In Elaine Chan, Dixie Keyes & V. Ross (Eds.), Narrative inquirers in the midst of meaning-making: Interpretive acts of teacher educators. In D. S. Pinnegar (Series Ed.) Advances in research on teaching (Vol. 16, pp. 143-148). New York: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. doi: 10.1108/S1479-3687(2012)00000160011 Clandinin, J. (2013). Engaging in narrative inquiry. Walnut Creek, CA: left Coast Press. Dervin, F. (2011). A plea for change in research on intercultural discourses: A ‘liquid’ approach to the study of the acculturation of Chinese students. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 6(1), 37-52. doi: 10.1080/17447143.2010.532218 —. (2013). Rethinking the acculturation and assimilation of ‘others’ in a ‘monocultural’ country: Forms of intercultural pygmalionism in two Finnish novels. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 34(4), 356-370. doi: 10.1080/07256868.2013.807229

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Dervin, F., & Layne, H. (2013). A guide to interculturality for international and exchange students: An example of hostipitality? Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 8(1), 1-19. doi: 10.1080/17447143.2012.753896 Foucault, M. (1983). Self writing - hupomnemata [L'écriture de soi]. Dits et écrits, 4, 415-430. Goodson, I., & Choi, P.. (2008). Life history and collective memory as methodological strategies: Studying teacher professionalism. Teacher Education Quarterly, 35(2), 5-28. Hollomotz, A.. (2013). Disability, oppression and violence: Towards a sociological explanation. Sociology, 47(3), 477-493. doi: 10.1177/0038038512448561 Mercogliano, C. (1998). Rid-a-him or: Why are so many boys given drugs in school? Chapter 4. SKOLE: The Journal of Alternative Education, 15(3-4), 12. Moray, A. (1966). Andrew Moir and the sea people A fair stream of silver (British ed., pp. 91-120). London: Longmans, Green and Co :td. Schon, D. (1991). The reflective turn: Case studies in and on educational practice. New York: Teachers College Press. Smyth, J, & McInerney, P. (2011). Whose side are you on? Advocacy ethnography: some methodological aspects of narrative portraits of disadvantaged young people, in socially critical research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2011.604649 Timimi, S. (2010). The McDonaldization of childhood: Children’s mental health in neo-liberal market cultures. Transcultural Psychiatry, 47(5), 686-706. doi: 10.1177/1363461510381158 van Maanen, J. (1990). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy (2 ed.). London, Ontario: Althouse Press. van Manen, M. (1995). On the epistemology of reflective practice. Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 1(1), 17. —. (2011). Inquiry: the revocative turn: lived-throughness Phenomenology Online Retrieved 12 August, 2012, from http://www.phenomenologyonline.com/inquiry/19.html

CHAPTER THREE BEGINNINGS, ENDINGS AND THE JOURNEY BETWEEN ERIN-PEARL BUCHNER, MELISSA ANDREWS, MELISSA CRAWFORD AND CAMERON FEITH

Abstract For the pre-service teacher authors of this chapter, writing becomes a means of understanding, articulating and coming to terms with the pain of loss and the self-questioning of guilt. The writers’ poems, narratives and reflections explore and express the complex and shifting territory of life’s transitions. Guilt gives way to redemption, and the taking on of the burden of care for another becomes an expression of hope. Through the processes of writing the authors come to acknowledge that life is not linear, but cyclic, and that through our continuing learning we may become wise custodians of knowledge, kinder persons, and better teachers.

Erin-Pearl Buchner Watching my mum and aunt struggle to look after their father during his worsening dementia intensified my interest in the shifting relationship between adults and children over time, and in the changing roles and emotions that are involved. The poem is aimed at readers who may or may not have encountered this role reversal in their lives, and it aims to help readers understand the emotions and challenges that changing relationships can cause. The twist at the end of my poem is intended to resonate with the audience, so that they continue to think about the poem and role reversal in their own lives after reading. Working with pen and paper allowed me to write and rewrite, to cross words out and to scribble ideasall over the page. I felt more creative using these tools than when I worked on a computer. The hardest challenge was at the development stage of the poem: I was unsure of what words would

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have the most effect on readers, but knew that I wanted to embed the right amount of emotion in the poem so that the reader would continue thinking after they had finished reading, about role reversal and its impact on the lives of the people involved. I’ll always love you, Mum I remember our day in that busy, bright place, I remember the warmth from your hand, I remember how cold the autumn breeze felt, And how alive my face became from being near you, I remember the bustle and hurry of that city, I remember how we ate that huge ice-cream, I remember walking close to you to keep warm, With your arm around me, Even though now that the autumn breeze is blowing again, I remember savouring that day with you, But now memories are all that I hold, As I parent you.

I discovered that for me as a writer the process of creating and drafting took longer than I had imagined. Transferring this knowledge to my classroom teaching I will allow students more time to plan and create their written pieces. I will also provide a variety of examples for the students to read, listen to, view, write and speak about, to give them an understanding of the structure of the texts before they begin writing. This really helped me in the development of my own writing. Also, for younger grades I will explicitly teach each step of the development of a written piece and give frequent feedback to my students as writers as they may find, like me, that it is easy to get lost in the structure and language features of a poem or story, yet to not understand what it is that makes a good written text.

Melissa Andrews The overriding themes in my writings are of love, loss and the bond that connects a parent and child. I wanted to show different situations in which a parent has to let their child go and the varying ways in which they might deal with the pain. Her Everything Sound of silence deafening, His face says it all.

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Lack of movement heartbreaking, "Your baby is gone." Storms foment in her heart, Raindrops descend from her eyes. Her thoughts cloudy and hazy She is left with ‘why?’ His words clinical and cold, Understand no pain. It was meant to be, there will be others. No reasons justify pain. Heart eternally lost to joy, she weeps, ‘She was my everything!’ Pregnant with a lifetime of dreams, Her future with a daughter, Life of love and laughter... Now sadness and sorrow Empty arms, an empty cot. Today she lost everything.

The intent of this poem was to describe the pain and hurt that is associated with losing a baby through miscarriage, and to demonstrate that although the physical bond between pregnant mother and unborn child may not be a long one, the emotional bond can have a lasting impact on the mother’s life. I wanted my poem to challenge the perception that miscarriage is easier to cope with than a stillbirth or neonatal death. As I was writing this poem, I imagined that I was reaching out to parents who have suffered the heartbreaking loss of a child. I wanted to share my feelings of sorrow, disappointment and longing for the baby whom I was unable to meet. I also wanted to communicate my experiences of supporting close friends and family through their own loss. It was especially important to me to portray how cold and clinical the comments of medical professionals can be. Parents who suffer miscarriage should be able to feel that their child was as important as any other: it is not appropriate to tell a mother who lost her child that she could have another or that the loss was meant to be. I chose to use free verse as it ensured I was not limited in my choice of words as I would be if I had used rhyming poetry. I used metaphors such as ‘storms foment in her heart’ and ‘raindrops descend from her eyes’ to paint the picture of the immense emotion and sadness that was felt. Furthermore I used alliteration in the lines ‘life of love and laughter’ and ‘sadness and sorrow’ to help the words flow. While I initially struggled to

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write it helped me to let go of my preconceived ideas of poetry to write whatever came into my mind. I found creative writing quite difficult. I have a tendency to over-think when I am writing and had to keep reminding myself to stop thinking and just write. I also thought that I could just sit down with my laptop and easily produce three pieces of writing. Hence, my first few drafts resembled a narrative rather than a poem. However, with the help of constructive feedback, I removed words that were not needed and tried to ensure that every word assisted the imagery and enhanced the meaning of the poem. I feel that my refined poem is a lot stronger and more aesthetically pleasing as a result. I will certainly use this process of writing down all my thoughts and later editing and polishing my language choices in my future creative writing and to assist students to write their own poems.

Melissa Crawford The topic “endings and new beginnings” came to me during my professional experience this semester: one of the children in my class lost her father to cancer. His death had a profound effect on the school community. Although families knew that he had been unwell, few were prepared for how suddenly things ended. His daughters who attended the school each reacted in different ways, showing that grief is never identical: mourning the loss of a loved one is a singular experience. Lilies The sweet smell of lilies filled the small room, easing Meg’s nervousness. As her fingers stroked the petals of the bouquet, she thought of how long it had taken to settle on the flowers. Many hours had been spent flicking through magazines, looking for something a little different, but still traditional. Lilies were an obvious choice. Justin had given her the flowers on their first date. Her nervousness returned as she thought of that night. *** Amy bounced into the kitchen. “Hurry up, Meg - he’ll be here soon!” Reluctant, Meg showered and fixed her hair and make-up. Amy and her partner had been trying to set Meg up for months now: a string of blind dates, awkward conversation and alcohol. The doorbell rang. Amy gestured for the stranger to come inside. Tall, with dark brown hair and eyes - his smile was nervous as he handed Meg the pink lilies. “Justin”, he murmured, and their eyes locked.

Beginnings, Endings and the Journey Between *** Meg’s focus returned to the mirror. Her heart began to pound. In just half an hour, she would walk down the aisle to Justin. She would finally be able to tell him how she felt. Until the early hours, she had been scribbling notes on a tattered piece of paper. She had started writing a week ago, and each day, a new memory had been woven into that special and meaningful speech. Smoothing the front of her dress, Meg managed a small smile. It was similar to the dress that she had been wearing when Justin had proposed, that first step towards their beautiful life together. *** It had been a hard year. The deaths of Meg’s mother and Justin’s sister had taken their toll, but Meg had worked even harder imagining them proudly smiling as they viewed her achievements. When she arrived home after the long school term, Justin was holding her suitcase: before she had a chance to panic he drew her into a warm embrace. “Guess what I have planned for us?” he whispered. “A relaxing two weeks at home, with no children, report cards or parent teacher interviews?” “How about a week in tropical paradise?” On their final night at the resort Meg shared the seafood buffet with Justin. The warm, salty air made her sleepy, but a resounding shatter jarred her back to reality: Justin had knocked his glass onto the floor and he was on one knee in front of her. Surely a member of staff could clean the shards away? Their eyes held as they had on that first night. “Meg, will you be my wife?” *** With tears in her eyes, Meg had not been aware of Amy at her side: the hand on her shoulder startled, but reassured. They stood in the church doorway. Why be anxious now? Meg had known this day would come. Amy hugged her. “You can do this. Justin loves you as much today as he did the day he proposed”. Meg lifted the bouquet, aware of the faces that turned to watch her. As she walked down the aisle, friends and family reached out to touch her hand. Meg needed their strength. She had wanted this day to be different. To go back in time and change something, change anything. There was nothing she could do now, but tell Justin how she felt. Stepping up to the microphone Meg drew the paper from her pocket and read:

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Chapter Three “Justin, you are the love of my life, my soul mate. All my life plans included the beautiful life we were meant to build together and now I don’t know how I can live each day without you...”

I created this short story with the intent that it would convey the emotions of someone who had planned a future with one other person, only to have this taken away prematurely. While creating this piece, I was faced with the challenge of writing for an adult audience. The stakes seemed a lot higher than when you create a piece of writing for pupils you are teaching. In saying this, it felt easier to write at my own level. However, it was difficult to develop a plot that it would be engaging for an adult audience. It was also hard to keep the piece short and interesting and to balance this with descriptive language that honoured the intense feelings of the characters. Using flashbacks. I was able to retell crucial moments in the relationship between Meg and Justin, using the structure of an orientation, complication and resolution. Although the resolution is very short, it makes clear the twist in the tale. In contrast, by elaborating on the feelings of Meg, I have endeavoured to create empathy with her as the main character: she appears to be preparing for her wedding day, rather than for her partner’s funeral.

Cameron Feith My poem focuses upon loss, remorse and guilt. ‘The phone call’ materialised from a place I never expected. It is a freeze frame in time and speaks of an incident from many years ago, an incident that has had a profound effect on my choice of occupation. Even now I find it difficult to write this as my words come from a place I dare not visit. Acknowledging that this poem is bathed in truth unearths intense feelings of regret, remorse and shame. The Phone Call In a dilapidated kitchen, the phone buzzes, I answer. A child is dead, a student from our class, My blood runs cold. A child has drowned, While his parents were asleep in the sun, Little dreaming their picture perfect world Was about to come crashing down into bleakness.

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A child ridiculed by his teacher, His class, his family: naughty then, If only I could right that wrong, Go back to change grave injustice Profound silliness to think: for me There is no return. A panoply of emotions drowns, The voice on the other end of the line, Starts to warble and crack. She too shares my feelings of remorse and sorrow. Of regret and despair. I hate thinking of that phone call.

The poem refers to a time when I was working as a teacher-aide in a low socio economic area with a class of young students. There were many behaviour issues. My colleague and I were young, careless and perhaps a little arrogant. We dealt with the bad behaviours in the only way we knew how: through laughter and ridicule. Of the many difficult students one in particular sought attention by causing an almighty racket, and through no fault of his own, harming other students. For him, to urinate onto another student was an amusing joke. The boy’s behaviour and his problems with speech made it increasingly difficult to communicate with him. My colleague and I became jovial jokers, teasing and ridiculing the boy. Neither of us was prepared for what was to happen. In the early hours one evening I received the call. The boy was dead. The shock made me recognise the arrogant child within me and his role in the tragedy. Now would he finally grow up? Ironically, this poem began as a detailed piece of prose, but upon reflection I realised a ‘less is more’ approach was necessary. In writing the poem, I presented the initial trauma of the news and what I imagined the child’s parents may have felt. I wished to express my sense of rage at the injustice: an ordinary moment in parents’ lives turned into an extraordinary tragedy. The third stanza reflects my feelings of remorse and regret that a ‘grave injustice’ could emerge from a seemingly jovial atmosphere. The child deserved understanding. I wanted to convey my desire to write this wrong, and right this wrong without giving too much detail to the reader. The remaining stanzas suggest the shouldering of responsibility and the power of guilt. Desiring to make good a situation of irreparable damage, I hope my studies will allow me to become a teacher who will work with troubled children differently and well. I do indeed ‘hate thinking of that phone call’.

CHAPTER FOUR FINDING MY VOICE ANNE JASMAN

Abstract Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding. Proverbs, IV, 7.

The writer employs auto-ethnographic methods in her critical re-viewing of personal and professional voice in her research publications over 2 decades. Exploring representations of self, place, space and time in those writings, the author reflects on the emergence of a choral yet individual voice that presents a document of her journey in learning yet functions also as the place of germination for her personal and professional growth and conscientisation. The author extends from this personal journey to consider the importance of writing as a means for shaping and honouring the changing personal and professional identity of educators, leaders and researchers in broader and transnational contexts.

Introduction In this chapter I use a selection of my written work as a way of sharing my struggle to find a unique and authentic voice throughout my career. I trace key themes drawn from selected writings published between 1987 and 2010. My intention is to explore through a new narrative within this chapter the emergence of voice and with it confidence in autoethnographic methodologies and the cyclical development of key ideas relating to place, space, multiple selves, identity and professional learning. Whilst looking back, now, forward and beyond I provide insights into my ‘river of life’, including stories of ‘selves’ in teaching and researching, professional learning and leading, working individually and collaboratively. This weaving of words will create new insights into my writing as research and of writing research to communicate with others.

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Fundamentally this chapter is about the emergence of ‘voice’, not just as the spoken word with which I have never felt anything but confident, but through the post hoc investigation of the written words of my own published work – an example of autoethnography. It is also about the beginning of this journey, its progress and conclusion – from the writings of students in the previous chapter to my sense of self now.

The beginning Notes made in preparing this chapter: In the beginning, as I start to write this chapter I am framing a number of questions that I hope will help me reflect on how best to construct my writing. For example, how do I construct a narrative that is unique and authentic? Should I try to write differently – this is a chapter of an edited book not a journal article? Is this writing as research and/or research writing? The beginning as described here has resonances with the narrative of deconstruction and reconstruction as told by Yvonne Findlay and Janice Jones in Chapter 2. This is not surprising as these writers are both close friends and colleagues. We share experiences crossing borders between countries and between educational roles. Our relationships also include that of supervisor and research student and, in the past, as performance manager. Conversations with both led to further clarity about the specific instances that I would explore - the particular points in my river of life that I felt were critical to my development. However, the reasons for selecting these remained tacit for some time and it is only now in the re-visioning or perhaps ‘re-voicing’ of this chapter that I recognise the assumptions that have underpinned my selection of ‘critical incidents (Tripp, 1993) as a mechanism for writing about my river of life and the journey I have taken over the last 25 years (and more). These narratives are presented as a series of chronological ‘incidents’ or places within my river of life, ordered from past to present. I have always thought about my development as a writer in this way, although intriguingly one of my reviewers suggested that it might be interesting to break the chronological sequence, moving back and forward without temporal progression. Whilst this is an approach I will use in the future to disrupt my assumptions, this is how I saw the river as I began my writing here. The idea of critical incidents as described by Tripp is intended to help teachers draw on their own classroom experience to develop professional judgment, to improve their own practice and to pass on their expertise to

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others. I translate this approach to enable me to study the written products of my research, drawing on my experience of doing and writing about research to develop a research identity, and improving my practice of writing as research and research writing to pass on my ‘expertise’ to others. To do this I write ‘around’ several pieces of my published written work, providing the context of the writing as research and research writing and therefore find a way to show through this writing aspects of my river of life that were central to ‘finding my voice’; and to develop key ideas relating to place, space, multiple selves, identity and professional learning. This translation of the use of critical incidents aligns well with the suggestion that the focus of autoethnographic research can be on the auto (the self – the finding of my voice); on the ethnos (the culture or social context, that is the insights and significance of this research writing for others) and/or the graphy (the research process or in this case the writing as research) (Reed-Danahay, 1997). My research practice is, therefore, located within a qualitative paradigm, drawing from the ethnographic tradition. Here the role of the researcher is to remain deeply embedded within the research. The personal voice is essential to reflect how the researcher as ‘ethnographer’ interacts with the cultural or social context being researched. Thus autoethnography is a genre of writing and research that connects the personal to the cultural or social context. In so doing I am inserting myself into this writing as a major character, and as noted by others (Charmaz & Mitchell, 1997; Holt, 2003) I challenge accepted views about silent authorship, where the researcher’s voice is not included in the presentation of findings. Embracing this methodology has been a critical part of finding my voice. As part of this methodological concern is that the need to find my voice is indicative of the lack of value placed on the self within research particularly at the time when I first engaged in educational research in 1970 as a post-graduate Certificate of Education student in Leicester. In order to frame this next section as ‘research’ the autobiographical and reflective writing surrounding the ‘critical incidents’ that follow is designed to address the following questions: x When was the beginning of my journey? x When did I start to have an emerging awareness of writing as research? x When did it become explicit? x When did I begin to understand the significance of my writing as research?

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x In what ways has ‘writing as research’ impacted on my research and research writing? x Where might these understandings lead now? From this beginning I follow the flow of the river through time to where I am now. In the next section I consider the characteristics of where and when I am now and crystallise key themes and ideas that emerged through my research writing over this period. As I name and consider emerging ideas I look forward. Finally, the understandings and insights from writing this chapter as research are set within a broader theoretical and professional context in the final section – looking beyond. These perspectives constitute the warp of the fabric of the narrative constructed through the weaving of words. The weft of this chapter is about auto (self), ethno (social/cultural dimensions) and graphy (the research process).

Looking back – tributaries in writing my ‘river of life’ Critical incident -1987 Being creative – in writing and in life This is the year that I have named many times as one of the most creative and productive years of my life. It was the year my son was born and also the year I submitted my thesis. It is also the year I made two trips from Australia to England: the first to submit my thesis and the second following the birth of my son to have my viva. If I was to characterise this point in my river of life it would be a broad, but shallow river where the waters flow with energy but smoothly over the rocks beneath. It is very like the River Don in Aberdeenshire near the farms where I spent my childhood holidays and where I was born. The order of the events in this critical incident is deliberate. It highlights the importance of both my professional and personal ‘creativity’ at this time and the synergies that emerged. I was pregnant, I was healthy, sailing every weekend, focused on full-time work and part-time writing. The imperative of finishing the thesis as a new life in my life came closer meant my physical, emotional, intellectual creative and spiritual elements were aligned, working synchronously and the river of my life was flowing seemingly effortlessly. It was a productive year. At this point I am reminded of the poem by Erin Pearl Buchner (Chapter 3). This poem speaks to me not only of becoming a mother enjoying such moments with my son, but as a daughter when my mother

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passed away finally after a period of fading away with Alzheimer’s. But in that end there was also a new beginning as I waited for the birth of my first grandchild who arrived six months later. Like this poem which spans years, the narrative of the development and completion of my thesis (Jasman, 1987) is a long one. The first part of the thesis was a correlation study to identify the reliability and validity of teachers’ assessments of pupil performance in areas other than the basic skills. During this time I became aware of my difficulty with research writing. This was evident after about two years working on the Observational Research and Classroom Learning Evaluation project (ORACLE) (Galton & Simon, 1980; Galton, Simon, & Croll, 1980; Willcocks & Jasman, 1980). I struggled with the genre, had writer’s block for six months and finally was able to develop an appropriately ‘academic research’ writing style. This experience framed the first half of my doctorate. I then began teaching at a College of Higher Education immediately following my time as researcher in the ORACLE project team. At this point I put my thesis in a cupboard, closed the door and placed a chest of drawers in front of the cupboard door. It was there almost two years. In terms of the place of writing research in my river of life, I was in stagnant waters – a quagmire where there was little flow. In 1982 I was preparing to leave to work on exchange in the United States for a year. I rented my house and I had to make a decision about my doctoral work – did I own it – would I finish it? I did take it with me and worked on the first half of the thesis whilst in the United States and re-engaged with the data. This research writing was familiar and built on my learning about writing research in the ORACLE project. I learnt a lot about academic writing that I still use today in supervising research students but it was a report, with minimal interpretation and ‘I’ was absent from the text. There was so much more that I could have communicated from this time of being an educational researcher. Some four years later as I worked on the second section of my doctoral thesis in 1986, I found I had to write differently. The second section involved a self-evaluation study of my own teaching practices. The evidence used to evaluate my practice involved documenting the professional learning outcomes of teachers studying assessment and evaluation full-time in an In-service Bachelor of Education (Hons) fourth year qualification. However, as it was a self-evaluation, I also made explicit my intentions, aims, planning and implementation of the course. This was to be my first experience of writing in the first person within a research context.

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I was no longer research writing, instead I was writing as research. I was using the first person as I wrote about my intentions, beliefs and anticipated outcomes. I reported through writing what I actually did and included my responses to the assessment and evaluation of the students’ learning as part of my research. There are many instances within the text of my self-evaluation in the thesis which provide evidence of both a sense of conflict being both a ‘teacher’ and ‘researcher’ and the use of my voice in reflecting my interpretation of the significance of our dialogues. For example, I commented that the following statement was a ‘turning point’ for me and supported the suggestion that the identification of the learner’s needs through the close observation and reflection on events could provide a more appropriate way of confronting any discrepancies between my own espoused theories and theories-in-use and that this might also applied to the teachers’ professional learning. I’m having to review and reappraise what I’m doing in the light of things which come up during the sessions. I’m suggesting that you might like to do that too …. Have a try in the light of that reflection on my part. I do understand what it feels like, the conflict, should I really be doing this (the self-evaluation) or should I discontinue. I believe I ought to be doing it. I’ve reworked the (teaching) plan for the term, if you’d like to have a look at these and see if there are any comments you would like to make (Jasman, 1987, p.283).

This narrative is also important to the idea of multiple selves and how these were visible in my writing. This understanding has also emerged through writing this chapter, and has led to an unanticipated new understanding which is revealed later in this chapter. In 1987, I was making the transition from writing in the third person as required within my first university writing using scientific, biological and systems’ perspectives; through a period of uncertainty to having confidence in my own thinking, critical reflection and professional learning relevant to understanding my teaching and research praxis and being able to write ‘I’. My river of life was gaining momentum. I(t) was cutting a new path through the landscape, narrow and deep. This was the first time I could publicly own my writing as research and was a first step towards finding my voice. However, the significance of this was hidden to me at the time as I did not initially see my doctoral research as the start, thinking that the articulation of the issue of finding my voice appeared later in my research trajectory as detailed below.

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Critical incident -1992 Finding my voice This is the year that I named ‘Finding a voice’ as an issue for me in a paper. It was written a month before my son started school, following completion of a six month Outside Study Program in England. I was also taking up university positions, being elected to Senate, appointed to the admissions committee of Academic Council. My sphere of influence was extending beyond the School of Education and Iwas expected to speak not only about my research but also influence other areas of work: in teaching and in leading and supporting other leaders within the university. My river of life was changing to a delta as the tributaries spread out across the landscape. The need to find my voice was first publicly expressed in a paper Women’s work: finding a voice (Jasman, 1992) presented at a conference on Women in Leadership in Perth, Western Australia. The abstract I submitted for the conference was a ‘traditional’ abstract explaining how the paper would describe aspects of the research and consultancy work conducted over the previous four years into self-appraisal and performance management systems. In addition, the paper was to draw on more recent research during study leave in the UK into teacher self-appraisal as part of a process leading to personal and professional development. However, the paper that I wrote was not that outlined in the abstract – it started with the following statement: As I sat down to write this paper I was confronted with a dilemma between the time of submitting my abstract and sitting down in front of the word processor my way of looking at the world changed and is still changing. I intend, therefore, to use this opportunity, first, to tell my own story to see if I can tease out some of the conflicts, dilemmas and issues which were brought into sharp relief by this change. Second, in telling my story I shall explore how I see the process of self-appraisal informing my own professional development and helping me to better understand the process which I am encouraging others to engage in. Third, I want to draw comparisons between the kind of learning I have done with the way in which a group of teachers involved in self-appraisal have articulated their concerns and the professional development outcomes they have talked about in relation to engaging in this process (Jasman, 1992, p. 1).

At this time and place there were few, if any, avenues open within academic research to use auto-ethnographic techniques. However, this is what I decided to do. I can recall the physical location, the feelings and thoughts circling in me as well as my uncertainty with taking the path that

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was emerging through my writing. I still am surprised and wonder about how this paper came into being – but it did. The story of its writing is included here since it was so different to my previous experiences of writing research; it was rather ‘writing as research’. I was sitting at my Mac Classic surrounded by various schemes of teacher performance management and appraisal for professional development trying to work out how to make this article interesting and reflect the research and my professional learning that was the outcome of my recent outside study program. I started writing and continued to do so for about four to five hours. I typed the words into the ‘word processor’. I did not reread, nor edit, nor reference the writing. At the end I went back and read from the beginning and made few changes to the text.

‘Women’s work: finding a voice’ is both an exploration of my writing process and a narrative of the tensions of being an academic. I write of the challenges of fitting into the academic mould when the reality of my lived experience then encompassed so much more. Like many other women I conceive of my role/work/job as a teacher and perhaps more now as a learner, in a more holistic way, the tasks I perform are all permeated by a belief that I have chosen to facilitate learning and that learning is my central concern. I would not call myself a manager or an administrator since both terms have negative connotations for me. This is consistent with research on women in educational management and leaderships (Jasman, 1992, p.4).

This is a recurrent theme throughout the paper, particularly in respect to whether I am being a teacher and/or researcher and/or a learner and/or a leader first and foremost. Using the metaphor of my river of life, this was losing direction, lots of tributaries were moving out from the river, dissipating the flow and force of the river. It was a time of uncertainty and confusion regarding my identity as researcher, teacher, learner and leader as well as raising issues about being a mother and woman within the academic world. I feel the need somehow to justify departing from the norm of an academic paper, and the temptation to move away from disclosure and finding my voice through this conference, yet I know too that to avoid this disclosure will limit my potential to learn from doing this – to learn from taking a risk, to do something in a different way from the accepted patterns and expectations which I had not questioned until very recently (Jasman, 1992, p. 1).

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I also write about being concerned as to my capacity to communicate effectively with my audience, in ways that were unfamiliar, of breaking out of the academic genre I am also interested in how to best represent the ‘messiness’ of my thinking in prose that is linear. I found myself using different typefaces – their form representing the degree of certainty I felt, whether I was trying to give ‘voice’ to a factual, reflective, interpretive or evaluative stance. I finished the paper and presented this at the conference. As I started to present I became aware that I didn’t know how to present this writing as research. For the first time ever I began to read the paper verbatim. There was no summarising or framing of the content with other messages. Within the time it took to read the first paragraph I realised that I had actually said what I wanted to say, creating a piece of written work that was as true to the narrative I wished to share as it would ever be. As a result I stopped reading the paper, and shared this realisation with my audience. I asked if they would be willing to read the paper for themselves which they did. As I reflected on the fact that I had actually written what I wanted to say I realised that this was the point at which I found my voice. From this paper I was able to distil the opportunities arising from the critical incident to explore my continuing development as an academic but also to understand this through writing about my lived experience (Denzin, 1991) in an authentic voice. Critical Incident: Changing place, space and pace in a new millennium (2000-3) During the period 2000-3 I made four career moves, from Perth to the University of Melbourne, taking up a DEST research fellowship in Canberra the following year and on completion of this moving to the University of Sydney. I progressed from a Level B position in Perth to Level D at the University of Sydney. Due to changes in my parents’ health I then relocated to the UK a year later and moved outside of the university sector into a senior policy advisory role with the General Teaching Council for England (GTCE). The third paper explored here is that on ‘Initial Teacher Education: changing curriculum, pedagogies and assessment’ (Jasman, 2003). The paper was begun some ten years after ‘Women’s work: finding a voice’. The abstract states that the ‘paper draws on the author’s experiences within a number of professional development projects, teacher education

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programs and the development of professional teaching standards in Australia’ (2003, p.1). I drew heavily on my own experiences and practices in relation to a range of professional and academic activities over the previous ten years. For example, I was actively involved in the design of professional learning experiences for teachers working in schools, the development of initial teacher education programs”, the federally funded National Professional Development program, and also collaborative research with teachers and peers into the nature of professional learning and identity (Grundy et al., 1999) that were part of the Innovative Links research program (Yeatman & Sachs, 1995). In addition, as a Department of Education, Science and Training, Commenwealth of Australia (DEST) Research Fellow I undertook an investigation of teacher professional expertise, what it is, how it develops and how it is assessed for recognition and reward. ‘Initial teacher education: changing curriculum, pedagogies and assessment’ was a sole authored paper. One of my first since re-engaging with research and securing research funding during the previous ten years. I also had built a state, national and to some extent an international reputation for my work on the Level 3 Classroom teacher career pathway and writing in the field of professional standards. My profile was more like that of a traditional academic, including writing of programs and courses, scholarship in teaching and learning, research funding from competitive grants, research and development projects in teacher career paths and professional standards. The tributaries were beginning to realign, to create synergies across my research and other activities and again to build momentum in my river of life. In this paper my research was ethnographic, tracing policy and research trajectories in initial teacher education over the previous 10-15 years. Much of the knowledge that is reflected in this paper was derived from my personal involvement in the events described and I offered my interpretation of this period as a time of ‘benign’ neglect. I was able to draw on my ‘self’ to create the data. I do not remember the circumstances surrounding the writing of this paper only that I presented the first version in 2002 at the first Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) conference for over eighteen months. I completed the published paper in England, when working at the GTCE. I had again drawn on my lived experience as the foundation for the paper. Another significant element of the content of this paper was to focus on the changes necessary to transform education and with it teacher education suitable for the 21st Century.

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Now some ten years later this paper is being read more than ever before, accessible through online searches because of its title: ‘Initial teacher education’. I was confident then and reassured now that I had made a contribution to knowledge, based not only on the rigorous analysis of policy and research but also through reflection on my own lived experience as I looked back over the previous ten years. Yet there are very few ‘I’ statements, although my perspective and lived experience permeates the paper. In the conclusion, I stated that I suggest we can begin to construct new knowledge and understandings from our own professional practices and our practical knowledge about teacher education. In the same way as we urge teachers to become researchers we can research our own practices in similar ways (Jasman, 2003, p.22).

I was now confident as a researcher and as a teacher educator to write for myself but also to recommend what I believed to be a way forward, creating new knowledge, changing practices and developing policy to improve the outcomes for all those within the education system. This confidence was soon to be translated into my policy work for the GTCE and I began writing not as research but writing as policy. The transformations resulting from this change in role are not described in detail here as this experience and the professional learninginvolved require much greater depth of consideration than I would be able to include in this chapter. Critical incidents – 2008-10 I left the General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) in April 2008, my father had passed away in 2005 and my mother in January 2008. I also knew that my work in regard to initial and continuing teacher professional learning and development policy was nearing completion. In fact the GTCE no longer exists following legislation enacted by the new UK coalition government in 2010. I moved back into the academic world where I could again write for myself, as an academic, rather than as an officer of the GTCE. I no longer was negotiating my own knowledge and views with the Director and Council. There was no requirement to stay on message nor did my writing go through five iterations including acceptance by the 40+ Council before it was sent to the Secretary of State. I also became a grandmother.

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The final paper that I consider in this chapter is one that went through many iterations between 2002-2010 when it was finally published (Jasman, 2010). I see this paper as the culmination of 25 years of writing as research beginning with my doctoral research. In this paper, I note that I examine my own involvement and that of teachers and teacher educators in five practice-based research studies in terms of our professional learning and border pedagogy. I played a key role in each project and offer an ‘insider’ perspective through autobiographical self-study (p.307).

In this paper I explicitly present an ‘autobiographical self-study’ on professional learning journeys and border pedagogy. This methodology had by now achieved status and recognition particularly in relation to the work of teacher educators (Loughran & Russell, 2002 ), although the main focus of this research is into the practice of teaching, not the practice of research and the professional learning that takes place as a result of this. Bullough and Pinnegar (2001) developed criteria to judge the quality of auto-biographical ‘self-study’. They include that they ‘ring true’, ‘enable connection’, ‘promote insight and interpretation’ (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001). They also note that the focus of the self-study is on problems and issues that make someone an educator and that authentic voice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for scholarly standing. In addition, they suggest that quality studies ‘attend carefully to persons in context or setting’ and that they ‘offer fresh perspectives on established truths’ (p.108). Reflection on the legitimacy of autoethnography: Unlike my earlier work in my PhD there was now a name for and acceptance of alternative approaches to research that value the self, the socio-cultural context and the research process.

In writing this paper as research, I created a narrative about my own professional learning journey – ‘my river of life’ and the journeys of others with whom I travelled at different times and in different places. I tell the story of five research projects and through these narratives conclude that ....in this exploration of border-crossing for professional learning the metaphors have included types of traveller, the passports and visas they travel under, their luggage and the territories through which they travel. This analysis captures in part the role of border-crossing between different professional knowledge contexts in enabling professional learning journeys. However, it also highlights the importance of the degree of

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difference between personal practical knowledge and/or professional knowledge contexts for learning to occur. Thus if we are to learn about the working lives of the other (and ourselves), it is necessary to cross the border between the ‘academy’ and the ‘school’...The learning that has been described here has resulted from such opportunities to cross borders (Jasman, 2010, p. 321).

In the next section through writing as research I reflect on where my river of life has led. I crystallise key themes and ideas that emerged through my research writing over this period. I also begin to clarify emerging ideas as I write the following section.

Looking now – the same river or a new beginning? From the beginning of this chapter I follow the flow of the river of my life through time to where I am now. In this section I consider the characteristics of where I am now and then how this may impact on my future writing as research in the next section - looking forward. Writing the previous section has illustrated how two tributaries, starting from the well springs of the completion of my doctoral thesis and the birth of my son, have contributed to my river of life. These wellsprings were of great significance in this journey of finding my voice. My thesis opened the door to a new way of researching and writing. It was the beginning of what has become the focus of much of my research, teaching, learning and policy work during my professional life. Like the ‘Women’s work: finding a voice’ paper I did not end up writing from ‘knowing’ what I wanted to say at the start of the writing process. The abstract for the chapter was constructed from tentative ideas about how my understanding might inform the ideas embedded within this book around the significance of writing as research, in order to conduct autoethnographic research and to communicate this research through writing. The reality of constructing this chapter has meant a number of iterations that has changed the content and order of sections as each in turn is written, re-written, re-positioned and edited. This is a fundamentally important part of writing as research and the voice that is associated with published work, as I create the research writing. The focus of this chapter finding my voice comes to the forefront again – what is it that I really want to communicate through this text, what do I want to give voice to? The birth of my son the significant transition points of his life and of other members of my family (and therefore having significance for me) have shaped decisions about place, space and ‘selves’ within my river of life. However, there is new learning emergent through the construction of

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this chapter is an example of writing as research. It was also shaped by the previous chapter where through writing poetry the authors were able to tap into the emotional, physical, creative and spiritual as well as presenting an intellectual perspective. It is also linked to the authors of the following chapter. So as a result this chapter not only mentions my professional life and experiences but also elements of my personal and social context as part of each critical incident. I have not balanced the intellectual with these other elements well but it is where I now wish to go – to write as a writer not as a teacher, researcher, leader, or learner. I also realised as I concluded the previous section on looking back that I have almost closed the door on life as an academic – constrained by the conventions of peer review, rankings of journals, and meeting the needs of the university and government. I have no regrets about what I have done and achieved. I have made contributions to knowledge and practice of which I am proud and have made a difference, but an ‘ending’ is approaching or rather a new ‘beginning’ as a writer.

Looking forward – becoming a writer This conclusion to this chapter is totally unexpected but that is the thrill and joy of writing and through that process finding my voice – being able to say what I really value and want to share with others. My river of life has taken me to an unexpected place. I imagine that I will continue to write in many genres, for research, as research, for teaching and learning, as a journal to help me learn, to gather data and to represent data. I can see occasions where I will write for fun, write to tell a story, to share something I value with others. Whatever kind of writing it is it will now be something of importance, that I value and care about and which I hope will make a difference. For as I wrote before ‘there seems little point of finding a voice if no one is listening; little point in writing if no-one reads the text’ (1992, p.12).

Looking beyond – the getting of wisdom This chapter is an attempt to write as one person, referencing the ‘multiple selves’ through the teaching, researching, leading and learning I have been part of throughout my career. To use multiple voices to convey some of the messiness of the writing process, its backwards and forwards motions, the re-ordering and re-figuring of the narrative to communicate meaning. The understandings and insights from writing this chapter as research are

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set within this final section – looking beyond. As noted earlier the weft of this chapter is my writing about autoethnography, through the lens of auto (self), ethno (social/cultural dimensions) and graphy (the research process) and warp is the focus on position and perspectives in time. As I linked the two underlying frameworks that emerged from my thinking and from my reading I recognised that I could weave – through warp and weft – these two frameworks to create this chapter so that the reader could follow the twists and turns of finding my voice. The warp of the chapter is in the heuristic of looking back, looking now, looking forward and looking beyond (Hamman et al., 2012). First I look back over my ‘river of life’ tracing this to the source – when I first recognised the need to find my voice and the beginnings of my struggle to find and use my voice. What followed is my attempt to convey the complexity and also the simplicity that emerge from some of my writing over 25 years. The unexpected outcome to this chapter is that I am embarking on a new beginning recognising that I am becoming a writer and that I can be this as one person – the processes of integration are evident in all spheres of my life and as a way forward it may be time for the ‘getting of wisdom’ (Richardson, 1910). My river of life has returned to that broad and shallow mass of water flowing smoothly towards the sea that I experienced with the completion of my thesis and the birth of my son. I am grateful that the authors of Chapters 2 and 3 explore through their writing what I have kept hidden beneath the factual reporting of the impact of my son and family as I have navigated my river of life. This has helped focus my writing as research on the ideas of autoethnography, and most importantly given me a new door to go through and begin being a writer.

Acknowledgements My thanks must go to Dr. Janice K. Jones. We share some of the same elements in our rivers of life. Without her insights, encouragement and faith in me as a writer I do not think I would have come this far through writing as research in this chapter.

References Bullough, R., & Pinnegar, S. (2001). Guidelines for quality in autobiographical forms of self-study research. Educational Researcher, 30(3), 13-21.

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Charmaz, K., & Mitchell, R. (1997). The myth of silent authorship: self, substance, and style in ethnographic writing. In R. Hertz (Ed.), Reflexivity and voice. London Sage. Denzin, N. (1991). Representing lived experiences in ethnographic texts (Vol. 12, pp. 59-79). Greenwich, CT: JAI. Galton, M., & Simon, B. (Eds.). (1980). Progress and performance in the primary classroom. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Galton, M., Simon, B., & Croll, P. (Eds.). (1980). Inside the primary classroom. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Grundy, S., Jasman, A., Mountford, A., Newbound, P., Philips, A., Robison, J., & Tomazos, D. (1999). Exploring an emerging landscape: a metaphor for university academics working with, in and for schools. Australian Educational Researcher, 26(3), 37-56. Hamman, D., Coward, F., Johnson, L., Lambert, M., Zhou, L., & Indiatsi, J. (2012). Teacher possible selves: How thinking about the future contributes to the formation of professional identity. Self and Identity, 12(3), 307-336. doi: 10.1080/15298868.2012.671955 Holt, N. (2003). Representation, legitimation and autoethnography: an autoethnographic writing storyInternational Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2(1), Article 2. Jasman, A. (1987). Teacher based assessment. Unpublished, Leicester University. —. (1992). Women's work: finding a voice.Paper presented at the National Conference on Women in Leadership, Perth. —. (2003). Initial teacher education:changing curriculum, pedagogies and assessment. Change, 4(2), 1-22. —. (2010). The professional learning journey: a meta-analysis of five research projects. In T. Bates, A. Swennen & K. Jones (Eds.), The Professional Development of Teacher Educators. London Routledge. Loughran, J., & Russell, T. (Eds.). (2002 ). Improving teacher education practices through self-study. London: Routledge. Richardson, H. (1910). The getting of wisdom. London, UK: Heinemann. Tripp, D. (1993). Critical incidents in teaching: developing professional judgement. London, UK: Routledge. Willcocks, J., & Jasman, A. (1980). Study skills and pupil performance. In M. Galton & B. Simon (Eds.), Progress and performance in the primary classroom (pp. 99-140). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Yeatman, A., & Sachs, J. (1995). Making the links: a formative evaluation of the first year of the Innovative Links Project between universities and schools for teacher professional development. Murdoch, WA: Murdoch University, Innovative Links Project.

PART II: WRITING THE WOR(L)D

Introduction Part two of this book builds upon the themes of writing for personal and professional identity and voice that constitute Part one, engaging with the dynamic and generative power of the oral and written traditions where text creates and re-presents the world. Writing about education and research assumes a degree of authorial distance from both product and experience, in that its purpose is to present evidence in support of, or counter to the author’s discoveries about the world. In contrast, and sometimes in parallel, writing as an educative process and as a method of research is a mode of creating the world. Moreover, such writing is reflective, relational and contextual revealing the author and his or her agency in the field. In the following chapters, the authors engage with practices of writing within the generative mode. This mode of writing is inherently troubling for the author, and perhaps also for the reader, because of its capacity to reveal the forces at work in creating our perceptions of the world, and the seeming of reality. Embracing these challenges, the authors of the following chapters engage with the process of writing, discovering that writing is of itself a construction of theory: writing creates the wor(l)d. Chapter 5, Dinawan Dreaming: Seeing the darkness or the stars employs research methodologies that are reflective of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples ways of generating, representing, protecting and sharing knowledge. Meaning making, community, the natural world, event time rather than ‘clock’ time and other ways of seeing and understanding self-in-the-world are central to this chapter by Janice K. Jones and Donna Moodie, who with Nicole Hobson interweave yarns from their visit to a site of cultural significance for the Jarowair Aboriginal people, and consider the intersections and spaces between those narratives. In Chapter 6 Conflict, adversity and reconciliation the connecting theme of pre-service teachers’ works is conflict and rapprochement. The authors present multiple ways of reading the world, the land, culture and

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belonging. Kirra O’Brien explores the lived experience of a child whose passion is to achieve a new life through education. Leanne Hubbert’s writings are a response to the devastating floods of 2010/11 in Queensland and the tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011. Catherine Somerfield’s short story draws upon the recent history of Australia’s lost and stolen generations to suggest the lasting damage to familyand belonging. Julia Grieve’s short play concludes the chapter. Revealing the tensions that split a family during an alcohol-fuelled wedding-day argument, it closes with a subtle call for wisdom, tolerance and reconciliation. In Chapter 7 Understanding and acting through conversational spaces authors Erin Christensen, Benjamin Williams and Joseph Occhino use a collective interweaving of narratives to make meaning of their separate but connected journeys as postgraduates becoming early career researcher and teacher educators. Through shared and reflective conversations they build a cooperative partnership, using electronic means to overcome the distance between them. Technologies support the researchers’ planning and testing of strategies that will allow them to survive and thrive in their respective and challenging professional contexts. Chapter 8, Relationships: Darkness, light and shades between explores the complex human territory of love, hope and fear through the writings of pre-service teachers. Natalie Romanet’s love story is an escape from turmoil, whereas Lorrae Charles’ darkly humorous story is of revenge within marriage. Jaclyn Fitzgerald offers a tender portrayal of the longing, hope and fear of a family separated by war. Claire D’Arcy’s short play reveals the struggle for power behind seemingly idle chatter, and Kathleen Parkes’ writings portray the Janus-faced aspect of devotion: rage and fear at the prospect of losing a loved one is contrasted against the wonder and generosity of parental love Robyn Henderson’s Chapter 9 closes this section presenting The Writer's Journey - Ways of being, knowing and doing, through the metaphor of a journey where identity and knowledge are re-generated and shared. Questioning what it is means for novice writers as future educators to engage in the process of creating texts that have value for self and others, the author considers the implications for their learning and future practices as professionals.

CHAPTER FIVE DINAWAN DREAMING: SEEING THE DARKNESS OR THE STARS JANICE K. JONES AND DONNA MOODIE WITH NICOLE HOBSON

Abstract This chapter uses Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research methodologies of walking together, yarning about our experiences and critically analysing the meanings of conversations and writings created by three Australian women. We are a university educator and recent migrant; a woman of the Kamillaroi people who is an artist and educator; and a preservice teacher whose family migrated from Europe in the last century to farm the land in Queensland. The chapter builds upon Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing and understanding as the authors share their understandings of an immersive experience during a day visit to Gummingurru: a ceremonial site of cultural importance to the Jarowair people. An art work created by Donna Moodie becomes a key and a metaphor for understanding the different ways of seeing and understanding land, self and, as the authors walk together on and through a site of spiritual and cultural significance. Film of their yarning about the day and a critical revisiting of the transcribed interviews allows a threeway re-framing of the day so as to generate new understandings of identity and culture, the land and time. The interwoven voices of the three highlight differences but also embody the potential for re-connection and transformed understandings through walking, yarning and writing together.

This chapter is dedicated to Janice Moodie-Hall, 1937 - 2013

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Introduction On one level this chapter offers a story of a day trip to a site of cultural significance, the Gummingurru site in South East Queensland on the Darling Downs. On another and more symbolic level the chapter explores ways of reading and understanding the land, time and belonging through visual art and ‘yarning’ or storytelling (Fredericks et al., 2011). It does so by interweaving the recollections of two researchers and one pre-service teacher who travelled to Gummingurru as part of an educational visit.

The Gummingurru site Anne Ross (2010) describes Gummingurru as “one of the largest intact stone arrangement sites in Queensland” (p. 113). On a site spanning some 5 hectares, it is situated between Toowoomba and Meringandan, lands traditionally part of Jarowair country. However, most of the Jarowair people were forcibly relocated to Fraser Island, Cherbourg, Palm Island and other settlements between 1950 – 60 by the government of that time, losing connections with family and the land. As custodian of the land, Brian Tobane (Ross, Ulm, & Tobane, 2013) has worked with Gummingurru Aboriginal Corporation to ensure that the site is preserved for its archaeological significance, but also as a place of living heritage (Ross, 2010, p.120) where Aboriginal Australians’ voices are heard over those of bureaucratic institutions, and where traditional ways of sharing knowledge continue through storytelling. The Jarowair were among the many peoples who travelled to the site on their journey to the Bunya Mountains for feasts and ceremonies that were held there once every three years (Ross & Ulm, 2009) when the trees fruited. It was a ceremonial place where young men were initiated into manhood before travelling on to the Bunya nut festivities. In the late 19th century Gummingurru was still being used for initiations, and it has long been a place of teaching for the Jarowair and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who travelled there: “The activities at Gummingurru and the Bunya Mountains included knowledge sharing, alliance making, trade and exchange” (Ross et al., 2013, p. 62). Brian Tobane’s role as caretaker of the site and in re-creating the site as a source of cultural knowledge has been reported in some depth by Tobane with co-researchers Anne Ross and Sean Ulm. Their most recent publication refers to Brian’s direct ancestor, Bunda, who was Brian’s grandmother’s brother (Ross et al., 2013). It indicates the history of the site and the people who knew its stories:

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The first European settler in the area was James Benjamin Jinks, who in 1871 settled the land on which Gummingurru is located. Jinks’ great-greatgrandson, Ben Gilbert, took up the property in 1948. Most of the knowledge about the use of Gummingurru and interpretations of its motifs comes from Gilbert (1992). Until his death in 2009, Gilbert was regarded by many, including the current Jarowair traditional custodians, as being the knowledge custodian of the site because of his close friendship with ‘Bunda’ (also known as John Darlow or Henry Darlow), a Jarowair man who remained in the vicinity of Gummingurru even when others were removed to Cherbourg (Ross et al., 2013, p. 63)

What is not mentioned so frequently is that it was a child’s play that led to the re-discovery of the site. When Ben Gilbert’s young daughter mentioned her play in the ‘fairy rings’ on the farm, her father began to explore further.

The context of this chapter The reviewer for this chapter commented at a ‘singular voice’ emerging from the writing. Acknowledging this, the main authors have walked together drawing on our strengths: Donna’s oral tradition has emerged in her telling of the storyof this experience, and I am honoured that Donna has entrusted me to give life to her telling, saying “That’s your skillset writing”. Transcripts of our conversations and the ‘story’ of our experience have been drawn together by Janice with the agreement of Donna and Nicole. Both are named as co-authors with respect to their oral contribution: telling of stories goes beyond writing as described by Julia Christensen in her work with homeless First Nations people in the Northwest Territories of Canada “storytelling and knowledge sharing are often one and the same”(2012, p. 231). By making transparent the intersections, boundaries and gaps (Licona, 2007) in our separate and combined accounts of the day we have strived to embody the intimacy of our shared yarning (Barusch, 2012), through respectful, and culturally sensitive relationships in research (Hill & May, 2013; Lloyd, 2012). Through experiencing, yarning, transcribing and critically re-visiting our talk we have gained a greater understanding of our shared and distinct intercultural understandings. In this chapter, we strive to find a starting point for understanding self, culture and the land by revisiting an experience whose intent was to help undergraduates in a Bachelor of Education program to understand Indigenous perspectives. As storytellers we are Donna Moodie, a woman of the Kamilleroi people of Australia, artist and researcher; Nicole Hobson, a woman with a

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rural and settler heritage who chose to attend the day trip during her first semester of study as a pre-service teacher; and Janice Jones, an economic migrant to Queensland, of a diasporic Celtic heritage, and also an artist, lecturer and researcher. By interweaving our stories of that day we strive to make meaning and bring a critical focus to our perceptions of the differences and similarities in our understandings of the land, self and time. Without knowing it at the time, our practices that day embodied teaching through community and the land, more than through content. In this way our practices were consistent with the 8ways pedagogy, whose interconnected dimensions include “Community Links; Deconstruct Reconstruct; Non-Linear; Land Links; Symbols and Images; Non-verbal; Learning Maps; Story Sharing” (Regional Aboriginal Education Team Western New South Wales, 2013, p. 6).

Figure 5-1: Indigenous research and teaching approach [Adapted from the RAET 8ways model, 2013, p.6]

The 8ways philosophy is presented (Fig.1) through words that have direct application to our conduct of the day, but each practice remains true to intent of the 8ways model, in its embodiment of “narrative-driven learning, visualized learning processes, hands-on/reflective techniques,

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use of symbols/metaphors, land-based learning, indirect/synergistic logic, modelled/scaffolded genre mastery, and connectedness to community” (2012, p.6). Our making meaning through holistic, arts-informed and landbased ways of teaching and learning has relevance within a national context of government imperatives to bring equity in educational opportunity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Behrendt, Larking, Griew, & Patricia, 2012, p. 17), and for embedding Indigenous perspectives within university and school curricula (MCEETYA, 2008). Land-and-community based ways of learning offer powerful ways of making meaning in global contexts where indigenous peoples’ approaches to relational learning (Goodyear-Ka'ǀpua, 2013; Milgate, Purdie, & Bell, 2011), ways of knowing and research methods (Christensen, 2012; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012), are emerging as counterbalancing epistemologies and ways of re-presenting self and the world (Warrior, 1995).

Research and ethics of practice The data from which this chapter is drawn from a three-year study into undergraduate pre-service teachers’ self-perceptions of creativity, and their perceptions and experiences of learning through natural environments at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ), Australia. In 2010 and 2011 Janice Jones gathered written reflections from a cohort (n=120) of first year pre-service teachers during their immersion over 6 hours’ in a groomed environment over 3 weeks. In 2011 a sub-project involved a research team of five: two researchers (authors of this chapter) focused upon learning in and through engagement in natural environments and sites of cultural importance. This involved a group (n=12 students, one of whom is an author of this chapter), who engaged in a full day immersion experience on 24th May 2011 with a focus on Indigenous perspectives in education. Janice Jones also worked with two other researchers in a parallel study within natural-seeming virtual environments (Second Life), where a virtual world was created (Farley, Jones, & Murphy, 2012) with the advice of cultural advisors and with approval by the Centre for Australian Indigenous Knowledges at the University of Southern Queensland. Both parts of the project were funded by an internal research grant. While ethics approval was granted by the university, more nuanced permissions were essential to ensure culturally sensitive practices, particularly in relation to female researchers’ engagement at sites of spiritual and cultural significance for men of the Jarowair and other peoples with spiritual connections to the place. Donna Moodie negotiated approval for a group visit to the Gummingurru site from caretakers of the

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site. Informal consultation with cultural advisors also supported our plans for pre-service teachers to understand the protocols for respectful access to Gummingurru as a site of cultural, spiritual and historical importance. Our intent was for the experience of land-based learning to enhance all visitors’ sensitivity to ways of understanding the relationship between the individual, the community and the land (Fig.1). As teaching researchers Donna and I had hoped that all participants would gain a greater understanding of different ways of experiencing time and nature, and an appreciation that place carries symbolic meanings. However, Nicole reflected that, inevitably, for her and other students the day was experienced differently by individuals. Part of working with Indigenous methodologies for learning is a readiness to accept that learning comes when we are ready, and although our experience of life includes temporal awareness (Lefebvre, 1974) our learning is not always informed by ‘clock time’. For some participants, the opportunity to gain factual knowledge about the local history of a site of cultural and archaeological significance, so as to share that knowledge with other learners will have been sufficient for that day. For participants who did not report changes in their thinking or awareness, and for whom feelings of resistance made learning difficult, our hope is that time and further experience may bring a re-connecting with memories for greater understanding. As organisers, the authors wished to create an experience where participants came away with a sense that Gummingurru is a living site (Ross & Ulm, 2010) where heritage is constantly evolving. Gummingirru is a site of regeneration, creation and sharing of knowledge and cultural pride by the first peoples of this land with peoples of all cultures. Donna’s advice ensured that the day coalesced around a gathering, sharing and reframing of the physical narratives embedded in the landscape, through her use of story, through the medium of her painting, Dinawan Dreaming, and through the didgeridu playing of her adult son, Ben. In writing this chapter, I removed some references to ‘Queensland’, feeling uncomfortable in the knowledge that the name of the state where I live embodies a history of recent and genocidal domination of the original inhabitants of this land. Donna, whose people have lived through that colonisation, is more sanguine – not accepting, but focussed on a positive future where Australians work together to gain from their rich diversity of culture and knowledge. Her research strives to recapture Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges of astronomy, plants, and healing, languages and song-cycles. We share an acute awareness of the loss of so many first Australians’ languages and stories, and their importance for culture and

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our global knowledge store. This understanding is supported by the work of Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Dunbar (2010) who decry the dominance of English in education and its genocidal impact upon the store of knowledge of indigenous cultures worldwide. More positively, in Australia, “more than 20 unique projects commenced by separate Indigenous language groups” (Behrendt et al., 2012, p. 103) are underway to digitally document and to teach those languages. While the focus of this chapter is upon a visit to the Gummingurru site, the broader experience of that day included storytelling and a focus on curricula for sustainability at the Amaroo Environmental Education Centre. The day concluded with a tour of the Cobb and Co Museum, hosted by Donna Moodie and with a focus upon first settlement of Queensland, and upon its ancient and recent history. During the day, participants were asked to record their impressions in writing after each stage of the program. Eight weeks later, participants were invited to interview. Three students responded. Filmed interviews captured the three participants’ recollections of the day. Nicole, as one of the participants is pleased for her words, which were transcribed from the interview, to be part of this narrative. Donna Moodie and Janice Jones talked during two separate 1.5 hour sessions about their recollections of the day. Those conversations were filmed, transcribed and then later discussed in depth by the researchers for key issues and points of critical interest. That second conversation provided a further layer of data. Themes emerging from the data were coded visually, and in note form by both researchers. They included: cultural understandings of time - event time and clock time; mapping and reading our relationships with the land and one another; visual and metaphorical/symbolic representations of human issues.

Theoretical and philosophical positioning At the intersections of those narratives, and in the contingent spaces between the binary and essentialist constructs of postcolonialism we experienced “contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences” (Docker, 1995, p. 410) that support our belief that our sense of identity and culture is multiple, layered, contextual and contingent or ‘liquid’ (Dervin, 2011, 2013). As a teacher and researcher my privileged present carries the dormant seeds of a Celtic diaspora, lost connection with land and people, and more recently, migration as a settler. As artist, researcher and teacher, and as a proud Kamilleroi woman, the seeds Donna carries are not dormant but active and regenerative of worlds shattered by genocidal colonisation. They are both metaphorical and real: her doctoral study

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involves the documentation, seed-capture and planting and sharing of traditional medicinal knowledges gathered from Elders. Our talk and our writing carry us back and forth across the boundaries between assimilation and acculturation: our experience of our different cultures gives life to anger and misunderstandings. As we work together a growing sense of trust affords more nuanced conversations to emerge – and for colonising ideas to be revealed and scrutinised. For Donna, yarning is a method of teaching, a means of problem solving, reconciling difference, or acknowledging the irreconcilable - and of making sense of and revealing the world beyond the literal and external. Nicole has a vivid recall of Donna’s embedding of a work of art as a metaphor for ways of seeing, two months after the day: …looking down at the land and looking up at the sky but also looking straight on at the same time, rather than looking at the side, looking at it from a different perspective.

As a non-Indigenous Australian researcher, my striving to understand, co-construct knowledge of and write with integrity about Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples’ ways of making meaning has brought the joy of using story, song and painting as means of exploring slippery concepts of culture and belonging. For Donna, Nicole and me, our discussions have allowed stories to become a form of discourse by which we test our understandings of what lies beyond and within the everyday, and behind the seeming patterns of lived experience. Donna has taught me to look with different eyes. Nicole has taught me of the importance of quiet spaces for conversations between learner and teacher, and for me to listen with great care to the wisdom of students who inhabit a world quite different from the one I know. As lead author, I thank them both, and hope that this chapter honours and privileges their voices equally to my own. The following section begins our stories of the day, captured from the transcripts and interwoven into a ‘yarn’.

Yarning…a day of learning 24.5.2011: Early morning on a chilly and damp Autumn day in the Southern hemisphere. Pre-service teachers and two lecturers gather in the sports centre foyer, waiting to board a rather rickety old minibus for our day trip to three sites as we learn about the history and peoples of this land. Our guides for the day are Donna Moodie, an artist and educator of Kamillaroi background, and Ben, her adult son. Ben is carrying a didgeridu. He waits in silence while Donna speaks. Donna has sought

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permission from the custodians of the land for our predominantly female group to visit the Gummingurru site (Ross & Ulm, 2009; Ross et al., 2013). Stone tools have been found at the site, and analysed, indicating that they were carried there from different places by tribal groups who converged on their way to the triennial Bunya Nut Feast. The route they took included camps for women and men, near water and food sources. In the last decade, a building has been placed to one side of the site: the new learning centre continues the tradition of learning.

Acknowledging country: Artwork as cultural key Dinawan Dreaming Donna quietly speaks of the beauty of the land, naming its traditional owners and caretakers, giving respect to the elders past and present. Then she introduces her painting Dinawan Dreaming (Fig 5-2). On the large canvas pinpricks of white and black stretch into infinity: a night sky – the Milky Way. Below the clouded stars a layer of deep red marks the earth. Donna explains that to ‘read’ Central Desert artists’ dot paintings we need to use a perspective that is different from the viewpoint of looking straight at the art work. At that moment none of us realises that behind this physical modelling of ways of reading and understanding her painting, Donna is using Indigenous teaching methods (Fig 5-1) as she has thought for many hours about how she can help frame our understandings of the day ahead. Donna tilts the painting flat, holding it horizontally - at waist height, like a table. She begins to speak, to shape our understandings of the day to come: Imagine we’re standing in the centre of the painting. First we look flat around us - through the lines and dots. Those spirals and lines are the shapes of the earth, places near and far; next, we rise up through the painting to look down. We see through the stars onto the earth, from the viewpoint of a bird. Looking down on the lines and patterns of the earth we see tracks made by human feet, and marks showing places of importance. This is a kind of map. Finally, we sink down under the earth like the earthworm, looking up at the stars and their patterns to know the time and seasons of the sky above.

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Figure 5-2: Dinawan Dreaming by Donna Moodie

The sports centre fades as we try to shift our mode of knowing from looking at, to becoming part of the painting’s layered world, mapping ourselves within and between the patterns of the earth and the skies. It is not easy to see from three perspectives, to resist the pull of the ways we know that draw us back outside the painting, blindly looking in. “Can you see the Emu, Dinawan?” Donna asks. I look at the patterns of light dots, uncertain. Then I point to a small group of stars that seem to make a shape. “Yes, I think so.” “Look between the stars,” Donna smiles. Suddenly, the darkness of the painting comes together. Between the stars is the long shape of an emu, its neck stretching upward and to the right. “When Dinawan appears in the night sky, our people know it is time to gather emu eggs.”

Donna’s painting, and her quiet revelation of another way of seeing becomes a way for our small group of travellers to re-frame our understandings of the day’s experiences. It provides a way for us to talk of

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our growing sense that we inhabit multiple spaces and intersections determined by our background and education. For each of us, that knowledge brings a sense that the fragile present is evolving around and with us; that we are part of the mesh of slow-moving stars; that our feet walk on and across pathways made by own and others’ ancestors, on the same earth, the same dust. On that day in 2011 with Donna’s guidance, we anticipated the 8ways approach to making meaning (Regional Aboriginal Education Team - Western New South Wales, 2013). Yarning, picture making and symbolic language were established from the outset as ways of engaging with spirit, culture, community, self and the earth.

In the middle of the painting: Stories of the land Mid-morning of the same day. Light spills over hills and onto ploughed farmland. Plastic litter discarded from cars is caught in the damp grass at our feet. We stop en route to Gummingurru as people must have done for centuries. Janice tells her story: Donna has pulled in on the grass verge on this broad plain. She is talking quietly, as if to herself. We gather close, listening as her words peel back the skin of the world so we see it anew. The sound of traffic fades. We forget the tarmac behind us, the fences, the ploughed fields and homesteads. Ancient volcanoes, their shoulders curved in the morning light become warrior giants, beheaded in battle. They rise out of the plain, protecting the curved side of a huge sleeping woman, her belly pregnant with life. Dormant, the warriors wait for a signal to rise, to protect her. The long hill that forms the woman’s side is dark against the sky, and far below her we stand, a small cluster of dots, on the broad brown earth with its criss-crossing lines. Are we in the middle of the painting, or looking from the side? I am no longer sure. Five generations ago, forest stretched to the edge of the sky. Now, roads, fields, fences divide the land.

Donna describes her thinking at that moment, as guide and as an educator: “It is not about looking ‘at’ but ‘being in’ the land.. My role is as artist: eye-opener, deconstructor, interpreter. Today is about experiencing art as a way of thinking, and about understanding our being with and in the land, so it is not about distance, but about connectedness with the earth. A moment to stop. Living in event time, rather than clock time. Part of the work that I’ve done with the Jarowair traditional owners was to gather stories around what some of the old people (including the non-Indigenous people) remembered were the stories that our peoples told. I was trying to ask everybody to look at (the Gowrie mountain area) from above, from below and at it again like we looked at the painting. It

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Donna’s story is told from personal knowledge of the history of the site, and her relationship with Brian Tobane. Two months after our visit, Nicole Hobson pauses as she searches for words to express her recollection of looking at, upon, and through the landscape of the hills and plane at Gowrie Junction. Her description breaks past the skin of the physical and familiar world to reveal an-other way of knowing. Nicole describes her awareness of co-existing worlds and ways of knowing the earth: We looked at the mountains and… you could see body shapes, and they were like warriors guarding a pregnant woman. That’s really the one I really remembered, and yeah (pause). (Looking) across the field and....like you knew that there were houses around but they didn’t really see them like you saw everything else because you’re looking past it to see all the mountains and the hills. It was an intrusion the fact that there was a road there with the cars going on. It still felt like (pause) like you weren’t... it wasn’t really (pause) it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere but it felt like it was to me.

From the sky looking down: Gummungirru As we arrive at Gummingurru Donna goes ahead to confirm with the caretakers that we can enter. As we pull in on the dirt track, a family of kangaroos rise above the long grass, ears pricked. Unhurried, the big male lopes away, leading his family to watch from a distance. Donna and Ben take us into the education centre. It feels temporary. Flimsy. Inside, Donna shows us cases of stones, and important artefacts gathered at the site and in nearby water ways where women used grinding stones to prepare a kind of damper. Donna yarns about Gummingurru to our group. Her story is not voiced as research, but as lived experience: The story of the Gummigurru site is probably the greatest story of hope that I’ve come across. The German settlers actually came into this area in the 1840s or fifties and a gentleman by the name of Ben Gilbert’s great

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grandfather, Benjamin Jinks, squatted on that area as that’s what you had to do in those days. You had to squat and part of that was clearing the land and putting up fences and then you could make a claim over that area which Ben Gilbert’s great grandfather did. The land changed hands a few times but in the end Ben Gilbert ended up with that tract of land and basically didn’t know this 5 hectares of stone arrangement was there until he found his daughter- she is now a 56 year old woman - at the age of 5, he couldn’t find her in the afternoon and he’d say to her around the dinner table, “Where have you been?” And Jean would say, “Oh I’ve been playing in the fairy’s room daddy” “Oh isn’t she quaint?” mum and dad would say. But then one day, he went down there and found that she was actually playing in a stone circle. These rocks were placed in a circle and she was playing her fairy games in the middle of this circle. And he realised then that this was not a natural thing, that this had been put there and so being quite an educated man, he realised that it must have been something to do with the Aboriginal people that had been there so he went on a life-long quest…(to protect and learn more about the site).

From there, we enter a modern cabin that serves as an education centre. I recognise a slight disappointment of my hopes that we would walk around the site, being shown the patterns of rocks. But Donna explains that as the grass has not been cut, snakes will be basking on the rocks trying to find warmth, and that brings a risk for us walking around. My sense is that also Donna is protecting culture. We are visitors, non-Indigenous, and most of our group is female. I sense a strong desire to protect. Boundaries are not always as clearly marked as those of cultures where wire and wood denote ownership of the land. There are invisible boundaries – that cannot be spoken of, but must be learned through what is not disclosed as much as what is shared. I recall the planning visit where Donna took me to the site and where she introduced me to Brian Tobane who was quietly courteous in his welcome. I sensed my own strangeness.

Story of the bird We have been standing for some thirty minutes as Donna explains the history of the site, showing us photographs, artefacts, stones, shields and spears. Jackets are slipped off as the sun begins to warm the room. Undergraduates shift from one foot to the other, trying to attend and understand as Donna talks, but drifting in the soporific warmth. Ben stands patient, arms folded, by the sliding glass door. Then the moment breaks. A Willie Wagtail lands on the handle of a lawnmower, inches away from

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Ben’s side, on the other side of the glass. It flips and turns, its tail flicking black-white-black. I smile, charmed at the strange closeness of the bird– the darting movement – I begin to make a comment about how pretty it is, and how fearless. Then I stop, seeing Donna’s face. Ben’s arms drop and his eyes flick from the bird, to those of his mother. Donna stops speaking mid-sentence. We all look at the bird then back to Donna and Ben. Donna: When we were in the learning and teaching centre, there was something quite significant happened. We were looking at the grinding stone and there was a double window behind us, a double door and I was in mid-sentence when a willy-wagtail landed… and started jumping around and carrying on like a bloody pork chop. I looked straight at my son who was doing the didge work for us on the day. We both just became quiet straight away because the willy-wagtail for us is a sign that somebody has died and that we’ve got some sorry business to attend to. And I think it was a bit of a shock. Donna asks Janice “What do you remember of that?” Janice: One minute you were talking to the students about rocks and the stones and about the grinding stone and suddenly… oh I can see the little bird land there. It started jumping around really vigorously right at hip height, just outside the door, next to Ben. I thought, “Ah…funny little thing!” But what caught me was that suddenly, you and Ben just stilled. The conversation stopped and then you explained to us all there the real meaning of what you were seeing. And I think that was quite confronting because (doing) that was peeling back the surface of the everyday to honestly deal with the meaning of signs that come to you. It was both very natural and very confronting because it’s not what western people do any more. They did at one time. My grandmother did. My mother less so. I have a natural feeling that a bird singing at night, or an owl appearing near you is (in the Celtic tradition) a sign that someone you know has died. Donna: I think my words were “Ben, we have a funeral to go to.” And we, at that stage didn’t know who it was but within the week we had a funeral to go to. Nicole: When (Donna) was talking about the bird, they sort of both trailed off and just look at the bird and said “For us this is an omen of a death: you know something bad has happened. So we’ll prepare for the worst and within the next couple of days, we will get the news. You held your breath. It almost felt like you’re intruding on this moment, a moment of great significance and importance. We just go (swaying her left hand), oh yeah..,it’s a bird...oh it’s pretty… and come back to what we were doing - whereas for them it was a very important moment. From the western perspective, you know,

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we see and hear lots of little omens and you know that this is the sign of bad luck…but we all just laugh about it: a black cat, or a crow or a raven or whatever. All these symbols at one point would have been a really strong and (now) we just (think) it’s something silly. But, it is almost like - if you give it power, it will have life. If you give it power - it will be true.

For future educators whose work will require them to cross seeming boundaries between the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ worlds of communities whose cultural experiences present different ways of knowing from those that align with their own understandings, this moment is confronting. Donna is acutely aware of a rejection of the uncomfortable and different by some of the pre-service teachers whose body language suggests that the challenge is simply too great. She notes that several students avoid eye contact, appearing uncomfortable and perhaps even threatened by an ‘other’ way of experiencing and making meaning. Donna imagines their inner voices: I’m going to avoid their eye contact, I’m going to avoid even talking about it. Just get me out of this head space, get me out of here. Get me away from that bird. Get me away from this thing that I don’t want to know about. That’s what I felt from some of the students but - some of the others- I thought…Ah no, you’ve taken that on, you’re really sad.

While Donna and I accept that some of those young Australian preservice teachers may have already encountered loss and grief we recognise this as a ‘both/and’ moment: looking away may allow privacy as the news is absorbed; looking away may also deny that ‘other(ed)’ reality.

A move outside – we touch the earth - feel the sun on our faces Ben plays the didge as we sit in the sun, listening to his song and the sounds of the earth: his playing is beautiful and powerful. A nonIndigenous colleague talks us through a guided meditation, and some students report that this is a perfect bringing together of different ways of thinking, being and knowing place and self. For me, it is an interruption between my hearing and feeling - my touching the earth. However, each of us recognises different qualities in this way of being and learning. Donna: Where Steve asked us to close our eyes and feel the wind and listen to the trees and, listen to the earth - I thought he got the mood of the place and was able to verbalise it so that we could understand -

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We are marks on this broad brown map where centuries of human celebration and initiation connect our small shapes. Other marks, stone totems and star maps have been formed here as recently as the late 19th century (Ross, 2008, p. 93) in a physical meaning making – storytelling where stones become stars, symbols, totems. We are comets, falling - our histories trailing behind us as we burn, stretching back in time and across the lands of our birthplaces. And, for a moment in that falling, Ben’s song connects us. We are captured in his stillness. Nicole: You just became aware of what was around you. Rather than just walking through it, or walking around it and, taking that moment you sat down and felt the ground. You could feel the wind and you could feel the sun. You were just in that moment, hearing and feeling and listening rather than just walking through.

From below, looking up – the gaps between stars and star paths It takes a long time for us to find a space to talk. Life gets in the way. Some months later (January 2012) Donna and Janice yarn about the struggle to learn, to understand their respective places on the broad brown map of history, and to generate knowledge and understanding that express their different ways of knowing, telling and writing the world. For Donna, her art works constitute a powerful means of knowledge transmission for Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. She acknowledges that for herself and other researchers using narrative and autoethnographic methods, knowledge of self and culture is often partial, fragmented and incomplete (Clandinin, 2012) but that the gaps in our knowledge invite creative interventions – offering places for inquiry. For Indigenous scholars in particular the gathering of knowledge about and from culture is made difficult by the loss of unique languages and histories, and by broken connections with family and the land. For Donna, education has become critically important in her own and others’ processes of reclaiming and reconnecting self and people - culture and land (Fig. 1). Through her art and teaching Donna shares:

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…what I can see and part of what was taught to me, from my grandma and the Indigenous side of my family the old people… also a lot of desktop research and a lot of searching other people’s information to see if any of it has any relevance to me and my mum and my family because we’re probably as affected as the stolen generation. I wouldn’t call it the lost generation but there’s a whole heap of people who didn’t know their past and those kids are now trying to find that out, here in 2012. So what I’m trying to say, what I’m trying to paint is…the gaps.

For me and for undergraduate pre-service teachers, acknowledging the gaps requires a reviewing of our seeming, and a readiness to question the evidence of our eyes: Looking at the painting again and seeing not a void but another presence in the gap, in the between space, my mind turned around and I thought, “Ah…you can see things in a different way”, and for me that was a really exciting moment, emotionally, physically, and visually. But, it made me realise that as an Indigenous person and non-Indigenous person, we’re actually seeing the world and understanding it in different ways. That’s something that keeps happening in our friendship as we work through and we talk through our ways of seeing the world and ways of working. So, this is a gradual and gentle education.

The lesson is over – so the drawing doesn’t mean anything anymore During our day trip Donna noted some anxiety amongst participants concerning the unknown nature of what they would be experiencing and what it might mean. Donna notes that at those moments where we appear to be doing nothing we are actually at our most open to learning: …sitting and listening to the didge in the middle of almost nowhere, in this gap, in this silent space…when we stopped and listened, there was not one thing silent about that place. It was heavy with sound, it was pregnant with spirit…it was… it was full.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander methods of teaching and learning are profoundly spiritual, relational, situated, contextual and connected to the moment, contrasting powerfully with externally developed curricula and processes of schooling and university education where time is structured and filled. Donna points to this difference between the transitory and the fixed. This brings to mind my first experience of research during a

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one year job exchange in Ontario, Canada. With my daughter, I attended a conference where we were fascinated to be introduced to the teachings of Elders from Canadian First Nations. Fortunately, the requirement to produce a report on that teaching exchange meant that my early endeavours to understand cultures and ways of knowing other than my own were preserved. Although it is an early work marked by moments of earnest clumsiness, the report provides rich insights into my openness to Ojibwa and Iroquois ways of knowing. Lovingly illustrated with photographs, the report is less scholarly than a rich document of a search for understanding: it touches me now to read that as a young woman (Janice Taylor) I was embarrassed at revealing what I anticipated would appear to be “cultural arrogance (because of) the assumptions which I had made in approaching native peoples as a wellintentioned ‘liberal minded’ academic” (Taylor, 1993, p. 2). However clumsy the language, as a novice researcher I explore with sensitivity my early understandings of Canadian First Nations’ ways of knowing and understanding time, the land and self-within-family. My report refers to presentations by Peter O’Chiese, an Elder of Cree ancestry, during his presentation at the Wanusekewin Tenth Annual Elders’ and Traditional People’s Gathering at the University of Peterborough, Ontario (1993). In recalling O’Chiese’s presentation I note that it was delivered in halting English, and that it was conceptually profound. O’Chiese’s drawings on a flipchart replaced the sand-drawings of his traditional teaching. My notes fumble, but show a grasp of event time and the cyclic processes expressed in Medicine Wheel teachings: Medicine wheel teachings are usually visual and interesting in a culture which did not invent the wheel for mechanical purposes. The wheel or circle is the most powerful image representing the sun, (so all sweat lodges where physical and spiritual cleansing take place are built in a circular shape) and the circle is usually bisected to represent quarters representing the four winds, the seasons, the ages/stages of human life, the clans and the properties of plants and other elements. The Circle represents both microcosm (the individual spirit mind and body) and the macrocosm (the forces of external flux) (Taylor, 1993).

Donna and I agree that our shared experience of Gummingurru was powerful not despite, but because of the temporary and situated nature of our engagement there. Donna, like O’Chiese, cites sand drawings as teaching methods, commenting upon the Impermanence of sand drawings…Rites of passage would include these magnificent drawings on the ground and whoever was meant for that

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lesson had the benefit of (those) dots or concentric circles and pathways in the sand. The people had to internalise that and take that into their own learning. When the lesson is over the drawing doesn’t mean anything anymore. The wind can blow it away, the rain can rain on it because the lesson’s been internalised. It doesn’t have to be kept for posterity.

Through our yarning, the authors have come to an understanding of teaching and learning that is profound and lasting: it often has nothing to do with a pre-planned curriculum but has everything to do with the relationships and interconnections between people, place, and time.

Conclusion We carry our histories and their meanings in the same way that the earth, subject to our orderly planning, the plough, planting and harvesting, holds in various stages of dormancy the seeds of ancient species and the dust of our ancestors. Thus, while we are ever ‘taught’ we are also ready to experience learning through event time, through nature, and through our instinctive understandings of the meanings of the earth. For educators seeking to understand and embed indigenous ways of knowing in their teaching, there is a need first to open the heart and mind to ways of meaning-making that exist in event time rather than chronological time. To support educators in this shift, the authors recommend yarning about experience. This involves testing our understandings of time, space and place, self-and-culture with those individuals and groups who move more comfortably between ways of thinking that embody First Nations and Indigenous peoples’ ways of making meaning and teaching and the discourse and philosophy of clock time and the academy. Nicole speaks: The memories and the feelings that have been invested in this place, and all the storiesthat are linked to this specific place drive the need to go back to it. Because this place is where all the stories come from and all the memories come from.

Donna, through whom the voices of her ancestors find expression, has the last word in this chapter. Her words are a call to deep honesty, consistency – a single face in a complex world. They issue a challenge that we be aware of the imprint of our footprints on this earth. Integrity means walking the talk of our teaching.

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Chapter Five It’s still about your world view, where you come from, who you are, how you teach your lesson, how you teach onwards in life. Because we are tomorrow’s ancestors, we have an obligation to do the right thing, to hold yourself well in this place, walk your pathway with your history, knowing your history so that you know which pathway you’re on. And that means you can’t have one face for the day or for the work world or the back world, and have a different face at night.

Acknowledgements The authors extend particular thanks to the traditional custodians of the Gummingurru site, and to the Elders, researchers and advisors whose cultural knowledge has supported the creation of this chapter.

References Barusch, A. (2012). Refining the narrative turn: When does story-telling become research? Paper presented at the Gerontological Society of America, San Diego. http://amandabarusch.com/tools-for-narrativeresearch/refining-the-narrative-turn-when-does-story-telling-becomeresearch/ Behrendt, L., Larking, S., Griew, R., & Patricia, K. (2012). Review of higher education access and outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People: Final report. Retrieved from http://www.deewr.gov.au/Indigenous/HigherEducation/ReviewofIndig enousHigherEducation/Pages/default.aspx Christensen, J. (2012). Telling stories:Exploring research storytelling as a meaningfulapproach to knowledge mobilization with Indigenous research collaborators and diverse audiences in community-based participatory research. Canadian Geographer, 56(2), 231-242. doi: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2012.00417.x Clandinin, J. (2012). Afterword: Reflections on Narrative Inquiries into teacher education identity making. In Elaine Chan, Dixie Keyes & V. Ross (Eds.), Narrative inquirers in the midst of meaning-making: Interpretive acts of teacher educators In D. S. Pinnegar (Series Ed.) Advances in Research on Teaching (Vol. 16, pp. 143-148). New York: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. doi: 10.1108/S1479-3687(2012)00000160011 Dervin, F. (2011). A plea for change in research on intercultural discourses: A ‘liquid’ approach to the study of the acculturationof Chinese students. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 6(1), 37-52. doi: 10.1080/17447143.2010.532218

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—. (2013). Rethinking the acculturationand assimilation of ‘others’ in a ‘monocultural’ country: Forms of intercultural pygmalionism in two Finnish Novels. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 34(4), 356-370. doi: 10.1080/07256868.2013.807229 Docker, J. (1995). Rethinking postcolonialism and multiculturalism in the fin de siécle. Cultural Studies, 9(3), 409-426. doi: 10.1080/09502389500490491 Farley, H., Jones, J. K., & Murphy, A. (2012). Rejuvenation Island: enriching the learning journey through immersion in virtual restorative environments. Paper presented at the Future Challenges: Sustainable Futures Conference, Wellington, New Zealand 25 - 28 November 2012. Fredericks, B., Adams, K., Finlay, S., Fletcher, G., Andy, S., Briggs, L., & Hall, R. (2011). Engaging the practice of Indigenous yarning in action research. ALAR: Action Learning and Action Research Journal, 17(2), 12. Goodyear-Ka'ǀpua, N. (2013). The seeds we planted: Portraits of a native Hawaiian charter school. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hill, R., & May, S. (2013). Non-Indigenous researchers in Indigenous language education: Ethical implications. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2013(219), 47-65. doi: 10.1515/ijsl-2013-0004 Lefebvre, H. (1974). The Production of Space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Licona, A. (2007). Borderlands Peregrinations. Nóesis. Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, 16(032), 14-44. http://redalyc.uaemex.mx/redalyc/html/859/85903202/85903202.html Lloyd, K., Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S., Burarrwanga, L., & Hodge, P. (2012). Weaving lives together: collaborative fieldwork in North East Arnhem Land, Australia. Australia: Macquarie University ResearchOnline MCEETYA.(2008). Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation Retrieved from http://www.curriculum.edu.au/verve/_resources/National_Declaration_ on_the_Educational_Goals_for_Young_Australians.pdf. Milgate, G., Purdie, N., & Bell, H. (2011). Two way teaching and learning: toward culturally reflective and relevant education: ACER Press.

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O'Chiese, P. (1993). Medicine Wheel Teachings. Paper presented at the Wanusekewin Tenth Annual Elders’ and Traditional People’s Gathering, University of Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. Regional Aboriginal Education Team - Western New South Wales. (2013). 8 Ways - Aboriginal Pedagogy from Western New South Wales. Dubbo, NSW Bangamalanha Centre. Ross, A. (2008). Managing meaning at an ancient site in the 21st century: The Gummingurru Aboriginal stone arrangement on the Darling Downs, Southern Queensland. Oceania, 78(1), 91-108. doi: 1002/j.1834-4461.2008.tb00030.x —. (2010). Defining cultural heritage at Gummingurru, Queensland, Australia. In C. Phillips & H. Allen (Eds.), Bridging the divide: Indigenous communities and archaeology into the 21st century (pp. 107-128). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Ross, A., & Ulm, S. (2009). Understanding Indigenous Knowledge traditions at Gummingurru Aboriginal Stone Arrangement Site: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Ross, A., & Ulm, S. (2010). Online heritage: Accommodating interpretation of a living Aboriginal heritage site. Paper presented at the National Association for Interpretation International Conference, 13 - 15th April 2010, Townsville, Queensland, Australia. Ross, A., Ulm, S., & Tobane, B. (2013). Gummingurru: a community archaeology knowledge journey. Australian Archaeology, 76, 62-69. Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & Dunbar, R. (2010). Indigenous children's education as linguistic genocide and a crime against humanity? A Global View Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino, Norway: Gáldu, Resource Centre for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Taylor, J.(1993). An exploration of the history and culture of native Canadian Indians. Report. League for the Exchange of Commonwealth Teachers. London, UK. Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2 ed.): Zed Books. Warrior, R. (1995). Tribal secrets: recovering American Indian intellectual traditions: University of Minnesota Press,.

CHAPTER SIX CONFLICT, ADVERSITY AND RECONCILIATION KIRRA O’BRIEN, LEANNE HUBBERT, CATHERINE SOMERFIELD AND JULIA GRIEVE

Abstract For pre-service teachers, writing allows personal and social rapprochement: the bringing together of conflicting knowledges, experiences and viewpoints. For Kirra O’Brien, words connect worlds, as she draws out the dreams that are common threads between the lives of rich and poor in her exploration of the social contexts that brought her as an Australian tourist to Vietnam. Leanne Hubbert offers a powerful representation of the impact of flood and tsunami upon individual and communal life, pointing beyond the physical world and the struggle against nature’s force to the potential for reconciliation in the world of the spirit. Catherine Somerfield’s poignant short story lays bare the lines of fracture resulting from Australia’s stolen generations through her exploration of lost history and connections. Concluding the chapter, Julia Grieve offers a wryly humorous view of the turbulent emotions that disturb a family on the night following a wedding celebration in her play-scene. Conflict and heightened emotions are resolved through the presence of an elder, who brings a new perspective to bear.

Kirra O’Brien Many beautiful children will have hopes and dreams for their future, but most will not be able to achieve them, where families are unable to afford for their children to go to school. Without the opportunity for a good education the child’s personal poverty cycle continues in alignment with that of his or her community.

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It is dark, the ground she sleeps on hard, Softness bruised by rock and stone, Every grain a glass shard, Draws in air thick and harsh, aching heart and bone. Continual dull roar of motorbikes a given, Ears half-dreaming, traffic near, her weary eyes awake. A smile lighting her dark prison, Empty belly hungering breakfast, dreaming steak. Her emptiness is here to stay. In tattered clothes she dresses, gathering what scraps she owns, Hoping her parents bring home some pay, A tenderfoot to life, she feels every stone. Arriving late, but eyes bright, and heart light. Proudly presenting her homework she sits next to her mate, Her teacher quickly stops: this child is bright! Determined to overcome her present state. Her day creeps by at a slow pace, School’s finished yet she has only just begun the race, With an optimistic smile ever present on her face, Her dreams are candles in this darkest place.

My intent was to share the message of appreciating the simple things some take for granted. The little girl in this poem has no food, no basic material possessions, not even a warm bed to sleep on at night. Yet grateful to be alive, the child smiles. For me, she is living proof that one needs to stop and to appreciate the simple things in life. Although many hurdles and obstacles have been placed in her way she is determined to follow her dreams and make a difference. I used the metaphor “Her dreams are candles in this darkest place”, to highlight that the little girl’s dreams provide her with hope through her determined efforts to succeed. I sought to portray her innocence through the lines; “A tenderfoot to life, she feels every stone Softness bruised by rock and stone Draws in air thick and harsh, aching heart and bone”

These words evoke the child’s fragility in this big, harsh world. My intent was to engage the readers’ compassion; to make the reader want to

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help and protect the little girl from this cruel reality. The poem offers an opportunity for the reader to connect and bond with the child and her journey. Finding words that rhymed and followed the flow and rhythm of the poem yet which did not contradict the strong imagery and meaning within the piece was difficult. After much re-writing I have come to a place where I am happy and proud of this fifth version of the poem. I had never attempted to write a serious poem before and I am aware that there are more adjustments that could enhance its impact. I would like the ending to be punchier. However, having gone through this process of writing has been a very valuable as it will assist me when I am a teacher and asking students to embark on a creative task. I have learnt a great deal about my own processes of writing and the gaps I need to fill before I am able to effectively teach within a classroom. I have, however, also really enjoyed being given the opportunity to be creative and enter a different space. I have realised I do not usually enter that space unless forced to do so. I am now inspired to continue writing and look forward to pushing boundaries to see where my writing takes me.

Leanne Hubbert The literary theme for my work is tsunamis and flooding. The pieces are intended to demonstrate how these natural disasters shape human futures from many perspectives. For the figurative language focus of the poem “Quilt Unravelled” I selected the metaphor of a quilt as pieces of a lifetime sewn together, pulled apart and then repaired. Words such as ‘square’, ‘weave’,’ thread’, ‘patch’, ‘stitches’, ‘unravelled’, ‘ripped apart’,’ blanket’, ‘unstitched’ relate to the overarching metaphor of carefullyconstructed complexity, damage and mending. However, I have woven into the poem meta-language associated with tsunamis and flooding so that images created by expressions such as ‘streaming rain’, ‘ripped apart’, ‘wiped away’,’ blanket of darkness’ and ‘destruction’ provide a second and connected layer of meaning. The poem also uses affective vocabulary, with the aim of creating an emotional response in the reader by offering shared and personal life experiences. Words such as ‘darkness’, ‘blackness’, ‘destruction’, ‘fear’, ‘despair’, ‘death’, ‘wiped away’, ‘invading chaos’, ‘drowned’, ‘clutter’, ‘scrapheap’ and ‘knocked down’ are thus associated with the devastation of tsunamis, and are intended to paint a vivid image in the reader’s mind and to elicit a powerful visceral response on the subconscious and affective level.

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Grammatical devices used within the poem include the division of lines and punctuation to create internal rhythm that shifts to a faster pace in the second, third, fifth and sixth stanzas bringing a sense of chaos, tension and urgency. Words such as ‘dark’, ‘black’, ‘darkness’, and ‘blackness’ establish a dramatic and sudden change in the weather. This repetition of words supports the affective intent of the poem; a response to the fear and despair caused by the tsunami and its impact upon human life. The use of colour within the poem was intended to evoke emotion, for example ‘blue turns to black in a moment’, suggests that the world has been turned upside down, bringing destruction and fear. The combined words; ‘lifesound’, ‘carsound’, ‘birdsound’ reinforce through repetition the unity of sound and energy. My conscious choice in creating these words was to generate a powerful sense for the reader of sound-in-place. Challenges I faced in writing this poem included finding the right words to express feelings and emotions without confusing the reader. This was quite a complex task as the context required a mix of past and present tense. To manage this I used a technique of reading aloud to determine the flow and rhythm of the poem, mixing and changing words and changing lines as I read. These are all processes that writers may find useful when constructing and deconstructing poetry. Quilt Unravelled Blue square of happiness, Prosperity and good woven in the quilt of life. Silent stitches, spaces between, Simplicity is strength. Strong threads cast of those dear. Blue transforms to black in a moment. All lost. Birdsound, carsound, lifesound. Sunshine drowned in a dark instant. Humming changed to white noise in a flicker. Quilt of life unravelling. White noise screaming, Invading chaos of wave. Blackness lingers, hissing like streaming rain. Its darkness covering us, stealing warmth and life. Prosperity gone, strength wiped away, fear anchors the stomach. Tsunami. Positive thoughts a mere glimpse, Two steps away from death, Yearning to walk those steps.

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Escaping reality a new emotion, The material world knocked down. Along with my resilience and hope for anything. Fabric torn, severed and irreparable, The quilt of life unstitched. Clutter, scrapyard, graveyard, Patterns of destruction and havoc. A blanket of darkness lay over us, A small voice quiet as a mouse. Corner of blanket pulled back, Despair shifts to a tiny ray of hope Voice grows louder. The ray becomes a beacon. Scurrying, digging, searching for the voice Adrenalin pumping, Overwhelming joy. Touches of warmth on fingertips restore prosperity, Two steps towards living, journey changes direction. Repair now begins, patches anew. Quilt of life no longer irreparable.

Devastating images of the flooding in Queensland and my own personal loss was the stimulus for the story which follows. The story is written for an adult audience as it contains content that may be disturbing to young readers. It begins with a cry for help to capture the attention of the reader. We are taken into the woman’s struggle to survive the raging water, experiencing her battle between hope and despair. Murphy’s Creek Torrent “Help, help me please!” I scream as I am pulled under again and again, swallowing the water, grit in my throat. I think the current is carrying me down Murphy’s Creek. How did I get here? My feet were torn from under me and swept away in an instant. It seems an eternity away that I was shopping for shoes to match my outfit for the weekend. Visions of my childhood and family faces surround me as I am swept down again and again, gulping sludgy murky water, trying to keep my head out of the surging current. I see my children’s hands as they were born, my husband’s face as I walked down the aisle, my son’s preschool graduation and my daughter’s first steps all flash before me. Will I see them again? Will I be able to touch their soft skin? Will I see them graduate from high school, wed and bear children?

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Chapter Six Please somebody help me. Water is all around me, the debris fast moving. Trees are floating down the swollen river like twigs in the sea. My body feels stiff, a separate entity, unable to be controlled. My eyes catch a shadow-shape far ahead. A glimmer of hope fills me. I have never been a strong swimmer, fearing water as a child, pleading with my mother to excuse me from those lessons. They would have served me well today. “Somebody please help me!” The sound of rushing water is deafening. My scream echoes in the darkness against the raging torrent. Night battles with day now, and I can see the shadow is a large tree. Can I make it? I need to see my children. Lifting my legs into a horizontal position may help, if only I could get them to obey. The water forces my legs down towards large tree trunks grounded to the depths. I manage to lift them up a little and kick like a mad woman but I am dragged under the water again. Fear is tugging me under but I cannot give in. The torrent is pushing me towards a ghostly white tree. Inch by inch I get closer. White trunk and branches are angelic now as the sun gleams behind them. It is daylight. Fear diminishes slightly. The world is seen again. Almost there! I need strength to make it, stretching my arms above the black torrent: if only I could see my children. The tree is close now….Kicking, waving, and grabbing at the water uses all my energy. I can almost feel the roughness of the bark as I reach further. I scrape the bark with my fingernails, clinging to hope, but the water pulls me down, deep down. I clamber to the surface gasping for air, struggling to remain calm. I hear my mother’s voice as I clasp the trunk. I grab the trunk with all my might wrapping my arms around it. For a moment I have time to look around me, searching for rescuers, firemen, anyone. I hear faint voices above the white noise of the water, becoming louder. Arms and legs become numb. The material world fades as I cling to life and wish I could have just a few more moments with the family I adore. All the times I said to my children “I don’t have time. Too busy...” Concentrate on strength. The voices in my dream are getting louder now. I realise those voices belong to men across the river. “Lady! Hold on!” All I can do is nod. It will all be alright. I promise myself things will change: time will be treasured when I am back in the arms of my family. The rescuer with the yellow cap flings a rope across the river, but I am too fearful to reach at first. I find the courage to snatch that rope. It is my saviour and will bring me to safety. “I am coming to help you!” Yellow cap struggles: the water is too fierce, debris tearing the line. He is screaming “Slide along the rope!” You can do this, I tell myself. With hesitation I let go of the angel in the water and grasp the rope for dear life. My hands feel like jelly, clinging

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to this coil of string. I dodge branches and sheet metal as I shift along. The smell of dampness and death surrounds me, stinging my nostrils. I can almost taste the foul odour of dead animals. A carcass of a kangaroo, strikes me in the back of my head. I go down, tossing and turning, stretching for the rope. It is dark and dense in the depths. Fear overwhelms me. Far away voices call. “Where did she go? Where is she?” I see my father. He is telling me to come to him. I remember his last days. He was strong to the end. I hope my children will be proud of my strength and willingness to fight against my greatest fear, drowning. It is dark, peaceful and silent in the blackness.

I have used figurative language within the story to suggest the immensity of the flood, as huge trees tumble past in the water. Words such as ‘sludgy’, ‘murky’, ‘surging’, ‘gushing’ suggest the thickness and power of the torrent, and the tree is presented in contrasting language as an emblem of hope and salvation: ‘ghostly white’, ‘angelic’. Physical actions such as ‘kicking’, ‘waving’, ‘grabbing’, ‘clinging’, ‘grasping’, ‘clasping’ are used to give life to the woman’s desperate struggle as she is swept away. My use of emotive language is intended to connect the reader with the character’s fear, anxiety and desperation as she inches closer to safety; and so that we experience with her the shift to surprise and loss and a conclusion offering silence, acceptance and blackness. Writing the story in the first person enabled me to keep the tense consistent and to maintain a sense of excitement. My intention was for the reader to hear the story from the character’s perspective and place themselves in her world. As an adult reader and writer I unconsciously write without thinking of processes and structure, however, while I am quite used to writing essays, I have learned to shorten my sentences in order to create dramatic pace, breathing space and immediacy for the reader within the story.

Catherine Somerfield Spirit It’s not so much the mess of the place. It’s not even the chaotic crowds of people calling across the docks in the early hours that I can’t stomach. It’s the smell a smell so strong I can taste it. Still, I’m here every morning before sun up, waiting for the trawlers. You’d think someone like me would love the stink of the place, and yet the smell of seafood staining my hands and the diesel fumes that burn the inside of my nostrils remind me every day that there must be somewhere else to be.

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Chapter Six I’ve worked hard enough before. Learned a few practical skills helping out on our neighbour’s property. Just a small crop of bananas, but there was always plenty to do. Seeing I wasn’t going to school anymore, it seemed a good way to keep busy. Got a bit fed up with copping the blame for anything that went wrong, though, so gave it a miss. My parents weren’t too impressed. They’d gotten used to me bringing home a few bucks each week. Nice enough people, my parents. White fellas, they are. Didn’t ever really talk about how I came to live with them. Guess they thought they were doing some good, taking in my sister ‘n me. Lots of people were doing it then. But they must have had some idea of what was going on. Taking us kids from our kin. Not sure what I’d do if I didn’t work here. Never did much school. Always got told kids like me couldn’t learn. Never tried too hard. Figured it wasn’t worth it. Preferred outside stuff anyway – you know, running and football. I was alright at that. Still play footy now, on the wing for the Cheetahs. Season’s started alright this year. Might go one better than last year. “Hey Jaiman! Get on with it, man”. I’m back arm deep in the container of fish. Every day it’s the same. We sort the fish, watched by outsiders, then they make their selection from the fresh seafood. I glance across those watching this morning; a few joggers sipping their coffee; littl’uns keen to have a go at the fishing life; and some faces I see round here a bit. There’s a bloke at the edge of the dock. He’s leaning on the rope by the pylon, watching the goings on. Tall fella. Looks strong. Black, like me, but it’s not just that that gets my interest. He’s close enough for me to see his face. His eyes. I look away, but I can’t concentrate now. I’m drawn to look at him, but I turn my back. Gotta finish this crate. Something in my blood. I know this bloke. Can’t ignore the connection. Deep inside me I know. My spirit tells me. I turn to look again. He’s not there - gone. Just the rope at the pylon swinging slowly.

Initially I felt a little overwhelmed at the prospect of writing as I am not an experienced writer. The ten minute writing activity I participated in during a tutorial was of great benefit, as I began to see that once I had an idea, this could be built upon and expanded. My mind could journey right into the story I was to write. I could smell the smells, feel the air, embrace the surroundings and actually feel what it was that my character was feeling. In fact, it was from a tutorial writing activity that this story was birthed. Then, away from university and home, it seems my mind was free to be creative: I found ideas, phrases and visual images rushing through

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my mind. It seemed all at once the story was coming to me. I wrote these things down as they came, expanding them as I was inspired. Suddenly, I could see a story forming before me – a story that I liked. Spirit, written for an audience having knowledge of Australia’s Stolen Generation, is written in first person, with the intent of sharing that feeling of oneness with Jaiman. As I wanted the reader to develop their own image of Jaiman, I intentionally did not reveal his Indigenous heritage at the beginning of the story. In the opening paragraph, my aim was to draw the reader to the docks. I wanted the reader to hear the sounds, smell the smells and see the surrounds, perhaps as one of the onlookers. I purposely used the everyday speech that I felt was appropriate for Jaiman’s character. I knew from early writing of the story that there would be no reconciliation between Jaiman and the man on the dock. I wanted the impact of an abrupt ending. Feedback from the course tutor suggested the disappearance of the man and the rope left swinging, implying an added element of mystery. I felt this enriched the final section of the story. An earlier version of the story stated directly that the man at the edge of the dock was Jaiman’s father. After discussing this with a peer, I decided to leave it to the reader to judge. After a rather nervous beginning, the process of writing has been quite enjoyable. The satisfaction of writing a story I am happy to have others read is something I have not experienced before. The ten minute writing activity is definitely a tool I intend to implement in my teaching. It provides an opportunity to grow in creativity and encourages a flow of writing. As a teacher, I would be honoured to share the journey of young writers growing in their understanding of the skills and processes involved in writing a variety of text genres

Julia Grieve The Wedding Scene 1 Late night. A beach resort. The sound of surf. Two houses with driveways face upstage. One is ablaze with lights and angry voices. The second has a single light, but all is quiet. Scott, a 16 year old boy, hunches over a figure in the gutter front of stage. House 1: Adult sisters, Jenna and Sara, in dishevelled finery of late-afternoon-beachside-wedding stand arguing in the entrance. Jenna and Sara: Sisters. Scott Stepmother Grandmother

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Chapter Six JENNA: You were so bloody anxious to be in the middle of everything you had no idea your daughter had a whopping bump on the back of her head. She could have been concussed! SARA: She didn’t tell me! How was I supposed to know? JENNA: If you’d paid attention to anyone but yourself you’d have realised she wasn’t well. Shit, she tried to tell you…. (Scott is bending over the heaving body. Sound of glass smashing in house 1. The accusations continue.) Oh that was grown up! Good luck with cleaning it out of the bloody shag. Poor Lucy was too bloody scared to tell you because you might have thrown something. Everyone at the wedding knew about your nose within five minutes and Lucy had to stand there and listen to you blame her! SARA: How dare you tell me how to deal with my daughter! JENNA: How dare I? Where were you? (Pause) Busy downing 3 champagnes before the celebrant even appeared. She was about to be sick and had a headache. SARA: How the hell do you know what happened? It’s none of your business. JENNA: It is my business when my niece asks for help. She couldn’t get your attention because you were too busy playing the prima donna for Elizabeth’s family. You couldn’t have cared less until…. SARA: Me? Me! Where the fuck were you just now when your daughter needed you? You’d just gone off to bed. I had to sort her out. (Scott quietly speaks to the woman in the gutter, then rises and strides towards the house.) JENNA: I missed half the night ‘cos I was looking after Lucy. Everyone at the wedding was so lovely and I hadn’t met Elizabeth’s family before. (Pause) And I hadn’t gone off to fucking bed, I was putting kids to bed and coming back. (Pause) So don’t you do that! Don’t turn this around. SARA: You try to tell me I’m a bad parent when…. JENNA: Lucy could have been in real trouble and none of us had any idea because we were all worrying about you (Pause). I’m so glad you enjoyed yourself while... (Scott appears in the door. Broken glass crunches underfoot as he steps inside) SCOTT: Fuck! Would you two just shut-up! You have no idea what I’m dealing with. My step-mother is spewing in the gutter and my father wouldn’t come to his own brother’s wedding. (He places both his hands on Jenna’s shoulders and guides her to the door.) I have to look after her. She doesn’t want Gran to know and you two are screaming the neighbourhood down and about to wake Gran up. Stop! (He kicks the door shut and manoeuvres Jenna down the drive towards his step-mother in the gutter. Sound of doors slamming in house 1, then silence. The step-mother begins to heave.) JENNA: Quick, grab her hair, don’t let her roll back. She seemed fine at the end of dinner.

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STEPMOTHER: Jus’ leave me, where’s he? (moaning) JENNA: (Looking over her at Scott) Let’s get her inside and to bed. SCOTT: No. Dad’s on his way. She doesn’t want Gran to know. I’ll stay with her till dad gets here. JENNA: What? That’s ridiculous. Call him back and tell him to sit tight. SCOTT: No. Gran can’t know. JENNA: Scott, it’ll take your dad an hour and a half to get here. Shit, it’s 2am. Call him! Tell him we’ve got her. He can come up in the morning. I’ll just go in and make sure there’s an empty bed. Then we’ll take her in. Ring your dad! (Scott looks at his step-mother then at his aunt Jenna, then pulls out his mobile and starts to dial. Jenna kicks her heels off and heads quietly down the second driveway towards the calm of the outside light. As Jenna approaches, the front door opens and out steps Gran, her mother gorgeous in her mother-of- the-groom attire.) GRAN: Is she ok? Poor Scott. Let’s bring her inside. (Pause) I’ve been listening to you argue with your sister. JENNA: Oh Mum. How did you know she was in the gutter? (Pause) Such a beautiful wedding and Elizabeth’s family are just lovely, so nice and well behaved. GRAN: (With upright dignity) Well, her parents thought we were all wonderful, they told me. JENNA: Do you think they’re all out on the street screaming and spewing like lunatics at 2am? (Mother and daughter laugh and fall into each other’s arms). GRAN: Thank goodness they didn’t rent the house on the other side for the weekend! (The two women continue to giggle as arm in arm they head up the drive way towards the two figures in the gutter.)

From the beginning the intent of this short play was to vividly depict the complex emotional tides that are carried from childhood into adult families. As in this scenario, I have reflected that the emotion that remains, years after a family drama is more absurd humour than distress. In my mind I envisaged a melodrama reminiscent of a film by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. While I had personal experience to draw from, the hardest part was fictionalising the characters. The challenge for a writer drawing upon personal experience is the tension between family loyalty, and honest presentation of the writer’s story: hence, I simplified all contextual details to minimise the background information, and instead focused upon the nature of the relationships. The backdrop of a family wedding hints at the drama to unfold, yet contrasts with the calm of the surf and the idyllic Australian beach holiday.

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I staggered the introduction of characters so as to maintain tension and flow, so that while the audience is focused on the argument between the sisters, the nameless and seemingly disconnected figures in the gutter draw their attention. Scott’s glance towards the house when the glass smashes is the first indication that there is a connection and a complication between the players beyond the argument. The scene had to allow for three independent backdrops: two houses and the gutter, and visually for two focal points. Once the setting, mood and focus are in place the context is able to be interpreted by the audience and they can begin to focus on the unfolding drama. I could hear and see the dialogue as I wrote it and in this way was able to ensure that it reflected the context and the characters. To be believable it is important that the spoken language remain colloquial and authentic. Through the process of refining the stage directions I realised that the dialogue alone does not communicate the story, the stage directions are an integral component of an engaging experience. Visualising the interactions facilitated the addition of the directions. I thoroughly enjoyed writing this piece and giggled my way through it. The process was an important factor in determining my engagement with the task. While the structural features are significant, it was getting the process right from the beginning that allowed me to succeed and to immerse myself in the development of the unfolding drama. I had already set the scene identified my characters and set the mood. The dialogue and stage directions could then just flow. Families are complex environments that we all inhabit: sometimes happily, sometimes not so happily. They are rich contexts from which to draw inspiration and my personal experience has supplied the context for this drama. The process of translating and transforming my lived experience into a calmer and more humorous presentation for a shared audience has been a process of reflection through writing: greater understanding and empathy for each party is born out of the processes of writing as reflection. Significantly I have learnt from this experience that the process of writing must be explicitly taught, but also given time and lots of encouragement.

Editor’s note During the twelve weeks in which these pieces were written between December 2010 and March 2011, natural disasters overwhelmed Queensland, New Zealand and Japan. The devastation caused by flood, earthquake and tsunami was followed by periods of intense and communally felt shock. Pre-service teachers’ writings voice their

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awareness of nature’s uncontrolled power and the tensions within their works foreshadow the continuing struggle for many survivors and communities impacted by disaster. Families and relationships became the ‘ground zero’ of longer term damage. The authors of works in this chapter strive to offer an unflinching representation of cultural and environmental violence, exploring aspects of our human desire to overcome or at least to bear adversity. Their writings speak of courage to endure, to make the best of circumstances and people around us, and to bring together the fragments of lives damaged by forces beyond our control. They speak powerfully of human dignity, courage and love in times of hardship, and the potential for reconciliation and hope in the darkest of places.

CHAPTER SEVEN UNDERSTANDING AND ACTING THROUGH CONVERSATIONAL SPACES ERIN CHRISTENSEN, BENJAMIN WILLIAMS AND JOSEPH OCCHINO

Abstract Three early career health and physical education teacher educators use collective telling sharing and writing of narratives to make sense of the transition from their postgraduate studies to teacher education. Their interwoven narrative presents an ongoing and multidimensional process of being and becoming, and of social action that is concerned with habits, crisis and creativity (Shilling, 2008). Through the process of coconstructing narratives the authors engage in socially critical insights into their transition experiences. The chapter illustrates how contemporary technologies can be used to create and sustain informal professional networks in teacher education, and to support and facilitate personal and professional transitions.

Introduction This chapter captures how we, three health and physical education (HPE) early career academics in teacher education (ECATEs), used collective telling, sharing and writing of narratives to make sense of our transition experiences from research higher degree (RHD) training to teacher education. Nearing the completion of our respective RHD studies, we each transitioned from the same large Australian capital city university, to three contrasting and geographically dispersed university places. While initially it seemed natural for us to regularly chat on the phone and via email, each of us discovered consolation in confiding in each other as HPE ECATEs, and as trusted friends, about the frustrations and challenges we faced in relation to our new contexts. Our commitment to these interactions was

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intensified by our shared, emergent understanding that we were “balancing at the periphery” of our new contexts. That is to say that as HPE ECATEs these interactions made us cognisant of the keen sense we felt of our own marginality as academics in our new university places. As such, we were each becoming enmeshed in a set of transitional experiences common to many early career academics. Mindful that we were “balancing at the periphery”, we recognised that we could meaningfully learn about, and make sense of, our transition experiences as HPE ECATEs through our already existing face-to-face (including verbal telephone, iChat and Skype conversations) and online conversational spaces. Thus, our initial online conversational spaces consisted of email correspondence and discussions. Subsequently, we broadened these spaces to allow inclusion of our own personal journals (both written and verbal) and communal reflective writings (how we broadened and used these conversational spaces will be elaborated below). These easily accessible conversational spaces facilitated our collective decision to investigate our experiences in the form of narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Thus, we embraced a particular view of experience as a storied phenomenon, and narrative research as a methodology for inquiring into our storied experiences (Clandinin & Murphy, 2009). Before elaborating on our use of narrative research in this way, it is necessary to position such use within the field of contemporary qualitative research. This is because while all narrative researchers use narrative in some way, many tensions exist across and within disciplines about this use (Pinnegar & Daynes, 2007 ). For instance, some researchers (e.g. Bamberg, 2004; Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008; Barone, 1995, 2007; Riessman, 1993) employ narrative analysis or construction to “collect descriptions of events and happenings and synthesize or configure them by means of a plot into a story or stories (Polkinghorne, 1995, p. 12). Notwithstanding the attention these forms of narrative research pay to individuals’ experiences of the world, and the stories that arise from them, they are sometimes guilty of reducing narrative research to a method of representation alone (e.g. Creswell, 1998; Sparkes, 2002). In this way, such a reduction fails to situate epistemological and ontological issues in relation to “assumptions around the nature of experience” and “the relationship between the researcher and the researched” (Clandinin & Murphy, 2009, p. 598). Accordingly, as we indicate above, we favour a narrative inquiry approach to research of the kind associated with the work of Jean Clandinin (see for example Clandinin & Connelly, 1995, 2000; Clandinin & Murphy, 2009), which attempts to explicitly address these

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concerns. The roots and uses of this approach are complex, yet are founded upon the understanding “that human beings are essentially storytellers who experience the world and interact with others through storied lives” (Holley & Colyar, 2009, p. 680). Thus, by adopting narrative inquiry as a methodological device, we understood, and used, narrative as a way of inquiring into, understanding and representing our transition experiences. These transition experiences and practices as HPE ECATEs within our new university contexts were the phenomena that we studied; phenomena that we chose to study, “narratively because narrative thinking is a key form of experience and a key way of writing and thinking about it” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 18). Dewey’s (1938) pragmatic ontology of experience is central to Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) conception of narrative inquiry and is used by these authors to frame a metaphorical three-dimensional narrative inquiry space. Clandinin (2006) described the three dimensions of this space as: x x x

Continuity (the past, the present and the future) Interaction (the personal and the social) Situation (place)

These dimensions guided our inquiries into our experiences, pointing us forward and backward, inward and outward, and locating our transition experiences, and our experiences of our conversational space, in a certain place or situation. Through our simultaneous exploration of all three commonplaces of narrative inquiry (i.e., temporality, sociality and place, see Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), we sought to capture, document and explore the narratively constructed particularities – the interaction between people, places and things (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995) – which comprised our transition experiences as HPE ECATEs. Through our face-to-face and online conversational spaces, we created a variety of interwoven field texts (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) that included audio recordings of face-toface meetings, Skype, iChat, telephone, SMS and email (written and picture) conversations and individual and collective written journal entries, reflections and stories. We uploaded, stored, maintained and shared these field texts in a communal Dropbox1 folder. For example, prompted by 1

Dropbox is a file hosting service “that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, and client software” and “allows users to create a special folder on each of their computers, which Dropbox then synchronises so that it appears to be the same

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experiences in our new university environments, we individually wrote and shared stories and journal entries with each other via the communal Dropbox folder and encouraged each other to engage with, and comment on, these entries. For all three of us, both the face-to-face and online conversational spaces (and the interaction between the two) represented important processes that contributed to the co-generation of our collective narrative understanding at a distance. The face-to-face, verbal conversations offered immediate feedback and support and a place to openly reflect on, consider and make meaning of our storied interactions and transactions with our new professional environments. In contrast, our online conversational spaces offered a more controlled, reflective, thought-provoking place for us to not only document, story and write about our individual experiences, but also to read, consider and respond to each other’s experiences. Unlike our face-to-face conversations, as the author of the written word we could not anticipate when or how our readers might engage with our text, and what factors might impact on his or her response to what was read. It was through our engagements with these online conversational spaces that our different theoretical, experiential and reflective practices came to the fore, interacted with our face-to-face conversational spaces, and consequently shaped our emerging collective narrative understanding. In this way, our use of these online tools informed the ways in which our narratives were constructed, shared, read and interpreted. We used the highly personalised, interwoven field texts that emerged from our face-to-face and online conversational spaces as a means of capturing ‘the many, layered narratives at work’ (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 70) in each of our stories of experience, and as a stimulus for luring us, as individuals and as a group, into rethinking ourselves, situations and understanding and our roles as educators (Barone, 1995; Naess, 2001; Sparkes, 2002). In this way we demanded of each other a narratively reflective approach to our lived stories of teaching and learning through telling, reliving and retelling. Drawing on the ongoing plotlines (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), or narrative threads (Thomas et al., 2009), of our transition experiences, in this chapter, we present a collective narrative that highlights how we inquired into our experiences as a means of working on our professional identities. The challenges faced by ECATEs, such as becoming familiar with institutional policies, developing a career plan, negotiating time for folder (with the same contents) regardless of the computer it is viewed on” (Wikipedia, 2012, para 1).

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research and managing large teaching loads, are well documented in the Higher Education literature (see for example Grbich, 1998; Laudel & Gläser, 2007). However, this part of the inquiry, regarding the negotiation of professional identities, emerged as an ongoing plotline of our storied experiences of transition; an ECATE challenge that presented as a significant silence in the literature. Thus, this part of the inquiry was guided by two key questions: x x

What does this new environment mean for who I am? How can I be who I want to be in this new environment?

Working within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, we understood the term identity to refer to "our understanding of who we are and who other people are, and, reciprocally, other people's understanding of themselves and of others (which includes us)” (Jenkins, 2008, p. 18, emphasis added). For us, the narrative orientation of this definition is a function of the process of understanding upon which it relies. As Connelly and Clandinin (2006, p. 479) have argued, “People shape their daily lives by stories of who they and others are and as they interpret their past [their present and their future] in terms of these stories”. Thus, our conceptualisation of identity is founded on the notion that people understand themselves vis-à-vis others, and others vis-à-vis themselves, through stories. As such, it should be clear that we conceived of identity as a fluid, ongoing and multidimensional project focused on continual processes of being and becoming. Further, our thinking and understanding about the processes of being and becoming in the project more broadly, was informed by the philosophy of pragmatism, and its application to social action theory, a philosophy with considerable connection to the field of narrative inquiry. Indeed, both pragmatism and narrative inquiry are founded upon and emerge out of the work of the aforementioned John Dewey. Besides Dewey, the pragmatic movement in philosophy has its roots in the works of other American thinkers such as William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce (e.g., Dewey, 1922/2002; James, 1907/2005; Peirce, 1903/1997). In the field of sociology, the philosophy of pragmatism has underpinned the sociological works of George Herbert Mead, Robert Park, and Nels Anderson, among others (e.g., Anderson, 1923/1961; Mead, 1934/1962; Park, Burgess, & McKenzie, 1925/1967). More recently, pragmatic thought has informed the writings of scholars such as Richard Sennett (2009), Hans Joas (1996), and Chris Shilling (2008). It is this shared Deweyian heritage, particularly as it relates to the notion of experience,

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the continuity of experience, and the personal and social dimensions of experience, that we seek to exploit in this chapter. Specifically, we attempt to do this by deploying narrative inquiry as a methodological device and Shilling’s (2008) pragmatic framework of embodied social action as an analytic tool in a complimentary effort to facilitate our investigation of the social action entailed in the transition from doctoral student to HPE ECATE; an investigation that this paper reports but one component of. Unlike theories that conflate the internal and external environments of social action by understanding structure as determining agency or vice versa, pragmatism recognises that action is “undertaken by individuals always already within a social and natural context, yet possessed of emergent capacities and needs that distinguish them from, and also enabled them to shape actively, their wider milieu” (Shilling, 2008, p. 4, original emphasis). In other words, pragmatism adopts a processual perspective of social action that is concerned with the interactions and transactions between the internal and external environments of embodied action. Within this formula, the former refers to the internal biological and psychological needs and capacities of interdependent human organisms, and the latter is concerned with the constraints and affordances of the social and physical milieu in which social action is situated. In so doing, pragmatism takes as its prime explanatory concern, not the initiation of action, but rather the characteristics of particular actions by particular people in particular situations. Thus, “pragmatism approaches action in terms of its orientation to phases of habit, crisis and creativity, modalities associated with degrees of conflict or equilibrium that exist within and between the environments of human being” (Shilling, 2008, p. 12, original emphasis). These modalities are central analytical concepts for comprehending the purpose and outcomes of our construction of, and engagement in, conversational spaces. Therefore, a brief summary of each phase is provided below to orient the reader. First: Habitual action is associated with a relative equilibrium in the relationship between the social and physical environment, biological need and bodily potentialities. It involves embodied subjects discovering routinised modes of behaviour that are more or less effective in ‘joining’ them to, and enabling them to manage, their surroundings. (Shilling, 2008, p. 12)

By contrast: Crisis occurs when there develops a significant mismatch or conflict [within or] between the social and physical surroundings in which individuals live and [or] their biological needs and bodily potentialities. In

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these circumstances, certain routine ways of acting become impossible or ineffective (Shilling, 2008, p. 16).

Last: Creativity is associated with actions that alter certain aspects of oneself and/or one’s surroundings in order to repair or enhance one’s embodied capacities for action. As such, creative action may result in the establishment of newly efficacious relations with the environment or, when carried out after a period of crisis inducing disruption to established habits, can resecure for the individual what Dewey ... refers to as the ‘stability essential to living’ (Shilling, 2008, p. 19).

In sum, then, habit is characterised by an established equilibrium between the internal and external environments of embodied action, crisis is characterised by an induced disequilibrium within or between the internal and external environments of action, and creativity is characterised by actions aimed at the restoration of equilibrium within or between the internal and external environments of action. Through the following assemblage of collective narratives, which we have titled “Works in progress: [Re]constructing our professional identities in and through transition”, this chapter highlights how narrative inquiry conversational spaces, both face-to-face and online, provided us with not only a means of understanding the social action taking place in our current environment, but also a tool for planning future social action in these environments. More particularly, it explores how we used conversational spaces to understand and discuss crises created by our new external environments, plan ways of "surviving and thriving" in them, and consequently transform our professional identities in and through transition. In other words this chapter explores how we used conversational spaces as a place for creative action to restore the equilibrium disturbed by transition within or between our internal and external environments.

Works in progress: [Re]constructing our professional identities in and through transition Being there, becoming here: Stories of habitual action in crisis We, Erin, Ben and Joe, can each vividly remember the pressure and expectation associated with the time consuming process of applying for

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ECATE positions, while concurrently working toward RHD completion. Equally memorable, if not more so, was the day we received notification about our specific ECATE appointments. Working closely throughout our RHD candidatures, as students and teacher education tutors at the same large Australian capital city university, together we celebrated each of our respective appointments (Erin and Ben in June and Joe, later in November). These ECATE positions would see our shared story of experience shift as we transitioned into three contrasting and geographically unique Australian university milieus. For each of us, the shared university context had been a meaningful place in our stories of professional learning and experience (interspersed with extended periods of teaching in a variety of school contexts) over the preceding 12 years. Not only had it shaped our RHD and teacher education experiences, but it was also the place where we had completed our undergraduate teacher education qualifications. In both our undergraduate and postgraduate experiences we were taught, mentored by, and worked with some of the world’s leading HPE teacher educators and researchers (all of whose work was informed by various forms of socio-cultural critique), as well as other leading academics in fields such as sports coaching, psychology, nutrition, physical activity and exercise physiology. This social and physical milieu emerged as a significant place in our stories of professional learning and development, and represented for each of us a place of relative equilibrium between our internal and external environments of embodied action. Nonetheless, the role of this context in our storied experiences and understandings of ourselves and others as undergraduate and postgraduate students, and the relative equilibrium we experienced in our interactions and transactions with this external environment was different for each of us. For Ben, as the first person in his family to obtain a university qualification, and having grown up in a working-class family that held strong social justice views in relation to matters of class and gender, the experience of studying at that place, at the time, under those individuals, was integral to the socio-cultural research that he has engaged in since. Similarly Joe’s interest in HPE and sport developed in his undergraduate study through his interactions with other like-minded academics in the school, leading to postgraduate study in the areas of sport coaching and sport psychology. These specific interests and experiences supported his knowledge base in HPE and allowed him to experience theoretical and empirical breath in his work. As the daughter of two social workers, who grew up climbing, kayaking and rock climbing, Erin’s commitment to social justice and experiential and inquiry-based learning was nurtured and supported in this particular university

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undergraduate and postgraduate context. For Erin, this context also represented a safe space where her developing interest in narrative approaches to research was nurtured and valued, despite many of the academics being relatively unacquainted with these approaches. In and through our transition from this seemingly familiar, supportive and “safe” external environment, we faced crises in constructing and reconstructing (a process hereafter denoted as [re]constructing) our professional identities as HPE ECATEs in three new university milieus. These crises emerged out of the conflict and tension between the needs of our pre-existing, aspired to professional identities, and the new physical and social external environments in which we found ourselves. At a School of Education in a large Australian regional university, Erin found herself inserted into a new workplace where a particular view of knowledge, the body and health – one that marginalised the social – was hegemonic (Tinning, 2004). Consequently, the written and verbal stories that Erin shared with Ben and Joe about attempting to connect with, and coming to know this environment and her place within it, were imbued with a strong sense of disappointment and disenchantment. The Secondary HPE Teacher Education program that she taught into tended to be dominated by courses that valued uncritically elite sports performance, hegemonic masculinity, hetero-normativity, the so-called “obesity crisis,” and the instrumental role of physical activity in the production of physically healthy citizens. Erin, who considered herself a socio-cultural researcher, HPE teacher and teacher educator committed to social justice, narrative inquiry and experiential and inquiry based learning, felt particularly marginalised by the persistence and the pervasiveness of these themes. She described how she was considered the “Other” amongst her HPE teacher education colleagues, often referred to as, “the qualitative researcher” who “does stuff with, and teaches about, words.” Initially, a disheartened Erin also faced challenges and resistances from her HPE teacher education students to the efforts she made to have them examine, consider and understand how physical activity, sport and HPE, are products of particular historical, social and cultural conditions. She understood much of this resistance as emerging out of an interaction between the largely incompatible identity projects of herself and her students. Erin believed that her own efforts to be recognised and valued as a HPE teacher educator concerned with socio-cultural perspectives and the promotion of social justice, were being understood by some of her students as “at odds” with their own efforts to be recognised as the kinds of HPE teachers that they aspired to be. Thus, Erin’s “crisis” could be summarised as emerging out of a double disjuncture between her existing, aspired to

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identity and the social milieu in which she was seeking to [re]construct this identity. The first of these disjunctures concerned her interactions with her HPE teacher education colleagues, and the second concerned her interactions with her HPE teacher education students. As the preceding account shows, both of these sets of interactions diverged markedly from the social milieu she encountered during her undergraduate and postgraduate studies. Similarly, the disequilibrium experienced by Ben during his transition to a large, multi-campus, urban university concerned the organisation and orientation of knowledge and expertise within the School of Education that he entered. Through his interactions and transactions with this new social milieu Ben was initially frustrated by the absence of the kinds of interlocutors he had enjoyed access to at his alma mater. Specifically, what Ben’s new professional milieu denied him were his conversational “similars and familiars” (Archer, 2007, 2012); that is, interlocutors who identified themselves (and were recognised by significant others) as teachers and researchers of HPE whose work was underpinned by sociocultural theories and understandings of human movement. Certainly, Ben could, and did, find colleagues with whom he could engage in conversations about elements of the knowledge and practices that made up his aspired to professional identity. For instance, he encountered, and was welcomed into the School by, an active group of teacher educators and educational researchers whose work was informed by quite sophisticated forms of social and educational theory. Similarly, he had a small number of colleagues who also taught into the School’s HPE teacher education program. Yet, none of the former applied or developed their ideas in matters concerning physical activity, health or the body, and few of the latter actively or explicitly sought to draw upon socio-cultural perspectives of human movement pedagogies (Tinning, 2010) in their teaching. Moreover, some of Ben’s nominally HPE colleagues did not even readily identify themselves as researchers of HPE. This stood in contrast with the social milieu of his undergraduate and postgraduate experience, where all of those academics working in the area of HPE – people that Ben had previously enjoyed ready access to as participants in professional dialog – did so in ways that overlapped with and complimented his own professional identity project. Therefore, much (but not exactly) like Erin, Ben’s “crisis” emerged out of a disjuncture between his pre-existing, aspired to professional identity and the social milieu in which he was now seeking to engage in this identity project. At another regional Australian university, Joe’s experience of transition consisted of a move from a social milieu characterised by a

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multi-discipline focus on sport science and education, to a new professional environment that was characterised exclusively by initial teacher education. Whereas in the former setting Joe had been surrounded by academics working in the fields of sports coaching, sports psychology and HPE teacher education who had similar values and interests as he, in the latter context, Joe often felt isolated, marginalised and disempowered. For Joe this experience of disequilibrium was exemplified by the number of insinuating comments he received from his new colleagues about his “casual” HPE attire. From his perspective, these comments exacerbated his feeling of professional isolation in this new setting, and confirmed that he was not surrounded by “like-minded people”. Concomitantly, Joe also had to wrestle with the unfamiliar dispositions, interests and motivations of the students he encountered in his new professional context. In the previous universities in which he had worked, Joe’s students had been studying to be sports coaches and specialist HPE teachers. Accordingly, these students had been interested in sport and HPE, respected his teaching approaches, and were enthusiastic about learning what he wanted to teach. In contrast, however, Joe perceived that the primary generalist teacher education students with whom he worked exclusively in his new professional milieu were largely not interested in or passionate about HPE teaching or sport coaching, and were, on the whole, negatively disposed towards learning about HPE or sport. Through his stories, Joe told of feeling that he had little influence or connection with these students, and that he was simply delivering a compulsory component of their degree that must be endured rather than enjoyed. Frustrated, Joe often recounted how he spent much of his time justifying the legitimacy of HPE to students whom he believed saw little or no value in his courses. This was in stark contrast to his teaching experiences in those previous professional milieus in which the legitimacy of the subject was rarely debated. Consequently, Joe’s experiences of disequilibrium in this new environment left him questioning his effectiveness as a teacher and coach educator. This was despite the consistently positive feedback he had received, and experiences he had had, in his previous professional settings. Thus, Joe’s “crisis,” like Erin’s, was a product of a double disjuncture between his existing, aspired to professional identity, and the social milieu in which he was seeking to engage in the project of being, and being recognised, as a certain kind of HPE ECATE. Specifically, the sites of these disjunctures within his social milieu were his interactions and transactions with his colleagues and his students, neither of whom he regarded as recognising the legitimacy of his work in the broader context of the School.

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Conversational spaces: the “safe” place for creative identity work With feelings of isolation, marginalisation and illegitimacy emerging from each of our ongoing stories of experience, the conversational spaces that we created together offered a respite from the complex, storied professional environments in which we found ourselves, and the crisis’ we faced in [re]constructing our professional identities. In this shared place, we felt that we could communicate openly and honestly about our experiences and challenges without jeopardising or endangering our always evolving professional identities. It was a place that we could tell “secret” stories (Connelly & Clandinin, 1995) about our experiences of our professional milieus, without the fear of judgment from influential or consequential colleagues with limited knowledge of the identity projects with which we were attempting to engage, or the means by which we were attempting to engage in them. In this way our conversational spaces represented a place where we could access, operate and recreate within a pre-existing state of equilibrium between our internal and external environments of embodied action. Acting reflexively, we were acutely aware that our level of comfort and sense of equilibrium in this place of shared story (re)telling was heighted by our shared history and understanding of each other’s commitments, interests and values. Moreover, we recognised that it also presented us a “safe” place that was physically separate and professionally removed from our workplaces. We were easily able to access these safe, conversational spaces through the variety of communication channels that we had created as we grappled with our geographically separate, yet temporally synchronous experiences of transitions. For example, it was common for us of each to speak to the others by mobile phone at the end of the working week, as we made the commute home. Similarly, throughout the working week, we would often converse by email, sharing resources or written ruminations on events and our actual, or retrospectively wished for, responses to them. In this way, we each felt safe in our conversational spaces to openly reflect on, consider and make meaning of our storied interactions and transactions within our new professional environments. Here, we could safely discuss and reflect on our experiences without fear or apprehension of how others in our new settings might interpret our musings about the affordances and constraints of our new milieus regarding how we sought to present ourselves and be recognised by significant others in our professional interactions. For each of us, the shared conversational spaces that we created provided a specific

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and “safe” place to converse and inquire into our experiences with similarly disposed HPE teacher educators and researchers with whom we shared a common history, and who were far removed from the specific, everyday, sometimes mundane, and occasionally dispiriting situations and politics of each of our new settings. Through our ongoing, collective inquiry into our experiences, we came to recognise that our shared undergraduate and postgraduate experiences, not only played an important role in shaping our research trajectories, agendas, commitments and pre-existing professional identities, but also in how each of us interacted with and enacted our identities in our new professional contexts. Furthermore, we came to understand that while we shared some common experiences, values and beliefs, the different theoretical, experiential and reflexive foundations of our work – in the context of trusted relationships – also shaped how we interacted with, understood and practiced in the conversational space, and ultimately contributed to our learning (Hollingsworth, 1989; Hollingsworth & Dybdahl, 2007). Ben, for example, whose initial responses to the micropolitics of his social milieu were often strongly influenced by his critical theoretical outlook, gained much from his ongoing written and verbal conversations with Erin, whose more interpretative research orientation often helped him “soften” his interpretation of, and engagement with, these politics. As such, it was both the convergences and the divergences, the similarities and differences of our respective backgrounds that proved integral to our interactions in the conversational spaces, and to the professional consequences of these interactions for negotiating the crises and disequilibria induced by our transitions. Thus, our conversational spaces became not only a safe place where some semblance of equilibrium could be maintained, but also a place of creativity. That is to say that it became a place where we could, through our verbal and written communication, plan, explore and discuss future actions aimed at creatively expanding this sense of professional equilibrium beyond our conversational space to the settings in which we currently needed to (at least) survive and (hopefully) thrive if we were to succeed at establishing a stable, desirable and workable professional self.

Surviving and thriving: Restoring equilibrium through conversational spaces At first, our written field texts and many of our conversations were dominated by the crises and frustrations we experienced as we engaged with our new professional milieus. As we each connected with, and

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developed our understanding of the people, places and things that comprised our transition stories, through our conversational spaces we encouraged and challenged each other to develop an attentiveness to the possibilities afforded us by our new professional contexts, and subsequently supported each other in pursuit of establishing and maintaining a sense of professional equilibrium in our new environments. For instance, through his own written and oral stories of crisis in transition, and the responses to them by Erin and Joe, Ben came to explore and identify ways in which he was able to productively combine and synthesise the theoretical and practical insights of his welcoming non-HPE colleagues with the concrete, technical and sometimes atheoretical practices of his HPE colleagues. From Ben’s viewpoint, this amalgamation of ideas and practices ultimately deepened his professional knowledge, understanding and application of social and educational theory, HPE pedagogies, and the complementarities and connections between HPE and other learning areas, in ways that may not have occurred as quickly in his previous professional context. Further, Ben came to recognise the opportunities presented by the receptivity of the students in his new context to socio-culturally informed teaching content and practices (relative to those in his former university). In this way, through his written and verbal conversation with Joe and Erin regarding teaching and learning in his new teacher education environment, Ben came to appreciate the ways in which these features of the external environment were far more compatible with, and affirming of, his aspired to professional identity. For Ben, these developments represented a movement towards a new state of equilibrium characterised by both modifications and solidifications of his aspired to professional identity and the social milieu of its enactment. Similarly, through interaction and engagement in the conversational spaces, Erin was challenged to consider and act on the possibilities of her situation as a researcher and teacher educator committed to socio-cultural approaches, social justice, and inquiry based learning, in a HPE environment where these approaches were often marginalised. Through her conversations with Ben and Joe, Erin came to understand that her socio-cultural and inquiry-based teaching practices, while initially not well received by students (due to the significantly different philosophical and pedagogical approaches she drew on compared to those of other HPE courses) not only challenged students’ understanding of HPE, but also encouraged students to rethink their often teacher centered and traditional pedagogical approaches and identities as future HPE teachers. Likewise, Erin came to understand that her socio-cultural, qualitative and narrative research approaches offered possibilities for collaboration with her non

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socio-cultural quantitative research HPE colleagues. Erin perceived that socio-cultural perspectives and qualitative approaches could offer new insights into their quantitative research projects; insights that she was in a prime position to facilitate and provide. As such, through continuing written and verbal conversations with Ben and Joe, Erin came to recognise her position of marginalisation as a niche position and possibility; a possibility that other HPE colleagues in her new external environments did not, and potentially could not necessarily provide. This understanding and position not only allowed Erin to move toward a new state of equilibrium and to enact her aspired to professional identity, but also to influence the external social milieu of its enactment. This influence was enacted through the provision of teaching and learning opportunities to challenge and (and at times) disrupt students’ sense of equilibrium in relation to their preexisting professional identities, and to broaden the research understanding and insights of her non socio-cultural quantitative HPE colleagues. Finally, the collaborative exploration of Joe’s transition experiences provided a place for him to reflect on the opportunities emerging from his new external environment, and its similarities and differences with his previous lived experiences of the HPE environment at a large Australian capital city (as an undergraduate and postgraduate student, a teacher and an academic), in order to strategically engage in the process of creating and sustaining a professional equilibrium in a regional university setting. For example, through careful, collaborative consideration of the similarities and differences evident between the learning styles and needs of his regional generalist (and often external, off campus) students compared to that of his (and Erin and Ben’s) former urban HPE specialist (and on campus) students, enabled Joe to plan and enact teaching strategies and practices that not only addressed his students’ needs, but his own professional expectations and needs in relation to his desired professional identity. Further, the conversational spaces offered Joe affirmation and encouragement to seek out opportunities to use his sports coaching knowledge and skills in his new professional milieu. In other words, it helped him to explore the possibilities of performing duties beyond his specific HPE teacher educator responsibilities, and thus present himself publicly in ways that helped restore his sense of professional equilibrium. Thus Joe’s engagement in the collaborative conversational spaces allowed him to not only move toward a new state of professional equilibrium, but also engage in and shape (through the enactment of his aspired to professional identity) the external social milieu of his new regional university environment.

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While each of us were encountering at times similar, and at other times very different, disjunctures or crises in the [re]construction of our professional identities as HPE ECATEs in our new university milieus, our conversational spaces provided us with opportunities, through ongoing written and verbal [re]telling of our storied experiences, to create and ‘strategise’ our responses to these crises, and to recognise and act on the opportunities that our new contexts afforded us to pursue the establishment and maintenance of our professional equilibrium. Through this process each of us was able to move (to varying degrees) towards a new state of equilibrium characterised by (often subtle) adaptations and solidifications to our professional identities (our internal environments) and the professional and social milieu of its enactment (our external environments) in order to survive and thrive in our new contexts. As such the conversational spaces that we created together represented an important place and source of validation, and an important precontextual (pre- in the sense of coming before our current contexts) reference point for our own specific professional identity [re]construction. That is to say that, firstly, our “recognition” of the legitimacy of others (in the conversational space) “attempts to be/become” provided positive reinforcement of each of our professional identity projects, and that, secondly, through our shared histories and overlapping professional identity projects, our conversations helped to maintain an ongoing connection with positive, relevant, contemporary exemplars that could act to orient our own professional identity [re]construction (exemplars that were otherwise less readily available).

Conclusion Through the sharing of our collective narratives, this chapter has captured how we, together, created and used conversational spaces as a means of restoring the equilibriums disturbed by our experiences of professional transition. Although this chapter focused inwardly on the [re]construction of our professional identities in and through transition, we believe that our storied experience is one that also speaks outwardly to other individuals in transition or balancing on the periphery. Our own conversational spaces emerged not only as stable, safe places of representation and knowledge construction, but also as places of creativity. In other words, they become places where we could plan, explore and discuss future actions aimed at creatively establishing, restoring and maintaining professional equilibriums in our new university environments, and of each moving towards and forming stable, desirable and workable professional selves. As such, our

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creation of this physically separate reflective community (characterised by our face-to-face and online conversational spaces) depicts how we used narrative as a powerful tool for generating (and reinforcing) personal and professional identity, for sustaining our individual and shared sense of purpose, and as an important tool for generating agency and capacity building in our new workplaces. Thus, we suggest that engagement in similar face-to-face and online conversational spaces may also be beneficial to other academics in transition, particularly those who are new entrants into the academic world. As we have illustrated in this chapter, the ongoing and interwoven nature of face-to-face and online conversational spaces can support critical individual and group reflection on transition experiences of disequilibrium. Furthermore, we have shown that the sustaining energy of a reflective community that is safe, stable and physically removed can help enact change in professional practice and support institutional change more broadly. Nevertheless, we are acutely aware that many of the benefits we experienced from these engagements were heavily influenced by our shared histories, ongoing friendships, overlapping professional identity projects and complementary academic interests and perspectives. To this end, it is crucial to recognise the integral role that relationships of openness, honesty and trust played to the processes described in this chapter. Yet, where such relationships exist, or where the potential for such relationships can be fostered, the power of creating and engaging in conversational spaces can be personally and professionally significant and rewarding.

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CHAPTER EIGHT RELATIONSHIPS: DARKNESS, LIGHT AND SHADES IN BETWEEN CLAIRE D’ARCY, LORRAE CHARLES, JACLYN FITZGERALD, KATHLEEN PARKES AND NATALIE ROMANET

Abstract Relationships in all their bitter-sweet complexity are the connecting thread of this chapter. First love and parenthood offer promises of hope and a shared future, yet marriage is also presented as the site of a struggle for power. Natalie Romanet’s short story Surf Break glimmers with hope, as a boy and girl escape from domestic turmoil to find love Jaclyn Fitzgerald’s Things that Measure Time interweaves nightmare and reality, and her poem Beside creates a sense of deep intimacy, as a couple separated by war meet in a dream-like other-world. The poem A Housewife’s Discontent by Lorrae Charles offers a dark prelude to her domestic revenge play which follows. Claire D’Arcy’s humorous scene A Gift for Cindy interweaves threads of gossip, self-deception and jealousy into a struggle for power. The chapter closes with Kathleen Parkes’ two affecting works: Broken is a cry from the depths. It contrasts with the author’s tender portrayal of a young family rapt in the moment. The generous love of parent for child is a bright thread, shot through the darker fabric of life.

Natalie Romanet I loved creating this short story. To begin with I was very concerned about constructing the narrative. However once I began writing, so many ideas came to mind that I couldn’t keep up. The audience I envision for this

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story is teenagers or young adults, who can relate to the stresses of family life and the pressures of school. I thought it appropriate to write in first person and in a very relaxed style, as this enables teenagers and young adults to relate to the characters and creates the appropriate ‘feel’ and mood for the story. I enjoyed this very much. Surf Break CRASH! I wake up with a fright. ‘I’m sick of you talking to me like that! I’m a bloody grown man Margaret. I can do what I like!’ ‘Well I’m sick of your late nights. Is being at the pub more important than your family? It’s 5am for God’s sake Peter and you’re only just getting home.’ Oh great, mum and dad are at it again. Fantastic start to the day. I pick my phone up off my bedside table. Shit, only ten past five. This is ridiculous. So much for a weekend sleep-in! I hear someone storm up the stairs as the front door slams. I hop out of bed and open my door to see what’s going on. It’s mum. I can see the lines of worry and hurt etched into her face. My anger melts into sympathy. I’ve seen this look many times lately. ‘Is everything ok mum?’ Her face strains as she tries to hold back the tears that threaten to take over. ‘Yes it’s fine Liz, don’t worry about it.’ She snaps turning away towards her bedroom. ‘Fine.’ I say. What did I do? How is this my fault? This is the last thing I need with my year 12 exams and HSC coming up. I shouldn’t have to worry about this shit. The last two months have been hell. Yelling, smashing, crying and slamming doors…I need to get out of here. I grab my phone and just keep walking, driven by anger-filled thoughts… BANG! Shit. I just bumped into some guy. He’s probably about 25, a beach bum, holding a surfboard. Dripping wet, he’s, probably just come out from a surf. Jesus, I think. Did I walk all the way to the surf club? That’s a kilometre away! ‘Oi! Watch where you’re going!’ I respond with a scowl. Really can’t be bothered being polite. I start walking away, ‘Ya know, when I’ve had a crap day I go down the beach and have a surf. Clears my head, good and proper! Should give it a try sometime mate.’

Relationships: Darkness, Light and Shades in Between ‘Right’ I say sarcastically. Without looking back at him, I stick my hands in my pockets and return to my thoughts. Why can’t they just get over their stupid issues? Would it be so hard to just get along? I look up from the pavement. Oh man, I’m down near the lighthouse - a good 45 minutes from home! Seagulls glide above me in the perfectly blue sky. It’s not fair, I think. I bet they don’t have any problems. Below them, the waves look pretty big. I’ve never really been a big beach person. Mum and dad used to take me down when I was younger, but I haven’t been for years. Truth is - I’m a bit scared of the ocean. It seems so unpredictable. I find myself on the sand. Taking shoes off, I feel the sun-warmed grains between my toes. Maybe if I just lie down for a second? I’m pretty tired from that walk. Closing my eyes, listening. The sun’s heat pours down onto my body. Waves are crashing a couple of metres in front of me, the wind gently breathing around me. I forget where I am - like all the anger has been swept away with the waves. ‘Feel better?’ I sit up with a start. It’s the surfer guy that I bumped into before. Now I begin to feel guilty for how rude I was. ‘The ocean has a funny way of making you forget all your worries, doesn’t it?’ he says looking out to the waves. ‘Um yeh, I guess it does. Hey…I’m sorry about bumping into you earlier…just had a rough morning that’s all.’ I say staring down at my feet. ‘That’s alright mate, don’t worry about it. We all have those days.’ I look up at him. He’s holding a surfboard. ‘You going for a surf?’I ask. ‘Yeh definitely! Every morning 5.30 a.m. I’m here! Couldn’t imagine starting the day any other way. You surf?’ ‘Nah, never tried.’ ‘Wanna give it a shot?’ ‘Um nah, it’s ok…thanks anyway though.’ ‘Com’mon mate, I’ll teach ya. It’ll take ya mind off things.’ I’m taken aback by his willingness. This guy doesn’t know me from a bar of soap! He doesn’t even know my name. I find myself replying ‘Yeh, ok.’ ‘Awesome, you’ll love it. I’m Trav by the way.’ ‘I’m Liz.’ By the end of the morning I’ve caught my first wave by myself and I’m really enjoying it. I don’t think about mum and dad. Trav says I’m a natural and I’ll pick it up in no time. ’Keen for a bite to eat at the surf club?’ Trav says. ‘Yeah sure’ While we’re devouring our Chicken Parmas I ask Trav,

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Chapter Eight ‘Where did you learn to surf?’ He stops and a furrow forms in his brow. Shit…I’ve asked the wrong question. I’ve just met this guy and he’s taught me all these awesome things and now I’ve gone and blown it all. I look over at him and his face softens. ‘Me dad taught me ever since I was little. We used to go out every weekend. He died when I was about your age. Cancer. He was a fighter. Fought for two long years. I stopped surfing to look after him, as much as he didn’t want me to. After he passed away I was just so angry at the world I didn’t want to get back on me board. A couple of months after he died I decided to get back out there. Best feeling ever. All my thoughts and anger just melted away. And I’ve been coming here every morning ever since.’ From then on we met to surf at the same time every weekend. One morning Trav had two surfboards lying on the sand. ‘Someone else comin’ today?’ ‘Nah mate. One of me buddies bought a new board. He wanted to chuck this one but I grabbed it. She’s all yours Liz. I was starting to get sick of sharin’ my board with you anyway!’ he laughed. ’Dude are you serious! That’s awesome! Thanks so much!’ My beautiful Trav. I never dreamed we would grow old together, but we did, and he surfed well into his 60's. Sometimes I turn over in the night and still reach for him. Its better he's gone now: Trave would have hated being in a nursing home. All gone now: Mum and dad's passionate rows. Trav. My wild days of surfing. Our youngest grandchild calls in sometimes, bringing the scent of the waves with her. And - I surf in my dreams.

In constructing this short story I noticed that I was beginning the sentences with “I” a lot: I had to rewrite the beginnings appropriately in order to stop repetition. I also had difficulties in trying to create a different ending, however, once I read Janice’s example ending I fell in love with it and even went back to change my character from a male to female so that I could run with that ending! A hurdle that I did not manage to leap over was in coming up with a title I really struggled with it and still am struggling to come up with an appropriate title that doesn’t give away any of the story or the ending.

Jaclyn Fitzgerald Like a patchwork quilt, my narrative is a collection of distinctly separate but interconnected stories. Each small portion, each scene, each experience connects to the others, yet the pattern becomes clear only when it is viewed as a whole. The structure to my narrative was something I have considered, discussed with peers and course examiner and re-worked

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repeatedly. Initially, the opening scene depicted the night the two meet and fall in love, followed by the scene in the supermarket, the evening at home and the dream. It concluded with the text message scene and husband’s phone call. I had written it this way so that the reader had to question her actions and emotional state, it only becoming clear that her husband was deployed when she had the dream. Under the guidance of Janice, I restructured it to engage the reader with the emotionally compelling and dramatic action of the dream sequence, which also sets the tone for the piece. I was quite concerned about changing tenses, and narrative voice (from first to third person) yet I practiced using different fonts to delineate between the times I wanted the reader to be intimately engaged in the story (as the writer was engaged in her world) and the times I sought to distance the reader from the action (as the writer felt as though she was watching certain painful experiences happen to someone else). Using fonts as a semantic cue to link stories I was able to visually guide readers in meaning making of the whole. Things That Measure Time “What’s your fucking problem Recruit? Get down there... lower!” The man has a fierce grossness about him as his screaming hails down on me. My chin touches the damp asphalt and I too am freezing, my muscles stiff and weakened by torturous physical training. I dare a glance at my abuser and see from the two stripes that he is a Corporal. My fatigue has caused me to forget I am in Basic Training, and have joined the Army to find my husband who is missing in action deep in the mountains of Afghanistan. A shift. Moments later, I’m nearing a massive, stark white compound. Its walls are impenetrable, but the rifle at my side stifles the fear: I’m here to find him and take him home. I begin to ascend the wide stairs to a heavy looking, white door. Outside this huge building there is no sound and I enter it alone, yet when the door opens, five white stairs lead down into a hell laid out before me. Bullets whiz past my head, dangerously close, and a chopper circles above. Soldiers swarm the area and the reek of excrement, garbage and death threatens to overwhelm me. Children scream and run terrified to their slain, bloody mothers. In the second it takes to absorb the scene I have knelt at the first white stair that will take me into the theatre of war and have raised my rifle. A searing pain begins in my right side and I look down, astonished to discover blood forming a perfect, growing circle on my uniform. I’ve been shot, and I didn’t even make it off the first step. “Shit!” I collapse in a crimson and khaki heap on those perfectly white stairs. *

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As she passed the window, she spotted the handsome stranger, rolled cigarette hanging from his lips, in her friends’ living room. A string of troublesome men led her to this point in time, but there was something in his voice as he greeted her that stirred something, fixed a permanent image of his face in her mind, perhaps a reminder of precious moments for future reference. His eyes looked into people, rather than at them. They told of experience. They blossomed in each other’s company. She fed off his intelligence, his interest in her mind. They discovered a shared love of words. Around midnight, alone for the first time, he said, “I’m going to marry you.” “I know,” she replied. “Is that weird?” “No, not at all. It’s right,” he said, and kissed her. She collected that moment in time like a butterfly in a child’s net. * Twelve years later she falls on her knees in the supermarket aisle. The noise of her children and sounds of a Tuesday afternoon fade to a whisper. Her mind empties briefly and a pure whiteness moves in, settles. She knows she looks foolish, is confusing people, but just for a moment she needs to clear a space within - to make room for the world. A woman looks on, quizzical, concerned. She nods an “I’m ok... really.” Collecting her children like a mother duck she heads towards the checkout. * A glass of red wine sits nearly empty, amongst family photos and a vintage hatbox. The lounge and kitchen areas offer security in the soft light of a lamp, but her restlessness leads her to the laundry to find a chore, anything to pass the time. The basket sits empty, the dryer not used for days. The clothes are neatly folded, tucked into drawers or hung in wardrobes. The ducklings sleep soundly and snore softly, one in time with the other. There is nothing to be done. No dishes to wash, no toys or books littering the floor. The television is off and no music plays. She looks at the phone, daring it to ring, waiting, waiting, waiting for it to interrupt the silence. He always calls when she needs him the most. Grabbing a pen and piece of paper, she writes … Dearest Pete, Things that measure time define our lives. Obviously, there is the clock, taunting with each tick, stealing one more second, one more minute and hour from us. And the calendar, thieving days, weeks and months with crosses and perforations! I want to take the time back, or forward, to our togetherness, but the pendulum swings as it knows it should, days pass as

Relationships: Darkness, Light and Shades in Between they always have, and I cannot move either back or forward. Then, there is the less obvious telephone, mocking me with its uncompromising silence as I wait and wait for you to call. Be safe sweetheart, loving you always, Wife x The silence of tonight’s time continues its assault until she reluctantly makes her way to their bed. She breathes a weak “goodnight” into a darkness that feels more claustrophobic than comforting, and prays that her whisper finds the strength to beat the tyranny of distance and touch her husband with its love. * At seven the following morning, I wake exhausted and remember the dream in exquisite, haunting detail, instinctively clutching at my abdomen to locate the bullet wound. I remember the incident at the shops the day before, embarrassed, and remember too that I have many more days like yesterday and today ahead of me, days when fear threateningly muddies my every thought. I sink back into the comfort of my pillow and remember our togetherness, so long ago now. I wonder how on earth I will get through this. How will I support our girls? Will he come home? How will I do simple things like smile and talk and hope? * At three o’clock, knowing her eldest daughter is chatting with friends, she waits patiently outside the school. Her mobile rests in her lap, the constant companion of the Army wife. A text message comes in and she reaches for the phone, but sees the pretty girl with long, dark-blonde hair approach, smiling in a way this particular child with her very unique set of circumstances normally doesn’t. “Hi Mum,” she says chirpily “Hi sweetheart, how was your day?” “It was good...OMG, Harvey was so funny, he’s just like totally obsessed with boobies! We were doing maths and he said...she laughs as she throws her bag on the back seat. “Hold on a sec babe, I just got a message” “What’s wrong?” the girl asks, sensing a change. “Nothing honey, everything’s fine”. The text message reads: Please do not respond to this message: Members of your loved one’s unit have been seriously injured in an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attack. The families of the injured personnel have been informed and the media will be notified shortly.

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When the phone rings two days later, I run to it “Hi sweetheart,” my husband says. “Pete...” I take a deep breath to strangle my tears, and he hears me let it out. He knows I’m hurting, but I will not let him hear me cry today, when it has been so long since we heard each other’s voices. “Sorry it’s so early and I’m sorry I haven’t been able to call. How are the girls? Are you alright?” “I am now. Are you ok? I heard about what happened.” “Babe, I’ve been given my redeployment orders, I’ll be back within fourteen days, sorry I can’t be more specific, but, you know...” he states, a hint of a smile at his lips that I can clearly see in my memory. He’s coming home. I want to hold onto this moment, this tiny little seed of pleasure, forever. Time, at times, ceases to be my enemy. Beside By Jaclyn Fitzgerald And so she knelt beside him and placed his hand upon her heart He felt its ache and traced a finger from eye to chin, sweeping her salty tearsCome back to me, she whispered, and disappeared, returning to her own dream sleep in a distant place. And so he knelt beside her and placed her hand upon his heart She felt its warmth and traced a tear from Tuesday to Wednesday and saw his love at a smile’s edge“I’m here”, he whispered, “I’m always here”.

“The Silent Ranks” is a portfolio of original pieces of writing and is largely autobiographical, depicting my family’s experiences as we endure a six-month Army deployment. Before my husband left for Afghanistan, I knew this would be a testing time for all of us. As a husband, father and combat soldier on the front line he faces innumerable challenges, both emotionally and physically. The stories of Australian soldiers throughout history are widely represented in literature, and in modern times these experiences are also shared widely and made available through the media. Through this collection of writing, what I seek to portray is a candid, honest and very real account of the stories of an Army wife and her children. Though quite different at times, what our children and I face at home in my partner’s absence is equally difficult as the work of our Defence Force. The fear, sadness and physical ache for a loved one doing

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such dangerous work is at times unbearable, yet through writing, my daughter and I have been able to validate our feelings and share our own experiences with the reader. It has also provided an opportunity for us to celebrate the love unity and strength of our family through sacrifice.

Lorrae Charles This lyric poem and short story include Lizzie, a housewife. The focus on her life creates a progression in time, drawing on themes of monotony, loneliness and power in a domestic setting. A circular journey is undertaken by the central character, starting with monotony and helplessness. She then challenges the situation and the portfolio concludes with a power shift. Ultimately my aim was to tell her story across the pieces. A Housewife’s Discontent The sunrise peeps through the curtains once more, Hoist myself out of bed; make my way to the door. It’s a woman’s job; it’s a wife’s call, Ceases to end when the day breaks nightfall. At the head of the table he plonks down to wait, Ready to serve comes his eggs and a steak. Yapping and barking like a small needy dog, My life passing by, like driving through fog. I prepare the house for the day ahead, He’s out the door with a grunt; at least he’s been fed. Meet the grumpy old man I’m tied to for life, But I dare not complain for I’m a housewife. The day is filled up with chores on a list, But outside these walls I cease to exist. Sweeping and dusting, put the clothes out to dry, Will this be my calling ‘till the day that I die? The hours go by in a housework daze, He’ll be back soon, in his chair he will laze. Tea on now or he’ll starve I suppose, Footsteps are heard as the door bangs to close. “Look at the bench; you’ve missed a spot,” “The roast is dry and the beer’s too hot!”

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“A Housewife’s Discontent” has been written from the perspective of middle aged housewife. The poem explores her discontent with life and her relationship with her husband. The poem expresses the woman’s thoughts, and as her husband does not let her express such feelings, this places the reader in the position of confidante. The poem is aimed at an adult audience as they are more likely to understand marital life and relationships. A Housewife’s Discontent is a lyrical poem: short and simple in structure and with a song-like quality, it utilises the first person to portray the central character’s perspective. I have used similes in phrases such as ‘yapping and barking like a small needy dog’ and ‘like driving through fog’ to suggest comparisons between the central character and her husband’s lives. Images such as ‘love’s trickled away’ and ‘the fire’s gone out’ are intended to suggest a bleak existence and to suggest feelings of loneliness. The poem has an AABB rhyme scheme adding another layer of predictability appropriate to the housewife’s monotonous life. The image of a door is important in both pieces, establishing a double meaning: it offers relief when the husband leaves and is a point of dread when he returns. The husband is referred to as ‘he’ as to distance him from the speaker, and to position the audience so as to be empathetic to the housewife’s circumstances. Throughout the planning, writing and editing of this poem I encountered several challenges, in particular finding rhyming words which fitted with the message of the poem. I brainstormed words which could potentially fit and reworded the line to fit with the rhyme scheme. Editing the poem also proved difficult: while it was easy to spot the inconsistencies and errors within the poem, correcting these without disturbing the rhyme scheme was an intricate process. I believe it would be beneficial to adjust the poem still further. My short story is also intended for an adult audience and includes themes of forbidden love and violence.

Relationships: Darkness, Light and Shades in Between Brad’s Scones Sew his jeans, sweep the floor and get his breakfast. A seamstress, cleaner and cook all in one. What was my occupation you may ask? Housewife. When I married Brad I didn’t expect it to be smooth sailing but I didn’t plan on being his own personal slave either. Before we wed he was charming, funny and considerate. He would take me to the movies and shower me with flowers and chocolates. Maybe it was all an act to lure in the fish until it couldn’t get away. Still... I have to admit the bait wasn’t bad looking then. We’d been married ten years on that cold July morning. Brad was too much of a cheapskate to buy a heater, so when I rose at dawn the house was freezing. As soon as I stepped onto those icy floorboards I knew it was going to be one of those days. Brad stumbled out of bed at mid morning “Big night at the pub?” “Mind your own business if you want to see that weekly magazine again”, he grunted. Silenced, I served bacon and eggs onto his plate. “Bit burnt” he grumbled, shovelling the pink bacon into his mouth. My eyes met his. The once twinkling gaze was cold. Silently, I watched him empty his plate. Then, mumbling about working in his shed Brad left, slamming the screen door. It hung off its hinges: another thing to fix. The morning swept by in a flurry of housework sweeping, mopping, washing and repairing the broken door. As lunchtime crept closer I pondered my life with Brad. Marriage didn’t suit him. He was cranky, demanding and selfish. I was sick of his nights at the pub. I set about my daily task of preparing Brad’s favourite and just as I pulled the tray of golden scones out the oven, the door burst inwards. Brad slumped into his chair. “Thought I smelt something.” Grabbing a golden scone with unwashed hands, he smothered it in jam and cream. Through a mouthful of hot scone he chuckled, “At least you can do one thing right.” It took all of my willpower not to yell at him. If I did I would pay for it later. Scone after scone, he devoured the golden shapes until only crumbs were left. “I’ll be down at the tank if anyone wants me”. With that, he brushed past me out the door. I turned on the television. An escape from Brad. Flicking through the channels I settled on a soap opera. An unhappy wife murdered her husband so she could collect his life insurance and run off with her secret lover. As the woman drove into the sunset it dawned on me what I had to do. My gaze shifted from the television to the jam-covered knife that lay on the

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Chapter Eight bench. I crept over to the bench and picked up the knife. For a moment it lay there on my palm. Down at the tank was Brad, unsuspecting. Mid afternoon a knock came at my door. Brad’s mother, as always, was impeccable in her suit and large hat. “Sorry to bother you dear but I was just passing by and thought I’d call in to see how my boy is doing.” Barbara walked in and sat in Brad’s chair. “He’s been busy today. I haven’t heard a peep from him all afternoon” “Oh well, if he’s not here I will call in another day,” “No, no. Please stay. I’ve just made a fresh batch of scones,” I offered. “Well I’ve never been one to say no to scones,” she chuckled. “They’re a funny colour dear” she poked at one. “Ah! My secret ingredient,” I smiled. “Mmm. Delicious!” Barbara gobbled up three scones in quick succession. “Well I’d better be off dear. Tell Brad I’ll call tomorrow.” She turned in the doorway. “I must ask you, how do you get them to taste so good?” “Well a lot of blood, sweat and tears. And of course, I always try to put a bit of Brad in my cooking.”

Discussion ‘Brad’s Scones’ is intended to portray the same perspective as the poem, but Lizzie draws on a strength she did not possess in the previous piece and Brad now has a name to make his character more believable. Brad’s Scones establishes the setting and characters before the story progresses to include tension resolved by a climax where Lizzie is inspired by a soap opera to get rid of Brad. It is written in the first person with speech used to emphasise the action, however, I have also tried to leave space for the reader to imagine what the characters are thinking or feeling. Lizzie is the protagonist triumphing over her husband the antagonist: just before the climax, a soap opera provides an ironic indication of the likely outcome to the story. This technique of offering a clue about a situation still to unfold is foreshadowing. I allow the audience to decide for themselves what has actually happened until the last few lines. The twist in this tale is prompted by the arrival of Brad’s mother and the preparation of Brad’s much loved scones, which are used by Lizzie as both as a way of covering up his murder, and implying horror without direct statement. The most significant challenge throughout the planning, writing and editing of this short story was removing superfluous information. It was difficult filtering which information was necessary and integral to the

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narrative and which had a supporting or enhancing role. In my teaching I now consider it important to point this out to students who have a tendency to record all of their thinking. Also, gaps are important, as they create space for audience interpretation In planning, creating, editing and reflecting on my collection of literature, I have come to appreciate that when teachers ask students to create literary works, they take much for granted. Through engaging in this process for myself, I have realised that the creative process is much more complicated than most of us realise: I can thus relate more fully to the difficulties and challenges students encounter when creating literature. It is my goal to also provide a scaffolded and supportive learning environment, encompassing the new learnings I have gained through this experience.

Claire D’Arcy Laughter is the best medicine; and my chosen genre is comedy based upon both real world experience and other comedy genre texts, literary and nonliterary. My intended audience is adults or older students. The writing illuminates the seemingly mundane, using comedic twist to allow the audience to reconsider the hidden meanings behind our everyday lives. A Gift for Cindy: A stage play in one act. Cast: Four women in their middle years. Sandra “Sandy” Bloom – Works in the local charity shop and feeds off local gossip. Susan “Susie” Mater – Slightly older than Sandra. She owns and works in local charity shop and loves juicy gossip. Veronica Kensington – An upper class woman who intensely dislikes her new daughter in-law. Margot Ridley-Smyth – An upper class woman who seeks to impress by bragging of her superiority. Setting: The local charity shop in a small English town in the home-counties, run by Sandra and Susan. Counters, shelves and a cash register are stage right. The shop door at stage left has a bell that rings each time it is opened. All products in the shop are mimed and described by the actors, leaving the audience to use their imagination.

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Door to stage left opens; shop bell rings and in walks Sandy with two cups of coffee to stage left. Sandy Sorry I’m late love! There was such a queue at the cafe. Mind you I heard some nice titbits whilst I was waiting. [Puts down Susie’s coffee and sips her own] Susie That’s alright my dear. [Sips her coffee] Mmm. Thank you. So what tasty news have you got for me? Sandy Well, according to that young blonde behind the counter, you know the one; has so much metal on her face she could double as a disco ball... She heard from her sister’s cousin’s next door neighbour that the vintage clothes shop on the high street is closing down. Susie Well, well, well, closing down eh? All the more business for us! [Laughs and toasts cup with Sandy] Anyway....”Vintage”....I ask you! Just a fancy word for out of date and second hand. They giggle to themselves. Susie So luv, how did it go, last night? Sandy Oh, I forgot to say! You’ll never guess who I ran into at the pub! There I was... having my usual gin and tonic when out of the blue in comes... Door to stage left opens; shop bell rings and in walks Veronica who starts to browse to shelves. Oh, shhh shhh, customer. [Turns to customer] Morning Madam, may we help you? Veronica No thank you, I’m just browsing. Door to stage left opens; shop bell rings and in walks Margot. Margot Veronica darling! I thought it was you. How are you dear? [Veronica and Margot air kiss each other’s cheeks] And how’s that handsome son of yours? And his charming wife? Oh and of course your new granddaughter. How are they all?

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They’re all fine thank you Margot. [Snide tone] That’s nice dear....What was it they named the latest addition... Cindy? Yes that’s correct: [With emphasis] Cynthia Beatrice Kensington. And...how are you Margot? Super darling, absolutely wonderful.... The christening is this Saturday, I’m just looking for a gift for Cynthia. I trust you’ll be coming? Oh of course darling. Wouldn’t miss it for the world. But you’re not buying a christening gift from here of all places? [Looks dismissively around the shop. Sandy and Susan stiffen in their seats at the perceived insult] Embarrassment crosses Veronica’s face. No, no.... of course not. Ahhh...ehm....No! I was just.... browsing. You know - perusing the life of the common people! [Laughs affectedly] Picks up and examines an old fluffy teddy bear, absent mindedly caressing its soft fur. Yes... it is rather sad to see what some people think of as stylish, isn’t it?! [Examines a lady’s floral dress that has caught her eye and sizes it up against her body] Speaking of common people...How’s that daughter-in-law of yours; Samantha wasn’t it? [Draws the name out with disdain]. Is she still working? No, no, she gave up her job as a beauty therapist when she was expecting Cynthia. Of course, women in this day and age should not be working, at least not when they have a rich successful husband to provide for them like my Phillip. Yes, well I’m just thankful my Linda has found someone as suitable as Jonathan. Did I tell you he’s now a highly successful and sought-after doctor? Harley-Street, my dear.

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[Rolls her eyes] Yes you’ve mentioned that more than once Margot. Margot Yes, but one mustn’t boast. But upbringing tells. It’s in the blood you know. Anyway, one can’t stand around talking all day. I must dash. Goodbye dear. Veronica I must be on my way also. Goodbye, Margot. [Puts down the imaginary teddy in a sitting position on the shelf, and pats its head. She parts with it reluctantly] Veronica and Margot exit. The, shop bell rings again. Sandy and Susie burst out laughing, breaking their silence. Susie Well that’s a turn up for the books. Successful doctor, on Harley Street?! Foot doctor more like it. He runs the podiatrist clinic over on Queen Street at Hastings village! [Laughs] Sandy Yes I thought so. [Still laughing] And her daughter-in-law, what’s her name; Samantha the so-called “beauty therapist”? [Makes air quotes] She’s the receptionist in the high street nail bar...worked to the 9th month - she was like the side of a bus! - And she’s still working. Susie Really. The way these women put on airs and graces is sickening. Sandy I know: a load of gossip - just bragging about their children’s success. Door to stage left opens; shop bell rings and in walks Veronica who returns to pick up the teddy bear she was looking at before. Veronica [Fumbling in her purse hastily] Just this teddy bear please. Sandy Certainly Madam, A lovely choice for Cindy. That’ll be three pounds fifty. Veronica [Opens her mouth to speak...then pushes the money into Veronica’s hand before turning on her heel and storming out, slamming the door behind her] Susie Do call in again. Have a nice day!

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[Pause] Goodness me! She must really hate the name Cindy! Sandy No, no Susie, not Cindy! [Puts on posh voice] Cynthia…remember? [Laughs] Susie Oh yes, of course. Cynthia. [Both laugh] Sandy and Susie toast their coffee cups again. Susie So anyway where were we. Oh yes...you were telling me about who you saw last night. Sandy Oh yes, well you are never going to believe this. There I was, minding my own business when... Stage lights dim and curtain draws. This piece of writing presents two sets of women who thrive on different types of gossip. Gossip is casual talk about people and their personal affairs which has the potential to be harmful. This play features gossip that shares useful information and gossip that is demeaning and potentially harmful. For Susie and Sandy it is entertainment; something to fill the working day, but Margot and Veronica use it to embellish others’ and perhaps their own perceptions of their lives, living vicariously through their children and bragging about their own and their children’s successes. While Susie and Sandy thrive on the gossip that passes their way through their charity shop, they judge women of their own age group as “gossips” without being aware of the irony. This play has been designed so as to be minimalist so that our focus is more upon the players than the surroundings. A single set is used and props are mimed rather than real. My intent in using this approach is to allow the audience to feel as though they had a hand in writing and designing the play. Initially, I was not enticed by the prospect of writing these pieces, as my experience with these styles of writing has been slim. However, once I began writing, the process seemed simpler, and I quite enjoyed working with the text pieces. My writing is based on personal experience, and I think I would find it difficult to write about anything different as I do not believe I have the creative scope. Consequently, perhaps writing from experience in a primary education classroom may produce some very pedestrian writing, although it could be valued for its entertainment.

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Kathleen Parkes This portfolio expresses family unity, exploring feelings of guilt and sorrow, joy and pleasure. Broken I feel I feel sick I am twisted As though my insides have been knotted into one And can’t be untangled I feel like my heart sits in my throat Its pulse hard and heavy with every breath Stabbed with a dagger and split in half Pierced with the lightning of a thousand storms I feel as though I have no eyes My sockets simply dark pits of emptiness My cheeks eroded by the thousands of tears I have cried And hands turned to a woman’s of eighty from wiping them away I feel like all is sour Where the light-hearted chirp of the bird is fierce against the ear Security, composure and confidence whittled away to leave the shell of a person Devoid of optimistic pondering I feel that she will never recover Her soul forever labelled sick and broken Ever shackled to its lonely grief filled shadow While all remaining shreds of happiness ebb Disappearing from sight

This piece of poetry was written to reflect the hurt and pain that was felt when a significant member of the family was diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness. The writing expresses my feelings of disbelief and sadness and the impact of illness upon the entire family. The first stanza registers shock at the news, expressing that gut wrenching, almost physical blow your body takes when shattering news is received. The second aims to convey the emotional toll of that experience. I felt this was a particular challenge, as using a lot of figurative language and imagery, I felt, obscured the rawness of the poem. The third stanza is again written

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with imagery and metaphoric language; however the message remains clear, and is not over powered. I believe the words “I feel like I have no eyes” are particularly emotive a showing how, in a time of trauma, one cannot think of anything other than the sickness; that blindfold has been applied and cannot be easily removed. At the time of writing, my mother was really struggling with her diagnosis, and felt that the sickness was her definition; she was no longer a mother, a wife, a daughter or sister. Her confidence took a bashing, and for a while she was simply the shell of the person she was before. We had a lot of trouble looking to the future as this diagnosis seemed to be so large and so my description focuses not only on my mother, but on the reactions of the entire family unit. Upon reflection, I found this entire process therapeutic. I really enjoyed writing this piece, and didn’t find it difficult to put the words on paper, once the initial line had been inked. The rhythm of the poem was a challenge, trying to find the right pace and level of flow, suitable to the content and context. The poem is full of sorrow and pain, elements of guilt and so the tempo couldn’t be too fast. There is no specific audience for this poem, although I feel that adults or older adolescents could relate to the workings on a deeper and more intricate level. Throughout the initial draft work there was play of alliteration, consonants and assonants, but I felt they interrupted the emotion that fuelled the words. The use of repetition in the form of I feel, brings the attention of the reader back to that sense of emotion. As mentioned, the poem is heartfelt and personal and so attempting to place too many of the formal aspects of poetrywriting felt abrupt and counteractive to the spirit of the piece. Dancing The smell of the sea is thick in the air just as the salt is thick in their windswept hair; messy and unkempt in texture, relaxed and content as ever. Beautiful dresses, feet bare of shoes, three little girls trace footsteps in the sand as they wander to the party, suddenly enthralled and delighted by the love and beauty that surrounds them. The band picks up as jazz tunes float through the air, trumpets loud and entertaining, enticing a love of erratic movement unheard of before. The light bounces off the brass. The glint in the girls’ eyes is simply innocent, as barefoot and playful they hold their father’s hands, twirling like the ballerinas they had always wanted to be. Dresses high, tulle and glitter swamping their sweet faces, only to fall and reveal rosy cheeks and smiles with numerous gaps. So proud they are to be dancing with father: his little princesses in their own little world, never wanting the notes to fall short.

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I think my short story could be read to children as a bedtime story, for mothers and daughters to share, or for adults to ponder. I feel that in order to gain the most benefit from this text piece, it would need to be viewed in conjunction with my other writings, which portray a richer sense of the family. To truly understand and appreciate the writing, an adult perspective would be best. My short storyaims to capture the innocence and purity of three little girls the delight they share in spending time with their family, and the value each person holds in that relationship. It targets the idea of reminiscing on the better times they have spent together, before the darkness of the sickness arrived, bringing uncertainty and pain. I use imagery to provide the audience with a picture of warmth and happiness. A party on a beach creates a relaxed, calm and easy atmosphere, enhanced by the girls’ having bare feet and loose hair. There is some use of simile and metaphoric language; however it is not used as often as with the first poetry piece. The use of descriptive language in this piece highlights the intricate details of the evening. In writing this piece, I wanted to show the happiness and peace of the family and the adoration between parents and the girls. Initially, there was a stronger presence of the father in the text, and a large play on the ‘daddy’s little girls’ aspect, but when reviewing and editing the works, I found that it didn’t tie together as well as it could have. With this in mind, I reworked the text to have the mother take a more pronounced role, showcasing her warm and nurturing nature. When we began writing this piece Janice used a particular technique in which we were asked to listen to a piece of music and simply write to it. This helped greatly as all background noise and potential interruption was dismissed, and the purity of the writing style was produced. I do not feel that this piece of writing reflects a traditional method, nor does it follow the traditional structure of an introduction, problem and resolution, moreover it simply recalls a beautiful memory and guides and directs the audience through it.

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Editor’s note: The unifying theme of these works is love, and the works shared by pre-service teachers in this chapter point first to the richness and complexity of the writers’ lived experiences, and next to the nuanced ways in which human understandings of powerful emotion may find expression and be captured in time through the written forms of poems, short stories, or plays. The works attest to the authors’ awareness of the power and flexibility of those literary genres, and how these may act in two ways. On one level these forms act as structuring devices for the writers as they make sense of the powerful emotions that inform human motivation and action. On another they offer a means for the authors to reach beyond the everyday, and towards the inexpressible. Their works attest to and seek to embody those spiritual and emotional understandings for which we struggle to find words. Thus the range of works and themes selected by the writers are as diverse as their messages. Love, and the loss of love, is pivotal to writers’ understandings of themselves, their relationships and their place in the world.

CHAPTER NINE WRITERS’ JOURNEYS: WAYS OF BEING, KNOWING AND DOING ROBYN HENDERSON

Abstract Traditionally, reading and writing have been recognised as characteristics of a literate person. However, literacy educators generally acknowledge that becoming literate is a complex and dynamic process that incorporates much more than learning basic skills. Literacy is understood as a situated social and cultural practice that incorporates coding, semantic, pragmatic and critical competences (e.g., Freebody, 2004; 1982; Luke & Freebody, 1999). As Freire and Macedo (1987) highlighted, reading the word cannot happen without a reading of the world. Additionally, our literacies (using the plural term) and our ways of being, knowing and doing are interconnected with our discourse communities, our identities and our sense of agency (Moje & Lewis, 2007). In this chapter, I analyse selected examples of the students’ writing and their reflections about their writing from Chapter 6, to investigate the students’ ways of being, knowing and doing as they negotiate their journeys as writers. I conclude the chapter with a consideration of implications for teacher education.

Introduction The starting point for this chapter was a reading of the selection of writing presented in Chapter 8. The writing is identified as focusing on Relationships – Darkness, light, and shades between. Interestingly, the dark-light-shade metaphor of the chapter’s title reminded me of Alfred Noyes’ poem The highwayman, where the tragic story of the highwayman and his sweetheart Bess, the innkeeper’s daughter, is told through the striking imagery of darkness and ghostly light, with shades of red. The highwayman is a story of love, and Bess makes the ultimate sacrifice,

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shooting herself with a musket, in an attempt to save the highwayman from sure death. Overall, the poem is about relationships and weaves together a story about love,betrayal, criminal activity and the law. Chapter 8 also focuses on relationships. The writing of Claire D’Arcy, Lorrae Charles, Jaclyn Fitzgerald, Kathleen Parkes and Natalie Romanet introduces an array of relationship issues, including love, loss of loved ones, relationship breakdown, and fear and hatred. The texts deal with the lives of real life and fictional characters, but they also prompt emotional reactions from readers. Through Chapter 8, the authors reflect on their writing and the learning that accompanied their journeys as writers. These pieces of writing provide insights into the work of novice writers and their ways of being a writer, and knowing about and doing writing. My reading of the texts produced by the five authors prompted me to reflect on my prior knowledge and experiences of the process of writing and the journey of the writer. My background in literacy education meant that I came to the reading of the stories (using the term stories in a broad sense) and the writers’ reflections with particular understandings about literacy and what it means to be a literate person. At the same time, my research background meant that I read the texts with an interest in their linguistic design and what that was telling me about the social and cultural contexts within which the texts were constructed. As I began to think about how I would respond, I decided that I would explore the writing and the authors’ reflections in terms of the themes of being, knowing and doing – being a writer, knowing how to be a writer, and doing writing. It seemed that the authors of Chapter 8 had been involved in learning how to ‘be’ writers as part of their university course work. It was likely, therefore, that their reflections might share some of their experiences and learnings about ‘doing’ writing. As a result, I begin this chapter by discussing my view of literacy and the social world and the application of these ideas to the texts of Chapter 8. I then conduct a brief analysis of the writing. In considering the writing and the writers’ reflections and on their writing, it is important to keep in mind that the writing in Chapter 8 represents the products of the writers’ personal experiences in their lives outside the university as well as the learning that occurred in the course they were studying. I conclude with a discussion of writing through the authors’ ideas of being, knowing and doing.

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From literacy and the social world to thinking about the production of literary texts I understand reading and writing, and literacy more broadly, as situated social and cultural practices and recognise that the authors’ writing and my reading of their work are part of the network of the social and cultural practices that occur around texts. Such a view acknowledges that a range of resources is needed in order to be a literate person. As highlighted in Luke and Freebody’s four resources model (e.g., Freebody, 2004; Luke & Freebody, 1999), a literate person needs coding, semantic, pragmatic and critical competences. This model highlights the complexity of learning to read and write and emphasises that each of the competences is necessary but not sufficient for such learning to occur. Indeed, the competences are “variously mixed and orchestrated in proficient … writing” (Luke & Freebody, 1999, p. 7). The appropriate use of these resources indicates an understanding of the particular situation, the context, in which literacy is used. Understandings about context are not new. The work of Heath (1982, 1983), Gee (2004), Barton and others (e.g., Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic, 2000), for example, noted the importance of context and offered empirical evidence about the relationship between context and text. As Stephens (2000) explained, such views of literacy are generally discussed under the labelof the “new literacy studies,” which highlight “the description of literacy practices of everyday life” and challenge “approaches which emphasise decontextualised basic skills” (p. 10). Rather than seeing literacy as an “autonomous” skill, using the language of Street (1997), this view of literacy takes seriously the effect of context. Indeed, reading and writing are practices of our social world. They do not occur in isolation, but have inextricable links to context. This is evident in the way that we always read and write for particular audiences and for particular social and cultural purposes. According to Freire and Macedo (1987), being literate involves both reading the world and reading the word. In the foreword to Macedo’s (1994) book, Freire explained that “there cannot be reading of text without reading the world, without reading the context” (p. xi). Moje and Lewis (2007) explained that learning always “involves and requires participation in something” (p. 16). They argue that learning is a “moment of participation” that occurs in what they term “discourse communities,” groups of people who share “ways of knowing, thinking, believing, acting, and communicating” (p. 16; see also Gee, 1996).

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People are members of many discourse communities (Moje & Lewis, 2007). Gee (1996) highlighted the way that different literacies are connected to “different ways of being in the world” (p. viii). Yet, becoming a member of a ‘new’ discourse community is not necessarily easy. Linkon’s (2011) work, for example, emphasised the importance of developing “strategic knowledge” (p. 2), in order to bring relevant “habits of mind, assumptions, attitudes, and critical practices” (p. 3) to literary tasks. Although Linkon’s focus was on the reading of literary texts, her message about making strategic knowledge visible has application to developing writers. For the novice writers in Chapter 8, their course work experiences apprenticed them into a writers’ discourse community and we would expect that their learning created opportunities to “make and remake selves, identities and relationships” (Moje & Lewis, 2007, p. 18). These provide the foci of the section that follows. A brief analysis of the writers’ texts considers their ways of being, doing and knowing and how that links to identity and agency and their place/s as markers of teacher transformation as the writers’ engaged in writing the word and the world.

The place of context and the analysis of the writing in Chapter 8 In previous research, I have used Fairclough’s (2001) context-interactiontext model to analyse text as data (e.g., Henderson, 2008, 2009). This model is founded in an amalgamation of theoretical traditions. In particular, linguistic, discourse and social theories, with critical and poststructuralist origins, contribute to an understanding of the social world (Henderson, 2005). Based on the work of Halliday (e.g., Halliday, 1985; Halliday & Hasan, 1985), ongoing work in the field of systemic functional linguistics (e.g., Butt, Fahey, Feez, Spinks, & Yallop, 2000; Derewianka, 2011) provides a theoretical frame for understanding the relationship between context and text, showing how an examination of text can provide clues to the context within which it was produced. Pragmatically, such work has provided guidance for linguistic analyses of text, by considering “how people use authentic language in various contexts in real life to achieve their purposes” (context of culture) and how “language choices change from situation to situation” (context of situation) (see also Butt et al., 2000, pp. 3-4; Derewianka, 2011, p. 3). The context of culture represents the way we do things in our culture, while the context of situation addresses “the things going on in the world outside the

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text that make the text what it is” (Butt et al., 2000, p. 4). Knowledge of the context in which a text is produced is important. However, the writing in Chapter 8 sparked my thinking about how writers have to create context for their readers. The fictional and, in some cases, autobiographical pieces of writing were created within a particular sociocultural context, where this type of writing usually serves the purpose of entertainment or provocation. As noted by Linkon (2011), we have to “appreciate … text as a construction” (p. 11) of an author, an individual with a perspective based on a specific cultural context, social position, and life history, who has imagined a world and a situation, invented characters, crafted a voice, and made hundreds of decisions and probably a number of revisions in constructing the text. (p. 11).

Additionally, the texts in Chapter 8 were informed by their production within a university course that is embedded in a broader sociocultural context. There were several clues to this context as some of the authors made explicit reference to Janice, their teacher. In terms of the context of the situation, the writers were obviously cognisant of the relationship that they needed to develop with an audience of readers. While Janice was a known and visible reader, their writing is now being presented to a wider, unknown audience. As a result of my thinking about this, I analysed the writing in Chapter 8 while pondering some particular questions: What do the texts tell me about the authors’ efforts at being a writer, knowing how to be a writer, and doing writing? How do the authors create context within their writing? To begin the analysis, I looked for ways of being, doing and knowing that were evident in the authors’ reflections on their writing and how they incorporated the notions they discussed in their writing. The next five sections discuss each of the writers’ ‘stories’ (or collection of writing, as the case may be) in terms of being, doing and knowing.

Story 1: Natalie Romanet’s Surf Break Natalie Romanet’s story Surf Break, for example, begins with narrator Liz in a dark place. In walking out of the house in the early hours of the morning to escape her parents’ fighting, Liz meets Trav, a surfer who had also experienced dark times. However, his return to surfing had brought a peace of mind where “thoughts and anger just melted away.” Liz’s story does not dwell on the many years they spent together – the light – but it shifts to a shade in between, where Liz recalls her “wild days of surfing”

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with Trav and reflects on the way their youngest grandchild continues the family’s surfing tradition. When Romanet reflects on her writing, she discusses the concern she had about writing the story and using an appropriate style for an audience of teenagers and young adults. In being a writer, she decides to write using the first person and what she describes as a “very relaxed style.” She identifies some of the linguistic choices she made, including her decision to rewrite the beginnings of sentences to avoid the repetition that had occurred. Through these reflections, Romanet positions herself as a novice, and at times struggling, writer who works hard at the craft of writing. She indicates that knowing how to write is important. Despite Romanet’s assertion that she is “still … struggling” with aspects of writing, it seems that her doing has worked. Her use of direct speech at the beginning draws readers in to her first person story. Her understatement about the happy years Liz and Trav spent together – summed up in the short sentence, “I never dreamed we would grow old together” – and her fleeting memories of events and people who are “all gone now” provide a short, succinct conclusion to her story.

Story 2: Jaclyn Fitzgerald’s The Silent Ranks Jaclyn Fitzgerald’s contributions to Chapter 8 demonstrate her use of writing as a survival strategy. With her husband on deployment in Afghanistan, she offers a portfolio of writing that she describes as “candid, honest and very real account of the stories of an Army wife and her children.” It seems that being a writer offered Fitzgerald opportunities, perhaps even a form of therapy, to validate, share and celebrate the family’s experiences. Her knowing of the heartache that results from the absence of a loved one provides the stimulus for writing that moves between shades of light and dark. Fitzgerald’s partly autobiographical work is full of contrasts, one of her techniques of doing writing. Her initial story uses images of crimson blood to contrast with the white compound and white stairs. The harshness and terror of battle is followed by the ‘softness’ of the next story where Fitzgerald describes meeting her husband and collecting “that moment in time like a butterfly in a child’s net.” As she tells other stories, the redwhite comparison continues with red wine and the whiteness of confusion. These visual images are supported by the juxtaposition of noise and silence, the symbolism of the ticking clock, and the personification of time, helping Fitzgerald to construct her fear of the unthinkable consequences of her husband’s deployment.

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Through these writing techniques, Fitzgerald allows readers to understand her feelings as she tries to deal with the “uncompromising silence” of her husband’s absence. As her stories shift between shades of light and dark, Fitzgerald creates a dream-like space for remembering her husband, a strategy that enables her to survive the uncertainties about what might happen.

Story 3: Lorrae Charles’ A Housewife’s Discontent and Brad’s Scones Lorrae Charles begins her writing with the dark poem of an abusive husband, written from his wife’s perspective. The poem is followed by a story about the housewife’s decision to act and to remove the husband from her life. The details of Brad’s murder are left to the reader’s imagination and, as Charles says, imply “horror without direct statement.” In her reflections, Charles is clear about her doing as a writer. She says that she chose first person to “emphasise the action” and she “tried to leave space for the reader to imagine.” She discusses foreshadowing as a technique, her attempt to add a twist to the story, and the effect of leaving gaps. Throughout her reflections, she indicates the importance of what is not said, as the gaps help to “create space for audience interpretation”. Knowing about these techniques seems to permeate the description Charles provides of being a writer. In the poem A Housewife’s Discontent, Charles identifies her choice of themes as “monotony, loneliness and power in a domestic setting.” Her focus, however, is the powerlessness that Lizzie the housewife experiences. Like some of the other authors featured in Chapter 6, Charles develops shades of dark and light through a range of literary techniques. For example, Lizzie’s life is “passing by, like driving through fog” and “love’s tricked away and the fire’s gone out.” Charles’ use of similes and images emphasises the drudgery Lizzie experiences and highlights the monotony of life “like an old re-run.” However, the poem finishes with Lizzie asking “What would happen tomorrow if I just stay in bed?” This forewarning that Lizzie might try to break the monotony and torment of her life leads the reader to the story of Brad’s Scones. It is here that Charles demonstrates the effects of not telling the reader every detail of the events that occur. Her use of foreshadowing is evident in Lizzie’s watching of a soap opera, where “an unhappy wife murdered her husband,” Lizzie’s gaze shifting to “the jamcovered knife,” and her statement that “down at the tank was Brad,

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unsuspecting.” The story finishes with dark humour when Lizzie tells her mother-in-law that she tries to “put a bit of Brad in [her] cooking.”

Story 4: Claire D’Arcy’s A Gift for Cindy Claire D’Arcy presents a play in a style that she describes as “minimalist.” Her doing of writing is “based on personal experience,” although she does not describe the experiences that brought her to the story set in a charity shop. D’Arcy’s choice of names for the characters seems to establish stereotypes, which are continued throughout the play. The names of Sandra and Susan who work in the charity shop are shortened to Sandy and Susie. Their banter about the “vintage clothes shop” being a “just a fancy word for out of date and second hand” is broken by the arrival of two upper class women, Veronica Kensington and Margot Ridley-Smyth, who are described by Susie as “put[ting] on airs and graces.” Both pairs of women enjoy gossip, although D’Arcy highlights the different purposes that gossip plays: “For Susie and Sandy it is entertainment; something to fill the working day,” but for Veronica and Margot it is a way of embellishing lives and “bragging about their own and their children’s successes.” In being a writer, D’Arcy explains that she “was not enticed” by the prospect of writing and that she did not think that she had “the creative scope” to move beyond her initial attempts. Yet D’Arcy highlights her intention to develop a sense of irony in her play. She emphasises her message about gossip, highlighting the irony that Sandy and Susie criticise the gossip of women who enter their shop, but are not aware of their own predilection for gossip. Her writing focuses on the dark undertones of a supposedly light situation. It seems that D’Arcy’s reflections on her experience of writing are transferable to her future as a teacher. In knowing about writing, she lays bare her perceived (in)ability to write. At the same time, she extends her reflections to understand and problematise the teaching of writing in schools.

Story 5: Kathleen Parkes’ Broken and Dancing Like some of the other authors, Kathleen Parkes offers a portfolio of two pieces of writing: a poem, Broken, and a story, Dancing. Parkes’ poem focuses on her feelings of torment when a close relative was diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness. Her state of knowing and feeling sorrow was translated into the repetition of the poem:

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I feel I feel sick I am twisted … I feel like … I feel as though I feel like … I feel that …

Parkes explains that she did not want to obscure the “rawness” of the experience and her choice of metaphoric language and imagery (re)creates the pain – “stabbed with a dagger,” “pierced with the lightning of a thousand storms,” and “cheeks eroded by the thousands of tears.” She reflects on the therapeutic benefits of being a writer and acknowledges the challenges and the benefits of the editing process. In Dancing, Parkes moves away from the darkness of her poem, to do some “reminiscing on the better times,” before the diagnosis that had brought the “darkness of sickness.” She expresses a preference for descriptive language to indicate this time and to create “the intricate details of the evening” when the characters are “suddenly enthralled and delighted by the love and beauty that surrounds them.” In doing her writing, Parkes feels that she has created a “fragile moment, captured in memories or words, delicate and fading, like a photograph captured in time.” Responding to this through her reading, the editor as teacher and researcher concludes that “love, and the loss of love, is pivotal” to writing and “writers’ understandings of themselves, their relationships and their place in the world.”

Conclusion Although the analysis of the writing in Chapter 8 was brief, it demonstrated the way that each of the students took on the role of writer. Many of their stories built on meaningful personal experiences of the past or the present, and the opportunity to write allowed them to write their worlds into textual form. The context of the university classroom offered an environment in which writing was encouraged and indeed expected. As some of the writers explained, their teacher Janice offered ideas and support, while providing a context within which they could take risks and try out ideas for writing. In this context, the students could ‘be’ writers. It became apparent from their reflections that the context allowed them to try new ways of doing writing. They experimented with the resources of Luke and Freebody’s model (e.g., Freebody, 2004; 1982; Luke & Freebody, 1999), focusing

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particularly on semantic and pragmatic decisions to enhance the texts they were creating. It was also apparent that considerations around codebreaking along with a focus on figurative language meant that the novice writers were learning to know about the craft of writing. Their doing of writing clearly had two main effects. On the one hand, the writers wanted to enhance their writing skills and to produce readable and meaningful texts. It seemed that they had taken on the identities of writers and were doing the work that writers do. On the other hand, they could see that learning to be, know and do writing can have greater longterm effects. To this end, there was some reflection on the implications for their futures as teachers and opportunities to share their learning with others. Their journeys as writers, towards being, knowing and doing writing, have the potential to transform and enthuse future writers. This transformational potential is an example of Fairclough’s (2001) context-interaction-text model in action. The model argues for a dialectical relationship between social structures and events or actions, in this case writing. Social structures are often theorised as constraining what can be done. However, a dialectical relationship means that events and actions are not only constrained, but they can enable change in the broader social context. This means that we can consider how the production of writing and the learning that has resulted from the writing that was produced and published in Chapter 8 can impact on broader social structures. There would seem to be potential for learnings for teacher education. In the current educational context, where the push for standardised testing and increased accountability seems to be resulting in a narrowing of curriculum and associated “teaching to the test” (see Mills, 2008, p. 212), it is important to make room for teachers and teacher educators to advocate the merits of opportunities for writing for creative purposes, for purposes other than those that meet the academic requirements of the political agenda. Luke (2002) argued that educational researchers often engage in critique but avoid getting their “hands dirty with the sticky matter of what educationally is to be done” (p. 54). Similarly, I argue that teachers often complain about educational change that is imposed, but they do not always offer new ways forward or advocate for rethinking how educational practice might be ‘done.’ The writing of Chapter 8, however, exemplifies opportunities for future teachers to become writers, to be able to talk from their experiences as writers, and to advocate for a renewed emphasis on a range of writing forms. Without realising it, the authors of Chapter 8 have demonstrated the effect of Fairclough’s (2001) model – of the potential to influence and

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change practices through experiencing writing as a writer. Indeed, Claire D’Arcy, Lorrae Charles, Jaclyn Fitzgerald, Kathleen Parkes and Natalie Romanet have already shown that they are willing to get their hands dirty with what might be done and, as a result, there is much to learn from their efforts. Just as Alfred Noyes’ poem The highwayman has been memorable for me, the writing of Chapter 8 has established the importance of students, or more specifically pre-service teachers, experiencing a writer’s journey of being, doing and knowing and advocating for these experiences to inform practice.

References Barton, D., Hamilton, M., & Ivanic, R. (2000). Introduction: Exploring situated literacies. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton & R. Ivanic (Eds.), Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (pp. 1-6). London: Routledge. Butt, D., Fahey, R., Feez, S., Spinks, S., & Yallop, C. (2000). Using functional grammar: An explorer's guide (2nd ed.). Sydney: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research. Derewianka, B. (2011). A new grammarcompanion for teachers. Marrickville Metro, NSW: e-lit, Primary English Teaching Association. Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and power (2nd ed.). London: Longman. Freebody, P. (2004). Foreword: Hindsight and foresight: Putting the four roles model of reading to work in the daily business of teaching. In A. Healy & E. Honan (Eds.), Text next: New resources for literacy learning (pp. 3-17). Newtown, NSW: Primary English Teaching Association. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. P. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. Westport: Bergin & Garvin. Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (2nd ed.). London: Falmer Press. —. (2004). Situated language and learning: A critique of traditional school. New York: Routledge. Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). A short introduction to functional grammarLondon: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1985). Language, context and text: Aspects of language in a social semiotic perspective. Geelong, Vic.: Deakin University Press. Heath, S. B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11, 49-76.

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—. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henderson, R. (2005). A Faircloughian approach to CDA: Principled eclecticism or a method searching for a theory? Melbourne Studies in Education, 46(2), 9-24. —. (2008). A boy behaving badly: Investigating teachers' assumptions about gender, behaviour, mobility and literacy learning. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 31(1), 74-87. —. (2009). Itinerant farm workers' children in Australia: Learning from the experiences of one family. In P. A. Danaher, M. Kenny & J. Remy Leder (Eds.), Traveller, nomadic and migrant education (pp. 46-58). New York: Routledge. Linkon, S. L. (2011). Literary learning: Teaching the English major. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Luke, A. (2002). Curriculum, ethics, metanarrative: Teaching and learning beyond the nation. Curriculum Perspectives, 22(1), 49-55. Luke, A., & Freebody, P. (1999). A map of possible practices: Further notes on the four resources model. Practically Primary, 4(2), 5-8. Macedo, D. P. (1994). Literacies of power: What Americans are not allowed to know. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Mills, K. A. (2008). Will large-scale assessments raise literacy standards in Australian schools? Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 31(3), 211-225. Moje, E. B., & Lewis, C. (2007). Examining opportunities to learn literacy: The role of critical sociocultural literacy research. In C. Lewis, P. Enciso & E. B. Moje (Eds.), Reframing sociocultural research on literacy: Identity, agency, and power (pp. 15-48). New York: Routledge. Stephens, K. (2000). A critical discussion of the 'new literacy studies'. British Journal of Educational Studies, 48(1), 10-23. Street, B. V. (1997). The implications of the "New Literacy Studies" for literacy education. English in Education, 31(3), 45-59.

PART III: WRITING FOR PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL TRANSFORMATION

Introduction In the chapters that constitute Part 3 of this work, the authors bring a close focus to writing as a transformative and knowledge-creating experience. They suggest that writing makes transparent the complex layers of thought and experience that form personal and professional identity, making visible the hidden processes of power in research partnerships. The authors recognise moments of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997a, 1997b, 2002) where cognitive, affective and artistic knowledges and processes of thinking align; they acknowledge the power of writing for transforming knowledge into practices of teaching and learning (Dressel & Langreiter, 2003; Pack, 2011; Schon, 1987; Wegerif, 2010), and consider the potential for those processes to give birth to wisdom. In Chapter 10, Constraints, creativity and challenges for educators and students writing together, Janice Jones brings together the writings of undergraduate teachers as they overcome constraints to translate their personal experience of creative writing into practices of teaching that are relational, constructivist and transformative. She offers the caveat that personal and institutional habitus act as breaks upon this important and liberating approach to writing with others. The authors of Chapter 11 challenge the ‘seeming’ of everyday life, offering layered representations of what seems to be and what is believed to be whilst hinting at the space and freedom of becoming. In Melissa Andrews’ play, power dynamics disrupt the quotidian. Matthew Hunt’s teenage protagonist finds escape as the hero of a multiplayer game. John Mulroney’s poem re-presents the turbulent and confusing world of adulthood from a quieter space, and Stephanie Rex takes form as an imagined self with greater power over the world. Natalie Romanet’s concluding and meditative poem creates a place of shared stillness. Calling upon concepts raised in the preceding chapter, in Chapter 12 Patrick Danaher locates pre-service teachers’ writings within broader

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frameworks of contemporary educational scholarship, linking the themes of seeming, being and becoming with the relationship between lifelong learning and writing as research. Ali Black’s Chapter 13 interweaves the voices of experienced early childhood teachers with her own self-questioning as she considers meaning-making, dissonance and disruptive inquiry. For Black, a troubling awareness of disequilibrium in research brings a re-examination of relationships of power, and the potential for transformation. Part three, and this body of writings by pre-service teachers and researchers concludes with Roberta (Bobby) Harreveld’s wise and delicately considered re-framing of key issues for writing and research in Chapter 14. Patrick Blessinger’s Afterword enacts a dialogic conversation with Lesley Saunders’ Foreword to this book, confirming the power and importance of writing as a measure of our humanity and as a mode of creating and challenging what is and what seems to be. Blessinger speaks to processes of education and research that give meaning to what it is to be human in the 21st century, forefronting the importance of writing for our individual and shared creative futures

References Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997a). Finding flow. Psychology Today, 30(4), 5. —. (1997b). Flow and creativity. NAMTA Journal 22(2), 38. doi: EJ547968 —. (2002). Flow : the classic work on how to achieve happiness (Rev. ed. ed.). London: Rider. Dressel, G., & Langreiter, N. (2003). When "We Ourselves" become our own field of research. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 4(2), 27. Pack, M. (2011). More than you know: critically reflecting on learning experiences by attuning to the 'community of learners'. Reflective Practice, 12(1), 115-125. doi: 10.1080/14623943.2011.542080 Schon, D. A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Towards a new design for teaching and learning in the professions (First ed.). San Francisco, CA. Wegerif, R. (2010). Mind expanding: teaching for thinking and creativity in primary education. Berkshire, England: Open University Press.

CHAPTER TEN CONSTRAINTS, CREATIVITY AND CHALLENGES: EDUCATORS AND STUDENTS WRITING TOGETHER JANICE K. JONES WITH PAULINE DOBBIE, KIM FOX, NATALIE KERSNOVSKE, JACLYN FITZGERALD, SOPHIE FITZGERALD, JENNY HOANG, TOMMY HA AND MELANIE HARRIS

Abstract Australia’s national curriculum calls for the prioritisation of teaching and learning in literacies, and the requirement for schools to familiarise students with a broad range of literature. Teachers are required to engage children in creating plays, stories and poems in traditional and multimodal forms. Similarly, universities providing teacher education programs must prepare future teachers who have a deep understanding of the creative processes involved in thinking about, writing and editing such works, across a range of audiences and genres. Drawing upon the experiences of pre-service teachers in their co-writing with young students, the author considers how writing within literary genres may support possibility thinking, relational and dialogic pedagogies and learner agency, and what challenges and constraining factors may operate upon the teacher-writer partnership.

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Introduction – Contextual challenges Researchers in education in the United Kingdom and United States have raised concerns that experiences of writing that are fulfilling, joyous, exploratory, creative and literary are diminishing in schools and universities (Meyer & Whitmore, 2013; Myhill & Wilson, 2013) as institutions respond to government requirements for consistent and regulated curricula, testing and reporting. Government inspectors of schools have reported concerns (Office for Standards in Education Children’s Services and Skills, 2012) at the impact of ‘busy’ and inflexible teaching practices upon the quality of learners’ experiences of writing and making meaning, observing that The desire to complete all elements of the planned lesson meant that the writing task could not be completed and the fast movement from one activity to another limited studentsெ development of new learning or their consolidation of existing learning. This pattern is noted regularly by inspectors (2012, p. 13, section 17.)

However, they suggest also that in some schools creative planning and pedagogies have been highly productive, with students’ ‘Home’ class teachers sharing the teaching role with creative partners who support ‘Away’ time outside the planned program, for greater creativity: Examples of ‘Away’ topics include ‘Short stories; reading and writing’, ‘Gothic in film and literature’, ‘Reading and writing thrillers’. Teachers and students are very enthusiastic about this programme and there is evidence that it increases motivation for both staff and students and encourages more independent learning (2012, p. 23, Section 44.)

In Chapter 1 pre-service teachers framed their personal experience of creating literary works in terms of challenges. These included: fear of the empty page; the call to write in a meaningful way and from a unique personal experience and context (Wilson, 2009); the anxiety of sharing work with peers and the teacher; the tension between the need to share a story and concerns about disclosure; the need for incubation time and quiet time before and during writing; the desire for tactful and positive support in crafting and editing works; the importance of trust between writer and reader during the birthing process of a literary work (e.g., Cremin & Myhill, 2012), and in support of the sharing of more polished works. In Chapters 3, 6 and 8 and in Chapter 11, pre-service teachers have generously shared their original writings. They have reflected upon those

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challenges, but also upon the joy of creating works that speak from and to a personal connection with family, and from the land (Trahar, 2013). For the authors who have shared their works, and also for those who chose not to do so their reflections indicate that the experience of writing has allowed a re-connecting of personal and professional knowledges (Wilson & Myhill, 2012), and for some of those authors the experience has been transformative. Writing that has a creative intent, therefore, attends to the human factor in education (Adu-Febiri, 2011). In this chapter, pre-service teachers reflect upon their experience of transferring their learning as beginning writers, to their practice as beginning teachers of writing.

From being a writer – to becoming a teacher of writing As they embraced the challenge to write, pre-service teachers spoke of their struggles in selecting a suitable topic, and in finding a balance between disclosure and desire to share stories ready to be told (Chapter 1). As writers, they showed a clear understanding of the kinds of pedagogical support and the spaces for creativity that they required and expected from me as their teacher. Pre-service teachers’ priorities were: a) Time in which to think about and choose a topic and approach that suited their interest and personal preferences. b) No pressure to share works at any stage. c) A safe and supportive space in which to learn from others, and where work could be shared if and when the writer felt ready. d) Timely, tactful and useful feedback. e) Positive encouragement at all points of the process, and particularly on the first sharing of a draft. f) Being respected and treated as an individual (open choice of topic, language, genre language, and mode of presentation). These codes or practices have long been recognised as being fundamental to respectful teaching approaches (e.g., Dewey, 1897), and they were reflected in the ways in which safe and supportive processes were negotiated within this course in which pre-service teachers experienced writing. Similarly, in working with a younger writer, undergraduates were encouraged not to plan formal teaching sessions, but to negotiate topics and approaches with the learner. In many cases this resulted in rich and memorable experiences for both participants. However, in others, preservice teachers did not seem able to make the connection between their personal experience as writers, and their practices as teachers of writing. It

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would be unrealistic to imagine that all participants in a course would be able to transfer a reflexive awareness of their experience as beginning writers to their professional practice, particularly within the constraints of a university course, and in the context of formal teaching practice as part of their program. However, a pattern began to emerge over the three years of the course offer, which raised questions about the real and perceived constraints informing our thinking and practices as educators and writers, in universities and in schools. The following examples of pre-service teachers’ practices and reflections on their teaching of writing include three examples where the anonymised authors struggled to transfer their personal understanding of writing into their practice of teaching. Following this, examples of more learnercentred and creative practices by pre-service teachers are offered, with reflections from several educators indicating that they and their students became partners in writing.

External constraints and the power of habitus Was becoming a writer perceived by some pre-service teachers as an experience distinct from their teaching of writing? Transforming our practice demands our connecting of knowledge and experience to bring understanding – and changes in our thinking and actions. For those preservice teachers who did not make that transfer of personal to professional learning, it is important to consider what factors may have impacted. The following descriptions illustrate the challenges facing newly qualified teachers of writing – and their responses.

Example 1: Teaching to the test – all work and no play Pre-service teacher Shirley (name anonymised) worked with a year 5 student (age 10 – 11 years): One on one sessions took place during the students (sic) lunch break and she would also write drafts at home as extra part of her homework. These sessions ran two days a week for the two weeks leading up to the NAPLAN test. This enabled the student to have a fresh mind when taking part in the testing.

Shirley noted that the child was “highly motivated” to do well in the NAPLAN tests. This detail offers an insight into how the broader sociopolitical reframing of education as a supplier of creative talent and knowledge for a global economy may impact at the level of the child.

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Teaching sessions took place over two weeks during the student’s lunch and play times. This erosion of the child’s free time may appear to suggest a lack of empathy on the part of the educator. However, it is consistent with responses by many pre-service teachers over a three year period, where they report intensive sessions with children during lunch or play breaks, after school, and at weekends. Further research will be required to establish whether such accounts are accurate, or whether they are fabrications aimed at gaining higher marks in return for lecturer’s rewarding future educators for their evidence of diligent planning and practice. This does not suggest that a generation of educators lacks compassion but rather that these responses point to a commodification of pre-service teachers and students’ thinking: education is about meeting targets. Joe Onosko citing Gewertz (2010) contends that the shadow of testing impacts upon entire states in the USA, and is expressed through schools’ manipulation of students’ lives in the interests of higher test scores: “Kentucky’s student exclusion rate on testing day jumped 300%, from 2% in 2007 to more than 6% in 2009”. This and Example 2 (Geraldine) below, give weight to Fiona Patrick’s concern (2013) that while the rhetoric of education emphasises the student’s needs, these “are narrowly defined as ‘learning’ needs within a model that reduces learning to a series of teaching inputs designed to meet pre-specified outcomes” (p.4). The first examples include three pre-service teachers’ experiences of teaching writing. These suggest a commodification of the roles of teacher and student: writing is presented as part of broader processes, outputs and measures of success. Pre-service teachers’ reflections echo the discourse of production processes, and the terms of external frameworks for testing and reporting (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2010) rather than responding to the rhetoric of creativity, diversity and equity in government documents (Onosko, 2011). In some cases pre-service teachers seemed insensitive to the rights of the child to play and rest: young children were subjected to hours of adult interventions and planning beyond their existing schooling and homework commitments. This finding is consistent with those of other researchers (Guldberg, 2009; Timimi, 2010), who point to a diminution of physical and temporal spaces within which children may play (Malone, 2007) particularly within urban environments (Louv, 2010; Meier, 2000); where adults’ management of young lives is all pervasive (Baines & Slutsky, 2009; Gatto, 2005); and where young people are defined “in terms of a series of market-like choices” (Devine & Luttrell, 2013, p. 242).

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Where children, and in particular adolescent boys (Mercogliano, 1998, Jones, 2008) and their families do not comply with these processes and timelines they are labelled as problematic and subject to interventions: compliance is enforced through punishment (Clarke, 1980; Skiba & Peterson, 1999) or pharmaceutical controls (Abraham, 2010; Timimi, 2010) in a climate of zero tolerance.

Example 2: The treadmill: plan, correct, re-draft, polish Geraldine writes (anonymised): Once we had worked through the features and the structure of persuasive text we could then move on to writing. Instead of jumping ahead and starting writing first, I urged the student to write the graphic organiser. At first she struggled, stating that she had not used an organiser before, but once I explained what was required of her she effectively completed the organiser. Once the student had completed the organizer we went back through it together making sure she had included everything required and fixed up any spelling and grammatical mistakes….I then encouraged the student to use the organizer to assist her in completing her rough draft. Once the student had completed her draft I then marked it, noting down any points that needed improvement.

The culture of practice that has brought pre-service teachers success over their four years of study appears to frame their response to this assessment task, and for many finds expression in a re-configuration of ‘scaffolding’ (Vygotsky, 1978) as a step by step process guided by an educator who, in turn, works within curriculum frameworks. The impact of this framing is to constitute a habitus for educators at all levels. Within global systems of education this appears to work against the creative impulse (e.g., Myhill & Wilson, 2013). It also runs counter to relational and land-and- community-informed ways of learning and teaching that have been an expression of indigenous peoples’ methods for learning (Chapter 5) since ancient times. Writing and our approaches to the teaching of writing, are an expression of the broader health of systemic educational practices. In the United States, a ‘Race to the Top’ has increased pressure upon teachers, schools and children in formal education, with Onosko citing a media report by King (2010): “Last spring, 8% of kindergarteners (one of every 12, over 300 kids) in the city of Indianapolis failed school and are repeating the grade this year.” Onosko notes a similar proportion of New York State students were held back to repeat a Kindergarten year. In social and emotional terms, and for a person of any age, but particularly for

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young learners, having to repeat an entire year of activities with a new cohort of peers is a diminishing experience for the individual who is separated from his or her peer group. In Australia, a report by Helen McGrath (2006) indicates that the percentages are even higher than those of the USA with “14% -18% of all Australian students” repeating a year, and particularly during their first four years of formal education (2006, p. 49). McGrath reports that the long-term impacts of students’ failure to keep pace with systemic requirements has lasting and damaging impacts upon individuals’ social, economic and mental health prospects. For these reasons, the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of our teaching of writing is important. Increasingly, government roll-out of hand-held technologies seeks to bridge the gap between their intent that children, teachers and schools meet external and competitive benchmarks – and the need to create a space for creativity.

Example 3: Technologies supporting teacher-centred pedagogies Elena (name anonymised) commences by asking a Year 2 child to compare and analyse two characters as ‘visual texts’ on an iPad. Then follows a brainstorming activity during which the teacher draws a diagram for the child’s use, mapping the ideas that the teacher has noted during her discussion with the child. The child is then given a further two images as texts to analyse and left to create her own diagram. She is then encouraged to write about each character. However, her writing at this point is treated as a ‘draft’ piece. Elena annotates the student’s work: To help the learner edit her work, I circled the incorrect words and worked beside her to try and sound them out. The learner was successful in correcting some of the words through sounding out strategies; we used the dictionary to explore the spelling for the other words. This was a successful strategy as the learner was able to look through the dictionary to find the word and we were also able to discuss the meaning of these words.

Elena continues, with the subtext of her description indicating that perhaps the child was tired, or losing interest: Stage 3 of the task was completed a few hours after Stage 2 was finished so the learner could have a break from the task. Stage 3 of this task was very laid back. During this stage the learner typed her work onto the computer, did a final edit through spell check and added a picture to reflect her character preference.

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The shift to digital hand-held tools appears to offer scope for childemergent learning, but in this situation neither the tools, nor the pedagogies allow for the child’s agency and imagination. The educator herself seems bored, and the throwaway description of the culminating task suggests a lack of awareness of the child’s experience as she labours over the final piece.

Constraining personal and cultural frameworks re-inscribe habitus Pre-service teachers have been enculturated through their own schooling, and subsequently during their years in a Bachelor of Education program to believe that compliance brings rewards. Janet Sheppard (2010) reports that pre-service teachers’ ability to recognise and respond to the overt and hidden codes of lecturer and systemic values and requirements means a greater chance of high grades, and enhanced potential for employment in a fiercely competitive market. Increasingly, undergraduates’ experience of secondary education has featured high-stakes testing and their success within those systems has been a framing experience. Similarly, university programs for teacher education are required to demonstrate highly structured and progressive experiences where academic content, pedagogical practices and professional standards for entry to the field are embedded throughout (Australian Insitute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2011; Queensland College of Teachers, 2009). This limits what can be taught, how students may progress through a program and over what period of time, and under what conditions they may graduate. External bodies at state and national level such as the Queensland College of Teachers or the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) apply a further layer of requirements for acceptance into the profession, so that universities in that jurisdiction tailor their programs to meet those standards. For universities competing within global markets, teacher education programs have been informed by successive governments’ neoliberal policies at national level (Furlong, 2013; Robertson, 2007). In Australia, the United Kingdom, and increasingly within the United States, policies have positioned education as the engine room for global competition, and for a creative and adaptive workforce (Torres, 2013). The means to achieve that end has been framed within the language of factory production: outputs, benchmarks, processes, standards. Ellis et al (2013) report the impact of neoliberal policy upon university courses for teacher education in the United Kingdom

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Any university or college whose provision was not judged to be ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted is no longer guaranteed a core allocation of students and in the 2013–2014 allocations, many well-known universities and programmes had zero allocations (p. 278).

Is it any surprise that pre-service teachers’ practices are framed by these discourses? In spite of our best efforts to reflect, critically analyse and transform our practice, the combined influences of personal and professional habitus (Wacquant, 2005) and a culture where education is governed by the “market logic of efficiency, competitiveness and profitability” (Bockman, 2013, p. 15) appear to act as brakes upon independent thinking and creative practice (Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). The types of cultural capital for which educators are rewarded and recognized (Bourdieu, 1992) mean that with every good intent, future educators are showing what they know (Ellis et al., 2013). Where the power of a hidden curriculum, as discussed by Giroux (1981; 2000, 1997) Holt (1984) and Wink (2005), was an expression of covert control, a curriculum of compliance is now both overt (De Lissovoy, 2011; Giroux, 2011) and transnational (Furlong, 2013; Levinson, Blackwood, & Cross, 2013), and expressed through policy and process at school and university. For those at the bottom of hierarchical systems, such as the young students in the preceding examples, a culture of compliance (Gatto, 2005) is embodied in their dutiful labour during hours of repetitive drafting (Myhill & Wilson, 2013): their joy in writing is crushed.

Relational spaces for writing Fortunately, many of the participants during each offer of the course created unique and relational spaces within which they and learners cooperated in the creation of written works. Pre-service teacher accounts of their practice included structured processes and an acknowledgement of the need to adhere to external curricula. However, each of the examples that follow demonstrates approaches where the teachers have brought humour, interest, and a rich array of experiences into their work with younger writers. At their best, and as described by Wilson (2013), such writing experiences were exciting, tender and respectful, with both teacher and student engaged in the unfolding transformation of their understandings. The Aristotelian philosophy (1908) that education should bring happiness emerges through the following accounts of writing. Counterbalancing discourses of education as a factory, the pre-service teachers in these instances created spaces within which more imaginative and literary forms of writing were supported.

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Creating a visual narrative: Jenny Hoang with Tommy Ha Jenny worked with her peer Tommy Ha engaging in a dialogic process as they enacted time, place and character in a graphic novel. Through Jenny’s attention to her learning partner’s interests and commitments they formed a creative partnership based upon synergies in their ways of working, and their shared respect for the work of Shaun Tan (2006). Jenny’s lively and insightful analysis illustrates the capacity of visual narratives to transcend language and culture. She presents the writing partnership as a creative dance within which agency and learning are negotiated. Jenny writes: Tommy is currently studying at university. He has had prior experiences in creating story boards since he has also studied Film, Television and New Media in high school. He enjoys reading comics and manga. As a hobby he practices sketching and designing characters and is currently developing his own indie video game as a side-activity when he has time. At the time when I gave him this activity he was inundated with assessments, so I told him to take as long as he needed to complete this activity. It took roughly one week. In introducing the task, I had discussed with Tommy my own comic (at the time ‘The Queen’s Request’ was in its planning stages) and I wanted to see if he was interested in creating a comic too. We discussed the challenges, various ideas and the new things I had learnt. He enjoyed looking at my progress and decided that he wanted to create a comic too. This activity was mainly done for fun. As Tommy had his own assessments to complete I had decided to give him a short and simple task: creating a one page comic with no words. The focus of the task was to emulate the flow of time, giving readers a sense of a short or long length of time. It was challenging to restrict the use of words, so that the character’s actions and her environment would portray the plot. Thus the thinking, planning and editing was the most important part, not the quality of visual images. I had given Tommy an example that had a similar theme to the task. The picture book called The Arrival by Shaun Tan (2006) was a very useful resource as it illustrates the plot without the use of written text and focuses on the actions of the characters. In completing this task, my learner had quiet time to complete his work, however, I would check his progress and I would give him feedback and question his actions and ideas. We agreed to use Photoshop CS5 to draw the comic, as it would be neater than drawing on paper and easier to edit with.

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Stage 1: Planning and thinking During this stage I worked closely with my learner. We both looked for useful websites and tutorial videos that were interesting and helpful. Even though it was an activity for him, I was looking for new things to learn in order to improve my own draft for ‘The Queen’s Request’. We also looked at other examples of comics and Manga, looking at the various ways they utilised the panels to illustrate time. We found that diagonal panels give an action-feel to the visual flow. The larger the panels the more time it took for readers to read the page, giving it a longer sense of time. The smaller the panels, the shorter the sense of time and the faster the action is especially if accompanied with movement lines or blurs. He discussed with me his idea for his plot: it had a basic concept of a man going on a treasure hunt, where he ages in the process of looking for treasure. He wanted his story to have a climax at the end of his story, not in the middle. After deciding on the plot, he started to plan out his panels (Fig. 10-1)

Figure 10-1: (A4 canvas size on Photoshop CS5) first layout

Tommy started drawing his character and background (Figure 10-1) but he found they were not suitable to his theme. He reflected on his panels and compared them to some other manga: with fewer boxes it would be more appealing. Thus Tommy moved around his panels (Figure 10-2).

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Figure 10-2: S Simplified layoout

Figure 10-3: D Diagonal panel creates a moree dynamic feel

As Tomm my continuedd drawing he struggled withh the panel ab bove (Fig 10-3). He w wanted to illuustrate how the t character is aging. Hee initially thought of hhaving two sm mall panels.

Tommy comments on o his use off images, fraames and contexts What I’ve ddone for the firrst frame (Fig g 10-4) is to m make it the esttablishing shot, givingg the readers an insight to what the stooryboard is ab bout. The compositionn is nothing faancy: it’s justt framed in thhe centre whicch allows the reader tto easily readd the treasure map. There is some sligh ht use of leading linees which genntly direct thee reader tow wards the map p. Empty background provides purre focus on th he map. The next frame (F Fig 10-5) attempts to sshow that a loong time has passed p and thee character haas aged as he spent a loot of time tryinng to find the treasure. A laarge frame waas used to contrast agaainst the prevvious smaller frames, hopinng to give it a longer

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‘beat’. There are leading lines which help guide the readers from the left to the right, changing focus from when the character was young to the older version on the right. The use of perspective was designed to make the young character smallest and the old character the largest, kind of like a timeline situation.

Figure 10-4: The map

Figure 10-5: The character ageing

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Jenny: I searched for information online, and [found a representation of Superman ageing over time]. This was the panel that Tommy struggled to fix – but the ageing Superman image helped Tommy create Figure 10-5. Jenny reflects: Overall, this had given me the experience of looking at the fine details of implementing a creative writing activity. During this experience I learnt with my learner, which I found very valuable. This experience has also given me insight into the challenges that students and I may face when implementing a similar activity, such as time management, locating resources and students’ questions or concerns with their writing. However, I believe with more experience and flexibility I would be capable of confidently implementing a creative writing activity similar to this. Janice observes: “The Arrival” referred to by Jenny is a powerful visual narrative of insider-outsider and transnational identities, displacement and space (Dony, 2012). Jenny also refers to a blogsite where Naruto Manga is analysed for its visual and narrative power to tell stories through images and text as graphic forms. She and Tommy strive to emulate the narrative density and “appealing richness” (telophase, 2005, para. 4) of these texts.

Kim Fox reflects on the challenge of teaching a younger writer While I do believe it is important to teach students the elements of poetry, my opinion now is that it is more important to experience poetry. So, it is acceptable not to get the iambic pentameter right every time, or to get your metaphors and similes confused. However, what is important is to consider “Why does this poem touch me? What meanings do I get from the words, and how has the writer conveyed that message?” In my classroom I would like to have students interact with as many different types of poetry as possible, so as to compare them and in order to justify their likes and dislikes. My hope is that this will help them to create a work that, while it may not be perfect, will allow the student to write about something that means a lot to them. That’s when I had my light-bulb moment. Surely students in classrooms all over Australia have the same feeling when they walk into a classroom, take their homework home, or have to work on projects outside of school. While this revelation in no way relates specifically to the writing process it was the first link I made during this

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assessment; and it has shaped my interactions with students within my practical experience of teaching. I no longer plan lessons that rely on a didactic introductory phase; my intent is to capture attention and excitement, to foster the hunger to learn more – not to feed that voice in some students’ heads that screams ‘School is boring.’ I have found myself having a YouTube video relating to a topic playing as students come in, finding songs that help learn and retain information, and even, on occasions when that didactic beast must be used, breaking the routine by having a dance break or stretching to music. The success of my lessons after incorporating this has been amazing. Students walk in to class ready to learn, ready to see how we will start a lesson today. For example, my blue- tacking many pinwheels of different sizes and colours to the board and having them all spinning as the students walked in certainly made teaching the subject of ‘Forces’ a lot more fun! Editor’s note: Kim was on teaching practice, working with a small group of students. As part of an assessment set out under the C2C guidelines (Education Queensland, 2013), students were asked to take a stereotypical character, and from this to reverse the character’s attributes and appearance. [Students then had to write a narrative using this new character]. I found this highly challenging. I was tasked to assist the child whose work is shown (Fig 6). My young writer struggled with the concept of reversing the stereotype within the narrative, as well as struggling with punctuation and correct grammar. While my task of guiding him in grammar and punctuation seemed easy in theory, I found that taking what I knew academically and filtering it so that a student of eight years old who has trouble with English as a subject could understand the task, was challenging. The first day we worked on this he said to me “Mrs Fox, you sound like the dictionary.” This made me think about what I was doing and saying. I asked him how I sounded like a dictionary, to which he replied “You just keep saying words I don’t know”. The words ‘punctuation’, ‘verb’, and ‘sentence structure’, meant nothing to him. I needed to be more explicit, demonstrating what I meant by using his words so he could make the connection between the “dictionary”, and how this directly affected him.

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Figure 10-6: Reversing stereotypes – 8 year old student’s writing

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The biggest challenge, however, was guiding an assessment task without affecting the piece of writing that was developed. The work had to be all his own, I could only edit and keep him on task. I found it terribly difficult to walk that fine line between guiding as editor and teacher, and actually helping construct a piece of writing. How much could I help before the work was no longer his own? I found the best way for me was to use the narrative he had already written as bricks from which he could build more. He would write “Then one day I was sent to Grandma’s house...” and have no idea what should come next. I could not tell him what to write or the work would belong to us both and now be truly his. So I would ask him to think back to his character and how his character had to change. What would your character do or feel about going to Grandmas? You have written down that “this” happened, what would your character do next? These were common questions that I found myself asking to help guide the process of from thought, to words on the page. This task definitely made me reflect on how I speak to students of varying age and ability levels; what words am I using and how am I demonstrating this in such a way that the content of the dialogue is equal to the language and understanding level of the audience. I have learnt that I truly need to address students as complete individuals, not just with different needs and interests, but also with different understandings, background knowledge and abilities; abilities they sometimes hide so as not to seem “unsmart” as my author told me. This is even more important when guiding the writing process of a child. You need to be able to find a way to connect on their level; they hear you in a way that makes sense to them. This doesn’t always mean using different words or asking different questions, sometimes it can involve no speech at all, with all the information being transmitted through demonstrations. Students rely on the teacher for guidance, and when that guidance is not differentiated to work at the student’s level it will be of no assistance.

Melanie Harris reflects When I began writing I encountered difficulties with the flow and I felt that this was largely due to the fact that I was concentrating too much on the technical elements and not immersing myself enough in the story. Once I decided to work on the technical side later (and hope that it just came through naturally) I found that poems seemed to emerge more easily. After this I found myself having trouble stopping. The most challenging

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element of my writing experience was actually sharing it on study desk and I can now relate to how my students must feel sharing their poems with their peers. In a classroom situation I would like to give students the opportunity to write a play which leads to the experience of performing. I feel this would allow more of a connection with the script and perhaps for students who felt the same difficulty in writing as I did would benefit from seeing their scripts “come to life”.

Melanie Harris reflects on her work with a younger writer The creative writing piece (Fig.10-7) was written by a student in my year two practicum class. The first draft was extremely rough due to the abilities of the student and the time constraints placed upon her due to the nature of the school timetable. Initially, the most difficult element of assisting the student was to stop myself from correcting her spelling: I had to constantly remind myself that in order for the student to learn from her mistakes, she had to correct them herself. The challenge for revising her work came from our different levels of understanding and experience of how a text should flow. To the student, the areas which I had highlighted for her did not seem incorrect and my explanations were sometimes too complicated for her to understand. During the process of helping the student, I came to appreciate the gap in understandings between us and the implications this had for my future teaching. It can become very easy to overestimate what young students know and what they can do. In future, stepping back and asking more questions of the student will help me alleviate some of the issues I encountered. Poetry has an extremely important role in education and I always seem to try and include examples of poetry in my teaching as I feel that the rhythms and rhymes poems include make the technical elements easier for children to understand and remember. Even young children love writing poetry and enjoying the sound of the poems they have created being read aloud. I did learn during this activity that letting the student lead the process is vital and that although you may feel that you are helping by pushing them along at times, the end result for the student is better if they construct their own knowledge themselves. I really enjoyed the process of helping this student with her work. Seeing her happy and proud of the end result made the challenges worthwhile. I look forward to working with many more students and seeing the exciting possibilities and ideas which emerge from students who have a uniquely imaginative basis when compared to that of adults.

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Figure 10-7: Year 2 student’s poem

Pauline Dobbie reflects on her work with younger writers Editor’s note: Pauline was on teaching practice, working with a small group of students. In the National Curriculum C2C documents (Education Queensland, 2013) given to me by my mentor teacher, the topics consisted of Identifying poetic features; Structure and language in poems; Comparing poems and texts; and Creating a poetry reconstruction. Because of the young age of the students (Grade 2) I requested they reconstruct a favourite or well-known nursery rhyme. These are two of the students’ reconstructed works: Tommy had a slimy snake (Reconstruction of Mary Had a Little Lamb). Tommy had a slimy snake Its skin was smooth as slate. And every night when Tommy slept He’d go out on a date.

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I began by immersing the students in a range of familiar and new poems and nursery rhymes by reading books and internet resources to them, and they reading to me. The students thoroughly enjoyed a variety of poems; some made them laugh while others made them think. Following this I was able to refer to these resources while stepping the students through the process of learning about and understanding poetry. To identify poetic features we discussed and learnt how to establish the audience and purpose of poetry, how to identify the topic, how visual images and different print features can enhance the understanding and enjoyment of poetry, how to recognise rhyming words and rhythms in poetry and what we can do to make poetry more engaging when reading it to others. To learn to identify and understand structure and language in poetry we discussed the use of nouns and noun groups, how to identify and use different structures, how to identify and use rhythmic and syllable patterns with punctuation and how these features would need to be considered when reconstructing a poem. When we began to compare poems, we considered similarities and differences in a variety of poems and nursery rhymes by examining their features and structures. This led to the students being able to determine the effectiveness of the poems and allowed them to begin thinking about how they would select a poem or nursery rhyme for reconstruction. My final teaching aim within the process was modelling how to reconstruct a nursery rhyme so they could create their own before reconstructing a longer poem. My aim was for students to have a deep understanding of the process and apply their knowledge to a small, familiar text before applying it to a not so familiar poem. Within this I modelled and discussed with the students how we could still apply poetic features, structures and language to change the nursery rhyme from its original form into something totally different. Following this we further discussed how the text could be enhanced by including images, and what images could be used. On reflection, I was able to supply a variety of stimulus materials for the students, give them the space and time required to develop a deep knowledge, understanding and appreciation for poetry and the support they

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needed to reconstruct a poem, then to repeat that experience with a poem that was not familiar to them. I found my experience to be very rewarding. I believe I was able to take the students on a journey where they began by engaging in lower order thinking skills such as being able to recall, comprehend and apply information, through to higher order skills such as analysing, evaluating and creating.

Natalie Kersnovske reflects I have not had much to do with short stories or poems since high school so felt very overwhelmed. One thing I found difficult was my closeness to my writing. This made me feel quite vulnerable: my writing seemed to be a window into my soul for everyone to see. This made it difficult for me to share my work with others and receive feedback on my writing. When I commented on other people’s work I was very aware that others may feel this way too and was quite sensitive when leaving feedback. For my future teaching practices this is something I will be aware of: creative writing is very personal. Although there is always a stage, maybe many stages, where critical appraisal is necessary, generative thinking has to be given time to flower. At the right time and in the right way, rigorous critical appraisal is essential. At the wrong point, criticism and the cold hand of realism can kill an emerging idea.

Natalie’s reflection on working with a younger writer I first met Lisa (anonymised), a grade 3 student in April, when our creative writing journey began. We discussed what she would like to do. Because Lisa was interested in poetry she chose to write a poem. This beginning stage was the hardest stage. How do I help Lisa in constructing a poem? I thought back to when I had been asked at the beginning of this course to create a poem and the daunting feeling of where to start. I thought it would be a great idea for us to look through some poems to get some ideas and identify some features such as repetition, rhyme, rhythm and alliteration. It was then I discovered that Lisa had only ever written rhyming poems before. So we set ourselves the challenge of writing a poem that didn’t rhyme. As Lisa commented ‘I don’t think it will sound good if it doesn’t rhyme’ and ‘won’t it be boring?’ this led us to our next task. We started to look at poems that didn’t rhyme and discussed why they were interesting. We agreed that when writers use similes and metaphors to describe a topic the poem became interesting for the reader.

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We brainstormed ideas for a topic, and Lisa wanted to write about roses, her favorite flower, but she didn’t know what to say. Lisa couldn’t think of how to write smiles and metaphors about the rose. It was then clear: Lisa was not ready to write. I had to take a step back and reflect. When writing my own poem I had prepared many drafts and picked them apart, practicing how to write. That was a light bulb moment for me. For Lisa to write her poem describing how she feels and thinks about roses she would need some practice. First we looked at different objects with a magnifying glass. I asked Lisa to consider what else could the object be? What did it remind her of? What could you use a rose for if you were an insect? What does it feel like? Lisa and I discussed those questions and drafted poems using age appropriate similes and metaphors. It was important for me to be creative in my own teaching to promote Lisa’s creative abilities. During the final stages we bought a bunch of roses, and again brainstormed ideas. Lisa was then able to write a poem about roses. After her first draft was written we discussed one thing we really liked about the poem and its central idea, and how we could enhance the poem. This allowed Lisa to complete her poem. What is a Rose? A rose is as pretty as a rainbow A fluffy bed for a bee A blanket for raindrops It’s a pillow for a baby bird As soft as a baby’s skin. A butterfly rests on the rose petals Because its as soft as a silk shirt And smells like a candy shop. I love Roses!

Educators should not expect students to know how to write a creative work. Students need to be exposed to a range of texts and mediums that tap into their interests. It is important to identify where the students are in their learning including finding misunderstandings and gaps, as I did with Lisa. I used this knowledge to identify starting points for teaching and provided hands-on learning opportunities appropriate to Lisa’s level of readiness and need. I believe creativity is possible in all areas of education and all young people and adults have creative capacities. Developing these capacities involves a balance between teaching skills and understanding, and promoting the freedom to innovate, and take risks. This model will

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guide my future teaching practices in the successful implementation of the National Curriculum – English.

Jaclyn and Sophie Fitzgerald Happiness by Sophie Fitzgerald, age 9 Happiness is family, laughter and pride, or your Dad coming home after going away. Happiness is a bird, chirping contentedly, a barbeque, a hug, the beach or a kiss. Happiness is a flower, dancing side to side, it’s a Sunday sleep in, dozing comfortably. Happiness is a butterfly, hatched from its cocoon free and flying off into the world.

Jaclyn: Writing with Sophie - Reflection Writing with Sophie has been a wonderful experience, and I found our time spent appreciating texts to be particularly rewarding, spending it tucked up in bed together: quite a beautiful, precious bonding experience as we pored over a variety of poems discussing how each made us feel, what we think the author was trying to achieve and developing whole life stories for poets. For my teaching, I now realise the importance of reading literature as fundamental to the entire writing process (i.e. the interconnectedness of reading and writing). For Sophie, it enabled her to locate a voice of her own, having abundant time to explore, examine and discuss the work of many poets in many styles before embarking on her own writing experience in her own poetic style. When we moved onto the creating and editing stage of the process, I discovered another essential element to productive teaching in any writing context, and that is allowing time and space for students to develop ideas around words, drawing and performing. Knowing Sophie is a visual learner meant that it was important to give her the freedom to express herself visually, and as a teacher I must ensure this is part of my pedagogical repertoire (catering to individual learning needs and styles) when teaching creative writing. I also felt it was highly beneficial to read poems aloud (both of us), and allow Sophie time to experiment vocally with her poetry, and regardless of context this will be an effective English

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teaching tool. As Schenk de Regniers (as cited in Anderson, 2006, p.303) eloquently states, “it seems to me that the full power of a poem… the lyrical cadence, the dance of language, the sheer pleasure of fooling around with sound and meaning…can be fully appreciated only if the poem is read aloud. This would be particularly true for children.” As Sophie’s mentor I felt it pertinent to scaffold and model the writing process to develop both writing and reflective practices, and The Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2011) provided a solid framework from which I developed a four-week plan. It also provided a clear indication of her current literacy abilities as a Year 4 student. Using the three content strands (Language, Literacy and Literature) and substrands, I was able to implement a plan that supported her development in many areas, inter alia creative writing. From appreciating and examining a range of texts to practicing writing through crafting, editing and reviewing, Sophie’s uniqueness, her writing abilities and experiences were nurtured and respected. One challenge that she encountered was in making appropriate language and grammatical choices. We overcame this by accessing a thesaurus and playing word association and other games that enabled Sophie to discover synonyms and explore words while I scaffolded and guided her language choices. As suggested by Ljungdahl and March (as cited in Winch, Ross-Johnston, March, Ljungdahl & Holliday, 2013, p.347) it is pertinent to “…give children as much practice as we can with language, allowing them to be playful and imaginative while at the same time giving them experience in the conventions of language so that they become familiar with the possibilities…” and it was to this I aspired. To overcome grammatical issues, I modelled and we engaged in shared reading of Sophie’s favourite poems to demonstrate and practice cohesion through punctuation choices and to show and explore how the writer achieved particular effects. As discussed previously Sophie also engaged in much spoken poetry reading, which helped guide her grammar decision-making and over what became a six-week process, Sophie revisited, reviewed, re-moulded and polished her writing until she was satisfied.

Jaclyn reflects For my teaching, I think the most important thing to do is inspire a love of reading and writing, and respect the ways in which my students want to learn while also heeding curriculum requirements. Writing is a challenging but incredibly rewarding experience, and something my students will need to be guided and supported through the writing journey by both teacher

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and peers. In this course, the support of my peers and course team was incredibly helpful, as I often felt I had become too involved in each piece and could not view the works as a reader, with fresh eyes and mind. I also shared some of my work with my parents and my husband who thankfully loved it, and who provided really productive and positive feedback about flow and cohesion.

Conclusion: The courage to create a space for writing? To conclude, and as other voices continue the narrative, I reflect briefly upon my own learning as an educator over three years of writing with preservice teachers. Each semester has been both troubling and rewarding. Surprised at first by pre-service teacher’s doubts: ‘Do we have to write? I haven’t got a creative bone in my body!’ - I responded by commencing the course with a brief personal phone call and email to each student, listening to their motivations and concerns. This allowed a deeper insight into how best to support individuals who were balancing the complex demands of study and family, managing health conditions, or caring for others who were unwell. For those who bravely shared their works with peers, the rewards were significant, as student success rates and anonymous feedback upon their study experience attest. Informal feedback also indicated that for many, writing generated a sense of personal agency and allowed a greater understanding of forces at work their lives. For all, the process of writing allowed deep reflection, an immersion in the craft and the opportunity to share works came after the course ended. As if a floodgate had been opened, stories poems and plays emerged, as new writers enjoyed and celebrated the singularity and intensity of their voices. As writers they spent careful hours weaving, unravelling and re-forming works that they hoped would meet their own and others’ standards for their chosen genres. As educators they worked to find a point of balance between creating a space for young people to write, and conforming to professional habitus and external constraints. Their reflections described the experience as illuminating and rewarding, and in some cases as transformative. Many pre-service teachers commented that the course had renewed their interest and enthusiasm for writing. Weaving Words: Personal and professional transformation through writing as research is in itself a celebration and validation of writing – and of silences. In the spaces between the narrative threads of this book, there are many stories that were not, or could not be told. As editor I acknowledge

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the writers whose works form the warp and weft of this book, but also whose works enriched each semester without being shared here. As educators and researchers we are privileged to create spaces for imagining, remembering and making meaning through our own and others’ stories. The little stories (Batorowicz, 2013) we tell may take many forms but unfailingly they speak to the simple but complex truths of what it is to be human. As Bruno Bettelheim (1988) attested, stories whether in the form of the fairy tales which sustain children in the darkest of places, or as tales from the field, or in the works created by children themselves, have power. As Jaclyn and Sophie Fitzgerald discovered, the reading aloud of poetry impacts upon the heart and mind of the teller and listener. As a listener to so many stories, my experience as author and researcher has been humbling, moving, joyous and enriching. I hope the writings and reflections of authors in this book will encourage others to create spaces for writing that articulate our being and becoming. The authors of the next chapter embody those practices, and their works sparkle with the excitement of creation. I thank them all as my teachers.

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Myhill, D, & Wilson, A. (2013). Playing it safe: Teachers’ views of creativity in poetry writing. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 10(0), 101111. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2013.07.002 Office for Standards in Education Children’s Services and Skills. (2012). Moving English forward (110118). Retrieved from http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/moving-english-forward. Onosko, J. (2011). Race to the top leaves children and future citizens behind: The devastating effects of centralization, standardization, and high stakes accountability. Democracy and Education, 19(2). Patrick, F. (2013). Neoliberalism, the knowledge economy, and the learner: Challenging the inevitability of the commodified self as an outcome of education. International Scholarly Research Network: Education, 2013, 8. Queensland College of Teachers. (2009). Professional Standards for Queensland Teachers (graduate level): A guide for use with preservice teachers. Brisbane: Retrieved from http://www.qct.edu.au/education/documents/PSQT_GradLevel_v3_We b.pdf. Robertson, S. L. (2007). 'Remaking the world': Neo-liberalism and the transformation of education and teachers' labour. In L. Weis & C. M (Eds.), The global assault on teachers, teaching and their unions. New York: Palgrave. Sheppard, J. (2010). Emergent selves, emergent lives: the role of curriculum in the identity development of undergraduate students : a narrative phenomenological study. (Doctor of Philosophy Ph.D.), Victoria, British Columbia. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1828/2733 Skiba, R., & Peterson, R. (1999). The Dark Side of Zero tolerance: Can punishment lead to safe schools? Phi Delta Kappa International, 11. http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kski9901.htm Tan, S. (2006). The Arrival. Sydney: Lothian Books. telophase. (2005). Part 4.2 - Combat (Masashi Kishimoto, NARUTO) Retrieved from http://telophase.livejournal.com/94255.html?nojs=1 Timimi, S. (2010). The McDonaldization of childhood: Children’s mental health in neo-liberal market cultures. Transcultural Psychiatry, 47(5), 686-706. doi: 10.1177/1363461510381158 Torres, C. A. (2013). Neoliberalism as a new historical bloc: a Gramscian analysis of neoliberalism’s common sense in education. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 23(2), 80-106.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN SEEMING, BEING AND BECOMING MELISSA ANDREWS, KIM FOX, MELANIE HARRIS, MATTHEW HUNT, JOHN MULRONEY, STEPHANIE REX AND NATALIE ROMANET

Abstract The authors of this chapter offer layered representations of what seems, is believed or known to be, or leans toward the disruptive space of becoming. Kim Fox draws upon a family photograph as the starting point for her poetic meditation on the connection between generations of women. In contrast, Melissa Andrews’ Pinteresque one act play recasts the familiar routine of a family breakfast as the site of struggle for power. In her short story Melanie Harris blurs the edges of real and imagined worlds. Extending the theme of parallel worlds, Matthew Hunt’s teenage protagonist finds an escape from the violence of home and school in the fantasy world of computer gaming. The life of an adult seems no less troubled than that of the teenager, in John Mulroney’s poetic representation of humanity wrung and tumbled in a washing machine. Stephanie Rex’s playful engagement with the concept of an elemental and powerful self is counterbalanced by Natalie Romanet’s re-engagement in the world of the senses in her concluding poem Nature’s Sea Song.

Kim Fox If I should happen upon you If I should happen upon you, In the lands where dreamers reap their treasures And memories find unblemished clarity Would we smile and embrace

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With the love your eyes show in every picture? Would my heart know yours? Without burdensome speech Could the passage of minutes Hours, days, years be gone? Their testaments of you breathe like the sun. Expanding bright and beautiful, Joyous and youthful. A Polaroid perfect moment of happiness, Embraced, Encircled, Lovingly relived; Told sacredly on near-breathless whisper. .

Could we have our moment? A mere second Coveted in my heart. Enfolded into my soul. My own offering upon the plate of memories. If I should happen upon you… An achingly untouchable imagining. A fable the heart envisions To fill the void left bare by circumstance.

Reflection When I first read about this task in the assessment details my excitement at being able to show myself through creative writing was quickly undermined by fear. What should I write about? Should I write about things I know, things I feel, things that interest and excite me; or draw upon another piece of writing that I love feeding off the ideas and imagery it provides? This troubled me for the first few weeks of semester until, forced out by lesson plans, prac organisation and countless other assessment pieces, I found myself having coffee with my mum at her house. I found myself looking anew at the photographs on her shelf: the same photographs have always been there. Added to after birthdays, weddings, my daughter’s birth; culled after my parents’ divorce and lovingly dusted every weekend. So much part of my mother’s home, they had become near invisible after 29 years of my sitting by them, walking past them and viewing them as peripheries. Then I noticed a picture of my great-grandmother Eunice, my mother’s Nan; an old colour photograph

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taken not long before she died. As if she had touched my mind herself the words to my poem started drifting in waves. I reached for my iPad and there in my mum’s lounge I drafted the first draft of ‘If I Should Happen Upon You’. I shared this with my mum, her mother, her Aunt and cousin and the memories and love flowed so deeply in their thoughts that I knew my words needed no altering. The piece I submit stands as I wrote it that afternoon at mum’s.

Melissa Andrews Happy Families Cast of Characters: Daniel and his friend since primary school, Shaun, both 18. Alice, Mid 50s, Daniel’s mother. William, Late 50s, Daniel’s father. SCENE 1: A Kitchen, Queensland Alice, dressed in a floral apron, is cooking breakfast. She has every element on the stove full with pans of eggs, bacon, sausages and pancakes. The kitchen table is beautifully but unnaturally set. There are just three chairs, a crisp white table cloth, fresh flowers, a jug of fruit juice, crystal glasses, silverware and place cards. [Enter Daniel] DANIEL: Mmmm mm. Breakfast smells good mum! The table looks great too. I am soooo hungry. All that packing has really worked up my appetite! [Sits down at the table and picks up the place-card in front of him]. DANIEL: So what’s the occasion Mum? Are we expecting company? ALICE: As a matter of fact we are. DANIEL: Oh cool, who? [Reads the name on the place card] DANIEL:[looks puzzled] Shaun? Why is he coming for breakfast? ALICE: Because he is a lovely young man. DANIEL: I know he is nice Mum: he’s my best mate! But why? ALICE: I thought it would be nice to have some company. [Shaun taps on the door and walks in] SHAUN: Hi Mrs B! Thanks for the invite. ALICE: [smiles sweetly] You are always welcome Shaun. Here, have a seat.

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[Alice pushes Daniel out of his seat]. Would you like some juice? SHAUN: That would be great. [Sits] [Daniel moves to the other side of the table, sits down and folds his arms. ENTER: William, Daniel’s father, dressed for work. He walks over and kisses Alice on the cheek] WILLIAM: Good morning beautiful. Breakfast smells wonderful! ALICE: Thanks sweetie. Take a seat over there. I’m just about to dish it up. [Motions towards the seat where Daniel is sitting] DANIEL: [Stands up, muttering to himself. Since when have we had place cards and specific seating anyway? [Daniel moves to sit in the only empty chair, notices the place card says ‘Alice’] DANIEL: ‘Alice’? Where am I supposed to sit? ALICE: I don’t know Daniel. How about you go and sit at your new house? DANIEL: Ah, I see what this is about. Mum. Look - we talked about this, I’m only moving to the next suburb. I’m not going to be far away! ALICE: We didn’t talk about it... [Pause. She serves Shaun a large breakfast] SHAUN: Thank you. ALICE: ...you simply told us that you were moving out. You didn’t give us a say in the matter. I didn’t realise that we were so horrible to live with! [She slams the frying pan onto the cooker and turns away to hide her upset] DANIEL: [Goes to comfort her] You are not horrible to live with Mum. I love living here, but this is something I need to do. Besides [brightening] it is because you and dad have always been such great parents that I am so independent! [Alice shrugs off Daniel’s consoling arm, and returns to fill three plates, placing them on the table in front of William, Shaun and herself. Daniel watches, struggling to find words, as they begin to eat] DANIEL: [Looking angrily at his mother] So, because I am moving out, I don’t even get breakfast now? ALICE: You can have breakfast love. DANIEL: [Looking around at the empty pan] How? You’ve given it all away. ALICE: Well like you said you need to be independent now.... so I think it is time that you make your own breakfast. You might as well start practising living on your own. It’s not all fun and games you know.

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DANIEL: Fine! I didn’t feel like having a big breakfast anyway. I might just have a drink. [Daniel grabs a glass out of the cupboard and walks to the table to get some juice just as Alice pours the last of it into Shaun’s glass] SHAUN: [Leans back in his seat] Sorry mate, did you want some? ALICE: It’s OK Shaun. You drink your juice. Daniel can get some more. DANIEL: [Raising his voice] There isn’t any more Mum! ALICE: [Laughing] Don’t be silly Daniel. Of course there is more. There is a whole aisle of juice at the supermarket. [The three begin to chatter about their plans for the day, passing items between them] DANIEL: Alright I get the message.... You aren’t happy with me leaving and you want to teach me a lesson. Well I’m going out to get Maccas. That is the best thing about moving out on my own. I can eat whatever I want and when I want! [Daniel starts to walk out the door, Stage Right - He stops and turns back to Shaun] DANIEL: ...and Shaun, perhaps you could give me a hand to move my boxes into the car later? That is, when you’re finished playing happy families! [Shaun looks uncomfortable to be in the middle of the family disagreement. He puts his head down and continues to eat his breakfast] ALICE: [Turns to William] I just don’t know what to do with him, Will. He is rushing into this moving out stuff way too quickly. He doesn’t even have furniture and how is he going to pay for rent, bills and food on his casual wage? [Alice gets up from the table and puts her plate and others on the sink] ALICE: Oh no! What if he decides to drop out of uni to get a full time job so that he can pay the bills? He’ll never go back William. I just know it... [She stands thinking...looking out of the window] Imagine! All his hard work and good grades will go to waste. WILLIAM: [Rubbing Alice’s shoulder] It’s ok love. He will be alright. It won’t be long until he realises just how good he had it at home. I bet he will be begging to come home in less than a month. SHAUN: [Takes a bite of a pancake and turns to Alice] Mr B is right, Mrs B. This place is a palace compared to Dan’s new joint. If I lived here, I would never want to leave [He smiles.] Hey...Mrs B...let me wash up. [Alice glances at Daniel with a faint smile....then turns to face Shaun] ALICE: That would be lovely Shaun, thank you. So...are you looking for somewhere to live Shaun? We have a spare room now.

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Reflection My third piece of writing is a scene from a theatre play, where the satire is mild so that even young viewers would be able to understand the puns. I originally planned the play as a dramatic piece, however, once I started writing the dialogue and developing the characters, comedic elements emerged from the characters and situation. In keeping with the main theme of the poem and short story, Happy Families is about the emotional struggle of letting a child go, and about the dark side of leaving home. It focuses particularly on the relationship between a motherand her teenage son, with all the tensions arising from his choice to move out of home. The dialogue in the play has been chosen to develop the audience’s understanding of the relationships: Shaun calls Alice and William ‘Mr & Mrs B’ and Daniel ‘mate’, which suggests that Shaun is well known to the family. I have also deliberately used language that suggests the age of the characters: Daniel talks about going to ‘Maccas’, a reference to McDonalds used by teenagers. When I developed the characters, I wanted them to have their own defined personalities so that audience members could relate to at least one character. I wanted Alice to come across as a very strong woman who uses sarcasm to mask her sadness. She uses a passive-aggressive tone to show her son that what he is doing is disagreeable to her. Yet, I wanted the audience to sympathise with Daniel so I included him hugging his motherand reassuring her, so that this makes him more likable and believable. I deliberately kept William’s dialogue to a minimum to show that he is a quiet man who avoids confrontation. Having never written a play, I really struggled with how to start the action. However, once I had my main idea, I pictured myself as one of the characters and wrote down what I would say and the responses that I would expect from my son/husband. I think that this exercise in identifying with the characters was crucial to my development of the play. Therefore I would ask students to undertake this process of ‘being in another’s shoes’ before writing a drama piece. I found creative writing quite difficult. I have a tendency to over-think when I am writing and I had to keep reminding myself to stop thinking and just write. I also thought that I could just sit down with my laptop and easily produce three pieces of writing. However in hindsight, I think that I went about the process in completely the wrong way. Because I did not have a clear plan it took me a long time to write, and each piece of work required many drafts. I really like the motto ‘fail to plan, plan to fail’ and this assignment has shown me just how important planning is in creative

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writing. I think I will definitely allow time for planning in my English lessons.

Melanie Harris Places in time On a hot summer’s day, a lonely figure sits on the back veranda. He looks steadily over the yellow fields to the far away horizon. The ground is already shimmering from the heat and there is a slight scent of smoke and eucalypt in the air. Faded children’s toys lie in the corner of the yard underneath an old gum tree. A cool breeze moves past his face and is gone again, becoming just a memory, like so many other memories which have passed before. The man drinks his morning coffee from a cracked porcelain mug, one of the few items remaining from a happier life. Contemplating the day ahead the man details in his mind the tasks which must be carried out before sunset. Sighing, he lifts himself from the comfortable chair, pulls on old, reliable boots and whistles for Beth. The young heeler races toward her master, excited about the prospect of another day in the field. The sight of her racing forward in ecstasy brings a smile to the man’s face – fleetingly. At least Beth would not leave… Out in the paddocks the breeze is refreshing. The crops are near harvesting and the workload will soon become enormous. This time last year he had a wife and family to go home to after a long, arduous day. He longed for that time when they would all sit around the dinner table, discussing crops and pests and school. Thinking about his wife and children brought a wave of happiness and despair. He still did not completely understand the circumstances which took them away that day, but it had been the longest ten months of his life since they had gone. After the long day, after the dogs and chooks have been fed and locked away for the night, he trudges in the front door. No one is there to cook dinner for him. No welcoming smile or hugs for daddy. He opens a can of spaghetti. Puts bread to toast. The food barely tastes in his mouth. He watches television where happy families parade as if teasing him. Life seems to stand still now, each day so slow and un-eventful. Sometimes he imagines he hears the voices of his family, almost feels them touching him… somehow. At night, in bed he can still hear his wife saying goodnight. It often seems so real that he is tempted to roll over and touch her, but then he drags himself back to reality. * Heavy with grief, the mother and her two young children walk along the grey corridor and through the same large, cold looking doors through which they have entered daily for the past ten months. As they reach the room, the little girl asks

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Reflection The process of writing each of the three creative texts presented unique challenges. Of the three texts, I found the play to be the most difficult to write. I have never written a play before and the absence of figurative language throughout the text made the story line harder to express than when writing the narrative and the poetry. Prior to writing the play I had an idea of the story line mapped out and had run through various scenes in my head. Adding the speech to the scene was something which was far

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more difficult than I had imagined and I often found myself drifting off and writing in more of a narrative style than a direct speech style. Although I enjoyed writing both the narrative and the poem, I did not really enjoy the overall process as it felt quite unnatural. In a classroom situation I would like to give students the opportunity to write plays which they had the opportunity to perform. I feel this would allow more of a connection with the script and perhaps for students who felt the same difficulty in writing as I did would benefit from seeing their scripts “come to life”. Perhaps in that situation, it would be easier to gather if the script followed a realistic path. In future I would like to find myself in a situation which requires me to attempt to write another play which would hopefully provide me with a spark to create better learning experiences for my students. I loved writing both the narrative and the poem. I was inspired through the reading of other poems on the study desk and I have always loved reading Australian themed poems. My favourite poem from childhood is “I love a sunburnt country” by Dorothea Mackellar. In creating the narrative and I really enjoyed the use of simple, flowing, descriptive text use. I found that the first half of the story flowed very easily and although I had written down a brief plan detailing my intentions for the plot, the ending I used finally was completely different and rewritten many times. Using descriptive language to create strong mental imagery was a fun challenge and I found that trying to express emotions exactly the way I intended required playing around with words and the order of words. This skill, while fun for me I could see would be challenging for students with a limited or undeveloped vocabulary. Having difficulty expressing a clear message in a narrative would be extremely frustrating for students so there is a need to build vocabulary within students to assist them with the writing process. I also feel that in order to build narrative writing skills in students, students need to read a wide range of both fictional and non-fictional texts and have texts read to them as surely nothing builds a better understanding and appreciation of the narrative process than reading other writer’s works. Overall, while the writing process was an enjoyable one, it highlighted areas which I need to consciously consider when teaching students. Helping students with writing creative texts not only requires teaching them about how to write texts but also encouraging them to explore their ideas and be comfortable with the audience to whom they are presenting.

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Matthew Hunt – Escape The overarching theme for my pieces of writing is “Escape”. Within that theme there is also a focus on gaming. My reason for choosing this theme is because I myself use gaming as an escape. It wasn’t always this way. Originally I played video games when I was bored, but because of events that have transpired in my life, video games have become more than just a hobby. Escape Only the strongest soldier Will survive this genocide, Slide to cover, throw out grenade, Hands shaking, dodge and shoot, Shields depleted, must recharge. Save and exit, insert new life, Assassin now, target sighted Wrist blade striking like a snake, Venom twice as fatal, Fade to shadow, mission complete. Blackout, blank screen holds No escape tonight No more distractions from a world Where terror wears a human face Lost in my own mind. Blank screen. Fear unplugged.

The poem Escape describes the experience of a gamer at a point in time. I originally wrote poems in this style in high school when I went through a ‘rough patch’. The layout is based on the style of lyrics, however, this poem is not a song. The poem firstly refers to a shooting game, “Halo”, which is a popular title on the Xbox console, the second ‘life’ the gamer inserts refers to another equally popular game called “Assassins Creed”. The final stanza relates to returning unwillingly to reality. In this instance a power shortage has interrupted the gaming, thrusting the player back into reality where he must face the fears he was avoiding. I chose those specific games because they are not only story-based but they are also action-packed. I focused on the actions which cause the gamer to feel exhilarated to try and draw in the audienceand make them feel the same. By getting the audience to identify with the gamer in the

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poem my intent was for the reader to see things from the gamers’ point of view. The gamer uses video games to escape the problems he is facing in real life, because in the gaming world there are no problems – except when deciding which weapon to choose. When writing this poem I struggled with the ending. I wasn’t happy with the way I tried to express the stop in gaming and forced return to reality. When I submitted my poem on the forum Janice replied with a suggestion for my final stanza. I was much happier with her suggestion as it artistically stated what I was trying to say, and got the message across clearly. Triumph at Enigami 22. EXT. BATTLE FIELD – AFTERNOON JAKE (8) runs towards his many friends that are gathered around looking on in triumph at their enemies retreating back into the forest on the border. MYA (10) runs at him and hugs him. They break apart. MYA We did it Jake! We did it! And it's all thanks to you! JAKE It was because of all of us. I couldn't have done this all on my own, Mya. MYA But Jake, without you coming to Enigami and leading us into battle to stand up against the monsters of Enola, we would still be cowering away in the castle just waiting for the day when they seize all the land. JAKE Well... I don't think they will be coming back ever again. MYA Jake, we all owe you. SIR MAX (40) gives JAKE a large pat on the back.

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SIR MAX Who would have ever thought that you'd be the one to save us young man? You did well! JAKE looks up at SIR MAX, tears welling in his eyes. JAKE Thanks Sir. PRINCESS LILITH walks over towards JAKE. JAKE looks at the Princess approaching him and his friends. Slightly nervous, he bows and then straightens up facing her. LILITH Kneel Jake. LILITH takes her sword from its sheath and touches it to both of Jake's shoulders. JAKE stares up at LILITH in disbelief. LILITH From this day forth, this boy will no longer be known as just Jake, but Sir Jake the Great Knight of Enigami. JAKE stands, and looks at the troops surrounding them. The troops raise their swords. TROOPS To Jake the Great Knight! The troops kneel to JAKE. LILITH, standing beside JAKE gives him a slight smile and then kneels to JAKE as well. JAKE looks out amazed at the sight of his friends and fellow soldiers kneeling before him.

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23. INT. BEDROOM – NIGHT Sound: things being thrown and broken in the living room. JAKE's parents are fighting. JAKE wakes up on top of his bed surrounded by his drawings of knights, castles, princesses, good winning over evil, and himself as the hero in each of his drawings. He slowly realises he is no longer in his imaginary world as he hears the argument. JAKE picks up his colouring in pencil, grabs a blank piece of paper and begins to draw. THE END My final piece of writing is a script segment from the end of the film: it is the best scene showing the way in which the main character Jake escapes. I found that acting out and visualising the action in my lounge room helped with the directions. This piece of writing was difficult as I was concerned with whether or not the ending was appropriate, as it is cardinal rule that a film or story should never end in, “and then he woke up”. However, I believe that the way I portrayed the ending was necessary, as the film itself is more about Jake’s imagination and escape into his drawings than what he is escaping from. The film is intended for a young audience. By Jake escaping into his drawings he is able to become more than he is, braver, and smarter: he can become anything or anyone he wants. My intent with this script is to suggest that while people may seem happy they may not be so. Instead they may be escaping into their mind and running away from their problems. Writing upon this theme allowed me to see how much I turn to my Xbox when I start to experience stress through university or personal problems. In completing these different types of writing I reinforced my knowledge of different writing conventions required for different types of poems/scripts and came to understand how the rules change for each. Out of the three pieces of writing I found the short story to be the most difficult. I had trouble starting the story, as every time I attempted to start the narrative it seemed to me to be weak and sub-standard. Eventually, however, I came to an opening sentence I liked.

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John Mulroney In this assignment I covered the literary genres of poetry, a fictional narrative and a one-man play. The theme of my creative writing was “Life”. The poem was an interesting introduction for me, as it came about from the everyday task of doing washing: the idea came to me to write a poem that used similes and metaphors connected with that process. The Washing Machine Clothes in a washing machine A tangle, a twist Beaten and battered A touch and a kiss Swimming then drowned As they rise and fall Turned one way and ripped to the other Washed and baptised Twisted and wrung Removed in a basket Unravelled and hung Clothes on the line They flap and they wave As a gentle breeze now makes them behave Cleaned and dried And warmed by the sun Now that a new day now has begun My life occasionally feels like this Clothes in a washing machine A tangle, a twist.

Although I was hesitant about having someone else review my poetry at first, I did enjoy the feedback and help with areas in my poem: it needed polish to conform to the style in which I was writing. The prose was a

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fictional piece in which I tried to create a picture of the mundane existence of an isolated old man, John. He struggles though despite what the world has dealt him, looking for solace in the bottom of a cheap bottle of wine. He lives in a dingy little apartment in the sleazy part of town, a place where no-one seems to return from. Here John hides in the shadow obscuring his past. He wakes in the morning, the sun steaming in through the window anointing his eyes with bright unrelenting light. “What happened?”

Stephanie Rex Magic, enchantment and mysterious worlds: each of these terms creates images within the reader’s mind. I have chosen this theme for my written pieces as fantasy literature is a genre I enjoy to read, because it provides an unlimited number of possibilities and directions for writing. I have always enjoyed reading as a way of discovering mysterious worlds and enchanted lands with magical creatures, people and places, and hope that my writing creates within the reader a similar enjoyment and escape to another world. The following poem, Wicked Me, is suited to a young adult audience, as is the theme which allows readers to escape to another time and place, filled with magical and mystical beings. Wicked Me This be a spell, Dangerous, it be, A wicked spell, Cast by wicked me. First I’ll need a cauldron, To brew a broth, As I dance around it, And cackle and cough. And for my cauldron, I will need, A cat’s whisker, a maiden’s hair, And one thistle weed. I’ll mix them with crimson dragon blood, And a shot of rum, As I read from my magic book,

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‘Thrice Widdershins! Beauty Come!’ The broth will boil, And smoke will rise, As I become a beauty, A perfect disguise… This be a spell, Dangerous, it be, A wicked spell, Cast by wicked me.

Poetry takes on many forms and can be created in a number of ways. The way in which a poem is written and the different techniques used all convey and create imagery and meaning for the reader. This is a technique that I have used when writing my poem, Wicked Me. Prior to creating this poetry piece I was unfamiliar with the process for constructing a poem. I found that the narrative style of poetry came naturally to me and allowed my ideas to flow and combine to create a snapshot of a wicked witch. I believe I have created a suitable narrative poem for a young adult audience. When I was experimenting, each draft followed the narrative poetry structure and alternate rhyme scheme. In my poem, Wicked Me’s rhyme scheme flows with the second and fourth line in each verse rhyming. This method of alternating or interlocking rhyme uses an ABAB pattern and creates a lyrical effect. Within my poem, Wicked Me, I have drawn upon and used imagery and word association to convey and create meaning to create and convey to the reader the sense of a wicked witch without actually using the term. I achieved this by using words like ‘cackle’, ‘cough’, ‘cauldron’, and ‘widdershins’ - which means counter clockwise. I believe that for a writer, the construction of a poem requires careful examination of the words used and images created, in order to communicate clearly to the reader the desired outcome. Creating a number of different written works has been an enjoyable and creative experience for me. As a result of my engagement with this task, I believe I am better equipped with skills and knowledge about poetry, prose and drama, and feel more confident to teach the processes and strategies of theses genres. As a future teacher of English, I believe it is important for pre-service teachers to engage with tasks and literature that they will encounter and teach in their own classrooms. I believe this task has provided me with the necessary skills to be a better teacher of English for my future students.

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Natalie Romanet I chose to create pieces themed by the ocean, and I approached this task with great hesitation as I felt that I had very limited knowledge of how to construct my own literature. During my years at school there was not a lot of emphasis placed on how to create our own pieces of work. We did study some aspects of poetry and short stories but not in great depth. I found myself struggling with this assignment at the beginning but I found that, as I progressed and began writing, it was not as scary and difficult as I thought it might be. Nature’s Sea Song Eyes close, as soft as a feather falls Sun warmed skin prickles hair, brings sense of joy Salty wind dances around me carrying the smell of the ocean Crash of the waves on rock and sand, ocean echoes around me Gush and splash, trickle from rock, waves pull back out to sea Soft whirring of fisherman cast, spin and line for daily catch A sparkling laugh, child’s splash, little fish dance and play in the wavelets My heart sings paradise At nature’s soothing sea song.

When creating this poem my intent was to construct a very visual text in the sense that someone would be able to read it and sense the feelings and moods that are described. My imagined audience was adults, who could associate previous times at the beach with calming and soothing experiences. This was my inspiration and I linked it to my own personal experiences at the beach, where I lie down on the sand and close my eyes. It is relaxing and calming to listen to surrounding sounds and to feel the sun soak into my skin, and this is what I was hoping to re-create for readers. I’m not sure if I managed to do this effectively. I found that initially the poem was quite easy to imagine and create, however, I often felt like I had the words on the tip of my tongue but couldn’t convey them. It was quite frustrating! Another difficulty was in the process of editing and making adjustments. I found this extremely difficult as feedback from my teacher

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and peers changed my initial ideas completely and I do not think the final result conveys the same meaning to the reader. The first draft read as follows. One of Nature’s Songs

My eyes gently close The warmth of the sun prickles my body with a sense of joy The wind whips around me and with it carries a faint smell of salt and fish The crash of the waves on rocks in the ocean echoes around me Water trickles lightly on the rocks as it begins to roll back out to sea The soft whirring sound of a fisherman casting and reeling his fishing rod in the distance, waiting for the catch of the day. Children can be heard laughing and splashing as they enjoy the rise and fall of waves coming to the shore. Paradise. One of nature’s soothing songs. I think it’s very hard to submit pieces of personal writing for assessment because everyone will have individual experiences and beliefs about what constitutes literature. Editor’s note: I have included Natalie’s original work here acknowledging her sense that the original work’s meaning was lost. For educators it is important to recognise that much may be lost - as well as gained - when novice writers respond to teacher and peer feedback. Thus the choices we make as teachers in suggesting ‘improvements’ may impact upon the integrity of voice, and limit the style choices available to writers.

CHAPTER TWELVE SEEMING, BEING AND BECOMING: LIFELONG LEARNING AND TEACHER TRANSFORMATION P. A. DANAHER

Abstract Education exhibits light and shade, substance and illusion, hope and despair, reflection and anticipation. Education demonstrates the recurring ambivalence and uncertainty at its centre by creating new and powerful opportunities for some learners and their teachers and by helping to perpetuate others’ marginalisation. For some, personal growth is accompanied by collective affirmation and the experience of being and becoming; for others, appearance is all and the potential associated with seeming is not translated into a lasting reality. This chapter presents a dialogue with the students’ works about the theme of “seeming, being and becoming” by linking their respective concerns and the convergences and divergences among those concerns with selected contemporary educational scholarship. In particular, the chapter examines education research that highlights the intersections and contradictions between lifelong learning and teacher transformation, which function as distilled encapsulations of the students’ writing. The proposition is propounded that learners’ and educators’ woven words can be very powerful in promoting these enduringly sought aspirations. At the same time, seeming, being and becoming can readily turn into unattainable chimera and evanescent glimpses of other worlds that can leave learners and their teachers feeling dissatisfied and incomplete.

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Introduction Living, working and learning in the world today are continually challenging and complex experiences. This is true heedless of whether one resides in a penthouse riverside apartment in Brisbane, Australia, a tribal village in Papua New Guinea, a favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil or a township outside Johannesburg, South Africa (while acknowledging the fundamental differences among the contexts framing these examples). Seeming, being and becoming, the focus of the preceding chapter and this one, are likewise significantly recurring themes that are closely aligned with the challenges and complexities of living, working and learning in the 21st century. Being (the present state) and becoming (the future state) are crucial contributions to what is sometimes called “achieving one’s potential” in educational contexts – the development of multiple subjectivities, the attainment of self-actualisation and (in diverse ways beloved of historical and current fiction) the fulfilment of destiny. Seeming functions as a timely reminder and a useful ‘reality check’ – that all is not what it sometimes appears, and that we (learners, teachers, humans, sentient beings) need to peer behind the surface and the superficial to what those with whom we seek to communicate are really saying about their understandings of the world. Writing for personal and professional transformation, the organising theme for this section of the book, links with the book’s emphasis on words being woven for manifold purposes and with varied effects. In this section, this and the other chapters highlight some of the ways in which writing can generate the profoundly powerful outcome of transformation – of significant and often long-lasting, even permanent, change in outlook, understanding and behaviour. Against this backdrop, this chapter reflects on the preceding chapter, containing selected students’ writings about seeming, being and becoming, and connects those writings with the author’s ongoing research and teaching interests in the enduringly important relationship between lifelong learning and teacher transformation. Establishing this connection is one means of guarding against the potential charge of writing being solipsistic, self-indulgent or trivial. This is because authentic and effective writing is indispensable to processes as varied as constructive feedback, critical reflection, futures-directed communication, well-intentioned dialogue and sustainable change locally, nationally and globally. It is certainly crucial to educators – including pre-service teachers, teachers and teacher educators – discharging their responsibilities to facilitate lifelong learning and to promote productive change and transformation.

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This chapter consists of the following four sections: x An engagement with the students’ writings presented in the preceding chapter x Locating the students’ writings in broader contemporary educational scholarship x Using that scholarship as a springboard for linking the themes of seeming, being and becoming with the crucial relationship between lifelong learning and teacher transformation x A concluding reflection on that relationship vis-à-vis weaving words and writing as research.

An engagement with the students’ writings in the preceding chapter As is the case with the other chapters featuring the students’ work in this book, the preceding chapter presents writings that are courageous, creative, diverse and timely. The students have elected to take up the theme of seeming, being and becoming in highly varied and yet very effective ways, reflecting simultaneously their own different backgrounds and experiences and their common focus on being pre-service teachers and becoming educators in their own right. Their writings also reflected a shared commitment to using the writing process to communicate their developing understandings of what it seems like to be successful teachers as well as engaged and informed citizens in the contemporary world. One index of the complexity and diversity of the students’ writings in the preceding chapter was the themes that they have selected to frame their work. In the students’ poetry, Kim Fox’s “If I Should Happen Upon You” expressed the poignant pleasure combined with the potential pain of reengaging with over-familiar yet long-forgotten family photographs, specifically of her great-grandmother Eunice, thereby synthesising the powerful love of generations of family members. For Matthew Hunt, “Escape” was his obvious selection as a theme, given that “I myself use gaming as an escape” and that “video games have become more than just a hobby” for him. The final stanza of his poem “Escape” shared what happened when a power shortage meant that the game was temporarily at an end: “No escape tonight…Fear unplugged”. John Mulroney’s ambitiously chosen theme was “Life”, and his multi-layered poem “The Washing Machine” cleverly conveyed several crucial rites of passage and commonly experienced emotions in his and others’ lives, as reflected in the lines “Washed and baptised”, “Cleaned and dried” and “A tangle, a twist”. Stephanie Rex articulated “[m]agic, enchantment and mysterious

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worlds” as her chosen themes, encapsulated in the playful poem “Wicked Me”, including the reference to “widdershins”. Finally, Natalie Romanet created an effective soundscape in her poem “Nature’s Sea Song” by deploying such immediately recognisable lines as “Crash of the waves on rock and sand”, “Gush and splash, trickle from rock” and “A sparkling laugh, child’s splash”, in the process tellingly communicating “the feelings and moods that are described” of a type of landscape very familiar throughout the world. Similarly in the students’ drama, Melissa Andrews’ scene “Happy Families”, part of a larger play production, told of Alice’s response to her son Daniel’s decision to move out of the family home and focused on the theme of “the emotional struggle of letting a child go”. In “Places in Time” Melanie Harris used a double parallel structure to experiment with what seems to be reality and what reality really is by recalling the memories of a man in a coma and by signifying his wife’s and his children’s concerns for him and their hopes for the future, with the two parallel elements being fused intriguingly in the last few lines of the script. Matthew Hunt returned to his chosen theme of “Escape” in his final scene of a film set in the mythical land of Enigami, with eight-year-old Jake being knighted for his crucial role in saving his community from invasion. Matthew shared with us that “My intent with this script is to suggest that while people may seem happy they may not be so. Instead they may be escaping into their mind and running away from their problems”. The students’ writings reflected a corresponding complexity and diversity with regard to their selections of literary genres and writing styles. Kim Fox’s poem “If I Should Happen Upon You” demonstrated the creative power of a long-familiar family object in stimulating new feelings and thoughts. Intriguingly, Melissa Andrews’ play scene “Happy Families” was planned originally “as a dramatic piece”, but as the writing evolved Melissa found that “comedic elements emerged from the characters and situation”. Matthew Hunt’s “Escape” was avowedly “not a song”, despite being “based on the layout of lyrics” that would presumably resonate strongly with the gamer represented in the poem. Furthermore, Matthew conveyed all the students’ growing awareness of and facility with different writing types in his “knowledge of different writing conventions required for different types of poems/scripts” and of “how the rules change for each”. John Mulroney overcame his initial hesitation to deploy a series of evocative “similes and metaphors” in “The Washing Machine”. Stephanie Rex built on “the narrative style of poetry” to create “Wicked Me”, and she found that the “alternate rhyme scheme”, “with the second and fourth line in each verse rhyming”, an effective structure for

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communicating her purpose. For Natalie Romanet, “When writing this poem my intent was to construct a very visual text in the sense that someone would be able to read it and sense the feelings and moods that are described”. Moreover, the students in the preceding chapter reflected directly on their experiences with writing their respective texts. Many of them acknowledged that that writing was not easy: Kim Fox noted that “my excitement at being able to show myself through creative writing was quickly undermined by fear”; Melanie Harris stated that “Although I enjoyed writing elements of the play scene, I did not really enjoy the overall process as it felt quite unnatural”; Matthew Hunt shared that “When writing this poem I struggled with the ending”; Stephanie Rex recorded that “Prior to creating this poetry piece I was unfamiliar with the process for constructing a poem”; and Natalie Romanet reflected that “I approached this task with great hesitation as I felt that I had very limited knowledge of how to construct my own literature”. Yet these student authors also observed that once the creative process had commenced it seemed to develop a life of its own (an experience that has been paralleled in writing this chapter). For Kim Fox, once she found the inspiration that she needed from a photograph of her greatgrandmother, “As if she had touched my mind herself the words to my poem started drifting in waves”. Melanie Harris “loved writing both the narrative and the poem”. Matthew Hunt reported that in his film scene about Jake “acting out and visualising the action in my lounge room helped with the directions”. Likewise for Stephanie Rex “the narrative style of poetry came naturally to me and allowed my ideas to flow and combine to create a snapshot of a wicked witch”. Natalie Romanet found that “as I progressed and began writing it was not as scary and difficult as I thought it might be”. Despite this common success, some of the students indicated that they were initially reluctant to share their writing with others, highlighting its personal significance and their vulnerability to potentially uninterested or uncomprehending responses by readers. For instance, Natalie Romanet reported that: Another difficulty was in the process of editing and making adjustments. I found this extremely difficult as feedback from my teacher and peers changed my initial ideas completely and I do not think the final result conveys the same meaning to the reader.

Yet the students also communicated the value of the feedback that they had received from such readers: sharing her poem with her family

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members, “I knew my words needed no altering” (Kim Fox); “I did enjoy the feedback and help with areas in my poem: it needed polish to conform to the style in which I was writing” (John Mulroney); and: When I submitted my poem on the [online course] forum Janice [the course coordinator and the editor of this book] replied with a suggestion for my final stanza. I was much happier with her suggestion as it artistically stated what I was trying to say, and got the message across clearly. (Matthew Hunt)

Finally, it is clear that all the student authors learned extensively from the dual processes of writing and of reflecting on that writing. Given the focus of this chapter, it was particularly noteworthy that some of the students referred directly to the association between that learning and their roles as educators. For instance, Melissa Andrews drew on a well-known adage to inform her future pedagogical approach: “I really like the motto ‘fail to plan, plan to fail’ …. I will definitely allow time for planning in my English lessons”. Melanie Harris recorded that “In future I would like to find myself in a situation which requires me to attempt to write another play which would hopefully provide me with a spark to create better learning experiences for my students”. In addition, for Melanie, “Helping students with writing creative texts not only requires teaching them about how to write texts but also encouraging them to explore their ideas and be comfortable with the audience they are presenting to”. And Stephanie Rex stated explicitly: As a future teacher of English, I believe it is important for pre-service teachers to engage with tasks and literature that they will encounter and teach in their own classrooms. I believe this task has provided me with the necessary skills to be a better teacher of English for my future students.

Locating the students’ writings in contemporary educational scholarship The teacher education literature abounds with accounts of the impact of writing on pre-service teachers’ developing understandings of being and becoming educators in their own right. Structured writing experiences have been demonstrated to assist student teachers in science education (Shin & Nam, 2012), in teaching poetry (Dymoke & Hughes, 2009) and in integrating technology into classrooms (Tonheur, van Braak, Sang, Voogt, Fisser, & Ottenbreit-Leftwich, 2012). Such experiences have also enabled hearing impaired pre-service teachers to connect with hearing children

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(Bailes, Hulsebosch, & Martin, 2010), have enhanced the practice of preservice English as a Second Language teachers (Guénette & Lyster, 2013) and have empowered Asian American women preparing to teach in multicultural environments in the United States (Gordon, 2013). Examples of effective writing experiences for pre-service teachers have included diary entries reflecting on critical incidents (GabryĞ-Barker, 2012), using metaphors to assist student teachers to re-imagine their students and themselves (Kitchen, 2011), narrative inquiry as a lens for exploring curriculum development (Ciuffetelli Parker, Pushor, & Kitchen, 2011) and exploring the affordances of webblogs and videologs in enhancing capacity-building in using multiple digital modalities within online communities of practice (Kajder & Parkes, 2012). At the same time, it is appropriate to acknowledge identified limitations of the impact of these structured writing experiences on pre-service teachers’ understanding of what it is to be and to become teachers. For instance, Pace (2010) reported that “ … reflective writing does not come naturally and students need help to understand the purpose of the process, as well as how to go about it … ” (p. 10), and he referred to “ … writing by pre-service teachers, which was purely descriptive and contained no critical analysis, … ” (p. 11). Similarly, Kitchen (2012) warned that “As [reflective practice] becomes commonplace [in teacher education] … , there is the risk that it may become less rigorous” (p. 87), and he argued that “One way to enhance reflective practice among preservice teachers is to improve the quality of [written] feedback provided by teacher educators” (p. 87). The phenomenon of flow mentioned by two of the student authors has been conceptualised by Csíkszentmihályi (1998) to denote a state of concentrated focus on an activity or experience. Furthermore, several teacher educators have taken up the notion of flow to analyse their work with their teacher education students, including the use of structured writing experiences. Examples have included learning about the arts, creativity and the natural environment (Jones, 2013), developing crosscurricular approaches to art and science in primary schools (Parker, Heywood, & Jolley, 2012) and generating understandings of transcendent music making (Bernard, 2009). More broadly, the literature also presents several studies of the development of authentic identities by pre-service teachers, including through the use of writing. For instance, narrative rehabilitation and bibliotherapy have been used effectively to enhance mathematics preservice teachers’ identity work (Lutovac & Kaasila, 2011), while preservice teachers’ autoethnographic writing has facilitated the development

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of more self-aware, self-reflective and open dispositions towards student diversity and a commitment to social justice (Mills & Ballantyne, 2010). Likewise a Culturally Relevant Pre-Service Teacher Intervention Model was developed to assist pre-service students to develop an enhanced understanding of their identities as future teachers and their potential work with African American students and communities (Ashby Bey, Blunck, Lewis, & Hicks, 2011). Lamote and Engels (2010) identified four elements of student teachers’ increasingly effective professional identity development: commitment to teaching, professional orientation, task orientation and self-efficacy. By contrast, pre-service teachers at greatest risk of burnout and dropout once they begin teaching tend to have naïve, unrealistic and poorly developed professional identities (Hong, 2010). Many of these ideas were encapsulated by a recent study of professional identity creation for Australian pre-service teachers: The importance of reflection in supporting the continued professional learning of preservice practitioners is well recognised …. In making the transition from student to teacher, preservice teachers create their own professional identity. Their ability to articulate this identity is examined through a new construct, a “teacher[’s] voice” … [which] develops when preservice teachers interpret and reinterpret their experiences through the processes of reflection. A teacher[’]s voice is articulated as part of the person[’]s self-image. (Sutherland, Howard, & Markauskaite, 2010), p. 455)

The students’ writings profiled in the previous section of the chapter therefore resonate strongly with the current educational literature related to the development of pre-service teachers’ professional identities and particularly to the important role of structured writing experiences in facilitating that development. Implicit in that resonance is an understanding of the relationship among seeming, being and becoming with regard to professional identity articulation and growth. It remains to make that understanding rather more direct, which is the focus of the next section.

Linking seeming, being and becoming, lifelong learning and teacher transformation It cannot be denied that the work of educators is complex, diverse and at times highly challenging. That work has to take account of wider sociocultural constructions of learning and teaching and to engage with broader political pressures (including accountability and standardisation).

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Teachers’ interactions with their students therefore take place against a backdrop of competing demands and discordant discourses, many of which they are unable to control but which exercise an increasingly powerful influence on what they do and who they are. Taking an implicit cue from the students’ writings in the previous chapter, teachers’ professional work and identity development can be viewed as a series of intertwining journeys of varying duration and with varied aspired and achieved destinations. The intersections among seeming, being and becoming are thus integral elements of those journeys, as is clearly demonstrated by published scholarship that traverses disciplinary and national boundaries that nevertheless frame the possibilities and the specificities of individual current and prospective teachers’ identity enactments. For instance, these enactments have been analysed among pre-service English language teachers in Hong Kong (Trent, 2010), among pre-service special education teachers participating in a practicum in an urban centre in the United States (Smiley & Helfenbein, 2011), by a highly qualified science graduate undergoing a career change to teaching (Wilson & Deaney, 2010), among artists experiencing a similar career change to teaching (Hall, 2010), among former primary school teachers and now teacher educators in the United States (Young & Erickson, 2011) and by a group of current doctoral students seeking to become teacher educators in Canada (Kosnik, Cleovoulou, Fletcher, Harris, McGlynn-Stewart, & Beck, 2011). Particular themes within this scholarship include the findings of “ … teacher professional identity as lived experience in the context of educational change” and “ … multiple roles, struggling voice and forging professional identity in the changing educational landscape” (Smit, Fritz, & Mabalane, 2010, p. 93). Moreover, “ … dissonance may play an important catalytic role in pre-service teacher identity development … ” (Galman, 2009, p. 468). Similarly, “Teaching contains a salient component of ‘heart-consuming’ labour” and “Teachers can be seen as emotional workers in teaching” (Yin & Lee, 2012, p. 56). Furthermore, “ … teacher educators can use fantasy and desire as an impetus for discussion about/working through the anxieties of the profession of teaching art and art teacher identity”, and “These pedagogical fantasies support the student teachers’ desires for power/recognition, love/connections, and salvation/social justice” (Hetrick, 2010, p. iii). Likewise, in a study that “ … draws attention to how teachers reconcile competing pressures”, “The ongoing pressure for performativity and constant change destabilises their work, yet they remain committed to meeting the needs and interests of their students” (Jephcote & Salisbury, 2009, p. 966).

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More specifically, seeming, being and becoming are also powerful themes in the crucial relationship between lifelong learning and teacher transformation. This relationship consists of multiple elements, including materiality and bodily matter (Mulcahy, 2012), engagement with cultural hegemonies (Peters, 2012), a renewed focus on heutagogy (Blaschke, 2012), an acknowledgment and an elaboration of the power of becoming (Hager & Hodkinson, 2011), using available environments (including virtual ones) to progress the project of becoming (Zuiker & Ang, 2011), maximising links between schools (and other educational settings) and their respective communities (Chapman & Aspin, 2012) and – in keeping with the book’s raison d’۶tre – using writing to facilitate both lifelong learning and teacher transformation (Walsh, 2012). From my perspective, lifelong learning and teacher transformation with regard to educators’ work and identities are neither automatic outcomes nor easy attainments, but instead are ideals towards which educators strive with varying degrees of success. If we return to the journey metaphor introduced above, lifelong learning and teacher transformation emerge as possible landmarks along our shared and separate journeys, but there are several other potential landmarks as well, including a sense of ‘treading water’ and of being in a ‘dead end’ role, professional and personal frustration, and self-perceived burnout leading to dropout and attrition from the profession. Certainly underpinning my conviction of the possibly powerful relationship between lifelong learning and teacher transformation are assumptions about professional agency and autonomy, individual and collective capabilities, and contextual capacity to enact those capabilities that are not always evident and available.

Conclusion For me, the students’ writings in the previous chapter present an engaged and thoughtful array of reflections on experiences and aspirations that augur well for their own professional careers and contributions as well as for the educational settings and the communities where they will be working. In particular, their musings on seeming, being and becoming, expressed through literary forms with which they demonstrated varying degrees of familiarity and comfort, generated themes that resonated with, and also added value to, the published literature about educators’ work and identities. Seeming, being and becoming also emerged as significant elements of the complex and contentious connection between lifelong learning and teacher transformation. Both the students’ writings and the selected published

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scholarship evoked a yearning for such a connection being strong, resilient and durable over place and time, and in some cases those features were in evidence. At the same time, the students’ writings and the published literature revealed instances where the connection was not wellestablished, and where educators at multiple sites along the continuum of experience struggled to understand and to engage meaningfully with their contexts. In that struggle are revealed much of our common humanity. A recurring motif of the preceding chapter and of this one, and indeed of the book as a whole, is the proposition of the power of the process of weaving words and of the potential impact of writing. My analysis of the students’ writings above highlighted the power of their woven words, by distilling what I saw as the emergent themes from those writings and by establishing direct links between those themes and contemporary educational scholarship. Likewise several published studies have demonstrated the practical utility as well as the long-term influence of writing – as reflection, as research, as learning, as veritable transformation – in the lives of educators of all types and in all contexts. Certainly this power of weaving words and of writing for multiple purposes needs to be allowed full rein if seeming, being and becoming are to be good companions along the journeys of lifelong learning and teacher transformation, rather than turning into unattainable chimera and evanescent glimpses of other words that never materialise.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Dr Janice K. Jones for the invitation to contribute to her edited book, and to the students whose work I have been privileged to read and engage with in this chapter. The chapter’s clarity and readability have been enhanced by the constructive feedback of two anonymous peer reviewers.

References Ashby Bey, J., Blunck, S., Lewis, L. L., & Hicks, T. (2011, Spring). Preparing pre-service teachers to teach African American students using the Culturally Relevant Pre-Service Teacher Intervention Model. Journal of Education and Social Justice, 1(1), 76-88. Bailes, C. N., Hulsebosch, P., & Martin, D. S. (2010, August). Reflective journal writing: Deaf pre-service teachers with hearing children. Teacher Education and Special Education: The Journal of the Teacher

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Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children, 33(3), 234-247. Bernard, R. (2009, April 21). Music making, transcendence, flow, and music education. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 10(14). Retrieved from http://www.ijea.org/v10n14/v10n14.pdf Blaschke, L. M. (2012). Heutagogy and lifelong learning: A review of heutagogical practice and self-determined learning. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 13(1), 56-71. Chapman, J. D., & Aspin, D. N. (2012). Schools and lifelong learning: The importance of schools as core centres for learning in the community. In D. N. Aspin, J. D. Chapman, K. Evans, & R. Bagnall (Eds.), Second international handbook of lifelong learning (Springer international handbook of education vol. 26) (pp. 521-538). Houten, The Netherlands: Springer Netherlands. Ciuffetelli Parker, D., Pushor, D., & Kitchen, J. (2011). Narrative inquiry, curriculum making, and teacher education. In J. Kitchen, D. Ciuffetelli Parker, & D. Pushor (Eds.), Narrative inquiries into curriculum making in teacher education (Advances in research on teaching vol. 13) (pp. 3-18). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Csíkszentmihályi, M. (1998). Finding flow: The psychology of engagement with everyday life. New York, NY: Basic Books. Dymoke, S., & Hughes, J. (2009, December). Using a poetry wiki: How can the medium support pre-service teachers of English in their professional learning about writing poetry and teaching poetry writing in a digital age? English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 8(3), 91106. GabryĞ-Barker, D. 2012). Reflectivity in pre-service teacher education: A survey of theory and practice. Katovice, Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu ĝląskiego. Galman, S. (2009, April). Doth the lady protest too much? Pre-service teachers and the experience of dissonance as a catalyst for development. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(3), 468-481. Gordon, J. A. (2013). Understanding taboos with Asian American women through autoethnography. In W. Midgley, P. A. Danaher, & M. Baguley (Eds.), The role of participants in education research: Ethics, epistemologies, and methods (Routledge research in education vol. 87) (pp. 159-167). New York, NY: Routledge. Guénette, D., & Lyster, R. (2013, May). Written corrective feedback and its challenges for pre-service ESL teachers. Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue canadienne des langues vivantes, 69(2), 129-153.

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Hager, P., & Hodkinson, P. (2011). Becoming as an appropriate metaphor for understanding professional learning. In L. Scanlon (Ed.), “Becoming” a professional: An interdisciplinary analysis of professional learning (Lifelong learning book series vol. 16) (pp. 3356). Houten, The Netherlands: Springer Netherlands. Hall, J. (2010, June). Making art, teaching art, learning art: Exploring the concept of the artist teacher. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 29(2), 103-110. Hetrick, L. J. (2010). Exploring three pedagogical fantasies of becomingteacher: A Lacanian and Deleuzo-Guattarian approach to unfolding the identity (re)formation of art student teachers. Unpublished Doctor of Philosophy dissertation, Graduate School, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. Hong, J. Y. (2010, November). Pre-service and beginning teachers’ professional identity and its relation to dropping out of the profession. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26(8), 1530-1543. Jephcote, M., & Salisbury, J. (2009, October). Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(7), 966-972. Jones, J. K. (2013, April). Re-discovering the arts: The impact of engagement in a natural environmental upon pre-service teacher perceptions of creativity. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 8, 102-108. Kajder, S., & Parkes, K. (2012). Examining preservice teachers’ reflective practice within and across multimodal writing environments. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 20(3), 229-249. Kitchen, J. (2011). Imagining and re-imagining our students and ourselves: Using metaphor to story the experiences of teacher candidates and teacher educators. In J. Kitchen, D. Ciuffetelli Parker, & D. Pushor (Eds.), Narrative inquiries into curriculum making in teacher education (Advances in research on teaching vol. 13) (pp. 109-128). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. —. (2012). The feedback loop in reflective practice: A teacher educator responds to reflective writing by preservice teachers. In J. Kitchen & T. Russell (Eds.), Canadian perspectives on the self-study of teacher education practices (pp. 87-95). Ottawa, ON: Canadian Association for Teacher Education/Association canadienne de formation d’enseignement. Kosnik, C., Cleovoulou, Y., Fletcher, T., Harris, T., McGlynn-Stewart, M., & Beck, C. (2011). Becoming teacher educators: An innovative approach to teacher educator preparation. Journal of Education for Teaching: International Research and Pedagogy, 37(3), 351-363.

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Lamote, C., & Engels, N. (2010). The development of student teachers’ professional identity. European Journal of Teacher Education, 33(1), 3-18. Lutovac, S., & Kaasila, R. (2011). Beginning a pre-service teacher’s mathematical identity work through narrative rehabilitation and bibliotherapy. Teaching in Higher Education, 16(2), 225-236. Mills, C., & Ballantyne, J. (2010, April). Pre-service teachers’ dispositions towards diversity: Arguing for a developmental hierarchy of change. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26(3), 447-454. Mulcahy, D. (2012). Affective assemblages: Body matters in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school classrooms. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20(1), 9-27. Pace, P. (2010). Self-evaluation as a tool in developing environmental responsibility. Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability, 12(1), 5-26. Parker, J., Heywood, D., & Jolley, N. (2012). Developing pre-service primary teachers’ perceptions of cross-curricular teaching through reflection on learning. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 18(6), 693-716. Peters, G. (2012). Teacher transformation: Transcending hegemonic roots. Unpublished Doctor of Education dissertation, Department of Educational Leadership, California State University, East Bay, CA. Shin, M.-K., & Nam, J. (2012, December). Exploring changes found in lab reports of pre-service science teachers by adapting a group questioning strategy with using the science writing heuristic template. Mevlana International Journal of Education, 2(3), 33-42. Smiley, A. D., & Helfenbein, R. J. (2011). Becoming teachers: The Payne effect. Multicultural Perspectives, 13(1), 5-15. Smit, B., Fritz, E., & Mabalane, V. (2010, August). A conversation of teachers: In search of professional identity. Australian Educational Researcher, 37(2), 93-106. Sutherland, L., Howard, S., & Markauskaite, L. (2010, April). Professional identity creation: Examining the development of beginning preservice teachers’ understanding of their work as teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26(3), 455-465. Tonheur, J., van Braak, J., Sang, G., Voogt, J., Fisser, P., & OttenbreitLeftwich, A. (2012, August). Preparing pre-service teachers to integrate technology in education: A synthesis of qualitative evidence. Computers & Education, 59(1), 134-144.

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Trent, J. (2010, May). From rigid dichotomy to measured contingency: Hong Kong preservice teachers’ discursive construction of identity. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26(4), 905-913. Walsh, S. (2012, March). Contemplation, artful writing: Research with internationally educated female teachers. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(3), 273-285. Wilson, E., & Deaney, R. (2010, June). Changing career and changing identity: How do teacher career changes exercise agency in identity construction? Social Psychology of Education, 13(2), 169-183. Yin, H.-B., & Lee, J. C.-K. (2012, January). Be passionate, but be rational as well: Emotional rules for Chinese teachers’ work. Teaching and Teacher Education, 28(1), 56-65. Young, J. R., & Erickson, L. B. (2011). Imagining, becoming, and being a teacher: How professional history mediates teacher educator identity. Studying Teacher Education: A Journal of Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices, 7(2), 121-129. Zuiker, S. J., & Ang, D. (2011, January). Virtual environments and the ongoing work of becoming a Singapore teacher. The Internet and Higher Education, 14(1), 34-43.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN RECONCEPTUALISING MEANING-MAKING AND EMBRACING DISRUPTIVE INQUIRY ALISON L. BLACK

Abstract Teacher education courses are often criticised as having little relevance or application for the real world of teaching. Staying awake to the everyday experiences and ways of knowing of external professional communities, such as graduate and experienced teachers, is a challenge for academics and educational researchers. If academics and researchers are to advance understanding of learning, meaning-making and curriculum decisionmaking in real-world situations, then genuine and shared opportunities to explore their own and others’ thinking, knowledge and professional transitions are needed. This chapter presents the voices of experienced early childhood teachers whose practice and ideas stimulate fresh awareness about meaning, its characteristics and development. My voice as an academic and educational researcher is also present and describes how conversations and interactions with these teachers disrupted my thinking and assumptions about teaching, research and the co-construction of knowledge — serving to jolt, jar and challenge. Ongoing encounters have led to unintended insights and offer suggestions for reconceptualising meaning-making in teacher education and educational research. Dissonance, disruption and ambiguity are ongoing features of learning and professional practice and are important catalysts for knowledge generation and enduring reflection. Watchfulness in relation to dilemmas, imprecise ideas and experiences of uncertainty and disquiet are important, as these characterise educational worlds and signal rich reciprocal meaning-making opportunities for those working within these worlds.

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Narrative threads In this chapter there are interlaced storylines and threads of meaning that wind through it. The underlying focus of these storylines is the interruption and interrogation of knowledge. The chapter follows my own meaningmaking as an academic/researcher seeking to understand teachers’ meaning-making; the meaning-making of two teachers as they live and tell their stories of experience; and, the unpacking of the dissonant and challenging characteristics of rich and co-constructed meaning-making encounters and inquiry. The meanings offered in this chapter are shaped in reciprocal personal and professional relationships through writing and conversations, and create opportunities for perception, conceptualisation and engagement. They also create opportunities to pay attention to the weaving of words, to the paradox of enduring and temporal meaningmaking, and to the discomforting and troublesome qualities of significant meaning-making encounters and exchanges. These experiences and processes are important, particularly if teacher educators and educational researchers are to truly understand the tensions and disjuncture that sometimes exist between teacher education institutions’ preparation of teachers and teachers’ real experiences in classrooms. If academics and educators hope to influence and understand what is happening in educational worlds then interrogating what assists meaning-making and what serves as meaning-making for others is crucial. This may involve interrupting everyday ways of thinking. It may even require the letting go of typical and natural ways of thinking and seeing. However, it might also provide potentially rich opportunities for discovering what else might matter.

Preparation for the real world? The nature and demands of educational worlds have intensified and changed profoundly over the years (Aarts, 2000; Hargreaves, 2004; Spalding, Klecka, Lin, Wang, & Odell, 2011). It is now taken for granted that education (including academia) is an incredibly complex action field (Robertson, 2007; Stairs, 2008) Educating involves more than the imparting of traditional methods and content (Folsom, 2005; Van Looy & Goegebeur, 2007). Yet, it would seem much of what is presented to preservice teachers at university continues to be utopian, largely disciplinebased and pedagogically narrow (Ayers, Michie, & Rome, 2004). Schools are also criticised for shaping teachers towards traditional and conservative approaches and traditional pedagogical (Whitney, 2011).

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Research repeatedly confirms students enter the educational profession unprepared for the environments and dilemmas they will face (Berry, 2005; Errington, 2011; Welch, 2005). This unpreparedness has been attributed to pre-service teacher education courses not being well related to the demands of teaching, and to the socialising effects of educational settings which often completely contradict what is espoused in teacher education courses (Graue, 2005; Onore & Gildin, 2010). Perhaps if pre-service teachers had opportunities in their education programs to critique the awkwardness and discomfort that tends to characterise important meaning making encounters, and to examine their own personal/professional meanings and the troublesome fit of these with real-world situations, there would not be so many who leave the profession very early in their career (Beltman, Mansfield, & Price, 2011; Kent, 2005; Sumsion, 2002).

Knowledge development and discomfort Knowledge development within the context of adult learning has been identified as a continuous process of invention and exploration that is linked to disequilibrium and dissonance (Houser, Parker, Rose, & Goodnight, 2010; Zellermayer & Margolin, 2005). Research about reducing graduate teacher attrition offers clues as to the importance of life-long knowledge development, and key processes such as meaning-making through storytelling dialogue and problematisation of pedagogical ideas (Long, 2011; Paulus & Scherff, 2008; Sinclair, Munns, & Woodward, 2005). Conversations, story and writing are valuable tools in meaningmaking processes (Johnston, 1994; Miles, 2010; Schultz & Ravitch, 2012). They support the capturing and hearing of differences in dialogue and experience, focus awareness, and offer spaces for negotiating and reconstructing ideas, tensions and experiences (Giorgio, 2009). It is clear these characteristics and processes should be highly valued by tertiary institutions and researchers and that the experience of dissonance and discomfort as part of meaning-making encounters should not be feared (Bresler, 2006; Hong, 2010). Ongoing efforts to cultivate knowledge using these types of processes are required if tertiary educators and researchers are to develop current and informed views of the contradictions, uncertainties, tensions and complexities of teaching, value life-long learning for themselves and their students, and seek to engage pre-service teachers in critical reflection about knowledge, dilemmas and identities and the interplay between these (Black & Halliwell, 2000; McInerney, Smyth, & Down, 2011).

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This chapter posits that attention to dissonance, friction and transitions in learning and meaning-making are crucial when researching to understand professional practice and educational issues (Black, 2000; Clandinin, Murphy, Huber, & Orr, 2009). Disruption, disenchantment, collisions of incompatible ideologies and realities, or confrontations with old and new knowledge can be viewed as problems learners and researchers are unprepared for. Or, they can be valued as critical events, defining moments, opportunities for reflection, interpretation, meaning construction and triggers for growth (Ben-Ari & Enosh, 2013; Long, 2011; Munns, Zammit, & Woodward, 2008).

The centrality of meaning-making Deficiencies in educational research have been characterised by poor anchoring to educational problems and realities; a lack of direct engagement, reciprocity and collaboration by researchers with practitioners; little regard for gaining access to teachers' subjective meanings and conceptions of their own education and their work; and an absence of accessible forms for the communication of findings and subsequent implications (James, 2012; Rizvi, 2011). Attention to meaning and meaning-making is therefore paramount as is recognition of the potential of writing to produce meaning. The role of meaning is of absolute significance in human life (Dewey, 1934; Frankl, 1963). Human beings desire to understand and make meaning of their lives and experiences and they draw meanings from, or give meanings to, events and experiences (Krauss, 2005). Meaning and meaningmaking are supported by interactions and exploration of thoughts, actions and knowledge. The challenge for education and education research lies with facilitating meaning-making processes and appreciating the complexity of meaning in the lives and experiences of people. In terms of understanding educational and practitioner experiences, research points to the central role of meaning-making, particularly in terms of how issues of self and identity and emotional and intellectual characteristics influence practice, and personal and professional knowledge and experience (Carpenter, 2010; McGregor, Hooker, Wise, & Devlin, 2010). It is clear from such research that educators’ meaning-making efforts are numerous as they contextualise knowledge, (de)/(re)construct personal and professional meanings and (re)interpret teaching experiences. Further, meaning-making often occurs during the action of managing and adapting teaching spaces and everything within those spaces. The qualities of these educational spaces are shifting, moving and temporary and include materials, history, dilemmas, people, conversations, identities, beliefs and

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pedagogy (Black, 2011a; Black & Halliwell, 2000; Wrench & Garrett, 2012). This chapter is an effort to redress some of the identified deficiencies in educational research. It follows the production of meaning as writing and conversations between teachers and myself unearth multiple perspectives and notions about what it means to teach (Black, 2011b; Dome, Prado-Olmos, Ulanoff, Ramos, & al, 2005). It also pays close attention to how we make sense of each other’s meanings, viewpoints and experiences and demonstrates how narrative methods support the shaping of our relationships, and our knowledge construction. These narrative processes of writing and storying have created spaces of understanding, and have invited — and continue to invite — ongoing reflection between different viewpoints and people (Thorne, 2012).

Initiating a dialogue In 2006, a group of five experienced early childhood teachers graciously accepted an invitation to collaborate with me in an inquiry into their meaning-making and pedagogy and to have their sense-making conversations featured in a teaching and learning resource for in-service and pre-service teachers. The making of this resource was funded by a teaching and learning grant focussed on supporting transitions to professional practice. The aim was to create a digital resource to support reflection about what it means to teach. The brief to these early childhood teachers was that the teaching and learning resource would capture them engaging in conversations about how they stayed alive to teaching and what sustained them in their teaching work. Part of my intent was to consider how uncertainty is an ongoing experience in teaching and how dilemma situations are in fact great opportunities for learning and understanding. My hope was that conversations would motivate new teachers to reflect on their personal meanings of education and contemplate a variety of questions such as why they became teachers, what enthused and challenged them about education, and what they envisioned for themselves and for learners. So, whilst these conversations were not embedded in what could be called a formal research project, the focus was on knowledge development and meaning-making. The substance of the teaching and learning resource was storytelling– which, for the narrative researcher, is also a valued research methodology. For me, the principal attraction of story is its capacity to reveal understandings and life experiences, both personal and social, in relevant and meaningful ways (Bullough Jr, 2010; Elbaz-

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Luwisch, 2010). Stories can encapsulate years of information, experience, thought, knowledge, context and emotion into a form that can be conveyed to others and that promotes understanding and empathy (Pink, 2006; Savvidou, 2010). Telling and hearing stories of experience can promote self-directed growth by bringing to consciousness forces and events shaping knowledge, and forewarning ways to take command of personal growth and development (Clandinin, 2010). Valuing narrative inquiry, I was interested in capturing teachers engaging in inquiry in the midst of (re) living and (re) telling the stories that made up their lives as educators (Clandinin, 2007). I wanted teacher stories to support reflection and to help us/others “see more in… experiences, to hear more on normally unheard frequencies, to become conscious of what daily routine have obscured, what habit and convention have suppressed” (Greene, 2000, p.123). I believe this happened, but not quite in the way I anticipated. To support the development of stories I engaged with teachers in a series of collaborative conversations and deliberations (both face-to-face and via email communication) that spanned approximately eight months. During this time, I offered questions to guide and focus teacher reflection toward their life history and identity, their decisions to enter and remain in the profession, and toward identification of knowledge development. I asked teachers to share examples of defining moments, dilemma situations, triggers for growth, passions of their work, driving images and valued interactions. Throughout this process I spent time reflecting on teacher responses, documenting points of view and watching for the emergence of key themes which might inform and shape the development of the teaching and learning resource. The sorts of messages I was hoping to explore were ‘teaching is an uneasy journey’, ‘finding certainty in uncertainty and comfort in discomfort’, ‘teaching as a continuous process of exploration’, ‘teaching as a life-long journey of sense-making’, ‘problems as triggers for growth’, ‘the importance of being part of a learning community’. I was interested in these types of notions because of the literature on teachers’ work which outlines that many teachers enter the profession unprepared for the experiences they will face, struggle to cope and leave (Beltman et al., 2011; Chambers, Hobson, & Tracey, 2010; Paulus & Scherff, 2008). They enter with utopian goals, unrealistic expectations and purist philosophies that are tested by the real-world challenges they confront (Ayers et al., 2004; Berry, 2005). These messages were also important to me personally because as a beginning teacher I had found it extremely challenging to action the early

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childhood ideals espoused by my university lecturers — ideas such as ‘learning through play’, ‘working with parents’ and ‘being part of a learning community’. In my real-world teaching setting structured curriculum approaches were valued over child-centred approaches, play in primary school was unheard of, parents worked or dropped kids off at the gate so you didn’t get to see them, and teaching was a very isolated endeavor. The idea of being part of or contributing to a learning community just felt like university rhetoric. I wanted the teaching and learning resource to support pre-service and in-service teachers thinking about the nature of teaching, their guiding ideas and perceptions, and the realities of teaching. I wanted the teaching and learning resource to provide anecdotes to provoke discussion about what it means to teach, and to advance these ideas from real-world contexts and perspectives — and for filmed teacher conversations to serve as catalyst for greater awareness and connections with the realities of teaching and encourage investigation into personal/professional meanings.

Shared meanings, definitive answers, writing as research, and other elusive things This all sounds relatively straightforward. But, it wasn’t... My group of early childhood teachers did not offer the typical, concrete or obvious responses I was expecting and seeking. Of interest to me now, I had anticipated a nice neat process of communication and I hadn’t really thought through what the ‘co-construction’ of ideas and meanings really entails (Lee, 2010; Musanti & Pence, 2010; Patterson & Brogden, 2006). Teacher conversations and responses did not follow my anticipated script and the patterns of discourse I had predicted did not eventuate. Despite my educator and researcher interests in valuing dilemmas, uncertainty and the problematising of ideas, I found that I was unprepared for the unsettling learning and provocations that awaited me and that have since become fodder for ‘research’ thinking not just ‘for ‘teaching and learning’ thinking. Identifying when and where this work with teachers moved and moves from the ‘teaching and learning space’ into the ‘research space’ is messy. The ‘research’ process I engaged in is also messy and I find myself asking ‘what counts as research?’ I have come to understand that education research can be a “messy terrain riddled with contradictions, choices, compromises, and most importantly, self-exploration” (Quaye, 2007, p.3). It is not easy locating when this work became ‘research’ in an accepted sense. However, it would seem certain that the research space was entered

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with the writing of this chapter. Perhaps this is not the ideal place to have begun, and my approach is an unconventional way of thinking about, doing and writing research. Yet, the writing of this chapter has offered me an opportunity to interrogate my own thinking about research/researched/ researcher spaces, meaning-making and co-constructing meaning with others. Returning to the experiences surrounding the production of the teaching and learning resource has provided rich information to inform my deliberations about knowledge generation, about the work of educators, and about the qualities of research and research relationships. In terms of a methodological journey it could be suggested that I have engaged in a kind of self-study or autoethnography, open to my reflections about disrupted assumptions and experiences of dissonance as a “vulnerable observer” (Behar, 1997, p. 6). As educator/researcher I was forced to engage in a process of knowing that acknowledged my experiences and preconceptions, that addressed the uncertainty that was happening within me, and obliged me to rethink and reflect (Craig, 2010; Dauphinee, 2010; Doty, 2010). With this chapter I am engaging in a process of writing vulnerably and offering “intimate confessions” about the awkwardness and fruitfulness of meaning-making in my own work, about my unintended presumptuousness as an academic and my ponderings about the privilege of research (Socolovsky, 1998, p.73). Perhaps my experiences across these messy boundaries further the suggestion that a viable educational research community in the future will need to grapple seriously with its diverse purposes, dimensions and internal influences to consider what constitutes the boundaries of educational research. We may need to consider anew what co-construction and co-production of new understandings might mean and remember that knowledge construction cannot ever be one-sided (Lee, 2010; Sharrock, 2007). Dialogue in the form of written reflection, email conversation and storytelling is scattered throughout the chapter — my dialogue ‘with self’ including reflections and vulnerable observations, and dialogue between teachers and myself. Some of this dialogue occurred in 2006, some of it in 2012 — a long time after our first interactions. Given this space and time between dialogues, the chapter has a capacity to highlight something of the nature of meanings and meaningmaking — how meanings can be limited, be truths, change and shift or intensify over time, be recognised again or silenced completely. It also has a capacity to highlight the contribution of writing to professional knowledge and learning, to attending to details of experience, and to the expression of feelings, viewpoints and imagination.

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As a way of illustrating how teacher conversations and writing engaged me in a process of knowing and learning, snippets and episodes from a series of email conversations between just two of the group of early childhood teachers (Jude and Jamie) and me are included. Any of the writing and conversations from the wider group of teachers involved in the teaching and learning project could potentially have been presented here. In choosing what to include, consideration was given to the size limitation of this chapter and to reader manageability, but also to the willingness, interest and availability of teachers to engage with me again six years later in this new ‘research’ context. Jude and Jamie’s responses also beautifully demonstrate and elucidate the particular meaning-making phenomena I am grappling with. Written excerpts from our email communication are used here to show something of how conversations disrupted everyday ways of thinking and acted as stepping off points for self-examination and for examination of ideas and concepts. This weaving of words back then, and over time, has encouraged knowledge construction and deep thinking. Advancing understanding, knowledge and meaning-making has been contingent upon the unique contributions of each of us (Anyan, 2013).

Relationships, power and reciprocity What our communications, interactions and experiences have shown me is that producing knowledge is a joint venture of ‘researcher/academic and participant/practitioner’, and I have benefited directly from the exchanges. So whilst I was initially quite keen to control the script with the questions I initiated according to my interests and desired project outcomes, the teachers took control over what they wanted to say and provided the most crucial part of the conversation (Anyan, 2013). Reflection on written exchanges has also enabled ongoing knowledge construction. At the time of the teaching and learning project, Jude and Jamie had been teaching for more than a decade and in a range of educational settings. They knew each other well. Having known these teachers over several years and in a variety of professional capacities, I was confident and comfortable I understood their positions on educational matters and their philosophies and practices. As a result of our history, relationship and frequent interactions, I had presumed I had a pretty good understanding about what their experiences of working as teachers were like, as well as the knowledge and motivations behind their philosophy, practice and pedagogy. I automatically assumed they would be on my wave length and I would be on theirs and that the making of the resource would therefore be easy and uncomplicated. Whilst I was genuinely interested in

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knowledge construction and ‘co-construction’ of knowledge, without realising it I brought a ‘taken-for-granted’ attitude with regard to how conversations would play out (Ben-Ari & Enosh, 2013). Whilst my true intent was to listen to teachers and value their voices, I can see that my actions then and now warrant further reflection. How had I positioned knowledge and who held it? Was it audacious of me to email them and seek their responses to ‘thirteen’ questions following an evening meal with them where conversations hadn’t progressed along the lines I had envisaged? The albeit passionate and provocative discussions had not revealed the tidy hoped-for responses I had imagined for my transformational teaching and learning resource. I did not consciously perceive I had the power in the relationship or held the expert knowledge, yet I had set an agenda for conversations around my constructs of the nature of teaching — constructs I had supposed were shared constructs. I soon found myself in a state of dissonance as I struggled to make sense of their different and seemingly nebulous ways of thinking about and communicating meaning. What I should have realised (given my interest in dissonance, difference and dilemmas) was that differentness of thinking is often the very thing that motivates engagement and knowledge production. Ben-Ari and Enosh (2013, p.425) suggest “Interactions within the research process are essentially ongoing occurrences of potential misunderstandings. Hence we should perceive research not necessarily as shared and agreed-upon meaning-making endeavours, but rather as ambiguously complex processes with multiple levels of ‘differences interrupting differences’”. Even though this original project was not a ‘research’ project, only becoming ‘research’ with the writing and self-study surrounding this chapter, our roles changed as we engaged in knowledge production. The reality was that I was socially close to the teachers and I believe this relationship was very significant for the talk that ensued. Perhaps the traditionally valued notion of a neutral researcher needs reconsideration? Ultimately, I believe our relationship enabled a willingness to explore differences and differentness and to engage in ongoing occurrences of complex meaning-making with multiple levels of “differences interrupting differences” which then became sources of new knowledge (Scheurich, 1995 p. 243). Back in 2006, teachers’ genuine and interested attempts to make meaning with me were such that in response to my thirteen questions during the making of the teaching and learning resource they engaged in the equivalent of nine A4 pages of written email dialogue with me and

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with other teachers. Portions of this email dialogue are presented or described within this chapter (with permission). I have in recent months reconnected with the teachers involved in the original project and asked them if they would revisit our email conversations and interactions, and respond to this chapter. Thinking about power relations, I have quietly wondered if this request of teachers to ‘reengage’ could be seen as researcher/academic presumptuousness to now want to use them as a ‘research data source’. Actually, this request was linked to a genuine valuing of our relationship and a desire to include them in my current musings. It was also linked to a curiosity about what had been said, a curiosity about knowledge, and about ‘new’ knowledge or talk that could ensue. Ultimately, I believe our relationship is a reciprocal one and this is evidenced by teachers’ collegiality and generosity in time and effort to share their meaning-making over many years. It is manifested in their genuine attempts to engage me in their thinking in order to make meaning with me. Rather than this being an exchange pattern that might serve exploitative relations, I prefer to think that I felt able to ask these teachers to re-engage due to our genuine and long-standing reciprocal relationship, interactions, and shared interests in learning and teaching (Ben-Ari & Enosh, 2013). I believe reciprocity is a defining attribute of our research relationship. Our exchanges over time highlight a sharing of power as knowledge is constructed (Maxwell, Locke, & Scheurich, 2013; Scheurich, 1995). Each party has brought different forms of expert knowledge to the exchange. Our exchanges have enabled negotiation of meaning making where we could and can agree and disagree. Across our exchanges there have been power imbalances and differences and these have perhaps been the cornerstone for the substance of our knowledge construction (Ben-Ari & Enosh, 2013). Our collective willingness to express resistance or conflict with regard to certain constructs or ideas has actually contributed to new knowledge and different ways of thinking (Ben-Ari & Enosh, 2013; James, 2012). Reciprocity has stemmed from our common interest in understanding and problematising what it means to teach. Despite my discomfort about discussion not following anticipated pathways, I was and am interested in understanding their perspectives and learning about their views. I was and am interested in developing and constructing new knowledge and understanding diverse points of view about teaching. The teachers have been very generous in their contribution to knowledge production and cooperative interchange and exchange of ideas. Their common interest in exploring these meanings and perspectives is evidenced in the time lags between the giving and receiving ideas and their

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willingness to continue email conversations years on. The products of knowledge presented in this chapter are created from the inputs and outputs of our ongoing meaning-making processes.

Differences interrupting and disrupting differences As a result of my work with these teachers, I realise afresh that meaningmaking is not a simple and precise process. Just like the research process it can involve ‘ongoing occurrences of potential misunderstandings’ and ‘ambiguously complex processes’ (Ben-Ari & Enosh, 2013). Meaningmaking can involve an ongoing playing with ideas, ideas that may seem obscure, hard to access or hard to define. Our attachment to particular meanings we make can be both fixed and unfixed. I can still recall, and feel, the emotions, discomfort and resistance I felt back then as I listened to and read written responses that to me seemed messy and hard to break down and not at all what I imagined they would be. I remember my initial desperation to try and find common ground and a common language, and the anxious attempts I made to steer my colleagues toward the safety of more standard, fixed, clear-cut responses. Now, I appreciate much better the fluid nature of what was said and the undecided open spaces for reciprocal dialogue and engagement with ideas. I appreciate the importance of disruptive inquiry for stimulating fresh ways of seeing and thinking and for interrupting old patterns and perceptions. As we reconnect six years on Jude says he remembers our conversations well. He describes being glad to have been reminded of the video snippet he had referenced in some original email comments. In these earlier comments Jude had recounted how, during a lecture for a group of education students, he had shown a piece of video which he had filmed early one morning at his centre where ‘nothing much had happened’. He liked this video because it seemed to him to be an authentic capturing of direct experience — a mundane capturing of some ordinary moments. His caution to me, both then and now, is around the strong inclination (of mine and others’ in education and academia) ‘to describe or prescribe or articulate actual practice’ – such as ‘the worth or value of the ordinary moment’. For Jude the very act of articulating and describing this ‘conceals and marginalises actual pedagogy and process.’ Jamie’s reflection on the fluid nature of meaning-making is of great interest to me. So much of what he said in our first conversations seemed inaccessible to me. Now, I think it is more tangible and I can ‘finally get it’. But, now as he re-reads his original email comments he says ‘I take responsibility for these comments even if I don't now always understand

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what I was saying’. I thought he was so ‘certain’ about the meaning he was making. Again the dichotomous qualities of meaning-making emerge: unknown, known, unfixed, fixed, indeterminate, determinate, undecided and decided. In our most recent exchange Jamie reflects on how he made meaning with other teachers. He reflects on how pivotal particular people were to his meaning-making efforts. He describes that he was always keen to ‘nail down meaning’ (like me) and that it was valuable to work with people who ‘side-stepped it and looked beyond the meaning that was created’. So even in holding up the email communication from this teaching and learning project as an example of meaning-making, the meanings are incomplete. The pivotal roles of others may not be seen. Researcher and author choices also impede so there will be ways of making meaning that are not captured and that remain obscured or missing altogether. Perhaps, the reality is we cannot ever truly capture the full truth of meaning-making endeavours.

To the weaving of words… As described earlier, during the development of the teaching and learning resource I engaged in many conversations with teachers and I also emailed questions to them following some of these discussions. In terms of the email communication, they also engaged in email dialogue back and forth with each other, agreeing and disagreeing, and then sent their collated shared responses back to me. The snippets of written conversations that are included here will be blurred by my interpretations and by time. Words that held a particular meaning back then hold a different meaning now. What remains may not accurately reflect intended or actual meaning. I have also framed and described some of the responses and interactions more narratively rather than just inserting the original email streams. I have resisted presenting all our exchanges narratively though — because for me it is the raw words and voices of teachers that are powerful and that we need to pay attention to, to hear (Ayers, 1987; Goodson, 1997; Hargreaves, 1996). It is the original streams of interaction and writing that excite me (now), confront/ed me and challenge/ed me to re-examine what meaning-making, co-construction and co-production of new understandings might really mean (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996; Goodson, 1997). However, multiple readers and reviewers of drafts of this chapter wanted the raw email conversations turned into more narrative prose. So again I find myself grappling with the boundaries of what counts as research, or research data/its presentation/analysis. Again I find myself pondering the norms, beliefs, and practices that matter to the academic

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community and wondering whether the/my academic/researcher interpretations might potentially blur the message or intensity of the original meaning-making, or might blur what really mattered/s to ‘the researched’ and to these teachers. Again, that idea of wanting/needing to challenge and extend what counts as research surfaces in my thinking (Clandinin, Pushor, & Orr, 2007).

My agenda and Question 1 of 13 I wanted the teaching and learning resource to make teacher knowledge, thinking, experience and meaning-making visible and palpable. My first email question asked teachers to describe some of the typical teaching situations that aroused the most emotion, energy, excitement or disenchantment for them. I wanted them to ‘describe what was important to them in terms of their work and their relationships with children’. To enable a sense of the type of written dialogue that occurred, these are Jamie and Jude’s email responses to this first question: JAMIE: Every event has potential for emotion and “energy / animation / excitement/ disenchantment” and many other things too. No situations possess any of these features inherently. So in this sense, every situation is crisis — especially those we don’t identify as ‘crisis’. Life is a crisis. Writing this is a crisis. Crisis is what makes stuff happen. Does that make ‘sense’? JUDE: Hmmm. So it seems to me that it is not so much the situations themselves that I can identify as being about something or being significant, but more what I can do/see/read into EVERY situation to see that it is all these things already. What is important for me currently? I think trying to construct and reconstruct some sort of connection over and over… also lately I’ve been considering that the idea of agency might be very very interesting to and for me. At the same time there are lots of things that are important but that I don’t necessarily aspire to…eg. It is important to me that I’m liked (and not just by children) but I don’t think that this is particularly useful or healthy. JAMIE: You’re right.. Situations don’t have any inherent features to them at all. What they DO have is what we read into them. But ‘crisis’ maybe can help us get through the idea that things have to be good or bad ….and help us get into that (seemingly) precipitous space where an event is neither one thing or another. But nothing and everything.

I found these responses to be very dense, ‘atypical’ and unexpected teacher responses, and I felt the intent of my question had been for the

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most part side-stepped and moved aside. These were not the answers I had envisaged. Rather than identifying situations or examples, these teachers problematised my question. They didn’t even get to the part where I wanted them to describe what was important to them in their work and relationships with children. Well Jude perhaps circled the question, identifying that making connection/s seemed important and that the idea of agency interested him. At the time of receiving these emails I was concerned that teacher responses weren’t clear cut. It felt to me like the conversations didn’t quite take off, that the questions were circumnavigated and answers were incomplete or only just begun before they ended. In fact, it felt to me like every question I asked was problematised! I found this tendency quite bewildering and frustrating. At a practical level (and in my defense) I had a teaching and learning resource to create and film, and I was scared that the ‘round and round’ email conversations the teachers were offering me potentially could challenge the making and completion of that product. I wanted to be able to record straight forward answers and examples. I wanted stories, anecdotes, examples and responses that could be captured. I wanted stories and ideas that would be accessible to pre-service and inservice teachers and perhaps offer help for those involved in navigating teaching and all its complexities. I hadn’t expected these teachers would identify the questions I was posing as problematic or needing to be taken apart or clarified. I also hadn’t expected to benefit so directly from the exchange in terms of being challenged to think differently. This unexpected change in the direction of conversations challenged my taken for granted ways of thinking. Ultimately these exchanges interrupted the ‘congealed knowledge I was using and which was potentially stopping me from seeing other perspectives’ (Ben-Ari & Enosh, 2013). I now know that these interruptions and disruptive exchanges encouraged the generation of fresh knowledge. Whilst I did not immediately recognise it, the email dialogue these teachers offered to me documents teachers engaged in acts of meaningmaking. Not only are teachers problematising my questions, they are agreeing and disagreeing with each other and they are adapting and amending and refashioning ideas, and extending their own thinking. And they are enjoying this process and finding it stimulating. Perhaps this is the reason they returned to me nine A4 pages of email chat? Certainly this is evidence of the notion of reciprocity which stems from the common interest of both parties to understand in depth the phenomenon in question (Ben-Ari & Enosh, 2013).

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Question 2 and emerging insights My second question asked teachers to describe some moments — either past or current — that stimulated their thinking about their practice, perhaps resulting in changes to their practice. I wanted them to identify some teaching experiences that ‘unbalanced cherished assumptions’ or that helped to make their tacit knowledge more explicit. Again they wanted to discuss, critique and assess the question before answering it. Had they provided my originally hoped for ‘simple answers’ the resulting resource may have in fact trivialised understandings about what it means to teach. Their need and desire to explore ideas reveals their genuine curiosity. Their answers highlight their contribution to meaningmaking and knowledge production. One of the teachers identified this was a tricky question to answer. I mean, how do you actually identify ‘what a current moment is’? Jamie also struggled with the idea of a ‘moment’ and mused that ‘the agents/moments of change I identify today may be different from those I identify tomorrow. So the things I used to think were critical aren’t anymore. And the things I didn’t know were critical are now. But the stuff I really hate at any moment is always useful to think on, because it’s the stuff I want to disown and take no responsibility for’. Looking at Jamie’s response now it seems rather profound and I can relate to it — now. And even though I didn’t see it at the time, this type of philosophy is actually very useful for teachers (or anyone) facing transition, dilemmas or change — life is flux, is fluid, is change, and yesterday’s problems will be forgotten tomorrow — or perhaps eclipsed by the problems of today. However, it is really important to pay attention to ‘the stuff we hate’, and to connect within to examine tensions, emotions and reactions to experiences (Berry, 2007; Black, 2012; Errington, 2011; Hong, 2010). It is this sort of paying attention that supports the making of meaning that is personally and professionally significant and transformational (Carpenter, 2010; Craig, 2010). ‘Paying attention and noticing’ are ideas Jude puts forward as well. I am reminded how important notions of awareness, mindfulness and wakefulness are for academics, education and education research (Brown & Ryan, 2003; Clandinin et al., 2007; Elbaz-Luwisch, 2010; MacDonald & Shirley, 2009; Sherretz, 2011). Jude wrote ‘in a general sense, in relation to teaching (as well as life) I am trying to remember that those times when everything seems bankrupt of interest or possibility are probably those times which have the most potential if I can just notice them at the time rather than complain about them.’

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As I re-read these words of his I am struck by their significance for me personally, and particularly the phrase ‘if I can just notice them at the time’. How pertinent these words are in terms of the academic blindness I was demonstrating and experiencing and am describing in this chapter.

Producing knowledge is a joint and endless venture In terms of what stimulated thinking about his practice, Jude identified that ‘connecting with people’ was important and supported his ways of knowing. Connecting with these teachers has certainly assisted and expanded my thinking, reflection and deliberation. The literature confirms how connecting with, conversing with, and collaborating with others supports professional dialogue and the construction of knowledge (James, 2012; Musanti & Pence, 2010; Savvidou, 2010). Forging connections is essential to the process of meaning-making, to enabling capacities to see differently, and to co-producing new understandings and possibilities (Lee, 2010). I now can see so much in what these teachers were saying, and many ideas now resonate. (And, during the resource production/resource editing process many significant ideas surfaced. A reviewer of the produced teaching and learning resource assessed it as ‘a rich and interesting resource offering contemporary perspectives on what it means to be an early childhood professional’ and identified it’s strength to be ‘the engaging professionals’ and ‘how the role of the teacher is defined and complicated’). Jamie was right. The things I thought were critical weren’t — my agendas, concerns re the departure of conversations from my designated dialogue. And the things I didn’t know were critical are now — how essential it is for academia/me to interrogate what meaning-making and co-construction actually means, how a way of seeing is also a way of not seeing, and the importance of self-examination during and in research. Teachers did not entirely or unreservedly agree with ‘my’ messages. Teacher comments indicated wariness and caution — similar to what Jude had offered regarding his video snippet — to be alert to the strong inclination academia has to define, describe and prescribe. It is interesting to ponder on my resistance to the definitions and prescriptions I was offered as a student (utopian teaching worlds) and my willingness to offer yet another prescription (dissonant teaching worlds). Jude’s feedback to me should have been the slap that woke me up. It certainly wakes me up now. He said that he appreciated the paradoxical qualities of ‘finding comfort in discomfort’ and the other messages as a whole ‘but only in the sense that they are currently where you are

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constructing your meaning about teaching’ and ‘if this becomes the new message about teaching then it becomes problematic’. Taking my ‘teaching as a life-long journey of sense-making’ message forward/backward Jude wrote ‘teaching can no more be an uneasy journey than it can be anything. It is endless sense-making, but framing this as a lifelong journey is just part of the sense-making. A journey (even if it is never ending) is always going somewhere from somewhere. But there’s nowhere to come from and nowhere to go unless you can posit some overarching frame or territory or eye view, which takes you right back to some ultimate ground of certainty.’ In my work with students I stress the value of multiple perspectives and viewpoints. Yet, here I was focused on my perspective and I hadn’t even stopped to consider that my viewpoint or vocabulary would or could be irrelevant or meaningless to others. Jamie tried to help me see, writing ‘the idea of a ‘journey’ is one way of looking at things. And there are many different types of journeys. The idea doesn’t do anything for me personally. So if I had to discuss my work as a journey, I’d have to engage with a perspective not my own. Which is fine as far as it goes – I’m happy to entertain it as an idea. But if I’m asked to give my perspective on my work as a journey, I can’t because it isn’t. And this is a vocabulary which doesn’t encompass my experience.’ I have experienced first-hand an awareness of how university educators and researchers can become oblivious and removed from the experiences and thinking of teachers in the field. I have been struck with an acute and uncomfortable realisation that I had/have developed my own kind of congealed knowledge, and thinking/meaning rhetoric, an ‘edu-speak’, during my time in academia. Whilst I had/have frequently espoused to value teachers’ voices, in this instance I hadn’t actually been prepared for the impact that ‘really listening and grappling with these teachers’ meanings’ would have on my own learning and thinking. Evidence of my grappling can be seen in the following communication with them. After participating in what were for me some particularly challenging discussions and emails, (but fantastic opportunities and triggers for growth in my understanding which I hadn’t counted on), I wrote to them: Now, I am going to give my honest reaction... Just so you can get where I am at in this conversation. I am finding it confronting trying making sense of all you are saying — just as I did the night at dinner — you speak a different language from me and I feel like all my meanings require qualification or contextualising or are invalid at an 'upper intellectual plane'. I feel like a conversation never quite gets off the ground because it

Reconceptualising Meaning-Making and Embracing Disruptive Inquiry 255 has always got to be analysed, reframed or something. I just want to talk. We need to venture 'down a plane or two' for the teaching and learningresource and I was hoping my questions would start to do that, but alas, I fear not. Perhaps if you engage in some ‘everyday’ sense-making with me? What about exploring aspects like 'listening to children', ‘coconstructing the curriculum with children’..... something along those lines?? I guess I need you to bear with me and Jude I am going back to the lecture info you presented in guest lectures for me — you were still constructing meaning, but you conveyed it in a language I could get. Maybe you could talk about [these lectures] as a place to begin meaning-making — as an exercise in showing me how you do it? I want the meaning-making to be accessible [for teachers using and viewing the resource] and to have some description of events, meanings, thinking being engaged in. I don't care if tomorrow you think something different. But I can't understand you in acts of co-constructing and sensemaking if the minute we make meaning it is deemed no longer valid. Let's talk about some of the things you are certain about, you are uncertain about, you have been informed by. Can you describe for me the meaningmaking you engaged in today?

Jamie provocatively wrote back: From my perspective the most significant part of any discussion is the meandering, and the uncertainty and the feeling of being perplexed. Of course it seems like we never get to the heart of the topic. We are already in the most significant part of the discussion. If we are valuing dissonance and uncertainty, then we really have to VALUE it, and not freak out when we become aware of it. How can we get anywhere if we are never perplexed/confused? Why should we be in such a hurry to reach conclusions? I don’t understand if this project is about dissonance why it is such a problem for meanings to require continual contextualisation or qualification.

This response really challenged me. Particularly the phrase, ‘we really have to VALUE it, and not freak out when we become aware of it’. Why was I freaking out? Why was I in such a rush? I was advocating for the value of dissonance for learning, and extolling the virtues of problematising ideas, but here I was trying to run from such feelings and hurriedly attempting to get to easier answers. Ready to deconstruct the ideas of others I had not expected to have to deconstruct my own. I also pondered about the many different meanings and interpretations that exist, or perhaps don’t exist in teacher educator/teacher professional vocabularies.

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Challenging fixed categories and congealed knowledge Jude sympathised with me as I struggled with this disenchantment and confrontation with old and new knowledge, old and new language, shared and unshared vocabulary, old and new meanings. His comments offered a range of provocations. I was caused to revisit what it was I really wanted — immediate definitions and prescriptions — or — meaning that by its authentic nature requires space for connecting and ongoing reframing and reconstruction. I have included Jude’s complete written response to me here because I believe it offers so much insight. It affectingly illuminates something of the essential nature, process and characteristics of co-construction and meaning-making. It also demonstrates the reciprocity of our relationship and the time and effort he gave to try and explain his point of view and invite me to ‘look again’. This was his email response: I understand what you are asking us to do here Ali, and why, and the ridiculous thing is, that even with the suggested topics that you make, I immediately feel a need to reframe and contextualize. This isn’t necessarily because that’s all I can do or want to do (although in a way that may be true) but merely, on a very practical level, that I feel there are some definitions that differ, or at least I’m not sure are shared, and some assumptions on all our parts that are maybe invisible or taken for granted that need to be acknowledged. So ‘listening to children’ or ‘co-constructing the curriculum with children’ become phrases that need to be worried at. To be specific, I remember several years ago (around the time of becoming interested in some Reggio writings) that I would throw around the term ‘co-constructing’ — and we often used it in our dialogues with each other. I thought I knew what it meant — by which I mean that it had a pretty non-problematic, defined meaning for me. It slotted into my pre-existing frame of reference as a new concept/term. In short, from memory it was an extension of the idea of knowledge “construction” (as opposed to transmission and reception) generally, and realizing that knowledge construction can (must) be shared and arises in dialogue. At a later point, after, in effect some co-construction with [others], coconstruction as a term actually began to MEAN something to me – because I guess we’d produced some meaning rather than just accepted a meaning as given. Not a final meaning, I hasten to point out, because that would be another embalmed meaning (i.e. definition), but more a meaning with currency. I can’t, after this space of time, tell you what that meaning was, how it differed from the definition I gave above — and this is crucial —

Reconceptualising Meaning-Making and Embracing Disruptive Inquiry 257 because it was meaning, not a definition. In other words it existed in relation to me and others and the time and the context, and can’t exist outside of that. That meaning (knowledge if you like) of “co-construction” isn’t something that existed as a “thing” which once I had I can keep for ever. It doesn’t actually exist at all now. It is not something I possess or can hold — it is something shared and as that, it has to be reconstructed again and again — always new — “it” can’t actually exist outside of that constructing. So, if you like, that experience, was a pivotal and crucially significant experience for me. And at the same time, to recount that episode and hold it up as some sort of object with a pre-given significance undermines the episode itself. In fact, the meaning I’ve just ascribed to it now in writing this is brand new to me, and only just arisen in the telling (writing). It could be very interesting and productive to make some meaning over these old lectures. I do vaguely recall though, that I came away from a couple of them with the lingering sense that I hadn’t actually communicated the meaning that I was intending to — in other words that we (at the lecture) hadn’t managed to co-construct a shared understanding. To put it another way — I had come away with what I thought I had been talking about, and the audience came away with what they thought I had been talking about… I do remember being quite keen on a piece of video I’d shown of early one morning at the centre, where nothing much happened. I thought this was great — because it seemed to me a really direct experience of some prosaic, mundane, uncluttered very tiny moments of connection, which were quite authentic. I guess this “type” of “moment” is something that — when I think about it, or experience/construct it — I value it. But I can’t bottle it. That piece of video would have produced many different meanings for different people watching. Mundane ordinary moments of authenticity or connection don’t look a particular way. To ascribe to that particular morning any sort of importance, or essential authentic quality would be to destroy it. Even just writing “mundane ordinary moments of authenticity or connection” is to sort of bottle it and I distrust those words as soon as I write them…. The thing (for me) is: that living and working and being around other people and connecting in whatever way we connect (which describes teaching and childcare to me pretty much) is only really worth doing (for me and children and others) if I can keep open some sort of space with it, some sort of lightness, some sort of freedom, spark and joy — some sort of life basically — keeping some sort of currency….

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These teachers have been very generous in their exploration of meaning-making and teaching. They have invested much time and energy thoughtfully responding to the myriad of questions that I have asked. I realise now that what I initially offered to them in the guise of ‘coconstruction’ of meaning wasn’t co-construction at all. But, what they offered to me was. Their conversations and writings were/are laden with insight that I continue to revisit. Through working with them on this project and over the years I have learned that ‘knowing’ and ‘interacting’ with teachers in the field isn’t enough. Reciprocal relationships, connections and authenticity really matter. And, if teacher education/higher education is to be transformed then academics and researchers must truly value, respect, engage and grapple with the range of ideas important to teachers. Advancing knowledge is contingent upon the reciprocal nature of research relations.

Staying alive to what matters by taking nothing for granted Interrogating what serves as meaning-making is crucial if academics, teacher educators and education researchers are to really appreciate the tensions and disjointedness that can exist for teachers as they embark on and engage in real experiences in classrooms. Of great importance is the meaning-making of teachers as they live and tell their stories of experience, and engage in ongoing dialogue and problematisation of pedagogical ideas. Researchers and teacher educators must pay attention and listen to — really listen to — (and digest, cherish and value) the different and diverse ways in which teachers themselves are attaching significance to what they are thinking, knowing, doing and experiencing, and to how they are defining their work (Black, 2011b; Musanti & Pence, 2010). They also need to pay attention to their own tacit and possibly preconceived notions about teaching while they listen. I have paid attention — after the fact. I have listened — after the fact. During the making of the teaching and learning resource, despite my own rhetoric about discomfort and disquiet being signals for rich meaningmaking opportunities, I almost failed to notice the multiple chances and spaces to make meaning with teachers. I almost failed to notice what was relevant to these teachers. And, I almost failed to notice the precious

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opportunities and spaces for co-construction offered to me by them. ‘Coconstruction’ moves educational research beyond the conventional boundaries of academic driven projects toward genuine interactivity and reciprocity that extends ideas (Sharrock, 2007). Co-construction does not presume that a shared vocabulary exists among practitioners, educators, researcher or others interested in educational matters (Ben-Ari & Enosh, 2013). What is valued is knowledge construction and the “co-production of new understandings and solutions that tap the expertise” of the individuals and communities with whom we engage and collaborate (Sharrock, 2007, p.10). As I have tapped into the expertise of these teachers I have learned more about the importance of mindfulness, of stepping back to pay attention, of listening more carefully, of not dictating or determining what should or shouldn't be discussed. I have learned that making meaning is not formulaic and straightforward. This process of meaning-making has engaged me emotionally and intellectually. Being in the thick of it has been uncomfortable and disquieting — even embarrassingly painful at times. It has also been very exciting, gratifying and worthwhile. It has helped that I have had a lot of time to give to it, and to return to it, and of some consolation to learn that it is never too late to make personally relevant meaning. The challenge is to avoid complacency and standardised ways of thinking and seeing. Embracing disruptive inquiry offers us alternatives. Disrupting our everyday ways of thinking about things provides rich opportunities for learning and reflection about what else might matter. Mutually disruptive conversations that ‘stir things up’ between teachers and teacher educators are crucial for improved teacher education and educational research. If academics truly value critical reflection on teaching, learning and thinking, we must value real-world, dissonant, ambiguous, authentic meaning-making not only for our students, but for ourselves too. The type of disruptive meaning-making I experienced during this project is the type I am advocating for. This kind of meaning-making has discomforting and troublesome qualities. Ultimately though it is strangely satisfying and dissatisfying, promoting vital growth in thinking and renewed awareness of the complexity and fluidity involved in understanding ideas, situations and ways of knowing. By valuing and engaging in these types of uneasy practices academics, educators and researchers can find impetus to interrogate and continue interrogating ideas. Rather than succumbing to the ease of accepting or (to use Jude’s

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term) ‘bottling’ ideas, they can find impetus to (re)/(de)/(co)construct, interrogate and reconceptualise teaching and what it means to teach. Complacency with edu-speak and promotion of utopian teaching worlds (and/or dissonant teaching worlds) or universal/bottled meanings can subtly bewitch the teacher educator and researcher (taking one unaware). You have read my intimate confessions of how my personal meanings/agendas/fear of the unknown threatened my hearing, valuing and understanding of what really mattered to teachers. So without ascribing ‘disruption’ and ‘interruption’ as doors to universal or bottled truths, they do signal the existence of opportunities for interrogating thinking, learning and knowledge. These opportunities for knowledge generation are best served not in isolation, but in relationship with other: ideally, as part of a learning community, a diverse community of learners (student teachers, teachers, teacher educators, researchers, others) who share common interests and concerns about issues and bring different forms of expert knowledge to the exchange. The generation of fresh knowledge is possible when we experiment together, when we question and disrupt each other’s rhetoric, and examine and problematise each other’s ‘shared’ meanings (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). Without these reciprocal relationships and opportunities to engage in the weaving/co-construction/co-production of words and knowledge, we can actually think we know what is going on — when in fact we may well be completely oblivious to the real experience and thinking in the field. Real and authentic meaning-making roughs us up – and my experience is that the quest for meaning is messy, hard to follow, deep, shallow, rich, provocative, enduring, finite and tremendously important.

Acknowledgements My thanks and appreciation to the anonymous reviewers whose insightful recommendations have allowed modifications to this chapter prior to publication.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE WRITER’S JOURNEY: RESEARCH AND TRANSFORMATION R. E. HARREVELD

Abstract Writing is considered within the broader context of a revitalised dialogic culture, wherein the expression of reflective critique through writing and other creative modes of expression inform the academic self, and enrich education research workforce capacity. Writing pedagogies are discussed in relation to the development of professional repertoires of practice, and the development of teacher-writers is positioned within broader discussions of the ways in which writing transforms research processes and vice versa. Focusing upon writing pedagogy, the author questions the frameworks within which writing is taught and practiced; the ontological and epistemological grounds upon which pedagogical choices are made in relation to writing; writing as a source of knowledge production; implications for pre-service teachers as writer-researchers and for teachereducation program providers within a broader education research culture.

Introduction This chapter explores the premise that the scholarly significance of a revitalised dialogic culture in research education can be explicitly built in to pre-service teacher education pedagogy. Specifically, it explores how dialogic encounters with self and others are both explicitly and serendipitously operationalised as pedagogical moments in teacher-writer researcher education. McAlpine and Amundsen (2009: 124) signify the role of dialogue for the professional self: What students experience in the academic workplace is guided by both complementary and competing motives and goals. Individuals are shaping

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Chapter Fourteen an understanding of the academic self, based on a constant dialogue with the communities with which they wish to become identified … and with which they may find themselves in tension.

Teachers who write and research are weaving professional repertoires of practice through reflective critique of their own and others’ ideas expressed in art works, cultural installations, plays, poetry, short stories, thesis documents, journal articles and even book chapters. Expressing themselves through such diverse genres enables an everevolving criticality that intertwines personal and professional nourishment that is essential for capability development (Sen, 1999 & 2010). Education research workforce capability development is significant in the context of national and international higher education policy agenda in research, teaching and learning (Bexley, James, Arkoudis, 2011; Edwards, 2010; Shulman, Golde, Bueschel & Garabedian, 2006). Accordingly, the development of teacher-writers could be viewed as a verdant site for researcher education. In this chapter, pre-service teachers are framed deliberately as earlycareer teacher-writers, researching their practices as both writers-for-self and teachers of writing for others. They are already ‘in-service’ as teacherwriters as the introductory notes to this book attest. Teacher education academics constitute another group of teacher-writer researchers contributing intellectual strength to this book. Collectively and individually, these teacher-writer researchers are constructing their writing as sites and sources of knowledge production. The dialogue continues among those starting out on the journey early in their teaching careers and those who have journeyed far and wide, yet all still engage in the transformations of identity, voice and their worlds of work. Richly nuanced knowledge is crafted. It is not dependent upon politicised national standards systems determining who gets to be a teacher, at what point/s in time that occurs, and what counts as knowledge in that process (AITSL, 2011). Such knowledge can be deemed to disrupt a culture that makes struggling writers out of early-career teachers and researchers, in a manner similar to that of a schooling culture that has been found to be actually “making struggling readers [and writers] out of some youth” (Alverman, 2006: 95; italics in original). Theorising writing-as-research raises multifaceted issues; three of which are explored in this chapter. There is the question of pedagogy – what is the pedagogical framework] for this weaving of words? This raises a perhaps more fundamental question: what is the ontological and epistemological basis for the methodological choice/s through which this pedagogy has emerged? Finally, what are the implications for early career

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teacher-writers as researchers undertaking pre-service or initial teacher education programs? These three questions frame the discussion that follows.

The dialogic self, pedagogy and critical performativity Conceptually, the notion of weaving words may be thought of as engaging the dialogic self as a phenomenon of interest worthy of investigation by teacher-researchers. Consider for a moment that pedagogy is a performative practice (Giroux & Giroux, 2006), in which people enact the principles and practices of the teaching profession (un)bound by constraints of systems, sectors or structures. Dialogic pedagogy is an enactment of education research interest that provides conditions for a conversational culture of engagement, critically reflective scepticism, debate and openness to possibilities in an ongoing project of knowledge democracy. Dialogic pedagogy may be understood as a discursive communal pedagogy constructed and contested by its participants (Matusov, 2009). As Matusov (2009) views it, these participants’ discourses address Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986 & 1994) conceptual concerns that the logics of dialogue and dialogic pedagogy may be absorbed into a conceptual framework for interpretation and knowledge production. This conceptualisation is mobilised in education among professional, adult and community, school and early childhood settings. In other words, there is no single dialogic pedagogy, although these critical theorists and pedagogues have enunciated principles upon which this conceptualisation is based and that are now explored. The essence of dialogue is “the word” and within the word, Freire (1972) claims two dimensions – “reflection and action”: When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism (italics in original), into an alienated and alienating ‘blah’. It becomes an empty word […] there is no transformation without action. On the other hand, if action is emphasized exclusively, to the detriment of reflection, the word is converted into activism. The latter – action for action’s sake – negates the true praxis and make dialogue impossible. Either dichotomy, by creating unauthentic forms of existence, also creates unauthentic forms of thought, which reinforce the original dichotomy. (Freire, 1972: 60)

The institutionalised governance of teacher education as well as research education ensures that power is always either implicit or explicit in encounters between teachers, students and supervisors as well as

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experienced and novice researchers. Early career teacher-writer researchers may find the idle chatter, verbalism and ‘blah’ of oral and written encounters with their more experienced colleagues quite obscure and alienating. In Freire’s (1972) view, this impedes dialogue; while action for action’s sake – talking the talk of doing research – is equally useless for learning. If they wish it to be so then, “at the point of encounter there are neither utter ignoramuses nor perfect sages; there are only men [sic] who are attempting, together, to learn more than they now know” (Freire, 1972: 63). This is the purpose of dialogue – for teachers to learn with students and vice versa – but more importantly, the purpose of dialogue is its respectful, active investigation, risk-taking, and presupposition of intellectual equality in the process of learning meaningfully. In teacher education for example, such a dialogicapproach is inclusive of cultural and linguistic diversity while concurrently cultivating creative critical thinking about being and becoming teachers (Hall Haley, 2012; Kizel, 2012). The notion of ‘dialogicality’ (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011; Markova, 2003; Bakhtin, 1986) is first a practical means of theorising research education pedagogy for teacher-writers in dialogue with imagined or real selves and others. Such reasoning provides a way-in to conceptualising dialogue, its embodiment in conversational narratives and its role in framing pedagogical practices. Contextual meaning is potentially infinite, but [and] it can only be actualized when accompanied by another (others) meaning, if only by a question in the inner speech of the one who understands. Each time it must be accompanied by another contextual meaning in order to reveal new aspects of its own infinite nature (just as the word reveals its meanings only in context). (Bakhtin, 1986, pp. 145–146)

Dialogue is the medium through which meaning, truth, knowledge, and justice are constructed (Matusov, 2009; Morson & Emerson, 1989; Sidorkin, 1999). In Bakhtin’s (1986) reasoning, meaning lives in relationships that are often invisible and taken for granted. This creates an illusion in people that statements make sense by themselves rather than being tokens and knots of dialogic relationships in which they are embroiled through conversation which may be at any one time written, oral, visual, and physical in processes of assimilating the words of self and others. In a Bakhtinian (1986 & 1981) view, we are all in constant dialogue with our worlds. Dialogue is the essence of pedagogy, and conversation is an expression of that (Cremin, Chappell & Craft, 2013; Myhill & Wilson, 2013). As a socio-

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cultural practice in education, Wells (1999) acknowledged conversation to be an imperfect medium; however, carefully crafted collaborative conversations contribute positively to learning and those skilled in that art, are considered effective teachers by students. Unexamined normative and normalised ways of being an educator, researcher and the practices of research education may be examined through a dialogic pedagogy. Learning through dialogic conversation is always possible. Moreover as bell hooks (2009, also known as Gloria Watkins) observes, “genuine conversation is about the sharing of power and knowledge; it is fundamentally a cooperative enterprise” (p. 45). Contemplate this point for a moment in terms of what it may mean for the pedagogy of weaving words among these teacher-writer researchers and their colleagues.

Dialogic conversations: a practical wisdom for weaving words Weaving words through conversations between self and others signals the development of what bell hooks (2009: 185) calls a “practical wisdom” of multidimensional democratic ways of knowing. It signals a commitment to thinking critically, which “places us in opposition to any system of education or culture that would have us be passive recipients of ways of knowing” (hooks, 2009: 185). At the heart of this practical wisdom is a presupposition that everyone is intellectually equal, that the world can be read through the criticality of words as Friere (1972 & 1973; Friere & Friere, 2006) so eloquently and consistently claimed. A dialogic teacherwriter research education pedagogy is based upon teacher knowledge of the education system’s economic, political, social and ideological framing of them; knowledge of the higher education system’s construction of adults as students and its economic, political, social and ideological framing of their candidatures. Such knowledge requires understanding of both the content and the “why [emphasis in original] of economic, social, political, ideological, and historical” constructions of teaching and learning relationships (Freire & Freire, 2006: 101). In higher education, teacher-writer researchers’ dissatisfaction may arise from the system’s positioning of what both education research and teacher education could and should be (Green, 2011; Kizel, 2012). Dialogic pedagogy offers three ways forward to action in this space. First, people’s complaints and concerns should not be dismissed as ignorant inflexibility because without a spirit of dialogicreflexivity there is no possibility of constructive change (Kizel, 2012). Second, the moral virtues of teaching should be taken seriously because people’s personal visions of what counts as a meaningful professional life have always sustained them

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throughout even the most appalling experiences; and they can continue to do so (Halpin, 2003; Harreveld, 2007). Third, hopeful imaginings can be seriously. Through dialogue, people have been known to mobilise ‘vocabularies of hope’ to envision better alternatives of improving the present; and this way, cynicism is thwarted by idealism’s accommodation with reality (Halpin, 2003). Conditions can be created to develop a shared sense of destiny, a feeling of solidarity and socialisation into a community of scholars. A shared sense of destiny comes from wanting to achieve, whether that be formal or informal e.g. graduation, promotion, publication, or personal sense of achieving a life goal. A feeling of solidarity comes from not being alone, and adrift in unchartered seas. A culture of dialogic encounters can mediate and enhance knowledge generation relationships through which contested moral, political, legal and economic issues of education may be examined. Such examinations occur at the level of the local and particular, while simultaneously engaging with forces of regionalisation and globalisation which are in and of the local – and vice versa.

Dialogue as method for teacher-writer researchers Dialogue as method for teacher-writer researchers forms, informs and transforms intellectual hegemony in teacher education from/with forces of the West’s Eurocentric world-view pervading non-Western knowledges (Alatas, 2006); high stakes testing (Au, 2011); and pernicious impacts of a now globalised ecology of education and work (Brown, Lauder & Thomas, 2010; Moretti, 2013). Dialogue as method enables informed, sometimes even risky critique to flourish among knowledge networking relationships (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007). In the spiritof new capitalism examined by Boltanski and Chiapello (2007), connections are networked in an ontology in which “the substantial properties of persons themselves depend on the relations they are rooted in” (p. 457). The knowledge economy is as dependent on these relations as technologies of transport and communications continued dependence on fossilised fuels. The essence of this ontological principle for forming, informing and transforming networked knowledge of teacher-writer researchers is its fusion of being and becoming – a fusionist ontology (Blasch & Plano, 2003) that operates across generational, sectoral, systemic, and professional borders. Methodologically, the logic of method used to explore an identified self in “a connexionist world” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007: 462) is that of dialogic relations, nurtured through conversations embracing mystery and uncertainty, playing with language

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in all its magnificent modalities, evoking visual renditions, and crafting meanings. Jones, Moodie and Hobson nurture such conversations in their chapter, ‘Dinawan Dreaming: Seeing the darkness of the stars’, where a visit to a site of cultural significance – intended to embed Indigenous perspectives in a first year undergraduate course – impacts powerfully upon their new ways of seeing the earth, of understanding the rhythms of life and death, their embodiment in the environment, and its visiting fauna. The knowledge thus produced is by necessity diverse, at the same time seeking to broker beyond the limits of individual knowledge. In other words, knowledge is produced through research and that research knowledge is transformed through writing. Seventeen years ago, Cook-Sather (1996) reported in her dissertation, ‘Writing Relationships, Weaving Words’, on the ways in which teachers constructed knowledge in a graduate education course for pre-service and in-service language arts teachers in the USA. Her pedagogical framework shares similarities with that reported in a recent Australian doctoral research study from Australia (Zipf, 2013); as well as the pedagogical framework underwriting this book (Jones, Chapter1). Teacher-as-bricoleur is a grounded phenomenological case study of creativity in secondary school science education (Zipf, 2013). Its thesis takes the notion of researcher as bricoleur advanced by Denzin and Lincoln (2013); and uses it to theorise findings related to the concept of creativity, its nature and attributes in secondary school science teaching and learning. Through an equally creative use of metaphor depicting the research process as an alloy, Zipf (2013) writes into her analysis of interview data, markers for creativity constructed from secondary teachers’ perceptions and conceptions of creativity in science; and representations of themselves and others as science teachers. Through a critically reflective use of the notion of bricoleur, Zipf’s (2013) writing embraces the eclecticism of education research while also co-constructing the intellectual resources offered by herself and her teacher colleagues as participants. It does not shy away from the dissonances encountered when discourses of teacher, colleague, writer, and researcher butt up against each other. In a distinctly autoethnographic account of the clash she encountered in, what were for her, risky insider researcher-researched relationships, Zipf’s candid acknowledgement followed by a rigorous dissection of its elements, choices and outcomes is a signature strength of the teacher-writer-researcher bricoleur dialectic. Her within-self dialogue commits this researcher to a writer’s journey through the spaces inbetween (Bakhtin, 1981 & 1986; Zipf, Harreveld, & Harrison, 2011; Zipf,

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2013). Emerging from this journey was a writer’s voice of knowledge production and self-transformation. These research-infused accounts are written through researchers negotiating insider/outsider relationships (Breen, 2007). They reveal complex power dynamics of authorial power and practice multidimensional relationships over time, with writers changing as they are merging what they may once have been with what they are becoming (or may become). Christensen, Williams and Occhino explore such a process also in their chapter, ‘Understanding and acting through conversational spaces’. Zaborskis (2011) explains the methodological dynamism of this process: becoming implies growth and change […] we are always ‘becoming’, what the self was is lost, but the self is now something new that it was not before. (p. 1)

Such thinking may seem ponderous, at odds with the intense practicalities of writing, teaching and research work. Yet it may well be at the very core of this pedagogical framework. It gives intellectual space to undertake the writer’s journey as teacher-researcher. Qualitatively different multidimensional writing relationships reported throughout this book use methods of narrative enquiry (Clandinin & Rosniek, 2007), ethnographic accounts including autoethnography (Ellis, 2004), and discourses of the dissonance in the borderlands of difference (Alsup, 2006). These narratives are profoundly relational among Indigenous and Asian cultures, disciplines of the arts, literature, history, sociology, health and physical education. They penetrate and propagate the worlds of teaching, artistic endeavours, creative encounters with knowledge and its production through research. Individually and collectively, the narratives within this collection include not only multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary dialogue but they also include Bakhtin’s (1986 & 1994) ‘within-speaker’ dialogue – the dialogic encounters with self. Dialogue as purposive research method is a powerful agent in knowledge production, dissemination and critique.

Teacher-Student: A problematic relationship in teacher education Envisage if you will productive, empowering and transformative relationships between teachers and students in teacher education programs. Key characteristics of such relationships may be found in supervisorcandidate relationships of research higher degree programs. The

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phenomenon is analogous to that of early career teacher education – if we are prepared to take the risk as teacher educators to make it so, as our colleagues in this book have done so. All relationships are fraught with risk, and those of supervisor-candidate (in research higher degrees) or teacher-student (in pre-service teacher education) are similar. Relationships that are explicitly fostered in higher degree by research supervision (e.g. masters and doctoral programs) offer a unique potential for transforming education research, and early career teacher education. Supervision is a phenomenon from other worlds of work that has been imported into university postgraduate research education when research programs were established within European universities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Lee & Green, 2009). In the last twenty years, knowledge about the education of postgraduate early career teacher-researchers has been constructed within a commodified higher education project of internationalisation, harnessing global stakeholder networks (Sursock & Smidt, 2010). With the rapid corporatisation of universities in this context, the logic of supervisory practice has been exhaustively examined in terms of doctoral education (Green, 2005; Lee, Brennan & Green, 2009). However critical interrogation of all early career teacher research supervision is warranted as the logic of practice in education research has been and continues to be radically challenged (Shulman et al., 2006). While the literature on supervision seems to privilege issues in doctoral supervision at the expense of other relationships, the issues are the same, especially in the field of education where teachers may begin their writing journeys as practitionerresearchers. To significantly disrupt the unnatural naturalness of supervision and its unquestioned “normalisation of human engagements” (Lee & Green, 2009: 615), it is necessary to first identify what supervision is not, and then to explore what it may be. Supervision is not just ‘doing research’, it is also adult education, and primarily it is about teaching and learning (McWilliam, Taylor, Thomson, Green, Maxwell & Simons, 2002). Supervision is not a “simplistic learner-centredness”, nor is it dismissive of explicit teaching; but it can open up “a new understanding of teaching and learning, curriculum and pedagogy, research and knowledge” (Green, 2011, p. 58). To articulate this developing understanding of supervisory relationships as teaching and learning with a curriculum and pedagogy requires explicit dialogue with the discourses of systems and self that construct us and through which we construct selves as education researchers and research educators. Through such constructions, supervision is understood as both relational and dialogic in character.

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Teaching the next generation of teacher-writer researchers is also hidden work because it may be not always named as ‘teaching’; yet this work is vital if people are to be attracted to careers in education and education research. This teaching is constructed differently by higher education’s governance systems; thereby ensuring that the pedagogical and dialogic nature of this work among supervisors and between supervisors and students remains hidden and uncounted. Teaching of coursework is visible within the system but the teaching incumbent in the supervision of research programs in education remains at best an afterthought and at worst, it is silenced (Johnson, Lee & Green, 2000). If learning and teaching is reconceptualised as a dialogic pedagogical practice, then conceptualisation and contextualisation of pedagogy as dialogic helps think of it as a three-way relationship between writers-asteachers, teachers-as-researchers and the knowledge produced through that relationship. Of consideration here is the positioning of adults as students in relationships with teachers/supervisors, many of whom are of similar mature age, often with other professional identities. As one student in Malfroy’s (2005, p. 169) study commented: “part of the problem is who we are in public life and then we have to go back to being a student (student, 13/9/01).” Discourses of power are inscribed through language written in to the governance structures of universities and higher education sectors throughout the world. Similar discourses of power are inscribed through the language of teacher education that itself is captive to similar governance structures and constructions of what counts as learning and teaching (Paugh & Robinson, 2011; Simon & Campano, 2013).

Operationalising dialogic pedagogy: weaving words What can be done? Reframing the language of relationships among the collectives of teacher education is a start; and extending those relationships to be inclusive of teachers as writers and researchers is a start because it requires a shift to pedagogical considerations of important aspects of academic work. A moral concern here is that while teacher education may be acknowledged as cross-sectoral, inter-systemic and multi-disciplinary, those who engage in education research have yet to articulate clearly and loudly the ways in which their work impacts the many valued social, organisational and personal challenges involving learning and teaching in an increasingly complex troubled world of the twenty-first century. The institutionalisation of what counts in twenty-first century education research filters, concentrates, professionalises and circumscribes teacher-

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writer researcher conduct (Foucault, 2010/, 1980: 195-196). If teacher education researchers, and early career researchers want material goods, “the external goods” (Weber, 2002/1930: 123) that can be acquired in terms of power and prestige within our profession, then we will still need a critical dialogic pedagogy to engage with and read differently the materialities of such relationships. Through such relationships, intellectually significant networked webs of knowledge are woven. In contrast to ancient and medieval times of Eastern and Western civilisations, universities in the modern era of the last two centuries are relatively immature institutions tethered to societal, political, legal and economic tentacles of nation-state(s) power. Forces of globalisation, localisation and regionalisation have not diminished this power; however they have challenged, and are continue to challenge its very survival, especially in the field of education research. The bureaucratic apparatus that names and controls what counts as this research, and thus work of teacher-writer researchers continues to proliferate (Lee, Goodyear, Seddon & Renshaw, 2011). This is occurring as the education profession is in transition to a globally mobile, border-crossing, knowledge generation and dissemination workforce (Bexley, James & Arkoudis, 2011: xi). Recent research findings from studies with teachers and students (e.g. supervisors and research higher degree candidates) confirm a deep interest in the quality of scholarship, allegiances to particular disciplinary fields of study and opportunities to develop new knowledge are the most attractive aspects of work in education (Bexley, James & Arkoudis, 2011; Edwards, Bexley & Richardson, 2010). Among the most vulnerable in the education profession are early career teachers who may be excluded from such intellectually transformative-networked webs of teacher-writer researchers such as those encountered through Weaving Words. Pedagogically, this provides a counter narrative to current seemingly global ideologies driving teacher education graduate standards, demonstrable competencies and measurable skills throughout the world (Bostok & Boon, 2012; Simon & Campano, 2013). A “vigilant critique” (Paugh & Robinson, 2011: 363) may provide alternative constructive relationships through which socio-material structures of institutionalised teacher education may be enriched.

Conclusion In this final chapter to the book, I was asked to re-frame issues within writing and research in response to the preceding chapters. That has been

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both an onerous task and a great relief. It is onerous because one feels the weight of responsibility to do honour to the work of authors in those chapters; yet it is also a great relief because it has licensed my drawing of sustenance from the words woven in those chapters. Through this process, an evolving conceptual-contextual lens focused the framing of this chapter. Conceptually, a dialogic pedagogy has been proposed to form, inform and transform teacher-writer researchers’ journeys of weaving words. This conceptual framework has provided an ontological and epistemological basis for the use of dialogue as method driving the reflexive criticality of weaving words. This is achieved through recursive cycles of writing informed research through which this pedagogy is enacted. Contextually, implications for early career teacher-writers as researchers undertaking pre-service teacher education programs have also been explored in conjunction with teacher educators as writer-researchers. First, I proposed that the writer’s journey is one of research and transformation. This means that the processes of writing transform research processes and vice versa; that is, through conducting and reporting research outcomes, the writing journey is itself transformative. Second, the researcher’s journey as one of transformation through writing was explored. This embodied the warp and weft of teacher-researcher education (see also Jones, Chapter 1) and provides a criticality for exploring the spaces in between. In so doing, it offered a particular view of twenty-first century education that may be reconceptualised through the critically recursive thinking expressed by early career teacher-writers as researchers, and their mid-to late career colleagues working in teacher education. Let us be clear about this journey. The writer’s journey is a journey of knowledge transformation through research. Once brave enough to embark on such a journey, qualities essential for the creative spirit in a rapidly changing world where learning is often lost are found through the playfulness of writing across modalities. Its outcome is always tentative, tenuous – forever evolving as knowledge is brokered continuously throughout life’s journey as teacher, writer, and researcher.

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AFTERWORD

Weaving Words shows how writing can be a useful mechanism for students to make more meaningful sense of their life-worlds - in both their personal lives and their professional lives as pre-service teachers. Creative writing, as discussed by the book’s contributors, serves as a means to allow our personal identities and our unique voices to come into sharper focus. In doing so, it not only helps to free us from the fetters of unquestioned mass conformity and mass identity impressed upon us through various hegemonic or propagandic means but it also provides a useful mechanism to help us transform ourselves. The types of writing explored in Weaving Words make certain demands on us as instructors and learners. In cultivating the imagination, literary forms of writing allow us to get in touch with the most personally meaningful aspects of our thoughts, feelings, and experiences and to express and articulate their deeper meanings in more authentic and experiential ways. There is no doubt that these types of writing can, at times, be a difficult practice (cognitively and emotionally) because in the process of writing we are obligated to confront our true selves (e.g., our attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, values, and convictions). In an age where many educational systems and curricula seem overly focused on standardised and de-contextualised approaches, Weaving Words raises meaningful questions about the role and value of writing in teaching and teacher education and in research. In so doing, it expresses the transformative potential of creative writing - writing where instructors and students learn to assess their roles as future teachers with greater agency and responsibility to self and to others. This type of meaningful learning is transformative because it is authentic and experiential in its process and purpose. Weaving Words speaks to the human condition, in all its complexity and potentiality, and it illustrates the importance of creativity in writing for personal expression and cultivation of imagination. The expression of imagination seems to be finding decreasing space in educational systems that are increasingly characterised by standardised approaches (e.g., curricula and assessments) and where knowledge and skills are increasingly viewed as mere marketable commodities and where education is used increasingly as a measure of economic and political benchmarking. Unfortunately, in such an environment, the moral, humanistic, and socio-

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cultural purposes of education can be easily overshadowed. However, writing that is expressed through literary forms in particular, as with the arts and humanities in general, should not be viewed as a luxury but rather as a necessary element in maintaining and cultivating the aesthetic and human values that define humanity and make our lives meaningful. Writing that takes a creative and reflective form is an expression of the self and it can provide an incubative space for being and becoming. Yet this space finds itself in a tenuous situation in some learning environments. Creative writing challenges us to go beyond the mechanics of language and encourages us to venture into a space where one’s voice carries moral authority and passion. Weaving Words illustrates how the writing process can be used as a vehicle for reflective inquiry and personal and professional transformation Thus, writing emerges as a means of knowing and understanding the world and the self (our life-world) – a self that is continually re-framing our experiences to generate new perspectives of identity, agency, language, culture, space, and time. Weaving Words challenges educators to confront their assumptions about teaching and research and the nexus between the two spaces and it encourages us to reframe our notions of meaning making in teacher education and educational research. Weaving Words contributes to the emerging dialogues around the space for creative writing within twenty-first century theories and practices of research and teacher education. By presenting the creative and personally meaningful works of undergraduate educators alongside those of researchers Weaving Words creates a third space for meaning making for readers. Patrick Blessinger Executive Director International Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association and Co-founder, Center for Meaning-Centred Education

CONTRIBUTORS

Janice K. Jones is Senior Lecturer in Arts Education in the School of Linguistics, Adult and Specialist Education in the Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts at the Toowoomba campus of the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. A member of the Capacity-Building Research Network at that institution, Janice’s leadership and teaching experience spans 30 years’ of international teaching and management in schools and in the tertiary sector in the UK, Canada, Korea, Turkey and Australia and as Lecturer and Program Coordinator for the Bachelor of Education at the University of Southern Queensland. A Churchill Fellow, Janice’s research and teaching interests include the arts, creativity, literacies and technologies in schools and in teacher education and her publications in these areas include book chapters, refereed journal articles and conference proceedings. Email: [email protected] Nita Temmerman was the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia until June 2013. Other executive positions occupied at USQ from 2007 to 2013 included Pro Vice Chancellor Partnerships, Pro Vice Chancellor Community Engagement and Pro Vice Chancellor Academic Quality. Nita has also held senior managerial roles in the University sector at the University of Wollongong, Wollongong Conservatorium of Music, NSW; and Deakin University in Victoria. Nita’s research/scholarship is exemplified by: 14 sole authored books; over 70 publications in refereed international and national journals; numerous citations; invited keynote presentations for educators in India, Japan, the Middle East, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vanuatu, the United Kingdom, Canada and the USA; editorial board membership of international and national education journals; regular conference presentations and media commentary. Her research areas of interest are principally Arts Education and Teacher Education. She is currently involved in education consultancies in the university sector in SE Asia and the Middle East. Email: [email protected]

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Lesley Saunders is a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education, London, a Research Fellow at the Oxford University Department of Education, and an Honorary Fellow of the College of Teachers. After qualifying as a teacher, she worked at the National Foundation for Educational Research from 1987 to 2000, where she set up and headed the School Improvement Research Centre. From 2000 to 2008, she was senior policy adviser for research at the General Teaching Council for England, where she promoted the idea of teaching as a research-informed profession. She started the Special Interest Group on educational research and policy-making for the British Educational Research Association, and served as a user member on the education sub-panel for the UK Research Assessment Exercise 2008. She is now an independent research consultant. Lesley is also a much-published and award-winning poet. E-mail: [email protected] Anne Jasman has over 35 years’ experience in initial and continuing teacher education as researcher, lecturer and senior policy adviser working in Australia, the US and the UK. In 2011 she was awarded a Fellowship of the International Professional Development Association and currently works at the University of Southern Queensland as Associate Professor (Teacher Education). She has led research and development projects on collaborative working, professional knowledge, learning and development. These include the creation and implementation of teacher career path based on accomplished classroom practice (1997-8) and a research study into teacher professional expertise: its nature, development, enhancement and assessment for recognition and reward (2001-2) whilst Research Fellow at the Department of Education, Science and Training in Australia. She has contributed to policy development in the UK and Australia for Continuing Professional Development, Leadership and the development of Teaching Standards. More recently her research interests have focussed on futures-focussed education across compulsory and post-compulsory contexts, including auto-ethnographic studies and scenario building for academic work in higher education. Email: [email protected] Yvonne S. Findlay brings a wealth of international experience in community work, social justice, the law and education to her research and teaching. Yvonne is an associate lecturer teaching into courses in philosophy and pedagogy of education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba Campus. Her research interests include narrative autoethnography, and the use of metaphors in negotiating and constructing identity. Email: [email protected]

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Donna Moodie is a descendent of the Goomeri/Gamillraay/Kamillaroi people. Her research and advocacy centres upon traditional ecological knowledge and natural resource management, Indigenous art education pedagogies, and advocacy for social justice. A recognised artist, and with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, Donna’s current role is as Widening Participation (Indigenous Community Engagement) Officer at the University of Southern Queensland. She has served as the multicultural development officer with Toowoomba City Council, and has worked with the local traditional custodians to preserve, protect and promote the Gummingurru stone arrangement site. Email: [email protected] Nicole Hobson has undertaken studies in education at the University of Southern Queensland. An alumnus of the School of Total Education in Warwick, Queensland, which was established by Vijayadev Yogendra, Nicole brings an holistic focus to her studies: her interests include education, the natural world and human wellbeing. Email: [email protected] Erin Christensen is a Lecturer in Health and Physical Education (HPE) in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. Erin completed her undergraduate degree in Human Movement Studies at The University of Queensland and has several years’ teaching experience at secondary school level in HPE, Science and Outdoor Education. Erin’s PhD focused on beginning teachers’ micropolitical experiences of the staffroom. During the final year of her doctoral study, Erin taught Senior Health and Health and Physical Education at a Private Girl's school where she also spent time as an acting Head of Department (Sport). Erin’s research interests include beginning teachers' experiences of the staffroom/ office contexts, teaching and learning, in HPE contexts, secondary-tertiary and early career, academic transition. Email: [email protected] Benjamin Williams A graduate of the Human Movement Studies and doctoral programs at The University of Queensland, Ben has several years’ Health and Physical Education teaching experience at secondary and tertiary level. Ben’s doctoral study inquired into the outsourcing of Health, Sport and Physical Education. A lecturer in Health and Physical Education in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, Ben is also a member of the Critical Research Methodologies Group and a member at Griffith Institute of Educational Research. Ben’s research interests include social theoretical investigations of health and

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physical education pedagogy,, and the implications of blended learning strategies for the (re)production of body knowledge in performative learning areas such as health and physical education. Email: [email protected] Joseph Occhino is a lecturer in Health, Physical Education and Sports Studies in the School of Education at the University of New England, Australia. Joseph is a completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at The University of Queensland in the School of Human Movement Studies. His research interests include coach learning and behaviour with a particular focus upon motivation within the framework, of selfdetermination theory (SDT); autonomy-supportive learning environments; creating positive motivational climates with teams, understanding and developing coaches' work; how high performance coaches learn, and developing coaching, practice. Email: [email protected] Robyn Henderson is an Associate Professor in Literacies Education at the Toowoomba campus of the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. She is a member of the Capacity-Building Research Network Faculty Research Centre. Her research interests are in the fields of literacies and literacy, education, family, mobility and its effects on schooling, and the student learning journey in higher education. Themes related to pedagogies, diversity and capacity-building run through her work. Email: [email protected] Patrick A. Danaher is Professor in Educational Research, and a member of the Capacity-Building Research Network Faculty Research Centre, in the Faculty of Education at the Toowoomba campus of the University of Southern Queensland. His research interests include the education of mobile communities; education research, ethics,, methods, politics and theories; and academics’, educators’ and researchers’ work and identities. Email: [email protected] Ali Black is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and the Arts at Central Queensland University Australia. An educator for more than twenty years, her experience spans contexts early childhood to tertiary. Ali's areas of research expertise include education research, curriculum, theorising arts-based and narrative inquiry, and early childhood education. Ali has published for a variety of national and international audiences and has been involved in a number of research projects that inquire into teachers work and what it means to teach; that explore ways of knowing

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and identities; and that promote understanding of self and context. Lately, her work seeks to foster connectedness through the building of reflective, aesthetic and creative lives, and exploring the conditions that enhance meaning making, wellbeing, and community. Email: [email protected] Roberta (Bobby) Harreveld is an Associate Professor in the School of Education and the Arts, and the Foundation Director of the Learning and Teaching Education Research Centre at CQUniversity Australia. Bobby has been awarded a Potter Foundation Scholarship, the Vice-Chancellor’s award for excellence in research supervision, and an Australian Research Council Linkage grant. She has managed a number of large externally funded research project and produced over forty scholarly reports and peer reviewed publications in the last five years as well as editorial advisory board membership of six journals. Bobby has taught in schools, colleges and university undergraduate, postgraduate and higher degree by research students. Her professional interest are in the areas of adult language and literacywork integrated learning, transitions and pathways, policy and practitioner leadership, socially networked technologies, curriculum development and evaluation. Email: [email protected] Patrick Blessinger is the founder and executive director of the International Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association and co-founder of the Center for Meaning-Centered Education. His scholarly contributions are in the areas of educational philosophy, meaningful lifelong and lifewide learning, creativity and happiness in education, professional learning communities, and instructional design. He has coedited and co-authored seven textbooks on learning-centered teaching using innovative technologies and one textbook on meaningful education and learning and he is the editor of three academic journals. During his academic career, he has taught over 170 college and university courses and he has managed academic programs at colleges and universities in the USA and EU. He has over twenty years of experience in leadership, management, capacity building, and innovation and he consults with academic institutions on learner engagement, instructional technologies, leadership development, and accreditation. Email: [email protected].

INDEX

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, 82, 85, 86, 97 academic, 131 academy, 26, 75, 99 acculturation, 2, 88 aesthetics, 4, 58 affect, 14, 16, 22, 26, 49, 106, 256 Africa, 2, 42, 222 African American, 228 alliteration, 16, 57, 155, 193 ancestors, 15, 91, 99, 100 apprenticeship, 17, 27 archaeology, 82, 86 Army, 141 assessment, 5, 23, 29, 67, 68, 71, 187, 189, 204 assimilation, 2, 88 assonants, 155 astronomy, 86 audience, 29, 55, 60, 71, 149, 155, 163, 164, 165, 189, 192, 208, 218 Auschwitz, 45 Australia, 2, 25, 44, 72, 85, 179 authentic language, 162 authority, 27 autobiography, 38, 39 autoethnography, 27, 38, 63, 64, 65, 75, 227, 244 becoming a writer, 12, 13, 23 being a writer, 77, 160 being and becoming, 222, 223, 226, 228, 229, 230, 270, 272 being, doing and knowing, 162, 163, 169 better teachers, 55 bibliotherapy, 227 birth, 44, 67, 75, 77, 204 bricoleur, 273

British schools, 25, 28 Bunya Mountains, 82 burden of care, 55 burnout, 228, 230 career in education, 12, 17, 51, 63, 72, 76, 118, 229, 230, 268, 270, 275, 276, 278 Celtic, 38, 49, 50, 84, 87, 94 changing roles, 55 clarifying questions, 48 clock time, 86, 87 coaching, 124 co-authoring, 51 cognitive learning, 26 collaboration, 240 commodification, 275 community and context, 13 competencies, 277 complexity, 28, 41, 77, 161, 224, 240 conscientisation, 63 consonants, 155 context, 231 adult learning, 239 change, 229 classroom, 46, 48, 64, 105, 167, 186, 211, 226 creative, 167 cultural, 5, 13, 160 education, 222 global, 28, 85, 222 multicultural, 227 national, 268 professional, 130 research, 245 school, 124 sociocultural, 163, 168 teaching, 17, 176 transnational, 2, 63

292 university, 119 virtual, 5, 13 workplace, 118 conversation, 270 conversations, 4, 37, 51, 81, 83, 87, 88, 237, 238, 241, 243, 246, 248, 271, 272 creative process for second language speaker, 14 creative space, 18 creative writing, 3, 18, 25, 58, 186, 193, 195, 196, 204, 208, 225 creative writing courses, 25 creativity, 3, 13, 24, 66, 174, 175, 177, 194, 227, 273 in science, 273 criticality, 3, 12, 23, 27, 48, 64, 68, 83, 84, 129, 161, 162, 181, 193, 227, 253, 259, 268, 270, 271, 278 crystallisation, 66 cultural knowledge, 82 culture, 4, 28, 83, 86, 87, 96, 98, 267 essentialised, 2 current and future identity, 24 curriculum, 1, 23, 44, 71, 168, 196, 227, 237, 243, 255, 275 Australian, 196 C2C, 187, 191 child-emergent, 12 distinctive, 28 frameworks, 178 guidelines, 24 play-based, 12 proscriptive, 28 sustainability, 87 deconstruction and reconstruction, 39, 64 deep learning, 13 delegitimisation, 2 dialectic, 23 dialectical relationship, 168 dialogue, 189, 208, 222, 239, 244, 246, 250, 256, 268, 269, 274 discourse communities, 161

Index discourses, 13, 24, 181, 229, 269, 275 power, 276 discovery writers, 29 doctoral study, 27, 46 drama, 4, 21, 218, 224 drama-in-education, 12 dream, 141 editing, 4, 17, 25, 58, 167, 174, 195, 219, 253 editor, 19 educational scholarship, 223, 231 emigration, 44 emotions, 60, 248 comfortable, 245 grief, 22, 58, 95 guilt, 55 hope, 17, 19, 21, 48, 55, 76, 86, 92, 108 longing, 14, 18, 57 loss, 59 love, 18, 21, 22, 38, 42, 57, 156, 159, 160, 165, 167, 204, 205, 206 melancholy, 14 pain, 14 redemption, 55 remorse, 60 shame, 60 empathy, 114, 177, 242 empowering, 274 English, 13, 187 dominance, 87 second language, 227 epistemology of practice, 39 equilibrium, 123 ethics, 20, 27, 85, 276 ethnicity, 45 ethnographic, 63, 69, 72 European universities, 275 event time, 87 experimental writing, 13 explicit dialogue, 275 explicit instruction, 23 extended metaphor, 38

Weaving Words family, 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 42, 44, 56, 57, 81, 93, 96, 154, 156, 164, 208, 223, 224 daughter, 57, 58, 112, 143 emotional bond, 57 father, 21, 55 grandfather, 14 husband, 21, 22, 141, 146, 164, 165 mother, 2, 49, 57, 66, 94, 166, 204 son, 66, 69, 77, 88 wife, 22 feedback, 5, 13, 23, 175, 193, 197, 216, 219, 222 anonymous, 20 constructive, 58 responding, 17 field texts, 129 fields of study, 277 figurative language, 168, 210 film script segment, 215 First Nations, 83, 98, 99 focus upon publication, 25 focused conversations, 29 frameworks, 77, 177 free verse, 57 gaming, 212 gaps and silences, 1, 4, 23, 48, 50 cultural gaps, 97 space, 97, 165 gathering data, 76 genocide, 87 genres, 5, 25, 29, 65, 71, 76, 85, 111, 157, 197, 216, 217, 218, 224, 268 gestation, 51 Glasgow, 40 globalisation, 277 governance, 276 graduate attributes, 2 graduate standards, 277 grammar, 4, 23, 187, 196 grandmother, 14, 82 graphic novel, 29, 182, 185 panels, 183

293

Gummingurru, 81, 82, 83 habitus, 1, 17, 24, 178, 181, 197 Hawaii, 28 health and physical education, 117 heritage, 82 hetero-normativity, 125 heutagogy, 230 hidden curriculum, 181 hierarchical systems, 181 high stakes, 60 history, 2, 21, 82, 88, 96, 240, 245 human dimension, 28 identity, 17, 27, 87, 125, 240 construction of, 52 evidence of, 44 fluid, 2 self and the world, 3, 85 teacher, 229 transformation, 268 illness, 166 imagination, 42, 149, 165, 180, 244 imagined or real selves, 270 indigenous, 83, 85, 87 pedagogies, 28 perspectives, 85 informational aspect of text, 39 insider/outsider, 74, 88, 124, 186, 274 institutionalised governance, 269 intellectual, 254, 273, 274 intellectual challenges, 17 intellectual equality, 270 intellectual hegemony, 272 intent and integrity, 27 interconnected stories, 140 intimacy, 13, 83 irony, 166 Jarowair, 81 just in time, 17 Kamillaroi, 81 knowledge as being, 39 knowledge as text, 39 knowledge generation, 28 labelling, 39, 44, 51, 178 ADHD, 44 adoptee, 44

294 Changeling, 49 dehumanising process, 44 disabled, 44 foundling, 44 of children, 49 other, 44 passport, 44 self labelling, 50 tattoos, 45 language features, 56 language teacher education, 13 legitimacy, 74, 127 life trajectories, 24 light bulb moment, 194 linguistic, 41, 160, 162, 164, 270 listening, 259 literacy, 4, 25, 29, 160, 161, 196 literary modes, 13 literary works, 17, 149 literature, 4, 5, 22, 174, 195, 218, 225 literature review, 49 lived experience, 3, 38, 41, 47, 70, 71, 72, 88, 92, 114, 229 loss, 14, 22, 56, 86 loss of a child, 57 manga, 182 mapping, 90 marriage, 22 meaning, 196, 218, 241 meaningful, 168 meaning-making, 4, 12, 23, 24, 84, 85, 88, 95, 99, 174, 198, 237, 238, 239, 240, 244, 246, 248, 258 memory, 14, 256 metaphor, 46, 50, 105, 159 closed the door, 76 door opening, 75 flood, 41 journey, 64, 229 personification, 37 reflective process, 46 river of life, 64, 76 shape and form, 50

Index the writer's journey, 168, 169, 196 tides of life, 38 metaphorical, 87 Mexico, 28 migration, 42 miscarriage, 57 misunderstandings, 194 modalities, 227, 273, 278 Montessori, 3, 16 motivation, 51 multi-disciplinary, 276 multiliteracies, 5 multiple selves, 63, 65, 68, 76 mutually accountable relationships, 27 mystery, 51, 272 narrative, 2, 11, 12, 21, 27, 50, 51, 58, 64, 67, 68, 74, 84, 87, 118, 140, 189, 211, 241, 274 neo-narrative, 63 visual, 182 narrative data collection, 41 narrative inquiry, 38 native language, 14 natural world, 20, 25, 26, 38, 58, 82, 89, 93, 94, 105, 109, 204 neoliberal, 27, 180 networked knowledge, 272 new media, 24 non-disclosure, 61 non-Western knowledges, 272 novice writers, 160, 168 painting, 89, 90 paper, 142 pedagogy, 1, 3, 12, 24, 84, 180, 195, 226, 241, 248, 268, 276, 277, 278 8ways, 84 creative, 13 dialogic, 17, 182, 267, 269, 271, 272, 274, 276, 277, 278 framework, 273 indigenous, 89 land-based learning, 86 problematising, 239, 247

Weaving Words traditional, 130, 238 writing, 29 photography, 42 place and space conversational spaces, 274 marginalisation, 128 spaces between, 12 symbolic meanings, 86 temporality, 38 play performing, 190 scene, 140, 141, 208, 210, 224 stage directions, 114 playing safe, 13 poetic devices, 18 poetry, 4, 12, 76, 202, 210, 218, 223, 224, 268 appreciation, 192 enjoyment, 192 figurative language, 18, 105 formal aspects, 155 rhyme, 18, 190, 193 rhythm, 192 sound, 190 understanding, 192 post hoc investigation, 64 power and control agency, 4, 20, 50, 162, 182, 197, 230, 250 Auschwitz, 45 compliance, 44, 178 disempowerment, 50 pharmaceutical, 44, 178 prestige, 277 punishment, 178 subaltern, 44 systemic violence, 49 violence, 44, 146, 203 writing choices, 51 zero tolerance, 178 pre-service teachers, 3, 4, 12, 18, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28, 85, 95, 97, 169, 174, 175, 176, 180, 181, 197, 218, 223, 226, 231, 238, 239, 241, 268 process writing, 29

295

professional identity, 120, 125, 126, 129, 132, 133, 228, 229, 276 changing, 63 professional learning, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70, 72, 74, 124, 228 professional life, 51, 76 professional practice, 25, 176, 240, 241 professional skills, 2 professional standards, 72, 180 professional understandings, 3 prose, 4, 61, 71, 218 publishing, 5 Queensland, 80, 86 reader, 4, 5, 12, 20, 24, 79, 141, 155, 160, 164, 165, 174, 182, 183, 197, 218, 225, 249, 268 impact upon, 16 reconciliation, 111 reflection, 3, 25, 27, 38, 61, 68, 73, 120, 155, 168, 197, 239, 240, 244, 246, 248 on experience, 1 Reggio Emilia, 3 relational, 2, 24, 52, 79, 85, 97, 173, 178, 195, 229, 274, 275 relationships, 56, 99, 146, 160, 162, 167, 238, 241, 250, 258, 260, 277 adults and children, 55 transformative, 274 remembrance, 42 reporting, 23, 24, 29, 77, 174, 177 representation, 4, 50, 186 reputation, 27 research agendas, 27 beliefs, 4 collaborative, 27 complexity, 243 culture, 269 doctoral, 275 doctoral research, 74, 273 education, 2, 3, 12, 237, 276 education research, 275 experience, 160

296 indigenous, 28 indigenous scholars, 96 journey, 38 life-writing, 52 method, 87 methodology, 65, 74, 81, 96, 241 narrative inquiry, 118, 121 paradigm, 28, 118 participants, 51 partners in, 24 policy, 73, 181, 268 practice, 65 praxis, 68 process, 48 quality studies, 74 relationships, 64, 83, 118, 273, 275 reporting, 3, 63, 65, 278 supervision, 275, 276 transformative, 274 writing about, 3 writing as, 1, 3, 27, 51, 63, 65, 68, 71, 75, 197, 223, 268 researcher, 38, 76 early career, 80, 98 education, 268 identity, 70 knowledge, 273 narrator, 51 novice, 27 positionality, 27 practice, 168 respect, 13, 52, 83, 89 re-visiting data, 48 revocative turn, 39 rhyming poetry, 57 risk, 12, 19, 29 role reversal, 55 safety, 13 sand-drawings, 98 scaffolded, 85 scholarship, 74, 221, 229, 277 schooling, 43, 97, 180, 268 schools, 20, 44, 72, 78, 174, 178, 227 scientific paradigm, 41

Index Scotland, 45 self-actualisation, 222 self-and-the-world, 50 self-appraisal, 69 self-confidence, 29 self-deception, 27 self-efficacy, 13, 228 self-evaluation, 67, 68 self-examination, 245 self-expressive writing, 19 self-image, 228 self-perceptions, 85 self-questioning, 55, 172 self-reflection, 17, 19, 27, 69, 74, 228 senses, 26, 96 smell, 14, 16, 58, 109 touch, 14, 139 vision, 14 settler heritage, 28, 83, 84, 87 shades of meaning, 38 situated history, 21 soap opera, 148 social justice, 124, 130, 228, 229 social milieu, 126 social theories, 162 soldier, 144 solipsistic writing, 28 song, 88 song-cycles, 86 sorry business, 94 space and place imaginative space, 3 spaces between, 41, 87 spinning, 2, 187 spirit, 42, 91, 97, 271 spiritual, 2, 26, 47, 66, 76, 81, 85, 98, 157 stakeholder networks, 275 stolen generation, 97 stories and storytelling, 1, 2, 5, 12, 17, 20, 21, 38, 40, 49, 50, 51, 60, 69, 70, 74, 82, 83, 86, 88, 92, 107, 110, 118, 119, 124, 128, 137, 141, 145, 156, 159, 164,

Weaving Words 165, 166, 174, 183, 195, 197, 210, 215, 238, 241, 244, 268 structure of texts, 56 struggling writers, 268 support systems for writers, 20 synchronous experiences, 128 synergistic logic, 85 teacher as therapist, 19 teacher education, 3, 4, 19, 25, 52, 72, 73, 124, 168, 226, 232, 238, 267, 270, 271, 272, 276, 277 teacher education programs, 72, 269, 274, 278 teachers as writers and researchers, 276 teachers of writing, 12, 175 teachers-as-researchers, 276 teaching, 3, 13, 17, 56, 67, 82, 84, 88, 98, 124, 149, 190 10 minute tool, 111 assumptions, 237 coaching, 127 creativity, 179, 194, 211 doubts, 197 English, 5, 28, 196, 209, 218 explicit, 56 formal, 175 inquiry approach, 130 leadership, 180 learning needs, 177 Medicine Wheel, 98 planning, 177 practice, 174, 187, 193 sentence structure, 187 strategies, 131 to the test, 168 teaching and learning, 16, 20, 24, 26, 72, 76, 85, 97, 99, 101, 130, 241, 242, 243, 244, 246, 249, 250, 251, 258, 268, 271, 273, 275 telling, 21, 38, 50, 52, 96, 165 testing, 3, 13, 29 text message, 141 the land, 2, 16, 18, 20, 21, 50, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 93, 175

297

themes, 66 theory, 28, 44, 49, 66, 120, 121 border, 2, 49, 74, 83, 93, 272, 274, 277, 278 connexionism, 272 educational, 126 grounded, 273 hybridity, 49 linguistic, 162 phenomenology, 38 postcolonial, 41, 49, 86, 87 thinking-as-writing, 39 transcripts, 48, 49, 88 transformation, 1, 27, 162, 181, 221, 222, 223, 230, 278 transition experiences, 68, 75, 118, 131, 133, 240 transnational, 181 trauma responding to, 20 tropical paradise, 59 truth, 24, 27, 60, 249, 270 seeming, 24 uisge beatha, 42 uncertainty, 28, 68, 69, 70, 156, 221, 239, 241, 243, 272 United Kingdom, 25, 180 United States, 2, 13, 28, 67, 178, 180, 229 unspeakable, 49 vicarious experience, 13 virtual world, 85 visual texts, 179 vocabulary, 211 voice, 18, 28, 50, 51, 64, 65, 68, 69, 74, 141, 163, 195, 228, 229 and identity, 50 and positionality, 51 authentic, 63, 71 culture, 2 ethics of, 4 finding, 63, 68, 75 multiple, 76 personal history, 2 using my voice, 77 vulnerability, 20, 225, 244

298 ways of knowing, 92 weaving, 2 Spider Woman, 2 warp, 12 wellbeing and illness, 42 cancer, 43, 58 healthy, 66 writer’s block, 67 writers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 23, 38, 162, 167, 168, 175, 181, 268 writing academic, 25 as creative space, 1, 3 benefits, 28 challenge, 13, 22, 28, 60, 175 characters, 60, 113, 138, 148, 160, 163, 166, 167, 182, 208, 224 craft, 4, 12, 17, 23, 24, 164, 196 disclosure, 4, 14, 70, 174, 175 drafting, 56, 194 elements of, 22, 60, 141, 148, 157, 165, 166, 189 enjoyment in, 196 enjoyment of, 29, 76, 182 ethopoietic in function, 27 fear, 174, 204, 219 finding a topic, 18 for professional development, 24, 69, 70, 71

Index for professional learning, 3 for self-knowledge, 1, 55 over-thinking, 58 ownership of, 189 partnership, 49 performative aspects, 28 power of, 3 practices of, 17 pride, 190 process, 4, 76 professional development, 4 purpose, 4, 18, 27 sharing, 14, 22, 76, 175, 193, 205 skills, 3 subversive, 13 teaching, 29, 166, 176, 177, 268 tension, 148, 174, 268 themes, 56 theraputic, 19 to disrupt, 3 to transform, 3 transformation, 4 with pen and paper, 55 writing choices, 17, 27 writing conferences, 29 writing in schools, 23 writing relationships, 274 writing story, 48 writing upon writing, 48 yarning, 81, 82, 83, 88, 99