Browsing by Subject "Artifacts"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Archaeological investigations of Xiongnu-Hun cultural connections.
    (2010-08) Hsu, Yiu-Kang
    Abstract summary not available
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    A Critical Writing Pedagogy toward Mental Health: Novice Teachers and Collective Memory Work
    (2023-06) Schick, Anna
    Trauma studies in education (Dutro & Bien, 2015) emphasize that while teachers and students may experience acute traumatic events, they are also subjected to the ongoing trauma of institutional spaces that attempt to bracket the emotional from the cognitive. This study engages novice teachers in critical writing pedagogy to examine what teaching is doing to teachers. To engage in critical writing pedagogy, novice teachers participated in collective memory work (Haug, 1999) to write and analyze memories from teaching. Critical writing pedagogy is an urgent area of study. Defined as an approach to teaching writing that engages cognitive, sociocultural, and critical orientations (Kline & Kang, 2022), critical writing pedagogy is necessarily evolving and contextualized (Kamler, 2001; Anzaldúa, 1987). This interpretative study (Erickson, 1986) analyzes novice teachers’ engagement with artifacts, collective analysis, and “rewrite questions” to theorize what is possible in a critical writing pedagogy toward mental health. This study is significant because of the way critical writing pedagogy revealed the mental health of the novice teachers to them. Findings demonstrate how artifacts interrupted self-gaslighting, the tendency to minimize or suppress the trauma, pain, or uncertainty (Bendt, 2020). Collective analysis invited introspection, generated consensus, and called out the unreasonable. The outcome of “rewrite questions” is interpreted as a space for addressing discomfort (Kumashiro, 2002) and unsettling emotions such as resentment. Informed by a framework of critical writing pedagogy according to Kamler (2001) and Anzaldúa (1987), this study highlights how relocating the personal and sustaining contradictions with a collective can increase the visibility and accessibility of mental health.
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    Poor but not deficient: the storied lives of working-class English teachers
    (2013-05) Jones, Heidi Jo
    Guided by my own experiences as an English teacher from a working-class background, I sought what Vagle & Jones (2012) term "a social, autobiographic, and pedagogical project" (p. 318), to understand, through autobiographical stories, how middle school and high school working-class English teachers from rural, suburban and urban contexts came to be teachers of English. In addition, I was interested in how their home lives and social class background influenced their career choice and how the participants describe their upward mobility and class passing in terms of their personal and professional lives. This qualitative study uses a Vygotskian (1978) sociocultural framework focusing on the mediation of tools, or artifacts, as avenue for meaning-making, as well as Holland et al (2001) as an anchor for theorizing the shifting negotiations of identity and social class as figured worlds. An interview study with embedded comparative case studies, the data were analyzed using narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) and critical event narrative analysis (Webster & Mertova, 2007) to mine the stories of the participants.Findings show that although all participants experienced similar trajectories, or a series of critical and like events (Webster & Mertova, 2007) to the middle class profession of teaching, two participants' trajectories enacted spaces of resistance within these common elements. One participant self-authored her own path to teaching after several well-timed interventions by school-related adults, whom I call social class brokers, a meme of Brandt's (1988) literacy sponsors. In addition, another participant used the cultural artifact of books--which she had previous viewed as a form of recreation--to leverage her entry into the teaching profession. The study also explains how the participants called on their sedimented identities (Rowsell & Pahl, 2007) to inform their day-to-day interactions with students.These findings reveal a need for social class-sensitive pedagogy (Jones & Vagle, 2013) and a better understanding of the ways in which social class vacillates and implicitly permeates virtually all classroom interactions. Specifically, this study has implications for teacher educators who are interested in ways to provide space for teacher candidates to have deeper and richer examinations of their own classed experiences in order to create the same type of space for the teacher candidates' future K-12 students.