Critical Praxis Research Research Articles

The secret art of pedagogical alchemy

This paper reveals secrets. Like their Renaissance counterparts, pedagogical alchemists often work in secret networks as they struggle against dominant forces. Pedagogical alchemists seek to transform assemblages of neoliberal education policies, shifting enactments of such policies from replication of systemic hierarchies and oppressions towards teacher and student experiences of joy, hope, and resistance. The secret art of pedagogical alchemy adopts critical praxis research method that amplifies epistemological insights arising from teacher experience. This paper utilizes performative autoethnography and social fiction to interrogate the influence of socio-political context on the labour of an 8th grade school-teacher. The secret art of pedagogical alchemy locates the experiences of a pedagogical alchemist whose 8th grade history class includes a unit of work on Renaissance alchemist Isabella Cortese. The experiences are framed by globalised, neo-liberal education policy assemblage. Like the writings of Renaissance alchemist, Isabella Cortese, the voice of the 8th grade history pedagogical alchemist is performed in quatrains that are written in iambic pentameter.

Being authentic and being a chameleon: nurse-patient interaction revisited.

This paper explores contradictory understandings of nurse-patient interaction arising through an exploration of 'being authentic' and 'being a chameleon'. The concepts arose during a critical praxis research study exploring nurse-patient relationships in the context of life-threatening or terminal illness. Being authentic can be understood as a dominant view in the nursing literature of the nurse-patient relationship, incorporating the value of being genuine. However, we argue that this concept offers only a partial and inadequate framework from which to understand nurse-patient interaction. The paper argues that nurse-patient relationships develop intersubjectively, with both the nurse and the patient choosing to reveal or conceal aspects of themselves in response to their interactions. Intersubjectivity as a concept provided the nurses in this study with a means for understanding how the nurse and the patient each contribute to interactions; nurse-patient relationships being understood as mutually constructed. These ideas are explored in this paper using examples from the nurses' stories, along with the implications raised for nursing practice.