Figured Worlds Research Articles

ИТОГОВЫЙ ОБРАЗ ПОЭМЫ А. БЛОКА «ДВЕНАДЦАТЬ» В КОНТЕКСТЕ НАЦИОНАЛЬНОЙ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ XIX - НАЧАЛА XX ВЕКА

Conclusive appearance of an author in A. Blok’s poem “The Twelve” indicated its lyro-epical nature. Conclusive figurative generalization develops the traditions of the Russian poem and novel, a conclusive image of which is associated with the writer’s image emerging in the artistic world. The lyrical content of the last lines of the poem appeared to be in disharmony with its epic plane, which caused contradictive perception of Christ’s image by the poet’s contemporaries. But it represents the constant of Blok’s figurative world, which the poet, trusting his feelings and following the traditions, considered as the key one.

Authoring the identity of learner before doctor in the figured world of medical school.

IntroductionStudents enter the ‘figured world’ of medical school with preconceptions of what it means to be a doctor. The meeting of these early preconceptions and their newly developing identities can create emotional tensions. The aim of this study was to advance our understanding of how such tensions were experienced and managed. Using figured worlds as a theoretical framework we explored students’ interactions of preconceptions with their newly developing professional identities in their first year at medical school. Advancing our understanding of this phenomena provided new insights into the complex process of identity formation.MethodsThis was a qualitative study underpinned by a constructivist epistemology. We ran biannual focus groups with 23 first year students in one UK medical school. Data were recorded, transcribed and then template analysis used to undertake an inductive, iterative process of analysis until it was considered the template provided a detailed representation of the data.ResultsSignificant preconceptions associated with the identity of a doctor were ‘to help’ and ‘to be a leader’. These early preconceptions were in conflict with realities of the figured world of medical school creating the emotional tensions of ‘being unable to help’ and ‘lacking power’, with implications for interactions with patients. By the end of year one students’ negotiated tensions and ‘self-authored’ their identity as a learner as opposed to an imagined ‘as if’ identity of a doctor.DiscussionWe revealed how preconceptions associated with becoming a doctor can conflict with a newly developing professional identity highlighting the importance of supporting students to embrace the formation of a ‘learner’ identity, a necessary part of the process of becoming a doctor.

Transforming Learning Identities in Literacy Programmes

This article draws on the theories of Mezirow, Foucault, and Holland and colleagues to investigate how students were positioned in relation to their own experiences, what opportunities they had to overcome their negative positioning in relation to the power structures that inform the worlds in which they move, and how their changed practices impacted on their positional and figured worlds. Data from community- and prison-based participants in Scottish adult literacy projects are used to interrogate the factors that contributed to overcoming the negative discourses that students had been embedded in. This article concludes that by the end of their programs, the students had experienced transformative changes in their learning identities, and these changes encompassed cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions.

I am smart enough to study postsecondary science: a critical discourse analysis of latecomers’ identity construction in an online forum

Latecomers to science are students who take non-traditional routes into postsecondary science because they are initially missing prerequisites. Latecomers have a lower rate of persistence than traditional science students. This critical discourse analysis of an online forum thread uses Gee’s toolkit to explore how latecomers, who have histories of not being recognized as smart enough to do science, find new ways to identify with science. Applying a theoretical lens in which identity is viewed as a process of continual negotiation, which is constrained and afforded by the resources of the relevant figured worlds, it is shown how four latecomers shared reinterpreted histories of being recognized as not smart enough to do science and in doing so, formed solidarity. As part of this process they co-produced a new cultural model in which the ability or inability to ask questions led respectively to success (good grades) or failure (low grades) in science. Used in conjunction with their solidarity, they were not only able to successfully position themselves in the elite figured world of science, but also to reify the result in a form that could potentially support future identification with science. Aspects of the online forum that supported the co-production are explored, including its ability to help students draw on resources from outside of the science program. The importance of encouraging students to discuss their struggles with science and the accompanying construction of solidarity is also discussed. This research is of particular interest to practitioners and researchers interested in supporting non-traditional science students such as latecomers, especially those wishing to move away from deficit views of these students and towards a more complex and agentic understanding of persistence and identity in science.

“This is English class”: Evolving identities and a literacy teacher's shifts in practice across figured worlds

Teacher learning should be regarded as a complex life-long process, one that may be best understood as interwoven with the life-long process of identity development. Using concepts like figured worlds, histories-in-person, cultural artifacts, and conceptual/procedural identity (Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998), this paper explores one secondary teacher's shifting from traditional methods of English teaching to a workshop approach. As the teacher perceived the figured nature of dominant narratives about schooling alongside his own history-in-person, emerging tensions became productive spaces. This paper concludes with implications about the usefulness of identity theories to examine and facilitate teacher learning over time.

Counter-narratives of coping and becoming: Karen refugee women’s inside/outside figured worlds

The purpose of our research is to understand the socially and culturally constructed architecture within which refugee women produce and negotiate identity. This ethnographic case study discusses findings from data collected through participant observation and informal interviews in two refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border. As Karen refugee women described their positionality within and negotiation between the socially constructed Inside and Outside Figured Worlds of the refugee camp, they depict the negotiation of a hybrid Third Space. Created at the intersection of the refugee camp structures that dominate individual agency and the discourses of gender and displacement that influence the social practices of women, this third space is characterized by the response strategies Karen women engage to support individual, family, and community health. Within the transformational spaces that refugee women constructed, the processes of coping and becoming reflected the relationship between structure and agency. Within these intersections a woman could express her resistance to a system that in its design represented a majority she was not a part of. As Karen refugee women moved to redesign their position within these systems, shifts in meaning of cultural norms resulted, inclusive of those that influence or define the role of women.

Critiquing Statistics in Student and Professional Worlds

ABSTRACTThis article compares students' critiques within a class discussion about an invented statistic to STEM professionals' critiques from interviews to better understand how the situated meanings of a statistic are similar and different across student and professional worlds. We discuss similarities and differences in how participants constructed meaning for the statistic, and argue that disciplinary practices in schooling will always have an approximate, and somewhat indeterminate, relation to the figured worlds of professional practice.

Primary pupils' creative writing: enacting identities in a Community of Writers

AbstractThis paper focuses on a Community of Writers creative writing project where 25 primary school pupils from lower socio‐economic backgrounds took part in creative writing workshops over a 2‐week period at a higher education institution. Using practitioner enquiry and discourse analysis, this paper views identity as participation in ‘figured worlds’ and highlights the relationship between the children's creative writing outputs and their shifting identities (Holland et al., ). A case is made that children's authentic creative writing can be nurtured by a community that promotes intertextuality and ‘hybridity’ (Bakhtin, ) as well as balancing pedagogical ‘structure’ and ‘freedom’ (Davies et al., ) in order to provide textual space for writers to enact different identities. At a time when the global figuring power of performativity (Ball, ) actively restricts the ways in which teachers and children interact, this paper also presents an informed argument for the value of school–university research partnerships.

Authenticity and the relevance of discourse and figured worlds in secondary students' discussions of socioscientific issues

The purpose of this paper is to examine how authenticity influences students' discussions of socioscientific issues (SSI). The students were found to bridge school knowledge and everyday knowledge, i.e. enter a “third space”, in their explorative discussions. When the SSI task changed into a decision-making discussion for communication with an authentic stakeholder, the students excluded many perspectives. In the process, authenticity caused a loss of relevance for one discourse and several figured worlds, including the students' emotional reasoning. While losing emotional aspects, students’ reasoning became more precise when grounded in rational reasoning, supporting well-informed decisions.

Agency and the GED: Personae and Artifacts in the Figured World of a Literacy Welcome Center

AbstractThe GED test has served as a mechanism for granting high school equivalency in the United States for decades, and some states have funded tutorial services because they have imagined the GED to be a means for getting a job or increasing one's wages. Based on field research conducted in literacy welcome centers in a small city in Upstate New York, we argue that teachers’ and students’ discursive reflections show that they attain agency in multiple ways during participation in tutorials. On the one hand, students build and hone their skills required for successful testing. On the other hand, teachers embody the caring disposition that the world inhabited by the students lacks. We argue that the GED and its practice exams are artifacts that only partly account for the agency of teachers and students, and, when reflected on by an administrator, erase crucial aspects of that agency.

Erratum to: Figured Worlds and American Dreams: An Exploration of Agency and Identity Among Latinx Undocumented Students

Erratum to: Figured Worlds and American Dreams: An Exploration of Agency and Identity Among Latinx Undocumented Students

The Effects of Zero Tolerance Policies on Black Girls: Using Critical Race Feminism and Figured Worlds to Examine School Discipline

Black girls are more likely to be suspended or expelled through exclusionary discipline than their female counterparts, but continue to be overlooked and understudied. This article presents a case for using critical race feminism and figured worlds as theoretical frameworks for examining the effects of zero tolerance policies on Black girls. We use these frameworks to explore how adults’ implementation of disciplinary policies not only affects the racial and gender identity development of Black girls, but perpetuates anti-Black discipline and represents behavioral responses to White femininity that may not align with Black girls’ femininity and identification with school.

Reproducing Figured Worlds of Literacy Teaching and Learning: Examining the “Language-In-Use” of an Inservice and Preservice Teacher Enacting the Practice of Literacy Planning

ABSTRACTThere are international calls for teacher preparation programs to increase the quantity and quality of field experiences. The belief is that spending additional time in the field being mentored by inservice teachers will develop high-quality preservice teachers. However, the figured worlds of teacher education and the knowledge base of inservice teachers are largely left unexamined. This study took place within an urban Professional Development School and used critical discourse analysis to examine the “language-in-use” between one inservice teacher and one preservice teacher as they engaged in the planning of a literacy lesson. The authors identified the figured worlds of teacher, literacy teaching and learning, and mentoring, as interpreted from this discourse event. Findings include figured worlds of (1) teacher as the giver and withholder of knowledge; (2) literacy teaching and learning that appears inauthentic, contrived, and teacher centered; and (3) an understanding of mentoring as inservice teacher as giver of knowledge and preservice teacher as receiver. Implications for teacher education and teacher educators are discussed.

The Retreat, York: an Organizational View of an Applied Group Analytic Approach

This article explores the discourse of care at The Retreat, York by examining its birth within moral treatment, Quakerism and the birth of asylums. I develop this further by linking these discourses into subsequent movements, namely group analysis and the therapeutic community movement. Through problematizing this history, I offer a new register for considering care in communities and groups by suggesting the use of the pedagogical concept of ‘figured worlds’. By doing so I aim to offer a contemporary view of moral treatment and suggest this is more important than ever given the nature of austerity in our current socio-economic paradigm at the possible end of British neoliberalist politics.

The Self-Authoring of a Music Educator: A Journey Through Figured Worlds

Abstract In this narrative, I tell the story of a music educator working on the West Side of Chicago through the theoretical lenses of Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogism and Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain’s (2001) concept of figured worlds. Over the course of 2 years (fall 2013 to spring 2015), I documented her story through Skype interviews and written correspondence. Through this story, I chronicle this individual’s process of “becoming” a music educator. I recount the development of a band program within an inner-city school and illuminate issues of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender identity with implications for music teacher education.

Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation by Ben Keppel

Reviewed by: Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation by Ben Keppel Dara R. Walker Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation. By Ben Keppel. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. vii + 225 pp. Paper $45. In historical memory and scholarship, Brown vs. Board of Education looms large as one of the central legal challenges to political and social inequality in the United States. Reflecting on this vast literature in 2004, just fifty years after the landmark case, Waldo E. Martin issued a call to his fellow historians to consider the social and culture history of the monumental campaign.* In many ways, Ben Keppel’s Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation is a response to this charge. In a history of the years following the US Supreme Court’s decision, or what the author calls the Age of Brown, Keppel examines how Americans responded to cultural changes that were products of calls for desegregation. At the center of this history are three “cultural first responders”: Harvard-trained psychiatrist Robert Coles, comedian Bill Cosby, and television producer Joan Ganz Cooney. In tandem, these individuals used the tools of their trades to help answer one [End Page 285] essential question: “what does the phrase ‘public education’ require of the rest of us?” (13) The first chapter characterizes the Age of Brown as a historical reenactment of the Reconstruction era. Although the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments represented an opening for African Americans to lay claim to citizenship after emancipation, the American polity had failed to fully embrace its new citizens. It would take the work of abolitionist Fredrick Douglass and others to transform a culture that had relied on racial inequality for centuries. Keppel argues that by the 1950s, public education had become a site of this struggle, or a twentieth-century Civil War. The second chapter examines the trajectory of public schooling in the United States during the 1960s, when Americans from all stripes wrestled with the cultural transformations Brown imbued in American schooling. Using Septima Clark and Marcus Foster as key examples, Keppel suggests that the pedagogical practices and school-centered approaches of Clark and Foster illustrate the cultural impact of Brown. These “new abolitionists,” which included the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists and their work with Freedom Schools, reshaped meanings of public education. Clark approached learning as a reciprocal process at the Highlander Folk School, while Foster worked with students and parents to lobby Sacramento legislators for increased school funding. In chapters 3, 4, and 5, Keppel takes the reader on a journey outside of the schools and into the world of social scientists and popular cultural figures. Each of these “cultural first responders” used their platform to push the country to reconsider the purpose of public education at a moment when federal programs like the War on Poverty pushed for greater citizen participation. Robert Coles, the author of the Children of Crisis series, used his fieldwork in Mississippi to support efforts to bring the Head Start Project to the state. Cosby, who saw himself as a teacher, created the Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids cartoon to raise racial awareness and to provide positive images for black children during the 1970s, when representations of African Americans were largely limited to news coverage of social unrest and protest. Cosby sought to provide an alternative to these depictions and the children’s shows that portrayed white children’s lives as normative. And of course, he brought the same agenda to his primetime show, the Cosby Show in 1984. Like Cosby, Joan Ganz Cooney, the creator of the Children’s Television Workshop and a producer for the popular children’s show Sesame Street, used her platform to transform the meaning of public education. Established in 1970 and set in New York City, the show represented a form of educational television that tried to imagine the world as it could be. It allowed American children the opportunity to integrate virtually without [End Page 286...

From a Geometry of Vision to a Geometry of Light in Early-Modern Perspective

Must the architect or artist understand how the world is perceived on the convex surface of the eye to simulate the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional plane? For many early-modern artists, optics – defined as the science of vision – was fundamental. Yet, for architects, the integration of optical theories into two-dimensional representations of buildings remained more tenuous. Architectural drawing depended on orthographic projection and the representation of built form through plan, section and elevation, which did not seek to mimic the process of vision. If anything, architectural drawing separated itself from the illusion of vision in its attempt to account for the discrepancies between the represented and the built form. Nevertheless, the shifting science of optics would come to influence the two-dimensional representation of the built world for both architects and painters. This essay covers a broad survey of perspectival treatises from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century in order to consider how changes in the science of optics shifted the means by which artists and architects theorized the representation of space and the simulated illusion of perspective. As will be seen, the seemingly innocuously obvious geometric parts for the creation of perspectival space – the Euclidean point and line – became obsolete in the eighteenth century due to fundamental shifts in the science of optics. Whereas once optics was a study of vision through points and lines, in the seventeenth century with the works of Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and René Descartes (1596–1650), among many others, optics transformed into a study of light. As light rather than vision became the focus of optics and its geometrical laws, the connection between a geometry of vision and a geometry of spatial representation became challenged. When light – not vision – became subject to the laws of geometry, the eye became one instrument among many (lenses, camera obscuras, microscopes and telescopes) capable of deception and fault. In turn, geometry lost its intellectual and metaphysical resonances and became a practical tool of application. The influence of the visioning technology of geometry on perspectival drawing for both the built and the figurative world lost its theoretical foundation. No longer a technology of vision, the art of geometry became reduced to non-theoretical rudimentary forms for beginning draftsmen.

Possibility and agency in Figured Worlds: becoming a 'good doctor'.

Figured Worlds is a socio-cultural theory drawing on Vygotskian and Bakhtinian traditions, which has been applied in research into the development of identities of both learners and teachers in the wider education literature. It is now being adopted in medical education. The objective of this paper is to show what Figured Worlds can offer in medical education. Having explained some of its central tenets, we apply it to an important tension in our field. The assumption that there is a uniform 'good doctor' identity, which must be inculcated into medical students, underlies much of what medical educators do, and what our regulators enforce. Although diversity is encouraged when students are selected for medical school, pressure to professionalise students creates a drive towards a standardised professional identity by graduation. Using excerpts from reflective pieces written by two junior medical students, we review the basic concepts of Figured Worlds and demonstrate how it can shed light on the implications of this tension. Taking a Bakhtinian approach to discourse, we show how Adam and Sarah develop their professional identities as they negotiate the multiple overlapping and competing ways of being a doctor that they encounter in the world of medical practice. Each demonstrates agency by 'authoring' a unique identity in the cultural world of medicine, as they appropriate and re-voice the words of others. Finally, we consider some important areas in medical education where Figured Worlds might prove to be a useful lens: the negotiation of discourses of gender, sexuality and social class, career choice as identification within specialty-specific cultural worlds, and the influence of hidden and informal curricula on doctor identity.

Preservice Music Teachers’ Descriptions of Successful and Unsuccessful Teachers

The purpose of this study was to examine how undergraduate music education students identify, through a reflective writing exercise, the major characteristics of successful and unsuccessful teachers. We asked two research questions: (1) How did preservice music teachers describe successful and unsuccessful teachers (2) How did perceptions differ based on academic class and/or age? Using a written protocol, we collected data from 134 participants within three institutions and coded the data using figured worlds as a lens. The participants depicted successful teachers with rich description and highlighted interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects. The participants described unsuccessful teachers succinctly; characteristics that emerged included a lack of care and knowledge of students, inflexible teaching methods, and inconsistent standards. Implications for teacher education are proposed.

Flight turbulence: the stormy professional trajectory of trainee early years’ teachers in England

ABSTRACTThis paper documents trainees’ ‘flight turbulence’ as they negotiate the complexities that lie between ‘the self’ and the securing of Early Years Teaching Status in England. Early Years Teachers, besides teaching, are expected to lead improvements to the quality of provision. However, drawing on interview data, an impasse is discerned where ideas meet instrumental policy in practice. Trainees are often unable to reshape the meeting of theory, policy and practice, and struggle in finding teaching approaches which they are comfortable with ethically. Drawing on Holland et al.’s concept of ‘figured worlds’, it is suggested that the development of theory-informed practice should not be seen as a solitary task for the student but as a dialogic though difficult conversation involving the student, university staff and placement practitioners. Dialogism is seen as requiring persistence but as offering opportunities for beginning early years’ teachers, with support from teacher educators and experienced practitioners, to negotiate the challenging spaces between policy, theory and beliefs as they seek to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct ethical professional identities for themselves.