Place Of Vulnerability Research Articles

Fostering a theoretical and practical understanding of teaching as a relational process: a feminist participatory study of mentoring a doctoral student

We were seeking to disrupt the practice of fostering theoretical understandings about teaching and learning in our graduate courses that had little connection to students’ teaching practices. We also desired a mentoring approach for graduate students in education that would foster an understanding and practice of teaching as a relational process. This paper provides a practitioner account of an action research study focused on the development of such an approach. In a semester‐long feminist participatory study, we utilized weekly dialogues, reflective journals, classroom observations and written documents to explore the mentoring experience of one graduate advisor, one graduate teaching assistant, and two critical friends. Through the action research process, a new mentoring approach grounded in the relational process of teaching was realized along with a new understanding of the place of authority and vulnerability in negotiations between mentor and student.

On Navigating Despair: Reports from Psycho- therapists

The few writers who address the issue of how psychotherapists experience and respond to hopelessness as it arises in their work emphasize the importance of exploring this reality because of its vexing centrality. However, there are no qualitative studies of despair from therapists’ point of view. In order to study this neglected phenomenon empirically, in-depth interviews were conducted with experienced psychotherapists and descriptions were elicited from beginning therapists through a creative writing workshop. Confronting hopelessness typically brought even seasoned psychotherapists to a place of vulnerability and uncertainty. And yet it was also evident that they had specific therapeutic ways of responding to this challenge, such as viewing hopelessness as an experience that may reflect significant transition. The implications of the findings of this study with regard to the practice of psychotherapy, supervision, and education are discussed.

A Lifestyle Analysis of the Elderly: Perceptions of Risk, Fear, and Vulnerability

This article examines the place of risk, fear, and vulnerability in the lifestyle choices of the elderly. Using the earlier lifestyle theory of the late researcher Michael Hindelang and his colleagues, Michael Gottfredson and James Garofalo, the authors note the extent to which the elderly lifestyle choices of Milwaukee citizens may be affected by beliefs about risk, fear, and vulnerability brought about by aging and corresponding losses in physical functioning. The study is based on a random sample of 1,100 Milwaukee County telephone subscribers contacted by mailed questionnaire by the authors under funding provided by Marquette's Urban Institute and Graduate School.

Collaborative narrative inquiry: Fidelity and the ethics of caring in teacher research

The authors discuss the internal and external conflicts they encountered while collaborating with teachers and situate their deliberations within the framework provided by Noddings's principles of fidelity and caring. The narrative inquiries that they examine involve methods for recording and reflecting on personal accounts, personal narratives, teachers' stories, and narrative interviews for the purpose of understanding how teachers make sense of problems in their lives and work. The authors explore the place of disclosure and vulnerability as well as the place of selectivity and silence in the texts collected. They reflect on how the ethic of caring helps resolve concerns for the presence of teachers' voices in the interpreting and writing of research. They conclude that it is precisely the relational nature of narrative inquiry that resists simple answers to the question: How can we share teachers' stories and speak to their multiple meanings in caring, moral, and ethical ways?