Recollections Of Life Research Articles

Climbing, Hiding and Having Fun: Schoolchildren’s Memories of Holistic Learning in a Norwegian Kindergarten

Firmly planted in the Nordic tradition, policies that guide practice in Norwegian kindergartens emphasize a holistic approach that integrates care, play and learning and promotes well-being and development through relationships and experiences in the natural environment. While the holistic approach enjoys support both politically and within the profession, a political call for increased learning has resulted in a number of programs embracing school-based methods of learning infusing the field. The aim to increase learning has increasingly relied on a concept of learning that is the result of intentional pedagogic practice and high quality engagement between educators and children. This understanding of learning does not embrace learning related to children as biological beings in a vital phase of growth; that occurs outside of situations crafted to be learning situations. In this article, we address learning as a biological and social phenomenon, and consider how schoolchildren’s recollections of life in kindergarten can shed light on how and what children learn in the unique learning environments of Norwegian kindergartens. Our approach offers an opportunity to understand what holistic learning in ECEC can mean for children as biosocial beings.

“After All of it, She is Here”: Gender, Identity, and Empowerment in Women’s Ravensbrück Memoirs

This paper examines how gender and identity function in the personal memoirs of female Holocaust survivors. The memoirs of Nanda Herbermann and Sara Tuvel Bernstein, two survivors of Ravensbrück, the Nazis' concentration camp for women, are explored as case studies of how feminine gender identity influenced female inmates' experiences and recollections of life in Nazi concentration camps. The different backgrounds of these women, as a German Catholic and a Jew, respectively, also affected their lives as inmates, and influenced how they constructed their personal narratives and identities through memoirs. Thus, gender and other aspects of personal identity intertwined both during their time in Ravensbrück and in their writings of their experiences. Their memoirs, moreover, serve as means of personal empowerment as they rewrote themselves into history on their own terms. These memoirs, therefore, enhance our understanding of the gendered and the personal dimensions of the Nazi concentration camp systems and the Holocaust.

Tan Kok Yang, <i>From the Blue Windows: Recollections of Life in Queenstown, Singapore, in the 1960s and 1970s<i/>

Tan Kok Yang, <i>From the Blue Windows: Recollections of Life in Queenstown, Singapore, in the 1960s and 1970s<i/>

Stella Bain

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessStella BainJeffrey L. Geller, M.D., M.P.H., Maggie Bennington-Davis, M.D.Jeffrey L. GellerSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.P.H., Editor, Maggie Bennington-DavisSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Dec 2014https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.651206AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail by Anita Shreve; New York, Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2013, 261 pagesAnita Shreve is an award-winning novelist; her past novels include The Pilot’s Wife and The Weight of Water. Stella Bain is her 17th novel. Although it stands on its own, it is meant to be a sequel to All He Ever Wanted. Shreve’s writing tends to be somewhat spare; Stella Bain is downright stark.The story opens in 1916 in a field hospital in France when the protagonist awakens with no memory of what has happened to her, who she is, or where she came from. She chooses the name “Stella Bain” and recalls that she can drive ambulances (a rather unusual talent for a woman in 1916). She speaks with an apparent American accent. Her quest to regain her memory consumes her; she demonstrates an ability to sketch portraits, which allows her to earn money to get to London’s Admiralty, where she believes she will regain her memory.Upon arrival in London, she is sick and weak and leaning exhaustedly against a stone fence in the bitter cold when she is rescued by Lily, the wife of a cranial surgeon. The surgeon is intrigued by Stella’s amnesia, having read about Freud’s emerging “talk therapy” and about success with similar techniques with shell shock. These elements of Stella Bain may draw your interest, and Shreve does a good job describing the state of knowledge in both of these areas in the early 1900s. There is something riveting about reading of these emerging ideas through the eyes of a surgeon of this era and then applying them to his female patient.The surgeon encourages Stella to use her drawing penchant as a way to tap into discovering who she is and what happened to her, in a sort of free-association-by-drawing. He takes her to the Admiralty time after time until someone recognizes her and calls her by her real name (Etna), which triggers her recollection of life in the States as a married woman, including that she has children and why she fled (this is the tie to All He Ever Wanted).Eventually Etna returns to America to face her loveless marriage and angry husband and fight a seemingly hopeless custody battle, all the while maintaining her connection with the surgeon in England. At one point, she attempts to explain her condition and treatment as part of her bid for her children, although at that point in history there is no language for either.Shreve deftly handles the topic of shell shock. The reference to the emergence of psychoanalysis is interesting (although given short shrift by the amazing success the surgeon has with little understanding or training in technique), and the plight of women in the early 1900s is exemplified by the lack of attention to shell shock among women. Etna’s difficulty in keeping her children is excellently portrayed—the best part of the book. All of these plot lines make for an entertaining read.Dr. Davis is chief medical officer at Cascadia BHC, Portland, Oregon.The reviewer reports no financial relationships with commercial interests. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 65Issue 12 December 01, 2014Pages e13-e13 Metrics The reviewer reports no financial relationships with commercial interests.PDF download History Published online 1 December 2014 Published in print 1 December 2014

Forging Ahead: Recollections of the Life and Times of Esther Dartigue by Esther Dartigue and John Dartigue (review)

Forging Ahead: Recollections of Life and Times of Esther Dartigue. By Esther Dartigue and John Dartigue. CreateSpace, 2014. ISBN 1477595902. 482pp. $14.50 paperback.Review by Grace L. Sanders JohnsonIn 1994, educator and activist Esther Dartigue published An Outstanding Haitian, Maurice Dartigue: The Contribution of Maurice Dartigue in Field of Education in Haiti, United Nations, and UNESCO. In so doing, she successfully wrote deceased husband and former Haitian Minister of Education, Maurice Dartigue, into modern history of Haiti. Esther's work has been widely cited in literature on post-US occupation politics, education, and international organizing and has enhanced recent scholarship in field, most notably Millery Polyne's From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, and Panamericanism, 1870-1964 (2010) and Chantalle Verna's forthcoming work and The Uses of America, 1930-1957. In a 2007 article Verna aptly argues, for example, that Maurice Dartigue was the leading educational reformer during two decades following U.S. occupation.1 Much of what we know about Maurice Dartigue's legacy is credited to his wife's tireless combing through his personal papers and related archives in order to bring his vision for to a broader audience. Yet, until now, little has been known about Esther herself-the assiduous mother, scholar and, on select occasions, orator who used historical prose to combine her two great passions, [Maurice] and Haiti (v).Her memoir Forging Ahead: Recollections of Life and Times of Esther Dartigue provides insight into Esther's life, love of Haiti, and contribution to Dartigue family. Esther conceptualized Forging Ahead as a family history for only child, John, and started writing details of childhood, marriage, and first decade and a half of son's life in mid-1990s. However, due to fatigue and illness, she was unable to complete autobiographical project. Inspired by his mother's commitment to their family's genealogy, John Dartigue picked up where his mother left off and narrated final fifty years of life using childhood memories, stories from family and friends, and a meticulous mapping of Esther's personal calendars, letters, and daily notes. Forging Ahead, then, is both a memoir and a biography, with first part primarily written by Esther Dartigue and second part written by John Dartigue. As a companion piece to Esther's first book, Forging Ahead is foremost a family conversation-a love letter to those individuals and places that Esther cared for dearly.Forging Ahead is an unconventionally written collection of remembrances (vii) sometimes connected and other times appearing in tangential and fragmented ways that memories float to and recede from our forethoughts. With a narrative cadence that reads like an oral history, text is not ordinary in structure, scope, or genre, as John Dartigue warns reader from outset. At several points he even suggests that text may not be of interest to a general audience and that some readers may find it useful to skip certain parts. And yet, while a reader who is not familiar with Dartigue family may be tempted to pass over litany of surnames and addresses, readers will likely find themselves continuing to read out of curiosity and expectation that one of those names casually mentioned may be of note: Resia Vincent, Jacques Roumain, Madeleine Sylvain, Jacques Stephen Alexis, or Rafael Trujillo.In this regard, Forging Ahead is at once a genealogical dig, an archival hunt, and a geographical odyssey. The book is divided into fourteen chapters that chronicle near century of Esther Dartigue's life-from birth in Hungary and early adolescence in United States to adulthood in and Central Africa and through death in France. The first three chapters are detailed accounts of Dartigue's poor upbringing in Hungary and young immigrant life with family in Ohio. …

The Divided Mind: New Perspectives on Colonial Representations in Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais

The idea of mild Portuguese process of colonization in Africa, reiterated by many academic and social milieus, is described in Caderno de Memorias Coloniais as an old wives tale (Figueiredo 131). (2) In this paper, propose discussion on the representation of colonial history in Isabela Figueiredo's book through the analysis of transculturation processes. argue that the narrator challenges the Portuguese colonial memory by adding divergent perspective to the historical archive. This occurs through her self-placement in liminal space that lies between cultures, national boundaries and identities. use the term double consciousness to refer to split within the protagonist, who is conflicted between being faithful to her Portuguese roots and (re)telling the truth about the colonization of Mozambique. (3) This question of truthfulness is explored in relation to the literary genre of the book, which puts at stake emotional and political implications for the understanding of history. This paper's main goals are to contribute to the deconstruction of the links between identity, nation and citizenship in postcolonial context, and to provoke awareness of the validity of different versions of history that are created by social regimes of remembering and forgetting. Caderno de Memorias Coloniais is first person account of Figueiredo's recollections of life in colonial Mozambique under the Portuguese dictatorship. The writer, born to Portuguese parents in Maputo (former Lourenco Marques) in 1963, moved to Lisbon in 1975 as one of many returnees who fled to Portugal following the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974. Being too young to participate in colonial oppression, instead the author acts as witness. She crudely describes and interprets the everyday life in the former colony, the atrocities of the colonial war, the massacres that plagued the regime's collapse and the aftermath of the traumatic decolonization process of the former colony. find the adjective transcultural appropriate to describe how the Mozambican and Portuguese cohabitate within the mind of the narrator. The term transculturation was coined by Fernando Ortiz to refer to the turbulent and unpredictable process resulting from the interaction among in contact [...] which potentiates, in spite of unequal power relations, the emergence of new cultural forms (qtd. in Cheadle and Pelletier xi). More recently, Roland Walter defines transculturation as a critical paradigm enabling us to trace the ways that transmission occurs within and between different cultures (idem 27). argue that the narrator is in this contact zone, occupying the position of mediator between the two cultures. This in-betweenness is visible in many ways. She lies between two homelands: Portugal, the land of her inherited roots and country of citizenship but which she does not see until she is nearly thirteenth, and Mozambique, the place of her birth and childhood, but, lacking natural claim to the land, place to which she never fully belongs. describing her last images of Maputo before taking the plane to Portugal, the narrator says: I wouldn't return to that place, which, being my land, did not belong to me (Figueiredo 87). In another passage, referring to the adult moment when she wrote those words, the storyteller states: I am here, but I'm still there. In fact, can only speak using the words border, transition, stained, dual formed therein (107). This double standard is also perceptible in her overlapped feelings for her dead father: When we love and we are violated at the same time, and we cannot escape, we deal from the same distance with love and hate (117). Furthermore, this split is the result of (then) young girl's inability to understand the unequal power relations at work in the former colony based on socially constructed distance of races. Her curiosity of the black children, and desire to join them in play could not be pursued because they lived in separate worlds: Life in the colony was impossible. …

The Bragg legacy: early days in macromolecular crystallography

W. H. Bragg arrived in Australia in 1886 as Head of the Mathematics and Physics Departments at the University of Adelaide. His son, W. L. Bragg, grew up in Adelaide and graduated from the Physics Department. Many years later I graduated from the same department and had the opportunity to share Lawrence Bragg's recollections of life in Adelaide. As well as touching on the 'Adelaide' connection, this report briefly reviews Bragg's critical role in encouraging, supporting and establishing the field of large-molecule crystallography.

Dignity, happiness and being able to live a ‘normal life’ in the UK – an examination of post-accession Polish migrants' transnational autobiographical fields

This article examines data from a qualitative study of post-accession Polish migrants living in the UK. We examine themes from our interviews such as ‘dignity’, ‘normality’, ‘happiness’ and the ‘affordability’ and ‘ease’ of life in the UK (compared to Poland). We focus on the autobiographical or intra-personal discursive practices that define what Habib calls migrants' continuing relationship with their ‘homeland’. We draw on Emirbayer and Mische's analysis of the relationship between ‘agency’ and what they call ‘embedded temporalities’ to examine the interaction between our participants' recollections of life in Poland and their evaluation of their present lives in the UK in order to examine the impact of these on their future plans (to stay in the UK or return to Poland). We locate this analysis in what we call a transnational autobiographical field which is a modification of what Levitt and Glick Schiller call a transnational social field. Rather than examine, for example, how decisions to migrate, settle and re-migrate are embedded in inter or trans-personal social relations and networks, in this article we examine the self-dynamics associated with our participants' articulation of their intra-personal and autobiographical embedded temporalities. Our argument is that articulations of individuals' pasts, presents and anticipated futures are also significant factors shaping their migration, settlement, and re-migration decisions.

Book Review: Recollections of Life on the Prison Ship Jersey

Book Review: Recollections of Life on the Prison Ship Jersey

The Disillusion of Linda Lê: Redefining the Vietnamese Diaspora in France

The Disillusion of Linda LêRedefining the Vietnamese Diaspora in France Lise-Hélène Smith A she refuses to identify as a Vietnamese or Vietnamese French writer, Linda Lê voluntarily resists national and literary categorizations. Since for her "appartenir, c'est mourir," Linda Lê defines herself as "une étrangère au monde, au réel, à la vie, au pays dans lequel [elle vit], à [s]on propre pays" (Argand 1999). In her struggle to transcend paradigms of national literatures, she arguably produces deterritorialized texts that rename and reconfigure while expressing "the sentiment that neither a return to the homeland left behind, nor being at home in the host culture is an option," as Azade Seyhan would have it (15). With literature as her only patrie "comme une demeure dont [elle] ne fini[ssait] pas d'explorer les pièces" (Argand 1999), Linda Lê grounds herself aesthetically rather nationally in art as a place of cultural engagement with the self, with the other, with one's own other. Even though she seldom makes Việt Nam1 the actual subject matter of her texts as a number of scholars have acknowledged, Lê claims that she carries her native land with her "comme un enfant mort" (Argand 1999). The idea of Việt Nam remains very much a part of her fiction especially in Les trois Parques, which came in 1997 as her seventh text or fifth novel. It is also the first of a trilogy about which Lê has stated, "Les trois Parques appartiennent au registre du mythe, Voix à celui du rêve et Lettre morte à la fantasmagorie" (Argand 1999). Although inscribed in the mythical, Les trois Parques takes on a very postmodern form. Paradoxically, it also presents a humanistic outlook embodied in the fragmented life of its postcolonial subjects. On the one hand, Linda Lê seems to reject the triumph of human reason by exposing the corruption of refugee life. On the other hand, she is also building [End Page 59] on the enlightenment project that fosters individual self-determination by presenting a critique of the traditional bildungsroman. She does so by staging her protagonists as three French women of Vietnamese origin whose lives are undeniably stagnating. Rather than focusing on the transmission of a cultural heritage anchored in the original land of Việt Nam, Linda Lê places cultural resistance and ambivalent identities at the center of her unorthodox narrative. In so doing, she problematizes the relation between origin and identity. The text appears particularly interested in disrupting the relationship between Việt Nam (the homeland) and France (the adopted land) to challenge categories of national and cultural identities. By examining its characters' failed attempts at self-definition, Les trois Parques can be read allegorically as an unusually caustic representation of the Vietnamese community that has emerged in France since the seventies. The product of transnational literature, Les trois Parques may present a linguistic and cultural challenge to its French reader. Written in a stream-of-consciousness form and in a language that mixes registers and conventions, its narration is that of a single afternoon taking place in the kitchen of the eldest of three female relatives. The 250 page-long narrative is only separated into a few paragraphs that juxtapose childhood memories, recollections of life in Việt Nam and present-day concerns, with constant introspections into the lives of its three protagonists. Such effacement of temporal and spatial markers is accentuated by the blurring of the three characters' inner voices. All three are channeled through the narrative voice of the bleakest—the only one to claim the first person pronoun—who constantly interrupts the others' past and present reflections. The narrative thus requires the reader to reconstruct, amidst vivid analepses, the story of these young Parisian women of Vietnamese descent, two sisters and their maternal cousin. Their empty lives parallel those of the absent patriarch le roi Lear and of his old friend le couineur, both of whom remain in Việt Nam. All characters, including the three female protagonists, are interestingly nameless—as if stripped of their identity—and remain limited to descriptive nicknames.2 The oldest sister is identified as l'aînée or...

Paternal Nightmare: Division and Masculinity in the Restored Edition of A Death in the Family

On the surface, A Death in the Family appears to be James Agee's dreamy meditation on his childhood and its defining event: the sudden death of his father in an automobile crash when Agee was only six years old. Early in its imagining, Agee believed the book would not be work written for any aesthetic value but rather for its intrinsic personal value, especially because through it he had hoped not only to complete picture of his absent and heroic father but finally to piece together the interior image of himself and project it for his reader. Originally published posthumously by Agee's editor and long-time friend David McDowell in 1957, A Death in the Family won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1958. In 2007, fifty years after its initial publication, the University of Tennessee Press offered readers a restoration of Agee's original text, edited by Michael A. Lofaro. The progression of this newly restored edition of A Death in the Family moves from Agee's first recollections of life with his father to his father's death in an automobile accident and the ensuing inner turmoil Agee experiences at the funeral and beyond. As book that ostensibly examines Agee's inner world as child, it also reveals the adult author's emotional life during the period in which he composed it. (1) In fragmentary essay about his intention for what Agee terms his autobiographical he writes that its composition was not just rendering of childhood memories or memorial to my but rather an effort to regain significant part of his life that suddenly seemed lost to him: Now as awareness of how much of life is lost, and how little is left, becomes even more piercing, I feel also and ever the more urgently, the desire to restore, and to make little less impermanent, such of my lost life as I can, beginning with the beginning and coming as far forward as need be. This is the simplest, most primitive of the desires which can move writer. I hope I shall come to other things in time; in time to write them. Before I do, if I am ever to do so, I must sufficiently satisfy this first, most childlike need. (Collected 142) A Death in the Family will be, as Agee describes it, book for himself first, work that not only restores the experience of his childhood but is itself an expression of child-like selfishness. Through the novel, he hopes to memorialize his father, but the book, as he later says in the fragment, is chiefly remembrance of my childhood. As such, it is all ego, (2) and Agee understands the selfishness of its composition, even as he justifies his need to work through himself. For all these reasons, critics have often argued that A Death in the Family is satisfying last work for Agee. Though he did not know it, his final novel would become the defining work of his career, and because of McDowell's arrangement of the text, Death was easily the most popular and accessible text in Agee's oeuvre. However, the structure and progression of the edition of A Death in the Family available for over fifty years does not seem to emphasize satisfactorily central part of Agee's artistic vision: the emphasis on the wounded body, the paranoia over making art out of the personal, the fragmentation of the body, the imagined violence as atonement, and the re-imagining of his father's body. Few critics really have questioned the authenticity of the first version of Agee's novel. The posthumous book manuscript was given to Agee's friend and collaborator David McDowell, who created cogent and readable version of Agee's sprawling novel even though Agee had provided no complete blueprint for how he wanted his book to be laid out. (3) After the novel won the Pulitzer Prize, few critics actively questioned its literary merits, and the Pulitzer gave the McDowell version credibility that continued for close to fifty years. However, serious questions over how Agee conceived his book, including central ideas of progression and placement of key scenes, deserved an answer, or, at the very least, comprehensive review. …

Inspection and the fabrication of professional and performative processes

This paper is about the issue of the performance of inspection. Based on research conducted in an English secondary school in the years following its time under Special Measures, I discuss the idea that during an inspection the school becomes focussed around performing for inspection. I discuss performance theory here as well as notions of performativity. I set the scene with middle and senior managers' recollections of life under Special Measures, in effect the time in which they learnt to perform. I then use data from time spent in the school before and during the school's OfSTED inspection, and discuss inspection as performance.

Why I wrote… The Wounded Storyteller: a recollection of life and ethics

Why I wrote… <i>The Wounded Storyteller:</i> a recollection of life and ethics

The Ottoman Ceremony of the Royal Purse

The Ottoman Ceremony of the Royal Purse

Recollections of life as a student and a young astronomer in Germany in the 1920s

Recollections of life as a student and a young astronomer in Germany in the 1920s

Gleanings from the First Fifty Years of Teocentli. Gleaned by Charles R. McGimsey III. Occasional Papers No. I , Bulletin of the History of Archaeology. 1998

Archaeological reports and monographs tend to follow a fairly formal style and it is the. rare author who includes recollections of life in the field, budget cuts, or such problems as finding enough workspace in the museum or department. Also, a significant amount of fieldwork never gets reported, although the Current Research section (and Notes and News before it) in Amercan Antiquity pro­vided a great deal of valuable information not available elsewhere, until it was killed off by the editor in 1994.

Primordial Home, Elusive Home

This article builds on a developing interdisciplinary discussion of home. It studies two 20th-century texts in counterpoint: political philosopher Agnes Heller's essay, `Where Are We at Home,' and novelist Melpo Axioti's My Home, a nostalgic recollection of life on Mykonos. Heller contrasts the elusive, self-appointed geography of postmodern living with a traditional view of primordial dwelling, a non-transient way of dwelling that gave to Earth a commitment stretching from ancestral past to a distant future. That experience is all but lost today, Heller muses as she surveys the horizon for space-bound alternatives to today's geographic promiscuity. The closing paragraph of her essay, which settles inconclusively on a Mediterranean landscape, opens a portal to My Home, the work of another political exile deprived of nationality and citizenship during the Cold War. Axioti's postmodern novel juxtaposes native stories of a transient life on Mykonos with the modern developer's efforts to discover firm foundations for building and an exile's wish to recover solid memories of home. Between those perspectives, Mykonos comes alive as a different type of home, in which obligation forms a bridge between presence and absence. The article closes by inquiring whether a thoughtful look at fragile Mediterranean worlds might reintroduce the idea of obligation to postmodern conceptions of home.

Generating Socialism: Recollections of Life in the Labour Party

'This book is a must for anyone who reaaly wants to understand socialism Britain, the Labour Party, its roots, its members, its activities and its debates over the last century. It is the best introduction to what we are about that I have read' -- Tony Benn, M.P. This book conveys through the words of the activists themselves the real history of the British Labour Party, from its foundation to the present day. It is illustrated with a number of previously unpublished photographs as well as several from the archives of The Daily Herald.

Off the Road: Alternative Views of Rebellion, Resistance and 'The Beats'

In the summer of 1990, I drove to western France with my two young children. 'Born to run', our favourite Springsteen track, was blasting out and Carolyn Cassady's (1990) book Off the road was in my luggage among the piles of clothes, towels, toys and other belongings that seemed essential at the time to displace and recreate home in a French gite. As I read Cassady's recollections of life with the beats, in snatched moments between dealing with my children's demands for time, attention, ice creams and coke, I remembered the shock of empathy and sympathy I felt with her bittersweet recollections of staying at home waiting for her men to return. In one sense, I was away from home that summer but I seemed to have brought all the responsibilities along with me. The book stayed in my mind for the next couple of years but when Cresswell's (1993) article on mobility as resistance was published I decided to re-read both Kerouac (1991/1957) On the road and Cassady's Off the road. This paper is the result of my reactions to both books. It is not a research-based

Traditions and Reminiscences of Concord, Massachusetts, 1779-1878

A statistician and pioneer in the treatment of the mentally ill, Jarvis (1803-1884) used Lemuel Shattuck's History of Concord as a springboard to record this detailed recollection of life in early 19th-century Concord, the town in which he was raised. Edited by Sarah Chapin with an extensive introdu