Eileen Honan

This paper reports findings from a small study with Fijian pre-service teachers about their perceptions of science and scientists. No known study of this nature has been conducted in Fiji nor in other Pacific Island Countries. The study drew on previous studies using Draw-A-Scientist Test as well as critiques of the instrument using qualitative methods associated with critical literacy approach to understand the relationship between Fiji school science curriculum and pre-service teachers’ knowledge of science and scientists. 88 pre-service teachers participated in this study. Data collection included participants’ drawings and written descriptions of scientists, notes taken during group discussions about their knowledge of science and scientific activities, and transcripts of interviews with some of the participants. While the findings resonate with similar studies conducted elsewhere, they have particular significance in a Pacific context where countries are attempting rapid technological transformations.

This paper draws on Foucault’s concept of governmentality to explore the use of reflective practice within Classroom Based Action Research (CBAR). The study reported here explored English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ reflective practice as they adopted CBAR as a professional learning model. Qualitative data were gathered from eight EFL teachers working in one public senior secondary school in a remote region in Indonesia. Foucault’s notions of power relations, governmentality, self-writing, technology of the self, and/or care of the self informed the analysis of the data from reflective journals in order to develop an understanding of how discourses of reflective practice were socially constructed in this particular context, and how these impacted on the implementation of CBAR. Findings related to the discourse of reflective practice are discussed in terms of the interactions among attitudes, behaviors, and language used by teachers, and power relations that acted to limit reflective practice. Abbreviations: CBAR: Classroom Based Action Research; EFL: English as a Foreign Language

The organisational territory of academia has become heavily gridded by consuming requirements to produce publications that ‘count’. To survive, the scholar must plug herself into this machine – a heaving, monstrous academicwritingmachine. She must invest libidinal energy into the process of counting if she desires to be counted. This troubles us, who write for both ‘work’ and ‘pleasure’, who write to seek connections with one another, with our sense of unknowns, and with ways people learn in communities.Taking as a starting point the concept of the academicwritingmachine, in this paper we attempt to collectively explore and interrogate our own investment, our own repression, and our own desire to be produced within this machine. We seek to explore how this well-oiled machine captures flows of desire and how the vulnerability and sensuality of writing risks being flattened out to achieve ‘results’ that can be measured as ‘research outputs’. In a production of synergetic collaborative writing, we explore the innards of the academicwritingmachine, following the tubes, cogs, and wheels, the pulleys and levers, to examine the series of machinic arrangements that construct and constrict those moments of presenting, rewriting, reviewing, rejecting, resubmitting. We see this as a process that propels us out and away from our individual scholarly commitments to the machine, and into a myriad of imaginative, creative and joyous collective experiences. We take back the joy of writing, and make visible our shared attempt to open/break the machine through writing which experiments with ‘the openness required for the condition of constant becomings and the value of uncertainty and questioning’.

In this paper we explore the contributions that Deleuze and Guattari have made to thinking/writing language and how these ideas can be put to work in producing a doctoral thesis. We contribute to the field of work within what Patti Lather and Elizabeth St Pierre have called the “post-qualitative” movement, where researchers attempt to “imagine and accomplish an inquiry that might produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently”. We attempt to rethink the thesis text, using a language where language always falls apart, a way of talking/writing/reading about presentation of research within a doctoral thesis that will provide the writermachine a space to “pass”. The paper will provide some ideas and ways forward for writers who are attempting to deterritorialize research, who are attempting to experiment with new representational forms.

Discourses of the universality of English and its role in individual mobility and social development abound in the literature; these discourses have contributed to the global spread of English and to the development of English Language Teaching as a profession. Despite the ubiquity of the discourses of the value and universality of English, there has been limited research on how these discourses unfold in local contexts, how these discourses are reproduced or appropriated, and how these are translated into teaching and learning artefacts (e.g. policies and textbooks) and practices by teachers and students. This paper explores the construction of the discourse of the universality and value of English within education policies, curricular documents, and textbooks used in Saudi Arabian schools, and how these discourses then play out within teacher/student interactions in a rural Bedouin-dominated classroom. Our aim is to contribute to the understanding of global English and its discourses taking a local, situated perspective.