Pronouns, Positioning, and Persuasion in Top Nonprofits’ Donor Appeals

Despite increased giving in 2019, competition for donations among nonprofits remains high, especially when a charitable organization’s niche overlaps with that of others’. Consequently, nonprofit charitable organizations must tell stories that persuade donors to support their mission and contribute. This study uses positioning theory to examine how websites of the charitable organizations that appeared in Forbes Magazine’s 2019 top 100 charities use storytelling to facilitate their ethos such that they gain support and thus increase their donor base. The results revealed that nonprofits use positioning to establish two types of partnerships: invited and assumed. Furthermore, the coding revealed three primary types of positioning within these partnerships: savior-follower, business partners, and teacher-student. These positions organize and set the parameters for each organization’s story and will not only influence and potentially dictate the speech acts that follow, but also the responsibilities and rights of all those involved.

Multimodal positioning of artifacts in interaction in a collaborative elementary engineering club

This exploratory case study uses multimodal positioning analysis to determine and describe how a purposefully crafted emergent artifact comes to influence and/or manipulate social dynamics, structure, and positionings of one design team comprised of five third-graders in an afterschool elementary engineering and literacy club. In addition to social semiotic theories of multimodality (e.g., Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: a social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. New York, NY: Routledge) and multimodal interactional analysis (Norris, S. (2004). Analyzing multimodal interaction: a methodological framework. New York, NY: Routledge, Norris, S. (2019). Systematically working with multimodal data: research methods in multimodal discourse analysis. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell), Positioning Theory (Harré, R. and Van Langenhove, L. (1991). Varieties of positioning. J. Theor. Soc. Behav. 21: 393–407) is used to examine group interactions with the artifact, with observational data collected from audio, video, researcher field notes, analytic memos, photographs, student artifacts (e.g., drawn designs, built designs), and transcriptions of audio and video data. Analysis of interactions of the artifact as it unfolds demonstrates multiple types of role-based positioning with students (e.g., builder, helper, idea-sharer). Foregrounding analysis of the artifact, rather than the student participants, exposed students’ alignment or opposition with their groupmates during the project. This study contributes to multimodal and artifactual scholarship through a close examination of positions emergent across time through multimodal communicative actions and illustrates how perspectives on multimodality may be analytically combined with Positioning Theory.

Teacher practice in primary mathematics classrooms: A story of positioning

<p>The past twenty-five years have seen a dramatic increase in the interest given to dialogue between teachers and students, and students and students during mathematics teaching and learning. This interest is evident within the growing body of research and the call for the increased quality and quantity of student discourse in curriculum and policy documents. Recent research in mathematics education is underpinned by the belief that students learn best when they have the opportunity to participate in their own and others’ mathematical talk, text, and actions in purposeful and meaningful ways. This study explores how teachers position themselves and students in their lowest and highest mathematics strategy groups and how that positioning influences the sharing of mathematical know-how. Mathematical know-how within this study comprises teacher and student independence, judgement, and creativity. Social-constructivist theories of teaching and learning underpin the focus of this study. The importance of teachers and students constructing and co-constructing individual and shared mathematical understandings through dialogically rich interactions with each other and the environment are considered. Positioning theory provides the theoretical lens through which mathematical know-how will be analysed and understood. The constructs of positioning theory important to this research were the teachers’ and students’ positions, enacted as their rights and duties, the storylines that develop through the positions, rights, and duties and the teachers’ and students’ social acts which come to have significance and be a social force within the teaching and learning. The decision to employ qualitative case study methodology arose naturally from the subjective social phenomenon of teaching and learning. The analysis of data generated through video and audio recordings, transcriptions, participant observations, and documents and archival records supported the development of the two cases: teacher affording positioning, and teacher constraining positioning. The particularised and investigative design of qualitative case study supported the development of an emerging taxonomy of teacher affording and constraining positioning. The taxonomy contributed to the growing body of knowledge regarding student participation by categorising new thinking in regards to the phenomenon of teachers and positioning in mathematics. Teachers in this study afforded the sharing of mathematical know-how from the position of appropriator, procurer, and provoker. The positions of controller, proprietor, and protector were found to constrain the sharing of mathematical know-how. Significant differences were revealed in how teachers positioned themselves and how their positioning influenced opportunities for student engagement. Higher levels of student talk, text, and actions were evident when teachers positioned themselves to ensure the mathematics was visible, fluid, and contestable. Collaboration between teachers and students, and students and students, was a strong feature of the emerging taxonomy.</p>

Teacher practice in primary mathematics classrooms: A story of positioning

<p>The past twenty-five years have seen a dramatic increase in the interest given to dialogue between teachers and students, and students and students during mathematics teaching and learning. This interest is evident within the growing body of research and the call for the increased quality and quantity of student discourse in curriculum and policy documents. Recent research in mathematics education is underpinned by the belief that students learn best when they have the opportunity to participate in their own and others’ mathematical talk, text, and actions in purposeful and meaningful ways. This study explores how teachers position themselves and students in their lowest and highest mathematics strategy groups and how that positioning influences the sharing of mathematical know-how. Mathematical know-how within this study comprises teacher and student independence, judgement, and creativity. Social-constructivist theories of teaching and learning underpin the focus of this study. The importance of teachers and students constructing and co-constructing individual and shared mathematical understandings through dialogically rich interactions with each other and the environment are considered. Positioning theory provides the theoretical lens through which mathematical know-how will be analysed and understood. The constructs of positioning theory important to this research were the teachers’ and students’ positions, enacted as their rights and duties, the storylines that develop through the positions, rights, and duties and the teachers’ and students’ social acts which come to have significance and be a social force within the teaching and learning. The decision to employ qualitative case study methodology arose naturally from the subjective social phenomenon of teaching and learning. The analysis of data generated through video and audio recordings, transcriptions, participant observations, and documents and archival records supported the development of the two cases: teacher affording positioning, and teacher constraining positioning. The particularised and investigative design of qualitative case study supported the development of an emerging taxonomy of teacher affording and constraining positioning. The taxonomy contributed to the growing body of knowledge regarding student participation by categorising new thinking in regards to the phenomenon of teachers and positioning in mathematics. Teachers in this study afforded the sharing of mathematical know-how from the position of appropriator, procurer, and provoker. The positions of controller, proprietor, and protector were found to constrain the sharing of mathematical know-how. Significant differences were revealed in how teachers positioned themselves and how their positioning influenced opportunities for student engagement. Higher levels of student talk, text, and actions were evident when teachers positioned themselves to ensure the mathematics was visible, fluid, and contestable. Collaboration between teachers and students, and students and students, was a strong feature of the emerging taxonomy.</p>

Vietnamese International Students' Experiences in a New Zealand University: A Narrative Study

<p>This narrative study explored the adjustment experiences of six Vietnamese international students at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Data for the study were based on two sources; in-depth interviewing and the researcher's field notes. Each of participants was interviewed twice on their adjustment experiences in New Zealand. Thematic analysis was applied to their stories and positioning theory provided a theoretical lens to further analyze and interpret the participants' stories. The findings of the study indicated that the participants experienced many new and different things. Most experienced a stressful academic environment during their first few weeks but they felt better as time passed. The most common challenges they faced related to language issues. Difficulties came from differences between cultures with a mismatch between the participants' previous learning experiences and teaching and learning in the new environment. The participants felt stressed by the amount of self-directed learning expected. These challenges brought benefits such as becoming independent and self- regulated learners. After one trimester one participant had happily adapted and thought of a future life in New Zealand. Three participants had gradually adapted and come to enjoy their new life Two of the six students were clear that they did not belong in New Zealand and wanted to finish their degree and then go back to Vietnam. The study concluded that the participants had diverse difficulties studying and living in New Zealand, mostly related to the different academic environment, language and culture. The participants used various coping strategies to deal with their challenges in the new environment and the main source of their support was from friends and families.</p>

Vietnamese International Students' Experiences in a New Zealand University: A Narrative Study

<p>This narrative study explored the adjustment experiences of six Vietnamese international students at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Data for the study were based on two sources; in-depth interviewing and the researcher's field notes. Each of participants was interviewed twice on their adjustment experiences in New Zealand. Thematic analysis was applied to their stories and positioning theory provided a theoretical lens to further analyze and interpret the participants' stories. The findings of the study indicated that the participants experienced many new and different things. Most experienced a stressful academic environment during their first few weeks but they felt better as time passed. The most common challenges they faced related to language issues. Difficulties came from differences between cultures with a mismatch between the participants' previous learning experiences and teaching and learning in the new environment. The participants felt stressed by the amount of self-directed learning expected. These challenges brought benefits such as becoming independent and self- regulated learners. After one trimester one participant had happily adapted and thought of a future life in New Zealand. Three participants had gradually adapted and come to enjoy their new life Two of the six students were clear that they did not belong in New Zealand and wanted to finish their degree and then go back to Vietnam. The study concluded that the participants had diverse difficulties studying and living in New Zealand, mostly related to the different academic environment, language and culture. The participants used various coping strategies to deal with their challenges in the new environment and the main source of their support was from friends and families.</p>

Cultural memories and their re-actualizations

Memory studies has, in only a few decades, produced insights in two inter-related processes. First, memory scholars theorized how representations of the past become socially shared. Secondly, they theorized how these cultural and collective memories circulate and are being re-actualized in different contexts. But critiques of the field have targeted the metaphorical and reified nature of cultural memory concepts. This article argues that some concepts developed in social scientific narrative studies could provide cultural memory scholars with a precise and less metaphorical vocabulary to understand how people make sense of non-autobiographical pasts in different interactional contexts. In particular, the article focusses on how positioning theory and unexplained events in narrative pre-construction assist analysis of the flexibility of the remembering self in everyday interaction. The examples in this article concern narrations of the Second World War and Holocaust gathered during fieldwork in the contemporary town of Auschwitz in Poland.