America Letters as Witnesses and Agents of Change. Norwegian-American Immigrant Epistles

America Letters as Witnesses and Agents of Change. Norwegian-American Immigrant Epistles. The letters written by immigrants to their family and friends in the homeland are pieces of a mosaic that provides a wider picture of the personal stories of migration. The analysis of migration has too often focused on statistics, on the mass of people who have emigrated to the New World. However, America letters represent genuine and simple stories of individuals and reflect, in a personal manner, the way immigrants experienced the migration, as well as the way they tried to adapt to a new culture. America letters reveal the enthusiasm, courage and sense of adventure of the immigrants, but also the difficulties, disillusionment, their struggle to belong, even the despair they went through. This paper argues that America letters are witnesses of change, since the immigrants described the challenges of adjustment and acculturation in the letters they sent home, but also agents of change, as they greatly influenced the Norwegian emigration to America. Norway’s coast and valleys were teeming in the nineteenth century with accounts of the conditions in the New World as they were described in the letters sent home by the immigrants. These immigrant letters contain the testimonials of those who had chosen to emigrate and were passed on from family to family, parish to parish, village to village, convincing more and more people to leave the homeland for America. Keywords: Norwegian emigration to America, Norwegian-American, immigrant letters, America letters, immigrant experience, evolution of mass migration, personal stories of migration

Light At the End of The Tunnel: Re-Storying the Experiences of Teacher- Covid19 Survivors

The continued service at the frontline of educational delivery in the time of COVID19 pandemic situates teachers to susceptibility that is no less critical. This study aimed to tell the experiences of teachers who were in the throes of COVID-19 disease and have recovered, through the narration of their personal stories. Narrative Inquiry was employed and facilitated by the use research interviews and written accounts of 4 teacher-survivors. Using Narrative Thematic approach in data analysis, themes were developed and were formatted in a literary chronological sense of the pre, during and post COVID19 stages of their journey to tell a cohesive narrative story. The plot started with Skepticisms and disbelief that describe the pre-COVID stage. Guilt, Anxiety and Shame; Fraud Information and Disclosure; Stigmas and Discrimination; and experiences pertaining to Temporality and Place; to their Being a Teacher; and to Relationship and Sociality, capture their During-COVID19 stage. The common accounts of Lessons and New Beginnings articulate the Post-COVID19 Stage. Recommendations to help advance the public’s understanding of the experiences of these teacher-survivors were also explicated.

How do we talk about race…and mental health?

This paper reports research undertaken with Access students at the UK Open University which sought to address the Black awarding gap through an intersectional approach. Noting Black students were less likely than White students to declare a mental health disability (for which institutional support would be triggered), the authors explored Black students' reasons for non-disclosure using an ethically sensitive methodology. A self-selecting sample of Black students were interviewed by Black tutors, resulting in deep insights into the lived experiences of Black students. Due to the challenging personal stories elicited, these were presented as five composite personas. Institutional recommendations around the need for enhanced cultural competence amongst staff, and more inclusive language in policy implementation may also address issues across the sector.

Tattoos Tell Stories: Children’s Literature Tattoos as a Form of Life Narrative

Tattoos and children’s literature seem to have little in common, but they come together in the form of children’s literature tattoos, which I argue in this article to be a new form of life narrative. A lot of literary tattoos are inspired by children’s literature such as the Harry Potter-series and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Despite being inspired by a literary work, the tattoos function as personal memoirs of childhood as well as a reflection of the tattooees’ hopes for the future and who they want to become. I empirically study these children’s literature tattoos as life narratives by combining three data sets: blogs with personal stories related to literary tattoos, an online questionnaire about the meaning of children’s literature tattoos for tattooees themselves, and semi-structured interviews. Based on my research, I argue that children’s literature tattoos tell personal stories about the tattooees and their lives and can thus be considered a form of life narrative. Children’s literature tattoos narrate what someone has been through, what someone likes, but most of all the things that shape the person and that they hope will continue to shape them in the future.

The Effects of a Multitiered System of Language Support on Kindergarten Oral and Written Language: A Large-Scale Randomized Controlled Trial

Purpose: The purpose of this randomized controlled trial was to examine the effects of a multitiered system of language support (MTSLS) on kindergarteners' narrative retelling, personal stories, writing, and expository language. Method: Participants were 686 kindergarten students from four school districts in the United States. Twenty-eight classrooms were randomly assigned to treatment ( n = 337 students) or control ( n = 349 students) conditions. The treatment group received 14 weeks of oral narrative language instruction using Story Champs, a multitiered language program. Classroom teachers delivered large group (Tier 1) instruction for 15–20 min a day for 4 weeks. After this short-duration whole-class instruction, speech-language pathologists began small group Story Champs (Tier 2) intervention with a random sample of students who did not make adequate progress from the large group instruction ( n = 49). These students received Tier 2 intervention for 20 min twice a week in addition to continued Tier 1 instruction. Results: Results indicated that the students in the treatment group had significantly higher scores on all outcome measures compared to the students in the control group. Analyses of outcomes from the 49 students who received Tier 2 intervention compared to a matching sample of at-risk control students revealed that the treatment group had significantly higher scores on narrative retells, personal stories, and expository retells. When compared to matched average-performing and advanced-performing control peers, the students who received Tier 2 intervention had significantly higher narrative retell scores and no longer had significantly lower personal story, expository, or writing scores. Conclusion: This effectiveness study demonstrated that MTSLS can lead to meaningful improvements in kindergarteners' oral and written language skills, even helping at-risk students catch up to high-achieving peers.

A Learning Journey through a Heart-Centered Book

As faculty for a graduate program in early childhood leadership, we co-designed a course on community-based action research around Patricia Wilson’s book, The Heart of Community Engagement: Practitioner Stories from Across the Globe. In this review we share how it mirrored our own deepening sense of community engagement practices, and how our students engaged with this unique text on their individual and collective learning journeys. We share highlights from the text that reinforced our sense of liberatory pedagogy. Wilson’s personal stories, as well as the stories of community-engaged practitioners across the globe , invite all of us to create our own purpose and intentions for the evolving path of facilitating change within ourselves and with others.

"Cultural Narrative" about European Identity in the Context of Personal Stories (Reflections on the Book by Orlando Figes)

Статья содержит рефлексии по поводу книги известного английского историка-рос-сиеведа О. Файджеса «Европейцы. Три жизни и рождение космополитической культуры», его подхода к репрезентации биографической истории И.С. Тургенева, П. Ви-ардо и Л. Виардо в контексте складывания общеевропейской культуры во второй по-ловине XIX века. Особое внимание уделено методологической значимости присутствующих в рецензируемой книге и формирующихся в современной историографии таких трендов как «новый нарратив», «история репрезентаций» и «новая биографическая история», а также дискуссии о смыслах концепта «европейскости» как характеристики над-этнической идентичности и о ее проявлениях на микро- и макро-уровнях в меняющемся и модернизирующемся историко-культурном пространстве Российской империи и Европы в XIX в. The article contains reflections on the book by a famous English historian – Russian scholar O. Figes "Europeans. Three lives and the birth of cosmopolitan culture", his approaches to the representation of the biographical history of I. S. Turgenev, P. Viardot and L. Viardot in the context of the formation of pan-European culture in the second half of the XIX century. Special attention is paid to the methodological significance of such trends as "new narrative", "history of representations" and "new biographical history" present in the reviewed book and emerging in modern historiography, as well as discussions about the meanings of the concept of "Europeanness" as a characteristic of supra-ethnic identity and about its manifestations at micro and macro levels in the changing and modernizing historical and cultural space of the Russian Empire and Europe in the XIX century.

Navigating Ethical Quandaries with Close Personal Contacts in Qualitative Research

There are a variety of ethical situations that qualitative communication researchers must navigate. This point is especially true when the research involves close personal contacts, such as friends and family members. In order to problematize the ethical frameworks that guide qualitative inquiry and illuminate the complexities of relational ethics, we—the authors—reflected on our past experiences engaging in research with close personal contacts. Specifically, we took a collaborative autoethnographic approach that involved sharing personal stories, drafting autoethnographic narratives, and engaging in individual and collaborative sensemaking. In doing so, we highlight the following three quandaries specific to conducting research with close personal contacts: (1) challenging/affirming identity anchors, (2) challenging/affirming power relations, and (3) challenging/affirming ownership. We explicate each of these themes using autoethnographic vignettes and conclude by offering five lessons learned of relational ethics, which are organized using the phases of qualitative research: conceptualization and design, data collection, and representation.