Sharon Groves

Bio: Sharon Groves is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Divergent question & Closed-ended question. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 5 citations.

Teaching What You're Not: Identity Politics in Higher Education

Abstract: Can whites teach African-American literature effectively and legitimately? What is at issue when a man teaches a women's studies course? How effectively can a straight woman educate students about gay and lesbian history? What are the political implications of the study of the colonizers by the colonized? More generally, how does the identity of an educator affect his or her credibility with students and with other educators? In incident after well-publicized incident, these abstract questions have turned up in America's classrooms and in national media, often trivialized as the latest example of PC excess. Going beyond simplistic headlines, Teaching What You're Not broaches these and many other difficult questions. With contributions from scholars in a variety of disciplines, the book examines the ways in which historical, cultural, and personal identities impact on pedagogy and scholarship. Essays cover such topics as the outsider's gaze as it applies to the study of non-white literature; an able-bodied woman's reflections on teaching literature by disabled women; and the challenges of teaching the Western canon at an African American college.

The use of storytelling in quantitative research reports: A marketing research firm perspective

Abstract: Orientation: Actionable reporting ensures that a marketing research firm communicates with clients to achieve business impact as opposed to merely communicating data to clients. Storytelling communicates with impact as it focuses on creating engagement and inspiring action. Research purpose: This article investigates the use of storytelling as a tool for actionable reporting by South African marketing research firms Motivation for the study: Clients of marketing research firms often criticise research reports as being too technical and lacking in strategic value. Storytelling is a reporting technique that can be used to develop actionable research and provide clients with more strategic value. Research design, approach and method: A total of 26 in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with client service directors and managers of marketing research firms that deliver quantitative research reports to clients. Main findings: Results indicated that all marketing research firms but one use storytelling. Barriers that impede more regular use are inexperienced research executives and the time intensity associated with creating stories. Practical/managerial implications: Storytelling should be used by marketing research firms to provide clients with more actionable research. Contribution/value-add: The study provides marketing research firms in South Africa with recommendations as to how to implement storytelling as a reporting technique, which will add value to clients and enable marketing research firms to remain competitive and develop relationships with clients.

Kastom , Syncretism and Self-Determination: the Reconciliation of Bipotaim and Pastaim in the Church of Torres Strait

Abstract: Late in 1997 the Anglican Church in Torres Strait, for more than eighty years the bastion of Torres Strait Christianity, split, and in the following year the new Church of Torres Strait came into being, its congregations aligned with the traditional Anglican communion. What follows is an attempt to unravel the complex political, communal and doctrinal issues that caused the split, considering them in the light of an ongoing assertion of indigenous self-determination which can be traced back to the colonial era. The article also briefly traces the emergence since the early 1980s of a potentially liberating syncretic theology in the Torres Strait Anglican tradition which may hold within it the possibility of a reconciliation between bipotaim and pastaim, darkness and light, and tries to assess the implications of the split for this nascent theology.

Reconsideration: Teaching in the Multiracial

Abstract: recent popularity of the text has to do with the fact that critics have come to recognize, over the past thirty years or so, that the novella powerfully and problematically addresses the politics of slavery and race in antebellum America; arguably, it is the pre-Civil War antislavery masterpiece. What I want to do here is discuss some of the problems I have encountered in teaching the novella in the multiracial classroom, and to use this discussion as a way of addressing the debate on multiculturalism. It needs to be emphasized that virtually every attack on multiculturalism, or on teachers who supposedly teach "political correctness," works with synchronic models: these monoculturalist polemicists have little to say about how the vast majority of college professors have wrestled, and will continue to wrestle, with pedagogical issues over time. Thus Dinesh D'Souza, the best known of these polemicists, in his chapter on 'Teaching Race and Gender" (194-228), simply calls attention, through the use of anecdotal examples, to what seem to be particularly egregious examples of misguided teaching by a group of unreflective, unself-conscious professors. (An emphasis on the synchronic is evident as well in attacks on multiculturalism in The Changing Culture of the University, Berman and Kimball.) All of D'Souza's anecdotes (many of which are lifted from the Wall Street Journal) are drawn from a very short period of time, and all present a cartoonish picture of "representative" professors who, presumably for the rest of their careers, have locked themselves into a militant 1960s radical authoritarianism, a new form of McCarthyism from the Left. In this essay I want to complicate such a perspective through a diachronic account of one professor's teaching practices, focusing on my shifting responses to teaching (and reading) "Benito Cereno" over a nearly twenty-year period. The sorts of nego