Group items tagged

"Comparative research in multilingual urban primary schools indicates that the pedagogical and political goals of schooling may operate at cross-purposes. Classroom observations and teacher interview-discussions were conducted in classes for immigrant children in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where the language of instruction is French, and in classes in Pretoria, Gauteng Province, South Africa, where children from many different language backgrounds are taught in English. Two main themes emerged: (1) pedagogically, effective teacher-learner communication can break down when teachers are unaware of the roles that language and culture play in second language classrooms; (2) politically, efforts to assimilate learners into new socio-cultural/political contexts sometimes take precedence over sound pedagogical practice, such as drawing on the linguistic and cultural repertoire that learners bring to the classroom. This ongoing qualitative research underlines the importance of preparing pre-service and in-service teachers for the linguistic and cultural diversity they are bound to encounter in their classrooms, and of deepening their understanding of the influence of such diversity on the teaching-learning process."

"Developing an agenda for the social study of ignorance, this paper introduces the sociology of strategic unknowns: the investigation of the multifaceted ways that ignorance can be harnessed as a resource, enabling knowledge to be deflected, obscured, concealed or magnified in a way that increases the scope of what remains unintelligible. In contrast to theoretical preoccupations that underlie the study of knowledge accumulation, a focus on the importance of strategic unknowns resists the tendency to value knowledge over ignorance or to assume that the procurement of more knowledge is linked in an automatic or a linear fashion to the attainment of more social or political power. Refining and challenging the assumption that modern liberal societies inevitably thrive on the accumulation of information about the public personas, private psyches, consumer habits or political proclivities of citizens, the papers in the special issue explore how the cultivation of strategic unknowns remains a resource - perhaps the greatest resource - for those in a position of power and those subject to it."

The purpose of this literary investigation is twofold: first, to make explicit the connections between reflective teaching and critical literacy, and second, to infer from the findings key tasks for teachers in the critical literacy classroom. Specifically, the investigation shows that the following features of reflective teaching connect with and form the core of critical literacy, and are vital to the teaching of critical literacy: giving careful consideration or thought in order to create meaning and pass judgement; questioning personal assumptions, values and beliefs; taking initiatives and using intuition; taking part in development and change; and the use of journal writing. Examples of teachers' tasks in the critical literacy classroom include: building time into lesson plans and implementation for students to give careful consideration and thought to and to pass judgement on the text being studied; guiding students' evaluations and criticisms in a judicious manner; encouraging students to look critically at literature and question what they are reading; emphasizing the readings of texts from a variety of perspectives; allowing students to use journals to write entries that juxtapose multiple viewpoints; and facilitating discussions generally that are based on students' journal entries.

This article examines how secondary English teachers in two racially diverse schools - one in Massachusetts, USA, the other in Ontario, Canada - described their knowledge of and practices for teaching about race and racism. The extent and quality of teachers' racial literacy knowledge and practice were considered in light of the literature on racial literacy, racial literacy instruction, and anti-racist education. Three approaches to racial literacy instruction were identified: apprehensive and authorized; incidental and ill-informed; and sustained and strategic. The paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of teachers' knowledge and skills in order to suggest content and structures for professional development in support of racial literacy instruction.

This article examines how secondary English teachers in two racially diverse schools - one in Massachusetts, USA, the other in Ontario, Canada - described their knowledge of and practices for teaching about race and racism. The extent and quality of teachers' racial literacy knowledge and practice were considered in light of the literature on racial literacy, racial literacy instruction, and anti-racist education. Three approaches to racial literacy instruction were identified: apprehensive and authorized; incidental and ill-informed; and sustained and strategic. The paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of teachers' knowledge and skills in order to suggest content and structures for professional development in support of racial literacy instruction.

Systems of governance are legitimised as an almost indispensable response to global co-ordination over matters of environmental degradation. Considering sustainable development as the key label for 'common-sense' political approaches to environmental degradation and a key informant for international environmental policy-making activity, this article seeks to problematise such a widespread discourse as (re)productive of (hetero)sexist power relations. As such, this article, informed by Foucault's conceptions of governmentality and biopower, contends that the global thrust towards sustainable development projects works to construct identities and discipline power relations with regard to gender and sexuality. Specifically, I argue that the disciplinary narratives and apparatuses of international sustainable development initiatives work to construct gendered identities and naturalise heterosexual relations. To demonstrate this, this article focuses on the discourses surrounding one of the most important international documents directed at informing national environmental policy, Agenda 21.

Over the past decade, international development policy has paid increased attention to social reproduction. While this offers an improvement over past practices in which care work was all but ignored, these policy frameworks continue to fall short of feminist goals. One reason for this is the way that dominant economic representations of social reproduction continue to rest on a universalizing portrayal of the household economy and family life as mired in patriarchal tradition, which fails to capture the diversity of economic and affective arrangements in which reproductive labor takes place at the local level. In this paper, I develop an alternative conceptualization of economic and affective life that challenges dominant understandings of the distinctions between market and non-market activity, paid and unpaid labor, and work and intimacy to provide space for new feminist conceptualizations of economy and care that can capture the diversity of its sites and practices.

"This paper contrasts the notion of 'independent learning' as perceived by two informant groups at a UK institution of higher education: (1) teachers, educators and providers of education and (2) their students or 'consumers' of education. Both informant groups are staff and students studying in a culture different to that of their first education. They are identified in their receiving institution as 'international', or have identified themselves as such. The experience of transition into a UK University was explored with both informant groups, through interviews and focus groups, over a cycle of two years. 'Independent learning' as rhetoric and practice emerged for both groups as an issue in their transition from familiar to unfamiliar learning culture. Three key insights emerged. Firstly, a mismatch is identified between teacher perceptions and student interpretation of 'independent learning' expectations and practice. Secondly, it emerges that student experience of the learning culture is in a state of continuous flux, evolving between first arrival and end of programme through cycles of bafflement and empowerment. Finally, both students and teachers identify a number of strategies for dealing with this experience of 'transitional' independence. The paper concludes by recommending a notion of 'phased scaffolding' that might inform educational practice and by reflecting on the implications for the educator in revisiting received educational discourse from the perspective of participants negotiating a second learning culture."

The Canadian Global Campaign for Education is pleased to announce the release of a new study on the contribution of Canadian Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to the Education for All agenda. The study, Power in Partnerships: A Survey of Canadian Civil S

These texts by Margaret Dickinson consist of a short article written in 1979 for the journal of the UK film trade union, the ACTT, and explanatory notes written in 2010. While the main article is about the author's experiences of teaching film editing to absolute beginners in newly independent Mozambique, the notes provide background information about both Mozambique and ACTT. In the early 1970s elements within the ACTT proposed nationalisation as a solution to problems of the British film industry; the union commissioned a detailed report, which was hotly debated but then shelved. In Mozambique after independence in 1975 the government decided to develop cinema on the basis of partial nationalisation and established a national film institute, the Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC), for the purpose. There was also a personal connection between ACTT and Mozambican cinema through the film-maker and radical thinker, Simon Hartog, who wrote the ACTT report and was subsequently employed in Mozambique to work for the INC there.

The popularity of visual literacy may have resulted, in part, from some school authorities rushing the process of determining school curriculum. This article argues that the haste is reflective of pressure placed on educational discourse to conform to neo-liberal reforms of the sector, and is not the result of a careful and complex debate within the education community. In Australia, such reform has contributed to the erosion of visual art as a discrete subject in the general curriculum. The article accounts for the fact that the lack of careful debate may be due to art educators rehearsing tired arguments for retaining the place occupied by visual art, which smack of sentimentality. The author examines the conceptualisation of visual art at a cultural and theoretical level, and argues that by considering the function art has traditionally played in relation to conceptions of human subjectivity, we may disclose the marginalisation of visual art as a signal of much larger threats to political and economic structures in democratic society. The article considers whether the absorption of 'art' within a broader preference for visual communication, graphic design, or design and technology, is symptomatic of a long-term cultural stagnation.

'Insistence on bilingualism in early years of education policy was wrong: MM Lee', on 17 Nov 2009. In it, MM Lee said: Successive generations of students paid a heavy price, because of my ignorance, by my insistence on bilingualism. And I wasn't helped b

"The past 25 years have brought upheaval to the indigenous people of Mexico due to two opposing forces: modernization and globalization, on the one hand, and indigenous uprisings on the other. Suddenly, the topic of indigenous languages and education was brought into official discussions at the national level. This paper examines the tensions that emerge between the political discourses which emanate from within the indigenous communities and from the national government, and the actual implementation of educational policy models. The political-educational discourse shifted from Spanishization [castellanización], assimilation, and integration to bilingualism, interculturalism, and participation. We demonstrate that this shift was not a smooth transition, but rather an abrupt change that occurred in the early 1990s. Further, despite the shift to new discourses that respected indigenous languages and cultures, institutional factors have not been altered sufficiently to improve the conditions of indigenous education or their well-being in Mexico. Thus, ultimately, the new discourse of bilingualism and interculturalism in education serves to obfuscate the socio-political-economic work that must be done to truly allow the indigenous people to participate in the nation's political life."

Stimulated by one public-friendly argument that foregrounds the integration of local identity and global citizenry and a second that is more mindful of the global-scale Othering, the present study draws attention to the seemingly intensified rivalry between global and local identities in Japan and argues that the nationwide interest in globalisation through the fervent yet often unsuccessful learning of English has contributed not only to the increasing call for English education and multiculturalism but also to a unified identity as we-Japanese. Thus, a sense of Japaneseness remains sustained, or rather fortified, within Japanese educational and industrial settings, in which English has acquired a crucial role. The present study hopes to serve as one attempt to critically interrogate a globalisation-endorsing state, Japan, from the broad macro perspective, by providing critical insights into the interaction among Global Englishes, globalisation and national identity.

This paper assumes that teaching for modern intercultural knowledge societies should rely on multilateral communication, students' ideas and social interaction. Based on observation data from 303 upper secondary school classrooms in randomly selected scho

On 30 April 2004, the New Yorker posted pictures online showing prisoner abuse at the prison in Abu Ghraib (Hersh 40-47). On that same day, as it happened, I signed the contract for a new job teaching English at a liberal arts college in upstate New York

In 1997 the government of Hong Kong reformed its policy on the language medium for teaching at the secondary-school level and removed schools' right to choose their own medium. Among the 404 public and "aided" secondary schools in Hong Kong, the governmen

"This article contends that the effectiveness of Postcolonial Studies in the Brazilian Academy is inseparable from an understanding of the singularity of Portuguese colonization in Brazil, responsible for the ethnic and cultural formation of the country and for many of the forms taken by its social and economic development, from colonial and monarchic days to the present. Since postcolonial criticism illuminates and is illuminated by the cultural production of the past and present, in the comparison and confrontation of the different colonial systems and their aftermath, Postcolonial Studies may substantially contribute to the research on identity and other crucial issues-in the Brazilian case, notably the problematic of the so-called minority discourses, native cultures and the Afro-descendant legacy vis-à-vis the European heritage."

"Intellectual freedom has long been a desirable ideal and a foundational value for supporting democratic governance. Since 1948, it has been a universal human right. Given the unique nature of education in democratic societies, schools serve as a crucible for helping children understand and practise the rudiments of intellectual freedom. Drawing on a diverse sample of exemplary secondary school teachers across the United States (N = 81), this article describes how these teachers help develop intellectual freedom in their classrooms. Using their various disciplines as a vehicle, they primarily utilize collective inquiry to foster communication and encourage values and attitudes conducive to intellectual freedom."

Feminist understandings of epistemophilia (the drive for knowledge) have typically focused on epistemophilia's destructive aspects with little consideration for the multitude of possible creative and productive expressions of the drive (see Grosz 1990; Ru