Developing Transnational Literacies

The word' partnership' is pervasive within debates about participatory global governance and the idea of partnership acts as an underwriting principle within both the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Paris Declaration. However, there remains general ambiguity about the meaning of the idea of partnership and how its conceptualisation is meant to normatively guide a more co-ordinated move from theory to practice. Indeed, the idea of partnership remains an impoverished theoretical and practical appeal, which is under-defined, poorly scrutinised and unconvincingly utilised as a normative tool in applied practice. This article will provide a more theoretical examination of what an appeal to ideas of partnership means and explore what a normative commitment to a robust conceptualisation of partnership might look like within the MDGs. To do so, it will examine the underwriting normative language of partnership as it is found within the MDGs, theoretically explore the principles inherent within this normative language, and locate present gaps within the MDGs between its normative theory and applied practice. By doing so, it will be possible to outline some additional principles and commitments that are normatively required to satisfy the underwriting spirit of the MDGs in order to bring them in line with said spirit's own normative values.

Social movements operate in 'an environment for politics that is increasingly information-rich and communication-intensive' (Bimber 2001, p. 53). There is an established literature on new ICTs and social movements, but little of it considers mobilization in the global South. This paper presents a case study on the use of ICTs by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a South African social movement campaigning for the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS. McAdam et al.'s comparative framework of three theoretical perspectives on mobilization (McAdam et al. 1996) - mobilising structures, opportunity structures and framing processes - is used to link the analysis into the social movement literature. The findings show extensive use of email, mailing lists and the Internet in TAC activities despite low levels of access among the movement's largely poor activist base. ICTs are used to help the movement engage with elites, professional groups and media, as well as in the development of local and international movement networks. There is also widespread informal use of mobile phones, which a local NGO is working with the TAC to extend. Mobiles are seen as a way to reach the previously disconnected majority, strengthening their involvement in existing processes as well as extending the movement's reach beyond its current branch-based structure.

The prospect for the MDGs cannot be reduced to the sum of the eight goals, divorced from international dynamics, the hard interests of states and the global dynamics that impact on both, or from the complexities and intractability of widespread poverty and its consequences. The legacies and controversies of previous international development initiatives also beset perceptions of, and support for, the MDGs. However, the wholly inclusive nature of the goals give them a unique normative standing and momentum; and the quantitative measures of progress ensure that there is more to the goals than lofty ideals. In addition, the thematic linkages between each of the goals is mutually reinforcing. While not discounting either structural difficulties or the lack of adequate progress in some specifics, it is important not to overlook the political consensus, abundant goodwill and normative momentum that have already been generated in the ten years to date. The answer to the question, 'How promising is the promise of the MDGs?' has not yet been answered definitively: there remains good reason for cautious optimism for progress up to 2015-and through revitalized commitment and persistent engagement, well beyond that date.

Recent work on the history of education has been registering a 'spatial turn' in its historiography. These reflections from a historical geographer working on the spatiality of knowledge enterprises (science in particular) reviews some recent developments in the field before turning to three themes - landscape agency, geographies of textuality, and speech spaces - as fertile arenas for further conversation between historians of education and historical geographers of science.

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.

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 reflection, using auto-ethnography as method, explores the value of attunement to feedback in the teaching of a professional postgraduate course for allied mental health professionals. This is, therefore, a story of two halves: a narrative of my learning based on my reflections of my own teaching, and a story of how I have integrated feedback from students and their clinical supervisors to refine my teaching and course development in the programme. The resulting model of teaching and learning I have developed involves a process of 'creative attunement'. 'Attunement' is a psychodynamic concept involving 'contact' or a quality of relationship based on availability, presence, empathy, respect and selective disclosure. The learning activities of the programme aim to develop an awareness of the students' own 'craft knowledge' as graduate social workers and occupational therapists during their intern year in the health services. Through a process of growing the students' awareness of self in the clinician's role by attuning to students' feedback, learning from undergraduate education becomes more available to be applied in a new field of practice. Designing learning activities that incorporate stories of practice and align with clinical supervisors and service user narratives provides access to a variety of learning experiences. I explore the implications for developing critical-reflective practice within a 'community of learners' model.

In Brazil - and more largely in Latin America - the fight of the indigenous movements for the demarcation of their territory and the installation of an intercultural school education contributed to the constitutional changes of the years 1980-1990 which led these States to regard themselves from then on as pluricultural and multiethnic nations and to recognize collective rights specific to native people and tribes living on their territory. The author analyzes the advent and the development of this intercultural bilingual education in two border regions of the State of Amazonas (Alto Solimes and Alto Rio Negro) near the populations Ticuna, Baniwa and Tukano during the years 1990 and 2000. He shows in particular how the indigenous school, an assimilationist instrument for the Occidental and Christian culture until the 1980s, has been transformed by supporting the reappropriation of the traditional knowledge; meanwhile this school has opened itself to 'Western' knowledge in order to make it possible for the younger generation to acquire the ability to go towards evolution.

Critical thinking (CT) has long been a valued curriculum outcome requirement for Nursing. In the early 1990s conceptualization of CT including two lists: cognitive and affective definitions. A decade later a Nursing expert panel added prediction and transforming knowledge, to the cognitive skills and intuition, open-mindedness and creativity to the affective definition of CT. Yet, there is still concern over how to teach nursing students to be creative, intuitive, and transform their knowledge. In this paper I used a geography of health concept to guide a series of general questions to help nursing students reflect on the physical and social environments to see ethical issues in their community practice. Fostering students' abilities to integrate their learning will nurture the essential affective (for example, intuition, creativity) and cognitive (transforming knowledge) skills that prepare them to make informed personal, professional and civic decisions throughout their lives.

Understanding state-citizen relations involves a multitude of spaces and actors, formal and informal political practices and the intricacies of subjectivity and citizen-formation. One emerging tactic by which both 'state' agencies and other non-state actors manage, administer, discipline, shape, care for and enable liberal citizens is that of governing through pedagogy. Schools, universities, the voluntary sector, civil society organisations, churches, commercial education and training providers, the media, government departments and state agencies offer fruitful empirical spaces through which the pedagogies of governing are worked and reworked. This special issue therefore brings together researchers from education, human geography, sociology, social policy and political theory in order to consider the idea of the 'pedagogical state' as a means of understanding the pedagogic strategies employed to govern citizens, both within and outside the formal education sphere.

This article analyzes the role of education in Latin America's development over the last two decades and recommends much greater emphasis on promoting learning, particularly among the poor. It documents significant progress in getting more children into school but little progress in making sure they reach minimum levels of learning (measured by scores on achievement tests). The authors find that the chief obstacles to improving the region's education systems are both technical (weak institutions and poor teaching) and political (teachers' unions that cling to the status quo and little political support for fundamental reform). The authors identify twelve policies they believe will improve the contribution education makes to development.

This paper will focus on an applied research initiative1 we are currently engaged in, which brings together academics (both from conventional institutions - the university, the research centers and undergraduate colleges - and from 'new and innovative institutional structures') with policy-makers and grant-making organizations. The initiative has to do with the entire field of higher education (India having one of the biggest higher education systems in the world), but interestingly it was incubated by the Center for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS). The painstaking process of the gestation of collaborative interdisciplinary themes/fields of research/teaching and the labor of negotiation with policy-makers and grantees in the field of higher education by a Cultural Studies centre is thus the focus of this paper. Called the Higher Education Cell, an important aspect of the initiative's genealogy is that it is based on (a) a critique of the existing disciplines and an attention to the birthing of 'new thematic/field specifics' as also (b) a critique of the research undertaken in mainstream institutions and an attention to new research methodologies. The Higher Education Cell is at present focusing on four major functions through which it plans to engage with the higher education sector. These functions are (i) Incubation of Research Initiatives, (ii) Institutional Collaborations, (iii) Documentation and Archiving, and (iv) Grant Development.

This paper focuses on an issue attracting increasing attention: the possible disadvantage inflicted on non-Anglophone academics by the dominance of English in scientific publication and academic exchange. We critically review the evidence for linguistic disadvantage, noting some of its limitations, and critique the native/non-native distinction as a coarse and somewhat unsatisfactory criterion for distinguishing between the advantaged and disadvantaged. In the second part of the paper we report on an empirical survey of the attitudes of Spanish academics at the University of Zaragoza to the possible disadvantage they may experience in publishing in English, and we investigate determinants of these attitudes. Though the survey shows, as expected, that a majority do feel disadvantaged in academic publication relative to Anglophone scholars, it also indicates, we argue, that attitudes are more complex and multidimensional than the literature sometimes suggests. Self-reported language proficiency emerges as a significant determinant of attitudes. The final part of the paper discusses a number of proposed language planning interventions designed to redress linguistic disadvantage. We argue that some of the more radical of these are flawed or unfeasible and suggest that more modest measures have a greater likelihood of ameliorating the situation.

This article emerges from a long-term project investigating the BBC initiative 'Blast' - an on- and offline creative resource for teenagers. Designed to 'inspire and equip' young people to be creative, the research interrogates the assumptions behind such a resource, particularly in terms of the so-called 'digital native', and tests such assumptions against the populations actually using and engaging with it. It finds that the conception of a 'digital native' - a technologically enthusiastic, if not technologically literate - teenage population, which is operationalized through the workshop structure of BBC Blast, rarely filters down to the teenagers themselves. Teenage delegates to the Blast workshops rarely validate interest based on technological facilities, enthusiasm or competency. Instead, it is peer groups and social alignments which shape declarations and, more importantly, enactments of interest. This suggests that while the concept of the 'digital native' may be pertinent for generational comparisons of technological use, or is a useful concept for the operationalization of creative media workshops, it is simply not recognized by teenagers to whom it refers, nor does it adequately define use. Further, technological competency and enthusiasm sits uneasily with social and cultural peer group norms, where certain (and very specific) technological competency is socially permitted. This means that the concept of the 'digital native' is problematic, if not entirely inadequate. Focusing on the BBC Blast workshops therefore raises some critical questions around teenage motivations to become technologically literate, and the pleasures teenagers articulate in such engagements per se.

Implicit and Explicit Knowledge in Second Language Learning, Testing, and Teaching is a book with ambition. The authors aim to provide researchers in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) with information on explicit knowledge (EK) and implicit knowledge (IK) of second language morphosyntax in terms of their definitions, their measurement, their utility to second language learning, and the effects that different instructional approaches may have on the creation of these two types of knowledge. The book is divided into five parts based on these aims. Part One, 'Introduction,' provides an overview of definitions and issues concerning EK and IK in cognitive psychology, educational psychology, and SLA. EK and IK are defined in terms of largely competing characteristics. For instance, EK is declarative while IK is procedural.

Until the early 1990s, we NNS English teachers were a silent majority, who got on with our teaching and kept mum about the rest. We used to hold NS in high esteem; we looked upon them in awe and tried to parrot their pronunciation to the best of our ability. We knew all too well that the goal of attaining native-level competence was but a mirage, and indeed only the most dedicated of our ilk could achieve anything like near-native proficiency in English.

However, if we survey the history of language education, we can discern the origins of every strand of thinking, every methodological trend, every curriculum change, not within the hermetic circle of ELT, but as more or less direct reflections of prevailing philosophical orthodoxies or challenges to those orthodoxies ('… if one wants to understand an intellectual position, one often has to find out against what it has been established (p. 93)).

"Why and how do issues expire? This paper applies the concept of path dependency to issue-life cycle and argues that the manner in which an issue dies is closely associated with how it comes to life. This paper argues that, on the Access to Medicines issue, the first actors (1) to have called attention to a legal problem, (2) to have capitalised on the HIV/AIDs crisis, and (3) to have used the example of Africa, were also the first to have felt constrained by their own frame in their attempt to (1) look for economical rather than legal solutions, (2) expand the list of medicines covered beyond anti-AIDs drugs, and (3) allow large emerging economies to benefit from a scheme designed by countries without manufacturing capacities. In order to escape an issue in which they felt entrapped, issue-entrepreneurs worked strategically to close the debate in order to better reframe it in other forums."

"The article introduces the path, the actors and the contexts of the Reflect-OR Project. Reflect-OR is a Leonardo da Vinci Transfer of Innovation (TOI) project developed in the framework of the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLP) and promoted by the European Commission. Reflect-OR aimed at sustaining the empowerment processes of career guidance practitioners by supporting a major awareness and use of their individual, organizational and networking resources. The Reflect-OR project is the transfer of a previous Leonardo da Vinci project called Reflect which experimented with reflective methodologies with teachers and trainers. The path was characterized by an active process of transfer of innovation, constantly constructed and negotiated with the various life-long career guidance (LLCG) practitioners and agencies and based on a creative methodological approach called Participatory and Appreciative Action and Reflection (PAAR). Another important aspect was constituted by the peculiarities of the different contexts involved in the transfer process (Italy, Switzerland and Bulgaria) which allowed a deep reflection on LLCG systems and created a common background for reframing and empowerment."

"The time dimension has become increasingly important in organisational management studies. Various concepts have been developed: temporary work, temporary systems, projectification and temporary organisations. Many aspects have already been studied; for example, relationship structures, the characteristics of projects that temporary organisations (TOs) intend to implement and develop, legal forms, the different sectors in which TOs have been disseminated, and the degree to which they have been formalised. However, one aspect that has still not been studied in depth is the specificity of their temporariness and the specificities of the organisational, social and learning systems that this encourages."