Developing Transnational Literacies

The central premise of this article is that the conceptual terrain of the global is fundamentally unstable, that its content is far from determined. This opens the door to many different interpretations and uses of the term, where the referent is not so much to a pre-given reality, or even a tangible geographical space. Rather, the global constitutes its own content in the various fields in which it gets deployed, selectively affirming particular images and representations, while denying, repressing, or otherwise excluding others. I draw on the early history of film to argue that the global is a virtual distribution of value and intelligibility, where its images and signs no longer 'represent' an independent reality, but actually shape and transform the inter-subjective experiences of its virtual subjects. I use a recent documentary film on call centers in India to demonstrate how distinct regimes of cinematic images enable different kinds of interventions into these virtual distributions, revealing the global as a richly imagined terrain of discourses and representations, which are always already subject to re-distribution.

After critically reviewing the apparent 'turn' from welfare states to pedagogic states, I focus on forms of pedagogy evident in notions of citizen empowerment. Issues raised through documentary analysis of key UK policy texts are examined through frameworks offered by Aradhana Sharma's work on women's empowerment in India in order to widen the analytical lens, opening up issues and questions that might be helpful in analysing new configurations of governance in the UK. These include the problem of multiplicity in the identification of strategies and technologies; the idea of pedagogy as a gendered domain, both in terms of the subjects targeted and in those involved in pedagogical work; and the problem of conceptualising 'the state' in formulations such as the 'pedagogical state'. Although questioning the idea of a 'pedgagogic turn', I conclude by addressing the forms of politics and political subjects called forth by pedagogic projects. The paper was written before the 2010 election but the analysis has much to offer to the politics of Cameron's Big Society.

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 study explores the personal transformation process experienced by future bilingual educators enrolled in a graduate school of education that is committed to rigorous, collaborative, innovative, and transformational research. The majority of these preservice (PST) and novice teachers (NT), largely White, monolingual women, has little direct knowledge about or experience with teaching culturally, linguistically and ability diverse students. Educational researchers have long emphasized the importance of providing PST and NT graduate students with opportunities to analyze and reflect on their personal theoretical beliefs concerning teaching standards and methods of student learning. Additionally, it has been determined that teacher educators must communicate the necessary theoretical foundations to provide their students with a starting point for analyzing their emerging teaching philosophies, the goal being the development of their new visions of reform-minded practices and innovative techniques of teaching. Data indicated that all the PSTs entered the program with images of teaching that were related to their earlier classroom experiences as students, and that, during their 2-year tenure in the graduate school of education, teaching internship, and master's-level coursework, most experienced professional and personal epiphanies.

In this article, the authors explore the camera lens as a metaphor for seeing the world in different ways. Their own stories and backgrounds with photography illustrate how they have come to make these connections. The authors present six increasingly abstract approaches to photography, as a way of demonstrating ''what you see depends upon how you look.'' They relate this to a holistic approach to transformative learning.

Challenging incidents associated with privilege and oppression occur daily. Within the fields of adult education and higher education, researchers and practitioners have examined and critiqued the exploration and understanding of privilege (e.g., White privilege). Studies have explored how adult educators, who acknowledged their own White privilege and the norms of whiteness, are working to change systems of privilege and oppression. This work furthers the current literature. The authors employ a meta-narrative approach analyzing narratives from faculty and professionals in the helping fields. The meta-narrative designation of a ''collective story,'' utilizing professional voices is a unique contribution in addressing privilege. The narrative tradition offers participant stories to systematically explore the interaction of dominant and nondominant privilege statuses. The findings relate to transformational learning and verify the need to consistently employ self-reflection and discourse toward examining and refining one's understanding of and interactions with privilege and oppression.

In an age of uncertainty, one of the aims of higher education is to establish lifelong learning abilities in students. However, different authors remain divided on the question of what constitutes 'lifelong learning ability'. This article proposes the hypothesis that the cultivation of lifelong learning abilities in higher education needs to be conceptualised and sustained through a focus on the constitution and operation of agency. The cultivation of lifelong learning as a set of agent abilities needs to be grounded within the mode of being, a concept inspired by Heidegger, rather than within having or doing. While the importance of developing epistemology by focusing on learning as delivery (having) and interacting (doing) is not denied, this article suggests that higher education also concerns ontological learning.

This paper discusses conceptual tools which might allow an elaborated sociological analysis of the relationship between information and communication technology on the one hand, and social inequalities on the other. The authors seek to go beyond the familiar idea of the 'digital divide' to develop a focus on digital social inequality, through discussing three bodies of literature which are normally not discussed together. The paper thus addresses issues in feminist theory; the sociological field analysis of Pierre Bourdieu; and the Actor Network Theory

No início do governo Lula, o país tinha um sistema de avaliação educacional ainda tímido, com poucos exames e em sua maioria amostrais. Em oito anos, foram criados novas provas e índices que permitiram um retrato mais preciso da qualidade do ensino no país. Muitos desses resultados ainda mostram uma situação ruim em boa parte das escolas brasileiras. Entre os novos exames está a Prova Brasil, aplicada a alunos do 5° e 9° ano do ensino fundamental e o Exame Nacional do Desempenho de Estudantes (Enade), para aferir a qualidade dos cursos superiores.

Brasília - Durante o governo do presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a taxa de analfabetismo na população com mais de 15 anos caiu de 11,6% para 9,7%, segundo dados da Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (Pnad) referentes a 2003 e 2009. Mesmo com um programa específico para cuidar do assunto, com o aumento dos recursos e da mobilização de governadores para resolver o problema, a redução ainda é lenta. É o que avalia a professora a Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Maria Clara Di Pierro, pesquisadora do tema.

During the last decade or so, schooling policy has had to increasingly grapple with processes that have a global reach. One significant aspect of globalisation has been the global flows of asylum seekers and refugees. Although Australia has a long history of accepting asylum seekers and refugees, in recent times, concerns about national security have fuelled community disquiet about refugees and asylum seekers. As such the 'refugee problem' is a crucial site for research by those interested in the relationships between a vibrant and socially just society and educational policy and practice. This paper draws on Rose's genealogy of 'community' (that is community now a site for governmentality); and Bauman's meditation on 'elusive community' (how can we have both freedom and security?) as a means to think through an appropriate ethico-politics for educators grappling with the refugee problem in Australia.

Vocabulary researchers have established that multiple aspects of word knowledge need to be mastered in order for a learner to truly know a word. Teachers, however, seem to follow the commonsense view that equates learning words with learning meanings, and to mostly ignore other aspects of word knowledge. This study seeks to discover whether the same is true of textbooks. The vocabulary activities in nine General English textbooks at three proficiency levels were analysed and each activity's focus on one or more of nine aspects of vocabulary knowledge noted.

The article comprehensively reviews the theoretical and empirical work on gender and the knowledge society and introduces the articles of the special issue. Three ways in which the knowledge society and economy are gendered are distinguished: the gendering of human capital; the gendering of networks and the gendering of the definitions of the knowledge society. Using data from the Labour Force Survey, an original analysis of the gendering of the UK knowledge economy is presented. It finds that the choice of definition of the knowledge economy makes a difference to its gender composition: the more centred on technology and fixed capital, the more masculine, the more centred on human capital, the more gender balanced. The knowledge economy provides better work and conditions. Gender gaps are narrower in the knowledge economy than the overall economy: occupational hierarchies are narrowed to women's advantage, while differences in work temporalities are narrowed to men's advantage.

This qualitative study examines how cultural and racial similarities and differences between teachers, regarded in their school as successful, and their African American students affect the student-teacher relationships and how these relationships shape and are shaped by racial ideology. The purpose of this paper is: (1) to offer an insight on teachers' and students' beliefs, expectations, and practices related to schooling and education; and (2) to understand how racial ideology plays out among teachers and students in a predominantly African American school. We rely on an understanding of race as ideology, rather than as an independent variable to be quantified and measured. We found that seemingly neutral and objective educational terms such as classroom structure, discipline, or achievement are infused with racial meaning and are a product of and reflection on racial ideology in which education and schooling operate. The power of racial ideology is not that it 'tells' its actors what to do or say; rather, it lies in the power of interpretive choices that teachers use to tell the stories about the school and the students.

Postcolonial theory, with its interpretations of race, racialization, and culture, offers us a set of powerful analytic tools to meet the epistemological challenge of giving voice to subjugated knowledges and the capacity to address and uncover social relationships within organizations. In particular, it opens up new ways of framing issues within organizational practices, enabling us to imagine new possibilities and practices. This paper suggests that the integration of postcolonial perspectives into cross-cultural management and its theorizing enhances and enriches its discursive import. The paper also attempts to sketch out a methodology to ground the intricate relationship between culture, practice, and organizations.

There is growing evidence that the use and management of language have important implications in international organizations. However, still only few empirical studies have been conducted in this theoretical field. Especially there has been a lack of quantitative insights into how language affects group processes and group performance in multicultural organizations. This paper outlines the results from a questionnaire directed electronically towards members of academic multicultural departments in Denmark. Results showed that consistency in English management communication was the dominating factor with strong relationships with all of the three investigated group cohesiveness variables: group involvement, group conflict and group trust.

This article examines, from a social semiotic perspective, how multimodal resources in EFL textbooks are deployed to enable dialogic engagement with readers. A range of multimodal features in the textbooks, including illustrations and the labelling on illustrations, dialogue balloons, incomplete jointly-constructed texts, and highlighting, are identified as enabling editor voice to negotiate meanings with character and reader voice.

Deconstruction arguably marked the last time that comparative literature was truly confident as a discipline; with a clear sight of its philological inheritance and posthumanist telos. Post-2000 comp lit, by comparison, has been plagued by insecurity over what it is and what it is not. At the present pass, even the discipline's recognized opportunity-which lies in its being well positioned institutionally to develop a worldly critical praxis responsive to the politics of the aesthetic-is experienced as a special burden; for no discipline wants to be responsible to "allness" (that is to say, to teaching all the world's languages and literatures) under the Malthusian market conditions that govern an enrollment-driven modern education. While there may be no ready solutions to the problems posed by the planetary imperative, one place to look for them is in the substantive discussions of translation and technics that lent self-assurance to literary education in the 1970s and 1980s. In the memos, letters, seminar notes, and texts written in this period, what emerges is a "right to translate" as the covenant of a deconstructive comparative literature.

This article argues for a more systematic and integrated approach to the cultural dimension within English language education in a globalized world, with the concept of culture taking on an affectively related and process-oriented meaning. To this end, it suggests an approach for the development of the ability to decenter from cultural norms and behavior that previously have been taken for granted, within a social constructivist framework of learning. The study from which the article is drawn was conducted through action research in an EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom during the three final years of basic education within the Swedish-medium educational system in Finland.

Outcomes Based Eeducation focuses on the development of critical thinking and it demands that the student does a lot of work himself.