Teaching intercultural awareness in the English as a foreign language classroom: a case study using critical reading

This paper reports on an educational intervention study that used linguistic and rhetorical approaches to critical reading, in order to teach intercultural awareness. The intervention was implemented with a group of Mexican college students learning English as a foreign language. The study focuses on changes between participants’ pre- and post-intervention articulated understandings of the targeted cultural context, namely the USA. The data was coded and analyzed using a complexity theory perspective and directed qualitative analysis. The results indicate that drawing students’ attention to the cultural situatedness of language use can increase their awareness of the multiple ideological positions existing in a cultural context. Based on these results, the paper argues that the field of intercultural education needs to take a linguistic turn in order to further its goals.     

Noisy zones of proximal development: Conversation in noisy classrooms

Despite the importance of context in studies of language use, sociolinguists have ignored the impact of noise on conversational interaction. This inattention is of particular concern in classrooms where language is a learning tool. Our research on interaction in noisy settings took place in English language elementary school classrooms with students in grades 3, 5, and 7, whose first language was English. Students were observed during regular classroom activities. Employing a novel method, in which students wore ear‐level microphones, we obtained stereophonic recordings of the noise and conversation that reached each listener's ears. A dosimeter measured the noise levels in each classroom. Analyses of students’ patterns of conversation suggest that noise levels impeded the intended development of complex conversational interaction and collaborative learning. This study also questions the place of acoustics in understanding context, and the significance of the hearer's perspective in sociolinguistic studies of conversational interactions.     

Examining power through social relations in teachers’ discourse about intercultural education

This study examined power through social relations between entities in the implementation of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in an environment where English is spoken as a foreign language. The examination involved analysing the discourse of two foreign English teachers. Specifically, subject positioning of entities, made apparent through pronominal markers and shifts, as well as discourse meaning, were analysed to establish attributes and relations pertinent to the teaching and learning entities and context. The findings showed how teachers’ epistemologies can be made visible through the examination of discourse. Steven, a participant of this study, indicated that while he seemingly practised an inclusive approach, he was restricted by his teaching context, which appeared to be stricter, and his students’ language proficiency. The second teacher, Tamara, was more democratic in her pedagogical approach, seen through her students’ involvement. This signified a more open work environment as both teacher and student could make necessary adjustments to support the learning objectives. From this study, we could see how intercultural education is still perceived differently. This difference may be due to the parameters of the teachers. This study also showed how teachers’ discourse is a feasible site for the examination of power.     

Beyond the mirror towards a plurilingual prism: exploring the creation of plurilingual ‘identity texts’ in English and French classrooms in Toronto and Montpellier

In an age of transnational mobility, there has been a growing recognition of the need for both English and French mainstream classroom teachers to be trained to teach increasingly plurilingual student populations. In this article, I begin by describing the context for an exploratory comparative and collaborative ethnographic action research study in four English and French schools in Toronto, Canada and one school in Montpellier, France that engaged children as co-researchers of their lived plurilingualism. I analyse in particular the process of creating plurilingual multimodal books with students and teachers across the five different school cases. This paper focuses on the iterative ‘identity text’ creation process across all five schools by examining one plurilingual identity text from each case, along with students’ research conversations about their creative productions, and interviews with their classroom teachers and parents. Finally, I summarize five features of inclusive plurilingual pedagogy that emerged across the five cases and call for further collaborative research across English and French schools and scholarly communities investigating creative plurilingual language and literacy production in the twenty-first century.     

Narrative accounts of university education: socio-cultural perspectives of students with disabilities

Research in higher education, linked to national and international policy, suggests the need for educationalists to show greater understanding and awareness of the lived experiences of undergraduate students with disabilities. These sources argue that this knowledge should then be used to inform their understandings as tutors and facilitate inclusive and effective teaching strategies. This research had a primary focus on first-year students with disabilities’ learning experiences; their transitions from school or college to university and their feedback on positive and negative learning experiences at both levels. Rich, complex stories were uncovered taking the research beyond the lecture theatre and seminar room, into the students’ union bar and back to the Year 10 classroom. It is the intention of this paper to relay some of the stories shared, in particular drawing out findings related to effective learning practices and to note the significance of placing a socio-cultural lens on the question of inclusion in education.     

Locating non‐Western enlightenment texts for a global curriculum

The context of this paper is a university‐based teacher education course in Melbourne, Australia. The assumption underpinning the course is that it is crucial for trainee teachers to examine the lenses they typically use in terms of common‐sense understandings of children and adolescents. We point to the 18th century Western enlightenment period as the source of this thinking. I argue that it is important to be aware of other enlightenments that have shaped the traditions of students in our multicultural mix. In this paper, I explore the writings of the Mahabharata and other early Indian texts to see how they have also influenced ways of thinking about childhood and adolescence. Data for this paper have been drawn from course materials, student responses, translations of early Indian texts and popular stories depicting childhood and adolescence.     

Speaking about building Rylands (1960s to 1980s): a Cape Flats history

This article looks at African and black men and masculinities, triangulated desire, race, and subalternity in Charles Mungoshi’s short story collections. It examines the negotiation of desire, and its interface and interplay with power relations and their negotiation in the colonial and postcolonial economies of domination and gender as depicted in the short stories. It uses the Gramscian concept of hegemony, Girard’s mimetic theory of triangular desire, and Sedgwick’s theory of gendered triangular desire, to examine these dynamics. It argues that colonial and postcolonial power and gender relations are negotiated through a complex interplay of desire that cannot all be accounted for by both Girard and Sedgwick’s models, necessitating their modification to deal with the complexity of desire in a colonial and postcolonial context. The short story collections examined span the colonial and postcolonial eras and these are Coming of the Dry Season (1981), Some Kinds of Wounds (1980), and Walking Still (1997).     

“Unless You Were Native American…Everybody Came From Another Country:” Language and Content Learning in a Grade 4 Diverse Classroom

Set amidst an increasingly tense discourse about immigration and substantial pressures on educators, this study examines a three-week fourth-grade social studies unit as taught to a class with a large number of English learners located in a low-income school in the Pacific Northwest. Using ethnographic and sociolinguistic perspectives, we provide evidence of how the teacher leverages a wide array of instructional strategies and scaffolds to build language skills and content knowledge within a fast-paced unit on 19th-century Westward Migration. Embedded within such instruction is the construction of narratives that highlight regional examples of a linguistic and ethnically diverse community and that connect immigration trends on a global scale to local history. These strategies and narratives are then used in a summative lesson about immigration that affirms students’ family stories as part of the U.S. history still being written.     

What we talk about when we talk about ‘walking in the city’1

Originally published. in France in 1980 (and translated. into English in 1984), Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life has assumed. the status of an ur-text for many cultural studies academics and students. In particular, his chapter on ‘Walking in the City’ is often cited. as a blueprint for understanding key terms in the cultural studies repertoire such as ‘power’ and ‘resistance’. This article revisits ‘Walking in the City’ in order to supplement some of the established. understandings of his work circulating in the field of cultural studies, as well as the intersecting fields of cultural geography and urban studies. The paper begins by suggesting ways in which established. understandings of Certeau's work might be usefully rethought and extended. through a consideration of differentiated. instances of walking. Critiquing the account of body-subject relations posited. by Certeau through reference to the writings of Marcel Mauss on techniques of the body and self, the author calls, in particular, for a greater consideration of the role of assemblages and affect in understanding everyday urban practices. By the conclusion of the article, the author arrives at a more nuanced. understanding of the feedback loop between the body-subject and the city, and suggests ways in which Certeau's writing on walking remains productive for those strains of cultural studies interested. in the practices of an increasingly virtualized. urban space.     

Students’ health engagement and affective relations in Danish upper secondary school

To increase our understanding of the dynamics of young people’s embodied engagement in health, this article analyses Danish upper secondary school students’ understandings and practices of health and the role of the school environment in these dynamics. Participatory, visual and narrative data were collected during fieldwork with 37 students aged 16–17. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of the body is applied to analyse the affective relations and emerging body-health assemblages within the students’ school life, which generated force and vitality (here conceptualised as health). Through becoming within sensuous, social and political body-health assemblages, the students attempted to curb school stress, sustain social belonging in an individualistic school environment and both reproduce affirming power discourses and subvert their territorialisation. The study proposes an analytical shift in perspective on young people’s health away from an individualistic ‘components approach’ towards a relational understanding, and suggests that students’ health at school relates to collectivity, quality, rhythm and co-produced engagement, rather than individuality, quantity, rules and performance, which increasingly characterise Danish health discourse and school policy.     

Telling stories for a politics of hope

This paper is about listening to voices from an excluded past. The oral history of disabled people challenges accepted, formal history, the history from dominant voices well established in unequal power relations. The paper draws on an oral history project conducted with over 60 visually impaired people who gave detailed accounts, telling stories of their experiences of education. This oral history research was carried out through the medium of the interview. The analysis covers school life, focusing on the recurring themes of abuse and friendships. The paper then turnd to relationships with family and community, and how participants placed schooling within the broader context of their lives. These stories are a small part of the history of disabled individuals' exclusion within which, as we hope to demonstrate, the chinks of collective light were born.     

SLAVERY: ANNUAL BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SUPPLEMENT (2005)

Based on life stories of ex-slaves from Ethiopia now living in Israel, the present article attempts to uncover complex relationships and conceptions of intimate domination and subjugation. The dramatic passage of masters and slaves from rural Ethiopia to the democratic State of Israel enables their stories to emerge.

Hearing these personal stories became possible when continuous slavery taken for granted in one particular cultural context became alien and unbearable in another. Key images at the basis of Ethiopian slavery constitute an ample reservoir for new interpretations, in which hidden aspects are brought into relief within a new reality. The present article focuses on cows as an organising image through which complex master–slave (Choa–Barya) relations are decoded. It explores the centrality of this image for these exploitative, complex relations, both in Ethiopia and following the move to Israel. The cow figures prominently as the embodiment of a range of concrete and symbolic meanings, particularly in the most intimate details of master–slave power relations and hierarchies.     

Pathways to permanence in England and Norway: A critical analysis of documents and data

The English language term ‘permanence’ is increasingly used in high income countries as a ‘short-hand’ translation for a complex set of aims around providing stability and family membership for children who need child welfare services and out-of-home care. From a scrutiny of legislative provisions, court judgments, government documents and a public opinion survey on child placement options, the paper draws out similarities and differences in understandings of the place of ‘permanence’ within the child welfare discourse in Norway and England. The main differences are that in England the components of permanence are explicitly set out in legislation, statutory guidance and advisory documents whilst in Norway the terms ‘stability’ and ‘continuity’ are used in a more limited number of policy documents in the context of a wide array of services available for children and families. The paper then draws on these sources, and on administrative data on children in care, to tease out possible explanations for the similarities and differences identified. We hypothesise that both long-standing policies and recent changes can be explained by differences in public and political understandings of child welfare and the balance between universal services and those targeted on parents and children identified as vulnerable and in need of specialist services.     

Educators and synoptic prudentialism: Educator reflections on educator training,student surveillance and using technology for student outreach

Surveillance plays several interrelated and essential roles in contemporary education. In the current article, we explore the understandings and experiences of educators related to surveillance; especially the ‘vertical’ surveillance ‘from below’ students themselves direct towards educators both inside and outside of the classroom (referred to as ‘sousveillance’). We also explore the prudential ‘intrapersonal’ and reflexive surveillance undertaken by educators to align and adjust to the expectations of educator professionalization, including during educator training, especially in terms of their social media use and under a context of synoptic prudentialism in schools. Synoptic prudentialism refers to the reflexive actions and adjustments by individuals and organizations in response to an acute awareness of widespread social surveillance—the many watching the few. Educators noted risks posed by surveillance, including sources of potential harm, both personal and professional. Findings reveal that, reinforced by the legal scare stories encountered during educator training programs, educators feel overwhelmingly vulnerable to the potential sousveillance of students, and are receiving little advice beyond the requirement to ‘be careful’. We explore educators’ privacy management strategies in response, for example, in response to concerns over students capturing videos in the classroom where situations may be taken out of context. This prudential framework, moreover, may also be inhibiting educators’ ability to conduct outreach with students to detect and respond to online mediated conflict and harm.     

Globalization and the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language in China

One influence of globalization is that English has become a global language whether we like it or not.This paper examines the resistances and pathways when we adopt Communicative Language Teaching in teaching English in China.In order to make CLT more effective in a global context,more attention should be paid to teachers’education,students’needs and alternative assessment.     

Korean students’ minority schooling experience in Japan

A qualitative study conducted in western Japan examined the perceptions of Korean students in Japanese junior high school to identify factors contributing to a consistently low high school advancement rate compared to mainstream Japanese students. Fourteen people were interviewed about their Korean students’ experiences in Japan. The findings of this study suggest that factors contributing to the low high school advancement rate among Korean students cluster around three themes: (1) discrimination experienced in society at large and at school, (2) assimilation to become more like the Japanese, and (3) inconsistent cultural and insufficient academic support given by the school and teachers. Findings from this study indicate how the power structure in a social context of schooling influences minority students’ learning and also confirmed in part Ogbu and Cummins’ theories of how power relations between the subordinated and the dominant affect minority students’ schooling experiences and learning.     

Letting Gender Secrets Out of the Bag

In this paper I record the understandings which have emerged for me through facilitating a series of workshops with family therapists and social workers, designed to help let ‘secrets' about gender issues and power relations between men and women ‘out of the bag’. I outline the background to these workshops, and describe both the workshop process used and the key themes which were addressed by participants. It is written in the hope that others will be encouraged to facilitate similar workshops in one anothers' agency groups.     

Racism,class ethos and place: the value of context in narratives about asylum‐seekers

The British public view asylum‐seekers in generally negative terms. Yet whilst there are an abundance of reports and opinion polls that measure levels of hostility in order to fuel political ‘debate’ very little is known about how asylum seekers are spoken about in more quotidian contexts. Based on an ethnographic study of racism in Southend‐on‐Sea, Essex this paper identifies two kinds of narrative (abstract truths and context‐dependent stories) commonly used by established members of the community to speak about asylum‐seekers. The paper then seeks to explain why more affluent, suburban residents of the town tend to draw upon the abstract narrative while less wealthy, centrally located residents are more likely to regale context‐dependent stories about asylum seekers. An explanation for this socio‐spatial phenomenon is constructed around a Bourdieusian theory of practice that unravels local class relations and maps out a field for local symbolic prestige. Finally this microanalysis is used as a springboard to consider the wider relationship between racist narratives and social and cultural reproduction.