Nouveaux cahiers de la recherche en éducation, 2014
Nous examinons, dans cet article, deux projets de littératie permettant de faire le pont entre le... more Nous examinons, dans cet article, deux projets de littératie permettant de faire le pont entre les sphères d’activité scolaires, familiales et communautaires. Le premier projet portait sur l’échange international de vidéos produits par des jeunes bilingues et plurilingues du primaire et du secondaire. Le deuxième projet impliquait des apprenants de l’anglais inscrits au primaire dans la création de vidéos documentaires. Le cadre théorique unissant ces deux projets permet de concevoir la production vidéo comme une forme de littératie multimodale mobilisant plusieurs moyens d’expression et ressources du répertoire linguistique. Nous présentons un récit interprétatif pour décrire les interactions entre les enfants et la technologie ainsi que les liens qu’ils tissent entre les apprentissages et les expériences vécues dans différents domaines de leur vie. Nous nous attardons aux conditions matérielles et aux discours institutionnels pour identifier comment ils influencent l’ouverture du ...
In this paper, we present excerpts from ethnographic data collected when a diverse classroom of c... more In this paper, we present excerpts from ethnographic data collected when a diverse classroom of children, some of whom were multilingual and others monolingual in English, used iPads to make videos. We discuss the practices, social relations, objects and material conditions that emerged as the children engaged in this production, with special attention to one child participating in the process. Drawing on New Literacy Studies, theories of the material and the construct sociomaterial assemblage, and another construct, production pedagogies, we analyzed the particular interactions this child engaged in while videomaking. These theoretical lenses helped us identify the challenges she faced and some of her strengths that might have been obscured from view during classroom negotiation of textual language, but were revealed when she interacted with digital technologies and multimodal texts. Video production allowed her to position herself and be positioned as knowledgeable, creative and as a legitimate peer with something to contribute.
In this article, Elizabeth Marshall and Kelleen Toohey use critical discourse analysis to examine... more In this article, Elizabeth Marshall and Kelleen Toohey use critical discourse analysis to examine educators' efforts to incorporate funds of knowledge from the communities and families of Punjabi Sikh students in a Canadian elementary school. Using MP3 players, students first recorded and then translated their grandparents' stories of life in India into picture books to serve as cultural resources in their school community. In retelling their grandparents' stories, students drew on a multiplicity of ancestral,globalized, and Western discourses in their textual and pictorial illustrations. The authors examine what happens when the funds of knowledge that students bring to school contradict normative, Western understandings of what is appropriate for children and how school might appropriately respond to varying community perceptions of good and evil.
This book in the Ablex series Language and Educational Processes is concerned with speculating ab... more This book in the Ablex series Language and Educational Processes is concerned with speculating about the relationships among family dynamics, sexual identity, attitudes toward work, and the literacy activities of thirteen children over three years from kindergarten to ...
In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contempor... more In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contemporary poststructuralist theories of language, identity, and power offer new perspectives on language learning and teaching, and have been of considerable interest in our field. We first review poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, and positioning and explain sociocultural theories of language learning. We then discuss constructs of INVESTMENT and IMAGINED COMMUNITIES/IMAGINED IDENTITIES (Norton Peirce 1995; Norton 1997, 2000, 2001), showing how these have been used by diverse identity researchers. Illustrative examples of studies that investigate how identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality interact with language learning are discussed. Common qualitative research methods used in studies of identity and language learning are presented, and we review the research on identity and language teaching in different regions of the world. We examine how digital technolog...
Advocates of critical approaches to second language teaching are interested in relationships betw... more Advocates of critical approaches to second language teaching are interested in relationships between language learning and social change. From this perspective, language is not simply a means of expression or communication; rather, it is a practice ...
This article explores ways in which gender might be productively investigated in classrooms where... more This article explores ways in which gender might be productively investigated in classrooms where students are learning English as a second language. We review studies that posit gender differences in communicative style and review feminist critiques of such studies on the basis of their essentialism and ignoring of political issues. Studies that document differences between the behaviors of boys and girls in classrooms are also examined and critiqued on the same grounds. The point is made that such explorations of difference commonly assume differences to be "normal" or "natural," merely a matter of "style," and ignore relationships of power that might be seen as instantiated in communicative events. Two projects of the authors are described in which the perceptions of a group of secondary school students of ESL about gendered speech conventions in home, community, and school were investigated. Recognizing that these students (despite diversity in ethn...
This paper represents preliminary efforts to understand what Actor-Network Theory (ANT) might con... more This paper represents preliminary efforts to understand what Actor-Network Theory (ANT) might contribute to our interest in analyzing what we hope are enhanced educational practices for second language (L2) learners. This theory encourages us to examine more closely the things, the tools, the non-human actants that are active in particular educational practices, and how those tools and not others, “exclude, invite and regulate particular forms of participation” (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010, p. 7). We identify aspects of ANT that are relevant to our work on videomaking, describe our videomaking research and provide two illustrations of how we began to see what ANT might offer in analysis of our video data and to consider its potential for guiding our ongoing fieldwork. We argue here that ANT highlights the importance of paying attention to the production of networks between both human and non-human actors during the videomaking process to understand how these interactions shape the sch...
Researchers followed 2 language minority children through their first 2 years of school, examinin... more Researchers followed 2 language minority children through their first 2 years of school, examining the influence of their parents and of school practices. Two cohorts of minority language students were followed from the beginning of kindergarten to the end of first grade. Students were observed once a week in their classrooms. Researchers kept field notes of conversations, audiotaped, and videotaped children monthly. The children's teachers were interviewed at least yearly. Bilingual research assistants conducted family and child interviews at least twice a year. This study focused on one child from each of the two cohorts. Results indicated that the children had rough transitions from home to school and from grade to grade, with teachers believing that they had fewer cognitive, social, and linguistic resources than their parents perceived. In both children's cases, the school's sorting practices negatively impacted their children's experiences. In the first chil...
This article is based on data derived from a four-year ethnographic study that followed two cohor... more This article is based on data derived from a four-year ethnographic study that followed two cohorts of ESL learners enrolled in mainstream Canadian primary classrooms from kindergarten through grade 2. It draws on sociocultural theory, based on the work of the Russian scholars Vygotsky and Bakhtin and developed in North America by Lave and Wenger (1991), Rogoff (1994), and others. In the article, we examine classroom practices that appear to offer our participants access to the linguistic resources of their community and those in which our participants appear to have limited access to these resources. Choral and small group activities are contrasted with Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequences to show contrasting possibilities for access. We argue that speech situations in classrooms that are ludic or playful, that, in Bakhtin's (1981) terms, offer ever new ways to mean, are those in which children have the possibility of appropriating the words of others and of finding v...
All the chapters in this volume share this aim-that is, to consider how, in diverse sites of lang... more All the chapters in this volume share this aim-that is, to consider how, in diverse sites of language education, practices might be modified, changed, developed, or abandoned in efforts to support learners, learning, and social change. At the same time, most of the authors here remind us that critical pedagogy cannot be a unitary set of texts, beliefs, convictions, or assumptions. Like Pavlenko (this volume), these authors describe local situations, problems, and issues and see responsiveness to the particularities of the local as important in the equitable and democratic approaches they are trying to develop. In seeking to resist totalizing discourses about critical teaching, subjects, and strategies for progressive action, we have used the term critical pedagogies in the title of our book. While each of the authors represented here uses critical lenses to reflect on the teaching and research practices in her or his community, there are important differences of focus across the chapters. We have therefore decided to divide the book into four sections, each with a slightly different emphasis. In doing so, however, we recognize that the distinctions between sections are not clear-cut and that many overlapping themes emerge. Such themes are discussed in greater detail later in this introduction.
THE FORUM TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOL professi... more THE FORUM TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOL profession. It also welcomes responses or rebuttals to any articles or remarks published here in The Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.
Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation, 2005
Chapter 3 Critical multiculturalism and second language education 30 Ryuko Kubota Chapter 4 Gende... more Chapter 3 Critical multiculturalism and second language education 30 Ryuko Kubota Chapter 4 Gender and sexuality in foreign and second language education: Critical and feminist approaches 53 Aneta Pavlenko Chapter 5 Assessment in multicultural societies: Applying democratic principles and practices to language testing 72 Elana Shohamy II CHALLENGING IDENTITIES 93 Chapter 6 Representation, rights, and resources: Multimodal pedagogies in the language and literacy classroom 95 Pippa Stein vii viii Contents Chapter 7 Subversive identities, pedagogical safe houses, and critical learning 116 Suresh Canagarajah Chapter 8 "Why does this feel empowering?": Thesis writing, concordancing, and the corporatizing university 138 Sue Starfield Chapter 9 Modals and memories: A grammar lesson on the Quebec referendum on sovereignty 158
In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contempor... more In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contemporary poststructuralist theories of language, identity, and power offer new perspectives on language learning and teaching, and have been of considerable interest in our field. We first review poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, and positioning and explain sociocultural theories of language learning. We then discuss constructs ofinvestmentandimagined communities/imagined identities(Norton Peirce 1995; Norton 1997, 2000, 2001), showing how these have been used by diverse identity researchers. Illustrative examples of studies that investigate how identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality interact with language learning are discussed. Common qualitative research methods used in studies of identity and language learning are presented, and we review the research on identity and language teaching in different regions of the world. We examine how digital technologies ...
Nouveaux cahiers de la recherche en éducation, 2014
Nous examinons, dans cet article, deux projets de littératie permettant de faire le pont entre le... more Nous examinons, dans cet article, deux projets de littératie permettant de faire le pont entre les sphères d’activité scolaires, familiales et communautaires. Le premier projet portait sur l’échange international de vidéos produits par des jeunes bilingues et plurilingues du primaire et du secondaire. Le deuxième projet impliquait des apprenants de l’anglais inscrits au primaire dans la création de vidéos documentaires. Le cadre théorique unissant ces deux projets permet de concevoir la production vidéo comme une forme de littératie multimodale mobilisant plusieurs moyens d’expression et ressources du répertoire linguistique. Nous présentons un récit interprétatif pour décrire les interactions entre les enfants et la technologie ainsi que les liens qu’ils tissent entre les apprentissages et les expériences vécues dans différents domaines de leur vie. Nous nous attardons aux conditions matérielles et aux discours institutionnels pour identifier comment ils influencent l’ouverture du ...
In this paper, we present excerpts from ethnographic data collected when a diverse classroom of c... more In this paper, we present excerpts from ethnographic data collected when a diverse classroom of children, some of whom were multilingual and others monolingual in English, used iPads to make videos. We discuss the practices, social relations, objects and material conditions that emerged as the children engaged in this production, with special attention to one child participating in the process. Drawing on New Literacy Studies, theories of the material and the construct sociomaterial assemblage, and another construct, production pedagogies, we analyzed the particular interactions this child engaged in while videomaking. These theoretical lenses helped us identify the challenges she faced and some of her strengths that might have been obscured from view during classroom negotiation of textual language, but were revealed when she interacted with digital technologies and multimodal texts. Video production allowed her to position herself and be positioned as knowledgeable, creative and as a legitimate peer with something to contribute.
In this article, Elizabeth Marshall and Kelleen Toohey use critical discourse analysis to examine... more In this article, Elizabeth Marshall and Kelleen Toohey use critical discourse analysis to examine educators' efforts to incorporate funds of knowledge from the communities and families of Punjabi Sikh students in a Canadian elementary school. Using MP3 players, students first recorded and then translated their grandparents' stories of life in India into picture books to serve as cultural resources in their school community. In retelling their grandparents' stories, students drew on a multiplicity of ancestral,globalized, and Western discourses in their textual and pictorial illustrations. The authors examine what happens when the funds of knowledge that students bring to school contradict normative, Western understandings of what is appropriate for children and how school might appropriately respond to varying community perceptions of good and evil.
This book in the Ablex series Language and Educational Processes is concerned with speculating ab... more This book in the Ablex series Language and Educational Processes is concerned with speculating about the relationships among family dynamics, sexual identity, attitudes toward work, and the literacy activities of thirteen children over three years from kindergarten to ...
In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contempor... more In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contemporary poststructuralist theories of language, identity, and power offer new perspectives on language learning and teaching, and have been of considerable interest in our field. We first review poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, and positioning and explain sociocultural theories of language learning. We then discuss constructs of INVESTMENT and IMAGINED COMMUNITIES/IMAGINED IDENTITIES (Norton Peirce 1995; Norton 1997, 2000, 2001), showing how these have been used by diverse identity researchers. Illustrative examples of studies that investigate how identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality interact with language learning are discussed. Common qualitative research methods used in studies of identity and language learning are presented, and we review the research on identity and language teaching in different regions of the world. We examine how digital technolog...
Advocates of critical approaches to second language teaching are interested in relationships betw... more Advocates of critical approaches to second language teaching are interested in relationships between language learning and social change. From this perspective, language is not simply a means of expression or communication; rather, it is a practice ...
This article explores ways in which gender might be productively investigated in classrooms where... more This article explores ways in which gender might be productively investigated in classrooms where students are learning English as a second language. We review studies that posit gender differences in communicative style and review feminist critiques of such studies on the basis of their essentialism and ignoring of political issues. Studies that document differences between the behaviors of boys and girls in classrooms are also examined and critiqued on the same grounds. The point is made that such explorations of difference commonly assume differences to be "normal" or "natural," merely a matter of "style," and ignore relationships of power that might be seen as instantiated in communicative events. Two projects of the authors are described in which the perceptions of a group of secondary school students of ESL about gendered speech conventions in home, community, and school were investigated. Recognizing that these students (despite diversity in ethn...
This paper represents preliminary efforts to understand what Actor-Network Theory (ANT) might con... more This paper represents preliminary efforts to understand what Actor-Network Theory (ANT) might contribute to our interest in analyzing what we hope are enhanced educational practices for second language (L2) learners. This theory encourages us to examine more closely the things, the tools, the non-human actants that are active in particular educational practices, and how those tools and not others, “exclude, invite and regulate particular forms of participation” (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010, p. 7). We identify aspects of ANT that are relevant to our work on videomaking, describe our videomaking research and provide two illustrations of how we began to see what ANT might offer in analysis of our video data and to consider its potential for guiding our ongoing fieldwork. We argue here that ANT highlights the importance of paying attention to the production of networks between both human and non-human actors during the videomaking process to understand how these interactions shape the sch...
Researchers followed 2 language minority children through their first 2 years of school, examinin... more Researchers followed 2 language minority children through their first 2 years of school, examining the influence of their parents and of school practices. Two cohorts of minority language students were followed from the beginning of kindergarten to the end of first grade. Students were observed once a week in their classrooms. Researchers kept field notes of conversations, audiotaped, and videotaped children monthly. The children's teachers were interviewed at least yearly. Bilingual research assistants conducted family and child interviews at least twice a year. This study focused on one child from each of the two cohorts. Results indicated that the children had rough transitions from home to school and from grade to grade, with teachers believing that they had fewer cognitive, social, and linguistic resources than their parents perceived. In both children's cases, the school's sorting practices negatively impacted their children's experiences. In the first chil...
This article is based on data derived from a four-year ethnographic study that followed two cohor... more This article is based on data derived from a four-year ethnographic study that followed two cohorts of ESL learners enrolled in mainstream Canadian primary classrooms from kindergarten through grade 2. It draws on sociocultural theory, based on the work of the Russian scholars Vygotsky and Bakhtin and developed in North America by Lave and Wenger (1991), Rogoff (1994), and others. In the article, we examine classroom practices that appear to offer our participants access to the linguistic resources of their community and those in which our participants appear to have limited access to these resources. Choral and small group activities are contrasted with Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequences to show contrasting possibilities for access. We argue that speech situations in classrooms that are ludic or playful, that, in Bakhtin's (1981) terms, offer ever new ways to mean, are those in which children have the possibility of appropriating the words of others and of finding v...
All the chapters in this volume share this aim-that is, to consider how, in diverse sites of lang... more All the chapters in this volume share this aim-that is, to consider how, in diverse sites of language education, practices might be modified, changed, developed, or abandoned in efforts to support learners, learning, and social change. At the same time, most of the authors here remind us that critical pedagogy cannot be a unitary set of texts, beliefs, convictions, or assumptions. Like Pavlenko (this volume), these authors describe local situations, problems, and issues and see responsiveness to the particularities of the local as important in the equitable and democratic approaches they are trying to develop. In seeking to resist totalizing discourses about critical teaching, subjects, and strategies for progressive action, we have used the term critical pedagogies in the title of our book. While each of the authors represented here uses critical lenses to reflect on the teaching and research practices in her or his community, there are important differences of focus across the chapters. We have therefore decided to divide the book into four sections, each with a slightly different emphasis. In doing so, however, we recognize that the distinctions between sections are not clear-cut and that many overlapping themes emerge. Such themes are discussed in greater detail later in this introduction.
THE FORUM TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOL professi... more THE FORUM TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOL profession. It also welcomes responses or rebuttals to any articles or remarks published here in The Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.
Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation, 2005
Chapter 3 Critical multiculturalism and second language education 30 Ryuko Kubota Chapter 4 Gende... more Chapter 3 Critical multiculturalism and second language education 30 Ryuko Kubota Chapter 4 Gender and sexuality in foreign and second language education: Critical and feminist approaches 53 Aneta Pavlenko Chapter 5 Assessment in multicultural societies: Applying democratic principles and practices to language testing 72 Elana Shohamy II CHALLENGING IDENTITIES 93 Chapter 6 Representation, rights, and resources: Multimodal pedagogies in the language and literacy classroom 95 Pippa Stein vii viii Contents Chapter 7 Subversive identities, pedagogical safe houses, and critical learning 116 Suresh Canagarajah Chapter 8 "Why does this feel empowering?": Thesis writing, concordancing, and the corporatizing university 138 Sue Starfield Chapter 9 Modals and memories: A grammar lesson on the Quebec referendum on sovereignty 158
In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contempor... more In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contemporary poststructuralist theories of language, identity, and power offer new perspectives on language learning and teaching, and have been of considerable interest in our field. We first review poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, and positioning and explain sociocultural theories of language learning. We then discuss constructs ofinvestmentandimagined communities/imagined identities(Norton Peirce 1995; Norton 1997, 2000, 2001), showing how these have been used by diverse identity researchers. Illustrative examples of studies that investigate how identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality interact with language learning are discussed. Common qualitative research methods used in studies of identity and language learning are presented, and we review the research on identity and language teaching in different regions of the world. We examine how digital technologies ...
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