Subtractive Schooling: US-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring: A. Valenzuela

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 technologies may be affecting language learners' identities, and how learner resistance impacts language learning. Recent critiques of research on identity and language learning are explored, and we consider directions for research in an era of increasing globalization. We anticipate that the identities and investments of language learners, as well as their teachers, will continue to generate exciting and innovative research in the future.

/pdf/identity-language-learning-and-social-change-8vig14nxdj.pdf

Identity, language learning, and social change

One day, you will discover a new adventure and knowledge by spending more money. But when? Do you think that you need to obtain those all requirements when having much money? Why don't you try to get something simple at first? That's something that will lead you to know more about the world, adventure, some places, history, entertainment, and more? It is your own time to continue reading habit. One of the books you can enjoy now is all you need to know about action research here.

All You Need to Know about Action Research

Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. James V. Wertsch

Book Review: Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach (2nd ed.):

* Ganda,1 a ninth grader from Nepal who was in the United States while his father completed a doctoral degree, and Nicholas, a ninth-grade immigrant from Ukraine, burst into the ESL room minutes after the seventh-period bell had rung. After checking out who was in the room and having a small conversation about the location of Kathmandu on one of the classroom maps, they sat down and attended to the task that had brought them to the ESL room. They told Judy, a volunteer tutor, that their science teacher had sent them there to get help completing their quizzes. One question read, 'You are at station two. Look at the model and describe the processes." Ganda and Nicholas were allowed to bring their quizzes but not the models to the ESL room, thus complicating how much help a tutor or teacher could offer. "What's happening in your science class now?" Judy asked. "Oh, the teacher is going over the quiz with the students. He's explaining the answers to them," Nicholas replied (field notes, October 22, 1998).

Whose Definition of Success? Identifying Factors That Affect English Language Learners' Access to Academic Success and Resources

Here we share findings from a 9-month qualitative case study involving a school–university professional development inquiry into how teachers develop, implement, and interpret community-based pedagogies (CBPs), an asset-based approach to curriculum that acknowledges mandated standards but begins with recognizing and valuing local knowledge. After describing the structure and activities of the professional development project, we focus on the work and perspectives of four teachers at one public school in Bogota. The challenges identified were outweighed by the benefits, including increased student engagement, motivation, family–school involvement, and an appreciation of local knowledge as curriculum resource. In addition to generating rich curriculum exemplars in chemistry, social studies, and language arts, the teachers’ interpretations and enactments of CBPs indicate that CBPs are flexible enough to allow multiple entry points, teacher autonomy, and ownership, and share enough commonalities with other pe...

Developing a Deeper Understanding of Community-Based Pedagogies With Teachers: Learning With and From Teachers in Colombia

This article presents findings from the first year of a 3-year qualitative case study investigating teacher knowledge and voice in an ESOL curriculum development project. Participants were nine elementary ESOL teachers, a school district coordinator, and a university researcher. This study engages the strand of research on teacher learning and knowledge that investigates the role of social and institutional context in teacher learning. This context includes both concrete and sociocultural factors: from the number of students and available materials to the values and ideologies that inform policies and practices. Findings indicate that teachers' knowledge of context served as a critical mediator in curriculum development in three principal ways: establishing trust and gaining access, articulating and defining needs and concerns, and identifying and critiquing political factors that affect teachers' work. I argue that contextualizing is a form of teacher praxis, an articulation of the theory-practice dynamic in which teachers consider a range of intricate contextual factors as they work to develop a conceptual framework that will inform their work. These findings can help teacher educators and others understand the role of context in teachers' knowledge production. If teacher educators hope to help ESOL teacher learners succeed in their classrooms and learning communities, they must acknowledge the complexity of those communities and the factors that affect successful negotiation in them.

ESOL Teachers´ Knowledge of Context as Critical Mediator in Curriculum Development.

Over the last 25 years, autobiography has gained increasing epistemological and methodological popularity and legitimacy in teacher education. Although this trend has opened up valuable new lines of inquiry, it has not been unproblematic. We have moved beyond the romantic, uncritical celebration of stories to the recognition of autobiographies as complex political texts that, when not open to inquiry and contextual analysis, can reinforce oppressive dominant ideologies. The teacher essay presented here, drawing on the growing field of self-study in teacher education, examines the role of particular social and political contexts in the production of autobiographies but also challenges teachers and teacher-educators to reflect on their roles in creating the contexts that affect autobiographical texts. The heart of the article is a narrative analysis of two specific incidents of self-censorship that occurred in teacher-education classrooms located in communities with undercurrents of anti-Semitism and homophobia. In exploring these instances of censorship, I question how censoring my sexual identity in an autobiography shared with my methods students may have been linked to one of my students censoring her Jewish identity in her autobiography. I argue that we can use our own experiences of self-censorship to question the kinds of pedagogical spaces we help create and sustain, an important issue in understanding how difference is denied or acknowledged in classroom spaces. Recommendations include: analyzing and critiquing the sociopolitical contexts in which classrooms are embedded (e.g., school and community); broadening the autobiographical frame to include more listening and attending to what students share outside of written texts; and recognizing silence not as a deficit of language but as a “counterlanguage” (Lewis, 1993) and as a “strategic suspension” (Hurtado, 1996) that can lead to political action.

Lives Stories Don’t Tell: Exploring the Untold in Autobiographies

Inspired by the recognition of teachers and teacher learning in the knowledge base and the calls for greater attention to the pedagogies and development of teacher educators, in this brief essay we...

Judy Sharkey

Papers

Whose Definition of Success? Identifying Factors That Affect English Language Learners' Access to Academic Success and Resources

Developing a Deeper Understanding of Community-Based Pedagogies With Teachers: Learning With and From Teachers in Colombia

ESOL Teachers´ Knowledge of Context as Critical Mediator in Curriculum Development.

Lives Stories Don’t Tell: Exploring the Untold in Autobiographies

Missing a S-STEP? How self-study of teacher education practice can support the language teacher education knowledge base: