Teachers and public engagement: an argument for rethinking teacher professionalism to challenge deficit discourses in the public sphere

In the context of public debates on teacher quality, both media and education policy texts construct deficit discourses about teachers, discourses that work together to inform public, commonsense understandings of teacher quality. This paper explores the interrelationships between discourses on teachers constructed on television and in policies in the Australian policy context. Critical discourse analysis was employed to trace the links between the discourses on teachers constructed in a television situation comedy and discourses in the policy documents that inform the Australian Government Quality Teacher Programme. The paper demonstrates the interdiscursivity of media and policy discourses on teacher quality by analysing the ways that the television sitcom constructed a particular version of teachers within the quality policy context. The analysis highlights the need for teachers to challenge these deficit discourses. The paper concludes by arguing for a rethinking of teacher professionalism in ways that include active engagement in public debates on education.     

Empowering English as an Additional Language students through digital multimodal composing

While digital multimodal composing, underpinned by a critical literacies approach, provides opportunities for students to make informed semiotic choices and voice concerns about social issues, there is limited research exploring how digital multimodal composing is employed to interrogate and challenge the entanglements of language, immigration status and power. This article explores how 23 primary-aged English as an Additional Language (EAL) students (Years 3–6) engaged in digital multimodal composing, in the context of an after-school multiliteracies programme in one Australian school. Conceptualising critical literacies as a bridge to access and transform codes of power, the article explores how the participating students selected and used different semiotic resources for their digital texts while challenging and redefining dominant discourses based on their lived experiences and interests. The study found that both students and pre-service teachers found value in students having access to digital technologies and experimenting with a range of multimodal and multilingual resources to create digital texts, which reflected cultural and linguistic identities. The findings illustrate how the creation of digital multimodal and multilingual texts allows for opportunities for students to reposition themselves as knowledgeable and active meaning-makers with strategic support from teachers and peers.     

ICT and Language Teacher Development in the Global South: A New Materialist Discourse Analysis

In this article, I present insights from a discourse analytic study in which I examined publications that emerged from a teacher development program in Bangladesh. The program, known as English in Action, utilizes information and communication technologies to deliver professional development activities to English-language teachers. Now in its 8th year, the program claims great success in developing teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and capacity. The primary purpose of this article is to analyze the discourses that this program uses to claim success. Building on Hargreaves and Fullan's (1992) three integrated approaches to teacher development, I analyzed a large corpus of texts. I drew on the recent scholarship on new materialism to guide the analysis. The findings suggest that most of the discourses that English in Action uses are detached from the material reality in which teachers live, learn, and work. I conclude the article with a call for using a new materialist lens to read dominant discourses about ICT-use in teacher professional development.     

Silencing the everyday experiences of youth? Deconstructing issues of subjectivity and popular/corporate culture in the English classroom

This paper investigates the influence of popular/corporate culture texts and discourses on the subjectivities and everyday social experiences of young people, and the extent to which such influences are critically analysed in the English classroom. I present two levels of synthesised information using data analysis born of a mixed-methods postgraduate research project with a group of 15- and 16-year-old high school students in Perth, Australia. First, I argue that popular culture texts position young people to assume subjectivities that are heavily informed by the ideologies and discourses of popular/corporate culture. Moreover, I argue that young people's social currency is often defined by the extent to which individuals demonstrate an alliance to such ideologies and discourses, and that individuals who deviate from popular norms experience subjugation and exclusion within peer and social settings. Second, I deal pedagogically with subject English and areas of it that hold relevance in terms of the integration and analysis of ‘the popular’. I argue that many students feel their teachers are ‘out of touch’ with the everyday realities of young people and their popular culture influences, and that there is a lack of commitment by teachers to critically analyse popular culture texts in the classroom. The paper concludes by arguing that such failures risk producing students whose everyday experiences are silenced and who are denied the critical learning spaces necessary to deconstruct the ways they are positioned to adopt certain subjectivities. Moreover, critical and progressive pedagogical praxis need to be further deployed by educators in order to effectively analyse the relationship between youth subjectivities and popular/corporate culture discourses.     

Latinx* popular culture imaginaries: examining Puerto Rican children’s social discourses in interpreting telenovelas

Abstract

In this paper, we present a collaboration project within one urban Puerto Rican classroom, focused on constructing a critical literacy inquiry curriculum grounded in the students’ out-of-school literacy practices in their communities, including their experiences with media and popular culture. We focused on a critical literacy and media inquiry unit centered on the students’ self-selected subject of the telenovela. Here, we examine one student’s work to highlight two overarching findings: (1) the visibility of the students’ complex understanding of the media landscapes in telenovelas, particularly the construction of dominant social discourses across telenovela worlds, and (2) the ways that bringing children’s mediatized cultural imaginaries in their creative work supports an approach to literacy in classrooms, where explorations of discourses of power emerge from the students’ knowledge. In order to articulate how children actively examine and construct discourses across multiple social worlds, we examine these findings using the Four Resource Model, and elements of discourse analysis, as theoretical and analytical frameworks, focusing on the construction of identities, worlds and meanings in relation to the social discourses of telenovelas.     

'For the Sake of the Children' as the Worth of the Teacher? The Gendered Discourses of the New Zealand National Kindergarten Teachers' Employment Negotiations

Within the texts from the 1992 National Kindergarten Teachers' Collective Employment Contract Negotiations, using Foucault's interpretation of 'discourse', dominant discourses were identified. Two of these discourses illustrate the gendered nature of the position of kindergarten teachers in New Zealand, which I have called 'Children First' and 'For the Sake of the Children'. These discourses can be seen to be used tactically to affect the outcomes of the negotiations, and have 'their' view accepted as 'reality'. Each sited teachers in a powerless position for negotiating wages and working conditions, but presented different possibilities outside of the negotiating setting. This paper addresses these two discourses, which most clearly illustrated the gendered nature of the position of New Zealand kindergarten teachers.     

Linguistic Features of Middle School Environmental Education Texts

The language used in environmental education texts has linguistic features that affect students' comprehension of concepts and their ability to envision solutions to environmental education problems. This paper shows what 143 middle school students focused on and what they failed to focus on when reading texts about biodiversity issues and identifies linguistic features of the texts that can account for this. Since much evaluation of students' knowledge of academic subjects, including environmental education, is done through reading and writing assignments, it is important to examine how environmental education texts present issues to students and what students write after reading environmental education texts. We suggest that features of texts such as abstract nouns and lack of explicit agents impede students' full comprehension of complex issues and obscure the causes and solutions to environmental problems. We present guidelines for teachers and materials writers to make abstract concepts more accessible to middle school students.     

Creating Catch 22: zooming in and zooming out on the discursive constructions of teachers in a news article

The media regularly present negative news articles about teachers and teaching. This paper focuses particularly on one such news article. Using reflective analytic practices, first we zoom in to conduct a detailed analysis of the text. We find that complex and contradictory moral categories of teachers are assembled within and through the text. We then zoom out to consider the potentially detrimental effects of such public discourses on teachers and the teaching profession. We make visible the dominant discourses in this text, illuminating some of the societal issues and practices that are textually constituted within this and other news articles about teachers. We provide evidence of a public discourse that might be contributing towards continuing concerns and negative public opinion regarding teacher quality and schooling standards. We argue that such news articles may well work to influence public opinion regarding declining teacher quality and standards, and views of public schools as being in crisis, creating moral panic.     

Teachers’ monitoring of students’ text comprehension: can students’ keywords and summaries improve teachers’ judgment accuracy?

We investigated intra-individual monitoring and regulation in learning from text in sixth-grade students and their teachers. In Experiment 1, students provided judgments of learning (JOLs) for six texts in one of three cue-prompt conditions (after writing delayed keywords or summaries or without a cue prompt) and then selected texts for restudy. Teachers also judged their students’ learning for each text, while seeing - if present - the keywords or summaries each student had written for each text, and also selected texts for restudy. Overall, monitoring accuracy was low (.10 for students, ?.02 for teachers) and did not differ between cue-prompt conditions. Regulation, indexed by the correlation between JOLs and restudy selections, was significant (?.38 for students, ?.60 for teachers), but was also not affected by cue-prompt condition. In Experiment 2, teachers judged students’ comprehension of six texts without knowing the students’ names, so that only the keywords and summaries, not prior impressions, could inform judgments. Again, monitoring accuracy was generally low (.06), but higher for keywords (.23) than for summaries (?.10). These results suggest that monitoring intra-individual differences in students’ learning is challenging for teachers. Analyses of the diagnosticity and utilization of keywords suggest that these may contain insufficient cues for improving teacher judgments at this level of specificity.     

Contesting education policy in the public sphere: media debates over policies for the Queensland school curriculum

This paper investigates the work of media discourses on education policy in public debates over the Queensland school curriculum. It draws on theories of discourse, theories that have recently influenced the field of policy sociology, to outline a conceptualization of policy and media texts as discourses in the public sphere. In so doing, it notes the significant contribution such public discourses on education make to the policy process. The paper employs critical discourse analysis to investigate the discursive constructions of curriculum during one particular policy initiative. The analysis focuses on newspaper debates over the inclusion of a subject called Health and Physical Education (HPE) in the Queensland secondary school curriculum. The paper shows how educational policy issues were discursively constituted and contested through the construction of public discourses on education policy. In particular, it demonstrates how such public discourses worked to construct authoritative voices on educational policy. The paper concludes with a call to teachers and policymakers to seek opportunities to construct an authoritative public voice on issues of education policy.     

Troubling “understanding mathematics in-depth”: Its role in the identity work of student-teachers in England

In this paper, we focus on an initiative in England devised to prepare non-mathematics graduates to train as secondary mathematics teachers through a 6-month Mathematics Enhancement Course (MEC) to boost their subject knowledge. The course documentation focuses on the need to develop “understanding mathematics in-depth” in students in order for them to become successful mathematics teachers. We take a poststructural approach, so we are not interested in asking what such an understanding is, about the value of this approach or about the effectiveness of the MECs in developing this understanding in their participants. Instead we explore what positions this discourse of “understanding mathematics in-depth” makes available to MEC students. We do this by looking in detail at the “identity work” of two students, analysing how they use and are used by this discourse to position themselves as future mathematics teachers. In doing so, we show how even benign-looking social practices such as “understanding mathematics in-depth” are implicated in practices of inclusion and exclusion. We show this through detailed readings of interviews with two participants, one of whom fits with the dominant discourses in the MEC and the other who, despite passing the MEC, experiences tensions between her national identity work and MEC discourses. We argue that it is vital to explore “identity work” within teacher education contexts to ensure that becoming a successful mathematics teacher is equally available to all.     

Postcolonial Literature and the Politics of Representation in School Programs

This article explores theoretical and pedagogical frameworks for re-evaluating literary curricula and reading practices in contemporary school classrooms. Data from a study of students' responses to reading international literature in a multi-ethnic urban Canadian high school and conversations with South African high school students on their reading preferences ground this discussion of how students and teachers can cross borders constructed within discourses of race, gender, and ethnicity. Drawing on postcolonial literary theory, critical theory, and reader response theories, the article considers the questions, concerns, and dilemmas that emerge when students begin to deconstruct misrepresentations of "others" in literary texts and acknowledge challenges to their perceptions of self.     

初中英语阅读教学对教师文体知识的要求

阅读教学是中学英语教学的主要内容和形式。学生的词汇、语言知识和阅读技能的获得主要是在阅读中进行的。因此,初中英语教师要具备文体知识,并且在阅读教学中使用文体分析方法培养学生对英语篇章的观察、理解、和欣赏能力,帮助学生了解各类不同文体的特点,学会运用阅读技能更快、更全面地获取文中信息,并最终提高英语表达能力。     

情景语境与广告语篇的语言选择

广告作为一种推销语篇体裁，意义在于其交际目的和交际效果，这就要求广告撰写者准确地把握语篇的文化语境和情景语境，才能实现其预定的目的和效果。本文运用系统功能语言学的语境理论，主要从情景语境中的语域变体，即语场、基调和方式三个方面分析广告语篇中的语言选择，探讨在具体语境下广告创作如何取得“适切性”，达到预期的交际目的和效果，以及运用系统功能语言学的语境理论来分析广告语篇的可行性。     

'The Trouble with Our Schools': A media construction of public discourses on Queensland schools

This paper gives an account of competing public discourses on schooling. In particular, it investigates one newspaper's coverage of the release of an educational report. The paper combines interview data with a critical discourse analysis of newspaper texts to show how media reporting of Queensland schools constructed a preferred discourse on education that represented schools as being in crisis, 'in trouble'. The analysis describes how the paper shaped popular opinion on educational policy through the construction of public discourses of crisis in education. Further, the analysis shows how this discourse positioned particular groups as the authoritative voice on standards in Queensland schools. It shows how, at a time when teacher quality was under question, the media constructed a public discourse that diminished the authority of teachers to speak about education policy, granting that authority to the newspaper's editor, who assumed the people's voice on educational issues. This analysis of the construction of public discourses about education policy gives insights into the media's place in educational policy-making. In so doing, the paper adds to the small body of literature that investigates the relationships between the media and education.     

Why teachers find it difficult to include students with EBD in mainstream classes

In Sweden, teachers in mainstream schools show frustration and insecurity about how to organise education for inclusion and diversity. This article contributes to the understanding of how they articulate their view of the advantages and disadvantages of including students with EBD in mainstream classes. To study teachers’ understanding, an approach of discourse theory which takes inspiration from Laclau and Mouffe (1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso) was applied. The empirical material consisted of 6 focus group interviews and 37 individual interviews based on stimulus texts. According to the results, the prevailing discourses focused on the disadvantages of it. However, they were articulated differently and filled with meaning mainly by three recurring nodal points: (1) problems, (2) dilemmas and (3) impossibility. The advantages of including students with EBD in mainstream classes were only to be found in the antagonistic discourses. They were articulated in different ways but were overpowered by others and therefore failed to fix the meaning. The overall conclusion is that teachers base their understanding on both their experiences and on the policy of the Educational Act, but the pragmatic discourse of the disadvantages was hegemonic to the ideological antagonistic discourse of the advantages.     

Promoting Mr. ‘Chips’: the construction of the teacher/computer relationship in educational advertising

The £1 billion government drive to integrate information and communications technology (ICT) into UK schools and colleges has been firmly focused on the technological transformation of the teaching profession. In particular, the establishment of a National Grid for Learning (NGfL) remains dependent on the successful ‘selling’ of ICT to teachers; many of whom have previously proved unwilling to use computers. In practice much of this task has been left to IT firms, eager to promote their products to a potentially lucrative educational marketplace. From this basis the present paper takes a detailed examination of educational computing advertising material currently being produced by IT firms in the UK. In particular it concentrates on how advertisements construct both the process of education and the teacher as a potential user of ICT. Four dominant themes emerge from this analysis: ICT as problematic for teachers; ICT as a problem solver for teachers; ICT as a futuristic form of education; and ICT as a traditional form of education. Despite the conflicting, and often contra-factual, nature of these four discourses the paper argues that educational computing advertising is consistent in its disempowering portrayal of the teacher at the expense of both the computer and IT firm. This ‘demotion’ of the teacher is likely to have negative effects on the way that teachers approach ICT as part of their professional routine, running contrary to the underlying aims of the National Grid for Learning initiative.     

义务教育阶段师生对新课程教科书认同情况的研究

2001年开始的国家基础教育课程改革是一场全面而深刻的变革.教科书作为师生展开教学对话的文本、媒介和工具,师生对新教科书的认同情况将直接影响课程改革的进程.通过对师生基于教科书认同现状的文献梳理,发现教师对新课程教科书的内容选取及呈现方式等认同度不高,而学生对新课程教科书的插图、内容难度等的认同度较高.师生对教科书的认同程度受到教师对新课程的理解以及学生的差异、学习兴趣等的影响.     

Study abroad as governmentality: the construction of hypermobile subjectivities in higher education

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the concept of hypermobility, the paper examines a case of study-abroad mobility from a governmentality perspective. Based on a critical analysis of policy texts and interviews with Irish students who have taken part in the Erasmus exchange programme, it argues that under the conditions of neoliberal globalisation, the normalisation of study abroad aims to produce self-governing practices that align with dominant discourses promoting voluntarist attitudes to labour mobility. These dispositions, described as hypermobility, are an additional dimension of the flexible, entrepreneurial subject imagined in neoliberal societies. The paper examines the discourses and practices at state and institutional levels and how they circulate and impact on students’ subjectivities – analysing affective detachment from home and cosmopolitan sociability as self-disciplining practices that align with the production of neoliberal hypermobile subjectivities.     

Reading for meaning: The foundational knowledge every teacher of science should have

Reading is fundamental to science and not an adjunct to its practice. In other words, understanding the meaning of the various forms of written discourse employed in the creation, discussion, and communication of scientific knowledge is inherent to how science works. The language used in science, however, sets up a barrier, that in order to be overcome requires all students to have a clear understanding of the features of the multimodal informational texts employed in science and the strategies they can use to decode the scientific concepts communicated in informational texts. We argue that all teachers of science must develop a functional understanding of reading comprehension as part of their professional knowledge and skill. After describing our rationale for including knowledge about reading as a professional knowledge base every teacher of science should have, we outline the knowledge about language teachers must develop, the knowledge about the challenges that reading comprehension of science texts poses for students, and the knowledge about instructional strategies science teachers should know to support their students’ reading comprehension of science texts. Implications regarding the essential role that knowledge about reading should play in the preparation of science teachers are also discussed here.