Examining the World Around Us: Critical Media Literacy in Teacher Education

This article presents findings from action research conducted in a graduate level course with practicing K–12 educators. In this article, I consider the usefulness of critical media literacy in the graduate classroom as I engaged students in discussions about multicultural issues including race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Through an examination of student presentations and field notes collected over the course of the semester, I found the graduate student participants were typically quite savvy at evaluating the messages they receive from media. Further, I found the incorporation of popular media into the classroom helped students grapple with typically foreign and often theoretically dense concepts like unconscious racism and heteronormativity, as well as theories like critical race theory, intersectionality, and queer theory. The graduate student participants were able to see deep connections between text/theory and media and often used various media to illustrate theory in quite complex ways. Lastly, engaging with texts of everyday life and using visual representations helped students interrogate the concepts explored in the course and provided students access to theory otherwise regarded as inaccessible.     

物我相融:早期中國人的信仰、生活和動物觀

一早期中國人生活之地域與環境 早期中國人生活地域之遼闊,遠遠超出今人的想象.原來人們認為,流經亞洲大陸東部的黄河流域是中國文明的發源地.但是,持續近百年的考古發現和民間遠古器物(特別是玉器)收藏顯示,這個文明有着多樣的文化來源.     

Uncovering the Hidden Power of Language: Critical Race Theory,Critical Language Socialization and Multicultural Families in Korea

This study utilizes critical race theory and critical language socialization to unpack embedded ideologies regarding language usage and immigrant wives’ heritage language transmission within multicultural families in Korea. Specifically, this study unveils hidden structures and beliefs which hinder or promote immigrant women’s use of heritage languages, and its intergenerational transmission. According to Sizemore, the language used by various ethnic group members often reflects their interethnic relationships. Exploring Asian female immigrants’ experiences of marginalization in Korea, this study uncovers the complex interethnic relationship among Asians, as well as show how immigrant wives’ language usage reflects power relations within Korea.     

Pathways of Immigrant Political Socialization: Examining the Role of News Media,Social Connections,and Community Interaction

Going beyond the traditional socioeconomic status model of political participation, this study examines pathways that lead to the sociopolitical incorporation of immigrants in the USA, with a focus on the role of communication socialization agents. Using a Current Population Survey sample of 7,626 first-generation immigrants in the USA, results show that communication socialization agents significantly contribute to immigrants’ political socialization, and an important mediating path translates political learning into greater political engagement. Results also identify ethnic differences in how socialization variables affect immigrants’ socialization.     

试论"天下一彭"

彭氏的先祖始于上古陆终氏第三子鞋铿，帝尧封他于大彭（古彭城，今江苏徐州市），称大彭国，遂以国为姓。     

Intercultural engagement and relatedness: Examining mediation effects

Most research on student sojourners has studied students coming from the Majority World to Western countries, especially the United States, for undergraduate and graduate education. Though increasing greatly in numbers, shorter sojourn has not been the focus of attention. With regard to the adjustment of sojourners, research has tended to stress situational factors rather than personality. This study is different in terms of focusing on short term educational sojourn of Western students in a Majority World country and examining the effect of personal characteristics and cultural evaluation of the sojourners on their experience. Relatedness and country of origin were found to influence the cultural experience of exchange students through their cultural evaluation at baseline. Students with higher relatedness orientation had more positive cultural evaluations at baseline which then led to a more positive cultural experience in the receiving country.     

Revisiting the Relationship between Teacher Confirmation and Learning Outcomes: Examining Cultural Differences in Turkish,Chinese, and American Classrooms

This study investigates the relationship between teacher confirmation behaviors (i.e., responding to questions, demonstrating interest, interactive teaching style) and student learning outcomes (i.e., affective learning, student motivation) across three cultures: Turkey, China, and the United States. Results indicates the confirmation-learning relationship was significantly stronger in the United States and China than it was in Turkey. The findings from this study suggest that teacher confirmation is an effective teaching behavior that transcends cultures, yet the magnitude of its importance on student learning appears more relevant in America, and to a lesser extent in China, than it is in Turkey.     

Not Stopping at First: Racial Literacy and the Teaching of Barack Obama

In this article the author speaks to the teaching of Barack Obama in U.S. schools. Drawing from scholarly literature on the heroification of American historical figures in public memory, the author argues that focusing on Obama's firstness as an African American may lead students to have incomplete and misleading understandings of what the 2008 election means for American racial politics and progress. Using a racial literacy framework, the author suggests Obama's narrative as an ideal subject for furthering students’ conceptions of race in its historical and contemporary manifestations. The author concludes with pedagogical recommendations for employing Obama's narrative toward improving students’ racial literacies.     

Painting and Erasing: A Way of Self Cultivation and Purification

Bian Qing has developed a painting method of his own.He first paints on a canvas with ink so that it is filled with unique black images.These images feature distinctive characteristics.They can be perceived as concrete objects,vague landscapes or simply color blocks with no significant meanings.Then he paints on the canvas with light pigments repeatedly until the original ink images become almost invisible,or in other words,to an extent that he is satisfied with.The original ink images are so blurred and     

More Than Goth: The Rhetorical Reclamation of the Subcultural Self

I argue that Calvin Schrag's performative notion of the "self after postmodernity" provides an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to the investigation of the rhetorical functions of spectacular subcultures. Focusing my discussion on the discourse, fashion, and demeanor of goth subculturalists, I argue that active human agents through their choices, decisions, and actions, rhetorically coauthor a degree of self-constancy. The rhetorical nature of self-identity, group identity, and subcultural ideology is the focal point of my work.     

Lost and Found: Making Sense of Foreign Spaces and the Self with Public Transport

How does public transport both enable and restrict one’s negotiation and interaction with cultural, social and material landscapes? The understanding of social space and self is guided by one’s journey through those spaces, by witnessing events and public conduct. This article presents autoethnographic accounts of two communication studies researchers placed in Cape Town, South Africa, and Helsinki, Finland, for more than three months. In both situations, researchers relied on public transport with which they were unfamiliar. This study considers how those experiences were perceived, and how the researchers encountered and experienced the new social environments, local population and themselves.     

Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews

ABSTRACT

This article tracks the development of French social history from its Labroussian origins through to the uncertainties that beset the subject in the 1970s and 1980s, and the call for a tournant critique (‘critical turning point’) in response to the conceptual challenges to its traditional methodological approaches. It then describes the responses that emerged in the wake of the tournant critique, as social historians attempted to renew their field. Instead of pursuing the debate about whether ‘class' or ‘order’ was a more useful category of analysis for early modern historians, French social historians have attempted, like their colleagues in the social sciences, to make the individual rather than collectivities the central focus of their research. The article outlines three approaches which try to capture the agency of individuals: prosopography, micro-history, and network analysis. Finally, the article makes the case that longitudinal studies can provide a means through which social history's traditional concerns with explaining the ‘social’ can be met whilst not losing sight of the exciting questions posed by cultural history in the last two decades.