Counternarrating Racialized Expectations at School: The Diverse Enactments of “Non-Dominant” Identities Among 1.5-Generation Japanese Immigrant Youth

This study adds to the research on the education of Asian immigrant adolescents by situating how generation, language, nationality, and race complexly impacted how a group of 1.5-generation Japanese youth have made sense of their multiple “non-dominant” identities as immigrant Americans and transnational students within an urban high school setting that publicly promoted a mission of inclusivity but, in practice, devalued “non-dominant” cultural and linguistic expressions. The findings highlight how the youth have contested the English-only ideologies and racialized expectations at their school through alternative literacies and other diverse enactments of their identities, such as by speaking Japanese or Japanglish (a mix of Japanese and English) and expressing their “Made in Japan” pride through the public display of nationalistic symbols and various bilingual or Japanese-language textual representations. New directions are offered for theorizing 1.5-generation Asian immigrant youth linguistic expressions with implications for practice and theory.     

Letting the Story Out: Drawing on Children’s Life Stories and Identities to Help Them Read Beyond and Enhance Their Comprehension

This study aims to explore the nature of the identities constructed by EFL learners through picture-book read-alouds and the possible relationship between these identities and their literacy learning. Eight Korean students were encouraged to connect with stories through picture-book workshops. Before and after the picture-book read-alouds, tests were administered to examine whether there had been any change in the participants’ comprehension. The main findings were the following: (a) McCarthey’s frames of “appropriation,” “transformation,” and “resistance,” which characterize the identities of students as literacy learners, were able to explain the nature of the identities the students in this study constructed through the read-alouds and (b) the nature of these identities seemed to influence the students' comprehension. The results of this study suggest that teachers need to create literacy curricula that students can connect with in meaningful ways and that students should be encouraged to continually reconstruct their identities.     

Learning,literacy and identity: ‘I don’t think I’m a failure any more’

The impact of participation in adult literacy programmes on learners’ identities is examined through an interrogation of their past and current experiences and the assessment of the effect of particular pedagogies. The findings show how learners’ positive experiences in their programmes had caused them to re-evaluate their previous understandings and enabled the construction of new identities as people that are able to learn. These changes had come about through the challenging of negative discourses, the creation of new figured worlds and imagined futures, and the use of a learning curriculum where learners’ experiences were utilized as positive resources.     

Echándole ganas: The academic identities of undocumented Latino youth

This ethnographic study explores what happens in the lives of two 1.5-generation undocumented Latino youth that results in academic engagement or disengagement. It examines how turning points, policy, language proficiency, school structure, economic needs, and family and personal circumstances affect academic identities. Findings reveal how students’ agency can make a big difference in explaining the high school graduation of youth who are proficient in English. Consequently, labeling students as low or high achievers disregards the fluidity of their academic identities as well as their capacity to change their academic trajectories within society’s structural limitations.     

Transformative and Transformed: Examining the Critical Potential of Service Learner Positional Identities

Critical service learning requires that students grapple with power even as they negotiate with discourses that frame service as transformative for others, without the reciprocal effect of service learners being transformed. To highlight microprocesses in power, this article uses figured worlds to explore the positional identities of service learners based on how participants viewed their experience, perceived the service site, and understood others’ structural and biographical contexts. Three positional identities emerged from this inquiry: (1) service learner as role model, (2) service learner as future professional, and (3) service learner as beneficiary. Each successive positional identity demonstrated more critical and relational content. Positional identities that emphasized the service learner as a transformative agent featured more acriticality and less relationality than those that positioned the service learner as having been transformed. However, neither position explicitly addressed race, class, or other dimensions used to distribute power. This article illustrates the value that examining small moments of positioning might offer service learners and instructors as a reference point for their own criticality.     

Building and destroying students’ ‘academic identities’: the power of discourse in a two‐way immersion classroom

Two‐way immersion is a model for bilingual education designed to help language‐minority students develop additive bilingualism while at the same time offering language‐majority students a chance to learn a second language. There is a great deal of rhetoric around two‐way immersion that claims these programs aim to improve overall equity among diverse groups of learners. The article begins with a brief review of the available research on two‐way immersion education. Then, using Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue and Bourdieu’s and Gee’s ideas of discourse/Discourse, this article takes a close‐up look at the discourse patterns in one second‐grade two‐way immersion classroom in Northern California, with an eye to uncovering how the teacher deliberately attempts to expose students to ‘alternative’ discourses and to lead language‐minority students to construct positive identities as learners. The ultimate question the article attempts to address is whether and to what extent any classroom program can create lasting change in the larger society through exposing students to ‘alternatives’ to mainstream dominant discourses within the context of classroom norms and activities.     

Redefining “Immigrants” Through Diaspora: Educational Experience of 1.5-Generation Chinese Youth in Cupertino

Through the intersection of diaspora and immigrant education, this article investigates how Chinese youth perceive their experience of being immigrant and 1.5-generation in and out of school. The fieldwork was conducted in Cupertino, California, in 2013–2014. In total, 11 students were chosen to participate in the research. It combines an ethnographic approach with narrative inquiry. The findings discuss how the youth’s multiple identities were an interplay with their cultural imagination and practices on two various levels: their concept of “home” and their longing for flexible citizenship. This article suggests the framework of diaspora to capture the process of immigration not as an uprooted directional trajectory but rather a complex space where immigrants from a range of backgrounds come to forge their multiple identities in a globalized context. Perspectives from the youth will enable us to critically redefine the term immigrant in the context of transnationalism and globalization.     

Crowdsourcing mode-based learning activity flow approach to promote subject ontology generation and evolution in learning

ABSTRACT

Subject ontology can help implement the structured organization of knowledge for online learners and thus plays an important role in the learning process. However, building ontologies by experts is time-consuming, and the adaptation of such ontologies to different contexts might be a problem. Crowdsourcing, which allows users to build and refine ontologies during their learning process, has exhibited potential for solving this problem. In this study, a crowdsourcing mode-based learning activity flow approach is proposed to guide the learning of online learners while promoting the generation and evolution of subject ontologies using the learners’ contributions to the learning content. This flow makes full use of the learners’ wisdom during the learning process to promote self-regulated learning as well as the generation and evolution of the ontology. Based on the proposed approach, a learning support system was developed and an experiment conducted involving a Chinese lesson on “The Liangzhou Poem”. In the experiment, student participants built 722 triples, of which 584 evolved as formal items in the subject ontology. Moreover, all learners were able to construct a well-organized knowledge graph. Students in both high- and low-scoring groups contributed valuably to the knowledge generation and evolution of the subject ontology. Furthermore, while the widths of the knowledge constructed by students in high- and low-scoring groups were similar, their depths were substantially different. During this process, the crowdsourcing-based activity flow system achieved satisfactory technique acceptance, which means that the proposed approach and system are useful for the effective generation of subject ontologies while helping learners acquire knowledge.     

Iranian EFL learners’ identity construction in a critical reflective course: a case of an online course

ABSTRACT

The present mixed-methods research examined the identity and attitude of Iranian English language learners as a result of their participation in an online critical reflective course. The participants were 38 English language students who attended ten online sessions within a five-month English language course. Their online posts underwent inductive qualitative content analysis and subsequently five themes were extracted. In addition, the content of the first and last two sessions were analysed quantitatively. A validated questionnaire was also administered and 18 participants were interviewed. Qualitative and quantitative content analyses of the data revealed eight finalised codes. The analysis of the findings showed that although the participants’ identity and attitudes did not undergo material changes, their awareness of the intercultural and interlingual issues, between Persian and English language and culture, was sharpened. In addition, their online identities proved to be not set off from their offline identities nor identical to them but interrelated.     

Negotiating second-language identities in and through border crossing

In this article, I describe the ways in which two British university students negotiated their identity as second language learners during a year abroad in Italy and the extent to which their struggles helped them to ‘fit in’ into the new social and cultural contexts. Building upon the lived experiences of the two participants, I follow a poststructuralist discourse on identity, which considers identities as dynamic and in continuous evolution. In this article, I argue that the extent to which individuals are prepared to negotiate second-language identities, or conversely to resist them, can be directly influenced by the ways in which they perceive their relationships to the new contexts and by the ways in which such relationships are constructed over time and across space. I also argue that the continuous evolution of identities tends to change more rapidly in new sociocultural contexts, such as those embedded in specific experiences of border crossing.     

Prospective elementary teachers’ aesthetic experience and relationships to mathematics

Previous research has adopted various approaches to examining teachers’ and students’ relationships to mathematics. The current study extended this line of research and investigated six prospective elementary school teachers’ experiences in mathematics and how they saw themselves as learners of mathematics. One-on-one interviews with the participants were conducted, and their written reflections were collected. A grounded-theory approach and a framework for analyzing mathematics identities were adopted in data analysis. The findings showed that the participants’ development of obligations-to-oneself was associated with not only their opportunity to exercise conceptual agency but also their aesthetic experience with mathematics. Their views on themselves as learners of mathematics had cognitive, affective, and aesthetic dimensions. The findings suggest that teachers and students can engage in a reflection on their aesthetic involvement in doing mathematics. There is a need for a local theory of aesthetics in K-12 mathematics.     

Becoming transnational: exploring multiple identities of students in a Mandarin–English bilingual programme in Canada

Guided by post-structural perspectives of identities as processes of becoming and transculturation and transnationalism, this study explores how multilingual students in a Mandarin–English bilingual programme form their sense of identities in a dynamic process. Multiple forms of data are collected, including observations, interviews and documents. The findings indicate that multilingual students are mobile, namely, they move across linguistic, cultural and ethnic spaces of interaction. In addition, they challenge the dominant discourse of any fixed and hyphenated identity and take up transcultural and transnational identities that allow their comfortable circulation among different worlds. This study calls for a need to unfold children's multiple and mobile identities and explores new possibilities for life.     

Gender Identity in a Second Language: The Use of First Person Pronouns by Male Learners of Japanese

This is a qualitative sociocultural study examining how five advanced-level learners of Japanese from the United States use gendered first person pronouns to negotiate their identities. Japanese does not have a ubiquitous pronoun such as English I. Instead, the language contains forms that are marked for formality and gender, including watashi (formal/feminine), ore (informal/masculine) and boku (neutral/boyish). We collected recordings of the learners speaking with four different native-speaker interlocutors (female friend, male friend, female stranger, male stranger) and conducted retrospective interviews. The analysis shows that these learners were actively involved in choosing pronouns that indexed their identities as men, although these masculine identities were not always ratified by their Japanese interlocutors. One reason for this was that the male identities expressed by the learners were at times closer to American than to Japanese masculinities. Learners also used pronouns as a resource to index their identities as proficient speakers of Japanese.     

The reformulation of national identity in the new Taiwanese citizenship curriculum through the lens of curriculum reformers

The national curriculum reformers, regarded as members of the social elites and intellectuals, projected their vision of identity onto the curriculum which they constructed and influenced the next generation’s national consciousness. In the tangled relationship between politics and education, the selection of the reformers in a sense dictates the direction of the new curriculum. This article interviewed 18 reformers, members of the latest citizenship curriculum of 2010, to investigate their individual views on identities and the monolithically-promoted Chinese configuration in the old curriculum. Although the new citizenship curriculum, renamed Curriculum Guidelines for Civics and Society, puts nothing in writing in favour of either a Chinese or Taiwanese national identity, according to the discovery in this research, the Curriculum Committee implicitly embedded a transformed inclusive and hyphenated Taiwanese national identity in the new curriculum in the hope of accentuating Taiwan’s exclusive sovereignty. The inner thinking of the reformers is uncovered to reveal their reasoning that a broadly constructed national identity can concurrently accommodate diverse personal identities and suits the society better than the previously prescribed Chinese identity. This article also records the evolution of the curriculum from the previous China-centred narratives to Taiwan-centred narratives, something that happened in line with the changes in Taiwanese society.     

‘I’m teaching,but I’m not really a teacher’. Teaching assistants and the construction of professional identities in Hong Kong schools

Background: In the past decade, educational settings worldwide have experienced a significant increase in the number of school-based teaching assistants (TAs). The deployment of these TAs has been accompanied by reports of confusion and uncertainty about their roles and responsibilities within schools. While the need to reframe the role and purpose of TAs is recognised, it remains unclear how this can be best achieved.

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to explore the ways in which one group of TAs deployed in Hong Kong schools construct their professional identities, to understand the constraints and enablements to these processes, and to consider how different stakeholders might be able to best support this identity work.

Sample: The primary participants in this study are nine English language teacher assistants employed at different schools across Hong Kong. Other participants include full-time English language teachers who have experience of working with one of these TAs, as well as students who attend English language classes in which these TAs participate.

Design and methods: A qualitative multiple case study approach is adopted. In-depth interviews with TAs, teachers and students are used to gain a contextualised interpretation of the primary participants’ experiences of constructing professional identities within schools. A multilevel, multidimensional theoretical framework, which considers identity construction as both a discursive and experiential accomplishment, is then used to understand the constraints and enablements TAs experience in constructing these identities.

Findings: Results indicate that TAs face challenges in constructing their professional identities at institutional, interpersonal and intrapersonal levels within Hong Kong schools. In addition, the TAs believe that exercising agency to contest their positionings within schools is often insufficient to place them on a trajectory towards become a teacher. The results also suggest that the identity conflicts TAs experience can lead some to question their decision to pursue a teaching career.

Conclusions: These results imply that in order to attract and retain TAs, educational authorities need to, first, problematise identity positions such as ‘TA’ and ‘teacher’ and then reconceptualise these identities in ways that allow for a multiplication of the identity positions potentially available to all stakeholders involved in teaching within Hong Kong schools.     

Transformative and emancipatory literacy to empower

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on sociological and critical educational frames, particularly Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, in order to contest the dominant model of literacy education that is driven by the premise of a ‘knowledge economy’. Instead it foregrounds the political, social, and economic factors that marginalise learners. Data from two projects: an ethnographic study in a Further Education (FE) College in England and a study of community-based literacy programmes in Scotland, are probed to show how literacy classes can offer spaces to challenge symbolic violence and facilitate learners to reclaim identities of success. These changes are illustrated from the learners’ views of the contrasts between their experiences of school education and literacy programmes that use transformative and emancipatory approaches. Our research demonstrates how critical education can open up spaces for a more equitable approach based on the co-production of knowledge. It is argued that making changes to policy and practice could inform and shape the literacy curriculum and its pedagogy if adult literacy can disentangle itself from instrumental approaches driven by neoliberal fusion and instead create critical space for contextualised and emancipatory learning.     

Dealing with gender in the classroom: a portrayed case study of four teachers

This paper emerges from a qualitative case study that takes place in a US preschool setting and explores teachers’ influences on the construction of children’s gender identities. According to postmodern theories of gender, identity is constructed and constituted through social interactions and performances. This study focuses on the gender identities constructed as preschool teachers and students interact and learn. In this portrayed case study, we combine the methodological elements of case study and portraiture. Portraiture methods enhance the traditional case study process, authorising a more considered presentation of participants and context. Four teachers at one preschool setting are portrayed. Some of the findings include the teachers’ awareness of the importance of their interactions with students and the impact they have on students’ gender performances. We also suggest that teachers need more resources and self-awareness regarding their own gender performances; teachers’ self-knowledge may be important in disrupting gender-stereotyped teaching and social constructions, and in creating more inclusive learning spaces for all students.     

Isolated learners: young mature-age students,university culture,and desire for academic sociality

The differentiated experiences of young mature-age students are under-researched and often unacknowledged in higher education literature and university policy. This article contends that, due to their age (early 20s to early 30s), many younger mature-age students feel ‘out of the loop’ and ‘alienated’ from university culture. The sample is drawn from a large first-year subject and analyses students’ written ethnographic reflections on their identities as students within university culture. Using interpretive theory and NVivo coding software to analyse the written assignments, the experience of isolation amongst the young mature-age demographic was a prominent and unanticipated finding. Students in this age range want academic-based sociality but do not identify as either school leaver or ‘mature-age’. They feel like isolated learners. We argue young mature-age students’ experiences of social isolation pose a significant barrier to full participation, negatively impacting their identities as students and their university transition. In Australia and internationally, governments and universities have increased their enrolments of young mature-age students, but their capacity to structure learning environments to suit them are limited without greater knowledge of their diverse experiences. Taking a cultural, socially situated view of learning allows insights into students’ experiences and suggests opportunities for understanding and supporting them.     

Creating sustainable societies: developing emerging professionals through transforming current mindsets

Future professionals will bear the brunt of creating sustainable societies. Equipping them for the task is the challenge of current educators. Educational experiences facilitating the development of sustainable habits of mind are needed. This research reports on the experiences of developing scientists and engineers engaged in a sustainable energy research program. Its focus is the learners’ changing conceptions about sustainability and their role in creating sustainable societies. It is an exploratory, multi-strand, case-oriented study, utilizing mixed methods to analyze qualitative and quantitative data. The research was grounded in the literature of education for sustainability and situated learning in communities, highlighting the common threads supporting the development of a new generation of scientists and engineers with sustainable mindsets. Findings indicated learners’ concepts of sustainability were broadened from narrow, discipline-specific definitions to an understanding of sustainability as a multidisciplinary field. Learners’ developing identities from budding scientists and engineers to citizens invested in and capable of creating sustainable societies is discussed. The development of learning communities was an integral mechanism for facilitating perspective changes; however, field trips and seminars focused on exploring sustainability were identified as key influences in developing multifaceted and more complex conceptions of sustainability.     

基于新生代农民工学习特点的成人教育策略

新生代农民工的生活行为和思维方式正逐渐被城市化,城市的"向心力"日益增强,如何为他们提供继续教育的机会、提高他们自身的素质和技能、为他们更好地融入城市和充分市民化做准备等问题已引起当前政府和学术界各部门的关注。作为成人教育受教育对象的一部分,新生代农民工既有成人学员的共性,又存在着独特的个性。全面分析和把握新生代农民工的学习特点,深刻挖掘他们的教育需求,并提出相应的成人教育策略,不但能在一定程度上丰富成人教育的内容,而且对当今社会教育公平的实现、和谐社会的构建具有重要的现实意义。