Does the Model of Language in the National Literacy Strategy Create Failure for Pupils from Differing Language Backgrounds?

The National Literacy Strategy (NLS) was introduced by the government in the wake of the hotly debated issue of falling educational standards in the UK. All schools were required to adopt the NLS Literacy Hour unless they could show their preferred programme would result in raised levels of achievement. My experience of delivering the Literacy Hour has been a process of adaptation to the needs of my pupils, who are drawn mainly from groups whose language backgrounds differ from that which is dominant in school. I have found that the requirements of NLS, together with many of the commercial resources used to teach it, are not appropriate for pupils from these groups and a question arose: is it the pupils who are in some way deficient or is it the approach and the resources being used? This article takes a case study of the use of a commercially produced resource to explore the model of language implicit in NLS, the kinds of resources it generates and the ways in which this creates failure in pupils from different language backgrounds. It then considers the New Literacy Studies and their implications for an alteration in our approach.     

用信息技术诠释乡土文化——历史文化名城保护与建筑教育的和谐共振

长江大学建筑学专业有两个立足点：其一是历史文化名城荆州深厚的文化底蕴和乡土气息，其二是地方院校建筑教育的生存发展空间。建筑教育应该同本地具体的区域经济、历史文脉、生态环境相结合，利用数字化信息技术研究并促进乡土建筑与自然环境的完美和谐，引导学生探求一种具有乡土特色的建筑创作思想和理念。     

广东省独立学院核心竞争力研究——基于教师科研能力的视角

文章通过对广东省独立学院教师科研现状的梳理及分析,提出了加强独立学院教师科研能力的对策,对独立学院在新形势下如何开展科研工作进行了有针对性的探索。     

Seeing one another as “other”

In this paper, the authors discuss two complementary life history research projects investigating prospective teachers' identities in relation to their race and social class. Drawing on the experiences of one student from each study, they show how both whites and students of color primarily thought about one another as “others”—people who fundamentally differed from one another and whom they understood through preconceived ideas about a group. The authors draw on a Bakhtinian notion of how a “surplus of sight” enables one to develop understandings of an “other” and also of oneself.