Children Reading Series Books: Ways into Peer Culture and Reading Development

This article, drawing on research which aimed to explore how young children read English in Singapore, demonstrates how nine-year-old Singaporean children’s voluntary reading of series books served the dual purposes of enabling their membership of the peer group through culturated reading and the independent development of their reading skills and motivation for reading. Using interviews to encourage conversation and reflection, the research examined children’s book choices and their reasons for reading. This formed part of a topic-focussed ethnographic study in three primary schools. In addition, the article seeks to prove that Singaporean children’s choice of series books makes them readers with potential for global, intra-generational, cultural connections rather than familial, inter-generational ones, and it is especially significant educationally for less well-off families where English is not the dominant home language.     

后殖民女性主义视野下的《百感神秘》和《所罗门之歌》

华裔女性作家谭恩美和非裔女性作家托妮.莫里森是生存在美国白人主流文化里的边缘作家,她们的身份和她们的文学一样被烙上了＂他者＂的标签。从后殖民女性主义视角,特别是斯皮瓦克的＂属下＂理论,我们可以看到谭恩美作品《百感神秘》和托妮.莫里森作品《所罗门之歌》里女性人物的具有浓厚的属下气质。但是＂属下＂女性们用她们的方式在＂说话＂,同时她们的属下气质不会因为＂说话＂而得到消解。     

“流放”与“寻根”——《英国病人》中阿尔马希文化身份的后殖民解读

摘要：在《英国病人》中,人物的文化身份是一个重要的主题,小说中主人公阿尔马希不断遭受到身份问题的冲击。文本从后殖民主义角度入手,运用“流放”与“寻根”理论来剖析这种“流放”状态给阿尔马希带来的失落感,并探讨主人公“寻根”的过程。     

奴役与新生--从后殖民女性主义角度解读《宠儿》和《慈悲》中母亲形象

《宠儿》和《慈悲》是美国当代著名黑人女作家托妮·莫里森的代表作。莫里森从女性奴隶母亲的角度描写了奴隶的真实内部生活,揭示了掩盖黑人真正历史的沉重黑幕,唤起黑人群体正视历史,探索了非裔女性如何更好地确立自身的身份的途径。     

Reading an ethnology museum as pedagogical space: a multitext study

Ethnology museums have a troubled lineage as they are inheritors of a violent colonial legacy while being steeped in a positivist epistemology that seeks to order and categorize an otherwise disordered world. Educational research, similarly, is often predicated on realist knowledge principles as people are made objects to demonstrate their interactions to predict likely outcomes of various interventions. This article considers how an ethnology museum, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, can be used as a learning site by student teachers as they experience reading a museum. Student teachers, having considered examples of postcolonial theory, use this scholarship to think through and critically read AMNH. The inquiry into how student teachers read AMNH as a pedagogical space is reframed, however, by multitext interjections offered by participants themselves. The study, then, is oriented around two principal areas: how student teachers can read an ethnology museum critically and how multitexts may work to address representational problems inherent in social science research, such as education.     

‘Our common world’ belongs to ‘Us’: constructions of otherness in education for sustainable development

The aim of this article is to analyse how good intentions in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) discursively construct and maintain differences between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. The empirical material consists of textbooks about sustainable development used in Swedish schools. An analysis of how ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ are constructed and maintained is done with help from critical race theory, whiteness studies and Popkewitz’ notion of double gestures, exclusion through intentions of inclusion. The analysis departs from five dichotomies: tradition/civilisation, dirtiness/purity, chaos/order, ignorance/morality and helped/helping. We consider these dichotomies as cogwheels operating in an ‘Otherness machinery’. Through this machinery, ‘We’ are constructed as knowing, altruistic, conscious and good. The Other is simultaneously constructed as ‘uncivilised’ or as a ‘bad’ Other in need of higher moral standards. With help from these two Others, ‘Swedish exceptionalism’ is formed. The ESD project could then be understood as a colonial and excluding project, and we ask how it is possible to avoid that ‘our common world’ only belong to ‘Us’?     

Student teachers in the contact zone: developing critical intercultural ‘teacherhood’ in kindergarten teacher education

This paper reports on the results of a narrative-grounded investigation ofstudent teachers' intercultural experiences and learning during their teaching practice. Our interest is in the meaning of the intercultural contact zone and how education for diversities is conceptualised and reflected upon in Finnish teacher education. Critical event narratives were collected from 10 kindergarten student teachers' teaching practice portfolios where the focus was on observing and reflecting on diversities in education. Theoretically, the study relies on Pratt's theory of contact zone. The methods and conditions for supporting student teachers' understanding of diversities in teacher education are discussed.     

Global citizenship education in South Korea: ideologies,inequalities, and teacher voices

Guided by neoliberalism and post-colonialism, this article takes the case of global citizenship education (GCE) in South Korea to explore social studies teachers’ experiences and their everyday voices in teaching GCE. The findings demonstrated a number of barriers that teachers confront and the entrenched ideologies behind these hurdles, which contributes to the marginalisation of GCE. By drawing scholarly and policy implications that consider the complicated global/local nexus of GCE within dominant Eurocentric and neoliberal discourses, the study adds to existing research on teachers’ GCE practices from different societies and expands upon the critique of Western-centric, neoliberal perspectives embedded in GCE.     

Decolonising religious education in sub-Saharan Africa through the prism of anticolonialism: a conceptual proposition

ABSTRACT

Through the lens of an anticolonial (as opposed to postcolonial) analytical framework, this conceptual paper examines decolonising efforts (and failures) in Religious Education (RE) as a school subject in post-independent sub-Saharan Africa. It critiques the missionary/European epistemological hegemony that continues to render RE a colonial rather than a postcolonial project. Beyond rhetoric of the impact of colonialism, the paper laments the perversity of a ‘colonial caged mentality’ affecting the conceptualisation of RE in what is supposed to be a postcolonial milieu in which Africans should design school curricula that suit their particular needs. It calls for the re-conceptualisation of RE de-linked from colonial/Eurocentric thought patterns and presents an ‘envisioned’ decolonised RE (post-confessional, inclusive and multi-faith) that speaks to the political and socio-cultural reality of a postcolonial environment in sub-Saharan Africa. The argument in this paper is that sub-Saharan Africa should yearn for a paradigm shift not only to ensure the decolonisation of the RE curriculum, but also crucially to challenge embedded colonial residues inherent in stakeholders ‘manning the gates’ ensuring that decolonised RE is supported and implemented effectively in the curriculum and schools.     

Internationalisation and indigenisation in Papua New Guinea’s universities: promoting authentic agency

ABSTRACT

In uncertain times for higher education learning communities, the risks of societal and epistemic dependence on a single globally dominant set of academic knowledge practices are evident. Nonetheless, many higher education institutions in developing nations struggle to achieve international presence unless they uncritically adopt these dominant practices, even where they recognise the need to use and promote local knowledge systems. We explore these dynamics in postcolonial Papua New Guinea, through an assessment of the intentions for internationalisation of the six PNG universities and barriers to agency. Our approach recognises the dialectical relationship between ‘internationalisation’ and ‘indigenisation’. We suggest that a pervasive but narrow view of indigenisation, emphasising the localisation of university staff, has hampered other forms of both indigenisation and internationalisation, producing more stasis than synthesis within PNG’s universities. Effective international agency by PNG universities, and their partners, requires more critical and continuous discourse between the international and the indigenous.