‘I've never done a dissertation before please help me’: accommodating L2 students through course design

This article considers how course design accommodates the adaptation of L2 students into the early stages of the master's dissertation (Social Sciences and Humanities) at a UK university. I present a contrastive process-oriented analysis of two students' experiences on different courses, extracted from a 13-month ethnographic study in which students' self-reports (journals; interviews) were triangulated with their assignments, interviews with lecturers and classroom observation. I identify two ‘literacy events’ in the early stages: discussing the topic and preparing the proposal. In order to make visible these events, I deploy Lave and Wenger's Community of Practice model, while taking a post-structuralist view of learning as a dynamic between language, identities, power relations, affordances and agency. Findings show unequal support for these events on the two courses; I argue that this exemplifies significantly different ideologies relating to the accommodation of L2 students, and discuss implications for course design.     

The de-facto privatization of secondary education in Egypt: a study of private tutoring in technical and general schools

Most secondary school students in Egypt enrol in private tutoring in almost all subjects throughout the school year. A large proportion of students have stopped attending school altogether due to their reliance on tutoring. This study of how educational markets are perpetuated at school level finds that in the technical track catering to the working classes, the market is forced upon students through physical and verbal intimidation by teachers receiving below subsistence wages. In the more middle class general secondary track, pressure to enrol in tutoring is less direct and the market is promoted as a necessity for competitive exam readiness, despite its unclear dividends. The result has been a de-facto privatization of secondary education facilitated by a state that has determined the material conditions of teachers, failed to prevent related abuse and corruption, and reduced its investment in education to the point that the market has effectively emptied out and displaced public schooling.