Brave Forms of Mentoring Supported by Technology in Teacher Education

Indexación: Web of ScienceQuality education is undoubtedly a global concern, tied closely to preoccupations with economic and social development. Increasingly, the adoption and effective use of current technology tools are being recognized as visible signs of that quality. Scholars are providing increasing evidence of the kinds of empowered teacher identities that will adopt the effective use of technology tools in teaching. Less is being discussed about how technology can support the processes needed to mediate such identities. The context of Teacher Education is a strategic place to begin to initiate such processes. Our aim in this article is twofold: 1) to describe two recent examples of innovative, technology - supported mentoring processes that were conducted in the context of an EFL Teacher Education program in Chile; 2) to revisit the findings of these studies in light of new evidence from participants who have moved on in their careers. This evidence is viewed in the framework of recent scholarship on the responsibilities that Teacher Education plays in their development. The first 16-month study examined the influences of a guided reading program involving e-readers on the identities and literacy skills of pre-service teachers. The second was a student-conceived study. That inquiry sought to determine the influence of upper year students' peer mentoring, made available partly through a social media site (SMS), on the identities and investment in learning of 12 firs-year students in the pedagogy program. The initial evidence from ethnographic tools used in both studies indicated that the participants were struggling with confidence and doubting themselves as knowledgeable, effective future teachers - not predictive of a potential for quality teaching. Positive signs at the end of both studies and more recent reports from participants suggest that the mentoring had longitudinal benefits for some, although not uniformly. The potential of apprenticeship and mentoring in a technology-supported environment requires rethinking Teacher Education mandates if we are to empower emerging teachers to be quality teachers.http://www.ejel.org/issue/download.html?idArticle=48

A Review of the "Digital Turn" in the New Literacy Studies

Digital communication has transformed literacy practices and assumed great importance in the functioning of workplace, recreational, and community contexts. This article reviews a decade of empirical work of the New Literacy Studies, identifying the shift toward research of digital literacy applications. The article engages with the central theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic challenges in the tradition of New Literacy Studies, while highlighting the distinctive trends in the digital strand. It identifies common patterns across new literacy practices through cross-comparisons of ethnographic research in digital media environments. It examines ways in which this research is taking into account power and pedagogy in normative contexts of literacy learning using the new media. Recommendations are given to strengthen the links between New Literacy Studies research and literacy curriculum, assessment, and accountability in the 21st century

Attitudes to English as a language for international development in rural Bangladesh

The high status of English within a global economy of languages has meant that English-language education is increasingly being promoted in international development initiatives. This is despite the fact that it may seem more valuable for the estimated 1.4 billion people living in poverty in the world to focus development initiatives on the lowering of infant mortality rates, clean water supply, access to electricity, and the provision of basic education, for example. A reason for the promotion of English-language education in development contexts is in part a response to a growing conviction that English-language education can play an important role in helping people gain the resources to lift themselves out of poverty and increase their ability to participate in the world economic systems from which they have previously been excluded. Despite the strong associations often made between the English language and development, there is, however, only limited evidence showing a relationship between the two. A first step in understanding this impact is an understanding of perceptions and expectations of English learning for personal and national development, and this research project investigates these in two rural communities in Bangladesh. Through the use of an ethnographic survey of two rural areas, it studies the needs and aspirations of the local community in order to better understand perceptions of whether and if so how English-language education could productively contribute to development as part of a wider programme of social and economic support

Editorial: Grammar in the face of diversity

The river one dips one’s toes into from one editorial to the next is never the same, as Heraclitus might have observed. Part 1 of this double issue (December, 2005) consisted of eight articles from contributors based in five countries: the United States, England, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. Part 2 contains six articles and two teacher narratives from the United States (two), Scotland, the Netherlands, Australia (2), Indonesia and Denmark. The inclusion of contributors from European countries outside of the United Kingdom is a reminder that debates over the “grammar” question are not confined to the Anglophonic world. I am grateful to Amos van Gelderen and Anette Wulff for finding time to contribute to a journal, which hitherto has addressed itself to readers in a relatively small range of (officially) English speaking constituencies. I am also grateful to Handoyo Widodo for his contribution, written in the context of English-language teaching in Indonesia

Economies of signs in writing for academic publication: the case of English Medium “National” Journals

The centrality of publishing in academic journals to academic knowledge work globally is largely taken as a given. Publishing is a defining aspect of scholars’ labour in the academic world, tied to both current and possible future material conditions in which they/we work. The aim of this paper is to focus on one part of this knowledge work, the production of English medium “national” journals in local contexts where English is not the official or widely used medium of communication yet where English, in a global context, is increasingly viewed as the “academic lingua franca.” The paper begins by outlining the longitudinal study from which this focus emerged, followed by a discussion of case studies of four English medium “national” journals in the field of psychology located in four southern and central European national contexts: Hungary, Slovakia, Spain and Portugal. I argue that a focus on the specific phenomenon of EMN journals brings into sharp relief the nature and workings of the dominant knowledge economy and also illustrates the ways in which some of the key ideological values, including a market model of academic knowledge production, are to some extent being challenged. A goal of this paper is to explore this particular fragment of the academic knowledge making world—what scholars are doing, why and under what conditions —to illustrate the need for closer scrutiny of the practices surrounding academic production and to open up debate about what kind of practices we want to be involved in and why

Multimodal representation in virtual exchange: A social semiotic approach to critical digital literacy

For agentive and influential involvement in online communities, language learners and teachers need to develop critical digital literacy (CDL), conceptualized by Darvin (2017) as an awareness of “how meanings are represented in ways that maintain and reproduce relations of power” (p. 5) and thus privilege some and marginalize others online. Virtual exchange (VE) provides an ideal socio-cultural and socio-semiotic context for fostering CDL (Hauck, 2019) as it is an educational intervention that is—by default—digitally mediated. In this contribution, we examine the employment of semiotic practices for multimodal representation and how they “shape power relations with others” (Bezemer & Jewitt, 2009, p. 1), thereby drawing on a social semiotic approach (Bezemer & Kress, 2016) to CDL (Bilki et al., 2023). Our insights stem from a six-week VE between two higher education institutions in Turkey and the UK, which brought together 48 future English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers. The task-based exchanges yielded a rich dataset which allows us to illustrate how CDL is materially achieved through transformative processes observed in multicultural, multilingual, and multimodal interactions. Our findings speak to Kern’s (2014, 2015) appeal for a relational pedagogy and highlight the need to promote CDL in EFL teaching and teacher education to foster critical reflection on meaning-making conventions while exercising agency to establish powerful online relations with others

Towards a plurilingual habitus: engendering interlinguality in urban spaces

This article focuses on the potential of the multilingual city to create spaces in which monolingual hegemonies may be challenged, inclusive, intercultural values may be nurtured, and plurilingualism may be valorised. Following a contextualisation of linguistic diversity in theories of globalisation and superdiversity, discourses of deficit and power are addressed, arguing that the problematisation of multilingualism and pathologisation of plurilingualism reflect a monolingual habitus. Bringing about a shift towards a plurilingual habitus requires a Deep Approach, as it involves a critical revaluing of deep-seated dispositions. It suggests that the city offers spaces, which can engender interlinguality, a construct that includes interculturality, criticality and a commitment to creative and flexible use of other languages in shared, pluralistic spaces. It then proposes critical, participatory and ethnographic research in three multidimensional spaces: the urban school and a potential interlingual curriculum; networks, lobbying for inclusive policy and organising celebratory events in public spaces; and grass roots-level local spaces, some created by linguistic communities to exercise agency and maintain their languages and cultures, and some emerging as linguistically hybrid spaces for convivial encounter

The Influences of Teacher Multilingual Linguistic Response of Spanish English Bilingual Student Linguistic Output

Honors (Bachelor's)LinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112097/1/gzvalen.pd