Does equal access mean treat the same? From theory to practice in the classroom of the English as an Additional Language learner in Ireland - towards a transformative agenda.

While a substantial body of research exists on First and Second Language Acquisition (SLA), research on the language acquisition process that a language minority student goes through when they are acquiring a second language in an environment where both the host language and the language of instruction is the second language has been largely unexplored. Pedagogical practices that espouse language learning theories facilitate both the language development and integration of the language minority child into the classroom. This paper will look at various linguistic variables within the field of SLA which are of particular relevance to the language acquisition process of such students. By embedding these linguistic factors into pedagogical practices, educators can engage with a transformative framework which will not only aid their linguistic and cognitive development, but will also empower the students by developing their critical language skills and facilitate their ability to access the mainstream curriculum

Running hand in hand : the librotraficantes mapping cultural resistance in the US Mexico borderlands

In January 2012, a groundbreaking K-12 Mexican American Studies [MAS] program in Tucson was dismantled by the State. The program had been implemented in the late 1990s to help reverse negative educational and socioeconomic trends within local Chicanx communities. The MAS curriculum had questioned prevailing national identity discourse, countering majoritarian myths of the founding and the functioning of the United States. Despite validated evidence of the program’s successful learning outcomes, it was ruled anti-American and seditious by a right-wing conservative legislature, and subsequently found to contravene state law. The books of the program’s bibliography were removed from the classrooms, these included texts considered a critical part of the canon of Chicanx, African American, and Native American literature. The news of the State’s dismantling of the MAS program resonated with Chicanx community groups across the Southwest, communities long embattled by the outcomes of majoritarian politicking and definitions of justice. One such group, Houston-based Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say [NP], decided to act. NP’s strategy was to return books from the removed MAS bibliography to the program’s students. To do so, the group applied a critical understanding of the racialized criminalization of their communities to then fourteen years of counter/storytelling organizing. Hereby, the Librotraficante Movement was born. In praxis, a group of thirty-eight “book smugglers” who, over a period of five days in March 2012, took a caravan of texts to Tucson, engaging on route with community sites in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. My project utilizes the caravan’s route as a framework to investigate Chicanx resistance in the contested US Mexico borderlands. I pay particular attention to Texas. Annexed in 1845 by the White Supremacist urges of Manifest Destiny, and bordered in 1848 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo saw Mexico stripped of fifty-percent of its territory, Texas has long been on the frontline of the making of the United States. This “making” brought about not only much of the geopolitical space of the nation, but the racialization of those who now found themselves, in the words of Mexican General José Mariano Salas in 1856, “strangers in their own land” (qtd. in Griswold del Castillo 1990, 3). Post-Hidalgo, said “strangers” were disenfranchised by settler-colonialism. They were surveilled and brutalized by the Texas Rangers, and from 1924 by the US Border Patrol whose praxis at that time, as Kelly Lytle Hernández argues, “was a matter of community, manhood, whiteness, authority, class, respect, belonging, brotherhood, and violence in the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands” (2010, 41). Little has changed. Yet, in this often-visceral contested space, Mexican heritage communities continue to struggle and thrive. The Librotraficante caravan’s Texas journey maps myriad resistance to historical and contemporary trauma as it “operates”, in Ofelia Garcia and Camila Leiva’s words, “within a dynamic network of cultural transformation” (2014, 203). This dissertation brings to light a legacy of Chicanx cultural resilience that troubles US-centric narrative constructions of identity and belonging. My work is located at the intersections of Cultural, Chicanx, Borderlands, American, Literary, and Ethnic Studies, and the Political and Social Sciences. It is at these intersections that sites in my four case-study cities (Tucson, Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso) operate in response to, and despite, historical and contemporary oppressions. Said oppressions take the shape of, but are not limited to, epistemological colonization, NAFTA, gentrification, right-wing politicking, border militarization, anti-immigrant discourse, and the persistent marking of brown bodies as “illegal”. My goal is to elevate the historical, cultural, political, and literary consciousness produced by the resistance organizing of the sites. This, I argue, is a consciousness that arises from within the community’s collective experiences

Crossing Borders: Transformative Experiences of Euro American Bilingual Teachers in a Spanish Speaking Context, A Participatory Study

Digitized thesi

Across Imagined Boundaries: Understanding Mexican Migration to Georgia in a Transnational and Historical Context

The Mexican immigrant community in Georgia grew at a dramatic rate between 1970 and 2000 as individuals entered the area to participate in the states burgeoning economy. Social networks played an integral role in this process, transferring information about Georgia through family and friendship bonds that stretched between sending and receiving communities across the United States and Mexico. This thesis examines the transnational characteristics of social networks as they influenced Mexican migration trends, responded to economic opportunity and crisis across North America, and challenged government attempts to restrict and regulate the movement of people across international boundaries. Conditions in Mexico greatly affected the migration flows entering the United States and Georgia; social networks developed close, transnational connections between these communities that fostered new forms of cultural expression, economic development, and political reaction during this thirty year span

Māori media : a study of the Māori "media sphere" in Aotearoa/New Zealand

This thesis examines Māori media use and participation in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. A number of news media formats are examined and consideration is given to what the most effective formats for Māori communications are. It is argued throughout the thesis that the commercial imperatives of mainstream media compromise the potential for Māori participation and content. It is asserted that the ideal media model for Māori communication is a combination of big and small media, with Māori active partnership and inclusion of Māori content in prime-time slots within mainstream media and with Māori-controlled media serving the diversity of Māori cultural needs and the demands for local communication. The thesis argues that Māori participation in the news media is vital for Māori self-identity and self-determination because both printed and electronic media are major sources of information about local, national and global issues. It describes how the European colonisers defined Māori people as “the Other” and denigrated their language and culture, and it argues that the current Pākehā-dominated media have continued this process. In view of this, the thesis contends that the advances in electronic media now make it possible for Māori people not only to access the media, but to control their own media, redressing this cultural disadvantage by setting their own information and cultural agendas, producing new cultural forms and methods of distribution. At the same time, the thesis notices how political rhetoric about the media being used for te reo Māori regeneration and Māori education and development, in practice lacked adequate complementary policies and funding. Finally, the thesis details the commitment of Māori broadcasters and publishers in Aotearoa/ New Zealand to using radio, television, online and print publications for Māori communication despite this lack of support

Taking a pedagogical turn: What happens when the student /teacher conference moves to the center of the basic writing course

This dissertation examines the redesign of a basic writing course at a large, urban, majority-minority public university in Miami, Florida. In the redesigned course, there are no regular class meetings at all. Instead, small groups of five students meet with a teacher in writing circles, where they workshop papers. The content of the course is provided by a third-party software program in a dedicated computer lab. The redesign project is examined in light of the particular institutional history of Florida International University, with special emphasis on the roles of space, time, and face-to-face interaction in the teaching of writing to a richly diverse student body. Support for the course redesign is adduced from the work of other scholars in social linguistics, Teaching English as a Second or Other Language, classroom discourse analysis and composition theory. The study finds that the changes in the delivery methods of the course can benefit teachers, students, and the institution

Impossible Communities in Prague’s German Gothic: Nationalism, Degeneration, and the Monstrous Feminine in Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem (1915)

My dissertation investigates the contribution of Gustav Meyrink’s best-selling novel The Golem/Der Golem (1915) to the second revival of the international Gothic. While previous scholarship suggests that this genre disappeared from the German literary landscape in the 1830s, I interpret The Golem as a Gothic contribution to the “Prague Novel,” a trend in Prague-based, turn-of-the-twentieth-century German-language literature that found inspiration in the heated sociocultural and political tensions that characterized the milieu. Structured around the demolition of Prague’s former Jewish ghetto under the auspices of the Finis Ghetto plan, a historic Czech-led urban renewal project that leveled the district of Josefov/Josephstadt between 1895 and 1917, The Golem portrays a German-speaker’s perspective on ghetto clearance and its impact on the city’s ethnic minority groups. Not only does Meyrink’s novel aestheticize the pessimism felt by many of Prague’s middle class and aristocratic German speakers living in a city governed by Czech nationalists; it also exemplifies a trend in Prague-based German-language literature to use the Gothic mode to translate experiences of ethnic marginalization, the rise of nationalism, and fears of social degeneracy. Like Max Brod’s A Czech Servant Girl/Ein tschechisches Dienstmädchen (1909) and Paul Leppin’s “The Ghost of the Jewish Town”/“Das Gespenst der Judenstadt” (1914), The Golem opens a window onto the cultural controversies and debates at the Jahrhundertwende that coalesced in radical municipal action targeting Prague’s German-speaking Christian and Jewish communities. Drawing upon theories of the Gothic highlighting cultural despondency, trauma, and human monstrosity, this dissertation argues that The Golem recreated the Finis Ghetto as an analog to the homogenization and expulsion of Prague’s all of German-speaking communities under Czech political leadership. The Golem addresses the radical social, linguistic, and economic reform enacted by Czech nationalist movements in three ways: 1) by portraying the “German experience” in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Prague after the entanglements of cultural privilege have dissipated; 2) by providing a representation of the social depravities in the ghetto that Czech nationalists cited as reasons to demolish Josefov/Josephstadt and disperse the city’s German-speaking non-Jewish and Jewish communities; and 3) by challenging the effectiveness of the Finis Ghetto in purging the city of its “monsters”—particularly its degenerate, promiscuous women. The Golem ultimately suggests, as I outline, that without social reform to accompany physical renovation of the city, these “monsters” will continue to plague Prague society

How can K12 Education reduce prejudice?

This thesis investigates how K-12 education can reduce prejudice. Firstly, I define what I mean by prejudice and explain what my research methodology is for the study. Through a conceptual examination of existing research, including theories on why people are prejudiced and what we know about prejudice reduction from social psychology, I go on to propose four areas of individual cognitive and social development in which educational strategies can act on prejudicial thinking and lessen it. These are: - Understanding beyond the other; - Critical Thinking; - Metacognitive thought; - Empathy. I also synthesise findings into two institutional approaches that are effective. These are: - The contact hypothesis; - Specific pedagogical principles that are embedded in international education. These six areas are brought together in a multi-facetted response to the problem of prejudice. The thesis problematises the construct of prejudice reduction by grappling with its complexity through a critical account of the substantial literature on the subject. This means not only contextualising studies according to the parameters of their method but also engaging with prominent discourses in associated fields in a reflexive manner. The thesis is an original contribution to knowledge in that it builds a bridge between work on prejudice in the schools of social psychology, cognitive psychology and neurobiology and K-12 education. My study offers a framework synthesising effective classroom interventions that can be adapted and adopted in a variety of contexts to combat the central operating system of prejudice formation

Bilingual preschool education: a comparative study between Hong Kong and Shanghai

Global and local factors have recently pushed English-Chinese bilingualism to the forefront of early childhood education in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Signaling new sociolinguístic alignments, each city is pursuing language policies according to its own political and economic imperatives. Using Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological system's theory as a framework for analysis, this research study examines the contextual layers that shape the linguistic environments of the two cities, focusing on the macrosystem’s forces of globalization, the exosystem’s social networks, the mesosystem's institutions and human players, the microsystem's schools and homes, and the chronosystem’s biology, acknowledging all factors that affect child development. In the hope of providing better strategies and interventions for developing second language learning, it looks at the stakeholders' attitudes towards, beliefs about, and expectations of English, as well as at parental involvement in children’s English education, perceptions about NETs (native English-speaking teachers), and curriculum implementation. Quantitative and qualitative data collected (from four schools in each city and a total of 438 respondents) through questionnaires, interviews and archival documents are then triangulated to identify differences and similarities between the two cities. The results show that English is universally promoted for its economic benefits, both to individuals and society. The form of preschool bilingualism advocated by the governments of Hong Kong and Shanghai, however, is unduly influenced by political and nationalist considerations. This has lead in Shanghai to conceptualizations of bilingualism that allow only for the acquisition of English without its attendant cultural and philosophical dimensions. In Hong Kong, the government's attempt to arbitrarily reduce the size of English-medium education, has lead, due to blowback, to extremely high English literacy expectations for preschoolers, delivered through overly ambitious programmes. In both cities, attempts to safeguard the use of the mother tongue as the primary medium of Instruction stand in the way of early bilingual development through immersion or partial immersion. In addition, the stakeholders' disparate expectations about when, how and why English at preschool is important have given rise to conflicts and dilemmas that distort the two cities' cultures of learning and the extent and form of their education reforms. The recommendations made seek to create for bilingual preschool education, sufficient space, given the current political, social, and economic conditions in both cities, to allow educators to pursue it with the most effective pedagogies

Transpositional Spaces and the Process of Becoming-Educator: A Cartography of International Student Teaching Experiences

This poststructural qualitative study examined the effects of the International Student Teaching experience on student/teacher subjectivity. Using qualitative methods such as interviewing, field observations, daily audio and written journals, blogs, a/r/tography, arts-based analysis, and social media interactions, this research examined the nomadic shifts and changes in personal and professional subjectivity that American, preservice, international student/teachers experienced during a five-week International Student Teaching experience offered at sites in Chennai, India, and San Jose, Costa Rica. As a conceptual framing device, this study engaged the theories of post-humanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2006, 2011), exploring her concepts of “nomadic subjectivity,” “transpositions,” and “becomings” in relation to study abroad and International Student Teaching. Positioning the international student/teacher as a “nomadic subject” (Braidotti, 2006, 2011) in a transpositional learning space in the process of “becoming” (Braidotti, 2006, 2011), this study created a cartographic rendering of a material, affective learning space where participants become multiple, nomadic, rhizomatic subjects who experience the world differently in a relational, cultural, embodied, and embedded way. This study positioned International Student Teaching as a profound, transformative experience that influenced students’ personal and professional subjectivity and prepared student/teachers to affirmatively engage with a diversity of the multicultural, multilingual students and classrooms