Visibility Matters Report Card

How visible are LGBTQ issues in programs that prepare educators to work in schools across Illinois? Which institutions include sexual orientation and gender identity in their policies? Are sexual orientation and gender identity identified in teacher education programs' conceptual frameworks? The Pre-Professional Preparation Project (P-Project) seeks to answer these questions and to report the results via the Visibility Matters report cards. Using only data available from university and college websites, the Visibility Matters report cards evaluate the public face of pre-professional programs across Illinois. This paper describes the project's rationale and goals, history, current status, and potential future directions.This is the report summary with comprehensive report card. Access the Alliance's IssueLab profile or website for the full report

Helping students connect: architecting learning spaces for experiential and transactional reflection

Given the complex and varied contexts that inform students’ consciousness and occasion their learning, learning spaces are more than physical and virtual spaces. Learning spaces are also a range of situations sedimented in our continuum of experiences that shape our philosophical orientations. As such, this article, written from the perspectives of two faculty members in an English department at a four-year public university, describes our efforts to do the following. First, to draw upon models of instructional design we have experienced in our own educational backgrounds; and equally importantly, to develop learning spaces that support learning that is continuous, situated, and personal. Specifically, we critique the ways in which learning has been segregated from the rest of our life contexts for us throughout our educational histories. The irony is that this de-segregation has motivated us to create diverse learning spaces that provide our students with a more realistic set of tools and techniques for integrative life-long learning

Engaging with History after Macpherson

The Race Relations Amendment Act (2000) identifies a key role for education, and more specifically history, in promoting ‘race equality’ in Britain. In this article Ian Grosvenor and Kevin Myers consider the extent of young people’s current engagement with the history of ‘diversity, change and immigration’ which underpins the commitment to ‘race equality’. Finding that in many of Britain’s schools and universities a singular and exclusionary version of history continues to dominate the curriculum, they go on to consider the reasons for the neglect of multiculturalism. The authors identify the development of an aggressive national identity that depends on the past for its legitimacy and argue that this sense of the past is an important obstacle to future progress

Education and older adults at the University of the Third Age

This article reports a critical analysis of older adult education in Malta. In educational gerontology, a critical perspective demands the exposure of how relations of power and inequality, in their myriad forms, combinations, and complexities, are manifest in late-life learning initiatives. Fieldwork conducted at the University of the Third Age (UTA) in Malta uncovered the political nature of elder-learning, especially with respect to three intersecting lines of inequality - namely, positive aging, elitism, and gender. A cautionary note is, therefore, warranted at the dominant positive interpretations of UTAs since late-life learning, as any other education activity, is not politically neutral.peer-reviewe

\u201cImprovisation is not allowed in a second language\u201d: A survey of Italian lecturers\u2019 concerns about teaching their subjects through English

English Medium Instruction (EMI) is increasingly being introduced across European universities in countries where English is not a commonly-used language, such as Italy and other central and southern European countries. However the competences and concerns of the lecturers involved are not always considered when such developments are introduced and support or training may not be offered. This paper reports on a survey on English-Medium Instruction (EMI) to which 115 lecturers in a public university in northern Italy responded. The survey was carried out by the university\u2019s Language Centre as part of the LEAP (Learning English for Academic Purposes) Project which was developed to support lecturers in EMI. The survey sought to identify what the lecturers perceived as their strengths and weakness in English, their concerns and also their evaluations of the experience of teaching through English if they had had any. The findings discussed in this paper shed light on the needs of lecturers that are involved in EMI, which relate to methodology as well as language issues. The implications of this for European Language Centres intending to support EMI at their universities are discussed in the conclusions

Educating the Central Asian Librarian: Considering the International MLIS in Kazakhstan

Why do Central Asian librarians enter the profession, and how do they decide which educational strategies to pursue in developing their careers? Using 13 conversations and 10 qualitative interviews with Kazakh and Kyrgyz librarians, this chapter finds that librarians enter the profession due to personal interest, by happenstance, or for university funding and continue when they perceive an opportunity for career growth as well as salary mobility. Central Asian librarians evaluate their educational options, including local bachelor's degrees; distance education from Russia; MLIS programs in Asia, Europe, or America; and short-term online training, while balancing family responsibilities and career prospects in and outside of librarianship. Prospects for creating a local MLIS or other improved professional training programs are discussed

Transformative Education in a Broken World: Feminist and Jesuit Pedagogy on the Importance of Context

This chapter relates the concept of positionality from feminist theory and pedagogy to the Ignatian paradigm to show how its focus on the individual, at the expense of the structural, fails to acknowledge the unequal power relationships that disadvantage students from minority groups. Focusing on the positionality of gay and lesbian students in the author\u27s classroom at a Jesuit college, it explores how becoming attentive to our own positions with respect to our students allows us better to examine how relationships of domination and subordination between members of oppressed and privileged groups in larger social and ecclesial contexts are re-created at the micro-level in the classroom

Analyzing ethnic and cultural materials : insights into ELT materials

Ethnic and cultural materials and English Language Teaching (ELT) materials are related especially in terms of the emphasis on cultural knowledge and skills as well as the language and critical thinking skills. This study intends to research on ethnic and cultural materials within the perspectives of English language materials design. Specifically, the objectives of the study are to investigate the relevance and implications of such materials to ELT materials. The materials were selected from the content of Ethnic Relations course as it contained rich ethnic and cultural elements. When examining such materials from the perspectives of English language materials design, three aspects are considered: learner factors, text factors and task factors. The instrument used for the study was a checklist derived from works by Contazzi and Jin (2001), Nunan (2001), Tomlinson (2001) and Banks (1990). Basically, the checklist consists of 25 items and it was divided into three parts, learner factors, text factors, and task factors. The materials were analyzed using the checklist according to the specified criteria and the data obtained were represented in the form of description, examples and evidence. In addition, lecturers’ perceptions on the materials were attained using a set of interview questions. The findings indicate that a) ethnic and cultural materials have positive impacts on students’ interest and motivation, b) such materials include useful cultural elements and are comprehensible to students, and c) the tasks given are relevant and meaningful. The study also proves that lecturers dealing with ethnic and cultural contents are aware of the benefits of using such materials for teaching language and culture as it can foster critical thinking and develop communicative competence. Thus, the use of ethnic and cultural materials has a direct and significant implication to English language teaching and learning if the same criteria were to be applied when selecting and using ELT materials

Moving Writing Out of the Margins in edTPA: “Academic Language” in Writing Teacher Education

The edTPA, a standardized teacher performance assessment developed by Stanford University and launched by the Pearson corporation, is quickly becoming a national measure of preservice teacher effectiveness. As more states adopt this assessment as a required component of successful completion of teacher education programs and licensure, we are compelled to critique the design, implementation, and evaluation of this high-stakes testing instrument. Our goal is to articulate the effects of this assessment on writing teacher education and the teaching of writing more broadly. Specifically, we argue that programmatic or individual interpretation of the edTPA can marginalize writing instruction (and writing teacher education) by focusing the English language arts “subject specific pedagogy” assessment on literature; further, we want to suggest opportunities for edTPA to emphasize the discursive nature of effective writing instruction for a range of students. We hope to use our experiences preparing for the edTPA to help other writing teacher educators consider how to respond in their states, classes, and with students in ways that promote successful writing instruction

Journalism in the Academy, a MacIntyean account of the institutions and practices of journalism education in England

This paper to considers some of the systematic problems and constraints faced by academics teaching and researching in the field of journalism and journalism studies. To do this, I draw on MacIntyre’s philosophical concept of practice, applying it to the practice of journalism and the practice of academia, which I argue here have many commonalities. This conceptualisation of the practical activities of journalists and academics also takes account of their factual dependence on institutions. MacIntyre argues that although institutions should be considered to be necessary, in bureaucratic capitalist social systems they tend to pursue external goods at the cost of the goods internal to the practice. Practices thus become corrupted as institutions orient them to the pursuit of external goods. I argue that both journalists and academics are subject to similar processes of institutional domination, or colonisation, and that because of this, the capacity study, teach, and then practice a critical journalism adequate to a properly democratic community is stymied. The most significant problem on this analysis is that processes of colonisation are not discrete, they are systematic, extensive and commonly experienced. Consequently it is inadequate to consider discrete forms of resistance to these problems and constraints. Instead, I argue, we must consider common and collective forms of resistance