(Re)Viewing Maggie and Tess through the Lens of Standpoint Theory

Literary critics admire George Eliot's touching portrayal of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. Many readers prefer to read Maggie's character as a reworking of Eliot's own life. In this article, I compare Maggie with another famous literary heroine, Tess Durbeyfield of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Tess is a "low-born" country girl whose suffering begins as soon as her family discovers that they have noble connections. Both Maggie and Tess go through hardship and humiliation due to their sense of responsibility and commitment to do the best for their families. Looking at these two characters through the lens of feminist standpoint theory, I argue that Maggie and Tess' social locations, imposed gender-roles, and families' expectations are among the primary causes of their tragedy. As members of the oppressed (gender) group, their epistemologies to understand the reality and to make sense of their social relationships contradict with those of the dominant group-masculine.  

Students and academics working in partnership to embed cultural competence as a graduate quality

Since 2014, the University of Sydney has been experimenting with a new initiative motivated by the research on “students as partners”. In 2014, six students were selected as Ambassadors of the Sydney Teaching Colloquium (STC)-the University’s annual learning and teaching conference-as undergraduate researchers. In that year, the focus was on assessment standards

Returning to Text: Affect, meaning making and literacies

Existing work on literacy and affect has posed important questions for how we think about meanings and how and where they get made. The authors contribute to such work by focusing on the relation between text and affect. This is a topic that has received insufficient attention in recent work but is of pressing concern for education as text interweaves in new ways with human activity, through social media, surveillance capitalism, and artificial intelligence—ways that can be unpredictable and poorly understood. Adopting a sociomaterial sensibility that foregrounds the relations between bodies (people and things), the authors provide conceptual tools for considering how texts affect and are affected by the heterogeneous entanglements from which they emerge. In situating their argument, the authors outline influential readings of Spinoza’s theories of affect, explore how these have been mobilized in literacy research, and identify how text has been accommodated within such research. Using texts from a political episode in the United Kingdom, the authors explore the idea of social-material-textual affects to articulate relationships among humans, nonhumans, meaning making, and literacies. The authors conclude by identifying four ways in which text participates in what happens, raising questions about how different materializations of text (or indeed “not text”) are significant to the diversifying communicative practices that inflect social, cultural, economic, and political life

Learner identity in second language education

The article reports on a small-scale classroom research study conducted at a university in Bangladesh. The study is based on the argument that a theory of identity is necessary to understand the complex dynamics of teaching and learning second/foreign languages. In this study, 18 first-year undergraduate students were engaged in a class project called e-autobiography. Naturalistic observations, participants’ autobiographical writings, and an open-ended questionnaire were used to collect the data. Analysis of the triangulated data indicated three main findings: most students constructed their identity as “users of English,” considered themselves “privileged” to have gotten the opportunity to learn English, and believed that their geographical location was crucial to their identity construction as well as success in learning English. The article concludes with a call for increased attention to learner identity, which is closely related to successful acquisition of foreign/second language(s)