We are more than EFL teachers-we are Educators: Emancipating EFL student-teachers through photovoice

The prevailing pedagogical orientations of English as a foreign language (EFL) education in Spain oppress learners intellectually in ways that are counterproductive to their learning. As a reaction to this, 129 EFL student-teachers (STs) took part during the 2013/14, 2014/15, and 2015/16 academic years in a workshop which drew on the methodology of participatory action research and on photovoice as a data-creating strategy, in order to emancipate these STs intellectually, boost their EFL development, and offer an alternative critical model for their future EFL teaching. The research was assessed collectively through a variety of qualitative strategies. Results showed that the photovoice workshop created a rich and meaningful context for EFL learning, one which enabled the STs to fully actualize their intellectual potential by producing knowledge collectively, thereby setting a memorable educational example for their own future teaching

Reclaiming the local in language policy and practice

Mahwah, NJxxx, 297 p.: bibl. ref., index; 22 c

Socialization in the Neoliberal Academy of STEM Scholars: A Case Study of Negotiating Dispositions in an International Graduate Student in Entomology

This article examines how neoliberal orders of discourse shape the dispositions to academic literacies of an international graduate student in entomology. As this ideology of market logic consolidates its hegemony in universities of excellence and US culture at large, academic socialization and disciplinary activities increasingly aim to create scholarly dispositions and subjectivities that align with it. Such processes are further complicated by the backgrounds of international graduate students—an ever-larger proportion of graduate students in STEM who often hail from educational cultures significantly different from the U.S. Our analysis of an international graduate student’s literacy practices in terms of motivations and outcomes shows that his literacies echo the dispositions pushed by neoliberal ideologies, but are not over-determined by them. Rather, as our case study illustrates, his socialization is a layered process, with ambiguous implications and strategic calculations making up literacies and disciplinary outcomes. We believe closely mapping such tensions in literacies and socialization processes increases humanities scholars’ awareness both of the potential contradictions of educating international graduate students into the neoliberal model and of how the university can still be used to develop the dispositions needed to renegotiate the neoliberal order of discourse for more ethical and empowering purposes