“What Must Be Done?”: Vincentian Teacher Preparation in the 21st Century

Christopher Worthman explores the defining characteristics of pre-K through 12th grade Vincentian teacher preparation and how it can ready teachers, regardless of their faith, to teach all student populations in all schools. He explains how the American preoccupation with accountability and standardization in schools is a social justice issue. To discern principles of Vincentian preparation, he uses the work of modern Vincentian scholars and draws on examples from the educational efforts of Vincent de Paul, Louise de Marillac, Marguerite Naseau, Frederic Ozanam, and Elizabeth Seton. Worthman identifies three principles: Lucan spirituality, a sense of immediacy, and affective and effective action. Lucan spirituality goes by many names in many faiths. It encourages pre-service teachers to reflect on how their experiences and values affect their relationships with students, parents, and colleagues and vice versa. A sense of immediacy refers to the necessity of addressing students’ greatest needs and assessing how well they are met. Affective and effective action arises from pre-service teachers’ convictions about who they are as educators and how they should teach. It serves “the whole individual and society writ large.” Suggestions for instilling these principles in pre-service teachers are described

Success Stories: Adult Learners Co-Constructing a Learning Context and the Implications for Identity Development

Using Foucault\u27s conceptualisation of power and Bahktin\u27s theory of dialogism, the research data presented in this article show how three ‘successful’ learners and their instructor in one computerised GED programme that relied on standardised curriculum materials co-constructed the learning context. The nature of interaction between the instructor and learners and between learners and the curriculum is analysed using survey, interview, observational methods, and curriculum materials review. Although the focus is limited in scope to one context, one educator, and three learners, the description and analyses demonstrate how through the dialogical interaction of the learners with the curriculum materials, the disciplinary power of the materials are perpetuated and the learners\u27 identities are shaped. Learners who successfully participated in the programme took up notions of knowledge, learning, and literacy promoted by the computerised curriculum materials and supported by the educator\u27s pedagogical choices. Ultimately, while learners identified gains in some skill areas and spoke highly of the programme as a safe place to learn, the programme perpetuated the autonomous theory of literacy and failed to engage learners in critical types of learning experiences. The article concludes by suggesting that dialogic interaction does not necessarily facilitate resistance and emancipation but can serve the goals of monological dominating discourses. Thus, the challenge for educators is to facilitate consciously critical dialogical discourse that moves the focus from the individual to the social

Fostering Dialogical Interaction: The Radical Side of Self-generated Dramatic Arts Activities

Inspired by bell hooks\u27 term ‘radical openness’, I describe and discuss the processes I observed and participated in a community-based youth theater program in a large urban center in the United States. Through the use of self-generated dramatic arts activities, radical openness or a ‘dialogue between comrades’ developed in this setting. The setting described is a manifestation of Bakhtin\u27s notion of dialogical interaction, i.e., of coming to know the world through interaction with others and of his aesthetic theory and how art informs life. The self-generated dramatic arts activities allowed participants to engage in ‘radical revisions’ of their perceptions of themselves as writers, readers, thinkers and actors in the world

A Good Student Subject: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of an Adolescent Writer Negotiating Subject Positions

In this article, we draw on the work of Michel Foucault to analyze one student’s subject development in an expository writing classroom. James, the participant, was embarking on the project of becoming a good student, as he understood it, after struggling and leaving school previously. Drawing on interviews, classroom observations and written artifacts, we use Foucauldian concepts and discourse analysis, along with one James Gee’s discourse analysis tools – the identities building tool – to conduct a microanalysis of James’s efforts to objectify himself as a good student subject. The data show how James acquiesced to the truths and practices of the regime of school, including how he mobilized truths of the regime through a process we call masked confession. That is, he negotiated his good student subject position by masking or silencing other subject positions. James’s masked confession was his way of negotiating the realm of ‘multiple truths,’ or multiple subject positions

The Positioning of Adult Learners: Appropriating Learner Experience on the Continuum of Empowerment to Emancipation

This article offers a critical analysis of discourses and power structures and the ways they operate in two instructors’ adult education and ESOL classrooms. The instructors defined learner experience in specific ways and subsequently used those definitions and drew on their learners’ experiences to define their curricula and pedagogy. They conceptualized learner experiences in ways that potentially empowered or emancipated learners from existing power structures. The data presented are part of a two‐year study of different lifelong learning and adult education contexts in the north‐eastern and mid‐western USA. Data sources included survey, interview, artifact collection, and observation methods. Data analysis was guided by a sociocultural theory of literacy development (The New London Group 1996New London Group. 1996. A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66: 60–92.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar], Gee 1996Gee, J. 1996. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in discourses , (2nd edn), London: Falmer. [Google Scholar], 2003Gee, J. 2003. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, New York: Macmillan.[Crossref], , [Google Scholar], Barton and Hamilton 1998Barton, D. and Hamilton, M. 1998. Local Literacies: Reading and writing in one community, London: Routledge.[Crossref], , [Google Scholar]), Holland et al.\u27s (1998Holland, D., Lachicotte, W. Jr., Skinner, D. and Cain, C. 1998. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]) theories of figured worlds and identity development, Bakhtin’s (1963Bakhtin, M. M. 1963. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Edited by: Emerson, C. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 1994 [Google Scholar], 1975Bakhtin, M. M. 1975. The Dialogic Imagination, Edited by: Emerson, C.and Holquist, M. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. 1998 [Google Scholar], 1979Bakhtin, M. M. 1979. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Edited by: Mcgee, V. W. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. 1994 [Google Scholar], 1986Bakhtin, M. M. 1986. Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Edited by: Liapunov, V. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. 1993 [Google Scholar]) theory of dialogism, and Foucault’s (1963Foucault, M. 1963. The Birth of the Clinic: An archaeology of medical perception, Edited by: Sheridan‐Smith, A. New York: Vintage. 1975[Crossref], , [Google Scholar], 1980Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews & other writings, 1972–1977, Edited by: Gordon, C., Marshall, L., Mepham, J. and Soper, K.New York: Pantheon. 1980 [Google Scholar]) conceptualization of power. One instructor offered her learners a chance to empower themselves, that is, to find gratification by learning to appropriate mainstream ways of acting, thinking, believing, and using text. The discourse that promotes such instructional efforts is predominant in lifelong learning and adult education. In this discourse, referred to at the outset as one of coherence, learner experience, as a resource for language and literacy development, is essentialized as dispositional, meaning that correct or proper attitudes and beliefs are necessary for empowerment. The other instructor practised a reverse discourse, or what Gee (1996Gee, J. 1996. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in discourses , (2nd edn), London: Falmer. [Google Scholar]) referred to as a liberatory literacy. She positioned learners to critique the Discourses they encountered, including those they participated in, as movement toward emancipation, toward communicative competence or a critical stance in the world. In effect, learners reversed the panoptic framework and turned the gaze back upon existing power structures. In this case, learner experience was valued for the experiential positioning it offered learners

Our Public and Private Selves: Fostering Dialogism and Student Perspective Taking

This article considers a site of practice that fosters dialogic consciousness, which I suggest is necessary to teaching social justice and diversity of thought in all sites of practice, including schools. Consciousness of one\u27s own perspective taking and the dialogism necessary to foster voice development are grounded in a growing awareness of our own multiple perspectives or understandings of the world and ourselves. This multiplicity is grounded in how we see the world and how we think the world sees us. Such multiplicity is dynamic in that what we know about ourselves and what we think others know about us are woven through a constant interaction of public and private selves. It is in this interaction that teachers can begin to explore voice and perspective taking with students. In this article, I present how teenagers in a community‐based theater ensemble used movement and writing to define their private and public selves, and conclude with possibilities for classroom practice

Students Being Teachers: Foucault’s Eventalization in an Authentic E-Learning Hybrid Course

In this article, I describe the development and teaching of an authentic e-learning hybrid English language arts (ELA) methods course that drew on Foucault’s (1984; 1991) concept of eventalization and Gee’s (1996; 2004) sociocultural theory of learning. Questions about what is worthwhile and who benefits guided the teacher-candidates’ (TCs’) quarter-long authentic learning project. They researched and developed online curricular modules and considered issues of pedagogy. As a self-study, I used discourse analysis (Gee, 2009) to analyze blog entries and TC weekly discussion board posts. TCs, working in collaboration, challenged taken-for-granted understandings of the ELA within a framework of identifying who benefits from particular theories and practices and what is worthwhile and why in ELA. They demonstrated an understanding of the complexity and ambiguity that defines ELA as contextualized practice. I conclude by considering how the course design facilitated TCs learning