The Self Access Centre as Mass Customization

This paper describes the Self Access Centre (SAC) at the Universidad de Quintana Roo and presents the research support for the model in terms of mass-customization. The SAC with its systems, materials, activities and tutor support may be described as offering mass-customized language education. Tutor support is conceived in systemic terms as mass-customization, but as provider of professional advice in support of students' own learning projects and facilitator of feedback in productive skills, tutor support is highly individualized. However, the mass-customization element makes individualization efficient and achievable

Saying and Silence: Listening to Composition with Bakhtin

Farmer explores the relationship between the meaningful word and the meaningful pause, between saying and silence, especially as the relationship emerges in our classrooms, our disciplinary conversations, and encounters with publics beyond the academy. Each of his chapters here addresses some aspect of how we and our students, colleagues, and critics have our say and speak our piece, often under conditions where silence is the institutionally sanctioned and preferred alternative. He has enlisted a number of Bakhtinian ideas (the superaddressee, outsideness, voice in dialogue) to help in the project of interpreting the silences we hear, naming the silences we do not hear, and of encouraging all silences to speak in ways that are freely chosen, not enforced.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1129/thumbnail.jp

TEACHER TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT IN ELT: A PROFESSIONAL APPROACH

English Language Teaching (ELT) has no professional body controlling entry to the profession, and there is a lack of clarity in the literature on the role and content of both pre-service teacher education and in-service teacher development. This paper builds on socioeconomic models of professionalism in an attempt to develop valid criteria for both. Professionalism as a system of rewarding and controlling expert labour is defined and the legitimacy of forming professional bodies is discussed. The criteria are then applied to ELT as a critique of existing pre-service and in-service teacher education, and suggestions are made for the professionalization of ELT. Keywords: professionalism, pre-service education, in-service education, ELT

Teacher Training and Development in Elt: a Professional Approach

English Language Teaching (ELT) has no professional body controlling entry to the profession, and there is a lack of clarity in the literature on the role and content of both pre-service teacher education and in-service teacher development. This paper builds on socioeconomic models of professionalism in an attempt to develop valid criteria for both. Professionalism as a system of rewarding and controlling expert labour is defined and the legitimacy of forming professional bodies is discussed. The criteria are then applied to ELT as a critique of existing pre-service and in-service teacher education, and suggestions are made for the professionalization of ELT

Of Thresholds and Springboards: Teaching Them, Teaching Each Other

In the fall of 2010, the authors were given the task of co-teaching the practicum for new graduate teaching assistants at the University of Kansas. One of the authors was, at the time, a doctoral student in rhetoric and composition. The other author was a senior faculty member in the same field. While such pairings are not uncommon, they are rarely addressed in the vast literature on the writing practicum. In this article—written as a dialogue focusing on the themes of locations and tensions—the authors conclude that such teaching arrangements as theirs offered valuable insights into student resistance, and encouraged them to be more attentive to the institutional contexts in which the practicum is taught. Based on their experiences, the authors concluded, as well, that there are good reasons to explicitly address what Paulo Freire calls “the teacher-student contradiction” with practicum students

An Empirical Note on the Social and Geographic Correlates of Mexican Migration to the Southern United States

This research empirically examines differences in the socioeconomic correlates of Mexican migrants to the southern region of the United States. More specifically, the research considers differences between Mexican immigrants choosing the South and those choosing other U.S. destinations. Using general estimating equations, the study provides evidence that several characteristics distinguish the stream of recent migrants choosing southern destinations. Notably, rural origins as well as rural destinations have substantial explanatory power. The results also show that immigrants to the South are likely to be pioneers in the sense that they do not have strong family-specific migration capital and are likely to be from a community without a long history of sending migrants to the United States. Immigrants choosing the South are also more likely to be undocumented. Additionally, they are far more likely to have arrived following implementation of NAFTA. Ownership of houses is also a distinguishing feature of these migrants

The Writing Program Administrator as Interstitial Radical

Drawing upon personal experience as a writing program administrator at a research university, and marshaling a body of critical scholarship that examines how neoliberal ideology in the academy might be opposed, the author discusses interstitial resistance in the form of a curricular alternative--namely, the outsider genre of zines. Because zines typically embody a "worldview dramatically at odds with the [one] cultivated and reinforced by institutions of higher education," zines offer students an alternative point of view not usually found in standard writing curricula. While the author uses zines as a central illustration, the purpose here is to encourage readers to find the "cracks and fissures" in their own institutions so that the insinuations of neoliberal policies might be resisted through teaching and administrative initiatives

Selective Migration and the Educational Brain Drain from the Lower Mississippi Delta Region in 1975-80

Using a unique source of information about migration, this paper calculates the rates of net migration by age and educational level for the Lower Mississippi Delta region for the period of 1975-80, compares different categories of counties in the Delta, and compares Delta areas with non-Delta areas of the seven Delta states. It shows substantial losses of more highly educated persons, especially the young, from all rural counties, but especially for the core rural Delta counties