Superdiversity in Music Education

Globalization has changed the social, cultural, and linguistic diversity in societies all over the world (Blommaert, J & Rampton, B. Diversities, 13(2), 1–22 (2011)). As new technologies have rapidly developed alongside increased forms of transnational flow, so have new forms of language, art, music, communication, and expression. This rapid and varied blending of cultures, ideas, and modes of communication is what Vertovec (2007) describes as super-diversity—diversity within diversity. In this narrative, I explore the theoretical and methodological pluralism that has aided my research in diverse settings, drawing from post-structuralism, critical theory, sociolinguistics, complexity theory, and discourse analysis—specifically Scollon and Scollon’s (Scollon, R & Scollon, W S. Discourses in place: Language in the material world. London: Routledge (2003), 10.4324/9780203422724; Scollon, R & Scollon, W S. Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging internet. New York: Routledge (2004)) recommendations for nexus analysis and Blommaert’s theoretical principles and concepts of ethnography, globalization, and superdiversity (Blommaert, J. Discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (2005), 10.1017/CBo9780511610295; Blommaert, J. The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (2010), 10.1017/CBO9780511845307; Blommaert, J. Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscapes: Chronicles of complexity. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters (2013)). I promote a need to develop a robust toolkit for music education that (1) better analyzes how we position and are positioned as part of larger groups and practices operating within multiple layers of social, cultural, and historical context, and (2) better advocates for equitable practices and inclusive spaces in our field

Challenging Social Cognition Models of Adherence:Cycles of Discourse, Historical Bodies, and Interactional Order

Attempts to model individual beliefs as a means of predicting how people follow clinical advice have dominated adherence research, but with limited success. In this article, we challenge assumptions underlying this individualistic philosophy and propose an alternative formulation of context and its relationship with individual actions related to illness. Borrowing from Scollon and Scollon’s three elements of social action – “historical body,” “interaction order,” and “discourses in place” – we construct an alternative set of research methods and demonstrate their application with an example of a person talking about asthma management. We argue that talk- or illness-related behavior, both viewed as forms of social action, manifest themselves as an intersection of cycles of discourse, shifting as individuals move through these cycles across time and space. We finish by discussing how these dynamics of social action can be studied and how clinicians might use this understanding when negotiating treatment with patients

Possibilities for pedagogy in Further Education: Harnessing the abundance of literacy

In this report, it is argued that the most salient factor in the contemporary communicative landscape is the sheer abundance and diversity of possibilities for literacy, and that the extent and nature of students' communicative resources is a central issue in education. The text outlines the conceptual underpinnings of the Literacies for Learning in Further Education project in a social view of literacy, and the associated research design, methodology and analytical framework. It elaborates on the notion of the abundance of literacies in students' everyday lives, and on the potential for harnessing these as resources for the enhancement of learning. It provides case studies of changes in practice that have been undertaken by further education staff in order to draw upon students' everyday literacy practices on Travel and Tourism and Multimedia courses. It ends with some of the broad implications for conceptualising learning that arise from researching through the lens of literacy practices

The big picture? Video and the representation of interaction

Researchers who use video to record interactions usually need to translate the video data into another medium at some stage in order to facilitate its analysis and dissemination. This article considers some methodological issues that arise in this process by examining transcripts, diagrams and pictures as examples of different techniques for representing interaction. These examples are used to identify some general principles for the representation of data where video is the source material. The article presents an outline of guided interaction and this is used as a case for illustrating these principles in the context of young children, technology and adults in pre-school settings. Although the article focuses on a specific study and solution, the principles are applicable in all cases where video is used as a source of data for the representation of interaction, whether or not it is technologically mediated

Language and anxiety: an ethnographic study of international postgraduate students

This paper presents some findings from an ethnographic study of international postgraduate students at a university in the South of England, which involved interviews and participant observation over a twelve-month academic year. One of the major themes that emerged from this research was students’ anxiety over their level of English language. Although all students entered their course with a minimum level of IELTS 6, the majority felt disadvantaged by particularly poor spoken English, and suffered feelings of anxiety, shame and inferiority. Low self-confidence meant that they felt ill-equipped to engage in class discussion and in social interaction which used English as the medium of communication. A common reaction to stress caused by language problems was to retreat into monoethnic communication with students from the same country, further inhibiting progress in language. Whilst some linguistic progress was made by nearly all students during the academic sojourn, the anxiety suffered by students in the initial stage must not be underestimated, and appropriate support systems must be put in place to alleviate their distress

Openings and closings in Spanish email conversations

Despite the increasing interest scholarly research has shown in the study of computer-mediated communication, there is still a need to investigate the empirical validity of assumed homogeneity of language usage over the net and focus on the social diversity and variation that characterizes any communication. With this in mind, the present paper is an investigation into the stylistic choices that a particular group of email users made when engaged in a specific activity type. More specifically, it explores the variation in the discourse practices employed to open and close emails in conversation alongside the institutional power of participants and the interactional position of each email contributing to the conversation. To carry out this study a corpus of short email conversations in Peninsular Spanish was collected (n = 240). The analysis focused on the opening and closing sequences of the emails that made up the conversations and considered opening and closing linguistic conventions as discursive practices that members of a community may use strategically. The findings revealed that the discursive practices under scrutiny were subject not only to technological but also to social and interactional constraints and thus highlighted contextual variability. Further, the high degree of sociability in the electronic episodes studied was interpreted as reflecting a ¿people first, business second¿ communicative style

Framing interculturality: a corpus-based analysis of on-line promotional discourse of higher education intercultural communication courses

This paper examines how intercultural communication (ICC) and the notion of culture are framed in on-line promotional discourse of higher education intercultural communication courses. It analyses a specialised corpus comprised of 14,842 words from 43 course websites of master’s programmes in intercultural communication in the UK and the US—internationally, the two largest providers of such programmes. Through combining corpus tools with a ‘situated meaning’ approach, the analysis reveals that while a small number of courses acknowledge cultural ‘complexity’, culture is still very often reduced to an essentialised and static notion, despite growing criticism against such an approach in ICC literature. Intercultural communication is valorised as a combination of desirable skills and knowledge conducive to effective communication of different cultural groups and for those working in international arenas. Significant differences between the UK and US courses are identified with regard to the extent of associations with diversity-related social categories. The lack of interpretive, critical and constructivist positions on culture in promotional discourse is discussed in the context of neoliberal discourse and the current thinking towards professional competences dominant in Britain, North America, and other parts of the world

Coordinated action, communication and creativity in basketball in superdiversity

This paper examines the complex social space of basketball training sessions at a sports centre in superdiverse inner-city Leeds, contextualising the site in relation to stigmatising discourses that suggest disorderliness and a lack of social cohesion. The microanalysis of video data from the training sessions counteracts these discourses by showing how social orderliness, cooperation, and creativity unfold in the details of interaction. The significance of its contribution lies in its analysis of communication that bridges across semiotic modes, extending the concept of translanguaging to encompass embodied practice. This practice contributes to constituting a small culture within the basketball club