Student-Centered Learning Opportunities For Adolescent English Learners In Flipped Classrooms

This study documents opportunities for diverse adolescent English learners to deeply engage with content and language in flipped learning environments. Through a linked description of teaching practices and student learning experiences in an urban New England high school, the study attempts to understand the potential of flipped instruction in preparing a traditionally underserved population for post-secondary education. Our research partner Patriot High School (PHS) is one of the New England schools implementing flipped learning. PHS represents a typical secondary school context for adolescent English learners: More than half of students speak a language other than English at home and the majority of students are from minority and low-income homes (Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2014). PHS is also an urban school committed to implementing student-centered learning strategies to meet the needs of its diverse students

Avanza la crisis y el racismo : respuestas desde abajo

En el actual contexto de crisis económica mundial los discursos racistas y xenófobos están cada vez más presentes en la esfera pública. Acciones y medidas que criminalizan y problematizan a la población inmigrante y a las minorías culturales están reforzando las desigualdades que ya existían. En este artículo, se argumenta que son las iniciativas provenientes de la comunidad las que están facilitando la superación de posturas que instrumentalizan la crisis para legitimar la discriminación de los sectores de la población más excluidosAmidst the economic crisis, racist and xenophobic discourses are increasingly present in the public sphere. Actions and measures that criminalize immigrants and cultural minorities are reinforcing previously existing inequalities. In this article, it is argued that grassroots actions are the ones are fighting against those positions which use the economic crisis to justify the advancement of discrimination towards those sectors who are more socially exclude

Student-centered Learning Opportunities for Adolescent English Learners in Flipped Classrooms

As schools look to raise standards and close achievement gaps, they need effective strategies for serving English language learners, the fastest-growing segment of the school-age population who have historically lagged behind their native English-speaking peers on state assessments and in graduation rates.Flipped learning, which blends in-person and online learning to maximize student and teacher interactions, shows potential for accelerating English learners\u27 progress. In a flipped classroom, students access direct instruction on their own time, while class time is used for interactive lessons, collaborative projects, and personalized teacher support.This study from the University of Massachusetts-Boston, examines how flipped learning can be utilized to improve the language and content acquisition of adolescent English language learners

The necropolitcs of austerity: Discursive constructions and material consequences in the Greek context.

The onset of the global capitalist crisis in 2008, brought about important shifts beyond the material plane. A crisis of capitalism can never be understood as simply an economic crisis; it is also, at its core, a political and ideological crisis. The ideological aspect of the crisis is further articulated through language, that is, through the use of particular discourses. Conservative think tanks and larger-than-life financial institutions have highjacked the mainstream narrative around the crisis and its consequences, and have changed the terms these crises are talked about and, therefore, understood.In this article I am offering a critical discussion of the closing of the universe of discourse since the beginning of the capitalist crisis in the Greek context. In the framework of what is often projected as an anthropomorphist economy, I examine the discursive and material construction of “austerity” as it articulates with other supporting discourses: that of “markets as people,” “sacrifice,” and “living beyond one’s means” as well as the discourse of “obedience/disobedience.” The narratives around these concepts have largely shaped and distorted the debate around the Greek financial crisis. My argument is, once more, that the shift in language is not natural or neutral but it reflects, refracts and shapes a deeper shift in its framing and therefore, in policies/politics. Those institutions that have the power to produce politics and ideologies, have also the power to produce a “strong discourse” and, thus, have hegemony over that discours

RETHINKING CRITICAL LITERACY IN THE NEW INFORMATION AGE

This article looks at new information and communication technologies (ICTs) as sites of public pedagogy in that they produce particular forms of knowledge and literacies and reproduce representations that are always mediated through specific social relations. Public pedagogy as a process that constitutes a broader category beyond classroom practices, official curricula, and educational canons, extends to all sectors of human life, including virtual spaces. No longer restricted to traditional sites of learning such as educational or religious sites, public pedagogy produces new forms of knowledge and apprenticeship and new narratives for agency and for naming the world. Virtual spaces as sites of public pedagogy create, in turn, forms of literacy that go against traditional understandings of what constitutes a text. The article also attempts to discuss yet unrealized alternative directions in these virtual spaces, where critical literacy becomes emancipatory and an essential and powerful tool in the project for a radical pedagogy

Educational Reform in Greece: Central Concepts and a Critique

The case of Greece as the most recent neoliberal experiment can provide valuable insights not only about a generalized attack on the welfare state and the public good, but also about the radical changes in public education that are altering its public mission, vision, and goals. In this paper first we trace the educational landscape in Greece as it emerges both from the reform in primary and secondary education and from the new law 4009 on higher education. The ongoing government discourse on education is shaped and constructed along the lines of a market-driven society and unapologetically espouses the neoliberal dogma that aims to convert education into training, universities into corporations, knowledge into a service or commodity, and students into clients. We further examine the official public discourse as illustrated in government documentation in an attempt to map out the marked shift from the university as a public good to the university as corporate entity, and highlight the particular ways in which this is done. The new educational legislation sets the stage for an education where the individual will thrive throughrelentless competition, where collectivity is abolished, where only “useful” knowledge counts and where “quality” and “excellence” serve as the excuse for a corporate standardization of the university and the academic life and thought

How to Tame a Wild Tongue: Language Rights in the United States

In the interest of unifying the online presence of the journal Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (ISSN # 1540-5699), its Scholarworks platform has been discontinued as of Oct. 15, 2020, and is being redirected as follows. The full free-access contents of the journal can be, as in the past, accessed directly by visiting the journal’s primary publication platform at https://www.okcir.com which is the homepage of the research center publishing the journal, OKCIR: Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). All download links of individual articles on the Scholarworks platform of the journal will direct to the corresponding issue of the journal from where further action can be taken to access the articles

Introduction to the Special Issue on Critical Pedagogies

“Language is a ‘war zone’,” Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o powerfully notes (Inani, 2018, para. 17). In trying to conceptualize and define Critical Pedagogy in the current historical moment for the teaching and learning of languages, this seems the most appropriate definition. After all, language teaching and learning are neither politically neutral, nor ahistorical, nor free of ideological considerations. On the contrary, language as a site of power, ideological tensions, political and financial interests, hierarchies, and symbolic and material violence, is most definitely a war zone. War is being waged over which languages have more “value” or are “worth learning;” which languages are at the core ..

Neoliberalizing Higher Education in Greece: new laws, old free-market tricks

Amid a financial crisis that has shifted politics in Greece to conservative market-driven ideologies and policies, specific major changes are proposed by the Greek Ministry of Education for primary, secondary and higher education. With the gradual disappearance of public space and of the welfare state, under the pressure and the auspices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), education becomes one more space quickly geared up towards privatization, marketization of learning and educational goals while the character of free public education is radically redefined. This article addresses the changes in higher education legislation and policy in Greece and analyzes the discursive constructions that legitimize such a change

Introduction to the Special Issue on Critical Pedagogies

“Language is a ‘war zone’,” Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o powerfully notes (Inani, 2018, para. 17). In trying to conceptualize and define Critical Pedagogy in the current historical moment for the teaching and learning of languages, this seems the most appropriate definition. After all, language teaching and learning are neither politically neutral, nor ahistorical, nor free of ideological considerations. On the contrary, language as a site of power, ideological tensions, political and financial interests, hierarchies, and symbolic and material violence, is most definitely a war zone. War is being waged over which languages have more “value” or are “worth learning;” which languages are at the core ..