Alex Kostogriz

Professional Identity and Pedagogical Space: Negotiating difference in teacher workplaces

This paper explores “spatial struggle” in the formation of professional identities of overseas‐born teachers. The basis of this struggle arises from a limited number of subject positions available for them in pedagogical spaces of the Australian system of education. We argue that relations of power/professional knowledge in teacher workplaces as well as the binary strategy of “us” and “them” generate marginal locations for overseas‐born teachers within schools. This construction of marginality is informed not only by discourses of what counts as being a professional but also by the conception of workplace as a monocultural, pre‐given and bounded entity. By rethinking workplaces as relational, as locations that are connected to other socioculturally produced places through spaces of semiotic flows, we can also rethink the professional becoming of overseas‐born teachers. This involves a critical understanding of their situationality, which can be conceptualised as a struggle for professional recognition, voice and place within the real and imagined communities of teachers.

Putting "Space" on the Agenda of Sociocultural Research

The global rescaling of the world, culture, and education has influenced how people experience their situationality, meaning-making, and learning in relation to the Other. This article explores the implications of spatial analysis for rethinking education in new conditions of cultural complexity. The experience of living and learning with difference is conceptualized as an open journey in which the very act of movement across spatial boundaries unlocks the fixity of meanings and identities and, hence, problematizes the spatial logic of bounded learning places. Explicating the tension between fixity and mobility, boundedness and flows, this article deploys the concepts of cultural-semiotic space, scale, and boundary to theorize locations of learning and meaning-making in new times.

Transcultural literacy: between the global and the local

In this paper the authors draw on a larger project related to diasporic identification in order to explore the concept of transcultural literacy. They argue that transcultural literacy grows out of border‐crossing dynamics that extend beyond the binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ as these are lived within and between nations. In this way it is responsive to, and reflects, the various shifts between the local and the global; between place and space. Transcultural literacy is inseparable from social and cultural practices of meaning‐ and identity‐making on the fault‐line between various and often competing cultures. This model of transcultural literacy uses theorisations of space to connect textual practices to the construction of hybrid identities. In so doing, it offers an alternative to models of literacy premised on liberal or neo‐conservative understandings of cultural difference. In this paper, we explore transcultural literacy in relation to current literacy debates.

ENCOUNTERS WITH ‘STRANGERS’: TOWARDS DIALOGICAL ETHICS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION

This article takes the inquiry into ‘nativeness’ and ‘non-nativeness’ to the level of developing an ethical framework for professional practice in English language education. In so doing, our aim is firstly to use the ‘sociology of the stranger’ as a framework to problematize discourses on the Other and Othering. We shall argue that these discourses are sedimented in the modernist project of perpetual purification in which “order making … becomes indistinguishable from announcing ever new abnormalities, drawing ever new dividing lines, identifying and setting apart ever new strangers” (Bauman, 1997, p. 11). Our next step is to open up the possibility of transcending these discourses in education through a dialogical ethics of respecting the otherness in the Other. Pedagogy based on the ethics of dialogical recognition emphasizes the value of difference in learning through the ‘surplus of vision’ that the Other provides for constructing new meanings and new ways to mean (Bakhtin, 1981; Levinas, 1969). The recognition of ‘the foreigner in the self’ has significant pedagogical implications for language educators and marks the movement from ethics to politics.

Standards-based accountability: reification, responsibility and the ethical subject

Over the last two decades, teachers in Australia have witnessed multiple incarnations of the idea of ‘educational accountability’ and its enactment. Research into this phenomenon of educational policy and practice has revealed various layers of the concept, particularly its professional, bureaucratic, political and cultural dimensions that are central to the restructuring of educational governance and the reorganization of teachers’ work. Today, accountability constitutes a core concept of neoliberal policy-making in education, both fashioning and normalizing what counts as teacher professionalism in the ‘audit society.’ This article focuses specifically on the recent introduction by the Australian Federal Government of standardised literacy testing in all states across Australia, and raises questions about the impact of this reform on the work practices of English literacy teachers in primary and secondary schools. We draw on data collected as part of a major research project funded by the Australian Research Council, involving interviews with teachers about their experiences of implementing standardised testing. The article traces the ways in which teachers’ work is increasingly being mediated by standardised literacy testing to show how these teachers grapple with the tensions between state-wide mandates and a sense of their professional responsibility for their students.

‘After hours’ schools as core to the spatial politics of ‘in‐betweenness’

In this article the authors draw on a larger study in which their overall concern is to illustrate how diasporic identifications develop through a range of scales related to self, family, community, nation and beyond. They consider the Melbourne Greek community as an exemplar of diasporic experience and use it as a case study for their investigation, which is aimed at exploring how transcultural literacies relate to spaces which complicate and enrich identifications. In this article they consider the role of ‘after hours’ schools in the shaping of diasporic identities. These are community‐based schools where Greek language and culture is taught. Commonly, classes are held on Saturday morning or in the evenings during the week. Such schools operate in classrooms that are rented from ‘real’ schools. By existing in spaces that are commonly occupied by mainstream day schools, students who attend ‘after hours’ schools experience a form of marginalisation that is also a right of passage. Here the authors argue that such ‘in‐between’ spaces assist with the formation of ‘in‐between’ identities that are emblematic of globalization.

English and its Others: Towards an Ethics of Transculturation

The article focuses on the significant role of English subject in the quality education. It states that a dialogical ethics might play in English education today as an alternative to the latest forms of political moralism in schooling the other. It highlights the need for a shift from the contradictory moralism of empowerment to a dialogical ethics of teaching and learning English language and literarcy for students and teachers to obtain a critical distance from their cultural bearings.

Spatializing sociocultural research : a reading of mediation and meaning as third spaces

We, the editors of this special issue, began our lives on other continents and in other countries. As we traversed the globe, finding our way to Australia, we became embodied examples of global movement: flows of humans, belongings, lives, and languages from one location to another. In making sense of our mobility, our memories and experiences, identities and identifications, discourses and social languages, we recognize that we are multiply situated in different discourses of spatial (re)production, and therefore our identifications with particular spatial-discursive locations can be both empowering and disempowering. Our ongoing negotiation with, and hybridization of, identities makes the work of positioning ourselves complex and messy. We are “in between,” ambivalent reporters who can only tell partial tales of Australia. Our hybridity positions us as latecomers to Australia—those who have come to find a better or a different life, those who are still seeking—and we are cautious of essentializing the identities of those who were here first and of those who came before us. To approach our task as editors of a regional special issue (the authors here are or were affiliated with Australian universities) and an issue on semiotic, dialogic, and material spaces, no less, we looked across our own hybrid identities at our general differences and overarching similarities. What stood out immediately to us were those aspects of our identities that are racialized, our abilMIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 13(3), 163–175 Copyright

Tutor and Teacher Timescapes: Lessons from a Home-School Partnership.

A partnership project was developed in which parents volunteered to support teachers in training years 1-3 children in computer skills at a primary school in a small, low socio-economic community. This article identifies the ways teachers and the ‘tutors’ (as the volunteers were called) understood the value of the project. ‘Being a teacher’ and ‘being a volunteer’ were structured by different forms of social engagement, which in turn influenced the ways individuals were able to work with each other in collaborative processes. We argue that the discursive practices encoded in homeschool-community partnership rhetoric represent ruling-class ways of organising and networking that may be incompatible with those of people from low socio-economic backgrounds. When such volunteers work in schools their attendance may be sporadic and short-term whereas teachers would like ‘reliable’ ongoing commitment. This mismatch wrought of teachers’ and volunteers’ differing everyday realities needs to be understood before useful models for partnerships in disadvantaged communities may be realised.

Becoming a teacher in neo‐liberal conditions

Taylor and Francis RPCS_A_334836.sgm 10.1080/14681 0802346697 Pedagogy, Culture & Society 468-1366 (pri t)/1747-5104 (online) Original Artic e 2 0 & Francis 6 30 000October 2 08 AlexKostogriz .k @education.monash. du.au Unpacking the loaded teacher matrix: negotiating space and time between university and secondary English classrooms, by sj Miller and Linda Norris, New York, Peter Lang, 2007, 256 pp., US