Shelley K. Taylor

Right pedagogy/wrong language and caring in times of fear? Issues in the schooling of ethnic Kurdish children in Denmark

Abstract Cummins calls on educators to promote critical dialog during micro-interactions with students, times when students acquire knowledge and negotiate their identities. For critical dialog to flourish, educators must create caring environments. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether a discourse of caring was transmitted to ethnic Kurdish students enrolled in a bilingual/bicultural education program in Denmark, and the mitigating role that macro (societal) factors, such as a discourse of fear played in their educators’ attempts to create safe, caring havens for critical dialog. To do so, I deconstruct issues that arose when an educator taught a novel study unit as a springboard for developing critical literacy. I adopted a critical ethnographic case-study approach that featured interviews, extensive participant-observation, and document analysis. There were mixed results with more at issue than pedagogical and linguistic factors. Macro-level discourses mitigated the success of the intervention, as did identity issues related to ethnic solidarity; however, some pedagogical features of the program opened up spaces for the ethnic Kurdish children to critically examine fear of ‘difference.’

Conformists & mavericks: introducing IT-enabled plurilingual pedagogy informed by the CEFR in high school French immersion

This exploratory case study investigates pathways taken by a Canadian French immersion high school teacher invested in pedagogical change. To fairly evaluate the successfulness of her attempt to effect change, Cummins’ ‘framework of coercive and collaborative relations of power manifested in macro- and micro-interactions’ was employed. Its use shed light on the structural adaptations needed for the innovation she was attempting to introduce to succeed. The teacher wanted to introduce plurilingual pedagogy informed by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) into a French-medium content-based course by drawing on student ease with using technology such as i-Movie. The findings gained through an analysis of classroom-based observation, interviews, documents and artefacts suggest the structural challenges she faced led her to make decisions at odds with her beliefs and goal of implementing innovative pedagogy (she modified a key aspect of a social justice task). They further suggest a mismatch between what she anticipated student reactions to the innovation would be as compared to their actual reactions. Students welcomed the chance to draw on their out-of-school digital knowledge to reflect their (linguistic) identity through their work, suggesting IT-enabled plurilingual pedagogy informed by the CEFR merits further exploration.

Más allá de la Educación: Educación Lingüística Multilingüe en Nepal

El proposito del presente manuscrito es describir el marco para la implementacion de la educacion multilingue de idiomas (EMI) por todo el pais de Nepal. Esbozo los conceptos claves de la EMI, explico la logica para la implementacion de la misma en el contexto nepali, y describo el marco de EMI que formo la base de los talleres para formadores. El marco se divide en 7 temas: 4 de los cuales son especificos a la EMI, y 3 de los cuales son discutidos ampliamente en la literatura sobre la educacion bilingue, que entonces no se presentan en este articulo. Argumento que la EMI debe ser implementada en otros paises para razones tantas educativas que socio-politicas, relacionando esto al bienestar educacional de los ninos de las minorias linguisticas.

Language and power

While interest in this area has been steadily mounting since the late 1980s, and an impressive array of theoretical work now exists on these constructs, how do they play out in practice? The purpose of the papers in this volume is to explore in depth the relationship between the two. To do so, we present cases that focus on bilingual proficiency, transformative pedagogy, identity negotiation, and power relations that critically address the constructs of language and power viewed from, related to, inspired by, or informed by Cummins’ (1986, 1996, 2001) empowerment framework. This special issue is thus a tribute to Cummins’ work on micro (school-based) and macro (societal) constraints in the development of bi/multilingualism, and how to overcome these constraints. This special issue is organized in three parts: the first explores macro-level issues, which include (c)overt, recursive, and hegemonic practices at governmental and institutional levels (Lee and Norton). The second provides a descriptive analysis of micro (school-based) instances of hegemonic discourses (Taylor). In the third and final part, the authors discuss the possibility of overcoming the sorts of constraints that hegemonic forces impose on bi and multilingual learners (Morgan; Mayer). In the first contribution to the special issue, Ena Lee and Bonny Norton discuss language hegemony at the global versus national level. In their discussion of English language learning globally, they explore Canagarajah’s (1999) notion of ‘periphery communities.’ In periphery communities, such as Singapore, learning English becomes politically and economically charged when it is perceived as posing a threat to individual identity and cultural ideologies. Through illustrative examples, these authors describe how to resolve potential identity and cultural conflicts by merging authoritative voices with diverse identities. This ability to construct a social identity via a selective process of discourses enables individuals to create the symbolic capital they need to challenge social and linguistic hegemony. Shelley K. Taylor’s paper deals with an ethnic Danish educator’s attempt to develop ethnic Kurdish and Turkish youths’ critical literacy. The study operationalizes the ‘focus on meaning’ segment of Cummins’ (2001) academic expertise framework, and relates the findings to his larger empowerment framework. Taylor examines the influence of macro-discourses on micro-interactions between students and educators, including how issues of ‘right’ pedagogy, but ‘wrong’ language, and discourses of ‘fear’ and ‘caring’ play out in second-generation immigrant youths’ identity