Alcorn (English and humanities, George Washington U.) argues that the gradual shift in the teaching of composition from a curriculum that looked at literature as an attempt to represent reality to one that stresses the subjectivity of the student in decoding texts has incorporated an insufficiently complex understanding of subjectivity. The current cultural studies programs stress political ideas over expressive writing, but Alcorn argues that political ideas will never be right unless there is attention to self-expression. Basing his work in the conceptual world of psychoanalytic theory, he outlines a cultural-studies practice that develops anti-ideological identity. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This book is based on a set of stories from teachers and education professionals in thirteen OECD countries. Twenty-three case studies tell of innovations in practice involving school teachers, inspectors, academics and policy makers.
In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under the conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India’s liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signaled the co-optation and depoliticization of struggles for women’s rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women’s empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and nonqueer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality’s focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism—both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world.
Education Reform and Social Change is about addressing and changing the structures, policies, and practices of schools that differentially advantage white, middle class, native English speakers over students of color for whom English may be a second or additional language. It is also about helping people to think critically about what it is schools do and to consider more democratic, participatory, and equitable approaches. The chapters in the text provide first-hand documentation of the voices, struggles, and visions of students, parent activists, advocates, attorneys, and educators involved in educational and social change processes. It chronicles real-life efforts of people challenging the status quo and working to build a more participatory, equitable, and transformative future. The goal of this book is twofold: first, to consider the structures, policies, and practices that shape and limit educational change, and learning and teaching; and second, to document grassroots collaborative and creative efforts to change them. It offers a critical framework both for conceptualizing and for actualizing educational change. Organized into four sections, this book provides a theoretical and practical framework for thinking about educational reform and social change -- one that moves from the broader structural concerns that are embedded in policy, to case studies that document activism and collaborative efforts to change school, city, and state policies, to classroom-based directions and initiatives, and to the construction of personal and collective visions for a more democratic, equitable, and just education. Each section includes an overview of the chapters, necessary background information to help the reader contextualize what follows, and guiding questions to encourage reflective thought and engagement with the text and to invite personal linkages. Two resource sections are included at the end of the volume: "Radical Educational Reform, Critical Pedagogy, and Multicultural Education: Selected Readings and Resources" and "National Organization Networks and Resources with a Critical Perspective."
Reflecting a multitude of developments in the study of language change and variation over the last ten years, this extensively updated second edition features a number of new chapters and remains the authoritative reference volume on a core research area in linguistics. A fully revised and expanded edition of this acclaimed reference work, which has established its reputation based on its unrivalled scope and depth of analysis in this interdisciplinary field Includes seven new chapters, while the remainder have undergone thorough revision and updating to incorporate the latest research and reflect numerous developments in the field Accessibly structured by theme, covering topics including data collection and evaluation, linguistic structure, language and time, language contact, language domains, and social differentiation Brings together an experienced, international editorial and contributor team to provides an unrivalled learning, teaching and reference tool for researchers and students in sociolinguistics
The authors explore some of the ways in which standardization, ideology and linguistics are interrelated. Through a number of case studies they show how concepts such as grammaticality and structural change covertly rely on a false conceptualization of language, one that derives ultimately from standardization.
What is the main role for teachers today? Why is the Council of Europe dealing with education, and teacher education in particular? How is educational thinking guided by visions of a future society desirable for all? How, in the midst of a fierce battle for curriculum time, can education for human rights, democracy and mutual understanding be embedded in the existing curricula? What are the values underlying our educational visions? The aim of this publication is to offer a few answers to these and many other questions. Above all, its purpose is to contribute to the ongoing debate, more necessary than ever, on the role of teachers and teacher education in the broader context of teaching and learning for a sustainable democratic society.
While verb classes are a mainstay of linguistic research, the field lacks consensus on precisely what constitutes a verb class. This book presents a novel approach to verb classes, employing a bottom-up, corpus-based methodology and combining key insights from Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, and Valency Grammar. On this approach, verb classes are formulated at varying granularity levels to adequately capture both the shared semantic and syntactic properties unifying verbs of a class and the idiosyncratic properties unique to individual verbs. In-depth analyses based on this approach shed light on the interrelations between verbs, frame-semantics, and constructions, and on the semantic richness and network organization of grammatical constructions. This approach is extended to a comparison of Change and Theft verbs, revealing unexpected lexical and syntactic differences across semantically distinct classes. Finally, a range of contrastive (German–English) analyses demonstrate how verb classes can inform the cross-linguistic comparison of verbs and constructions.
Featuring a highly accessible essay from Irigaray herself, this volume explores her philosophy of life and living. Life-thinking, an important contemporary trend in philosophy and in women's and gender studies, stands in contrast to philosophy's traditional grounding in death, exemplified in the work of philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Schopenhauer. The contributors to Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray consider Irigaray's criticisms of the traditional Western philosophy of death, including its either-or dualisms and binary logic, as well as some of Irigaray's "solutions" for cultivating life. The book is comprehensive in its analyses of Irigaray's relationship to classical and contemporary philosophers, writers, and artists, and produces extremely fruitful intersections between Irigaray and figures as diverse as Homer and Plato; Alexis Wright, the First-Nations novelist of Australia; and twentieth-century French philosophers like Sartre, Badiou, Deleuze, and Guattari. It also develops Irigaray's relationship to the arts, with essays on theater, poetry, architecture, sculpture, and film.
