scholarly journals Language, citizenship and schooling: A minority teacher’s perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Burner ◽  
Audrey Osler

In an age in which a shift towards increased authoritarianism and populism means that citizenship is defined in increasingly exclusive ways, migrant teachers’ perspectives are vital in informing inclusive educational decision making, policies and practices. We draw on the life history tradition to present the perspectives of one minority teacher, living and working in Norway. Elif, a Turkish-Norwegian, reflects on her motivations in pursuing teaching as a career. As a multilingual minority teacher, she considers the relationships between language use, citizenship and belonging. For Elif, having Turkish roots and living in Norway presents certain advantages, possibilities and challenges, both in school and society. She suggests that her intercultural experiences and multilingual skills provide her with insights that enable special relationships with minority students, whose language skills and identities she seeks to activate and demystify. She identifies tensions between the Norwegian ideal of equality, her experiences of being minoritized by her professional peers and the mechanisms of exclusion operating among teachers to the detriment of minority students. Minority teachers’ insights inform education for social justice. Including their stories avoids distorting knowledge critical to inclusive citizenship and inclusive processes of teaching and learning.

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 55-62
Author(s):  
Nasy Inthisone Pfanner

The aim of this reflective article is to investigate firstly, the preconception of professionalism in teaching; secondly, whether minority teacher’s identity influences their professionalism; and, thirdly, how minority teachers affect minority students, since minority teachers face real inequality in white societies. The issue of teacher professionalism has always been controversial due to the changing nature of the profession and society’s expectations of how the profession should be. There has not been an investigation regarding minority teachers in Austria. I wish to address this gap in the research by investigating the experience of a Laotian-American in a secondary school. The investigation reveals that in spite of the efforts that governments in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have put into recruiting minority educators, minority teacher population does not keep pace with the minority student populations. Regrettably, Austrian government does not have such a recruiting scheme. This study has the potential to raise debates about minorities in the Austrian educational system and contribute to existing discussion about minority educators in white society.


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Ingersoll ◽  
Henry May ◽  
Gregory Collins

This study examines and compares the recruitment, employment, and retention of minority and nonminority school teachers over the quarter century from the late 1980s to 2013. Our objective is to empirically ground the ongoing debate regarding minority teacher shortages and changes in the minority teaching force. The data we analyze are from the National Center for Education Statistics’ nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and its longitudinal supplement, the Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS). Our data analyses document the persistence of a gap between the percentage of minority students and the percentage of minority teachers in the US. But the data also show that this gap is not due to a failure to recruit new minority teachers. In the two decades since the late 1980s, the number of minority teachers almost doubled, outpacing growth in both the number of White teachers and the number of minority students. Minority teachers are also overwhelmingly employed in public schools serving high-poverty, high-minority and urban communities. Hence, the data suggest that widespread efforts over the past several decades to recruit more minority teachers and employ them in disadvantaged schools have been very successful. But, these efforts have also been undermined because minority teachers have significantly higher turnover than White teachers and this is strongly tied to poor working conditions in their schools.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-137
Author(s):  
Norbazila Mohd Asikin ◽  
Noor Aireen Ibrahim

Pronunciation is a key component of speaking skill and providing students with sufficient knowledge on correct pronunciation will help to improve their overall speaking skills. However, pronunciation remains a contentious issue in English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching and learning process as teaching pronunciation has often been avoided by language teachers. There are many factors that make teaching pronunciation a challenge for teachers and can be divided into internal and external challenges. This study was conducted to examine challenges faced by teacher trainees in teaching pronunciation and ways in which these challenges were managed. This study employed both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection. A set of self-developed questionnaire with two main sections and a total of eight items was distributed to 34 teacher trainees, six of whom were interviewed to gather data for this study. Challenges in teaching pronunciation found in this study can be divided into two categories which were internal and external challenges. Internal challenges consist of i) lack of confidence, ii) lack of sufficient knowledge and iii) pedagogical issues. On the other hand, external challenges faced by novice teachers in this study included i) lack of priority, ii) limitation of time; and iii) lack of teaching materials and resources. Although novice teachers face both internal and external challenges in teaching pronunciation, three main methods were employed by the respondents to manage these challenges. The management of these challenges showed that novice teachers were aware of the importance of teaching pronunciation and therefore did not allow these challenges to become a barrier.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 139-144
Author(s):  
Muhammad Badrus Sholeh ◽  
Sahril Nur ◽  
Kisman Salija

Task-Based Learning (TBL) is one of the contemporary approaches, which has attracted a great deal of study in recent decades. It is a language education approach that offers students the opportunity to use authentic target language use by tasks. Task-Based Learning drives skill-based teaching and learning, engages students in the learning process, motivates and enhances student imagination. This paper focuses on some fundamental aspects of TBL in literature: (1) the task-based learning definition, (2) the task-based learning characteristics, (3) the task-based learning framework, (4) the task-based learning benefits, and (5) a proposed task-based learning practice for EFL learners. The paper gives useful suggestions to EFL teachers who have similar teaching strategies to help students meet such learning goals in their classrooms and continue positive TBL patterns in teaching and learning.


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Larsen-Freeman,

AbstractRepetition is common in language use. Similarly, having students repeat is a common practice in language teaching. After surveying some of the better known contributions of repetition to language learning, I propose an innovative role for repetition from the perspective of complexity theory. I argue that we should not think of repetition as exact replication, but rather we should think of it as iteration that generates variation. Thus, what results from iteration is a mutable state. Iteration is one way that we create options in how to make meaning, position ourselves in the world as we want, understand the differences which we encounter in others, and adapt to a changing context.


Author(s):  
Irina Lyublinskaya ◽  
Xiaoxue Du

This chapter describes pedagogical practices and teaching strategies with instructional technology used in an online summer course with preservice K-12 teachers. The course provided preservice teachers (PSTs) with experiences in using technology in K-12 classrooms from both students' and teachers' perspectives, engaged PSTs in active explorations of various K-12 curriculum topics using technology that could enhance high-impact teaching strategies, and supported PSTs in development of virtual lessons using instructional technology. The study identified effective practices with instructional technology to support preservice teachers' development of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) for their own online teaching. Study findings suggest that online immersive experience created a virtual student-centered space to nurture collaborative inquiry and that contributed to the growth of PST's TPACK. However, this experience also brought challenges and concerns for sustaining and transforming teaching and learning with instructional technology to an online environment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-372
Author(s):  
Lucia Molnár Satinská

Abstract The paper focuses on the individual language management of Hungarian minority students from Southern Slovakia who migrated to study at university in the capital city of Slovakia, Bratislava. It presents language strategies of five students, based on their language biographies. Each student was interviewed three times during their first three years of study. The language problems of these students include maintaining their mother tongue and improving their skills in Slovak as well as balancing between the two languages in various spheres of life. Factors affecting the language use of the students are family, institutions, peer group and overcoming fear. The students deal with their everyday multilingualism according to several models, which can be described on the axis between Hungarian only to Slovak only, but the students mostly find themselves somewhere in between the two, depending on various spheres (family, university, jobs, peers).


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Qismat M. Zahawi ◽  
Fatimah R. Hasan Al Bajalani

The aim of this study is to elicit Kurdish EFL teachers’ perspectives on constructivism and its implementation at university level. To obtain the needed data, a questionnaire is administered to 49 EFL teachers at Salahaddin University. According to the most significant results of the research, the Kurdish EFL teachers in general have positive perspectives toward constructivism as a teaching and learning approach. However, their agreement with the implementation of the different principles of constructivism varied and the agreement percentage for the items ranged from 89.39% to 73.47%. It is worth mentioning that the current study is an extract from a PhD dissertation that investigates the effectiveness of implementing the principles of constructivism in the Kurdish context.


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