In Praxis: Creating a (Web)Site of Resistance and Disrupting the Hidden Curricula of Academic Socialization

The navigation and socialization within academia is rife with toxicity and a hidden curricula reflective of neoliberal competitiveness, drawn from White cis-hetero colonialist patriarchy. To challenge and resist the toxicity within academia, Communities of Color have created counterspaces to share resources, build beyond the purported individualism, and connect through vulnerability and care. Within this reflection, are the lessons learned of creating one such counterspace through the development of a website— a “site” of resistance.

Confronting the nameless-faceless: a duoethnography of navigating turnover and early career socialization

PurposeThe purpose of this duoethnography was to share our narratives as a left-behind early career faculty (ECF) and graduate student with minoritized identities and reflect on academic socialization processes. Specifically, when many scholars are raising alarms about the retention and success of faculty with minoritized identities, it is crucial to recognize the dimensions of socialization within the organizational context of academia.Design/methodology/approachThe authors sought an approach that would facilitate the interrogation of the overlap and divergence of the authors’ perspectives. Duoethnography research design was chosen for its focus on self-reflection as well as on the importance of the expression and consideration of those diverging perspectives. The goal was collaboration to generate a discussion that deepens a complex understanding of socialization in and professional commitment to academia.FindingsThe central insight that surfaced from the analysis of our duoethnography data is the enhanced understanding of the “nameless-faceless” dimension of academic socialization. Endeavoring to understand why faculty leave and how those who are left behind make sense of that departure led the authors to examine the unknown entities the authors are responsible to and for so they may better understand their commitment to academia.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors’ findings reveal that the nameless–faceless element is just a generalized behavior adopted in the interest of restricted and individual advantage. Diversity and equity practices are touted as a priority, but frequently, institutions act in ways that establish their own self-interests. The authors argue that we are all the nameless–faceless when they participate in academic norms that work to uphold and perpetuate traditional practices in academia.Practical implicationsThe authors’ findings point to intentional mentoring and integration of responsibility in faculty roles as potential recruitment and retention tools.Originality/valueThe authors extend the importance of collaboration and mentorship in retaining graduate students and EFC to the concept of intertwined professional commitment, or the theory that it is not simply the outcomes that are influenced by the support and cooperation between faculty with minoritized identities but that our professional commitment to academia is strengthened by that collaboration and witnessing each other's purpose and motivation to remain in academia.

Elternbeteiligung als Potenzial zur Förderung des schulischen Erfolgs. Ein Second-Order-Review

Dieses Second-Order-Review geht der Frage nach, inwiefern verschiedene Formen der Elternbeteiligung (home-based parental involvement, school-based parental involvement und academic socialization) die schulische Leistung und Motivation von Schüler*innen fördern können. Die systematische Auswertung von 18 Metaanalysen zeigt größtenteils positive, aber unterschiedlich große Effekte. Daraus ergeben sich vielfältige Möglichkeiten, wie Schulen mit ihrer pädagogischen Expertise Elternbeteiligung gezielt unterstützen können.

"MIND THE GAP": THE TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING PROCESS OF SECOND LANGUAGE PRACTITIONERS WHEN BECOMING SCHOLARS

This paper is about transformations from knowing to not-knowing and from doing to becoming. The paper’s focus is an ongoing research project on a new Doctorate program in Modern Languages studies (DML) and the process that the students in this program undergo when transitioning from being practitioners to becoming novice scholars. This program is part of a conscious effort to create an academic field whereby scholarly and professional types of knowledge are organically co-produced and this interlaced knowledge is expected to fertilize practitioners’ professional practices. The program’s graduate students are mostly in their mid-career and are motivated to pursue their DML studies for multiple reasons. The necessity of developing a study plan that can foster their transition from practitioners to scholars and help them develop a researcher identity became evident early on. Students were expected to quickly re-adjust their self-image as future theorizers who could carry out independent research and produce original scholarship. While the challenges mentioned above are not unique to this specific doctorate program and are well documented in the extensive scholarship on doctorate students’ education, fewer studies have addressed the particular challenges faculty and students face as part of the latter’s transition from practitioners to graduate students and novice researchers. Therefore, we ask, what accounts for a successful process of supporting language teachers in becoming novice researchers? Our aim is twofold: first, to detail our pedagogical rationale, dilemmas we faced, and the solutions we carved out; and secondly, to contribute to a nascent discussion on doctorate students’ training and academic socialization in applied disciplines. Using Mezirow’s adult learning theory of Transformative Learning, we describe the challenge of designing a process of academic socialization that can support adult learners’ development and shift in perceptions, skills, and actions. During the first four cohorts of the program, in an introductory course, “Research Foundations,” we faced dilemmas regarding reading materials and teaching activities, and collected students' reflections and communications with us, the course professors. Accordingly, the paper explicitly emphasizes our efforts to actively foster a culture of independent learning and a productive learning community by introducing new knowledge and skills. The paper can benefit instructors who design and lead graduate programs for practitioners in any field of practice.

Coping strategies in oral academic presentations of international undergraduate students in a Philippine university: a small-case study

Higher education students are increasingly becoming aware of the importance of being successful in oral academic presentations (OAP) in their academic endeavors. For English as a second language students in English-medium institutions, it also provides them with opportunities for language socialization. However, succeeding in the delivery of an OAP comes with various challenges emerging from linguistic and psychological factors. This small-case study explores OAPs as an oral academic socialization activity by documenting the strategies that 13 international undergraduate students in a large private Philippine university use to cope with the difficulties facing them in preparing and presenting an OAP. Using language socialization as the theoretical framework and semi-structured interviews to gather data, it identifies and explains eight personal strategies (six still employed and two no longer used) and discusses various factors that play a vital role in applying these strategies. The three most commonly used strategies are adopted to ensure a successful and acceptable OAP, typically a graded task. The two least frequently used ones are yet to be employed successfully. In applying these strategies, students not only perform the required academic task but are also engaged in different levels and frequencies of language socialization before and during the delivery of an OAP. Pedagogical implications in the use of OAPs as an academic task for language socialization in higher education are also discussed.

Emergent Literacy Development in Adult L2 Learners

Globally, many adults lack access to education due to gender, poverty, ethnic discrimination, political conflict, and geographic proximity. Moreover, many of these same adults may migrate at some point in their lives, needing to adapt to new linguistic settings. Oftentimes, such adults need to learn both an entirely new language and first-time literacy - not necessarily in their first language, but in the new language (L2) which they may not yet speak. By providing a robust overview of scholarship on emergent literacy acquisition in children and adults, this chapter heightens understanding of the complexity of acquiring literacy for the first time as an L2 adult migrant. The chapter provides practical guidelines on how teachers of L2 adults with emergent literacy can apply this knowledge in the classroom, focusing on three pedagogical areas - vocabulary acquisition, metalinguistic awareness, and academic socialization.

Jewish-European Émigré Lawyers

Jewish émigré lawyers, historians, archivists and activists and their individual approaches to International Humanitarian Law. Jewish-European émigré lawyers in the twentieth century were important agents of legal internationalism and served as carriers of intercultural concepts of international legal thought; concepts, which fed into postwar discourses, but were also often forgotten or marginalized. This interdisciplinary volume focusses on a range of international lawyers, historians, archivists and activists and their individual approaches towards International Humanitarian Law. It uses a biographical lens to analyze the impact of subjective experiences like academic socialization, ideological and religious viewpoints (Weltanschauung), social marginalization, political and racial persecution, and forced emigration. Moreover, it investigates the extent to which the emigrants’ experiences shaped typical notions of twentieth century politics and law, such as universalism and particularism, cosmopolitanism and sovereignty, national self-determination, citizenship and statelessness, collective minority rights, and individual human rights.