Preparing Bilingual Teachers to Enact Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Bilingual students and teachers in the U.S. live in a context where linguistic and ethnic minorities are associated with inferiority. Preparing bilingual teachers of color without explicit attention to issues of race, language, and power would maintain and feed the vicious cycle of linguistic hegemony. With the goal of preparing critically conscious future bilingual teachers equipped to enact culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP), the authors centered issues of race, language, and power alongside bilingual instructional methodology and theories of bilingualism in their respective bilingual teacher preparation programs. Drawing on bilingual teacher preparation course material, student reflections, and bilingual teacher candidate interviews, they illustrate how two bilingual teacher preparation programs take two distinct approaches to developing bilingual teachers' critical consciousness and CSP practices. In this way, they outline how bilingual teacher educators can prepare and support bilingual teachers to enact CSP with their K-12 students.

Writing, History, and Power in the Classroom

Many students experience difficulty with the tensions and disjunctures between their vernacular ways of communication and standardized college English. The history of linguistic standardization in European imperialism, however, provides a pedagogically helpful critical heuristic for examining with students the power relations inherent in college writing instruction. By historicizing the entanglements of language and power, students are empowered to choose how and what they want to learn based on an awareness of their educational situatedness and with the support of a open and reflexive instructor.

Resisting a postcolonial construction of historical trauma and healing: Critical discourse analysis of public apologies in Canada

The contemporary discourse around historical trauma and healing is site for debate and resistance in public spheres. Guided by critical scholars in language and power as well as post-and settler colonialism, this study analyzes texts and contexts of two public apologies in Canada – Chinese head tax, and residential schools for Indigenous children – to examine how historical trauma and healing were understood, and by doing so how the subject and object were re/constructed to maintain or resist social (dis)orders – postcolonial racial orders – in the past and the present of Canada. Findings included: (1) a split and temporal distance between the wrong past and the benevolent present with governments constructing themselves as the good subject reifying a sincere fiction of a liberal, benevolent, and just white-nation; (2) no acknowledgement of the cause of historical trauma, namely colonial governing; (3) ongoing construction of the other racialized population as victims/burdens/lesser citizens to current Canada; and (4) the explicit demand to collective forgetting of the past/historical trauma as current healing and inclusion. We discuss social responsibilities when historical wounds continue to leave injuries and the risk of perpetuating systemic violence to people with whom we currently share the nation all of us call home.

Power, Politeness and Liquid Persona

This article explores pre-service English teachers’ self-reflections as participants in online intercultural exchange (VE). The aim is twofold: to examine participants’ perceptions of intercultural experiences in response to VE; and, to understand whether and how teacher trainees gain pedagogical insights through self-reflection situated in a cross-cultural online project. The study draws upon two iterations of exploratory research in a VE-project carried out with two cohorts of student groups. The first cycle involved students in Indonesia and Sweden, and the second cycle, a three-way collaboration, involved students in Argentina, Poland and Sweden. This article focuses on the Swedish side and examines empirical data incorporating e-diaries and interviews. A qualitative transcript analysis generated three intersecting themes: language and power, politeness, and participation through digital tools. Two theoretical constructs provide the analytical lens: persona (Hinrichsen & Coombs, 2014) and liquid interculturality (Dervin & Dirba, 2006). The findings challenge fixed notions of identity and interculturality, showing how participants engage in negotiations and fluid constructions of persona in response to perceived expectations of their interlocutors. The findings also indicate affordances of VE as a lingua franca contact zone in developing pre-service English teachers’ self-awareness and pedagogical competences.

Ethno-Nationalism: Theories and the Dynamics of the Demand for the New Federating Units

Ethnicity has been not only the source of diversity but also social and political tensions across the globe. The socio-economic and political alienation and sense of deprivation trigger ethnonationalism that manifests itself into different forms and manifestations ranging from armed struggles to political movements. The failure to establish a vibrant and pluralist society with social and economic justice at its heart paves the way for ethnic strife that attracts different responses and reactions from the states faced with the ethnic conflict. Based on the qualitative research methods, this scholarly endeavor seeks to dissect the dynamics and drivers of ethnic-nationalism and how the countries like India, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Switzerland, the Philippines and South Africa have tried to address the problem. Further, it analyses the different theoretical approaches, notably primordialism, constructivism, instrumentalist, language and power, religion, race and culture have been employed by the countries to tackle the non-traditional threat posed by ethnonationalism.

Book Review: "Evil Political Intent: Benedict Anderson on Language and Power"

Joss Wibisono has recorded well every time Benedict Anderson writes something, especially in terms of language. Of course, Ben Anderson (Benedict shortened to Ben) is an Indonesian specialist, who is super critical (in this topic, of course, criticism in terms of language). Ben Anderson, who is an observer of Indonesia, on the other hand is also a person who truly loves Indonesia. It can be said that he contributed his writings on Indonesia which is very legendary in the Indonesian intellectual group. Therefore, Joss Wibisono here tries to reveal politics in Indonesian using Ben Anderson's perspective. Of course, the main purpose of this is to be read and then reviewed by readers, this book is to remember Ben Anderson himself as a friend and a supercritical Indonesian intellectual.

‘To Possess the Power to Speak’

I argue here that first person speech on sexual violence remains an important dimension of the movement for social change in regard to sexual violence, and that the public speech of survivors faces at least three groups of obstacles: 1) the problem of epistemic injustice, that is, injustice in the sphere of knowledge 2) the problem of language and power, and 3) the problem of dominant discourses. I explain and develop these points and end with a final argument concerning the critical importance of speaking publicly on these areas of human experience.