The following paper is a critical examination involving the misuse of sacred cultural tools and practices in the name of multicultural education. Native American practices are identified to illustrate how such inappropriate usages promote pedagogical racism. The misuse continues the hegemonic distribution of social capital. Through the…

This essay looks primarily at one approach to teaching about privilege in a feminist research course. I talk about the motivation to ask students to participate in this exercise and the potential as well as the challenges it has for raising awareness of one's own privileges before setting out to do feminist research. Additionally, the paper…

Garth Boomer's ideas in "Negotiating the Curriculum" (1992a) resonate with discussions of shifting teacher and student roles and relationships in the "student voice" movement. Boomer (1988) critiqued his earlier conception of power in "Negotiating the Curriculum," asserting that he would "now like to write a book…

In response to the national conversation about the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration in recent years, we created an online partnership between students in concurrent border studies courses at our two campuses: a public Hispanic-serving institution in South Texas and a private, small liberal arts college in Michigan. We explored whether and how…

This paper is in part, a reflective analysis of 15 years living with the state-recognized Florida Creek Indians of the Central Florida Muskogee Creek Tribe and the Pasco Band of Creek Indians, formally of Lacoochee, FL and currently in Brooksville, FL, respectively. It addresses the power structures within tribal organizations. Selected Creek…

Throughout the twentieth century, middle-class progressives embraced visions of democracy rooted in their relatively privileged life experiences. Progressive educators developed pedagogies designed to nurture the individual voice within egalitarian classrooms, assuming that collective action in the public realm could be modeled on the relatively…

Being up front with students about Standard English as "the language of power" allows them to learn valuable lessons about Standard and non-Standard English dialects. In this article, the author describes an eighth-grade language unit that helps students understand the value of dialects and standardized English. The author concludes that the…

In this paper, a series of vignettes is used to explore important current challenges in TESOL. These vignettes are drawn from many different settings, including Bengali-, Pahari- and Chinese-speaking children in UK primary schools, speakers of Aboriginal English in Australia and Chinese teachers of English on courses in Higher Education. A number…

This article draws on a study which investigated the interpretation and use of Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) in primary schools in the UK (the authors gratefully acknowledge Studentship funding from the Economic and Social Research Council for this study). The paper focuses on school staff members' perceptions about the…

Trauma pedagogy occupies an intriguing space within the discourse about effective teaching of culturally and linguistically diverse students, particularly in relation to preservice teacher notions of power. One set of messages received by future teachers strongly advocates for asserting authority within the classroom by taking control via strict…

Secondary English teachers are charged with helping all students to read, write, and understand English in its many forms and functions. However, students' language can be as diverse as the literature teachers bring to the classroom. Not all students come to the classroom with the skills to write standardized English; even fewer students come with…

Formative assessment is the process of eliciting students' understanding during instruction in order to make sensitive instructional decisions and provide feedback to enhance students' learning. Research indicates that when used properly, formative assessment can lead to significant learning gains and enhance students'…

This article explores the use of group work strategies to increase student interaction and learning. Despite the growing linguistic and cultural diversity in tertiary institutions, there is strong evidence of minimal interaction between "domestic" and "international" students in classrooms and in wider university contexts. This study investigates…

We describe the dynamic discourse interactions between a teacher and her students in a third-grade science classroom. We focused on how the teacher and students initiate, prompt, respond, and provide feedback; use questioning and power strategies; and how questions are associated with power dynamics. We relate the consequences of teacher use of…

Inspired by the views by the American educationalist Henry Giroux on the role teachers and educationalists should be playing in the time of postmodernism and by Abraham Maslow's concept of biological idiosyncrasy, the author discusses how the concepts of the dialogues created by the representatives of Norwegian Dialogue Pedagogy, Hans Skjervheim,…