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The article is concerned with teaching language by utilizing social media from a social justice perspective. It makes an argument for taking a dialogic approach to pedagogy based on serendipity and contingent scaffolding. The article is inspired by a small but growing body of literature known as Critical Computer-Assisted Language Learning. First, I provide a brief introduction to Computer-Assisted Language Learning, and its recent turn toward a critical approach. Then, I discuss social media, and what "social" means when it precedes the word "media." Next, I describe how social media are being used in language education, and why the dominant methods of use may not prepare language learners as justice-oriented democratic citizens. A key barrier I identify in this regard is media users' increasing ability to filter what they want to see and hear. To re-think the pedagogical uses of social media, I draw from Mikhail Bakhtin's works and propose a dialogic approach, which may be helpful for language teachers and teacher educators.

In this article, I re-visit the gap between educational research and practice, by reviewing some initiatives that have been taken to bridge the gap. I argue that most of these initiatives do not pay due attention to local contexts of research use. They tend to focus more on the "management" of researchers' theoretical knowledge than on the "generation" of teachers' pedagogical knowledge. For the development of meaningful pedagogical knowledge, I recommend that teachers be provided with appropriate opportunities to engage directly with educational research. However, I note that such engagement with research is not without challenges and constraints. Borrowing from Denzin and Lincoln (2005), I discuss three challenges--of representation, legitimation, and praxis--to teachers' engagement with research. To overcome these challenges, I propose that teachers work as locally-based interpretive communities, in which they negotiate a communicative validity of research findings through dialogue with one another.

This article is concerned with a group of language teachers' reading and interpretation of a peer-reviewed journal article. It draws empirical materials from a larger study, which explored how teachers addressed the 'crises' of representation, legitimation and praxis in educational research. In this article, I present a subset of data to illustrate how some of the participants responded to the crisis of praxis. I describe the participants' interpretive work as ways of reading, and discuss how these "ways of reading" constitute an imaginative-ethical approach to reading research. Such an approach, it is argued, holds the potential to interrupt the dominant instrumental model of research use. Throughout the article, a case is made for understanding how teachers read and interpret research-based recommendations in keeping with their local contexts and professional commitment.

This article is concerned with teachers' engagement with educational research. It presents a subset of data from a larger study, which explored teachers' responses to educational research published in a peer-reviewed journal. In this article, I discuss four ways of reading that the participants employed while addressing the validity and usability of research findings. Collectively, these ways of reading challenge the dominant applied science model of research use. Based on insights gleaned from the participants' ways of reading, I propose an interpretive-ecological approach to educational leadership. This approach would ask educational leaders to facilitate the creation of spaces where teachers may be able to actively interpret the meanings of research-based evidence. It is hoped that such interpretive readings will help teachers gain contextually relevant knowledge and practical wisdom in the contemporary culture of evidence-based practice, which leaves little room for personal judgement and interpretive practice.

Emotions are often used to categorize migrant and refugee populations, and to place them into particular subject positions. In much of the literature on the education of migrant and refugee students, emotions are viewed through a therapeutic lens. Against this backdrop, I argue that curriculum inquiries need to pay more sustained attention to how emotions are generated and circulated through complex discursive practices and to their potential implications for the curricular experiences of migrant and refugee students. I discuss some principles of Critical Emotion Studies, which constitute an analytical framework for future curriculum inquiries.

Educational leadership in Canada has traditionally been conceptualized as a solo activity. However, in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the distributed character of leadership. Like any other theory or concept, distributed leadership has attracted praise as well as criticism. In this chapter, we conceptualize distributed leadership as concerted actions that happen in everyday practices in schools and through relationships among various partners such as principals/heads and teachers. The chapter is divided into four sections. In Section 1, we trace historical and theoretical antecedents of distributed leadership in general with respect to questions of representation, legitimation and praxis, with specific references to social impetuses. Section 2 considers Canadian educational contexts in terms of current conditions and trends in distributed leadership. The third section deals with the global perspective in terms of social, political and aesthetic forces. The fourth section speculates upon the future of distributed leadership in terms of utopian/dystopian possibilities. In this final section, we experiment with what philosophical hermeneutics may offer to a re-conceptualization of distributed leadership. Through Gadamer's notion of praxis, we discuss concerted action of distributed leadership. We highlight the importance of this form of leadership in an era of unprecedented global interconnectedness, and how it may facilitate teachers' professional learning and development.

While the field of second language teacher education (SLTE) has expanded noticeably over the past decade, little attention has been paid to specific approaches to its curriculum. Taking a hidden-curriculum approach, I show that the curriculum of SLTE is focused predominantly on the content, method and assessment of teaching, which I describe as Tylerism. Moreover, the curriculum remains largely silent about such social concerns as the spread of violence. I argue that this silence itself serves as a frame of violence. In order to re-imagine the SLTE curriculum, I propose three principles drawn from rooted cosmopolitanism.

The central argument of this essay is that critical literacy with a rationalistic bent may not enable us to cope with ethical dilemmas in our responsiveness to human sufferings. I argue that critical literacy education would benefit from turning to the recent scholarship on affect/emotion studies. I draw upon the works of Sara Ahmed--one of the leading contributors to critical affect studies--to shed light on what is called a "regulatory power" that creates a schism in our responsiveness to violence and suffering. The key contribution of this essay is to present an actionable framework of what I describe as critical affective literacy. To delineate this framework, I present four pedagogical principles, along with examples of instructional activities.

While teachers are being called upon to turn to educational research and find evidence of "what works," critics argue that research often suffers from a crisis of representation. They contend that research reports fail to sufficiently capture the lived experiences of research participants. In this article, I present insights gleaned from 12 in-service teachers who read and responded to a research-based article published in a peer-reviewed journal. Data were collected from the participants' threaded discussions on a wiki discussion board and individual in-depth interviews. The analysis of data suggests that the participants viewed the research article as both a means of representation and a potential obstacle to it. Contrary to the crisis rhetoric, the majority of participants were not too concerned about the issue of representation. They interpreted the theoretical knowledge presented in the article in light of their past experiences and socio-material contexts of work. I use the concept of recognition to illustrate their interpretive readings of the research article. I conclude the article with a discussion of how a recognitive approach to representation may help us re-conceptualize the dissemination and utilization of educational research in the current climate of evidence-based practice.

In this article, I present insights from a discourse analytic study in which I examined publications that emerged from a teacher development program in Bangladesh. The program, known as English in Action, utilizes information and communication technologies to deliver professional development activities to English-language teachers. Now in its 8th year, the program claims great success in developing teachers' pedagogical knowledge and capacity. The primary purpose of this article is to analyze the discourses that this program uses to claim success. Building on Hargreaves and Fullan's (1992) three integrated approaches to teacher development, I analyzed a large corpus of texts. I drew on the recent scholarship on new materialism to guide the analysis. The findings suggest that most of the discourses that English in Action uses are detached from the material reality in which teachers live, learn, and work. I conclude the article with a call for using a new materialist lens to read dominant discourses about ICT-use in teacher professional development.

The advancement of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has challenged the traditional notion of literacy as print-based reading and writing. In this article, I discuss why integration of ICTs into language and literacy curricula is important from the perspectives of the pedagogy of multiliteracies and sociocultural theories of learning. After reviewing the state of ICT use in language and literacy education in Bangladesh, I argue that the use of ICTs does not automatically guarantee improved student learning. On the contrary, it may reify transmission models of education and situate teachers and students in certain identity positions as passive consumers of pre-packaged curricula. Building on Althusser's notion of interpellation, I give an example of how a top-down ICT-integrated curriculum may severely restrict teachers' and students' agency to interrogate assumptions about power and politics around schooling and to develop a language of critique and hope. I conclude the article with a call for integrating the principles of critical pedagogy into teachers' professional development programs so that teachers may learn to use ICTs in liberatory ways.

In this article, we report on a small-scale study in which we investigated English-language teachers' engagement with educational research. We conceptualized engagement with research as reading and systematically using research for professional development. Using questionnaires and in-depth interviews, we gathered empirical materials from 40 English-language teachers who teach at various primary and high schools located in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Our findings indicate that there is an absolute absence of teachers' research engagement for professional development. We discuss the key reasons for this lack of research engagement. We conclude the article with some implications of our findings for teachers' professional development and the practical value of educational research.

In this article, I employ Jacques Rancière's conception of an explicative order to explore how the World Bank contributes to the global project of educational neocolonialism. I argue that the Bank operates as a Master Explicator who taps into students' "inability" to learn by themselves. It explicates concepts such as "development" and "educational reform" as if the so-called Third World is unable to identify and solve its own problems. I also discuss how the Bank's self-described role as a knowledge bank is based on biased notions of research knowledge and evidence-based practice. In the name of objectivity, the Bank promotes particular kinds of knowledge, which steer educational policies and reforms towards neoliberal capitalism. I conclude the article with some implications that Rancière's conception of emancipation and equality may provide for imagining alternative futures.

Based on the observation that most of my students use computer-based technology (CBT) in their daily activities, I used computer assisted language learning (CALL) as an intervention in this action research study, carried out at a university in Bangladesh. This CALL curriculum was focused on Web 2.0 and its applications for educational purposes. The main objective of the study was to understand the effects of a CALL curriculum on the participants' learning motivation. To meet this objective, I designed CALL and non-CALL lessons to teach English to a class of first-year undergraduate students. Throughout this course, I observed students' behaviours and attitudes and collected data from different artifacts and student responses. Comparison between student behaviours during the CALL and non-CALL lessons and analysis of the triangulated data indicated that the use of Web 2.0 in the CALL curriculum contributed to an increase in students' motivation as well as their learning of the target language. (Contains 1 table and 2 images.)

Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation by Charles Bingham & Gert Biesta New York: Continuum, 2010, 176 pages. ISBN: 978-1-4411-9095-6 (HB), 978-1-4411-3216-1 (PB) In the title under review, Bingham and Biesta [...]

The greatest problems of the world result from people of different cultures, races and religions being unable to get along and to work together to solve problems such as racism, religious extremism, terrorism and ethnic conflicts. These problems have implicated our contemporary time, especially the post-9/11 era, with anxiety, fear, and suspicion. In this crucial phase of human history, we need what Martha Nussbaum calls an "imaginative capacity" to see how the world looks from the point of view of a person who has a different religion. In this article, I discuss the religious thoughts of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Although they lived in different cultures and belonged to different literary periods, their intellectual correspondence shows how both of them transcended contemporary religious traditions and established an original relationship with the Supreme Being. It is my hope that this comparative analysis, thus far unexplored, will provide us with insights into understanding religion with an "imaginative capacity" at a time when religious intolerance is disrupting peace across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reveals that some scholars have initiated moves in the past toward a true internationalization of the field of curriculum studies. These initiatives include the August 1995 meeting in Oslo, Norway, under the leadership of Professor Bjorg Gundem and the 2000 conference of scholars from 27 countries at the Louisiana State University in the U.S. The article also references the book "Conflicts in Curriculum Theory: Challenging Hegemonic Epistemologies" by João M. Paraskeva.

The article reports on a small-scale classroom research study conducted at a university in Bangladesh. The study is based on the argument that a theory of identity is necessary to understand the complex dynamics of teaching and learning second/foreign languages. In this study, 18 first-year undergraduate students were engaged in a class project called e-autobiography. Naturalistic observations, participants' autobiographical writings, and an open-ended questionnaire were used to collect the data. Analysis of the triangulated data indicated three main findings: most students constructed their identity as "users of English," considered themselves "privileged" to have gotten the opportunity to learn English, and believed that their geographical location was crucial to their identity construction as well as success in learning English. The article concludes with a call for increased attention to learner identity, which is closely related to successful acquisition of foreign/second language(s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the characteristic features of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) curriculum is its focus on language teaching methodologies which prescribe learning techniques, classroom activities, and behaviors of both teachers and students. Methods are no doubt an important element of any language teaching curriculum. However, I argue in this paper that TESOL methods excessively empower native-speaker teachers of English, teacher-trainers, and publishing companies in the UK and the USA to monopolize the global TESOL industry. The methods also marginalize the non-native-speaker teachers of English around the world. Thus, the legacy of TESOL methods has become a part of the USA-led neo-colonial enterprise. The article concludes with a plea that a more locally-situated approach to TESOL pedagogy needs to be adopted for a diversity we need in global TESOL education in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]