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From conservative estimates, as many as 1 in every 5 schoolchildren is an immigrant. Through both sheer numbers and qualitatively different migration practices, these populations have productively created an opportunity and imperative for educational practice to redefine its assumptions, practices, and relevancy. In this article, the author present snapshots of young immigrants navigating schooling and society, and more specifically, elucidate how these snapshots can productively agitate how literacy educators understand and undertake their work. The article uses case studies of two recently arrived immigrant students to examine how classroom practices and educational policies position these students, how literacy pedagogy follows from that framing, and how those frames obscure the complicated ways that textual practices reflect and structure societal experiences for immigrant youth. It provides recommendations for how educators can revamp their work to create educational experiences considerate of and re...

Critical literacy has been on the map of literacy pedagogy internationally since the time of Freire, and more commonplace in the United States in the last few decades. However, in this column the authors argue that the common practices of critical literacy are insufficient for critical engagement with texts. The tools of critical literacy are employed to explore ways in which recent legislation about immigration and ethnicity in Arizona is connected to racialized laws of exclusion and inclusion in the United States.

In this policy analysis column, we use the analytic tools of frame analysis to explore the ideologies, implicit and explicit, in the Obama administration's educational policies. In particular, we explore the ways that the initiatives are being framed through an oversimplified view of the “problem” in education and a capitalist-based approach to fixing that problem. For a point of conjecture, we offer an alternative framing of the challenges facing current educational practice and a requisite set of responses to those challenges. However, more important is that stakeholders of the Obama administration's initiatives engage in regular and consistent analysis of political frames and reconstruction of those frames when appropriate. في عمود تحليل السياسة هذا نستخدم الأدوات التحليلية لدى الإطار التحليلي كي نستكشف العقائد أيا كانت الباطنة أو الظاهرة في سياسات إدارة أباما التعليمية وعلى وجه الخصوص نستكشف الطرق التي تشكل من خلالها المبادرات التي تنتج رأيا مبسطا للغاية عن ((المشكلة)) في التعليم والمنهاج المبني على الرأس المالي ليحل تلك المشكلة. ومن باب الافتراض نقدم إطارا بديلا للتحديات التي تواجها الممارسات التعليمية القائمة الآن ومجموعة الردود الضرورية على هذه التحديات. ولكن أهم من ذلك هو أن أصحاب الحق في تشكيل مبادرات إدارة أباما يشتغلون في تحليل منتظم ومستديم للإطارات السياسية وإعادة بناءها في أوقات مناسبة. 在本政策分析专栏中，作者利用框架性分析作为分析工具，探究奥巴马政府的教育政策所存在的隐式及显式意识形态。作者特别探究政府所框定出来的新方案，如何以过分简单化的视野去看待教育「问题」及如何以资本主义为主的观点去解决这问题。作为一个猜想，作者提出另一个框架去看待当前教育实践所面对的挑战及所需的一组回应方法。然而，更重要的是，奥巴马政府新方案的利益相关者，必须定期与持续参与分析政治框架，并在适当时重新建构这些框架。 Dans cette rubrique d'analyse politique, nous utilisons les outils de l'analyse des structures pour examiner les ideologies, implicites et explicites, des politiques educatives de l'administration d'Obama. Nous examinons en particulier la facon dont les initiatives sont en train d'etre structurees a travers une conception sur simplifiee du « probleme » de l'education et une approche basee sur le capitalisme pour resoudre ce probleme. En guise de point de conjoncture, nous presentons une structuration alternative des defis auxquels font face les pratiques pedagogiques actuelles et un ensemble de reponses qui seraient necessaires pour relever ces defis. Cependant, le plus important est que les parties prenantes des initiatives de l'administration Obama s'engagent dans une analyse reguliere et coherente des structures politiques et a la reconstruction de ces structures quand ca s'avere necessaire. В этом выпуске рубрики, посвященной образовательной политике, мы используем аналитический инструментарий анализа фреймов, чтобы исследовать явные и скрытые идеологические посылки, которыми руководствуется администрация Барака Обамы в области образования. В частности, мы исследуем фреймы, связанные с различными инициативами: упрощенное представление о том, что в образовании наличествует некая “проблема”, и типично “капиталистический” подход к решению этой проблемы. В качестве гипотезы авторы предлагают альтернативные представления о проблемах, существующих в современном образовании, и набор действий, необходимых для их решения. Однако, самое главное, чтобы ключевые фигуры в администрации Обамы производили регулярный и последовательный анализ политических фреймов и при необходимости их видоизменяли. En esta columna de analisis de politicas, se usa las herramientas analiticas del analisis enmarcado para explorar las ideologias, implicitas y explicitas, de la politica educacional de la administracion de Obama. Exploramos en particular las maneras en que se estan enmarcando las politicas por medio de una perspectiva sobresimplificada del “problema” eduacional y un acercamiento capitalista para arreglar el problema. Para iniciar la discusion, ofrecemos un marco alternativo a los retos que las practicas de hoy dia enfrentan y las respuestas necesarias a tales retos. Pero, mas importante es que los interesados en las iniciativas de la administracion de Obama participen en analisis regulares y consistentes de los marcos politicos y la reconstruccion de dichos marcos cuando necesario.

From a critical language perspective, the main issues facing education of immigrant populations are the ways in which these populations are segregated as the Other and how educational practices often work to perpetuate a fringe status. In this paper, I draw upon both discursive perspectives on policymaking and pedagogical practices to address the ways in which immigrant multilingual populations are conflated as deficient English Language Learners and how this framing works hegemonically to situate them as an underclass in so-called developed nations. From this frame, I address the agenda facing critical linguistic research that addresses immigration and introduce the articles in this themed issue that provide possible architectures for knowing immigrant populations other than as deficient language learners.

In recent years, there has been a flurry of media and public policy attention paid to adolescent literacy. The attention has taken shape in the form of federal policies, research, recommendations from private entities, and position statements from professional organizations. The work pressing upon educators now is to engage substantively with these various incarnations and positions on adolescent literacy; to understand where and how issues about adolescent literacy surface, and how policies deal with these issues. First in this task is deciding what counts as policy and what we should read and interpret analytically. Through analyses of how issues are framed, we can better understand the social contexts of our work—what is possible and not possible discursively. And this puts us in a more agentive position for engaging in and transforming dialogues about adolescents, adults, and literacy. في السنوات الأخيرة قد تزايد انتباه وسائل الإعلام والسياسة العامة إلى معرفة القراءة والكتابة لدى المراهقين. وقد أخذ هذا الانتباه شكل السياسات الاتحادية وأبحاث العلم والمقترحات من الكيانات الخاصة والتصريحات الموقفية من المنظمات المحترفة. إن العمل الضاغط على المجال الآن هو الانشغال الجوهري بالتجسدات المتنوعة والمواقف حول معرفة القراءة والكتابة لدى المراهقين للفهم أين وكيف تنبثق قضاياها وكيف تتعامل السياسات مع هذه القضايا وعليه فإن الأول في هذه المهمة هو القرار ما يعتبر كسياسة وماذا يجب علينا أن نقرأ ونفسر بشكل تحليلي. ومن خلال تحليلات كيفية تأطير القضايا بإمكاننا أن نفهم وبشكل أفضل المواقف الاجتماعية لعملنا—ما هو ممكن وغير ممكن استطراديا. وهذا يضعنا في موقف أكثر فعال للقيام بالحوارات وتحويلها بشأن المراهقين والبالغين ومعرفة القراءة والكتابة. 近年来，青少年读写能力曾受到媒体与公共政策一阵短暂的关注。这些关注出现于联邦政策、研究、私营个体的建议，以及专业机构的立场声明中。 教育工作者的当务之急，就是真实地探究这些各种不同的青少年读写能力的体现与立场，了解有关青少年人读写能力的问题所在，及问题如何产生，以及公共政策如何处理这些问题。在这些工作中，首要的任务是决定什么是公共政策最重要的、什么是我们应该用分析的态度来阅读和解读的。通过分析问题是怎样被拟定的，我们便可以更明白我们工作的社会背景¾¾什么是在话语上可能的或不可能的。这样会让我们处于一个较为有原动力的地位来参与有关青少年人、成年人和读写能力的对话，以及改变这些对话的性质。 Une attention massive a ete apportee ces dernieres annees a la lecture-ecriture des adolescents. Cette attention a pris la forme de politiques federales, de recherches, de recommandations venant de sources privees, et de prises de position d'organisations professionnelles. La tâche urgente qui incombe maintenant aux enseignants est de s'engager de maniere substantielle en partant de ces diverses manifestations et positions sur la lecture et l'ecriture des adolescents, de comprendre d'ou viennent et quelles sont les questions qui se rapportent a la lecture-ecriture des adolescents, et quelles politiques adopter a leur propos. La premiere chose a faire dans ce domaine est de decider ce qui importe sur le plan politique et ce qu'il faut que nous lisions et interpretions precisement. Faire l'analyse de la facon dont les questions se presentent permet de mieux comprendre les contextes sociaux de notre travail — ce qui est possible et ce qui n'est pas possible discursivement. Et ceci nous place dans une position plus active pour nous engager dans le dialogue et les transformations relatifs a la lecture et a l'ecriture des adolescents et des adultes. В последние годы СМИ и общество уделяли особое внимание подростковой грамотности. Это внимание обретало различные формы, в том числе: государственной политики, научных исследований, рекомендаций и заявлений частных профессиональных учреждений и организаций. Теперь работникам образования предстоит разобраться, как сочетать эти точки зрения на подростковую грамотность, как следовать этим рекомендациям, в каких случаях эти вопросы стоят особенно остро и какова при этом официальная политика. Первоочередной вопрос: что именно можно считать официальной точкой зрения, а что мы вправе читать и трактовать аналитически. Исследуя само формирование подобных проблем, мы можем лучше понять социальный контекст нашей работы: что возможно и что невозможно в рамках предложенного дискурса. Это дает нам больше возможностей значимо участвовать в обсуждениях о подростках, взрослых и о вопросах грамотности. En los ultimos anos, los medios y la politica publica han mostrado mucho interes en la capacitacion de los adolescentes. Esta atencion ha producido normas federales, investigacion, recomendaciones de entidades privadas, y declaraciones de posicion por organizaciones profesionales. Lo que pesa sobre los educadores ahora es el de ser participe en estas encarnaciones y posiciones sobre la capacitacion de adolescentes; entender de donde y como aparecen estas cuestiones sobre la capacitacion de adolescente, y como las politicas se enfrentan a estas cuestiones. Lo primero que hay que hacer es decidir que se debe considerar norma y que se debe interpretar analiticamente. Al analizar como se enmarcan las cuestiones, podemos mejor entender el contexto social de nuestro trabajo—lo que es posible y lo que no es posible razonablemente. Esto nos pone en una posicion mas instrumental para participar y transformar los dialogos sobre adolescentes, adultos y la capacitacion.

Among the consistent tensions in teacher education is the need to mediate students' strong desires for precise methods with an appreciation for the epistemic and ontological realities of working with diverse populations. We aver that at the heart of affirming diversity is an enactment of democratic discourse, preparing citizens to participate in and shape the very structure of society (Gutmann, 1987). This article describes an attempt to use democratic discourse to both interrogate and provide an alternative to the methods fetish (Bartolome, 1994) that has plagued various areas of teacher education. As those who worked together in a teacher education program in a Australia, we identified an overlapping praxis gap in our courses and then worked together to develop a set of pedagogical and curricular approaches that used democratic discourse as a conduit to enable preservice teachers to examine the relationship among specific teaching practices and underlying beliefs framing those practices. In thi...

This paper explores the political, social, and cultural contexts of current early literacy federal policies in the United States. Building upon existing critiques of the policy and its epistemological stances, this paper first analyses the planning and discussion surrounding the introduction of the policy to state leaders and also how it is first discussed and planned for in one local context. The paper poses questions of how language and literacy are being defined and for whom, and explores these discussions in both federal and local uptake in the implementation process. A Foucaultian analysis is used to document and explore the beginnings of the implementation of the policy. By examining the techniques of power, knowledge, and surveillance exacted through the policy, the paper also sheds light on how these explicit and sub-textual messages are mediated by school-based educators. The paper closes by averring that language and literacy policies would do best to recognise and work within the complex learni...

Although all teacher education programs worldwide tout the importance of reflection in teaching, few studies, particularly in the field of literacy education, have researched the dimensions of teacher reflection. This study explores the use of scaffolded reflection in two literacy education courses in an urban university in the southwestern United States. Using constant comparative and critical discourse analyses, the preservice and inservice teachers' online and written reflections were analyzed for reflections of and challenges to various education-oriented discourses. Results show that scaffolding helped the students to formulate and articulate their personal belief system but did not substantively help them to challenge larger discourses of teaching, learning, and students

In Lisa Patel Stevens's undergraduate training as a print journalist, a professor handed her the journalistic charge succinctly: A newspaper should convey what it was like to be alive on that day in that place. Fairly straightforward, right? However, even a cursory scratch of the surface of that statement agitates and enlivens the complexity that spills over the capacity of texts to capture lived realities neutrally. For example, depending upon the news source, the flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster of climate patterns or a human-made disaster of civil engineering. Also depending upon your lived experiences, the reporting of these events may be, in and of themselves, textual acts that perpetuate racial inequities in the United States. It is within this complexity of texts as representative and agentive that policy analyses and document-based literacy research finds itself. Keywords: discourse analysis; language policy; methods; research methods in applied linguistics; literacy; sociocultural language studies

In this chapter, the authors explore the current challenges facing educational institutions to design learning spaces congruent for learning with and through multimodal textual practices. The chapter reviews the inherent design, or grammar, of multimodal literacy practices and that of learning with these texts. Using examples from secondary and tertiary contexts, constructs from complexity theory offer a theoretical lens that is more generative for conceptualizing and analyzing dynamic literacy practices in educational institutions than multimodal literacy. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the tensions that arise form these examples, using Bourdieu’s (1984) habitus to problematize the future of designing dynamic educational spaces.

This paper discusses the development of a new Bachelor of Education (Middle Years of Schooling) at The University of Queensland. The middle years of schooling have increasingly been the focus of education reform initiatives in Australia, but this has not been accompanied by significant increases in the number of teacher education institutions offering specialised middle schooling-level teacher preparation programmes. Considering the rapidly changing social and economic context and the emergent state of middle schooling in Australia, the programme represented a conceptual and practical opportunity and challenge for The University of Queensland team. Working collaboratively, the team sought to design a teacher education preservice programme that was both responsive and generative: that is, responsive to local school contexts and to current educational research and reform at national and international levels; and generative of cutting-edge theories and practices associated with middle schooling, teachers' work, and teacher education. This paper focuses on one component of the Middle Years of Schooling Teacher Education programme at The University of Queensland; namely, the practicum. We first present the underlying principles of the practicum programme and then examine "dilemmas" that emerged early in the practicum. These issues and tensions were associated with the ideals of "middle years" philosophy and the pragmatics of school reform associated with that new approach. In this paper, and within this context, we explore what it means to be both responsive and generative, and describe how we as teacher educators negotiated between the extremes these terms implied.

This paper explores various epistemological paradigms available to understand, interpret, and semiotically depict young people. These paradigms all draw upon a metadiscourse of developmental age and stage (e.g. Hall 1914) and then work from particular epistemological views of the world to cast young people in different lights. Using strategic essentialism (Spivak 1996), this paper offers four descriptions of existing paradigms, including biomedical (Erikson 1980), psychological (e.g. Piaget 1973), critical (e.g. Giroux & MacLaren 1982), and postmodern (e.g. Kenway & Bullen 2001). While some of these paradigms have been more distinct in particular cultural, historical, and political contexts, they have overlapped, informing each other as they continue to inform our understandings of young people. Each paradigm carries unique consequences for the role of the learner, the teacher, and the curriculum. This paper explores contemporary manifestations of these paradigms. From this investigation, a potential new space for conceptualising young people is offered. This new space, underpinned by understandings of subjectivity (Grosz 1994), assumes sense of self to be both pivotal in generative learning and closely linked to the context and its dynamics. We aver that such a view of young people and educational settings is necessary at this time of focused attention to the middle years of schooling. In so doing, we explore the potential of classroom life and pre-service teacher education constructed within this new discourse of young people.