Discourses and Identities in Contexts of Educational Change: Contributions from the United States and Mexico(387 Counterpoints)

Discourses and Identities in Contexts of Educational Change presents the work of fourteen scholars concerning the United States and Mexico. The authors explore current and changing educational contexts through the relationship between discourses and identities. These are contexts in which the participants must negotiate multiple, and sometimes conflicting, positions. The empirical studies reported here are grounded in contemporary theories of sociolinguistics and literacy practices, social relations conceptualized in dynamics of power, and identity representations. The book uniquely contributes to the challenges facing different educational communities in specific contexts by using discourse and identity as the conceptual tools to analyze the problematic and often unclear relationship among diverse educational actors immersed in contexts of change at the local, national, and global levels.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Guadalupe López-Bonilla/Karen Englander: Preface – Colin Lankshear: Introduction – Hugh Mehan/Nadia Khalil/J. César Morales: Going the Distance: The Challenges of Traversing Cultural and Geographical Space between Home and School – Elizabeth Birr Moje: Developing Disciplinary Discourses and Identities: What’s Knowledge Got to Do with It? – Guadalupe López-Bonilla: «Teamwork»: Conflicting Cultural Models of Gender, Class, School, and Family among High School Students – James Paul Gee: Reading, Language Development, Video Games, and Learning in the Twenty-first Century – Carmen Pérez-Fragoso: Between Physical and Virtual Spaces: The Literacy Practices of High School Students – Judith Green/Ana Inés Heras: Identities in Shifting Educational Policy Contexts: The Consequences of Moving from Two Languages, One Community to English Only – Alma Carrasco/Rollin Kent: Power, Identity and Discourse in the Institutionalization of Basic Education in Mexico – Karen Englander: The Globalized World of English Scientific Publishing: An Analytical Proposal That Situates a Multilingual Scholar – Guadalupe Tinajero-Villavicencio: Bicultural or Intercultural? The Official Discourse and Its Appropriation by Indigenous Teachers in Mexico.

About the Author :
Guadalupe López-Bonilla is a professor of literacy studies and discourse analysis at the Universidad Autónoma of Baja California. Her research interests include high school students’ literacy practices, inequality in education, and youths’ identities. She is coauthor (with Alma Carrasco and Alicia Peredo) of La lectura desde el currículo de educación básica y media superior en México (2008) (Reading in Language Arts in the Mexican National K-12 Curriculum). Karen Englander is a professor in the Faculty of Languages at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Ensenada, Mexico. She brings 25 years of teaching experience in English as a second/foreign language in Canada, California, and Mexico, to her research in academic literacy and disciplinary writing. She is co-author (with David Hanauer) of the forthcoming Scientific Writing in a Second Language.

Review :
"The chapters in this book collectively address an interesting range of educational change proposals and implementations, from global to local levels, and with varying points of impact within the overall educational enterprise [...]. Across this span we are presented with diverse and interesting perspectives on, and insights into, ways in which social orderliness and hierarchy are constituted and refined within everyday processes of people being recognized as being particular kinds of persons within particular contexts [...].This book could be read in many ways. My way reads it as a text that moves between forms of social research that speaks to questions of meaning, action, and social order, on the one hand, and forms of educational inquiry undertaken with a view to contributing toward promoting better quality learning and more equitable academic achievement, on the other. In the final analysis, the book prompts difficult questions about the relationship between how formal learning is socially ordered and the ideal of enhancing learning on an equitable basis [...] (It) is a timely reminder that in the game of educational change the odds are stacked heavily in favour of established order, structure, and hierarchy" (Colin Lankshear, from the Introduction)