English Education - Volume 42, Issue 4, 2010

Calls now abound in a range of literatures “philosophy, education, sociology, anthropology, media studies;” to reimagine citizenship and identity in ways befitting a global age. A concept predominant in many such calls is the ancient idea of cosmopolitanism. Refashioned now to serve as a compass in a world that is at once radically interconnected and increasingly divided, a cosmopolitan point of view remains resiliently hopeful, asserting that people can both uphold local commitments and take into consideration larger arenas of concern. This article animates theorizing about cultural citizenship, identity formation, and communication with an examination of what might be considered sites for cosmopolitan practice’ an online international social network and offline local programs designed to engage youth in representing themselves and interacting with the representations of others. Specifically, we report our initial research with a group of teenage girls in India, tracing their participation online and offline and their cosmopolitan imaginings of self and other. We hope that this work with young people worlds away geographically, culturally, and ideologically will speak to English educators in the United States who feel likewise compelled to support their students in developing twenty-first-century literacies’ both the technological competencies and the values, knowledge, and dispositions’needed to participate confidently and critically as citizens of local and global worlds.

This case reflects a yearlong project I, as the instructor of an Advanced Methods course, conducted with my students to help them plan and implement critical literacy units in their high school and middle school student teaching placements. To do so, I assigned student teachers to explore notions of critical literacy (including resistant reading, marginalized perspectives, and social action projects) and then use these methods to create and teach critical literacy units over two semesters. Students then uploaded these units, along with their reflections, to electronic portfolios. This research explores how these student teachers defined critical literacy for themselves and then planned, implemented, and reflected on their units.

This study examined the complexities of mentoring discourse and agentive teacher preparation. I argue that such an examination is necessary to better prepare student teachers to engage agentively with the powerful status quo in schools. I begin by discussing the intersections of current thinking about mentoring and dialogue, and I describe how these intersections suggest productive avenues for analyzing mentoring discourse. I then use a conceptualization of “dialogic praxis” to look closely at one instance of mentoring talk. Finally, I suggest this study’s implications for teacher preparation research, practice, and policy.

English teachers and educators of English teachers should work within rather than against the tensions present in their classrooms. For us, nothing could be more key. Until university teacher educators construct and enact classrooms that embrace the dialogical tensions and possibilities within those settings, new and veteran teachers in the profession will have few if any sustained experiences upon which to base their own dialogical classrooms. Moreover, to either deny that tensions exist or to struggle to eradicate them is to misunderstand the purpose and possibility of tension. Learners caught between stabilizing and destabilizing tensions enter a state of wobble, one that asks them to pay attention to the issues at hand and to author a response. The goal is not to remove oneself from that tension but instead to enter into a dialogue that, like the cables on a suspension bridge, uses tension for support and equilibrium.