English Education, broadly defined, is the study of the teaching and learning of English teacher education. The curriculum of English Education addresses all aspects of reading and writing, including language and rhetoric, and the teaching of those entities. Historically, the field has been punctuated by contention, with debates over what texts, contexts, and approaches should be included, and has been subject to the political influences that have impacted all public education, ranging from calls for progressive approaches that are student-centered to an emphasis on standards and accountability. Intertwined with these forces have been scholars whose theories greatly affected teachers’ approaches, especially related to the teaching of literature and methods for writing. While some movements advocated for basic skills and isolated drills, others pushed for a more critical and culturally situated English Education that expanded traditional notions of literacy to include social practices. Scholarship and research in the field mirrored these trends, with much focus on preservice teacher education, secondary students’ performance, and teachers’ use of various strategies to further engage youth. Future directions for the field include more classroom-based research on how English Education can respond to the demands of our technology-saturated and media-driven society as well as longitudinal studies of English teachers from preservice through their induction years to further study the impacts of their preparation programs.
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Article
The majority of European countries consider themselves as monolingual nation-states. Some exceptions are countries composed of different linguistic territories, such as Belgium and Switzerland. Another form of exception is countries where certain territories are inhabited by linguistic minorities who are granted particular linguistic rights. Monolingualism with exceptions for special constellations or cases is therefore considered the “linguistic normality” in European nations. This understanding of normality is also reflected in the nations’ public institutions and is particularly pronounced in the national education systems.
The linguistic reality in Europe, however, contrasts with this notion of normality. Since time immemorial, the regions that have become European nation-states have been characterized by linguistic diversity, not only across but also within their boundaries. Since the second half of the 20th century, however, the number of languages that are vital and used daily has considerably increased. The most important driver of this development is international migration. Some European countries—Germany in particular—belong to the most attractive immigration destinations of the world. Despite of this reality, European national education systems largely persist in their monolingual mindset—or in other words: in a monolingual habitus.
This ambiguity can be amply illustrated by the example of the German education system. Education research shows that it belongs to the causes of educational disadvantage for children from immigrant families. This is precisely why innovation initiatives have been launched to mitigate the risks to teaching and learning associated with multilingualism, while making the best use of the resources offered by linguistic diversity to all children—be they growing up in monolingual or multilingual families.
Article
Angela Aisenstein and María Liliana Gómez Bidondo
Eating is a conscious activity, not just a biological necessity, and as such, eating habits and tastes can be guided. When individual issues, such as those around food, coincide with the economic, demographic, and health problems of society, they become public issues, then state concerns, and ultimately part of public policy. In Argentina, the education system was founded simultaneously with the nation-state and became a crucial tool in the process of modernization. Feeding and food education were part of that process. This issue was of essential importance in a country structured from the beginning as a dependent agricultural-export economy. Food education is defined as a set of means, methods, and social relationships related to the production, transmission, distribution, and acquisition of knowledge and expertise. The purpose of food education is to influence the kind of food the population eats, to shape their nutritional habits and tastes; to produce enough food and set the conditions, techniques, and technologies to achieve it; to convey people’s rights and obligations to access food; and to establish the roles the state, community, family, and the market must play in order to reproduce the biological, economic, and cultural order of society.
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Elisa Gavari Starkie and Paula Tenca Sidotti
The democratization of university access made possible the arrival of new university students from different backgrounds. At this time access was opened to all individuals coming from all different backgrounds. The new student population had a strong impact on the university life. Some university professors complained that although some students were talented, they could not communicate in complex scenarios. The article will focus on the theoretical principles that inspired the democratic curriculum and the psychological approach that allowed new individual cognitive perspectives and a new vision of the university population. At this time the education principles by Freire and Dewey generated an impulse for democratic education. From this framework the article will analyze the research and educational principles that inspired the Writing Across Curriculums (WAC) movement and the supplementary Writing in the Disciplines (WID). Both programs were very successful and led to the establishment of the Writing Academic Centers that since then and until now guarantee a democratic university education. These centers have fostered WAC, which developed into WID. The need to address global classrooms has inspired Writing Across the Communities, which considers race and social justice within language programs. The university scientific approach is aligned with the international organization’s objectives for the 20th century.
Article
Callie Cleckner and Tim Hallett
Research on schools has long been central to the development of institutional theory. Scholars from the tradition now labeled “old institutionalism” used historical case studies of educational institutions to examine how organizations pursue social values and how those values and the organization change in the process. The subsequent shift to new institutionalism entailed a more macro-level approach, as scholars began to view schools as organizations nested within a broader field or environment. Instead of analyzing how organizations pursue values, new institutionalists examine how organizations conform to macro cultural “myths” or “logics” to maintain legitimacy in their respective fields. For instance, national and global education reforms compel schools to adopt remarkably similar organizational forms, despite the diverse needs of schools and their divergent practices. Inhabited institutionalism, which explores the recursive relationships among institutions, organizations, and social interactions, provides a consolidated approach and incorporates a symbolic interactionist lens to examine the meaning and implications of institutions at a more local level. Educational settings have been important sites of empirical investigation in the development of inhabited institutionalism, specifically by showing how schools incorporate cultural mythologies such as “accountability” in context-specific ways.
Article
Staffan Larsson
The study circle is a “free and voluntary” pedagogy that has become a mass phenomenon in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. It was initiated within the popular movements in the first years of the 1900s as a tool for education among their members. Around 10 adults typically meet a few hours a week to develop their interests, for example, in art, political topics, music, or foreign language. The “study circle grammar” includes voluntary participation, an extremely wide span of topics to be studied, no requirements of a teacher, and no entrance qualifications, grades, or exams. Tradition stresses deliberations among participants, but practical topics often have a workshop pedagogy. They have received subsidies from the state and from municipalities through various organizational structures depending on country since the early 1900s. They grew and spread fast, reaching a peak in participation in the late 1900s, but have since stagnated; however, a substantial share of adults in Nordic countries continue to engage in them.
Article
Karen Moran Jackson and Rosemary Papa
The use of artificial intelligence in education (AIED) is a growing concern for both its potential benefits and misuses. Originating in research following the Second World War, artificial intelligence (AI) refers to technology that perform activities, such as making predictions and generating text, at levels equivalent to human ability. Early AI efforts had little public applications, but that began to change in the late 20th century, with applications in education becoming common in the early 21st century. AI is dependent on data collection and model selection, technical aspects of development that allow for personalized data but that also permit human biases into the system. AIED applications have taken largely predictive and decision-making roles, but generative applications are becoming more common. How different types of AIED applications become integrated into educational systems will depend not just on student and teacher needs, but on larger stakeholders in educational systems, such as administrators, policymakers, and business interests. AIED applications are subject to ethical violations and concerns, so development and implementation must be guided by ethical principles, even as ethical governance of AI in schools is riddled with challenges. Implications for educational organizations include developing more robust frameworks and principles around data access and generative AIED challenges, similar to those surrounding personalized medicine. These frameworks can guide oversight, auditing, and analysis of the performance of AIED applications, including miscues and mistakes. Educators should strive to implement AIED that is human-centered and based on principles of transparency, explainability, trustworthiness, accountability, fairness, and justice.
Article
In many communities around the world, speakers learn and speak more than one or two languages, so multilingualism and multiliteracy are habits and ways to communicate. In fact, it is well documented now that bilingualism and multilingualism are wider practices than any kind of monolingualism that might exist and that might be predominant in a particular country. Consequently, the world is becoming increasingly aware of the value of multiculturalism as part of a knowledgeable society.
Studies in both schools and communities continuously support the theory that bilinguals learning two languages simultaneously have the potential to develop literacy in two languages when this is supported in their environment and when given access to opportunities to read and write within relevant biliteracy experiences. These opportunities are provided when linguistic and cultural resources are part of day-to-day interactions, and emergent bilinguals, who develop two languages from a young age, take part in them.
Article
Earl Aguilera and Christina Salazar
The term “critical digital pedagogy” has been used to describe a broad range of approaches to teaching and learning rooted in critical theory, digital cultural studies, and the liberatory education promoted within schools of critical pedagogy since the 1960s. References to critical digital pedagogy began to appear in published scholarly literature in the early 2000s as a response to the expansion of neoliberal ideologies and policies in an age of proliferating digital and networked technologies. These shifts in technological, economic, and social organization have since become collectively described as the “platformization” of society, driven by processes such as datafication, commodification, and algorithmic selection. In response to concerns about the neoliberalization, dehumanization, and platformization of education specifically, the emergent field of critical digital pedagogy has coalesced into a community of educators, designers, and theorists with an international scope, though the majority of published scholarship originates from the United States and the European Union. While the approaches and methods that the proponents of critical digital pedagogy engage with are varied, three broad families of practice include critical instructional design, humanizing online teaching and learning, and digital ungrading. Following earlier traditions of critical pedagogy, practitioners in the field of critical digital pedagogy find themselves grappling with critiques of their approaches as overly politicized, ideologically driven, and pragmatically limited. Open issues in the field include the expanding role of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the role of political activism beyond the classroom, and the addressing of intersections between race, class, and other dimensions of identity within a critical framework.
Article
Sybil Durand and Nina Asher
Examining curriculum in terms of local, national, transnational, and global contexts requires engaging discourses of postcolonialism, decolonization, and globalization. Curriculum studies, empirical research projects, as well as literature, film, the arts, and social media collectively illustrate the many ways in which local, national, transnational, and global influences intersect and inform each other. These intersections and the tensions they raise with regards to race, culture, gender and sexuality, and nation, in turn shape curriculum, teaching, and educational research. The resurgence of racism, xenophobia, and global capitalism, and the resounding calls for activism in response to social and systemic injustice have implications for education researchers to persevere in advancing decolonizing curriculum studies that aim to dismantle oppressions and build coalitions.
