Now showing 1 - 10 of 22
  • Publication
    Primary School Teachers’ Understandings of Human Rights and Human Rights Education (HRE) in Cyprus: An Exploratory Study
    (2015-06-01) ;
    Zembylas, Michalinos
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    Charalambous, Panayiota
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    Lesta, Stalo
    ;
    Zembylas, Michalinos
  • Publication
    Empowering Teachers to Augment Students’ Reading Experience
    (Brill, 2019) ; ; ;
    Panayiota Anastasi
    ;
    Ilona-Elefteryja Lasica
    ;
    Nayia Stylianidou
    ;
    Christina Vasou
    ;
    This chapter discusses an attempt to empower teachers to 'augment’ students’ reading experiences as part of the project The Living Book, Augmenting Reading for Life (Erasmus+). The project’s overall aim is to address the under -achievement of European students in reading by developing an innovative approach that combines offline activities promoting reading literacy with online experiences of books’ 'virtual augmentation.’ More specifically, recognizing the important role of teachers in any educational reform effort, the project aims at strengthening teachers’ profile and competences in adopting the Living Book approach and in dealing with diversified groups of learners, and particularly with pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, through a series of training sessions. The chapter outlines the theoretical premises of the Living Book and provides an overview of the theoretical framework underlying the design of the 'Augmented Teacher’ professional development course. It also describes the content and structure of the course, and the process of evaluation currently taking place in the project partner countries.
  • Publication
    Superdiversity and linguistic ethnography: Researching people and language in motion
    (2018-01-01)
    Karrebæk, Martha Sif
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    ;
    Karrebæk, Martha Sif
    In their position paper on language and superdiversity, Blommaert and Rampton state: “Rather than working with homogeneity, stability and boundedness as the starting assumptions, mobility, mixing, political dynamics and historical embedding are now central concerns in the study of language, language groups and communication” (2011: 3). Blommaert and Rampton’s main point is that increased and more varied mobility to and within Europe, together with rapidly increasing technological innovations and modes of interconnectivity, have led to new social formations, including new forms of commonality and differentiation, and that this requires new perspectives in (socio)linguistic research. A ‘state-centric’ approach (Moore 2015; Silverstein 2015) is no longer adequate, and instead, researchers must embrace a condition of constantly changing social realities, expect the unexpected, learn to understand the unfamiliar, and accept a lesser degree of uniformity and agreement across the board. Blommaert and Rampton argue that language is a particularly sensitive instrument for capturing these dynamics of social transformations (cf. Blommaert 2014: 432). Specifically, the combination of linguistic ‘tools’ with ethnography, which is known in the UK and Europe as ‘Linguistic Ethnography’ (Rampton et al. 2015: 4), appears as a particularly adept way to move “beyond pattern analysis - no matter how detailed, delicate and fine-grained [the] … description” and to “respect … uniqueness, particularity and creativity just as much as convention and structure” (Deumert 2014: 118). Before expanding on this, we will say a few more words on the sociolinguistic uptake of the notion of superdiversity.
  • Publication
    The schooling of emotion and memory: Analyzing emotional styles in the context of a teacher's pedagogical practices
    (2014-11-01) ;
    Charalambous, Panayiota
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    Zembylas, Michalinos
    ;
    Zembylas, Michalinos
    This paper presents an exploratory case study of the dynamics of the entanglement between emotion and memory in the context of a teacher's pedagogical practices in a conflict-troubled society. The theoretical concept of emotional styles is used analytically to demonstrate how emotions and memory are intertwined and political. The analysis shows the ways in which emotional styles enable or discourage certain representations of the past. Also, it is shown how individual emotional experiences are connected with larger historical, political and social discourses. The implications of the concept of emotional styles are discussed in the context of teacher pedagogies.
  • Publication
    De-securitizing Turkish: Teaching the Language of a Former Enemy, and Intercultural Language Education
    (2017-12-01) ;
    Charalambous, Panayiota
    ;
    Rampton, Ben
    ;
    Charalambous, Panayiota
    This article explores the fit between orthodox ideas about intercultural language education and situations of acute insecurity. It describes the teaching of Turkish to Greek-Cypriots, introduced in 2003 by the Republic of Cyprus as part of a desecuritization policy. Although these classes were optional, many students regarded Turks as enemies, and after documenting hostility itself as one motive for learning Turkish, we describe three teaching strategies used to deal with the powerful emotions that Turkish evoked: (i) focusing on the language as a code, shorn of any cultural association; (ii) treating it as a local language; and (iii) presenting it as a contemporary international language in a cosmopolitan ambience that potentially transcended the island-specific conflict. In this way, the Cypriot case calls mainstream language teaching assumptions into question: Exclusively grammar-focused pedagogies display acute cultural sensitivity, and images of language in a globalized world look radical and innovative. For intercultural language education more generally, it is the combination of institutionalised language learning as a distinct cultural activity with the ideological plasticity of language itself that seems especially valuable.
  • Publication
    Troubling translanguaging: Language ideologies, superdiversity and interethnic conflict
    (2016-09-01) ;
    Charalambous, Panayiota
    ;
    Zembylas, Michalinos
    ;
    Charalambous, Panayiota
    This paper looks at how histories of conflict and ideologies of language as a bounded entity mapped onto a homogeneous nation impact on attempts of translanguaging in the classroom in the conflict-affected context of Greek-Cypriot education. Drawing on ethnographic data from a highly diverse primary school, this study examines how nationalist understandings of language and belonging affect the ways in which a group of Turkish-speaking students of Pontian and Turkish-Bulgarian backgrounds relate to their Turkish-speakerness in classroom interaction. The findings show that, despite the multilingual and hybrid realities of this particular school, in formal educational practices Turkish-speaking students kept a low profile as to their Turkish-speakerness. Even when the teacher encouraged translanguaging practices and a public display of students' competence in the Turkish language, this was met with inarticulateness and emotional troubles, fuelled by a fear that 'speaking Turkish' could be taken as 'being Turkish'. In discussing these findings, the paper points to the impact that different overlapping histories of ethnonationalist conflict have on translanguaging practices in education; in our case by associating Turkishness with the 'enemy group' and socializing children within essentialist assumptions about language and national belonging. The paper argues that in this case the discourses of conflict create unfavourable ecologies for hybrid linguistic practices, which ultimately suppress creative polylingual performances.
  • Publication
    Language Education and ‘Conflicted Heritage’: Implications for Teaching and Learning
    This article revisits discussions of the relationship between language and heritage, bringing into the picture processes and experiences of (in)security and conflict. It draws largely on critical heritage studies literature, as well as on literature that deals with managing heritage in postconflict situations, and uses insights and concepts from this literature to inform current debates in modern language education and heritage language education in particular. Using the notion of conflicted heritage, it focuses on a particular type of language class, Turkish classes in Greek-Cypriot educational settings, where the target language has been part of a long history of conflict. The discussion of these classes reveals the role that language education can potentially play in wider social and political processes of managing a conflicted heritage as a society attempts to move beyond a conflict-troubled past. Finally, the article points to the implications for language education when a language is associated with a conflicted heritage and discourses of (in)security.
  • Publication
    ‘Republica de Kubros’: Transgression and collusion in Greek-Cypriot adolescents’ classroom silly-talk
    This paper focuses on seemingly ‘silly’ talk, whispered by Greek-Cypriot students during Turkish-language classes. Taking into account the history of violent conflict between the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities, Turkish-language learners’ silly-talk emerges as an interactional space that refracts larger discourses and ideologies, and is therefore analysed in relation to historico-political and institutional processes occurring in different timescales. Playful youth-talk has attracted the interest of sociolinguistic research, providing insights into how adolescents’ interactional practices orient to larger issues such as ‘boundaries’, and ‘discrimination’. Here, playful talk during the process of learning the language of ‘The Other’ provides an insight into the ways in which Greek-Cypriot nationalist ideologies leave little space for the renegotiation of interethnic animosity in the classroom. The analysis reveals that, although students’ ‘silly-talk’ appeared sometimes as seriously transgressive, students still recognised the power of the dominant institutional ideology and colluded with the teacher in repressing any deviating discourse.
  • Publication
    Manifestations of Greek-Cypriot teachers' discomfort toward a peace education initiative: Engaging with discomfort pedagogically
    (2012-11-01) ;
    Charalambous, Panayiota
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    Zembylas, Michalinos
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    Zembylas, Michalinos
    This study sought to understand how teachers' discomforting emotions were manifest in a teacher education setting and how teacher educators might engage with discomfort pedagogically. A qualitative perspective was used with a group of teachers who participated in a series of peace education workshops in Cyprus. All of the workshops were audio- and video-recorded; in-depth interviews were also conducted with seven focal participants before and after the workshops. The findings show the manifestations of discomfort, the sources of discomfort, and the ways of handling teachers' discomfort pedagogically. The paper discusses how this study may inform teacher education.