"Rethinking Online Education" analyzes online educational materials on the recent Iraq war aimed ... more "Rethinking Online Education" analyzes online educational materials on the recent Iraq war aimed to be used by U.S. educators in elementary and secondary schools. It is suggested that far from being ideologically neutral, these educational materials weave together resources which provide a coherent view of the Iraq war theme, and can thus been seen as constituting a kind of an informal curriculum. Mitsikopoulou argues that the teacher resources adhere to different pedagogical discourses and constitute materializations of two broad approaches to education. A number of pedagogical issues are also raised in the discussion: What is the difference between critical thinking and critical pedagogy? How is the genre of lesson plan realized in different teaching philosophies and how do curricular texts change when they are delivered online? This important book highlights the need to explore the new forms of textuality which emerge from online curricular materials and to develop an understanding of the processes of text composition, distribution and consumption.
This chapter draws on an ethnographically oriented study of the everyday English literacy practic... more This chapter draws on an ethnographically oriented study of the everyday English literacy practices of 15 Greek teenagers in order to explore the way they visually represent their relationship with English literacy and language learning. Theoretically and methodologically the study is rooted in socio-cultural approaches to literacy practices and language learning. These approaches call for considering individual learners’ understandings about the role of literacy and language learning in their lives. In response to such a need, our focus here will be on two sets of self-made visual data through which teenagers depict the ways they make sense of and relate to English literacy and language learning. Our findings illustrate that teenagers’ resources are drawn mainly from their out-of-school interests but also from the world of education. It seems thus that their representations are framed by an everyday life discourse and in part by a school-based literacy discourse. The analysis highl...
... Karavanta, Assimina. 2008. 'The Global, the Local and the Spectral: Contemplating Spect... more ... Karavanta, Assimina. 2008. 'The Global, the Local and the Spectral: Contemplating Spectral Politics.'. ... See Theodor Adorno's analysis of 'constellation' and his reading ofWalter Benjamin's Origin of German Tragedy in Negative Dialectics. ...
"Rethinking Online Education" analyzes online educational materials on the recent Iraq war aimed ... more "Rethinking Online Education" analyzes online educational materials on the recent Iraq war aimed to be used by U.S. educators in elementary and secondary schools. It is suggested that far from being ideologically neutral, these educational materials weave together resources which provide a coherent view of the Iraq war theme, and can thus been seen as constituting a kind of an informal curriculum. Mitsikopoulou argues that the teacher resources adhere to different pedagogical discourses and constitute materializations of two broad approaches to education. A number of pedagogical issues are also raised in the discussion: What is the difference between critical thinking and critical pedagogy? How is the genre of lesson plan realized in different teaching philosophies and how do curricular texts change when they are delivered online? This important book highlights the need to explore the new forms of textuality which emerge from online curricular materials and to develop an understanding of the processes of text composition, distribution and consumption.
This chapter draws on an ethnographically oriented study of the everyday English literacy practic... more This chapter draws on an ethnographically oriented study of the everyday English literacy practices of 15 Greek teenagers in order to explore the way they visually represent their relationship with English literacy and language learning. Theoretically and methodologically the study is rooted in socio-cultural approaches to literacy practices and language learning. These approaches call for considering individual learners’ understandings about the role of literacy and language learning in their lives. In response to such a need, our focus here will be on two sets of self-made visual data through which teenagers depict the ways they make sense of and relate to English literacy and language learning. Our findings illustrate that teenagers’ resources are drawn mainly from their out-of-school interests but also from the world of education. It seems thus that their representations are framed by an everyday life discourse and in part by a school-based literacy discourse. The analysis highl...
... Karavanta, Assimina. 2008. 'The Global, the Local and the Spectral: Contemplating Spect... more ... Karavanta, Assimina. 2008. 'The Global, the Local and the Spectral: Contemplating Spectral Politics.'. ... See Theodor Adorno's analysis of 'constellation' and his reading ofWalter Benjamin's Origin of German Tragedy in Negative Dialectics. ...
Author(s): Mitsikopoulou, Bessie | Abstract: This paper focuses on critical pedagogy and EFL teac... more Author(s): Mitsikopoulou, Bessie | Abstract: This paper focuses on critical pedagogy and EFL teacher education and it argues that it would be unrealistic to expect students who have been educated through traditional university curricula (aiming to deliver content through a ‘banking model’) to become critical foreign language teachers and educators. The education of future teachers requires new university curricula which view literacy as a critical social practice and prepare them through transformative pedagogies, encouraging them to examine critically their values and beliefs by developing a reflexive knowledge base, an appreciation for multiple perspectives and a sense of critical consciousness and agency.Based on this premise, the article presents the case of Genres in English, an undergraduate language course at the Department of English Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, aiming to raise students’ critical literacy. Using the tools of Systemic Functional Grammar and drawing on a genre-based approach to writing development, the course initially invites students to take up the role of critical text analysts deconstructing academic and media texts and at a later stage to engage in a popularization of science writing task mediating information from an academic to a media text. Through language tasks which approach genres as historical constructs, students are introduced to the ideological nature of discourses and genres and they explore the conditions of production, distribution and consumption of texts. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, the paper presents the findings from a small-scale research conducted with students who have attended the course.
This paper focuses on critical pedagogy and EFL teacher education and it argues that it would be ... more This paper focuses on critical pedagogy and EFL teacher education and it argues that it would be unrealistic to expect students who have been educated through traditional university curricula (aiming to deliver content through a ‘banking model’) to become critical foreign language teachers and educators. The education of future teachers requires new university curricula which view literacy as a critical social practice and prepare them through transformative pedagogies, encouraging them to examine critically their values and beliefs by developing a reflexive knowledge base, an appreciation for multiple perspectives and a sense of critical consciousness and agency. Based on this premise, the article presents the case of Genres in English, an undergraduate language course at the Department of English Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, aiming to raise students’ critical literacy. Using the tools of Systemic Functional Grammar and drawing on a genre-based approach to writing development, the course initially invites students to take up the role of critical text analysts deconstructing academic and media texts and at a later stage to engage in a popularization of science writing task mediating information from an academic to a media text. Through language tasks which approach genres as historical constructs, students are introduced to the ideological nature of discourses and genres and they explore the conditions of production, distribution and consumption of texts. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, the paper presents the findings from a small-scale research conducted with students who have attended the course.
... Karavanta, Assimina. 2008. 'The Global, the Local and the Spectral: Contemplating Spect... more ... Karavanta, Assimina. 2008. 'The Global, the Local and the Spectral: Contemplating Spectral Politics.'. ... See Theodor Adorno's analysis of 'constellation' and his reading ofWalter Benjamin's Origin of German Tragedy in Negative Dialectics. ...
This study explores media discourses and representations of Greece and Europe in the Greek press ... more This study explores media discourses and representations of Greece and Europe in the Greek press in the context of the recent socioeconomic crisis. While several studies have explored the representation of Greece in the international press, very few have investigated the discursive construction of crisis in the Greek press. Theoretically and methodologically, the study draws on the tradition of critical discourse analysis, which it combines with corpus linguistics tools. The employed methodology is qualitative and interpretative in nature and attempts an analysis of media texts at a discoursal and grammatical level. The analysis is both synchronic and diachronic, following the development of the crisis through two newspapers, Kathimerini and Ta Nea, at different phases of the crisis.
Uploads
Books
Special Issues
Language Textbooks
Papers
Based on this premise, the article presents the case of Genres in English, an undergraduate language course at the Department of English Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, aiming to raise students’ critical literacy. Using the tools of Systemic Functional Grammar and drawing on a genre-based approach to writing development, the course initially invites students to take up the role of critical text analysts deconstructing academic and media texts and at a later stage to engage in a popularization of science writing task mediating information from an academic to a media text. Through language tasks which approach genres as historical constructs, students are introduced to the ideological nature of discourses and genres and they explore the conditions of production, distribution and consumption of texts. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, the paper presents the findings from a small-scale research conducted with students who have attended the course.