Papers by Michelle Bedeker
Language and Education, Jan 4, 2015
Twenty years after democracy, the legacy of apartheid and hitherto unmet challenges of resourcing... more Twenty years after democracy, the legacy of apartheid and hitherto unmet challenges of resourcing and teacher development are reflected in a severely inequitable and underperforming education system. This paper focuses on second language writing in the middle years of schooling when 80% of learners face a double challenge: to move from ‘common sense’ discourses to the more abstract, specialised discourses of school subjects and, simultaneously, to a new language of learning, in this case English. It describes an intervention using a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) genre-based pedagogy involving 72 learners and two teachers in a low socio-economic neighbourhood of Cape Town. Using an SFL analytical framework, we analyse learners’ development in the information report genre. All learners in the intervention group made substantial gains in control of staging, lexis, and key linguistic features. We argue that the scaffolding provided by SFL genre-based pedagogies together with their explicit focus on textual and linguistic features offer a means of significantly enhancing epistemic access to the specialised language of school subjects, particularly for additional language learners. Findings have implications for language-in-education policy, teacher education, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in multilingual classrooms.
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Language and Education, 2015
ABSTRACT Twenty years after democracy, the legacy of apartheid and hitherto unmet challenges of r... more ABSTRACT Twenty years after democracy, the legacy of apartheid and hitherto unmet challenges of resourcing and teacher development are reflected in a highly inequitable and severely underperforming education system. This paper focuses on second language writing in the middle years of schooling when 80% of learners face a double challenge: to move from 'common sense' discourses to the more abstract and specialised discourses of school subjects and, simultaneously, to a new language of learning, in this case English. It describes an intervention using a Systemic Functional Linguistic genre-based pedagogy involving 72 learners and two teachers in a low socio-economic neighbourhood of Cape Town. Using an SFL analytical framework, we analyse learners' development in the Information Report genre. All learners in the intervention group made substantial gains in control of staging, lexis, and key linguistic features. Those who had been evaluated as 'not competent' by their teacher made the greatest gains. We argue that the scaffolding provided by SFL genre-based pedagogies together with their explicit focus on textual and linguistic features offer a means of significantly enhancing epistemic access to the specialised language of school subjects, particularly for additional language learners. Findings have implications for language-in-education policy, teacher education, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in multilingual classrooms. Introduction This paper takes up the challenge posed by McCarty, Collins and Hopson (2011, 336): "What will count in changing what counts as a contemporary solution to linguistically structured inequalities?" by focusing on epistemic access, or access to the knowledge that educational
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Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Jul 17, 2023
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Research Square (Research Square), Mar 24, 2023
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The pandemic resulted in countless tips about how technology can replace face-to-face instruction... more The pandemic resulted in countless tips about how technology can replace face-to-face instruction. This paper illustrates how pedagogical philosophies can impact online course decisions and how a PCK frame offers a gateway for thinking about epistemological access and social justice during Emergency Online Teaching (EOT). This research followed an intrinsic case study design including multiple data sets that were analyzed through inductive, deductive, and axial coding before generalizing patterns across students' reflective journals, FlipGrid recordings, daily tasks, and end-of-course feedback. The results showed that a collaborative online community of practice, self-directed learning, and integrated assessment provided student access and encouraged voice and engagement. Thus, post-COVID-19 PCK holds potential for instructional design and emancipatory online pedagogies in higher education.
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Routledge eBooks, Jan 31, 2023
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Language and Education, 2015
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In Kazakhstan, the rich diversity of local knowledge seems to be ignored by policymakers who favo... more In Kazakhstan, the rich diversity of local knowledge seems to be ignored by policymakers who favor discourses of globalization and internationalization that disempower local expertise in favor of dominant Eurocentric thinking. Such discourses can marginalize teachers' philosophical assumptions, beliefs, and values that underlie their teaching practices. This article argues for including teachers' Funds of Knowledge (FoK) and practice-based insights to foreground their responsive and lived pedagogies despite their limited English proficiency. We used a qualitative approach that included teachers' reflections on multimodal teaching scenarios (comics) to elicit their values and beliefs about science pedagogy. The second instrument was teachers' narrative descriptions of language use in their science classrooms, collected and observed during a 45-hour professional development program. The third instrument was focus group interviews to identify biology teachers' pract...
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Papers by Michelle Bedeker