This article is inspired by Lo Bianco's theory of discourse planning. Using the case of Indonesia's second president Soeharto, the article demonstrates the usefulness of Lo Bianco's theory to understand how language was instrumental in the discourse planning of "Pembangunan" [Development], and as such, in understanding the nexus of…

Colleges and universities and members of their communities--administrators, faculty, and students--are caught in the crosshairs of sharply divided sociopolitical debates. Issues at home and abroad have polarized campuses, reflective of national division. With activism alive and well on campuses across the nation, and very much the focus of public…

We function in an increasingly politicized environment, hostile to Socratic discourse and the pedagogies of education abroad. The classroom has become a battleground in which ideologies of right and left collide, making debate and dissent problematic. These pressures have distorted the ways in which we talk about our endeavors. We believe that…

This article introduces the method of "podcast ethnography." The method encompasses three general stages: to "explore" a podcast from a particular social field, to "engage" with it through careful, ethnographic reflexivity and to "examine" the podcast by developing typologies and themes expedient for…

New Public Management (NPM)-inspired higher education (HE) governance has become increasingly topical in recent years. However, while existing research provides an overall understanding of relevant changes, it does not offer a complete analysis of complex governance and falls prey to deterministic and relatively narrow ideological impositions.…

The economic dislocations and political antagonisms brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic are once again fueling speculation that we are collectively witnessing the terminal crisis of the neoliberal order. It will be argued here that this crisis rhetoric is grounded in a fundamental misconception of neoliberalism that fails to capture its…

Language education policy in Arizona has been on a rollercoaster over the last five years. Between 2019 and 2024, the state shifted from strict English-only enforcement to loosening restrictions and encouraging dual language approaches, then back to strict English-only enforcement. In this forum piece, we use approaches from critical discourse…

In the last two decades, global citizenship education (GCE) has become a catchphrase used by international and national educational agencies, as well as researchers, to delineate the increasing internationalisation of education, framed as an answer to the growing globalisation and the high values of citizenship. These developments, however, have…

The monologues presented in this article represent a particular Bakhtinian analysis of a transcript of a passionate, dramatic, and conflictual General Assembly meeting held in the first democratic school in Norway, the Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO), only two months after the school was opened, on November 2nd, 1967. In the meeting, they…

In South Africa, the school textbook remains a powerful source of content knowledge to both teachers and learners. Such knowledge is often engaged uncritically by textbook users. As such, the worldviews and value systems in the knowledge selected for consumption remain embedded and are likely to do powerful ideological work. In this article, we…

Since their introduction by the Conservative government in 2013, primary school children in England have taken a mandated grammar, punctuation and spelling assessment, which places an emphasis on decontextualised, standardised English and the identification of traditional grammatical terminology. Despite some concise criticisms from educational…

Theoretically speaking, semantic minimalism and semantic maximalism are two current dominant assumptions on the nature of meaning in the linguistic communication. The former lays more emphasis on the syntactic basis of sentence meaning, while the latter stresses much over the pragmatic properties of utterance meaning. This paper, grounded on the…

In this memoir, I accounted several episodes of my childhood of a middle class family in early 1990s in a Chinese urban city. Two major discourses permeated my account: the nationalism and socialism discourse and the upward social mobility discourse. While my family and I cherish the comfort and joy of everyday life enjoyed in the era of…

There are similar assumptions between participatory action research (PAR) and teaching for social justice (TSJ). Much of this paper focuses on the influence of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire on both PAR and TSJ. Personal anecdotes with both PAR and TSJ from my twenty years of experience as a teacher educator/researcher in western Canada…

Drawing on the notion of translanguaging, I show how learners in a Black township secondary school in Cape Town use their multilingual repertoire to achieve power, agency and voice. I use the conceptualisation of the prototypical pedagogical macrogenre from systemic functional linguistics to show how translanguaging can be used strategically to…