As the diagnosis of AD/HD becomes more frequent in our schools, and as many individuals across ages embrace an AD/HD identity, scholars need to account for the lived experience of the disorder to understand the meanings individuals give to it. This paper analyses the relationship between ethical practices of self-formation, power, and knowledge…

Due to the history of assimilation, power relations, and their sociolinguistic situation, the Sámi languages are categorized as endangered. The position of the Sámi languages in Sámi education is reviewed, and language immersion as a teaching method and as a means of language maintenance is discussed. Sámi language learning is described through…

This article explores the mobilization dynamics of a school-based minority language revitalization initiative in the French Basque Country, known as the Ikastola Movement. Bringing the study of language revitalization into dialogue with social movement theory, I discuss how the solidarity of Basque language activists was influenced by state-level…

English language educators are often advocates for social justice and often focus on learners' identities, such as their race, gender, and ethnicity; however, they tend not to employ a social class lens in analyzing students, teachers, classrooms, and institutions. Yet social class plays a significant, if unacknowledged, role in the field.…

Theoretically informed by a Foucauldian understanding of power, this article documents how power is exercised and resisted in an English-as-a-foreign-language context. In particular, the article focuses on individual seatwork, during which students were working individually on written exercises, as one of the three basic modes of teaching/learning…

This article explores the methodological turning points in conducting a critical ethnography on the discursive practices of Italian Canadian youth identities across their multiple worlds in Toronto (cf. Giampapa, 2004a). Specifically, I aim to problematize the construction of the "researcher," researcher identities, and the conceptualization of…

This article focuses on how issues of power and identity were negotiated when doing a critical sociolinguistic ethnography as a Spanish researcher in the Chinese educational context. Data come from fieldwork conducted in 3 different primary and secondary schools together in Zhejiang province, where inside- and outside-classroom…

One of the major dilemmas when practising critical sociolinguistic ethnography within the field of education is the ethnographer's degree of implication within the studied site (Goldstein, 2003; Martin Rojo, 2003; Unamuno, 2004). How far should the researcher intervene within the daily practices he/she is observing? This exercise of methodological…

Through a theoretical framework that builds on constructs of identity, community of practice, power relations, and investment (Blackledge & Pavlenko, 2001; Gee, 2001; Norton, 2000; Peirce, 1995; Wenger, 1998), this educational ethnographic study (Preissle, 1999) explores one English-as-a-new-language (ENL) student's identities within and across…

In this introduction, we situate the theme issue within a growing body of research on Indigenous youth language practices, communicative repertoires, and ideologies, articulating points of intersection in scholarship on Indigenous and immigrant youth bilingualism. Our geographic focus is North America. Ethnographic studies from the Far North to…

This article explores the construction of a bilingual professional identity in a bilingual creative-writing graduate program in southwest Texas by analyzing a classroom event and the participants' interpretation of it. In bilingual classrooms the resources available to construct professional identities include a large repertoire of linguistic…

This study was an exploration of how high school language learners and their teacher jointly constructed word meanings through multimodal representation and the sociopolitical reality of learners' lives as mediating factors in the context of simultaneous multiple learning activities. Thirty-three high school Advanced ESL 3 students were taught…

Research has revealed an underlying link between identity construction and academic success for adolescents (Nasir & Saxe, 2003); however, research has not addressed how students' identities are formed and negotiated in the cultural practices of elementary school. This article examines how early elementary Mexican-origin bilinguals' racial,…

Literacy today is characterised by rapidly changing and emergent forms of meaning making in the context of increased cultural and linguistic diversity, giving rise to the multiliteracies pedagogy of the New London Group. This article responds to these imperatives, reporting findings from a critical ethnography investigating the interactions…

This article first reviews important issues of language, power, and testing. It then examines in critical fashion a particular instance of the use of language testing by the Hong Kong government, namely, the Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers (LPAT). Treating the LPAT developments as a form of narrative rather than debate, it presents…