Announcements

Call for Proposals

Special Issue of TESL Canada Journal, Fall 2011
Popular Culture in TESOL: 
Identity, Performance, and Reflection

Edited by Awad Ibrahim and Ardiss Mackie

This special issue of TCJ encourages submissions that deal with the intersection between TESL and popular culture. We encourage particularly research that looks at the impact of popular culture on TESL identity formation and issues related to pedagogies of popular culture. Clearly, these areas are interconnected and can be explored from an ethnographic, practice-policy, global-local, theoretical and empirical perspective.   Reviews of books on popular culture and ESL are also requested.  Questions include:

In Classrooms:

What role does popular culture play in TESL? How do teachers engage in popular cultural forms without promoting western popular culture and English as the most legitimate form and language? What Englishes result from learning (with) forms of popular culture? To what extent do aspects of popular culture such as visuality and aurality/audiation advance English learning? Does the instant access of Internet images in a wireless classroom promote visual literacy at the expense of an aural/oral curriculum? Is the “image” replacing the “word” in our pedagogy? How do we engage both word and image?  What issues emerge in a Canadian teaching context from the use of American popular culture in textbooks and other curricula?

In Teacher Education:

How do we as educators engage popular culture not as a naïve site of consumption and celebration but as a pedagogical site of critique and identity?  Where do Canadian youth (and youth from other countries) form their identities (if not in relation to popular culture)? What “third spaces” and “hybridized” identities result from engagement with popular culture? 

In Theory:

Given the multitude of global Englishes, how do Canadian ESL teachers (and ESL teachers from other countries) account for local translation and appropriation of global forms of popular culture? In what ways does popular culture uphold or subvert theories and practices of TESL? How has the representation of TESL changed historically in forms of popular culture?

A 250 word abstract outlining the paper is due December 31, 2010 and should be sent to amackie@okanagan.bc.ca.

Please indicate the section of the TESL Canada Journal you are considering:  Perspectives, Articles, In the Classroom, or Book Reviews.  To review author guidelines, visit the journal Website: www.teslcanadajournal.ca and click on bottom right 'Information for Authors’.

Papers due February 28, 2011

Queries for the special issue can be sent to Ardiss Mackie (amackie@okanagan.bc.ca).