Heteroglossia : a space for developing critical language awareness?

This paper reports on research into the challenges of implementing a critical writing pedagogy within a teacher education program in Australia. Participants in this study are student teachers enrolled in a compulsory subject, ‘Language and Literacy in Secondary School’, a subject requiring them to develop a knowledge of the role of language and literacy across the secondary school curriculum and to show personal proficiency in literacy (this is dictated by state government specifications of graduate outcomes for teacher education programs). To develop an understanding of the way that language has shaped their lives, students write a narrative about their early literacy experiences – a task which they all find very challenging, especially in comparison with the formal writing of other university subjects. Rather than simply reminiscing about their early childhood, they are encouraged to juxtapose voices from the past and the present, and to combine a range of texts within their writing. They thereby create a heteroglossic text (Bakhtin, 1981) that stretches their repertoires as language users and enables them to develop a socially critical awareness of language and literacy, including the literacy practices in which they engage as university students. Later in the semester they revisit these accounts of their early literacy experiences, and (in a separate piece of writing) endeavour to place these accounts within the contexts of theories and debates they have encountered in the course of completing this unit.

The students’ writing provides a small window on how they are experiencing their tertiary education, including the managerial controls that are currently shaping university curriculum and pedagogy. Their writing also raises questions as to extent to which tertiary students are actually able to formulate a critical language awareness that will subsequently inform their professional practice as secondary teachers.

Heteroglossia : a space for developing critical language awareness?

This paper reports on research into the challenges of implementing a critical writing pedagogy within a teacher education program in Australia. Participants in this study are student teachers enrolled in a compulsory subject, “Language and Literacy in Secondary School”, a subject requiring them to develop a knowledge of the role of language and literacy across the secondary school curriculum and to show personal proficiency in literacy as part of graduate outcomes for teacher education dictated by the State Government of Victoria. To develop an understanding of the way that language has shaped their lives, students write a narrative about their early literacy experiences – a task which they all find very challenging, especially in comparison with the formal writing of other university subjects. Rather than simply reminiscing about their early childhood, they are encouraged to juxtapose voices from the past and the present, and to combine a range of texts within their writing. Later in the semester they revisit these accounts of their early literacy experiences and, in a separate piece of writing, endeavour to place these accounts within the contexts of theories and debates they have encountered in the course of completing this unit. The students’ writing provides a small window on how they are experiencing their tertiary education and their preparation as teachers, including the managerial controls that are currently shaping university curriculum and pedagogy. We argue that such heteroglossic texts (Bakhtin, 1981) prompt students to stretch their repertoires as language-users, enabling them to develop a socially critical awareness of language and literacy, including the literacy practices in which they engage as university students.

The monologic, power and mental illness

 This thesis considers the issue of the ‘Monologic, Power and Mental Illness’. Bakhtin’s concept of ‘Heteroglossia’, Foucault’s concept of ‘Subjectivation’, and the work of other writers in relation to mental illness are covered both in the Exegesis and throughout the creative component comprising excerpts from Kemp’s novella entitled, Haven.

Displaced metaphors: collaborative poetic responses to language in a post-physical world

This paper discusses an ongoing creative and conceptual collaboration between three authors, in which poetry has been approached as a way of exploring how lived experience and language are being transformed by the rapid evolution of virtual reality and its lexicon. We recognise, via Bakhtin, that language is always shared, in-use and redolent with multiple meanings. We acknowledge that we have written within a metaphorical space where we, as avatars of ourselves, use word processing software loaded with its own metaphors of page and print. The poems we have collaborated on have interrupted the increasing invisibility of metaphors such as ‘cloud’ and ‘screen’ as applied to technology, by working in the disjunction between metaphor and what it describes. We now reflect on the collaborative process and on the influence of technology on our practice, whilst maintaining a collaborative strategy. The paper explores the poetics of longing (Stewart) and Baudrillard’s simulacra and argues that concerns over remembering the real and the effects of nostalgia are offset by the generative potential of collaborative writing and its surprising forms of heteroglossia, which have exciting possibilities for creative practice.