This paper analyses the contribution of student agency and teacher contingency in the construction of classroom discourse in adult English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) classes for refugees and asylum seekers, for whom the identity of student itself can constitute a stable point in a highly unstable and potentially threatening lifeworld. In contrast to accepted ideas of the prevalence of teacher-initiated initiation–response–feedback (IRF) sequences in whole group teacher-fronted activity, characteristic student- initiated moves for bringing the outside into classroom discourse are identified. These are discussed in terms of the student agency and teacher contingency involved, drawing on the Bakhtinian notion of “answerability.”: teacher and students are robustly claiming interactive space in classroom talk, bringing the outside into discussion. This data, drawn from narrative and classroom data in case studies of Adult ESOL classrooms, points to less docile more agentive and open-ended models of classroom discourse than have typically been evidenced in the literature.
Living with multiple claims to Truth, none 'proveable,' we choose our truths by 'what works,' aspiring to a democracy which supports coexistence of 'contradictory' truths, without resort to killing each other off, or appealing to a 'higher authority.' [av
During the Seventies Rorty became convinced that if God, Mind and the Good are figments of metaphysical dreamwork, the same must apply to the World as It Really Is.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998), Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and (with Gianni Vatti
Aurelius meditated that, “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
Aurelius meditated that, “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”