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This study examines how writing teachers manage linguistic ideological dilemmas (LIDs) around grammar instruction and highlights productive strategies employed by one teacher in an instructional unit on poetry. We conducted semi-structured interviews with nine elementary and middle-school teachers to better understand how they conceptualized and enacted writing pedagogies in urban classrooms. Then, we documented the teaching practices of one teacher during a 9-week case study. We describe three LIDs expressed by the teachers we interviewed: (1) a perception of greater linguistic flexibility in speech than in writing; (2) a sense that attention to grammar in feedback can enhance and/or inhibit written communication; and (3) apprehension about whether grammar instruction empowers or marginalizes linguistically minoritized students. We also highlight three productive strategies for teaching grammar while valuing linguistic diversity employed by one teacher: (1) selecting mentor texts that showcase a range of grammars; (2) modeling code-meshing practices; and (3) privileging alternative grammars while grading written work. We describe how teachers might take up pedagogical practices that support linguistic diversity, such as evaluating written assignments in more flexible ways, engaging in contrastive analysis, and teaching students to resist and rewrite existing language rules.

The ongoing “digitalization of work” is one of the major phenomena shaping contemporary organizations. The aim of this study is to explore linguistic constructs of white-collar workers (WCWs) related to their use of digital tools.

The framework of ideological dilemmas (Billig et al., 1988) is mobilized to investigate the conflicting demands WCW interviewees construct when describing the ongoing digitalization of their office work.

This study shows how “digitalization of work” is enforcing an organizational ideological dilemma of structure and flexibility for WCWs. In the digital workplace, this dilemma is linguistically expressed as the individual should be, or should want to be, both flexible and structured in her work.

The use of language exposes conflicting ideals in the use of digital tools that might increase work–life stress. Implications for managers include acknowledging the dilemmas WCWs face in digitalized organizations and supporting them before they embark upon a digitalization journey.

The study shows that the negotiation between competing organizational discourses is constructed irrespective of hierarchical positions; the organizations digital maturity; private or public sector; or country. The study confirms contradictory ideological claims as “natural” and unquestionable in digitalized officework.

This paper aims to examine how a collaborative narrative inquiry focused on cultivating critical English Language Arts (ELA) pedagogies supported teacher agency, or “the capacity of actors to critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations” (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998, p. 971).

Situated in a semester-long inquiry group, eight k-16 educators used narrative inquiry processes (Clandinin, 1992) to write and collectively analyze (Ezzy, 2002) stories describing personal experiences that brought them to critical ELA pedagogies. They engaged in three levels of analysis across the eight narratives, including open coding, thematic identification, and identification of how the narrative inquiry impacted their classroom practices.

Across the narratives, the authors identify what aspects of the ELA reading, writing and languaging curriculum emerged as problematic; situate themselves in systems of oppression and privilege; and examine how processes of critical narrative inquiry contributed to their capacities to respond to these issues.

Collaborative narrative inquiry between teachers and teacher educators (Sjostrom and McCoyne, 2017) can be a powerful method to cultivate critical pedagogies.

Teachers across grade levels, schools, disciplines and backgrounds can collectively organize to cultivate critical ELA pedagogies.

Although coordinated opportunities to engage in critical inquiry work across k-16 contexts are rare, the authors believe that the knowledge, skills and confidence they gained through this professional inquiry sensitized them to oppressive curricular norms and expanded their repertoires of resistance.

Three distinctive domains of inquiry in comparative and international education (CIE) point to epistemic fault lines that simultaneously enable and disable the possibilities for social transformation in the cultural ecologies that demarcate, but also entangle, the so-called Global South and the North. Historically, these domains of inquiry – language/multilingualism, education, and development – engage arenas in which ideas about wellbeing, social arrangements, and the politics of knowledge (and of power) are constantly constructed, contested, and renegotiated. This analysis pinpoints some of the discursive technologies, which guarantee that active scholarly innovations and differentiation proceed in ways that ultimately leave intact the territorialized regionalizations of development differences. It reflects on ongoing fieldwork from the South to highlight three spheres of social control, and struggle, illustrative of the coloniality of difference and the expanding institutionalization of learning (as schooling) in an era of global interventionism. These loci – the sources of knowledge traditions, the sites of its enactment, and the power of knowledge transactions – represent overlapping activation points through which education interventions both stimulate and stultify social transformations. Specifically, the sources, sites, and power of knowledge offer empirical and discursive tools for historiographic reconsideration of the role of linguistic diversity and education in social change processes, and, crucially, for shifting critical focus from merely the occidentality of contemporary education traditions to the universalism of its social imaginaries. In this critical reading of new understandings of language(s) as invention, therefore, lies analytic opportunities for rethinking epistemic dilemmas in linking education and “development” in CIE scholarship.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal how “cool” as a concept is constructed by urban tweens in the post‐socialist country Estonia.

The data consist of 42 essays written by 12‐year‐old schoolchildren of a secondary school in Tallinn in 2007. Discourse analysis was used to discover interpretative repertoires, subject positions and ideological dilemmas in the essays.

“Cool” is primarily constructed within three interpretative repertoires: cool as appearance, cool as leisure and cool as sports and hobbies. The main subject positions are young expert consumer, fun‐lover/pleasure‐seeker, achiever and creator. The main ideological dilemma is between individual distinction and fitting and merging into the group.

The essays are rather brief and normative statements of what qualifies as “cool”. However, a certain degree of social desirability constitutes the value of these texts, revealing what Estonian tweens consider to be norms and shared beliefs.

The paper addresses the prominent place consumerism occupies in tweens' everyday life. It opens up the world of meaning‐making of “cool” by tweens, offering an insight into which repertoires responsible marketers could use to empower young consumers.

The paper sheds light on tweens' complicated symbolic and material worlds in a post‐socialist context, providing a continuum of meanings of “cool” and its relationships with the consumer and peer culture.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the contribution by the Russian social philosopher and cultural theoretician M.M. Bakhtin to the development of social sciences and, particularly, the author's relevance for the issue of agency.

The article provides some details about Bakhtin and discusses his theories and their influence.

Agency is always directed towards the other axiological position, in which the Self‐Other relationship is always a cross‐over or a transgredient relation. The active role of the Other in the act of communication is the very reason why “the utterance of the Other” is not only the topic of speech but also why it enters speech and its syntactic construct as a particular constructive element.

In this way, Bakhtin's philosophy of language can find an equally constructive use in the interdisciplinary theoretical discourse within the context of the development of post‐Cartesian human sciences as well as in the new practical determination of human agency in an era of globality.

Bakhtin's theory of speech as human agency provides a tool for constructing new mental models, the realization of which relies on the assumption of the organizing culture.