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This paper analyzes how employers use discourse to ideologize the value of college internships--a historically emergent form of contingent, temporary, educational labor which has rapidly become a major feature of both higher education and labor relations in the United States (Frenette, 2015). The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with employers (n=38) in firms and organizations across a range of sectors who supervise and coordinate the work of college student interns from two public universities and two technical colleges located in different economic regions within the same U.S. Midwestern state. Using the anthropological theory of value (Graeber, 2001), we develop an analysis of how employers use discourse to ideologize and coordinate internship labor. Employers use three discourses of value to ideologize 1) the individual intern as the primary beneficiary of the internship ("entrepreneurial discourse of value"); 2) the organization or firm as the primary beneficiary of the internship ("corporate efficiency discourse of value"); and 3) the community, industry, or society in general as the primary beneficiary of the internship ("community service discourse of value"). The article develops the concept of a "discourse token of value"--discursive forms that (like cash) mediate value--as a central concept of the analysis of emergent forms of education and labor.

Theories of learning in social settings, no matter their philosophical orientation, must address issues of intersubjectivity (IS). This paper starts with the premise that IS is a fundamental and unavoidable aspect of social interaction, and that understanding its nature is necessary for developing reliable theories of socially mediated learning and for designing the next generation of effective learning environments. The authors' central hypothesis is that IS acts as more than a point of convergence toward a common idea or solution, but that the dynamics toward and away from convergent ideas appears to be instrumental in fostering sustained and engaging discourse and influencing the representations that students propose during problem solving. They use discourse analysis techniques to show how IS is manifest in the classroom and explore its role in structuring and perpetuating participants' intellectual interactions. (Contains 4 tables and 7 figures.) [Production of this paper was funded by: the Interagency Educational Research Initiative, an alliance of the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development within the National Institutes of Health; and the University of Haifa.]

This paper explores the role of co-expressivity of drawing, speech, and gesture as sixth graders strive for intersubjectivity in their attempts to communicate solutions of a spatial reasoning task. Several obstacles to intersubjectivity are documented, particularly conflicts between a literal and geometric interpretation, limits of students' drawing abilities, and lack of conventions for designating cuts and interpreting three-dimensional information depicted in two dimensions. A conversation analysis approach reveals how failure to achieve intersubjectivity leads students to employ co-expressive forms of communication and to make conversational and representational repairs. The discourse analysis exposes students' optimistic views that their graphical representations will be understood by and convincing to others. It raises questions about the nature of students' understanding and production of graphical representations. Students need to see external, graphical representations as formal representations of the world. As such, they need to establish conventions for reading these representations and for connecting these representations with those aspects of the world they are meant to model. (Contains 4 figures.) [The research reported in this paper was supported by Interagency Education Research Initiative (IERI; a collaboration of NSF, Department of Education-OERI/IES, and NIH-NICHD).]

Since 1995, the University of California has been prohibited from employing affirmative action principles in student admissions. In response to this constraint, the UC has sought to pursue a number of other avenues for promoting the selection and retention of a diverse student body. In this paper we look at how officials and staff within the UC system have sought to develop an alternative rationale for managing the categorical problem of identifying types and classes of applicants along with strategies of action that stay within legally allowable frameworks. We argue that a new framework for organizational action has emerged (a cultural logic) which is made up of a dually ordered system of identity categories and institutional activity categories. We use Galois lattices as a way of unpacking the dynamic emergence of this new organizational logic. (Contains 4 tables, 4 figures, and 12 footnotes.)

This study of social capital employs data from the Longitudinal Study of Adult Learning (LSAL), funded by the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL) and conducted at Portland State University to increase understanding of the learning process of adults with limited formal education. It provides longitudinal data on how people continue learning in multiple contexts--through formal adult education programs and in their daily lives. This paper is presented in two sections. The first is a theoretical exploration of the intersections of critical literacy, adult learning, and social capital theories. The intent of this discussion is to introduce key concepts from multiple disciplines and develop a synthetic model of social capital influences on lifelong learning (SCILL) in which adults construct their social environment and the discourses that influence their learning strategies. The second section empirically tests a piece of the SCILL Model related to the structural and discursive dimensions of social capital, using data from the first wave of the LSAL. Multiple measures of social capital are detailed. The author argues that in addition to the structural dimension of social capital, local discourse generated through interaction is an interpretive dimension of social capital. The discussion ties the empirical and theoretical elements, offering implications for the study of adult education participation in adult education for research on social capital. Appendices include: (1) Longitudinal Study of Adult Literacy Study Design; (2) Instrument Items from LSAL Wave 1; (3) Confirmatory Factor Analysis of Lifelong Learning; (4) Tables of Descriptive Statistics and Univariate Analyses of Indicators; (5) Items Parameters in Final Models; and (6) Model Calibration. (Contains 18 tables, 3 figures, and 6 footnotes.)

This paper describes the communicative situation of 17 Mexican immigrant women in San Diego County (California), focusing on a set of narratives of personal language experiences in everyday life. Data collection included intensive fieldwork in an adult computer literacy project serving predominantly Mexican immigrants and interviews with seven project coordinators, seven participants, and four nonparticipants. Subjects' English language proficiency ranged from none to full bilingualism. To exemplify how events involving communicative challenges took place, the women reported on dialogues that occurred in different situations. By quoting others' words, the women were not only reporting speech, but also assessing the problematic nature of the incident. Analyses of these dialogues include setting, unexpected event, psychological response, attempt to resolve the challenge, and consequences. Examples presented in detail involve the women's interactions with doctors, other medical staff, school personnel, their own child in a school situation, and a priest. In monolingual U.S. institutions, the women experienced "invisibility" (exclusion) responses from the people they interacted with. The examples show that the invisibility responses occurred when the women did not have enough English to defend themselves, when language judgments were mapped onto Mexican ethnicity, and when Spanish was underprivileged in institutions. (Contains 84 references.) (SV)

The purpose of this study was to identify the initial terms and means of creating and assessing the quality of what the author calls "fear education" (analogous to sex education or health education). Using a review of a random sample of discourses from the educational literature, the author analyzes how "fear" and "education" have usually been discussed and operationalized. This report offers the first known critical summary on the status of fear education in Western society, and probably in the world. The results of studying fear education for the past 13 years casually, and the last four years intensely, have shown that fear education is not yet an entity (or field) self-reflective, never mind critical of itself. According to the author, "fear education" is now as inadequate as sex education was 100 years ago. With such an important topic as fear (and fearlessness), the author also suggests that the lack of systematic study of fear education itself, may be equally as much of a problem to healthy human/global functioning, as fear is. Some recommendations are offered to improve the state of "fear education" in a post-9/11 era. [Published by In Search of Fearlessness Research Institute, Vancouver, BC, Canada.]

Three papers written by graduate students on educational linguistics are included. These papers represent works in progress by students and professors on topics ranging from speech act analysis and classroom discourse to language planning and second language acquisition. The papers are generally based on research carried out for courses offered in the Language in Education Division of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. The papers are intended to be a forum for the exchange of ideas among scholars in the field of educational linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and at universities with similar programs in educational and applied linguistics around the world. Papers in this volume include the following: "From Interpersonal to Classroom Discourse: Developing Research Methods" (Elite Olshtain); "Error Treatment in a Japanese Language Classroom" (Aiko Inoue and Mitsuo Kubota); "Cross-cultural Communication in the Writing Center and in the Tutoring Session: A Process of Sensitization" (Michell Y. Szpara). Contains 14 references. (CK)

The relationship between life history, gender, and the discourse of modernization was examined from the perspective of a researcher with extensive experience performing evaluations about modernization within human services in Denmark. Three stories about site-based management in two human service institutionsa youth center and a boarding school for autistic childrenwere presented to illuminate fragments of the complex condition that modernization represents. One story, which was told by a female superintendent, reflects feelings of skepticism and professional pride and discusses modernization in terms of development. A second story, which was told by a male superintendent, stresses the challenges and criticism encountered during modernization. In analyzing the stories, the author explored the following themes: (1) the discourse of modernization; (2) pre-existing or interpretive narratives; (3) the notion of the dialectical, liberated, and dispersed subject and the various theoretical forms in which life histories emerge; (4) the concepts of subject and surface and their relationship to the discourse of life history and modernization; (5) fluent and fixed icons of life history; (6) lost virginity and floating space as images of modernization; and (7) rituals of passage, storytelling, imagination, and the researcher's voice. (Fourteen endnotes and 27 references are included.) (MN)

This paper identifies and discusses the connections between the way individuals frame their world based on the language they use and the impact of language and stereotyping on the perception that computer technology is primarily for certain individuals. The study explores how some of the dimensions of the language of computers and technology, computer culture, and computer-based activities are inextricably linked to the language and culture of mathematics which has framed a particular way of thinking about computer technology. The document discusses an array of anecdotal evidence and research findings supporting the contention that technology education carries with it the biases and beliefs of the society in which it operates. The use of computers often exacerbates inequities for students of color and poor students rather than act as an educational panacea. However, a broad understanding of this cultural context can be used to begin to change the culture of the classroom and school to respond better to the educational needs of the broad range of students who traditionally do not succeed. Questions are raised regarding, how to make technology engaging for both males and females and how can a new approach to technology support a democracy? The document concludes with a number of approaches to creating classroom changes. These include increasing the opportunities for girls to engage in technology-related activities, working with more collaborative activities, giving students' more control over the activities that they work on, and changing patterns of discourse. (MJP)

A study identified some implicit concepts, knowledge, and skills that a seemingly standard adult literacy and numeracy "lesson" contains. Conversation analysis was used to show instances of how adult numeracy is embedded in adult language and literacy. The "conversation" was a transcript from an adult literacy class for long-term unemployed adult men that began with a recall segment about question and answer patterns. Two types of questions were compared: those occurring "naturally" as part of the "common sense" made during the classroom conversations and those asked as part of the instructional content of the lesson appropriate to the subject matter of mathematics. Analysis showed how language and literate practices in the adult literacy classroom created the reality that adult learners come to recognize as the subjects mathematics or numeracy. Two implications were explored. First, considerable differences between school mathematics and real-life numeracy raised the dilemma of what should be taught. Second, embedding of language with particular sets of valued "content areas" caused teachers to reproduce school-based practices and discourses for adults who had already experienced school failure and implied that literacy and numeracy teachers be trained in language interaction patterns and ways for teachers and adult students to manage them to achieve an identified purpose. (Contains 28 references.) (YLB)

This study examined the moral values embedded in the instruction and practice of higher education, focusing on instruction within three disciplines at a mid-sized residential university in the Pacific Northwest over the course of three semesters. Through classroom observations and transcriptions of tapes of classroom interaction in 46 undergraduate classes, the study examined faculty discussions of student evaluation and grading, using Rokeach's (1973) typology of values. Three vignettes from the classroom transcriptions are provided to show that the relationship between the faculty and students is less important than their respective relationships to the content. These models attempt to show that according to the realist discourse, knowledge/power originates from the discipline's content and acts on both the faculty and the student. The script employed by faculty in the hard sciences and mathematics conveyed a message that affirmed obedience to the knowledge paradigm of the discipline, while the script employed by faculty in the social sciences and humanities emphasized the interpretation of knowledge as a human responsibility. (Contains 63 references.) (MDM)

A study analyzed gender bias in dialogues as presented in three recent, popular textbooks designed for early intermediate or intermediate English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction. Analysis focused on dialogues intended for practice in speaking. For each textbook, data were gathered on: different male and female character types; number and average number of appearances of each characters; number of mixed-sex dialogues initiated by males and females; male and female turns; average turns per character and character type; and number and average number of dialogue words spoken by males and females and by male and female character types. Results suggest that the authors and publishers gave consideration to social roles, language use, and gender and did not fall into patterns indicating gender bias. Characteristics of ideally gender-balanced instructional materials are also discussed. Further research in this area and in gender bias in the classroom is recommended. Contains 35 references. (MSE)

A case study examined the brief conversations about writing that took place between a high school English teacher and two of his students. One illustrative writing conference conversation lasting 1 minute and 19 seconds shows how, through the push and pull of their short exchange, student and teacher simultaneously read the book, read the writing assignment, and read each other, revising their "readings" along the way. Another such conference between the teacher and a different student, lasting 1 minute and 1 second, illustrates how the student examined a rhetorical strategy that had begun to look problematic and worked through a solution that confirmed her original plans. Because he has limited amounts of time in which to converse with each student, yet places high value on such talk, the teacher has adopted four strict strategies to make such conversation possible. These "ordinary" and quickly fleeting exchanges between teacher and student are critical events in the business of learning to write. (RS)