Diverse Perspectives
Featured Developing Culture and Climate: LGBTQ+ Embedded Systems View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Monica Lakhwani
This study provides an overview of the development of LGBTQIA+ support during the last eight years in schools as well as how this process initially began. It considers how community/resources were integrated, lways to build internal and external collaborations, how to increase capacity; and reviews some of the resources provided to staff within an urban school district of 96,000 students. This paper recognizes and address the needs of our diverse student population and ways to build networks towards a more inclusive organizational culture. We include understanding diverse student populations in a majority-minority school district, learning of terms/resources, reflection through activities and prompts, and creating safe and welcoming schools/communities.
Gender Diversity: Moves Towards Inclusive Education in Brazil and England
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Else R. P. Vieira, Sonia Fatima Schwendler
This paper explores decision-making regarding the inclusion of gender diversity in the curricula and syllabi of secondary schools in Brazil and England. The particular focus of this comparative case study is on secondary schools in Greater Recife and Greater London, drawing upon data obtained in fieldwork in 2020-2022. Both schools are situated in communities marked by diversity, respectively social and ethnic. How do these schools further respond to gender diversity in their communities? Which pedagogic tradition illuminates their strategies to promote social justice and tolerance? What tensions and challenges do they encounter amidst fast-changing legal provisions and cultural values?
Levinas and the Other: Revisiting Life Experiences and Identity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ronald Gobbi Simoes, Flavia Bonella
In this paper we present a theoretical hybrid framework for ethics and literacy applied to language teaching and autoethnography. The philosopher Emanuel Levinas defends that alterity and singularity are ways of questioning stable and colonized social notions about the other and about our own subjectivity. In order to have some understanding of the process of developing our identity as English language teachers in the Brazilian public school system, we revisit some life experiences through Levinas’ lenses and its ethics of the other using autoethnographic narratives. Two of these accounts tell about moments lived by one of the authors in the school environment, and they are related to Levinas’ face-to-face encounter between the self and the other person. The other two narratives describe the aesthetic encounter between the self and two other symbolic subjects - a prostitute and a “Preto-Velho”.
