How doctoral researchers (and their supervisors) experience and conceptualise the process of becoming a researcher and the identifications that are enacted during the process has hitherto been researched only in terms of disciplinary and professional identities. Yet, within Europe, the creation of a common Higher Education Area has a potential impact on the doctoral experience and there is a declared intention to encourage doctoral students to see themselves as European researchers. The University of Luxembourg has policies and characteristics which might be expected to support this direction of development, and this study analyses the nuances of doctoral researcher experiences, at this University, of European and wider international identifications comparing these with policies at European and local levels. The opportunities offered to researchers in Luxembourg to ensure the policies are implemented are considered by participants to be significant. Whether the level of expenditure needed is possible in other countries and universities is an open question but remains a crucial condition for policies to be successful.
The school environment of the 21st century is shaped by rapidly changing social and societal conditions that teachers need to adapt to, increasing linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversity among other things. The development of attitudes to cope with these constant societal transformations is one of the main challenges of teacher professionalization today. In this chapter, we concentrate on the self-positioning and argumentation patterns of two Luxembourgish primary school teachers. We focus on the question how these teachers construct differences and homogeneity, what kind of categories and norms they rely on (e.g. performance, sociocultural background, and language) and in how far mechanisms of in- and exclusion become visible.With its trilingual tradition and school system (mainly Luxembourgish, French and German), and at the same time a highly diverse society with more than 170 nationalities, Luxembourg represents a particularly interesting case. As the recent PISA studies have repeatedly shown, the Luxembourgish school system (including its traditional trilingualism and strong orientation on language education) produces a high degree of inequality, and represents an important challenge especially for children of migration.With our study, which is based on in-depth interviews and which adopts an analytical approach combining elements of content and discourse analysis, we found a tendency towards a backward oriented idealized orientation of the past and a high degree of insecurity. We also show which ambivalences the teachers are confronted with and their efforts to deal with these ambivalences.We hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of how teachers position themselves vis a vis the existing diversity in schools, and which discourse and argumentation patterns they rely on. We see this study as part of research on teacher professionalization that will be useful for reflexive pre- and in-service teacher training.
Along with the important objective of communicative competence in foreign‐language learning, intercultural learning has been emphasized, especially since the 1980s, as a main objective of foreign and second language pedagogy (Bredella & Christ, 1995; Hu & Byram, 2009a).
Globalisation, mobility and linguistic diversity Globalisation is a process full of complexities and inherent tensions. On the one hand, we are seeing increasing numbers of people from a variety of communities using a more diverse range of repertoires and entering into increasingly multilateral relationships. In this respect, globalisation is giving rise to more flexible and mixed views of identities, more hybrid language practices and new cultural scripts. But at the same time, perhaps as a response to these changes, we are witnessing the re-emergence of stronger nationalist and communitarian currents in many parts of the world. Under this new globalised regime, neighbourhoods, workplaces, schools and universities are changing in Europe and beyond. For example, the number of children, young people and adults learning to use and navigate new languages at different points in their lives has surged. In education, mobile learners have also contributed to the diversification of classrooms, raising new questions as to how best to support them in their educational trajectories, in particular when their linguistic repertoires do not correspond with the languages of schooling. Simultaneously, issues related to fairness and equity have become more pressing in many spheres of social life.
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