More words from Raoul Vaneigem Everything that human beings do and undo passes through the mediation of language. The semantic realm is one of the main battlefields in the struggle between the will to live and the spirit of submission. The fight is unfair. Words serve Authority more faithfully than most...
During the second half of 2022, Bayo Akomolafe and I had a series of recorded Zoom conversations, with my Institute colleague Janet Wootten spurring us on, Bayo and I both wanted to make these conversations public. and you can find slightly edited transcripts of them here, titled A Meandering Search for Method: Becoming Human in a...
I'm so delighted by a project initiated by friends in Taiwan that I decided to share it with readers. What follows is a guest post written by Pei and Joe Spirito. Enjoy! Speak English Any Way You Want By Pei and Joe Spirito For the last year or so, we’ve been teaching a...
Today’s ponderings come from Winnie the Pooh, who I’m finding remarkably relevant to living/becoming/developing in this strange and scary 21st century. So philosophical! So Vygotskian! So post-postmodern! (Thank you, A.A.Milne for your creation.) “When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that...
Back: Mayari Perez Arroyo , Mike Pickering, Bashiru Lasisi, Guillermo Terisotto, Francisco Estefogo, Laura Sonnino, Martha McCoy, Eva Brenner. Front: Andre Liberali, Mieke Lippstreu, Oscar Lozoya, Drazen Horvatic, Annie Rose Stathes. This past Saturday (June 15, 2019) the happy group pictured above graduated as the 15th International Class of the East Side Institute (joining 130...
I’ve been getting lovely feedback from readers since the publication of my book, The Overweight Brain: How our obsession with knowing keeps us from getting smart enough to make a better world. You might remember it from this site, where I published chapters as I wrote them and invited reader...
I was one of four invited speakers at the Applied Linguistics Winter Conference last week, the theme of which was Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Preparing my talk took me back to my academic roots as a researcher of early language development. It also took me back to my organizer-activist roots as...
“Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.” So said Mark Twain, a wise and witty man with a singular way with words. I’ve long thought Twain is giving us excellent advice and these days it’s especially compelling. Whether in the newspaper,...
Here is a slide show of Wittgenstein quotes I put together for the online course, Investigating Wittgenstein. Happy pondering! Investigating Wittgenstein ...
The latest issue of Idiom, the newsletter of New York State Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Language (TESOL) contains an article by my friend and colleague Gwen Lowenheim. Congratulations Gwen! The entire newsletter issue can be read here. Magic Yet Mundane: The Social Creativity of Language By Gwen Lowenheim As humans, we...