Introduction

This book is about a teacher and her English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes, and what happened when she began collaborating with a researcher over the course of several terms. Although she hadn't known him beforehand, she graciously allowed him to observe her teaching, audio- and video-record her classes, take copious notes while doing so, and interview her numerous times.

I am the researcher she worked with for most of that year. I had taught English language learners (ELLs) for 18 years prior to working with her, and my critical pedagogy practices (Chun, 2009a) informed how I initially conceptualized and planned my EAP classroom research with another teacher. However, I hadn't fully considered how my own embodied histories of critical EAP teaching practices, approaches and theories would be questioned and problematized when I stepped into this teacher's classroom. As the dialogic collaborative process gradually developed between us, a praxis arose. The theories and literature addressing EAP pedagogy and curriculum, language learning, critical literacies and meaning making we read together, discussed and sometimes argued over found their way into the teacher's attempts to implement some of these approaches in her classroom. What emerged from these developing practices further provided a basis for our ongoing shared reflections and discussions. We of course had no way of knowing at first how these dynamics would play out in her classroom in the way it did, but in the end this praxis proved far richer and more meaningful than either of us could ever have predicted. What follows then is the unfolding of this praxis of meaning making between us and the texts and practices we explored, the meanings made by her and the students in the classroom, and the ensuing pathways that continually redirected ways of thinking, seeing and engaging with the language, texts, discourses and representations of the everyday.

The Issue at Hand: What's at Stake?

In chronicling the teacher's practices and ensuing approaches with her students over the course of several terms in her advanced level EAP reading and writing classes, I aim to illustrate the challenges of applying critical theories and approaches to daily classroom encounters and engagements with language, texts and discourses. This will be addressed in part through exploring how particular discourses in circulation were taken up, mediated, co-constructed and recontextualized by the teacher's and students' making of complex meanings from texts, videos, discussions, actions and the world at large.

The EAP classroom is a site of power, agency and multiple meaning makings. These are practiced, displayed and realized in various ways and to varying degrees, depending on who is doing what, and the multimodal modes of social-semiotic resources including language, discourse and texts that are privileged, utilized and materially available. These include the institutional and academic texts used in the classroom, the power-laden forms of discourses constructing and circulating these texts, and the ways in which teachers and students choose to address and interact with these discourses by adding, layering, interweaving and/or resisting with their own lived and common-sense discourses. Their ensuing discourses in a classroom may reflect alignments to varying degrees with privileged and dominant meanings or equally may contest these, and they can also be complex combinations of both at times, even within the span of an utterance. As a site of power relations involved in the often privileged institutional and societal making of meanings, and the continuing struggle over whose meanings count and are heard beyond the immediate four walls, the EAP classroom is thus inescapably political. By the term 'political', I mean it in the dynamic mobile sense of what Janks (2010) defined as politics with an uppercase 'P' and a lowercase 'p'. In her formulation, 'Politics' is what most people might immediately think of: governmental policies and debates revolving around socioeconomic systemic relations impacting us in material ways through conflicts over scarce resources, ongoing climate change, accompanying economic crises and collapses, and so on. In the case of 'politics', this attends to the ways in which we directly and indirectly imbricate those discourses and practices of Politics within our everyday lives and beliefs. This can be manifested, for example, in the way we might treat others whom we view as Othered, whether based on mediated notions of gender, racial, class and/or sexual differences. As Janks (2010: 188) points out, 'while the social constructs who we are, so do we construct the social'. Politics and politics are inextricably intertwined, sometimes obviously and at other times less so, but they are both present in various forms via discourses and practices in the EAP classroom.

The increase of multimodalities in the officially sanctioned curriculum texts (e.g. Kress, 2010; Stein, 2008) as well as the outside texts often found in the same classroom – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and so on that are accessed by students on their laptops, smartphones and other digital devices – have helped to disseminate discourses already circulating in and through the classroom via the traditional textbooks, teacher talk and institutional texts. These need to be addressed as well inasmuch as ELLs face a daunting array of power-laden discourses they need to learn and engage with in their various academic, institutional and societal forms. Those who have had immediate and available access to the various resources of cultural, social and material capital have been able to decode, understand, embody, rework and rewrite these discourses to their advantage. But for those who don't have access to these resources, then what? Will these students be able to speak back to the spheres of power and attendant meaning makings that help shape and attempt to fix the representations (Hall, 1997; Hall et al., 2013) of the world featured both in their classroom and outside texts? How can teachers address these representations with their students so that they can make sense of these discourses while learning how to make sense of the language and other equally important meaning-making modes that constitute and are constitutive of these discourses and representations? And what are the ways in which EAP classroom practices can facilitate deeper and more productive engagements with these texts so that both teachers and students become more active readers of the everyday featured in these materials? This book addresses these questions by looking at the teacher's EAP classes over three terms.

Critically Engaging with the Everyday

Because the EAP classroom is a site of power, then...