Symposium Keynote Speaker Professor Joe Lo Bianco

Joseph Lo Bianco is professor of Language and Literacy Education in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. Currently he is completing a four year project in SE Asia on language – policy and peace building in conflict zones in SE Asia.

Recent publications include: Learning from Difference: Comparative Accounts of Multicultural Education, (Springer, 2016) and Conflict, Language Rights, and Education: Building Peace by Solving Language Problems in Southeast Asia.

Keynote Abstract

In this talk I will trace the role of teachers of language into the sphere of planning and policy. While teachers can be active as policy influencers in their role as citizens and specialists in language and learning, they are policy planners in a more specifically professional way. Sometimes called educational linguistics I will describe some ways in which teacher talk, teacher language modelling and other classroom and communication practices represent language planning as much as language teaching.

The aim is to support both individual teachers and teacher associations to think of themselves in leadership roles. As our communities become increasingly diverse in a cultural and linguistic sense, teachers and teacher associations need to become more aware and more assertive of the their unique perspective on the language development and therefore the social, personal and educational prospects of young learners and the resultant effects of new conceptions of citizenship, new forms of economy and new kinds of identity.

---

Click here to find out more about the VicTESOL 2016 Symposium