"Second Language Learning as a Tool for Conviviality"

We've just learned of "Wringing the Neck of the Swan," a paper published recently (PDF) in the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. In it, Kristin Dillman Jones of Concordia University in Chicago, looks at the teaching and learning of second languages.

"I propose language learning as a convivial tool [that] opens our hearts to learn in the commons from our neighbors and also shatters the current commodification of languages" Ms. Jones writes. The swan whose neck she seeks to wring is modernist and industrial methods of learning, and in that process, she refers often to the thought of Ivan Illich, among others. Ms. Jones relates some of her own experiences learning - and not learning - foreign languages at different moments of her life.