Check out Nicholas Burbules work if you haven't already.

And, though not pointedly about your topic, i highly recommend Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto and Ursula Franklin's Real World of Technology (the CBC Massey Lectures some years ago).

along with looking at melanie's work (above) check out pierre levy...(he also has a facebook page)...thanks for writing, and feel free to contribute your own work in regard to the Internet and critical pedagogy, shirley

i am an american who has been living and teaching in the arab world for over four years. after having taught in lebanon and palestine, i am currently teaching in jordan. i am facing some new challenges at my new university this year and hoping that people here might be able to offer some practical advice.

some context: i am a literature professor teaching at a private university. in theory, my students enrolled in my classes should be upper-level english literature or translation students. in practice, only about half of my students can understand even the simplest english questions in print or orally (i.e., "what is your name?"). and yet they are enrolled in classes i'm teaching such as "the novel" or "twentieth century literature." the students at my university are generally fairly privileged students financially, though many of my students are palestinians who have been barred from studying the subject of their choice in their country because they come from historic palestine (what is known by many as israel). there is a genera lack of reading here since western culture has invaded so deeply into society. i have not faced these sorts of a problem before in this region.

in my classes most of my students are not doing any reading at all and we are at the point of midterms. i suspect that many of them are not reading because they cannot. some do have full-time jobs in addition to their classes (those are students taking my night classes who are less privilaged economically).

i have been teaching since 1993 and was schooled in freire from the first day of graduate school. critical pedagogy is at the core of what i normally do, but i'm feeling thrown by these new challenges by having mixed language abilities in my class (which is not supposed to happen at my university, but the university's response is that i should wait for them to fail the midterm and drop the class). but normally my pedagogy gets students who normally don't read or like to read to read what i have on the syllabus. once they do they are interested and want to read more. this has worked in palestine and lebanon. but it is not working here. i need help with strategies to motivate my students. i made some concessions by cutting down my syllabi. in my class on "the novel" i cut down from 6 novels to 4 to accomodate their reading levels. in my "twentieth century literature" class i'm teaching a film version of lorraine hansberry's "a raisin in the sun" right now to help students catch up with their reading work load before the first exam (we are required to give exams at universities here, though i would prefer not doing this).

anyone who might have some ideas about how to motivate students and get them to read or about how to deal with mixed language level abilities in a classroom would be greatly appreciated.

thank you!