Bartleby The gospel according to Paul
An executive who showed you can combine sustainability with profits
Mr Paul Polman argues that businesses are returning too much cash to shareholders via share buybacks and dividends, meaning they are not investing enough for the future. He believes that if you can get big fund managers, the big asset owners (pension funds and foundations) and a few high net-worth people, it might be possible to sort things out. The solutions would be to create better incentives for fund managers: judging their record over a period of 3 to 5 years rather than on the next quarter . That, in turn, allows them to back companies that have long-term investment plans.
Mr Polman was ahead of the game in realising that consumers identify with the brands that they buy.”woke capitalism”
Negotiating School Literacy
Dr Mukhlis Abu Bakar
Schools may not always be the place where everyone has an equal chance, because hidden inside are all kinds of ways in which certain kinds of social, cultural and class positions are being privileged. And literacy is one of the dominant ways of doing that. Literacy as embedded in social practice just as eating is a social practice. Children do not just acquire language and literacy skills; they learn different ways of relating to texts, different ways of being a reader and writer, through participation in social practices, and through the pursuit of social relations.
Particular literacies are thus value over others and children are differently positioned in relation to their access to the dominant forms. This in turn affects children’s participation in classroom language activities, their curriculum experience ad their educational achievement. To address this issue, researchers have called for school literacy practices to be set within a wider context.
Students are not inherently weak or unmotivated when they cannot cope with the demands of school. Rather, at home they have limited access to the dominant literacy while their own family literacy find little value in the classroom, Sorting them early into a low achievement track and ignoring their cultural and bilingual resources only serve to penalise their social and cultural background.