Imagining Multilingual Schools: Language in Education And Glocalization

Contributors analyze the pedagogical, social, educational and socio-political issues inherent in teaching immigrant students, indigenous peoples, traditional majorities and minorities and groups with multiple cultures and ethnic identities. They describe the actual and the imagined in creating multilingual schools, the construction of self through multiple literacy pedagogy, lessons from Native American youth on proposing a multilingual country, attitudes toward learning in the Basque autonomous community, marketing bilingualism to parents, emergence of new social actors and gendered voices in the Mayan community, the tensions among multiple realities in failure to deliver, monolingual assessments and the limits of time (using Botswana as a case study), local and global perspectives on US language, and cultural diversity and multilingualism in Latin America and in India. Distributed in the US by UTP Distribution. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Ofelia Garcia is professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she presently serves as coordinator of the Bilingual Education program and co-director of the Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies. Garcia research interests are in the areas of language education policy, sociology of language, immigrant education, in particular the education of US Latinos, and teacher education for urban schools.

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, University of Roskilde, Denmark, and Abo Akademi University, Finland. Her main research interests: linguistic human rights, multilingual education, subtractive spread of English, and the relationship between linguistic (and cultural) diversity and biodiversity (also in practice, on an ecological smallholding, with her husband Robert Phillipson).

Maria E. Torres-Guzman is associate professor of Bilingual/Bicultural Education in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her recent publications are on dual language education models both in the U.S. and in the Basque Country, as well as pedagogical practices of read-alouds in such programs. She has also published in the area of multicultural education and the preparation of teachers.