This book brings together visions and realities of multilingual schools throughout the world to order to examine the pedagogical, socioeducational, and sociopolitical issues that impact on their development and success. The chapters describe and analyse schools with different target populations. Each contribution, written by well known scholars, affirms the desirability of multilingualism as a societal resource and as a right of individuals, whilst acknowledging the social, economic and political differences that make the acquisition of multilingualism easy for some and difficult for others.
Ofelia García is a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she presently serves as coordinator of the bilingual Education program and co-ordinator of the Centre for Multiple Languages and Literacies.
Dr. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Emerita, guest researcher at the Department of Languages and Culture, University of Roskilde, Denmark and visiting professor at Åbo Akademi University, Department of Education, Vasa, Finland, had a bilingual upbringing in Finnish and Swedish in officially bilingual Finland. She has been actively involved with minorities’ struggle for language rights for over five decades. Her main research interests are in linguistic human rights, linguistic genocide, linguicism (linguistically argued racism), bilingualism and multilingual education, linguistic imperialism and the subtractive spread of English, support for endangered languages, and the relationship between linguistic and cultural diversity and biodiversity. She was the Linguapax Award recipient and the Carl Axel Gottlund Award recipient, both in 2003.
She has written/edited around fifty books and monographs and around 400 book chapters and scientific articles in over thirty languages. Among her path-breaking books in English are Bilingualism or Not – the Education of Minorities (1984); Minority Education: from Shame to Struggle, ed. with Jim Cummins (1988); Linguistic Human Rights. Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination, ed. with Robert Phillipson (1994); Language: A Right and a Resource. Approaching Linguistic Human Rights ed. with Miklós Kontra, Robert Phillipson and Tibor Várady (1999); Linguistic Genocide in Education - or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? (2000); Sharing a World of Difference. The Earth's Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity (with Luisa Maffi and David Harmon, 2003) and Imagining Multilingual Schools: Language in Education and Glocalization, ed. with Ofelia García and María Torres-Guzmán (2006). Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local (ed. with Ajit Mohanty, Minati Panda and Robert Phillipson) will appear in 2009.
She is presently involved in projects in Nepal and India where Indigenous children are being taught through the medium of their mother tongues. She lives on a small ecological/organic farm in Denmark with husband Robert Phillipson. For more publications, see her home page http://akira.ruc.dk/~tovesk/.
María E. Torres-Guzmán is Associate Professor of Bilingual/Bicultural Education in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University.
