This book brings together visions and realities of multilingual schools throughout the world in order to examine the pedagogical, socioeducational, and sociopolitical issues that impact on their development and success. The chapters describe and analyze pedagogical, instructional, and policy efforts to develop multilingualism through school with different targeted populations -- immigrant students, indigenous peoples, traditional minorities, majorities, and multiethnic/multilingual groups. Each contribution, many written by well-known scholars in the field of bilingual and multilingual education, affirms the desirability of multilingualism as a societal resource and as a right of individuals, while acknowledging the social, economic and political differences that make the acquisition of multilingualism easy for some, and difficult for others. And yet, the book focuses on the school as a place of promise and resistance, having the potential to preserve, recover, and expand the world's linguistic diversity. The introduction, written by the co-editors, identifies the conceptual threads that are developed throughout the chapters. But the chapters themselves remind us of the importance of local conditions, despite the global pressures of the 21st century, in imagining and creating multilingual educational spaces.
Ofelia García is Professor Emerita in the Ph.D. programs in Urban Education and Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published widely in the areas of multilingualism and translanguaging, the education of bilingual students, sociolinguistics, and language education policy and practice. García has received Distinguished Scholar Lifetime Awards from the American Education Research Association (AERA) (Social Contexts in Education, 2019, and Bilingual Education, 2017); from the Modern Language Association (MLA), 2022; and from The Literacy Research Association (LRA), 2024. In 2023 she was elected into The Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023) and in 2018 into the National Academy of Education (2018). Her website: www.ofeliagarcia.org.
Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (Emerita) has been actively involved with struggles for language rights for five decades. Her research interests include linguistic human rights, linguistic genocide, linguicism (linguistically argued racism), mother-tongue-based multilingual education and the relationship between linguistic and cultural diversity and biodiversity.
Professor María E. Torres-Guzmán is a professor in bilingual/multicultural education at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY. She has primarily focused on teacher development and cultural aspects of the education of language minority populations in the United States, Spain and elsewhere.
