This book explores the freedom to use the language resources we have at our disposal to learn to our fullest, to engage in inquiry about learning and teaching, and to go beyond the surface in topics of schooling and education. Within a particular school context, the author explores how these freedoms came into being, how they took shape, and what they meant for the individuals involved. She shows that the individual and social freedoms in which the teacher and the learner operate within schools are important measures and outcomes of intellectual development. In connecting language, culture, learning, and intellectual development as freedoms in her own life, the author explores a new way of seeing the role of multiple languages in education and the freedom to learn.

This book explores the freedom to use the language resources we have at our disposal to learn to our fullest, to engage in inquiry about learning and teaching, and to go beyond the surface in topics of schooling and education. Within a particular school context, the author explores how these freedoms came into being, how they took shape, and what they meant for the individuals involved. She shows that the individual and social freedoms in which the teacher and the learner operate within schools are important measures and outcomes of intellectual development. In connecting language, culture, learning, and intellectual development as freedoms in her own life, the author explores a new way of seeing the role of multiple languages in education and the freedom to learn.

The case studies in this book are based on transcripts of classroom interaction in nine different countries. In each chapter, the first author explains the specific context and through a theoretical and/or experiential perspective interprets the transcript data. The data are then re-interpreted by other authors in the book, illustrating the complexity and richness of interpretation and creating a dialogue among the book's contributors. At the end of each chapter, readers are then invited with assistance to join in the conversation by providing their own interpretations of other transcript data from the same context. The book will be useful for student teachers or practicing professionals, as well as all educators interested in exploratory classroom research.

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.

In this timely volume, international scholars examine how multilingual schooling is handled in schools across the world with a series of case studies from South Africa, Nigeria, Germany, Colombia, Slovakia, New Zealand, and Taiwan. Presenting new contributions arising from the varied contexts of multilingualism today, this collection urges educators to employ broader definitions of multilingualism; to treat the intricate messiness of language modes and language community goals as factors that mediate instructional and organizational designs, practices, and policies; to question the hopes or disappointments of democracy as we now know it; and, to consider the connections or disconnections of teaching with the cultures represented in the classroom. Demonstrating the commonalities among exemplars of practice, this book will help U.S. educators construct more effective policies and programs for multilingual instruction in K-12 schools.