The principles for enabling children to become fully proficient multilinguals through schooling are well known. Even so, most indigenous/tribal, minority and marginalised children are not provided with appropriate mother-tongue-based multilingual education (MLE) that would enable them to succeed in school and society. Experts from all continents ask why, and show how it CAN be done. The book discusses general principles and challenges in depth and presents case studies from Canada and the USA, northern Europe, Peru, Africa, India, Nepal and elsewhere in Asia. Analysis by leading scholars in the field shows the importance of building on local experience. Sharing local solutions globally can lead to better theory, and to action for more social justice and equality through education.
Minati Panda is an Associate Professor of the Social Psychology of Education at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She is a cultural psychologist with special interests in culture, cognition and mathematics. Her research and publications are mostly in the areas of mathematical discourse and learning, curricular and pedagogic issues and social exclusion. She has been working on mathematical notions and their socio-cultural embedding among the Saoras and other tribes in India. She has studied extensively over the past decade the everyday discourse and school mathematics discourse in tribal areas of Orissa and has tried to theorise the common epistemological ground of these two discursive practices in formal classrooms. Her book on “Meaning Making in Ethnomathematics” is under publication. She has been a Fulbright Senior Fellow in the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, University of California, San Diego and a Witkin-Okonji awardee of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Prior to joining JNU, Dr. Panda was a Consultant for Tribal Education in the District Primary Education Programme, India and a Faculty in Tribal Education in National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). She is also the Co-Director of the MLE Plus Project.
Robert Phillipson is a graduate of Cambridge and Leeds Universities, UK, and has a doctorate from the Faculty of Education of the University of Amsterdam. He worked for the British Council in Spain, Algeria, Yugoslavia and London before settling in Denmark. He is a Professor Emeritus at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His main publications include Learner language and language learning (with Claus Færch and Kirsten Haastrup, Multilingual Matters, 1984), Linguistic imperialism (Oxford University Press, 1992, also published in China and India), Linguistic human rights: overcoming linguistic discrimination, edited with Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (Mouton de Gruyter, 1994); Language: a right and a resource, edited with Miklós Kontra, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Tibor Várady (Central European University Press, 1999); Rights to language: equity, power and education(as editor, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000); English-only Europe? Challenging language policy (Routledge, 2003). Linguistic imperialism continued (Orient Blackswan, in press) is a collection of articles and book reviews written over a decade. He has lectured worldwide, and had attachments to universities in Australia, Hungary, India, and the UK. See http://www.cbs.dk/staff/phillipson.
Tove Skutnabb-Kangas is actively involved with minorities’ struggle for language rights since five decades. Her main research interests are in linguistic human rights, linguistic genocide, linguicism, MLE, linguistic imperialism and the subtractive spread of English, and the relationship between linguistic and cultural diversity and biodiversity. She has written/edited around fifty books and monographs and around 400 book chapters and scientific articles in 32 languages. Among her 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). Tove has been involved in the Indian and Nepali projects described in this book since their planning phases. She lives on a small organic farm in Denmark with her husband Robert Phillipson. See www.tove-skutnabb-kangas.org.
Part I: Introduction Editors’ Foreword 3 1. Ajit K. Mohanty Multilingual Education—a bridge too far? 5 Part II: Multilingual Education: Approaches and Constraints 2. Jim Cummins Fundamental psychological and sociological principles underlying educational success for linguistic minority students 21 3. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas MLE for global justice: Issues, approaches, opportunities 36 4. Carol Benson Designing effective schooling in multilingual contexts: The strengths and limitations of bilingual ‘models’60 Part III: Global and Local Tensions and Promises in MLE 5. Robert Phillipson The tension between linguistic diversity and dominant English 79 6. Kathleen Heugh Literacy and bi/multilingual education in Africa: Recovering collective memory and knowledge 95 7. Teresa McCarty Empowering Indigenous languages—What can be learned from Native American experiences? 114 8. Ofelia García Education, multilingualism and translanguaging in the 21st century 128 9. David Hough, Ram Bahadur Thapa Magar and Amrit Yonjan-Tamang Privileging Indigenous Knowledges: Empowering MLE in Nepal 146 10. Shelley K. Taylor The caste system approach to multilingualism in Canada: Linguistic and cultural minority children in French immersion 162 Part IV: MLE in Theory and Practice—Diversity in Indigenous Experience 11. Susanne Jacobsen Pérez The contribution of postcolonial theory to intercultural bilingual education in Peru: An Indigenous teacher training programme 183 12. Andrea Bear Nicholas Reversing language shift through a Native language immersion teacher-training programme in Canada 200 13. Ulla Aikio-Puoskari The ethnic revival, language and education of the Sámi, an Indigenous people, in three Nordic countries (Finland, Norway and Sweden) 216 Part V: MLE in Theory and Practice—Diversity in South Asian Tribal Experience 14. Amrit Yonjan-Tamang, David Hough and Iina Nurmela ‘All Nepalese children have the right to education in their mother tongue’—but how? The Nepal MLE Programme 241 15. Dhir Jhingran Hundreds of home languages in the country and many in most classrooms—coping with diversity in primary education in India 250 16. Rama Kant Agnihotri Multilinguality and a new world order 268 17. Ajit Mohanty, Mahendra Kumar Mishra, N. Upender Reddy and Gumidyal Ramesh Overcoming the language barrier for tribal children: MLE in Andhra Pradesh and Orissa, India 278 Part VI: Analysing Prospects for MLE to Increase Social Justice 18. Minati Panda and Ajit K. Mohanty Language matters, so does culture: beyond the rhetoric of culture in multilingual education 295 19. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Robert Phillipson, Minati Panda, Ajit K. Mohanty MLE concepts, goals, needs and expense: English for all or achieving justice? 313 About the authors 335 References 343 Index 387