Voices Of Authority, Vol. 1

This collection of case studies from around the world examines how struggles for equality unfold in policies, programs, and practices in educational settings in multilingual contexts. Using sociolinguistic, interactional and discourse analysis, Heller and Martin-Jones examine the complex ways in which dominant ideologies of education, pedagogy, language and identity intersect in a wide variety of educational settings. They focus in particular on how those ideologies are reproduced or challenged, and on the consequences of such processes for changing or maintaining social relations of difference and inequality. Written for policy-makers, educators, and anyone else interested in education and multilingualism, the book places questions of power at the center of thinking about language and education.

This collection of case studies from around the world examines how struggles for equality unfold in policies, programs, and practices in educational settings in multilingual contexts. Using sociolinguistic, interactional and discourse analysis, Heller and Martin-Jones examine the complex ways in which dominant ideologies of education, pedagogy, language, and identity intersect in a wide variety of educational settings. They focus in particular on how those ideologies are reproduced or challenged, and on the consequences of such processes for changing or maintaining social relations of difference and inequality. Written for policy-makers, educators, and anyone else interested in education and multilingualism, the book places questions of power at the center of thinking about language and education. It invites us to link questions about minority language maintenance, individual multilingualism, immigrant language education, and the use of former colonial languages in post-colonial settings to the politics and economics of our globalizing age, and to look locally for the spaces for change and action that always present themselves.

A sociolinguistic account of how struggles for equality unfold in policies, programmes and practices in educational settings in multilingual contexts.

Booknews

Arguing that most work on providing effective, democratic education under conditions of increasing sociolinguistic diversity ignore the pivotal issues of social and political issues, Heller (sociology and equity studies, U. of Toronto) and Martin-Jones (bilingualism and education, U. of Wales) present 18 contributions that highlight the role played by education institutions in the construction of cultural identities and in the reproduction of social inequalities. They argue that we can develop a fuller understanding of these processes of production and reproduction in education by investigating the communicative practices of learners and educators in the daily cycles of life in educational settings. The chapters provide ethnographic analyses of socially and historically situated cases from a variety of education sites in postcolonial, indigenous, and immigrant settings in Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Britain, Burundi, Canada, Corsica, Hong Kong, Jaffna, Kenya, Malta, Peru, South Africa, and Switzerland. A number of the chapters originally appeared in issues 1 & 2 of (1996). Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Monica Heller is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies and the Centre de recherches en education franco-ontarienne of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

Marilyn Martin-Jones is Professor of Bilingualism and Education at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.