Multilingual education and sustainable diversity work : from periphery to center

This book includes recent and compelling data of successful bi/multilingual education policy, planning and delivery in Africa, South and South-East Asia, Latin and North America, accompanied by surprisingly modest costs and investment. It brings new, long-awaited and system-wide data to the international theory of bi/multilingual education. The richly textured evidence has the potential to influence educational debates for the next decade and beyond. This is particularly because low-cost cum high-return education, with relevance in “developing” and “developed” contexts, is of particular interest during the current downturn in the global economy. The volume shows successful case-studies of bi/multilingual education at work amongst Indigenous and minority linguistic communities in North America, Peru, Nepal, India, South-East Asia, Burkina Faso; and across the entire education system of Ethiopia. The volume also includes contemporary and high cost cum low return challenges to multilingual education in case-studies fromMorocco and Ethiopia. This is the first time that it has been possible to compare student achievement in different system-wide bi/multilingual models of education. Simultaneously, it is also the first time that it has been possible to focus on what research and expertise in low-income countries and contexts can contribute to the international field of bi/multilingual education. The implementation of linguistically diverse education as discussed in this volume, therefore, has significance for both low-income countries and dominant world powers experiencing unprecedented in-migration and socio-cultural diversity.