Social Justice Through Multilingual Education

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. In this book experts from around the world ask why this is, 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.

Robert Phillipson (linguistic imperialism, English as a ' world' language, language policy) is emeritus professor, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. 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. Ajit Mohanty (psycholinguistics, multilingualism and multilingual education focusing on education, poverty and disadvantage among linguistic minorities) and Minati Panda (mathematical discourse and learning, cognition, culture, curricular and pedagogic issues and social exclusion) are both professors at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.