Tourination: The Ruination By, Of and With Tourism

We recently published The Impact of Tourism in East Africa by Anne Storch and Angelika Mietzner. In this post the authors explain the concept of ‘Tourination’.

Beaches are problematic spaces. They are the porous sites of uncertain encounters, of contact between humans and spirits, firm ground and uncertainty. In many parts of the world, they are lined by the ruins of imperialism and colonialism, and by the excessive waste produced in global mass tourism. Paradise is depicted on nearby billboards, the flawless white sand and turquoise waters are a promise for all those who can pay their way in.

From places that seem destroyed, ruined or abandoned, new systems of togetherness emerge, as we describe in our book. The ruination by, of and with tourism is a concept we tend to call Tourination. Tourination is found in every single part and corner wherever tourism takes place. It describes how people and places change because of tourism and what emerges out of this change. We would like to propose making Tourination a term of its own in the discourse on tourism and change. A term that does not always imply a negative connotation of the term ruination, but rather a connotation that shows what comes out of it.

Meanwhile, the knowledge and techniques of creating spaces that are alive and allow for resistance and sovereignty remain. In Digo (a Bantu language spoken in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania), like in the languages of many other Indigenous peoples, there is a wealth of ways to express reciprocity and conviviality.

Utsi is managed by a group of elders, who figure out who is in need of the help of others and make this help happen.

Mweria is more about reciprocity. In a community, people help each other handling hard labour.

Harambee is an expression that can be used as a call, or shout, by a group of people who pull something heavy (a boat). It is also the name for asking around in the community for assistance in one’s own financially challenging tasks.

Merry-go-round is another possibility.

Saying nothing at all is a reply to an invitation to join a meal. One simply sits down and eats.

Or maybe we could sit down and listen, engage in a conversation here and there or just watch.

rest/histories

gift/offerings

celebration/connection

Angelika Mietzner and Anne Storch

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like the authors’ previous book, Language and Tourism in Postcolonial Settings.

Futures Perspectives on Tourism Inclusion

This month we published Inclusive Tourism Futures edited by Anu Harju-Myllyaho and Salla Jutila. In this post the authors explain the concept of inclusive tourism and provide examples of how we can influence inclusive tourism futures.

There are numerous academic and practical discussions concerning inclusive tourism, especially in terms of different stakeholders and actors. Yet, there is still room for futures perspectives on tourism inclusion. The aim of this book is to pay attention to inclusive tourism futures. We ask how to understand and enhance inclusive tourism development in academia and in the field of tourism. In other words, the purpose of this book is to set a basis for further discussion as well as to understand the various tourism stakeholder groups, viewpoints, methods and practices that are important for supporting inclusive tourism.

Inclusive tourism, as a dimension of sustainable tourism, is part of a wider societal discussion. Sustainable tourism is a multidimensional issue and neither of the different dimensions exist in a vacuum. This means that, for instance, ecologically sustainable tourism demands a recognition of its social dimension. It is very important to continue discussions and to commit to action regarding socially responsible tourism and environmental sustainability. However, such engagement also causes conflicts. If we must restrict tourism or compensate for the emissions it causes through taxation, who then has the right to travel? Does anyone? At the same time, we ask: who is permitted to take part in planning tourism and consuming it? Who benefits?

Along with the diversity of tourists, inclusive tourism emphasises the participation of local people (e.g. Höckert, 2015; Simmons, 1994). Inclusion also always requires acknowledgement of exclusion, both compulsory and voluntary. Chapters of the book highlight both guest and host points of view in versatile contexts. For example, in chapter one Höckert, Kugapi and Lüthje point out the role of development projects in inclusive tourism. Authors discuss their own project, Culturally Sensitive Tourism in the Arctic (ARCTISEN), in the context of the thoughts of hosts and guests. They note that inclusion also incorporates freedom of choice: that choice can be not to participate but to stay excluded. According to Höckert et al, inclusive development cannot be pre-organised. A certain openness to different ways of being, knowing and doing must remain part of the process. They suggest that development projects should nurture the idea that hosts’ and guests’ roles are reciprocal and that they change depending on the situation.

It is important to give a voice to future generations and to consider different possibilities and paths that might be pursued to achieve mutually desired goals. By anticipating alternative futures, while recognising different perspectives on inclusive tourism, it is possible to consider future actors and what might be best for them. The future has one positive aspect: we can have an impact on it. As futures researchers often say, we cannot predict the future, but we can make it ourselves. Thus, as a chronological dimension, the future is full of possibilities.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like The Impact of Tourism in East Africa by Anne Storch and Angelika Mietzner.

Disability, Language and Mothering

This month we published (M)othering Labeled Children by María Cioè-Peña. In this post the author explains the inspiration behind the book.

I never sought to study mothers. To be honest, mothers were never really a part of my professional circle. Yes, I worked with women who were mothers and I also engaged with my students’ mothers, but I rarely saw mothers as an asset; truth be told, I probably didn’t really see them at all. I remember many of my former students but very few of their mothers – the ones I do remember often tended to be the “squeaky wheel” mothers – the ones who came across as “irrational” and “demanding”.  As an educator, I didn’t really think about mothers, not the way I do now.

To be clear, I thought about parents. As a special education teacher, I had been trained to communicate with parents, to consider their emotional capacities, particularly around disability diagnosis or program placements, as well as their education level when communicating information and interacting with them. I was taught to be a co-conspirator, always working with parents towards more inclusive placements. As a bilingual educator I was trained to be culturally responsive and to consider parents’ cultural identity and language practices when communicating. All of this was under the guise of compliance and rarely under the umbrella of collaborative partnerships. After all, I had been trained to believe that culturally and linguistically diverse families needed teachers like me to advocate for them.

My relationship with parents in many ways took on similar characteristics to my relationships with children in special education – I was a helper to the helpless, a voice for the voiceless, an advocate for the powerless. Thus, my relationship to parents took on the same deficit framing that plagues emergent bilinguals and students labeled as dis/abled. So it makes perfect sense that parents, especially mothers, were outside of the scope of my inquiries. This is not to say that I did not have beautiful and meaningful relationships with mothers. On the contrary, I credit those relationships with my growth both as an educator and as a researcher, but at the time I did not recognize them as a part of my practice, rather I saw them as another feather on my cap; another thing that I did that made me great.

I was really interested in studying the ways in which my teacher training had failed me. I recognized that my teacher training had been an amalgamation of parts (special education training with a bilingual extension or a bilingual education training with a special education extension) and as such had failed to prepare me, and others like me, for the unique challenges that a bilingual special education teacher might encounter. It wasn’t until I did a pilot study centered on teachers that a participant made a claim that shifted my whole perspective. When speaking about changes that had arisen as a result of special education reforms in NYC, changes that encouraged Emergent Bilinguals Labeled As Disableds’ (EBLAD) placement in monolingual English Inclusive Co-Teaching (ICT) classrooms over bilingual self-contained special education settings, she commented that she felt badly for the mothers because they had no say in this transition. The bilingual special education classrooms were closed and students were placed in monolingual ICT classes, and while the children could adjust, the mothers had lost a huge connection to their children’s learning. While in the bilingual special education setting they could encounter a teacher who spoke their home language – that was not true in the monolingual ICT classes.

That comment sat and rattled around my head for weeks and months, until finally I realized that the problem didn’t lie in my training. It originated from the fact that these children were being treated as the sum of their classifications: English language learners, students with disabilities, culturally and linguistically diverse, Latinx, etc. My training was a hodgepodge of programs because the students were being viewed as the sum of their parts rather than as whole. Thus, in order to foreground children as whole, I needed to step out of the classroom and into the home. I needed to center their foremost teacher: their mothers. They are the ones who saw their children as whole first. They are the ones who rooted their children’s differences in a disabilities studies perspective. They are the ones who saw their children’s bilingualism as a linguistic human right central to survival not just capitalism. In order to help EBLADs, I first needed to center mothers’ expertise and experiences.

This book, (M)othering Labeled Children, does just that. It centers mothers, their successes, their struggles (inside and outside of their children’s schooling), their ideologies on disability, language and mothering. In order to see children as whole, we need to see their parents, especially their mothers, as whole first. In doing this work, I have come to better understand myself as a teacher and as a mother. In these women’s testimonios I see my mother, my aunt, and myself. I hope that in reading this book others will see the complexity that is motherhood and the ways in which schools can make this work both easier and significantly more difficult. I hope that this book becomes a step towards a more inclusive school model.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Bilingualism for All? edited by Nelson Flores, Amelia Tseng and Nicholas Subtirelu.

Why We Notice

We recently published Language Teacher Noticing in Tasks by Daniel O. Jackson. The author previously wrote a post explaining the concept of ‘teacher noticing’ – in this follow-up post, he discusses why we notice.

Following up on my previous blog contribution on Language Teacher Noticing in Tasks, I wanted to share that book’s practical implications. In my view, one role of a language teacher is to consciously perform the art of noticing. This differs from noticing by learners and is grounded in core assumptions about language learning and teaching. As the book explains, teacher noticing involves attending to, interpreting, and making decisions about events while engaging with learners. Noticing is essential to teaching practice because it supports five major goals.

The first three pertain directly to instruction. Namely, noticing helps us to:

1. Build rapport – Harmonious relationships and a friendly atmosphere improve the learning environment. Teachers need to be able to swiftly orient to student identities to achieve rapport, which provides the foundation for communication and engagement. We can also ask students what they want us to notice.
2. Support acquisition – Because second language development is highly individualized, scholars argue that it is effective to focus on form at the point of need during communicative lessons. This means attending to a learner’s use of language and acting on it appropriately. To provide such feedback, we can tell students what we noticed.
3. Enhance participation – Learning-centered lessons depend on active participation. Teachers can notice various dimensions of engagement by asking themselves at key points during their lessons: Who are my students connecting to? What are they doing/thinking? How do they feel about it?

The final two goals link instruction to teacher development, where noticing is used to:

4. Foster reflection – Noticing-based reflection is valuable because it relies upon evidence drawn directly from teaching experiences. By focusing on interactions with learners, we improve our classroom practice, refine our noticing skills, and develop professional identities as “noticers” of student learning.
5. Guide observation – We can also co-notice with teaching colleagues during class visits. By sharing our insights, we can coach others toward professional development. To enhance post-observation feedback sessions, try to establish a focus prior to the observation, to which the teacher and all observers pay close attention.

These reasons to notice are discussed in more detail in the book, which opens the door to an integrated account of noticing by teachers and learners by providing a theoretical framework and methodological options for future studies. The book also reports a task-based study of noticing by pre-service English teachers in Japan. More research is needed on when, what, and how language teachers notice, as we live through and learn from these challenging times.

You can read the author’s previous post here.

For more information about Language Teacher Noticing in Tasks please see our website.

Supporting Language Learning Through Assessment in Primary Education

This month we are publishing Assessment for Learning in Primary Language Learning and Teaching by Maria Britton. In this post the author explains what we can expect from the book.

It is probably fair to say that teachers and learners can invest significant amounts of time and energy in assessing language learning. As a minimum, such effort should pay off by providing clear and accurate information about what has already been achieved and what needs to be improved. It would be even better if assessment could also support learners in becoming more proficient language users as well as more effective and independent learners. This may not seem easy to achieve, especially when the learners are young children.

What criteria should assessment meet to support language learning in primary education? I was keen to find out what educational research can tell us about this. In this volume, I outline what we know about children as language learners; how they learn languages and what factors might affect the outcomes of primary language education. This serves as a starting point for drawing out characteristics of the kind of language assessment which could benefit learning.

So much for theory, now onto practice. I took to the classrooms to investigate what actually happens when assessment for learning (AfL) is used and what teachers think about using it with primary-aged children. In this volume, I share a detailed report of what I found, offering insights from a large dataset. Importantly, the findings clearly show that AfL is appropriate for use with primary-aged language learners as it meets the criteria for effective language assessment in childhood. Perhaps even more significantly, they also suggest how using AfL may help enhance language learning.

Readers might be interested to find out about the four types of implementation of AfL in primary language education which I identified, or about the ways in which teachers can practically support language learning through AfL techniques, described in detail and illustrated with examples sourced from lessons. The discussion also clarifies the compatibility of AfL with teaching various language skills, task types and age groups. Finally, I explore the impact of AfL on language learning in primary education, focusing on interactions and feedback. I propose that the concept of an assessment spiral is an accurate and useful model for thinking about AfL and researching its use and impact on language learning in primary education.

I am grateful to all the teachers and learners who kindly welcomed me into lessons and were keen to share their practice and thoughts with me.

Maria Britton

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Integrating Assessment into Early Language Learning and Teaching edited by Danijela Prošić-Santovac and Shelagh Rixon.

How are Pre-service Teachers Being Prepared to Work in Multilingual Contexts?

This month we published Preparing Teachers to Work with Multilingual Learners, edited by Meike Wernicke, Svenja Hammer, Antje Hansen and Tobias Schroedler. In this post the editors discuss the project that inspired the volume as well as the research initiatives currently emerging from the project. 

Among the many challenges, the current COVID-19 global pandemic has brought to light a heightened need to take into account the reality of language diversity in our societies, especially in a time of crisis. Conveying rapidly changing information related to public health cannot only happen in the dominant or official language. Local communities require reliable, consistent access to relevant information in the languages they use, including minoritized languages that have historically been devalued and continue to be marginalized across many regions of the world. This sense of urgency is also a reality in educational contexts, where teachers are confronting an ever wider range of culturally and linguistically diverse students in their classrooms. This past year, with repeated lockdowns making home-schooling and online learning and teaching the only options, the importance of home languages has become all the more salient as teachers are navigating daily communication with students and their parents. An ever-important question that both pre-pandemic and the current realities raise is, “how are pre-service teachers being prepared to work in multilingual contexts?”

This edited volume responds to exactly this question. The chapters presented here discuss in detail the kinds of multilingual approaches that are being developed in teacher education programs and professional learning in countries across Europe and North America, in response to the national and regional language-in-education policies implemented over the past several decades.

What makes this volume unique is that it is not merely a collection of research studies centered on a common theme. Rather, the volume is the culmination of an international research project initiated at the University of Hamburg in Germany in 2018, bringing together emerging researchers from Canada, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Sweden and the United States for the purpose of exploring key approaches to linguistic diversity in current pre-service teacher education. Two webinars and a face-to-face workshop in Hamburg resulted in an exceptionally rich exchange of ideas on multilingualism, producing not only a much-needed overview of different international perspectives on multilingual teacher preparation, but also providing an opportunity for project participants to take a step back from their own educational setting and to situate their practices and perspectives within a larger context.

Notably, the chapters highlight the complexity of each educational context and the role that history, language policies, and institutional and programmatic priorities play in the development and implementation of a multilingual focus in teacher education. Of particular interest are the country-specific issues that have evolved due to the history and ongoing presence of multiple languages in educational contexts. The authors who have contributed to the volume take a critical view of how multilingualism itself is conceptualized within and across these settings, while considering not only migrant-background learners but also students from Indigenous, autochthonous and heritage language backgrounds, or speaking minoritized regional varieties. Overall, the book highlights the positive and valuable impact that explicit instruction on theories of multilingualism, pedagogies in multilingual classrooms, and lived realities of multilingual children can have on beliefs and practices of pre-service teachers.

To date, the MultiTEd project has already led to further collaborations for a number of the researchers in their respective contexts. For example, the book has prompted countrywide discussions among teacher educators, practitioners and researchers in Canada with an emphasis on “Centering multilingual learners in teacher education.” A Germany-Sweden collaboration is exploring pre-service teachers’ beliefs about multilingualism in different national settings while research partnerships between Italy, Germany and Estonia are working to expand cooperation in teacher education and are focused on inclusive linguistic practices and the promotion of social equity in educational settings through translanguaging pedagogies. Research extending from the study described in the US context is currently investigating multilingual, inclusive approaches in remote contexts, including online instruction during the pandemic and in teacher education. In response to the ideological and structural challenges highlighted by students and teachers in this research, the group is now exploring advocacy efforts to address state-level education policies as they relate to languages in the classroom. The MultiTEd project also underpins work in Finland connected with the research alliance FORTHEM Multilingualism in School and Higher Education. Moreover, it has initiated further international cooperation to commonly analyze the role of multilingualism in teacher education in Austria as well as South Africa. And not only is the volume providing a useful comparison for ongoing empirical investigations about teachers attitudes toward multilingualism or the volume’s contributors, the chapters are also being built into future research projects, seminars, and teacher education courses. In that regard, the authors and editors are happy to share their experiences and collaborate with interested scholars to further explore the subject in other national or regional contexts.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Preparing Teachers to Teach English as an International Language edited by Aya Matsuda.

Language Teacher Noticing as Professional Development

This month we are publishing Language Teacher Noticing in Tasks by Daniel O. Jackson. In this post the author explains the concept of ‘teacher noticing’ and the book’s aims.

To teach effectively we need to notice. Detailed accounts of how language teachers attend to and act upon student contributions in a range of ways are somewhat rare, however. The article I have already published on this topic needed expansion. My new book dives deeper into this key aspect of teachers’ mental lives and how it develops. The Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching (PLLT) series is the ideal venue for this research.

Teacher noticing involves attention, interpretation, and decision-making. It is a form of reflection that happens during engagement with learners. That engagement can be cognitive, affective, or social – it’s something we experience every time we teach. For years, such encounters have informed my practice and my identity as a teacher. This book examines noticing by a group of pre-service English language teachers studying at my university in Japan. It offers fresh insight into the teacher’s role in task-based language teaching in this setting and beyond.

The book’s main purpose is to introduce the concept of teacher noticing to the second language field. It situates noticing among related concepts and theories, but instead of being a purely theoretical book, it uses evidence to shed light on noticing in practice. I drew on a rich array of sources and methods to illustrate the implications for teacher development. The results show how tasks guide pre-service teachers to notice verbal and nonverbal resources that underlie successful communication in a second language.

I regard this effort as a tribute to and a continuation of the work of the late Richard “Dick” Schmidt, who was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is especially renowned for his widely cited noticing hypothesis. Dick was my PhD supervisor and he truly was a great mentor. For this book, I revisited his account of learner noticing and sought out connections with teacher noticing. It frames joint attention by teachers and learners within expanding contexts of tasks, programs, and schools.

Ultimately, I aim to encourage dialogue between teacher educators and language teachers about learning to notice. Pre-service teachers should have opportunities to observe on video how they interact to orchestrate performance on a range of tasks. I also offer practical suggestions to improve the noticing skills of in-service teachers. A key point for reflection is to consider when, what, and how you and your students notice during lessons.

Lastly, I could not have come this far without the support of my loving family, many wonderful students, teachers and colleagues, the PLLT series editors, and everyone at Multilingual Matters – thank you all!

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Language Teacher Recognition by Alison Stewart.

A History of Bilingual Education in the US

We recently published A History of Bilingual Education in the US by Sarah C.K. Moore. In this post the author briefly summarises the book’s content.

The Bilingual Education Act (BEA) (later Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) was signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 to promote bilingual-bicultural education programs. Many experts have dissected its systemic undoing – what the author of my new book’s Foreword, Terrence G. Wiley, Arizona State University Emeritus Professor and former President of the Center for Applied Linguistics, has referred to as ‘the sunsetting’ and ‘grand erasure’ of Title VII. An initial goal in my research for this book was to better understand the ‘Title VII Fellows Program’ – it funded postgraduate students seeking Masters and Doctoral level degrees enrolled in universities as part of the BEA. In addition to the ‘Title VII Fellows Program’, myriad other activities once supported bilingual education in the US.

This book offers sociohistorical snapshots and revisits periods during which aid for bilingual programs existed on a national scale. Although perhaps fleetingly, a time did exist when bilingual education in the US was supported by federally administered services. ‘The Network’ of the 1970s and later was comprised of a countrywide system of resource centers serving a combination of regions and language groups, including for materials development, dissemination and assessment activities, and bilingual educator training.

By the 1990s, ‘bilingual’ education connoted a particular political stance – one either in favor of endorsing language as a civil right or against ‘affirmative ethnicity’ (made mainstream by conservative Washington Post columnist, Noel Epstein during the 1980s). We widely accept that the BEA emerged in part from the Civil Rights and Chicanx movements of the same era; it was also politically agreeable, which benefited its marshaling to passage.

Contemporarily, most multilingual education programs are labeled Dual Language Education – an arguably deliberate middle-of-the-road phrasing less ‘politicized’ than the sullied ‘bilingual’ education. Dual Language Education programs are expanding across the country rapidly and the three states targeted by the English-Only Movement (California, Arizona, and Massachusetts) have either overturned or pulled back emphasis on English-priority instructional approaches for Emergent Bilingual students. Notably however, numerous scholars have laid out in striking detail examples of racism, linguistic imperialism and prejudicial ideologies often underlying in characteristics and implementation of these programs.

Given the history of bilingual education programs and supports enabled by the BEA and Title VII, now may be a pivotal time to examine whether these could be re-conceptualized in ways that serve existing and new programs – and also, fundamentally, position language as a civil right – in harmony with the 1968 conception of bilingual-bicultural education.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Dual Language Bilingual Education by Kathryn I. Henderson and Deborah K. Palmer.

What is ‘Ultralingualism’?

This month we published The Performance of Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims by Andrey Rosowsky. In this post the author explains the concept of ‘ultralingualism’, which is central to his book.

One of the words in the title of my book may be unfamiliar – ultralingual. And I could be accused perhaps of introducing a new term unnecessarily. And, moreover, without a significant degree of academic consensus. Yet, as a word, and as a concept, it is born out of nearly a quarter century of research which has focused, primarily, on what I would now call ‘ultralingual’ practices. My research into language practices in, primarily, minority religious communities, which I originally called ‘liturgical literacies’ (Rosowsky, 2008), regularly came up against the issue of how to account for reading and other language practices (artful recitation, memorisation, singing, for example) which appeared, on the surface, to be divorced from meaning, or from referential meaning to be more precise.

Fishman (1989) famously coined the term ‘religious classical’ to denote language varieties which were exclusively used for liturgical purposes such as Lutheran German, Geez and Ecclesiastical Greek. Such varieties are invariably linguistically distant from the spoken languages of their congregations and so understanding of what is being read or recited is often absent or incomplete. It is this which I am calling ‘ultralingualism’ and is an attempt to capture the experience of, usually, very accurate decoding accompanied by a, sometimes heightened, experience which could be considered spiritual or emotional and which is achieved beyond the words performed – thus ultralingual. However, in more recent and very detailed and useful categorisations of linguistic competences (Blommaert & Backus, 2012), there is still no obvious place for the near universal practice of ultralingualism. If it isn’t ‘full’ competence, then is it ‘partial’ or ‘minimal’?  Both the latter terms seem inadequate.

And although much of my research has featured ultralingualism in a religious context, there are many other contexts where it appears. Singers in all shapes and sizes often end up being very comfortable singing in an ultralingual way. How many choir members understand the Vulgar Latin of Carmina Burana? I recall a former colleague of mine, Professor Greg Brooks, working in east Africa in the 1960s, relating to me how he would often be asked to read out letters in Kikuyu (written in Roman script) to his Kikuyu speaking caretaker whilst not understanding the language himself. This could be called another form of ultralingualism, albeit a more prosaic one.

This book offers a fresh look at language practices of young British Muslims and provides ample support for ultralingualism as a useful term to account for such practices.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Language Maintenance, Revival and Shift in the Sociology of Religion edited by Rajeshwari Vijay Pandharipande, Maya Khemlani David and Miriam Eisenstein Ebsworth.

Foundations and Frustrations in Adolescent Newcomer Programming

This month we are publishing Educating Adolescent Newcomers in the Superdiverse Midwest by Brian David Seilstad. In this post the author explains how the idea for the book came about.

Schooling is often represented in dichotomous terms as either a liberator or an oppressor. Reading about various student experiences across diverse histories and contexts reflects and refracts this reality and underscores the equity and social justice goals inherent in education. Adolescent newcomers globally and in the US Midwest, the focus of this book, are particularly relevant to this theme in that they arrive in new locations, often as refugees or other transnational migrants, buoyed with an array of skills, experiences, and dreams that can support their, it is hoped, adaptation and creation of lives of dignity. However, the research on adolescent newcomers points out that this is neither an easy nor straightforward task and that schools often struggle to support and retain students, leading to disparate and sometimes troubling outcomes for both individuals and society (Fry, 2005; Short & Boyson, 2012; Suárez-Orozco et al, 2010).

This project was born from several personal experiences and convictions. First is my own history of living and learning in other cultures and facing the intense challenges of languacultural learning, particularly as an adolescent or adult.  Second is a conviction that schools, among all social institutions, can be positive transformative agents for learners if the institution and educational actors are highly attuned and responsive to the lives of the learners. Largely as a result of my White, American male background, a majority of my own schooling and learning experiences have been affirming and engaging, but I recognize that this is not the case for many learners throughout the world, a situation that remains a deep need for redress.

These aspects led me to explore in this book the languacultural practices of an adolescent newcomer program community in the US Midwest. The inquiry includes descriptions of the program’s history and policies while following and recording the daily class activities of one cohort of first-year high school students across their academic year. The students collectively spoke varieties of Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, Kibembe, French, Somali, Nepali, and Arabic in a program with many staff and teachers of similar linguistic backgrounds and proficiencies.  This approach provides a broad and relevant context while maintaining a focus on daily communicative interactions as the core of the learning experience – indeed, what is education other than one extended experience in language development?

The chapters of the book ultimately center the disparate experiences and outcomes of the students and underline that, while the program supports many learners well, the program’s English-centric ideologies, policies, and practices create obstacles to many students that, in some cases, are insurmountable and lead to intense frustration and even dropping out. This leads to a recommendation that the program reorient its priorities to understanding the students’ languacultural backgrounds, specifically their home language literacy, and designing learning experiences to fully embrace and support the students’ emergent or experienced bilingualism.

Taken as a whole, the book strives to present a vision for humanity and schools –  one that is positive and affirming of all peoples and reflective of the beauty that emerges from the diversity and complexity of the human experience. While this may remain unrealized in many contexts, it must remain, particularly for educators, our global aspiration and driving purpose. I am deeply thankful to the program’s many administrators, teachers, bilingual assistants, and students for allowing me to share a year in their lives and discuss their own perspectives about these issues. I hope that readers of the book will find meaning here, and any comments or questions can be communicated to:

Brian Seilstad (American College Casablanca, Morocco) bseilstad@aac.ac.ma or website.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Researching Language in Superdiverse Urban Contexts edited by Clare Mar-Molinero.