Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference

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.