A Brief Rationale

Among my other academic activities and duties, I have been giving talks to teachers and teachers' organizations since the early 1970s. These have typically dealt with the points of intersection among education, social class, ethnolinguistic status and group identity. Such topics, with all their many ramifications, have always been of great interest to teachers, since they are so obviously relevant to the daily life of an ever-increasing number of classrooms. Whether it is a matter of accepting or rejecting nonstandard dialects or foreign languages at school, of adapting classrooms to language diversity or attempting to maintain a strict monolingual regimen, of seeing school as a contributor to social change or as a supporter of some 'mainstream' status quo, of arguing the merits of 'transitional' versus 'maintenance' programs of bilingual education, of embracing multiculturalism or recoiling from it – in all these matters, the knowledge, sensitivities and attitudes of teachers are of no small importance.

And yet, over three decades or so, I have been amazed and disappointed at how ill-prepared teachers typically are with regard to linguistic and cultural variation in the classroom. The education of teachers generally involves very little exposure to this sort of heterogeneity, and yet it is easy to see that it has made its presence felt in virtually every global setting. Even schools in 'traditional' and rural areas whose populations were historically both local and stable are now more and more confronted with children from many different backgrounds.