International Research and Practices in Bilingual Education: Expanding Learners' Multilingual and Multicultural Repertoires

This three-day intensive workshop, which took place from June 1 to June 3, 2012, engaged students with current research on policies and practices of multilingualism and multilingual schools in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Multilingual schools are defined as those serving learners who speak or will learn to speak two or more languages in addition to developing literacy in these languages. Workshop participants learned about the contexts in which multilingual schools are called for and developed; the current research basis for multilingual teaching strategies; international approaches to developing appropriate curricula and policies, as well as challenges and promising directions in the pursuit of multilingualism and equity.

Workshop Leaders

Carol Benson, whose PhD is in Social Sciences and Comparative Education, is an experienced educator, researcher and consultant in educational development with a focus on language issues in multilingual societies. She has worked in formal education (teacher education, curriculum development) and non-formal education (literacy, gender equity) in the Asia, Latin America and Africa regions, most recently in Madagascar and Cambodia. On leave from Stockholm University in Sweden, where she works in higher education pedagogy, Benson also pursues interests in European regional and minority languages in education, and is a believer in multilingualism for all.

Kendall A. King is Associate Professor of Second Languages and Cultures at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches about and conducts research on language policy, sociolinguistics and bilingualism. Recent projects have examined transmigration, parenting practices and Spanish-Quichua-English language learning and use in Washington DC, Minneapolis, MN and Saraguro, Ecuador, and the relationship across (im)migration status, second language learning and school engagement for Latino youth. Her recent work appears in the Modern Language Journal, Discourse Studies, Applied Linguistics and the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. She is an editor of the journal Language Policy.