This book brings together visions and realities of multilingual schools throughout the world in order to examine the pedagogical, socioeducational, and sociopolitical issues that impact on their development and success. The chapters describe and analyze pedagogical, instructional, and policy efforts to develop multilingualism through school with different targeted populations -- immigrant students, indigenous peoples, traditional minorities, majorities, and multiethnic/multilingual groups. Each contribution, many written by well-known scholars in the field of bilingual and multilingual education, affirms the desirability of multilingualism as a societal resource and as a right of individuals, while acknowledging the social, economic and political differences that make the acquisition of multilingualism easy for some, and difficult for others. And yet, the book focuses on the school as a place of promise and resistance, having the potential to preserve, recover, and expand the world's linguistic diversity. The introduction, written by the co-editors, identifies the conceptual threads that are developed throughout the chapters. But the chapters themselves remind us of the importance of local conditions, despite the global pressures of the 21st century, in imagining and creating multilingual educational spaces.

Ofelia García is professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she presently serves as coordinator of the Bilingual Education program and co-director of the Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies. García research interests are in the areas of language education policy, sociology of language, immigrant education, in particular the education of US Latinos, and teacher education for urban schools.

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, University of Roskilde, Denmark, and Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Her main research interests: linguistic human rights, multilingual education, subtractive spread of English, and the relationship between linguistic (and cultural) diversity and biodiversity (also in practice, on an ecological smallholding, with her husband Robert Phillipson).

María E. Torres-Guzmán is associate professor of Bilingual/Bicultural Education in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her recent publications are on dual language education models both in the U.S. and in the Basque Country, as well as pedagogical practices of read-alouds in such programs. She has also published in the area of multicultural education and the preparation of teachers.