Displacement Planet Earth: Plurilingual Education and Identity for 21st Century Schools

Description

"Displacement Planet Earth" is for teachers and all educators, program builders, and policymakers to learn about refugee and displaced students and to learn strategies. To learn about displaced students, you will learn for example about English Language Learners in the U.S. and Australia, Muslim females who wear the scarf, undocumented students, displaced Albanian-Kosavars, refugee resettlement programs, deaf students. All types of educators can also learn about programs in Australia, Portugal, France, and Spain. Strategies are suggested for critical media literacy, inter- and trans-cultural understanding, professional development for all types of educators and especially ELL, best practices of schools with programs for displaced students.

The book addresses issues of teacher education and school policy, in a context of media representation, the heightened security environment of Western nations and fear factors like Islamophobia. Misrepresented cultures and ways of life are pretexts to reject languages and repositories of knowledge. Displaced children and youth must negotiate the difficult process of integration, affecting their identities and society as a whole. The issue is how to cultivate the distinctiveness rather than merely assimilate through language and standardized content.

The theme of the book is Language Education Policy for a new nomenclature for displaced students, ie newcomers, neighbors & guests. The book brings together narratives of experience and approaches that provide a deep rationale for LEP that addresses the realities. We hope to transform the dominant paradigm of what are really linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms.

Chapters help teachers address: The presence of displaced students, whether first generation or beyond, and in both western and non-western (or north-south) countries; fosters the cultivation of the distinctiveness of their languages and cultures. How can teachers, schools, and policymakers deal with non-dominant languages and non-standardized knowledge?

Language Education Policies and teachers' practices can help repair the contextual, psychological, ideological and social fabric of human lives and societies impacted by misconceptions based on language ideologies and language status that lead to miscommunication, discrimination, social divisions, violence, war, and human struggle, especially for those displaced.