Multilingual Education and Sustainable Diversity Work: From Periphery to Center

Drawing on the most powerful and compelling research data on bi/multilingual education to date, this book demonstrates how, in developing countries where educational practices are inclusive of linguistic diversity and responsive to local conditions and community participation, implementation of bilingual education even within limited budgetary investment can be successful.Using a recent system-wide study of the medium of instruction in Ethiopia, it shows, for the first time, a country, supportive of mother tongue and bi/trilingual education, in which for contextually specific reasons different regions have implemented bilingual education in different ways (from subtractive to very late-exit transition), and compares student achievement through each model. Chapter authors analyze the language education policy and practice within their own sphere of interest in relation to the results and challenges in the Ethiopian study.Triangulating ethnographic, qualitative and quantitative data and connecting this research to linguistic human rights, this book contributes new, long-awaited data to the international theory of bilingual education with the potential to influence educational debates for the next decade and beyond.