This volume brings together established and new scholarly voices to explore how participatory and situated approaches to learning can contribute to educational innovation. The contributors' critical examinations of educational programming and engagements provide insights into how educators, youth, families, and community members understand and enact their commitments to diversity and equitable access. Collectively, these essays complicate notions of community, alerting readers to ways in which community can be constructed other than in geographical and ethnoracial terms--as alliances and collaborations of individuals joining together to accomplish or negotiate shared agendas. The focus on agency combined with social context, a dialectic to which all of the authors speak, enlarges and invigorates our sense of what is pedagogically possible in societies characterized by diversity and flux. *Part I, "Linking Pedagogy to Communities," focuses on dynamic initiatives where practitioners collaborate with community members and other professionals as they acknowledge and build on the cultural, linguistic, and intellectual resources of ethnic-minority students and their communities. *Part II, "Professional Learning for Diversity," centers on the authors' experiences in facilitating opportunities for working with prospective and practicing teachers to develop situated pedagogies, highlighting both the challenges that emerge and the transformations that occur. *Part III, "Learning in Community (and Community in Learning), illustrates how educational innovation can extend beyond the realm of schools and classrooms by elucidating ways in which individuals construct learning venues in out-of-school settings. Learning, Teaching, and Community: Contributions of Situated and Participatory Approaches to Educational Innovation is a compelling and timely text ideally suited for courses focused on teacher education and development, informal learning, equity and education, multilingual and multicultural education, language and culture, educational foundations, and school reform/educational restructuring, and will be equally of interest to faculty, researchers, and professionals in these areas.

Product Description: Language Socialization in Bilingual and Multilingual Societies is a multidisciplinary, multinational collection of essays that explore language socialization from very early childhood through adulthood, not only in oftenstudied communities in Canada and the United States, but also in Australia, Bolivia, Egypt, India and Slovakia...read more

Product Description: Language as Cultural Practice: Mexicanos en el Norte offers a vivid ethnographic account of language socialization practices within Mexican-background families residing in California and Texas. This account illustrates a variety of cases where language is used by speakers to choose between alternative self-definitions and where language interacts differentially with other defining categories, such as ethnicity, gender, and class...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

These personal essays by first and second language researchers and practitioners reflect on issues, events, and people in their lives that helped them carve out their career paths or clarify an important dimension of their missions as educators. Their narratives depict the ways in which professionals from diverse backgrounds and work settings have grappled with issues in language education that concern all of us: the sources and development of beliefs about language and education, the constructing of a professional identity in the face of ethical and ideological dilemmas, and the constraints and inspirations of teaching and learning environments. They have come together as a collective to engage in a courageous new form of academic discourse, one with the potential to change the field. Many of the authors write their stories of having begun their work with voices positioned at the margins. Now, as established professionals, they feel strong enough collectively to risk the telling and, through their telling, to encourage other voices. This volume is intended to provide graduate students, teachers, and researchers in language education with insights into the struggles that characterize the professional development of language educators. Both readers and contributors should use the stories to view their own professional lives from fresh perspectives -- and be inspired to reflect in new ways on the ideological, ethical, and philosophical underpinnings of their professional personae.