Geraldine Smyth

Multilingual conferencing: Effective teaching of children from refugee and asylum seeking families

What happens when a monolingual school in an economically deprived area of an inner city becomes a multilingual, multiracial school as a result of government policy (The Immigration and Asylum Act)? How do children from asylum-seeking families, many of whom have never had formal education prior to arriving in Scotland and all of whom are new to the English language, make meaning of the school community? This article will report on how a bilingual unit has become an integral part of the mainstream school due to creative pedagogy. The article will discuss how this highly mobile pupil population has enabled the school to take more cognisance of learner perspectives and has allowed a creative pedagogy to emerge in the school.

Who Are the Teachers and Who Are the Learners? Teacher Education for Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

The focus of this chapter is a response to the publication of Teaching Scotland’s Future (Scottish Government 2011a) a review into teacher education in Scotland. The author argues that teaching in this future will need to evolve to be more responsive to linguistic and cultural diversity in the schools of Scotland. This chapter draws specifically from the Scottish experience to consider what teacher education for diverse classrooms might consist of. The chapter incorporates data from three research projects conducted by the author in Scottish Schools in the twenty-first century to investigate the implications of this situation regarding teacher demography and teacher education in Scotland and the education of culturally and linguistically diverse pupils. The author argues for a greater exposure to and understanding of diversity throughout the pre service and inservice education of teachers.