Vandra L. Masemann

Cultural Reproduction in the Bilingual Classroom

Research on bilingual education in the United States in the last decade has been more profece in terms of publications, whether books, reports, dissertations, or journal articles, than in any other country, except perhaps, in relation to population, Canada. The vast bulk of the material has consisted of attempts to evaluate programs or to assess children’s linguistic and academic competence and even psychological well-being (Dissertation Abstracts International, 1978, 1979, 1980). The underlying research models are derived from educational psychology or linguistics, with an ethnographic component where necessary. When anthropological insights have been used, they have generally been in the subfield of “ethnography of communicative competence” (Bauman Sherzer, 1974). However, comparatively little research has been published using a theoretical perspective that does not fit in with prevailing evaluation models.’ Indeed, in the climate of the 1970s, there was a particularly urgent need for the development of such models, in order for programs to be legitimated publicly and to be funded and expanded (Rosario Love, 1979).

The Right to Education for Multicultural Development: Canada and Israel

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the right to education for multicultural development. The right to multicultural development is accepted to a greater or lesser extent in many countries. The history of worldwide migration in the past several millennia, and more notably in the past two centuries, has resulted in a mix of peoples of various cultural, linguistic, and religious backgrounds within the boundaries of many modern nation-states. An overview is given of the ethnic and linguistic diversity of each nation, and this is linked with specific problems that have been addressed in educational programs devoted to the teaching of languages and to multicultural education in the broader sense. The achievements in allowing for multicultural development in Canada have taken a number of forms. The new Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrine group and individual rights to education in one or both of the official languages. In spite of continuous efforts on the part of the educational system of Israel to cope with problems of multiculturalism, none has been resolved satisfactorily. As these problems are of a political, social, and cultural nature and have implications beyond those of education, they cannot be expected to be solved by the educational system alone but with the active support and involvement of other social institutions as well.

The Society in the World Council of Comparative Education Societies

The World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) is bound up almost inextricably in the history of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), because some of the same central figures were involved in their founding and development. The Comparative and International Education Society of Canada (CIESC) was also connected to these events because of the collegial relationships of scholars in the United States and Canada, and because of the hosting by the CIESC of the preliminary meetings in 1969 for the establishment of the WCCES in 1970. In this chapter, these relationships in several key time periods from 1956 to 2016 will be disentangled and discussed.

Education in a time of terror: an address given at Kent State University

This paper gives an overview of the ideas generated in a course taught by a Canadian academic to American students on the subject of teaching in the post‐9/11 period. The four major topics discussed are the technological context in which modern societies are situated, particularly the evolution from agrarian to industrial and now knowledge‐based societies, the development of the mass communications media and their role in desensitising children to issues of violence against the ‘Other’, the need for widespread reform in multicultural teacher education, and the challenges for teachers to gain a broader understanding of their own and other societies’ history and culture.