Language, Culture, and Teaching: Critical Perspectives

by Sonia Nieto

Overview

Distinguished multiculturalist Sonia Nieto speaks directly to current and future teachers in this thoughtful integration of a selection of her key writings with creative pedagogical features. Offering information, insights, and motivation to teach students of diverse cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds, examples are included throughout to illustrate real-life dilemmas about diversity that teachers face in their own classrooms; ideas about how language, culture, and teaching are linked; and ways to engage with these ideas through reflection and collaborative inquiry. Designed for upper-undergraduate and graduate-level students and professional development courses, each chapter includes critical questions, classroom activities, and community activities suggesting projects beyond the classroom context.

Language, Culture, and Teaching

• explores how language and culture are connected to teaching and learning in educational settings;

• examines the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of language and culture to understand how these contexts may affect student learning and achievement;

• analyzes the implications of linguistic and cultural diversity for classroom practices, school reform, and educational equity;

• encourages practicing and preservice teachers to reflect critically on their classroom practices, as well as on larger institutional policies related to linguistic and cultural diversity based on the above understandings; and

• motivates teachers to understand their ethical and political responsibilities to work, together with their students, colleagues, and families, for more socially just classrooms, schools, and society.

Changes in the Third Edition:

This edition includes new and updated chapters, section introductions, critical questions, classroom and community activities, and resources, bringing it up-to-date in terms of recent educational policy issues and demographic changes in the U.S. and beyond. The new chapters reflect Nieto’s current thinking about the profession and society, especially about changes in the teaching profession, both positive and negative, since the publication of the second edition of this text.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781315465678
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/01/2017
Series:	Language, Culture, and Teaching Series , #23
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	246
File size:	787 KB

About the Author

Sonia Nieto is Professor Emerita of Language, Literacy and Culture at the College of Education, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Language, Literacy, and Culture: Aha! Moments in Personal and Sociopolitical Understanding

Part I: Setting the Groundwork

Chapter 1: What is the Purpose of Schools? Reflections on Education in an Age of Functionalism

Chapter 2: Multicultural Education and School Reform

Chapter 3: Revisiting the High Hopes and Broken Promises of Public Education: Still an Uncertain Future

Part II: Identity, Learning, and Belonging

Chapter 4: Culture and Learning

Chapter 5: Lessons from Students on Creating a Chance to Dream

Chapter 6: The BC 44, Ethnic Studies, and Transformative Education

Part III: Developing a Critical Stance

Chapter 7: Profoundly Multicultural Questions

Chapter 8: Affirmation, Solidarity, and Critique: Moving Beyond Tolerance in Multicultural Education

Chapter 9: Becoming Sociocultural Mediators: What All Educators Can Learn from Bilingual and ESL Teachers

Part IV: Praxis, Hope. And the Future

Chapter 10: Nice is Not Enough: Defining Caring for Students of Color

Chapter 11: Doing Their Part: Teachers as Leaders in Multicultural Education

Chapter 12: Critical Hope… In Spite of it All

Editorial Reviews

"Nieto's work would make a good textbook for teacher preparation, or a book for study groups of educators to use to examine their own practice. It would also have value for individual teachers who wish to reexamine their own stand on multiculturalism and how they practice it in their classrooms."
—TESL-EJ

"...this text offers a critical perspective from which to engage teachers in examining cultural and linguistic differences. Nieto provides the reader with a hopeful and critical examination of ways that teachers can change classroom practices and school politics to better serve all students. She refers to the role of teachers as never neutral but rather as a "political project," either for or against those whom they teach. Her book encourages readers to question their beliefs and the attitudes of their students—in order that we can all learn how to meet the needs of students in a changing world."
—Childhood Education

"Nieto's gracefully written book is designed mainly for pre- and in-service teachers, who are mostly white women from working and lower-middle class backgrounds with little experience with racial minorities...Nieto's book will prove an extremely useful resource for anyone dedicated to teaching all students."
—British Journal of Educational Psychology

"...offers constructive ideas regarding the nature of changes needed in teacher education in order to meet the challenges of linguistic and cultural diversity of students....Designed to be used as a textbook reflecting the emphases Nieto believes are needed in the education of teachers at the beginning of the 21st century, the text contains several directions for this education....She presents an amazing array of statistics to show the ever-increasing diversity of students."
—Educational Researcher

"The thought-provoking and interesting reading materials, together with the supplements, make the book very useable in a classroom environment."This book is defin

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