Language, Culture, and Teaching: Critical Perspectives

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.

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