Superdiversity and Teacher Education: Supporting Teachers in Working with Culturally, Linguistically, and Racially Diverse Students, Families, and Communities

Guofang Li · Jim Anderson · Jan Hare · Marianne McTavish

Mar 2021 · Routledge

About this ebook

This edited volume addresses the pressing imperative to understand and attend to the needs of the fast-growing population of minority students who are increasingly considered "superdiverse" in their cultural, linguistic, and racial backgrounds. Superdiverse learners—including native-born learners (Indigenous and immigrant families), foreign-born immigrant students, and refugees—may fill multiple categories of "diversity" at once. This volume helps pre- and in-service teachers and teacher educators to move beyond the demographic backgrounds of superdiverse learners to consider not only their ways of being, motivations, and social processes, but also the ongoing systemic issues of marginalization and inequity that confront these learners.

Challenging existing teaching and learning paradigms in the K-12 North American context, this volume provides new methods and examples for supporting superdiverse learners in a range of settings. Organized around different conceptual underpinnings of superdiversity, contributors identify the knowledge gaps and effective practices in engaging superdiverse learners, families and communities. With cutting-edge research on this growing topic, this text will appeal to researchers, scholars, educators, and graduate students in multilingual education, literacy education, teacher education, and international education.

About the author

Guofang Li is Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Transnational/ Global Perspectives of Language and Literacy Education of Children and Youth at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Jim Anderson is Professor of Literacy at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Jan Hare is Associate Dean of Indigenous Education and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) of Indigenous Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Marianne McTavish is Professor and Associate Dean of Teacher Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada.