Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview

In this introduction, we articulate the themes addressed by this edited volume as well as its primary focus and rationale. We provide a brief overview of the four sections of the volume and emphasize the major insights and arguments made in each individual chapter, as well as how individual chapters cohere around broader claims related to the potentially powerful ways that transformative schooling (broadly and diversely defined) could be realized across policies, pedagogies, and practices.

The purpose of this edited volume is to bring together educational researchers and practitioners who have implemented, documented, or examined policies, pedagogies, and practices in and out of classrooms and in real and virtual contexts that are in some way transforming what we know about the extent to which emergent bilinguals (EBs) learn and achieve in educational settings. In the following chapters, scholars and researchers identify both (a) the current state of schooling for EBs, from their perspective; and (b) the particular ways that policies, pedagogies, and/or practices transform schooling as it currently exists for EBs in discernible ways based on their scholarship and research.