Context-driven research on and for multilingual learners: Developing and disseminating a research agenda for international education
The publications submitted as the body of research for this PhD by Published Work are the result of four research projects, spanning 20 years of work over four continents with families, organisations, and schools. At the heart, they tell the story of a journey from practitioner to mentor researcher, from insider to outsider to inbetweener researcher, and from academic writer to blogger and back again, all through a programme of research designed to help parents and educators support bilingual children. In practical terms, they offer insight into the school change process for supporting bilingual learners, whether it be through programme structure, curricula, or pedagogy, The four research projects are focused on different aspects of second language acquisition research, in homes and in schools. The publications stemming from the research projects include one book, five peer-reviewed book chapters, and one peer-reviewed journal article. The choice of media for publications is connected to my continuing efforts to make research accessible and useful for the participants themselves and for the wider education field. The projects are connected to each other through their thematic links to second language acquisition and are designed to create situation-specific understanding about how families and schools can best support the development of bilingualism. They are also linked by an emerging focus on case study methodology, by my hybrid role as a teacher-consultant-researcher-mentor and by my positioning as an inbetweener researcher in the organisations I collaborate with professionally. This thesis, and the publications submitted with it, represent a significant portion of the current research on linguistic diversity in families and schools in international contexts. They offer various stakeholders empirically based models of support for multilingualism in development, and a more ethical way forward for international education.
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