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Jim Cummins
The papers in this special issue of of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism edited by Shelley K. Taylor and Mitsuyo Sakamoto cover a wide range of educational contexts and issues and they draw on a variety of disciplinary perspectives to interpret the phenomena they analyze. As the editors point out in their introduction, the common thread linking these analyses is the intersection between language and power. In some contexts, minority communities are the victims of overt violence exercised either by racist groups within society. In other cases, coercive power operates through discourses that position individuals and groups in subordinated relationships. The papers by Lee and Norton, and Morgan all analyze how individuals and/or educators can challenge coercive relations of power operating through these discourses to re-position themselves as agents in their own identity formation. The disciplinary focus shifts in Mayer's paper to address the psycholinguistic challenges faced by Deaf and hard-of-hearing students in appropriating the academic language competencies (in both first and second languages) necessary for school success. Although the primary focus in these papers is on psycholinguistic and pedagogical issues, societal power relations are never far from the surface. The devaluation of community languages (e.g. American Sign Language in the case of the Deaf community) in the wider society results in ambivalence among parents and educators about whether these languages should be strongly supported in home and school.
