Minority Education From Shame to Struggle

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas was born in Finland, raised with two mother tongues, Finnish and Swedish, and educated in both languages. She studies at the University of Helsinki. Her dissertation (Ph.D. equivalent) was about the school achievement of a bilingual vocational school in Finland. Her second Ph.D. (Roskilde) was about linguistic imperialism. She has taught and/or done research at the Universities of Helsinki (Finland), Lund (Sweden), Harvard (USA), and Roskilde in Denmark where she has lived since 1979. She is the author of Tvåspråkighet ("Bilingualism"), 1981; God, bedre, dansk? Om indvandrerbörns integration i Danmark ("Good, better, Danish? On the integration of immigrant children in Denmark", 1983 (with Birgitte Rahbek); Bilingualism or not: The education of minorities, 1984; Minoritet, sprak och racism ("Minority, language and racism"), 1986 (in collaboration with Ilka Kangas and Kea Kangas, Tove's daughters) (Finnish translation Vähemmistö, kieli ja rasismi, Gaudeamus, 1987); Linguicism rules in education, 1986 (with Robert Phillipson).

Jim Cummins was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1949. He carried out his doctoral research in Canada on the effects of bilingualism on children's cognitive development and obtained his PhD from the University of Alberta in 1974. He subsequently worked in the Educational Research Centre in Dublin where he conducted several studies relating to the consequences of Irish--English bilingualism and bilingual education. He returned to Canada in 1976 and carried out research on cognitive processing and reading difficulties at the Centre for the Study of Mental Retardation in the University of Alberta. He currently works in the Modern Language Centre of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto and is the author of Bilingualism and special education: Issues in assessment and pedagogy (Multilingual Matters) and Bilingualism in education: Aspects of theory, research and policy (Longman; with Merrill Swain).