Description

While political debates have raged over bilingual education in the United States over the past few decades, developing nations around the world have been actively embracing multilingual mother-tongue based education as a key solution to expand access to schooling for all children in their countries. This presentation will share findings and video clips from an award-winning research study on the inspirational story of the Kingdom of Cambodia’s efforts to adopt, develop, and expand multilingual education to reach indigenous ethnic minority children in the country’s remote regions who were previously excluded physically and linguistically from schools. Implications of Cambodia’s successes and remaining challenges will be considered for the USA as bilingual education is once again being widely embraced across our country.