Jim Cummins Quotes

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As educators of linguistically and culturally diverse students we face choices with respect to how we view language and human potential. Is language the means of interpreting our increasingly complex world and mobilizing intellect, imagination, and identity to create new knowledge and act on social realities or is it simply a set of sounds and symbols and the codes that bind them? Can our society benefit from all the intelligence, imagination, and multilingual talent it can get or should schools develop these attributes only among a privileged elite while focusing on English-only basic skills for those constructed as incapable of independent learning?

Jim Cummins

When students' language, culture and experience are ignored or excluded in classroom interactions, students are immediately starting from a disadvantage. Everything they have learned about life and the world up to this point is being dismissed as irrelevant to school learning; there are few points of connection to curriculum materials or instruction and so students are expected to learn in an experiential vacuum. Students' silence and nonparticipation under these conditions have frequently been interpreted as lack of academic ability or effort, and teachers' interactions with students have reflected a pattern of low expectations which become self-fulfilling.

Jim Cummins

Jim Cummins

Jim Cummins

Born: 1949 (age 74)

Bio: Dr. Jim Cummins is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto where he works on language development and literacy development of learners of English as an additional language.

Known for:

Language, Power, and Pedagogy (2000)
Bilingualism and special education (1984)
Negotiating Identities (1996)

Jim Cummins on Wikipedia

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