Multilingual conferencing: effective teaching of children from refugee and asylum- seeking families (R)

What happens when a monolingual school in an economically deprived area of an inner city becomes a multilingual, multiracial school as a result of government policy (The Immigration and Asylum Act)? How do children from asylum-seeking families, many of whom have never had formal education prior to arriving in Scotland and all of whom are new to the English language, make meaning of the school community? This article will report on how a bilingual unit has become an integral part of the mainstream school due to creative pedagogy. The article will discuss how this highly mobile pupil population has enabled the school to take more cognisance of learner perspectives and has allowed a creative pedagogy to emerge in the school.