FOREWORD Pedagogies of choice: challenging coercive relations of power in classrooms and communities Jim Cummins* Modern Language Centre, Department of Curriculum, Teachingand Learning. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada The papers in this special issue 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. Keywords: framework; identity; L2 learning; power relationships; teachers; theory In this foreword, I will attempt to provide a perspective on the varied phenomena discussed in the core papers. This perspective is intended to be dialogical and to fuse theory and practice (Cummins 2000). Practice always embodies theory and theory strives for understanding of practice. Critical approaches to education, understood as both theory and practice, aim to identify and challenge inequitable social structures and policies. Given the centrality of power relations within all the contexts and social practices discussed in the core papers, we can frame the issues in terms of the question: What options do educators have to resist and challenge the operation of coercive relations of power? The starting point in articulating a pedagogy of resistance is to emphasize that there are options. Although coercive power relations between dominant and subordinated groups may occupy the social space in the wider society and directly influence pedagogical spaces created within classrooms, there are always degrees of *Email: jcummins@oise.utoronto.ca International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism Vol. 12, No. 3, May 2009, 261271 ISSN 1367-0050 print/ISSN 1747-7522 online # 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13670050903003751 http://www.informaworld.com