This book delivers a comprehensive picture of HIPPY, a family support, parent-focused, early childhood literacy program. With 17 evaluation studies of the program, offered by researchers and practitioners from seven different countries, the book highlights the successes and challenges HIPPY faces in communities around the world. Dedicated to HIPPY's founder, Professor Avima D. Lombard, the collection presented here aims to provide answers to the different questions that might arise among all kinds of stakeholders, from program practitioners to policy markers to family members to researchers. The studies are organized around five themes: exploring theoretical perspectives; examining HIPPY's impact on children, on families and on communities; and navigating the research process. An in-depth introduction describes the various purposes of the book, outlines the contents of each chapter, and provides, in the form of two unique tables, detailed information that can be used as a reference for many stake-holders. With the goal that the book be as accessible and useful to program practitioners as to researchers, each chapter is followed by suggestions on how to integrate the evaluation findings into the daily life of the program. The result is a volume that can serve as an invaluable tool for international early literacy and family support program development, while also offering direction for the future course of the HIPPY's program.

An important feature of this book on Language, Identity and Immigration is its broad representation of different disciplines, scholars, research methodologies and international perspectives. Such variation and plurality further enhance the overall complexity of global migration, while focusing on the central role of language in the identity crises caused by immigration. The volume consists of five different parts with the first two being devoted to the process of acculturation, the next two to processes of language maintenance and developing bilingualism, and the last focusing on the larger social context. The sixteen articles included in the book are mostly based on presentations given at the international conference on Immigration, Language Acquisition and Patterns of Social Integration, held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the summer of 1994, under the auspices of the NCJW Research Institute for Innovation in Education.

The problems of ethnicity and migration encapsulate the modern dilemma, not only for those who are on the move, but also for those who remain at home deliberating their existential identity. This volume brings together an international array of scholars to discuss some of the leading questions concerning ethnicity and migration. Roots tell us about origins, identities and the past. Routes refer to peregrinations, diasporas and future paths. This volume incorporates a rich variety of case-studies from all over the world contributed by a group of international scholars from countries as far afield as Spain and India.

This book addresses a fundamental social problem arising from the massive and ongoing expansion of educational systems in the modern world. Educational expansion invariably involves the diversification of student populations, especially in terms of the distribution of ability and talent. Inclusion of a wider range of students in educational systems poses a major social dilemma: how can societies effectively provide equal educational opportunities for increasingly heterogeneous student populations while, at the same time, encouraging individual achievements based on the principal of equality? This book analyzes the strategies used by various educational systems and institutions, in order to cope with the equity-equality question in a comparative perspective concentrating on the Israeli case.