As a new immigrant to Canada, Marie-Paule Lory lived the popular “Canadian experience,” including learning and working with English-speaking researchers. Her vision of multilingualism in Ontario is to address the "threat" to the sustainability of the French language while taking the risk of changing teacher practices in multilingual classrooms.

David Little presents Roger Williams as a seventeenth-century champion of conscience. Williams was expelled from Massachusetts Bay that ostensibly prized free exercise, but in fact recognized it only within narrow bands of orthodoxy. Williams thereafter prized freedom of conscience in the charter for the Providence Plantations and Rhode Island. A central principle for Williams is the distinction between the “inward” and “external” fora. The “inward forum” is the conscience, a “spiritual power” changeable by reason and persuasion. The “external forum” is “outward behavior,” meaning actions that can be coerced by the governing authority through force, in order to protect life, property, and other interests. Williams provocatively labeled coercive acts against conscience as “soul rape” and “piracy,” indicating how deeply and intimately these violated the person. Williams maintained a fruitful relationship with the Narangansett Indians, having shown them great respect, as the people who provided him refuge when he was expelled from Massachusetts Bay. He didn’t co-opt their government, and fully respected their ability to choose religion (or not), in the quiet of their own internal fora.

This chapter traces the evolution of language learner autonomy under the impact of transformative classroom practice. It begins by summarizing Holec's definition of the concept, and then describes an approach to teaching and learning that sought to operationalize that definition, but with two added features: use of the target language for all classroom communication; and a strong emphasis on collaborative learning. This gave the concept of language learner autonomy explanatory power: learners acquire L2 proficiency when their agency is channeled through the target language. The chapter then turns to inclusive education, describing an approach to the integration of immigrant pupils that engages their agency by encouraging them to use their home languages in the classroom. This enables them to develop a capacity for agentive behavior in English and Irish with the cognitive support their home language provides. The chapter concludes by briefly associating the two learning environments described with the concept of plurilingualism as it is defined in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

In the decades following the Second World War, there was a strongly felt need on both sides of the Atlantic to find ways of describing L2 proficiency in terms of functional capacity—the ability to perform communicative tasks in the real world—rather than grammatical knowledge. In the wake of wars against Japan and Korea, the United States government wanted to be able to gauge what its employees could do in the L2s they had learnt; in Europe, a major challenge was to enable adult language learners to develop communicative repertoires sufficient to support mobility. This chapter focuses on the two most influential instruments to emerge from this reorientation of L2 education, the Proficiency guidelines developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL PG; ACTFL, 1986, 2012a; Breiner-Sanders et al., 2000; Breiner-Sanders, Swender, & Terry, 2002) and the Council of Europe’s Common European framework of reference for languages (CEFR), originally published in the organization’s two official languages, English and French (Council of Europe, 2001a, 2001b).

INTRODUCTION

It is now clear that an important source of modern constitutionalism, including, eventually, the protection of freedom of conscience and other rights, were the colonial covenants and compacts established by Anglo-American Puritans in the seventeenth century. Whatever their other differences, American Puritans “in their towns and congregations” were of one mind that “the crucial feature of all covenants” is “a people's willing consent,” that “covenant [is thus an] instrument and expression of popular decision-making.”

According to a leading authority, the Charter of Massachusetts Bay of 1629 “was not strictly a popular constitution, because it was in form and legal effect a royal grant, but in its practical operation after the transfer, it approximated a popular constitution more closely than any other instrument of government in actual use up to that time in America or elsewhere in modern times.” The Puritan authorities went well beyond the original wording, claiming that their charter permitted an astounding degree of political independence. As early as 1641, they refused help from the English Parliament because the colony might “then be subject to all such laws as [the Parliament] should make or at least such as [it] might impose upon us.” When in 1646 the authorities were criticized for considering themselves “rather a free state than a colony or corporation of England,” they agreed! Parliament might have authority in England, but “the highest authority here is in [our legislature], both by our charter and by our own positive laws…. Our allegiance binds us not to the laws of England any longer than we live in England,” an interpretation applying to the charters and compacts of the other colonies, as well. Though the colonials were slow to admit it, it was not a large step to the eventual replacement of the authority of the English Crown, as well as of Parliament, with the will of “the people” who inhabited the colonies.

A critical part of these early constitutions was the declarations of rights that were included. The Body of Liberties, adopted by the Massachusetts Bay legislature in 1641, amounted to an exceptionally lengthy list of fundamental rights. Though it incorporated provisions from English statutes and precedents, it went well beyond them.

Determining the role of Magna Carta in relation to ideas about religion and the rule of law in the colonial and revolutionary periods of American history turns out to be a complicated task. To begin with, we must cope with the fact that one American historian has identified as many as six different theories regarding the origins and foundations of the American Republic, without ever mentioning Magna Carta or the English legal tradition. The range of theories encompasses the economic determinism of Charles Beard, advanced in the 1920s; liberal ideals associated with the natural rights philosophy of John Locke, and its close relative, civic republicanism, taken up by Bernard Bailyn in his influential book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution; Scottish Common Sense philosophy, as discussed by Gary Wills; and a more pluralistic ‘multiple traditions’ approach, as well as a theory about the importance of forgotten and oppressed groups such as slaves, native Americans and women. The influence of these groups is held to be significant in a negative sense, since in drafting the constitution the founders actively contrived to diminish their protection.

As a matter of fact, Bailyn does assess the impact of common law, and its legendary advocate, Sir Edward Coke, on the colonial and revolutionary periods, but concludes that the legal and constitutional tradition was not the primary source of the central issues as they were perceived at the time. Probably more important, Bailyn implies, was ‘a major source of ideas and attitudes of the Revolutionary generation [that] stemmed ultimately from the political and social theories of New England Puritanism, and particularly the ideas associated with covenant theology’.

Jack P Greene, known as ‘the dean of constitutional historians of the eighteenth-century British empire’, has sharply challenged Bailyn's ‘ideological’ approach and, indirectly, the other approaches cited above, in a series of studies culminating in his recent book, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution. Drawing on the work of John Phillip Reid, Greene specifically criticises Bailyn for ignoring the significance of ‘the early modern English jurisprudential tradition’.