ABSTRACT
Wai Ming was from Hong Kong. We met him, as teachers, in a first year, secondary humanities classroom where several other languages as well as English were spoken and where the other two speakers of Chinese were Vietnamese. He was used to being mistaken for Vietnamese. When misidentified, he would flash darkly that he was not the same. He spoke English as a second language. But he had been for some time in Britain and was not special in this. So did several others. Many pupils in this class might once have been withdrawn to language centres or to special classes. Now the school, in the light of recommendations in the Swann Report (DES, 1985), provided classrooms which sought to recognise difference as a central principle of organisation and teaching and to provide a flexible system of in-class support. Rather than special individual attention for some, the intention was that all pupils should participate in different ways and from different starting points in common enterprises. Like others, Wai Ming was being offered opportunities to engage with important ideas and to talk and think and read and write, in ways which allowed, we hoped, for different versions to be made and for different courses of development to be taken.
