What looks like learner deficit is often a deficit in curriculum design and assessment procedures. Given the right conditions, capabilities emerge that no standardised measure can detect. This book sets out how multilingual learners bring sophisticated capabilities developed through navigating multiple languages, modes, and cultural contexts, only to find these qualities rendered invisible by conventional pedagogies and assessments.

How teachers position students is critical. Is affect engaged or discouraged? Does content connect to lived experience? Does learning unfold as fragmented skill-building or sustained meaning-making? Drawing on sociocultural and aesthetic theories of learning, and on their own research across classrooms and community settings spanning early childhood to adult education, Julie Choi and David Nunan show what happens when learning conditions support the interplay of affect, identity and lived experience, and build on the funds of knowledge, aspiration and 'dark funds' that learners bring. While their examples often feature multilingual learners, these are principles that apply to all learners, regardless of first language or ethnicity, whose lives, experiences, or ways of knowing differ from what mandated curricula promote. What learners can show depends on the conditions we are willing to bring to light.