Introduction to 'Reaching EFA through multi-grade teaching: Issues, Contexts and practices'

This book grew out of the Second International Multigrade Teaching Conference: Turning Biases into Benefits, which was held in Bangkok in September 2004. All the authors of the chapters in this book attended the conference and most of them presented a version of the chapter published here. Some papers have been changed minimally, some have been reworked extensively, and some chapters are completely new. Delegates at the conference were united in their desire for more conversations about multi-grade (MG) teaching. Many countries were represented at the conference, both developed and developing countries, some with universal primary education and some struggling to implement Education For All (EFA) by 2015. Papers were presented by people from Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Fiji, Finland, India, Ireland, Kenya, Lao PDR, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Thailand and USA.