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This paper describes a research project that uses Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and cultural and social capital to penetrate how middle-class parents exercise influence and form positive relationships at the neighbourhood public school that serves various ethno-cultural groups of students. One group of white, economically privileged students have populated the school since its founding; the others are new, immigrant, and diverse in ethnicity, race, and immigrant status. The parents of the former group of children enjoy active involvement in the school and trusting relationships with teachers that involves their differentiation from and exclusion of the new immigrant group. While the paper affirms the importance of social class differences in parent involvement, it integrates additional dimensions of immigration status and ethnicity. (Contains 5 notes.)

This paper is based on qualitative interviews undertaken with immigrant youth of African descent in Windsor, Ontario; it describes their sojourner lives across geographic borders and their final settlement in Windsor. The paper also offers narrations of the activities that enabled them to formulate friendships and the barriers and facilitators to the development of friendships across races. Critical findings reported in this paper reveal the ways that youth use resources in their travels to construct and negotiate their identities and to formulate new friendships. An important resource used by the majority of the youth was that of an imagined homeland, which consequently impacted on how they viewed and acted on the racial boundary critical in the formation of friendships in the Diaspora. (Contains 11 notes.)

Our paper illustrates how males of Chinese descent in British Columbia (BC) have historically been victims of overt and subtle forms of discrimination, and describes how racism is and was integrally linked to notions of class, gender and the body. Highlighted in our historical overview are issues around race and masculinity for Chinese males as they existed (and still exist) in the BC educational system, especially in sport-related and physical education (PE) contexts. We examine how some of these issues continue to impact Vancouver's schools through Millington's (2006) study of masculinities in secondary PE which showed how that environment, while offering the potential for various masculinities to flourish, tended to promote hegemonic gender identities as "normal". In particular, we show how Chinese-Canadian boys, both Canadian born as well as more recent immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, continue to be subject to subtle racist understandings of Chinese masculinities--understandings that are often camouflaged by the dominant national rhetoric of multiculturalism. We conclude the paper by arguing that if indeed schools' curricula exacerbate problematic understandings of race and masculinity that underlie discriminatory behaviours and attitudes, then physical educators need the tools to develop strategies for change. (Contains 14 notes.)

The Family Class Category of Canada's Immigration Policy exists with the key objective of family unification. Among Canada's second largest immigrant group, the South Asians, the cultural practice of arranged marriage is applied across international borders, leading to spousal sponsorship. Existing research on South Asian sponsored wives suggests that they tend to misunderstand their rights as sponsored persons, as well as the rights and limitations of their sponsors. Misunderstandings may lead women to passively respond to sponsor-imposed barriers to integration. This paper builds a case for educating South Asian women about their sponsorship rights to assist them in recognizing and responding to rights violations. The paper presents an educational framework that would respond to their unique needs and vulnerabilities.

Public schools have historically been key sites where children learn of and adopt a common national identity. In states where multiculturalism plays a central role in the articulation of a national identity, schools actively recognize and support the diverse cultures of their students in fulfilling this function. Canada is a state where, via federal policy, multiculturalism has been identified as a fundamental element of the national ethos. Formal education has been a key area in which the government has implemented this policy. However, public education in Canada is also committed to secularism, and this has been a cause for resistance by diverse immigrant groups. This paper examines resistance among traditional Muslim groups to Toronto school policies and practices that reflect an avowedly secular orientation. It focuses on the experiences of one Muslim group in particular, Somali immigrants, and their encounters with school policies and practices that both supported and challenged their identities. In doing so, the paper exposes the schools as sites of countervailing policies and practices within which students must nonetheless forge new and meaningful identities. (Contains 11 notes.)

Purpose--The paper seeks to explore workers' learning in relation to the racialized and gendered organization of contingent work. Design/methodology/approach--This paper is informed by Marxist theorization of labour power and learning. It draws on the interview data of 24 highly educated immigrant women from the research project "Skilled In Vulnerability: Work-related Learning Amongst Contingent Workers". Findings--The two types of learning that we have identified include conformative and transgressive learning. Conformative learning refers to the learning that workers engage in to conform to the workplace expectations. The workers are not rewarded or acknowledged for their learning endeavors, and their efforts end up being appropriated by employers to maximize surplus value. Transgressive learning refers to the learning initiatives undertaken by workers to challenge and transcend the depressing work environment and life conditions. Research limitations/implications--This research was not able to capture what conditions facilitate transgressive learning versus conformative learning. Practical implications--The study first calls on the state to deal with the systemic negation of professional immigrants' previous skills and learning experiences. Second, it encourages employers to provide appropriate training and reward the workers for their learning endeavor. Third, drawing on the research findings, work educators could help foster the forms of learning that are conducive to workers' better control of work and life. The authors also suggest that to optimize their work and life opportunities in general, immigrant women workers need to come together, exchange information and knowledge, learn from each other, and form collective actions amongst themselves. Originality/value--This paper contributes to the literature on workplace learning from a learning perspective. It is one of the first endeavors to look at how highly educated immigrant women learn to exercise agency to challenge contingent work structures.

This paper examines the cultural production of "Canada" and "Canadians" in "The Newcomers", a 1953 film produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Using a form of discourse analysis that sees talk as social interaction and identity as socially and locally constructed, this study illuminates how "Canada" and "Canadians" are talked into being in a film ostensibly about immigration and immigrants. While illustrating the moment-to-moment construction of these social identities in this specific context, this study also illustrates how ethnomethodological tools could be used to critically analyze the production of ideologies and identities in audio-visual media. Specific attention is paid to the marginalization of Aboriginal peoples in this governmental text. (Contains 3 footnotes.)

One of the defining characteristics of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is the increasing importance of international migration, an epoch Castles and Miller term the "age of migration." The precise size of the international migrant population is unknown. Much of this movement--such as unauthorized and other irregular flows--is not recorded in official statistics. Nonetheless, by all accounts international movements have soared in recent decades, especially since the 1970s, with the acceleration of cross-border flows of trade, investment, ideas and people--key features of globalization. As in the past, many of today's international migrants move toward areas of economic opportunity. In this paper, the author talks about immigrant incorporation and presents articles that focus on how integration opportunities and constraints shape social membership among newcomer immigrant groups across a number of advanced industrial nations, including European countries, the United Sates and Canada. Social membership here refers to a set of basic social rights conferred on members of a society, including the right to work, the right to participate in political life, or the right to education. The author discusses the historical views on immigrant incorporation and social membership and the narrative that emerges from the papers on social membership opportunities emphasizing the strong arm of national integration policies and institutional characteristics in influencing integration processes and outcomes. (Contains 4 notes.)

Based on a qualitative study of home care workers, this paper aims to understand elder abuse of Chinese Canadians. The findings show disrespect is the key form elder abuse takes in the Chinese community. As a culturally specific form of abuse, disrespect remains invisible under categories of elder abuse derived from a Western cultural perspective. Applying a social exclusion framework to understand the dynamic of elder abuse, we argue that as a marginalized racial minority immigrant, an elderly Chinese person's vulnerability to abuse is increased under conditions of social isolation.

This paper identifies: (a) discourses that shape immigrant parents' and early childhood educators' views of young children's bilingual development, and (b) ways in which these discourses are manifested in the everyday lives of immigrant parents as well as in the practices of early childhood educators. The findings of a study in a mid-size Canadian city are reported and interpreted from the perspective of the role of power relations in language and using critical discourse analysis. The paper explains how dominant language discourses manifest themselves in parents' views of their children's language development and in the practices of early childhood educators. In addition, it explains how those discourses become ideological. The following issues are discussed: how is the importance of dominant and minority languages shaped? How do monolingual discourses shape parental and institutional language responsibilities? How do parents confront language domination? How do early childhood educators make sense of their work with bilingual families? The paper concludes that dominant ideologies of language need to be challenged to ensure the maintenance of home languages among immigrant families with young children.

This paper examines challenges and supports experienced by internationally educated immigrants who participated as adult students in an Initial Teacher Education Bachelor of Education degree program in Ontario as part of their strategy to begin new careers as teachers. The narrative of one participant, a Chinese-educated meteorologist and journalist is presented as a powerful illustration of the challenges, supports and common themes described by the study participants. Her story communicates challenges related to: time; language; the culture of the teaching profession in Ontario; intra-cultural racism; feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, isolation and invisibility related to "otherness"; and a competitive labour market that disadvantages immigrant teachers. Her story also describes support through: constructive mentoring, a course developed specifically for internationally educated student teachers; and, supportive peer colleagues. (Contains 2 footnotes.)

This paper reports on findings of a qualitative study that explored the experiences, needs and challenges of internationally educated teacher candidates (IETCs) in a large metropolitan university in Canada. Interviews were conducted with IETCs as well as the teacher educator working with them. Findings revealed that IETCs required additional support in developing their oral and written communication skills and cultural knowledge for teaching in Canadian classrooms. The pedagogical implications of these findings for IETCs, for teacher educators and educational institutions are discussed. (Contains 6 footnotes.)

The mainstream curriculum is extremely efficient in furthering a neoliberal multicultural discourse, what is described as the dance, dress, and dining, or heroes and holidays, or Taco Tuesday approaches to diversity. Given this, doing anything else is an ongoing challenge. This paper shares details of a government-university-school collaboration in which the authors were participants in a national project to digitize ethnic group archives and create lesson plans based from those archives. The authors share insights and challenges about what worked for resisting the "zoo" approach.

In democratic societies the level of citizens' civic engagement and inclusion in all forms of democratic participation is crucial in maintaining social cohesion and a vibrant democracy. In the historical development of Canada's demographic, political, socio-economic and cultural systems, immigration continues to play an influential role. Our paper presents conceptions of civic participation held by, inclusion and integration of recent African immigrants to Canada. We focus on volunteerism as one form of democratic participation. The findings show immigrants volunteer for the common good of society, making a difference, personal self-service gaining experience for advancement in their host society. Some are coerced into volunteering. Some of these findings concur with theoretical literature that positions various volunteering motives, bringing up implications for federal agencies involved in the settlement, adaptation programs for newcomers and educational curriculum planners attempting to widen conceptions of volunteerism, fostering engagement and promotion of citizenship education in general. (Contains 3 tables.)

This exploratory study investigates the intersection of bilinguality and giftedness in the public school system in Ontario and the connection between the bilinguality of gifted immigrant minority language (IML) speakers and their giftedness. Following a series of semistructured interviews with gifted pupils and teachers in the gifted program in an Ontario elementary school, it was concluded that the bilinguality of gifted IML students who are literate in their home language is not utilized for either curricular or community-building purposes. Drawing on recent research in psycholinguistics of bilinguality, this paper argues that the bilinguality of gifted IML students constitutes a cognitive asset that should be used for curricular purposes in the gifted program, suggesting potential ways to accommodate the continued bilingual development of the students within the largely monolingual framework of the Ontario curriculum. These potential ways are situated within the current research on biliteracy and critical literacy. (Contains 1 table and 3 footnotes.)

This paper examines relationships between the resources available to immigrant families and the amount parents are willing and able to save for their children's post-secondary education (PSE). We use data from Statistics Canada's 2002 Survey of Approaches to Educational Planning to compare immigrant and native-born PSE saving. The results indicate that income and asset wealth constrain PSE savings in some immigrant families. However, immigrants share with non-immigrants a set of parenting beliefs and practices that encourage both groups to invest in their children's educational futures. (Contains 3 notes and 2 tables.)

The objective of this paper is to understand the transition between immigrants' premigration education and their educational trajectories once in Canada, and the return on investment in postmigration education in terms of employment status and earnings. The data come from Statistics Canada's Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada. Using multinomial logistic regressions and fixed effects regressions, we found that: a third of new immigrants with postsecondary training pursue their education during their early years in Canada; those who are admitted to Canada because of their high levels of skills, namely the principal applicants in the skilled workers category, are more likely to pursue their education; and those who enrol do not see an immediate benefit in terms of their earnings. This is further evidence of the lack of foreign credential recognition in Canada, which delays entry into highly paid occupations and delays full participation in the Canadian economy. (Contains 3 notes and 5 tables.)

This paper explores the academic and psychosocial outcomes of immigrant students from the former Soviet Union (FSU) in an ethnic school in Toronto. Based on interviews with the principal, teachers, students and parents, together with questionnaire responses, the paper describes school programmes and practices that contribute to FSU immigrant students' high academic achievement, within the categories of curriculum, pedagogy, discipline policy and teacher-student relationships. The creation of this ethnic school suggests that Canada's educational system has not met the needs of the immigrant group. The paper seeks to further understanding of educating FSU immigrant students, and discusses the implications of ethnic schools for educating children in a multicultural society.

Objective: Digital storytelling and other methods of self-expression and autobiography have become an increasingly important tool for those working with young people, including those from migrant, refugee or other 'culturally diverse' backgrounds. A structured scoping review was undertaken to better understand the potential value and challenges of using digital stories to promote the health and well-being of these diverse groups of young people and to identify key knowledge gaps. Design: The review process comprised a systematic search of the literature and strategic consultations with professionals working with young people in the area of sexual and reproductive health promotion and care. A descriptive-analytic method was used to collate and synthesise the literature and apply narrative and thematic analyses. Results: In total, 28 papers were deemed eligible for inclusion. Findings are presented as two analyses: what is known from the literature and key knowledge gaps. Identified themes included the use of digital stories as social activism and as research intervention, recognition of digital stories as complex terrain and recommendations for good practice. Three key gaps of particular relevance to our research aims were identified. These were (1) the lack of digital stories on sexual health and relationships by 'culturally diverse' young people in Australia, (2) the need for discussion of the ethical considerations of using digital storytelling and related methods in sexual health fields and (3) the value of exploring opportunities to employ digital methods as self-representation and autobiography to generate new knowledge and build organisational capacity. Conclusion: As confirmed in discussions with professionals working in the youth, migrant and sexual health sectors, the literature highlighted the many potential applications of digital storytelling to promoting the sexual health and well-being of young people from diverse backgrounds. Additional research is required to understand the particular ethical and contextual issues shaping, and at times constraining, this engagement in specific cultural contexts.

Teacher educators and field placement supervisors in early childhood teacher education (ECTE) programs aid their students in learning a specific repertoire of tools and skills, including pedagogical tools they can mobilize in their future practice. However, these tools reify abstract notions about how to teach young children that are consistent with the values and beliefs of the specific community of practice or culture, and culturally diverse students may ascribe different meanings and uses to the tools. This one-year ethnographic study explored how 20 immigrant and refugee students constructed understandings of the authoritative discourse during their coursework and field placements in an urban ECTE college program in western Canada. Qualitative data were collected through field notes, spatial mapping, interviews, focus groups, and artifacts/documents. Framed by sociocultural-historical theory, this paper focuses on the scaffolding methods used by teacher educators and expert peers to assist students in appropriating children's picture books and songs as tools to use during their field placement experiences. The most effective of these scaffolding strategies used mediational devices to evoke recollections of each student's experiences "back home," thus advancing possibilities for more culturally resonant teacher education classes.

This paper reports the effects of communication strategy instruction on second language performance (communicative success, speech rate, message abandonment) and on the use of communication strategies (paraphrase). Two classes of adult immigrants, enrolled in a full-time intermediate proficiency ESL program at a post-secondary institution in Canada, participated in this study. One class received 12 hours of direct communication strategy training, and the second served as a comparison group. Speaking tasks (picture story narratives, object descriptions) were administered as pre-tests at Week 1, immediate post-tests at Week 5, and delayed post-tests at Week 10. Post-test results showed a direct effect in favor of the communication strategy condition on range of strategies used in the object description task, which was more effective than the narrative in eliciting communication strategies. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the ESL classroom. (Contains 3 tables.)

This is the first of three papers based on a 20-month study of teaching and learning in a diverse classroom in a downtown community school in Toronto, Canada. The purpose of the study was to examine teaching and learning in a multicultural classroom and to document successful strategies in working with immigrant and minority students. The three papers detail the process by which this focus on classroom life led to a critique of the literature and to a new way to think about multicultural teaching and learning that I call "narrative multiculturalism." In this paper, I explore the place of multiculturalism in education and describe several limitations of the traditional ways of examining the issue. I also outline the understanding with which I began the study and describe the nature of my inquiry. I use my autobiographical experiences of multiculturalism and multicultural research to reflect on the literature of multicultural education. The narrative of my relationship with a teacher participant provides a conceptualization of the field and suggests the nature of narrative multiculturalism. (Contains 5 notes.)

This is the second of three papers based on a 20-month study of teaching and learning in a diverse classroom in a downtown community school in Toronto, Canada. The purpose of the research was to describe the details of teaching and learning in a multicultural classroom and to document successful strategies in working with immigrant and minority students. The three papers detail the process by which this focus on classroom life led to a critique of the literature and to a new way to think about multicultural teaching and learning, which I call "narrative multiculturalism". In this paper, I provide a sampling of stories that illustrate what contributed to my changing thinking about multiculturalism. Four short stories focus on a participant teacher in her school, in her classroom and in interaction with her students. The stories illuminate the complexity of multicultural teaching and qualities of narrative multiculturalism. In the analysis of the stories I explore multicultural understandings that developed from the experience of being in the classroom, being in relationship with a teacher participant, and our on-going dialogue. (Contains 2 notes.)

Purpose: HIV or AIDS remains invisible and dismissed by most South Asians living in Canada as HIV or AIDS issues are perceived as an offshoot of Western lifestyle linked with drug use and promiscuity. This paper aims to look into how people living with HIV or AIDS (PLWHA) cope with prejudice and stigma. Design/methodology/approach: To guide this research, a constructivist grounded theory approach was adopted as the theoretical and methodological framework. The authors reached the participants through a Toronto-based group that works with PLWHA. The authors chose their respondents in a snowball method and interviewed them both in person and online. Findings: This paper identifies how South Asian immigrants and refugees/refugees with HIV or AIDS claimants are vulnerable to discrimination in Canada due to the following factors, which include but are not limited to: a lack of information about HIV and AIDS incidence in the community; and the Canadian health system's inability to respond appropriately to the lack of information. Practical implications: HIV service engagements should take place within the context of a constellation of local traditions, or standardized expectations of patient engagement with HIV services can be counterproductive. Originality/value: It is critical that governmental action prioritizes increasing public understanding of stigma. To minimize the consequences of HIV-related discrimination and stigma, misconceptions about HIV transmission must be debunked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses issues related to teaching newcomers to Canada, such as learner identity, multiculturalism, changing visions of Canadian culture, changing expectations of English-as-a-Second-Language teachers. Highlights four studies on the topic. (Author/VWL)

This paper problematizes Canadian breastfeeding policies and programs. It criticizes Canadian federal and provincial government policies and programs, which focus on a global goal of enabling all women to practise exclusive breastfeeding and do not pay enough attention to immigrant mothers' breastfeeding experience. Based on an analysis of government policies and in-depth qualitative interviews with two Chinese immigrant mothers in Canada, I argue that breastfeeding is an ideological practice associated with neo-liberalized restructuring that shapes the organization of current breastfeeding policies, educational and medical programs, and migrant mothers' everyday practice.

This article examines the salience and content of representations of language education in a corpus of English- and French-Canadian newspapers. Findings suggest that English-Canadian newspapers foreground official-language education issues, in which public schools are represented as the primary means by which Canadians can gain equal access to social resources. In contrast, French-Canadian newspapers do not foreground language education issues; in the few cases where these are discussed, the focus tends to be specifically on immigrant acquisition of French. Since representations of these issues reflect beliefs and attitudes toward languages, the paper concludes that they also reveal the successes and failures of discourses concomitant with Canada's language policy.

In this paper, I will explore how links between migration, official language proficiency and labour market needs are being forged within the context of an increasing neoliberal agenda for immigration. Specifically, I will examine how the stated need for immigrant labour has made the official language proficiency of newcomers a site of increasing concern and regulation for the Canadian Government. Foucault's notion of governmentality as the conduct of conduct will frame my analysis as I examine how the immigrant language learner is subject not only to institutional processes of management but is also constituted as responsible immigrant language learners in terms of how they self-manage and control their own learning.

This study explores the experiences of a culturally and linguistically diverse group of immigrant adult students as they attended a 12-week employment preparation course for newcomers to Canada. The main aim of the course was to equip the immigrants with knowledge and skills, including English for employment purposes, which are necessary to be competitive in the labour market. Using ethnographic methods, mainly participant observation with audio recording, to collect data, this paper analyses the communicative strategies that this group of multilingual speakers and their Canadian teachers deployed to discursively construct a "heterotopia" defined here as "intensely affective spaces that redefine the experiential feeling of being and becoming". Analysis of transcribed audio recordings reveals that despite differences in communication conventions and sociocultural backgrounds, the research participants from Congo, Haiti, India, Bangladesh, Jordan and the Philippines managed to establish a socially cohesive team that emphasises shared relational identity and in-group membership. The findings show how they creatively mobilised previously acquired pragmatic strategies and resources from their L1 to suit the demands of the ongoing interaction in English. It is suggested that language teaching in the context of preparing immigrants for labour market integration entails a pedagogical approach that foregrounds the affordances of English not only as the language of employment but perhaps more importantly as the "language of comity". It is therefore suggested that the teaching of the host country's language should focus less on grammatical correctness and focus more on providing the adult learners with opportunities to activate existing pragmatic resources and strategies which have to do with establishing rapport and friendly relations.

This paper discusses findings from focus groups with youth located in underprivileged surroundings in one large multicultural city in Canada and in a moderately large city in Mexico, examining their understandings and lived experiences of migration-related conflicts. Canadian participants framed these conflicts as a problem of racist attitudes towards immigrants in an otherwise welcoming city. Mexican youth understood emigration as a questionable individual dream to overcome precarious economic conditions, bringing about violence to those travelling and family fractures for those who stay. We identify tensions between these dominant narratives about mobility and conflict--usually also present in intended curriculum--and students' first-hand, every day experiences with migration in each setting. We point out to youths' contrasting imaginaries of citizenship--sense of agency and identity positions--with regards to migration in each setting, showing the limited opportunities they have to make sense of their lived (globalized) conflicts beyond their own localized cultural explanations. We argue that connecting the recognition of cultural differences in the world with the power imbalances, unequal positions, and historically structured global inequities revealed by issues such as migration, must become a crucial effort in citizenship education on global issues.