Rahat Zaidi

Newcomer youths (i.e., young immigrants, refugees, international students) represent a growing community across Canada, and their transition into school systems is critical to their wellbeing. School integration represents a novel vantage point by which to explore the immigration experiences of newcomer youth who are adjusting to student life. Service providers (e.g., administrative staff, guidance counsellors, settlement workers, etc.) are critical partakers in the school integration of newcomer youth. This qualitative study employed a social constructionist perspective and an integrated social justice lens. The central research questions guiding this inquiry included (1) How do participants understand newcomer youths’ experiences of school integration? And (2) What are the ways in which participants support newcomer students in high schools? In-depth, semi-structured, qualitative interviews were conducted with six service providers in one designated high school. A thematic analysis led to the development of five salient themes: (1) supporting academic needs, (2) life outside of school, (3) mental health concerns, (4) connections in school, and (5) gaps in the education system. Results of this study highlight the larger systemic issues that continue to impede the experiences of newcomer youth in schools. Implications for service providers working with newcomer youth in schools are presented.

Despite research advocating for more inclusive support for their communities, newcomer families often struggle to thrive in their adopted lands. While countries like Canada promise peace and a better quality of life, the reality of the settlement process often disrupts newcomers’ expectations, challenging the paths they had envisioned for a stable and fulfilling future. Using an arts-based workshop approach with 21 newcomer families over 5 weeks, this project explored the role places and spaces play in building newcomer resilience. An analysis of maps, collages, portraits, and other multimodal components revealed how home and place are central to newcomers’ resilience and perseverance. This research reinforced the notion that resilience is not just experienced individually but is also linked to the ongoing act of placemaking. The places that newcomers have left behind still connect to the early experiences of their current lives, and their resilience is thus rooted in a balancing act that seeks the familiar while recognizing the complexities of nostalgic remembrances. The researchers centered newcomers’ feelings and emotions, placing their voices at the forefront of this research. Through participation in multimodal narrative workshops, the participants engaged in meaningful dialogue and exchange. These reflections have led to a deeper understanding of newcomers’ awareness, sense of belonging, and resilience.

Canada has experienced an unprecedented surge of immigrants, with more than 1.3 million individuals resettling into the country between 2016 and 2021. This demographic shift is anticipated to persist well into the future, potentially resulting in newcomers and their Canadian-born children constituting nearly half of the total population by 2041. Inevitably, school environments have become a critical access point in the host country, underscoring the importance of educational systems in shaping the settlement and school integration experiences of immigrant children and their families in Canada. To better understand these processes, this study employs a social justice (SJ) framework to identify systemic inequities and a culturally responsive pedagogy framework as a practical means for addressing them. An arts-based engagement ethnography (ABEE) method was used, allowing participants to document their experiences through cultural probes (e.g., diaries and Polaroid cameras). Using purposeful sampling, a single family who immigrated to Canada from Bangladesh participated in this study. The results reveal three overarching themes central to the immigrant family experience: settlement in Canada, school integration, and mental health and well-being. These themes highlight both the challenges and opportunities faced by newcomer families, offering insights into the ways culturally responsive educational practices can help overcome the inequities identified through an SJ lens. The study provides strategies to support the effective integration of immigrant families into both home and school environments.

This study sought to empower the perspectives of racial minority adolescent students by creating an opportunity to advocate for themselves and to seek change in the community they live in. The study took place in a highly diverse rural high school in Western Canada and included creating a social media advocacy campaign that addressed the challenges faced by these students. The researchers used Rose’s four sites for interpreting visual materials, focusing on a student-produced short film that depicted the issues and challenges of a racialized Muslim student, highlighting matters of belonging and the importance of building what is known as religious and racial literacy. The scholarship represents a transformational experience, encouraging student participants and administration to heighten awareness and understanding of self-advocacy in authentic discussions. It includes suggestions for teaching education programs, curriculum revisions, and pedagogical practices that awaken our sense of social justice.

This study explored racialized newcomer student participants' experiences in a rural high school in Western Canada, and utilized critically engaged language and literacy workshops (CELLWs) as a means to authentically represent participants' interrelationships with and relatability to their school and community spaces. CELLWs are an important avenue for self‐reflection that fosters socially just, diverse, and equitable educational practices. Understanding the nuanced lived experiences of newcomers, and how these inform educational practices today, represents a pivotal need in the development of educational pedagogies that encompass past and present experiences reinforced within different places and spaces. The study was guided by the following question: To what extent can CELLWs afford multicultural and plurilingual identities to establish a disruptive pedagogy and re‐imagine classroom spaces? The researchers centered arts and walking methodologies within four CELLWs sessions to open up subjective practices and analyses that intersect equitable, inclusive, and diverse theories and participants' life experiences. Data was drawn from a qualitative and thematic analysis that was obtained from participants' artwork, written reflections, and individual/group interviews. The study revealed the importance of CELLWs in research and in‐classroom practices as practitioners and scholars become accountable when appropriating such activities to create spaces for meaning‐making processes that consider relevant personal experiences and feelings within schools and communities.