Recent years have witnessed the large number of Chinese immigrants in Canada. With the coming of those immigrants is the large number of school age children. Hence, immigrant families' educational expectations and parental participation in their children's schools become major educational concerns. This study focuses on recent Chinese immigrants' expectations of and concerns about their children's schooling. / Drawing from Bourdieu's cultural capital theory and Ogbu's social mobility theory, in this study, I used a qualitative interview methodology to explore the educational expectations and school involvement of five Chinese parents who had recently immigrated to Canada. The educational expectations for their children and school participation of these Chinese immigrants are deeply rooted in Chinese tradition and heritage and are also greatly shaped by their personal experiences in Canada. Their cultural values and beliefs and immigration experiences as visible minorities have had a great impact on their educational expectations. Language barriers and different cultural values between dominant mainstream and Chinese traditions are the two main factors that hinder immigrant parents' participation in school activities and hence in their children's schooling.

Thèse (D. Ed.) -- Université du Québec à Montréal, 2003. / Bibliogr.: f. [426]-442. Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2010. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-88). Also available on the World Wide Web.

While educators have recognized that students from other countries often face traumatic experiences in their initial period of adaptation to the receiving country's schools and society, little attention has been devoted to understanding the nature or educational significance of these experiences. Traditionally, educators have equated adaptation difficulties with host language deficits, while other, possibly more consequential dimensions of the adaptation experience have gone unrecognized, and have not been represented in educational policy and funding decisions. Accordingly, this study is directed toward providing a more comprehensive understanding of the adaptation experiences of adolescent students who have recently arrived in Canada from other countries, and addresses a critical need for understanding these experiences from the perspectives of the students themselves. Inquiry is advanced within a descriptive, exploratory, and explanatory study which predominantly utilizes a phenomenological, qualitative methodology. The study's principal methodology builds upon Edmund Husserl's philosophical foundation by incorporating the existential perspectives of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the life-world social dimensions of Alfred Schutz, and the historical-contextual and interpretive elements of Max van Manen's hermeneutic phenomenology. Fieldwork occurred over a six month period in a suburban Canadian secondary school. Study findings and recommendations derive from analysis of interviews, observations, and self-reports of three male and three female grade 10 students who arrived in Canada not more than 20 months prior to the outset of the study. Initial adaptation experiences of study participants point to three principal findings. The study's finding that despite adaptation challenges, students from abroad often achieve at or above receiving society norms within a short period after arrival, suggests that educators should consider how successful academic patterns of newcomers might be adopted by receiving society members. Participant experience indicates that host language acquisition is but one dimension of a multidimensional adaptation experience, and that it is seldom the student's most critical adaptation concern, even in terms of host communication skills. Participants experienced establishing friendships as their most critical and difficult adaptation concern, and looked to friendship to provide uncertainty reduction, access to and inclusion in the receiving society. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

While much research on teaching has focused on what teachers know, less attention has been devoted to understanding what they actually do. This empirical absence can be felt in particular in the adult English as a Second Language (ESL) instructional context, despite the continued growth of the U.S. immigrant population. The current study addresses this gap by examining discursive practices employed by experienced teachers as they manage multiple demands in the adult ESL classroom. Data include over 25 hours of video-recordings and transcripts of interaction in four intact classes taught by four instructors at two sites: an academic ESL program, housed at a community college, and a community-based ESL program, housed at a school of education. Microanalysis of teacher-student interaction, conducted within the framework of (multimodal) conversation analysis, uncovered three teacher practices for managing multiple demands. The first, voicing the student perspective, entails the teacher verbalizing how students (may) perceive or experience a pedagogic topic or task; the topic/task is framed in a way that acknowledges its difficulty or problematizes students’ engagement with it. By employing this practice, teachers simultaneously affiliate with the (potential) student perspective while preparing students for explanations of challenging topics or recruiting their participation. The second practice, binding student contributions, entails marking connections, verbally and/or non-verbally, between one student contribution and teacher explanation or the contributions or identities of other students. Through binding, the teacher displays responsiveness to individual contributions while promoting the engagement of (other individuals in) the class. The third practice, resource splitting, entails the use of verbal and embodied resources to simultaneously pursue different courses of action within a single turn, or the use of different embodied resources to do so. By “splitting” semiotic resources, the teacher can accomplish two actions at the same time: align as a recipient and validate one contribution while managing turn-taking or pursuing topic/task shifts. By providing empirically-grounded and fine-grained descriptions of actual teacher practices, this study contributes to explicating how the complex work of teaching is accomplished. Findings bring specificity to the conversation on what constitutes skillful teaching and may benefit teacher educators and novice (ESL) teachers.

The purpose of this qualitative study is to understand the beliefs and experiences of Korean immigrant parents who chose to send their children to a Korean dual language bilingual education (DLBE) program in the United States. Utilizing cultural historical activity theory and bilingualism as theoretical and conceptual frameworks, the author explored (a) how these parents’ prior experiences, transnational/transcultural knowledge, ethnic and cultural identities, and language ideologies have contributed to their educational decision and (b) how the parents are mobilizing their children’s heritage language education through a DLBE program. To honor and value the participants’ emic view, this study employed in-depth individual interviews, activity-based focused group interviews, home visits, and participant observations. Furthermore, for participants to experience and explore dynamic ways to share their stories and lived experiences, the author facilitated opportunities for multiple multimodal research activities such as a shared community walk, a word association activity, and a map drawing activity. The findings revealed that the most important motivation for choosing a Korean DLBE program over English-only programs came from their strong Korean ethnic pride and identity, which they all felt obliged to pass on to their children. Additionally, the participants became social, cultural, and educational resources for each other to compensate and overcome various challenges in supporting their children’s bilingual education due to the short bilingual teacher retention, isolated program configuration, and discontinuity of the program after elementary school. All the participants embodied the importance of maintaining heritage language and culture, actively supporting their children’s in and out of school experience and advocating for their children’s bilingual education. This study offers implications and suggestions for teaching and research as well as for ethnically, culturally, and linguistically marginalized immigrant bilingual communities. The author hopes to contribute to research and pedagogical practices in bilingual/bicultural education, heritage language learning, and community-based research, focusing on finding ways to better serve minoritized immigrant communities in the United States.

With globalization and migration of people and ideas becoming an increasing reality around the world, the needs of immigrant families and students is vital for countries to consider, particularly within their educational systems. This is true especially in the Nordic countries, where the national discourse of equality and egalitarianism are increasingly questioned due to increased awareness of inequality in society as immigration from outside of Europe continues to rise, particularly in Finland. Multiculturalism and integration are thus a relatively new but pressing concepts gaining attention in the Finnish education system. Research in the Nordics that has looked at approaches to integration has typically looked at the institutional practices of integration, particularly in schools, but research on families’ responses to these efforts has often not been nuanced enough to consider their experiences holistically and in depth. Literature from the Nordics has often also taken deficit perspectives on immigrant families and their communities. This study takes an asset-based, narrative approach to understand the knowledge of immigrant parents of their experiences with schools in Finland and their aspirations for the education of their children. Using a sociocultural framework to understand identity as constructed through practice, it combines narrative inquiry with ethnographic approaches to decolonize research on immigrant families in the Nordics. Through the narratives of three racialized immigrant parents, their experiences with belonging and engaging in practices that span across national borders allow for new conceptualizations of integration that move beyond traditional assimilationist and deficit perspectives.

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published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education