When immigrants move to another country, their success is determined by acceptance within the new society. Acceptance within the new society is dependent upon removal of the language barrier and thus learning the English language. My question for this study are as follows: 1) are there cultural or environmental barriers which may inhibit the ability of immigrant women to learn and use English, and 2) are there role expectations which may prevent women from taking full advantage of opportunities to learn the new language? Such barriers may arise from the nature of the interpersonal relationships or roles within the family unit, or values held by women or their spouse/partner, such as attitude toward gender equality, which could influence the ability or opportunity to learn English. This research explores the experience of immigrant women from the former Yugoslavia in accessing and learning the English language. These women who are between the ages of twenty and forty-five and their families, have immigrated to a small western Canadian city, since the war in that country in 1990. In addition, this study explores the influence of factors such as educational attainment, efficiency in their first language, motivation and desire on learning and retaining English. My analysis, based on interviews with seven immigrant women, revealed that even though hierarchical structure is evident in their cultural beliefs, women empower themselves through their motivation and desire to learn English, primarily for reasons of economic stability. / v, 112 leaves ; 29 cm.

Research in cooperative learning in education generally and second language education in particular has documented the apparently successful and simultaneous achievement of a number of educational goals. For second language learners, these goals include developing the second language (L2), maintaining the first language (L1), and acquiring content knowledge. However, little research has examined the opinions of the learners themselves with regard to cooperative learning together with the process of cooperative interaction. This study explores the opinions and interactions of Chinese immigrant students engaging in cooperative learning in English as a second language (ESL) classes. Drawing on qualitative research and discourse analysis traditions, the study used multiple methods of data collection in a Canadian secondary school ESL program: (1) individual interviews were carried out with 49 Chinese students; (2) 120 hours of observations in natural classroom settings were conducted; and (3) 30 hours of audio taped recordings of Chinese students' interactions during cooperative learning activities were also analyzed. The findings of the study present a complex picture of cooperative learning in the ESL classroom. The Chinese students seemed to be sitting on the horns of cooperative learning dilemmas between cooperation and individualism, between achieving results and sharing understandings of the task, and between using L1 to help with L2 / content learning and developing L2 for academic purposes. Particularly with cooperative learning goals of developing L2, maintaining L1, and acquiring content knowledge, Chinese students had difficult choices to make between developing L2 and maintaining L1, between using L1 for academic language and developing academic language in L2, and between learning content in L1 and learning content in L2. At a detailed level, tensions and dilemmas that Chinese students confronted appear to be intrinsic to the simultaneous pursuit of the three cooperative learning goals claimed for L2 learners. Cummins' (1991b, 1992) bilingual proficiency theory, which offers a possible theoretical model of how these goals are related, needs to address the various conflicts and dilemmas involved in these three cooperative learning goals. While recognizing other contributing factors, this work suggests that cooperative learning dilemmas may arise from conflicts of socially shared values and beliefs, and that discrepancies between Chinese students' home educational culture and their present Canadian secondary school culture add a layer of complexity to the dilemmatic situation of cooperative learning in an ESL context.

The purpose of this study is to explore how the Arabic novel can and does challenge the conventional characterization of what constitutes constructive Middle East historiography. The thesis draws on a case study of undergraduate history course syllabi in order to highlight a number of crucial issues related to Arabic literature and the production of modern Middle East history. My analysis of the syllabi concludes that in general, Arabic novels in translation are part of a varied group of resources selected by a professor in order to complement the "official" histories provided by textbooks and government documents. The novel is deemed helpful because it often describes the "ordinary" or daily life of people. Also, the novel is presented as the contribution of an "indigenous voice" to the historical narrative.

Research in cooperative learning in education generally and second language education in particular has documented the apparently successful and simultaneous achievement of a number of educational goals. For second language learners, these goals include developing the second language (L2), maintaining the first language (L1), and acquiring content knowledge. However, little research has examined the opinions of the learners themselves with regard to cooperative learning together with the process of cooperative interaction. This study explores the opinions and interactions of Chinese immigrant students engaging in cooperative learning in English as a second language (ESL) classes. Drawing on qualitative research and discourse analysis traditions, the study used multiple methods of data collection in a Canadian secondary school ESL program: (1) individual interviews were carried out with 49 Chinese students; (2) 120 hours of observations in natural classroom settings were conducted; and (3) 30 hours of audio taped recordings of Chinese students' interactions during cooperative learning activities were also analyzed. The findings of the study present a complex picture of cooperative learning in the ESL classroom. The Chinese students seemed to be sitting on the horns of cooperative learning dilemmas between cooperation and individualism, between achieving results and sharing understandings of the task, and between using L1 to help with L2 / content learning and developing L2 for academic purposes. Particularly with cooperative learning goals of developing L2, maintaining L1, and acquiring content knowledge, Chinese students had difficult choices to make between developing L2 and maintaining L1, between using L1 for academic language and developing academic language in L2, and between learning content in L1 and learning content in L2. At a detailed level, tensions and dilemmas that Chinese students confronted appear to be intrinsic to the simultaneous pursuit of the three cooperative learning goals claimed for L2 learners. Cummins' (1991b, 1992) bilingual proficiency theory, which offers a possible theoretical model of how these goals are related, needs to address the various conflicts and dilemmas involved in these three cooperative learning goals. While recognizing other contributing factors, this work suggests that cooperative learning dilemmas may arise from conflicts of socially shared values and beliefs, and that discrepancies between Chinese students' home educational culture and their present Canadian secondary school culture add a layer of complexity to the dilemmatic situation of cooperative learning in an ESL context. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

No description available.

The research questions of this thesis, “Migrating Through Currere: A Narrative Inquiry Into the Experience of Being a Canadian Teacher,” are three-fold: What is the experience of being a Canadian teacher? How do personal and trans/national migration histories influence this experience? How does being a teacher of English-as-a-Second/Additional- Language of adult immigrant and refugee students affect this experience? The aim of this thesis is to better understand how auto/biographical migration stories are connected to a pedagogical life and how this connection influences a teaching praxis. The following quotation sets the teacher in migration: “What is the experience of being…a stranger in a land not one’s own” (Pinar, 1975a, p. 399)? Curriculum reconceptualist theory asks the teacher to engage in processes of self-reflexivity in social, historical, and pedagogical contexts. The experience of being a Canadian teacher is reflected in my family’s and others’ migration stories during the first wave of migration of immigrants to Alberta. Four narratives of my own arose out of self-reflection on topics of identity, culture, home, location, and ethnicity. Each narrative is developed using William F. Pinar’s (1975a) method of currere. The narratives are interspersed throughout the thesis from the regressive to the synthetical moments of currere; they are juxtaposed against autobiographies written by first and second generation Canadians. A review of the literature illuminates the works of educational philosophers such as Maxine Greene and contemporary curriculum scholars including Ted T. Aoki, Dwayne Huebner, Janet L. Miller, Leah Fowler, Erika Hasebe-Ludt, and Cynthia Chambers, in addition to Pinar. The inquiry reveals how a historical return to the self can inform the teacher of the meaning of the teaching experience found in the pedagogical, lived, and historical v circumstances of the self and other. A new awareness of the teaching self emerges in the foreign and familiar of the classroom. Tensions found in dichotomies of language, culture, and ethnicity become generative spaces to reflect on the experience; home becomes a portal through which the teacher views the world with empathy. The teacher lives perceptively in a culturally diverse classroom and amongst the complexities of another’s life circumstances. / ix, 157 leaves ; 29 cm

This thesis will critically examine the project on globalization as articulated by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada (ATS) in an effort to uncover the presuppositions and motivations that underlie the project, and to situate them historically and with reference to current North American trends in education and politics. It will argue that the project, as it has been described and defined, comes out of the ethos of Protestant liberalism, particularly as this is embodied in missiology and the 19th century Social Gospel Movement, and that this liberal foundation has been influenced since the 1960's in North America by the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement and the more recent concern related to minorities and North American pluralism. Although lip service is paid to evangelism, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue, the globalization agenda is expressed in terms of social ethics, predominantly justice or liberation theology.

[No Abstract Submitted] / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

No description available.

This study is a meta-analysis of the transformation of the curriculum for basic education in South Africa. The integration of indigenous knowledge systems (IKSs) in the curriculum is one of the reconciliatory practices adopted in an effort to deal with the rights of indigenous people globally. The study analysed cases relating to IKSs and the curriculum in Canada for a case reference in juxtaposition with South Africa, in particular. Examples of cases drawn from elsewhere in the world have also been included briefly to justify the researcher’s claims for the urgent integration of IKSs into the curriculum, which complies with the human rights course of the rights of indigenous people. Cognitive imperialism – in the form of residential schools and their assimilation policies, which functioned in the context of an informal apartheid system as was the case in South Africa with Bantu education – has been an obstacle to transformation of the curriculum in the education system in Canada. However, the Canadian government of the day has been held to account for recognising the knowledge of the indigenous people (IP) of Canada. In South Africa, the curriculum continues to be characterised by the “mute” tendencies of perpetuating a colonial-type of curriculum, which is still being European in nature and is largely excluding African interests and cultural practices. The affirmation of the United Nations Organisation’s (UNO 2007) advocacy for recognising the rights of indigenous people by means of various international forums motivated a number of scholars globally to shift their attention to a research agenda on IP issues such as their IKSs in relation to education systems that should be transforming their curricular programmes. This study forms part of that indigenous research agenda by proposing that IKSs be integrated into the curriculum for basic education in South Africa, in response to the UNO’s declaration on crucial guidance to developing societies for transforming their education systems to include relevant curricula related to IP. The aim of this study is to explore ways in which the curriculum for basic education in South Africa can be transformed by, among other things, changing the paradigm of knowledge production through emerging concepts in developmental education and using, on the way to recovery, experiences of assimilation in the education system of South Africa, with reference to experiences from Canada, in particular, and elsewhere. An in-depth literature study relating to IKS perspectives of integration in the curriculum, and its implication for transformation in the basic education curriculum in South Africa, was done. The qualitative research approach was used and a cultural phenomenological design was used. Data were collected through a desk research, including pre-meta-analysis (PMA), meta-analysis (MA), in-depth desk research (IDR), and case studies (CSs). The collected data were investigated by means of a pre-meta-analysis, which demonstrated how the transdisciplinary approach can be used to immerse IKS in such a way that it may enable indigenous people to define their own perspectives instead of relying solely on Western research concepts of anthropology and history theorists, which have relegated IKSs to something “exotic”. The synthesis of data in this study “opened a window” to the researcher, which also assisted the researcher to understand the concept of “coming to knowing”1 as an antithesis of the language of conquest that is used in the hidden agenda of assimilation in a curriculum that continues to marginalise the representation of IKSs. The transformation of the curriculum in the education system of South Africa is a political initiative driven by government, by virtue of the establishment of the South African Chairs Initiative (SAChI) which has been entrusted with the task of developing education in the country in the different disciplines. One of the driving concepts of this particular chair, the South African Chair Initiative in Development Education (SAChI-DE), is the methodology of immersion that is based on the notion of “transformation by enlargement” (TbE). Using this methodology, the emergence of new concepts in transformative education is propagated, which, according to the findings of this study, may reverse the negative situation in which the indigenous worldviews is erased for indigenous learners (IL) throughout the world. The findings were used to invoke the attention of the Department of Basic Education (DBE), for them to consider validating the newly emerging concepts of the SAChI-DE, which can make a meaningful contribution to the guidelines for a suggested, Afriko-continuum curriculum for basic education at the foundation level. / Curriculum and Instructional Studies / Ph. D. (Education)