Stand Together or Fall Apart: Professionals Working with Immigrant Families, by Judith K. Bernhard

Over the next twenty years, it is projected that the percentage of people born outside of Canada will rise to as much as 28% of the population (Statistics Canada, 2011).In spite of this, Judith Bernhard, professor of Early Childhood Education at Ryerson University and author of Stand Together or Fall Apart: Professionals Working with Immigrant Families, contends that professionals working with immigrant families in fields such as education, health, counseling, early childhood, child and youth care, and social work, while well intentioned, are often illequipped to work effectively with immigrants.Practitioners in these fields commonly operate within a narrowly defined discourse of deficits, effectively subjugating these families.The intention of this text is to inform professionals and undergraduates studying in these fields about immigrant families' strengths and to impart a series of principles that might become tools for helping professionals working with immigrant families.Bernhard also seeks to inspire reflection in readers, exhorting them to "examine their own attitudes and approaches and to become more self aware" (p.16).The book is organized into three sections focusing, respectively, on the realities of immigration, the theoretical and practical tools professionals need to work with immigrants, and interventions that have been successfully used to empower immigrant families.The work is premised on two main assumptions; first, that immigrants possess strengths or funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) which are often rendered invisible or undesirable in the dominant discourse of deficits and, second, that empowerment must be the central goal of any work with immigrant families.Bernhard contextualizes the first assumption by elaborating on the discourse of deficits that proliferates in academic research and filters into practice.This discourse derives from the work of Western developmental psychologists and assumes children progress through universal stages and milestones regardless of the social, cultural and economic circumstances of their lives.Immigrant children are deemed to be disadvantaged learners who lag behind their peers because these stages fail to account for contextually-influenced variations.By extension, their parents are seen to be lacking the "right" knowledge and skills to instruct their children (see NAEYC, 2010).In the field of early childhood, Bernhard is one of a growing number of Reconceptualist scholars to problematize this view:The problems and perceived problems of immigrant children and families are an enduring acceptance of mistaken assumptions regarding what is 'normal' in child development...cultural differences penetrate to the core and...should be honoured rather than remedied or ignored (pp.60-61).

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