Lived experience in the initial period of adaptation: a longitudinal multi-case study of the experience of recent immigrant students at a Canadian secondary school
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".