Co-Creating a Curriculum Journey: A Participatory Exploration of how Zimbabwean Immigrant Youth in an Urban Alberta Community Negotiate Liminality in their Lived Experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many people have told stories concerning their experiences as immigrants in diaspora communities (Trueba & Bartolomé, 2000). Many of these stories tell of unimaginable hardships, strife, pain as well as joy as immigrants settle into the host country. The diaspora literature in Canada has not adequately documented research on immigrant youth from their point of view. More so, research on Zimbabwean immigrant youth is non-existent. This study seeks to understand immigrant life journeys of Zimbabwean youth with a focus on the “liminal” qualities of their experiences. A significant number of researchers (Gennep, 1960; Turner, 1967; and more recently Anzaldúa, 2000; Bhabha, 1994; Ledgister, 2001; Bannerji, 2000) have discussed liminality as a phase that everyone encounters at different points in life. In the summer of 2014, six immigrant youth from Zimbabwe, all residing in Alberta, agreed to take part in a participatory research study that explored this main question: What implications does conceptualizing Zimbabwean immigrant youth experiences as liminal, through the collaborative creation of a curriculum artefact, have for understanding immigrant youth experiences and how can this process contribute to the youths’ ongoing negotiation of their experiences? I wondered: Will the youth understand their experiences as liminal? What curriculum artefact will the youth create with me? How do youth negotiate their experiences and how has the participatory research process aided in their curriculum journeys? Focus groups (Kitzinger, 2004) and interviews (Creswell, 2007) engaged youth in discussions to explore their understanding of their own identities as immigrants, thereby creating a space where they could effectively negotiate liminality. The participants engaged in a total of seven focus groups along with one individual interview each. The culmination of the study, based on youths’ interests and what they identified as important, congruent with participatory research sensibilities, was the creation of a curriculum artefact in the form of an e-handbook. The purpose of the artefact was to articulate information about life in Canada to prospective immigrant youth. Study findings indicated that the research participants identified with the concept of liminality as it manifests in their daily life experiences. They articulated liminal experiences through three themes that emerged from our discussions: parent-child tensions, language, and foreign credentials/professional upgrades. Findings also included the ways in which youth negotiated their experiences of liminality. This study adds to the body of literature on youth immigration and education, with specific emphasis on Zimbabwean immigrant youth experiences conceptualized as liminal.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".