Navigating two worlds : culture and cultural adaptation of immigrant and refugee youth in a Quebec (Canadian) educational context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The last ten years has witnessed the inflow of a large number of new immigrant and refugee children, many from Africa, into Canada. These new immigrants and displaced persons (refugees) undergo a cycle of adaptation in a new society; a process that takes much longer time than the host society allows them. Most children of refugees and new immigrants enter the school system few months after their arrival in Canada when they have barely had the time to adapt to their new socio-cultural environment. However, little research has been done on the cultural adaptation of African immigrant and refugee youth in the Canadian educational system. This study examined the social integration and educational experiences of teenage immigrant and refugee youth mainly from minority backgrounds in their first few years of contacts with the Quebec educational system. Using a qualitative methodology, interviews were conducted with ten youth, eight parents, four community leaders, two social service reception center workers and a school administrator together with information from focus group discussions with a number of youth and parents from the same backgrounds. The cultural and acculturating patterns that emerged in the context of school, family, peers, and community as well as the way in which the respondents negotiate, create, and maintain their identities were examined. The findings showed that culture and cultural adaptation play very significant roles in the social and educational integration of immigrant and refugee children in Canadian society. They further pointed to how acculturation difficulties have led to many of these children feeling less motivated to study, losing interest in education, or dropping out of the school system altogether. Implications of this research for curriculum development in education and social work practice with this population group are offered. These include the need for social service professionals and educators working with refugee youth to have an understanding of the different needs and history or cultural context of the country of origin of the refugees. Others are the need for teachers to be culturally responsive and competent as they deal with increasingly diverse student populations. Also of equal importance for policy formulators in the educational field is the need for curriculum that is designed to address the distinctive challenges of acculturation that these new arrivals face especially at the High School levels in Quebec. Recommendations are made for directions for future research in the social work and education fields including structuring a longitudinal study to follow these youth participants over a period of time to examine the evolution of their ethnic identity, bicultural development, cultural values, their educational attainment and the challenges they face as adults. Furthermore, a nationwide or an inter-provincial study with similar population groups (with language as a significant variable) would provide a broader understanding of the integration issues associated with this population group.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".