Educational and cultural adjustment of ten Arab Muslim students in Canadian university classrooms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Arab Canadians are a heterogeneous and frequently misunderstood group whose educational background and cultural heritage have received little attention in the scholarly literature. In multicultural Canada, educators, curriculum developers, textbook authors and policy makers rely on available literature to inform their decision-making processes. Mainstream media, as a source of information and insight, do not fill this need. In this inquiry, I examine the cross cultural and educational experiences of ten Arab undergraduate students in two English-language universities in Montreal. Participants were from Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco and have been in Canada for three to seven years. Classic qualitative methodological tools of in-depth interviews, participant observation and document analysis were employed to record, analyze and interpret the experiences of these students. In order to give voice to these students' insights and experiences, a narrative approach is used in presenting and interpreting the data. Seven themes identified as educational issues emerged from the analysis: Student-Teacher Relationship; Teaching Methodology; Democratic dialogue in the classroom; Teaching and learning foreign languages; Examinations; Research and Library Facilities; and Problems encountered in interactive classroom. Two themes, identified as cultural issues, emerged: Canadians' Perceptions of Arabs and Muslims from the perspectives of the participants; Islamic dress (hijab) and Sex-segregated relationships. The analysis revealed differences in culture, language, and social and educational systems between these students' countries of origin and Canada as the major sources of these students' positive and negative experiences. The study concludes that Canadian educators can assist these students by becoming aware of their home culture, different learning styles, frustrations in adjusting to school life and in overcoming cultural shock; and by helping them adjust to Canadian educational system and learn about the Canadian culture.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 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".