Exploring Arab Muslim Children's Home and School Literacy Experiences in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this ethnographic study I explore the cultural practices and literacy engagement of first generation Arab Muslim children who either immigrated to Canada or were born to parents who immigrated to Canada. Responding to an ongoing concern within Boards of Education in the Greater Toronto Area around the underachievement of minority students and their disproportionately high dropout rates (McKell, 2010), I focus on Arab Muslim children since they are repeatedly identified as underachieving and under-researched. Although low achievement is typically linked to demographic markers such as race, socio-economic status and linguistic and cultural background, little is known of how immigrants socio-cultural practices, in particular religious practices, impact literacy learning in schools. Working from within a situated literacy framework (Gee, 1996; Heath, 1983; Street, 1997; 2005; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988), I explore how three Arab Muslim families, two whose children go to Islamic schools and one whose child goes to public school, engage their children in language and literacy acquisition. Moving beyond the findings of previous studies that document the central role of Islam in the daily lives of Muslims, observational data and interviews from this study highlight the extent to which religion influences and shapes the literacy choices, thoughts, and writing that form the childrens worldview. I conclude with a summative analysis of best practices and academic successes from private Islamic schools that provide insight into the underachievement of Arab Muslim children in public schools in the Greater Toronto Area.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.347 | 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 teacher head, 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".