My Journey From Being "Othered" and "Othering" to Listening and Creating Spaces for Change With Newcomers to Canada

• In Event: Autoethnographies of Critical Action Researchers: Trajectories to Equitable Learning Communities That Challenge Neoliberalism

Abstract

In this autoethnography, I share my journey from my youth in Quebec, a French dominant province of Canada, to my life as a teacher educator and critical action researcher in Ontario, the Canadian province with the greatest diversity and largest share of newcomers.

Growing up in Quebec as a bilingual/bicultural French and English Canadian I experienced being ‘othered’ by my peers and other people in my multiple worlds. However, as I could pass as either an Anglo or Franco Canadian, I also learned how to ‘other’ those in my midst. In fact, living across various continua of cultures, languages, religions and experiencing the distress of those close to me experiencing mental ill-health, questioning their sexual orientation and living in subjugation because of their gender, provided a rich experiential foundation for my work with newcomers to Canada once I was an established teacher educator and researcher at the University of Toronto.

When I first read about Intersectionality Theory (Crenshaw; 1989, Hankivsky, 2014) and how our multiple identities shape how we experience various forms of discrimination as either the oppressor or the oppressed while functioning in the larger socio-political landscape, I was excited to see a framework which explained my reality.

One of my first experiences teaching English to newcomers in their workplace which was a food factory, made me aware of how both these newcomers and I were perceived as outsiders in Quebec society because we had not been born in Quebec and raised monolingually in a French Catholic environment. This strong feeling of exclusion motivated much of my research with newcomers and my push for teacher education for diversity.

For nearly two decades from the mid 90s to the early 2010s, my research focussed on spending time with newcomer youth and their families. My goal was to ensure that these newcomers who had often been marginalized were seen and heard. In the past decade, I realized that making newcomers ‘more visible and audible’ in the education community and beyond was not enough. As such, I began to shift to more critically oriented research such that I would be able to determine the research agenda with newcomers and support them in bringing about positive change.

My presentation will include a timeline of my experiences and transformation as a teacher educator and researcher with examples of CAR projects involving newcomer children and youth.

Author

• Antoinette Gagné, University of Toronto