Educational experiences of children and families with post-Soviet background in Canada: A missing perspective in comparative and international education research

• In Event: Education Reforms in Comparative Perspective

Proposal

Educational experience of immigrant and refugee children in the Global North has become a field of research and action in comparative, international and development education (Dryden-Peterson, 2017). Canada and Canadian education systems (both public and private) have been at the forefront of research, policy and practice in this field for decades (Lara & Volante, 2019). While Canadian engagement with challenges, including educational ones, of immigrants and refugees has also included newcomers from post-Soviet countries, research on the experiences of this diverse (Tereshchenko et al., 2019) and fast-growing population (Statistics Canada, 2016) has been scant.


Our paper presents preliminary findings of an ongoing project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which directly explores the Canadian educational experiences of the children from former Soviet Union countries and their families in Canada. The study uses a mixed method multiple embedded case study approach (Yin, 2003) where data from classroom observations, interviews, focus group discussion, surveys and key documents are collected, analyzed and presented. Initial qualitative data has been collected from a range of stakeholder groups: teachers, principals and counselors from public and private schools, as well as from students, parents, and community educators with Soviet and post-Soviet backgrounds. The research team includes four seasoned scholars and four research assistants, with the majority of whom are connected with countries of the former Soviet Union. Our positionality was instrumental in designing the study, engaging with participants, and analysing data (Parson, 2019). We are also guided by a combined critical-constructive framework of ecological, multicultural, intersectional conceptual apparatus.


The data has been collected and analyzed using interview and survey guides that were created via a critical constructive review of the existing literature on immigrant and refugee education as well as of our personal-professional experiences as both immigrants and scholars of immigrant and refugee education in Canada. NVivo and SPSS were used (in addition to manual readings of the data) for data coding and identification of themes and subthemes. This framework and approach have allowed our team to identify challenges and opportunities at the micro (individual/family), meso (school/community centers) and macro (province of Ontario) levels. The study seeks to identify commonalities and differences in the participants’ perspectives on themes such as rationale for immigration to Canada; their relationship to the constructs of Soviet and post-Soviet; views on the comparative advantages and disadvantages between the Canadian and their home-countries’ curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher-student relationships. Using an asset rather than deficit approach to treating our participants, our study also presents solutions and suggestions proposed by the parents, students from the former Soviet countries, as well as from Canadian educators.


While many of the identified themes show parallel similarities with the experiences of other immigrants and refugees from the Global South (downward social mobility of parents (Liebert, 2010), language barriers (Author, 2019), there are many unique themes and nuances of this newcomer group to Canada that stand out and provide important and valuable insights for scholarship, policy and practice of education in Canada and other similar education system of the Global North.


Preliminary findings show that students with post-Soviet backgrounds experience tension between the academic aspect and social aspects of education in Canada. They found the curriculum insufficiently “rigorous”, while enjoying the more humanistic pedagogy compared to their home countries. Students also experience difficulty adjusting to the new education system and its unwritten rules, which they see as implicit and vague compared to a more explicit and direct system in post-Soviet states. Coming from countries with centralized education systems, parents notice lack of explicit character education in Canadian schools and have to manage their children’s newly acquired freedom to make educational choices in school and beyond.

Authors

• Max Antony-Newman, University of Glasgow

• Stephen A Bahry, OISE - University of Toronto

• Umme Kulsum, Toronto Catholic District School Board, University of toronto

• Sarfaroz Niyozov, OISE, University of Toronto

• Kateryna Pashchenko, OISE - University of Toronto

• Qiongli Zhu, O.I.S.E. University of Toronto

• Anna Rzhevska, OISE, University of Toronto