Sending Your Kids to Canadian High Schools: Voices of Parents of post-Soviet Backgrounds

• In Event: Multi-Stakeholders’ Perspectives on the Education of Children and Families with post-Soviet background in Ontario: Implications for Policy and Practice

Proposal

This presentation is based on 42 interviews with parents from 11 countries of the former Soviet Union, who attended school in their home countries, while their children study in high schools in Canada. We show the diversities and commonalities in how the challenges, opportunities and responses to Canadian education are constructed among. We asked participants about their immigration experiences, attitude toward Soviet past, home language maintenance, thoughts on Canadian school curriculum and ways of communication with schools, and facts of discrimination of their children in Canadian schools.

Preliminary results show that parents’ attitude toward the Soviet Union and their common past (Russian language, for example) is shaped by the positive or negative experiences of late 1980s-early 1990s. We found that parents from the former Soviet Union republics that separated from the rest of the country peacefully tend to judge the USSR less and use Russian more eagerly. Most post-Soviet parents value their native languages and use different methods to preserve them. Many of them use only their native language at home; those parents who can afford it send their kids to the country of origin for the summer for language and culture preservation.
Even though parents approve of the Canadian school support system in general, they don’t feel that everything is done in terms of better academic results or parents’ involvement. They highlight the lack of uniform textbooks and teachers’ insufficient initiative as main barriers to students' learning experience.
Discrimination in school reported by the post-Soviet parents seems to be based on tensions related to historical events, e.g. conflicts between Greece and Turkey or is manifested by Canadian-born students keeping together apart from immigrant students.

Almost every post-Soviet parent finds teacher-parent communication during the official school meetings insufficient: contacts with teachers are rare, teachers themselves often rotate, and no one asks for parents’ opinion or concerns. Some parents mentioned that an initiative should always come from parents because nothing will change for the better if parents are not persistent.

Many post-Soviet parents are eager to take a more active part in their kids’ studies. Even if they cannot help children study better, these parents prefer to know what their children learn in school. One commonly addressed problem is the absence of an approved textbook for every school subject that prevents parents from understanding the school curriculum better. One Latvian mother pointed out that in modern Latvia, parents have an opportunity of following subject curricula as well as their kids’ progress online. Some parents have mixed feelings about teacher-student “equal” communication – in particular, some post-Soviet parents indicate that they would love local teachers to be more authoritative and actively engaged in the process of character formation of their kids. While these parents appreciate a more humanistic pedagogy of the Canadian schools, they also believe that even in high school it is too early for their children to make any life-changing decisions on their own, and therefore, they want to support their kids together with the schoolteachers.

Authors

• Anna Rzhevska, OISE, University of Toronto

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

• Max Antony-Newman, University of Glasgow