Perspectives of Community School Educators on Post-Soviet Youth in Toronto

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

Proposal

Community school and Heritage language educators are key stakeholders that contribute to the educational experience of post-Soviet youth in Canadian schools. Immigrant parents wish to transmit the knowledge, culture and language of the home country to their children, seeing it as essential to their identity. Yet doing so is challenging for parents alone: support from regular schools is variable, thus support of community and heritage language programs are resorted to as a means to extend parents’ efforts. Parents can support the development of heritage language conversational proficiency at home but need additional support in developing their children’s literacy and academic language proficiency, typically the domain of teachers and schools (Cummins, 2021; Gee, 2012). Despite inclusive education policies, regular schools find it challenging to support the knowledge, culture and language of children’s communities, and parents often see schools associated with loss of the Heritage Language, development of negative attitudes towards the home culture, and underperformance at school, as immigrant students have been found to lag in vocabulary development in the mainstream language (Cummins, 2021).

For these reasons Ontario schools have introduced Heritage Language programs and communities organize part-time or full-time community-operated programs that may focus on heritage language and culture, or home country approaches to teaching school subjects, which in the case of the post-Soviet space, introduce advanced STEM knowledge several years ahead of the Ontario curriculum.

We have interview data from 7 community/heritage language educators: from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Our main research questions are: 1) what community educators believe the significance is for post-Soviet youth of participating in community education, what is taught and how is it learned, and how it relates to what students learn in mainstream Ontario curriculum schools. And of special interest is the question of the influence of community/heritage language education on identity development as someone who becomes bicultural and bilingual. Additionally, we engaged with two community programs, in one case participating in a community celebration, and in another case delivering a workshop on multilingual pedagogies for a weekend community school.

The community educators strongly identify with their heritage, actively striving to transmit community knowledge, culture and/or languages and striving to following generations. Their expectations for inclusion of post-Soviet content in regular school curriculum were mixed. Notably, the study uncovered important insights and recommendations about integrating home culture and languages within mainstream education. Additionally, the research revealed diverse viewpoints on the contrasts between home countries’ and Canada’s education.

Moving forward, we expressed our intention to sustain collaborations with both community centers, recognizing their invaluable contributions to our research data. This ongoing partnership promises to provide significant insights into the cultural and educational dynamics of these communities. Indeed, in our knowledge dissemination phase we will organize a participatory series of workshops and mini conferences in which their participation would be key.

Authors

• Talar Melkissetian, The University of Toronto

• Stephen A Bahry, OISE, University ofToronto

• Johanna HELIN, OISE, University of Toronto