Conference Agenda

Background: According to Canada’s 2016 census, approximately 1.36 million people, or about 4% of the population, report at least one of their ethnic origins as Ukrainian. About 112,000 Ukrainians have come to Canada between 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and 2016 (Stick and Hou, 2022). An additional 200,000 individuals, mostly women and children, have been approved to enter through the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) program since Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Many find their way to Ukrainian heritage language community schools or ridni shkoly (RiSH) to maintain the academic levels of their children’s Ukrainian language competence. These diaspora institutions are symbols of community identity.

RiSh began with the first wave of Ukrainian immigration in the late 19^th century, are located across the country and have been revitalized with new perspectives with each of the six waves of immigration to Canada. Unlike some immigrant groups and despite their prevalence in Canada for over 100 years, Ukrainians have produced very few articles about their language schools, instructors or learners (Bilash & Soroka, 2014; Bilash, 2015).

Research question/Objective: The sudden arrival of children to RiSH doubled or tripled the enrolment in these schools, calling for new instructors, many from among CUAET arrivees. The resulting changing dynamics is the focus of the qualitative investigation of this paper.

Theoretical Framework: Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, capital and field are useful here in helping to explain how individuals think about, and react and adjust to, the social world in which they find themselves. Bourdieu (1977) defines ‘habitus’ as “a system of lasting transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and action and makes possible the achievement of infinitively diversified tasks.” (p. 78) It is an individual’s accumulation of cultural and historically specific knowledge of the social world within which they operate, including values and dispositions. As a sociological tool, habitus allows Bourdieu to “access internalized behaviors, perceptions, and beliefs that individuals carry with them,” and which are often reflected in practices and the social worlds they inhabit (Costa and Murphy, 3-4). Further, Bourdieu argues that habitus is not static. Rather, he “emphasizes the potential for habitus to be reconstructed or changed in the event of encounters with the unfamiliar, such as resettling in a new country” and “learned, acquired and transformed, both through new experiences in one’s social environment and the process of socialization” (Jung, Dalton and Willis, 2017, p. 6). Habitus is thus “a complex interplay between the past and the present” (Reay et al, 2009, 1104).

“Field” is understood by Bourdieu as “a series of institutions, rules, rituals, conventions, categories…which produce and authorize certain discourses and activities” (Webb, Schirato and Danaher, 2002, p. 21). Education can be considered a field as it is able to set rules for behaviour, thus creating a social system that has an internal structure (Özçürümez et al, 2023, p. 5). Within a field, Bourdieu argues that individuals maneuver, compete and negotiate for power, which he calls “capital”. Capital goes beyond economic resources to include social and cultural resources, including networks and connections and symbolic assets, like university degrees, as well as patterns of accent, dress, or “taste” (Kelly and Lusis, 2006, pp. 833-34). Thus, social and cultural capital are reflected in the ways of thinking teachers use in a classroom, and their classroom practices, their ideological beliefs, all of which have implications for their students and their education (Özçürümez et al, 2023).

Across Europe many education systems struggle with continuous and strong performance inequalities between students form a minoritized and majority background. (Hadjar and Gross, 2016). Despite many policy actions to tackle these inequalities the latter seem quite persistent. What remains particularly puzzling in this regard is that ethnic minority students are generally highly motivated to perform well in education, yet their educational outcomes remain, on average, low. This is also known as the achievement-motivation paradox (Hadjar & Scharf, 2019; Mickelson, 1990; Salikutluk, 2016). Much time and effort have been spent researching this paradox and the causes of these inequalities, focusing on theories around the reproduction of inequality, capital theory and deficit thinking theory (Agirdag, 2020; Dewitt & Van Petegem, 2001; Triventi et al., 2022). Yet, this research has mostly focused on mainstream education institutions. The role and the agency of the ethnic-cultural minoritized communities to mitigate themselves the inequalities they are most affected by has been mostly overlooked. In addition, research in education initiatives beyond the boundaries of the mainstream institutions which produce or reproduce these existing inequalities has been limited until now.

One of these alternative forms of education are the supplementary or complementary education various ethnic-cultural minoritized groups organise for their youth. These community-based educational initiatives (CBEI) are bottom-up learning environments offering not only support for minoritized youth in their mainstream academic studies, but also providing (positive) recognition of their ethno-cultural identity and familial and community heritage (Baldridge et al., 2017; Steenwegen et al., 2022). These initiatives (which range from homework support and mathematics instruction, to language classes (Hall, 2002)) have been documented in ethnographic studies and serve as important examples of minoritized communities organising their own education specifically to fill in gaps they experience in their children’s education. This is particularly important in contexts where mainstream education often caters to the cultural (religious and linguistic) needs of dominant ethnic majority groups but fail to be as sensitive to similar needs among minoritized communities (Clycq, 2017; Van Praag et al., 2016; Yosso 2005).

Current research in this field has documented both the organisational nature of these CBEI and the motivations of minoritized communities to organise these schools (Steenwegen et al., 2022). Yet, the processes within these initiatives, the resources they provide, and the potential impact on the educational trajectories of minoritized youth, all remain largely unknown. Through extensive qualitative observations and interviews conducted with students, teachers, and organisers, across various CBEI, this research offers new insight into the educational organising various communities are involved in. It also shows how these initiatives serve as important networks of support for minoritized youth. We present these CBEI through the lens of the community-cultural wealth framework (Yosso, 2005) and offer an expansion of this framework with resources that contain the transnational nature of many of the CBEI included in this research. We also showcase the importance and impact of these (third) spaces through centring the words and experiences of minoritized young people attending these schools.

The research took place in Flanders, a particularly interesting context to study educational initiatives as this Flemish speaking region of Belgium is notably marked by one of the largest, and quite tenacious, ethnic achievement gaps in education in Europe (Jacobs & Danhier, 2017).

Ideas in the western world are changing about home-school relationships, and on how parents and teachers of school children communicate, collaborate and even build partnerships. Some changes are mainly because of development in our societies, for example due to growth in migration often from east to west in the recent two decades. Other changes arise from policy changes fuelled by increased individualism and liberalistic ideas that has had its impact on education.

This paper derives from the research project Language policies and practices of diverse immigrant families in Iceland and their implications for education, shortened to the LPP project. The objectives of the project are to explore language policies and practices of diverse immigrant families (Curdt-Christiansen, 2013; Spolsky, 2004), how these affect their children’s education and the relationships and interactions between these families and the children‘s teachers.

The research questions posed in this paper are:
How do principals and teachers percieve their relationships with migrant families?
How do they envision the possibilities to develop these relationships?

The paper builds on Bronfenbrenner‘s ecological systems theory (1979, 2005) and a further development of this by Schwartz (in press). The theory of Bronfenbrenner is useful to understand the relations between students, families, teachers and schools and how they are interrelated. Schwartz has furthered this well known model by bringing forth how different systems affect multilingual children‘s language identities. That brings attention to both overt and subtle influences a migrant background has on home-school relationships.

The theoretical framework also includes a family-school-community partnership model that is often attributed to Joyce L. Epstein (2011), who along with her colleagues formulated it and has led its development in collaboration with a group of researchers and teachers at all school levels. It describes how the three fields, that the title refers to, relate, and how important it is that family, school and society work together as a whole and thus support children in their development and education (Coleman, 2013).

Findings on home-school relationships in Iceland, deriving from a big data gathering for 10-15 years ago, showed that participants valued parental involvement highly as „Overall, about 99% of parents and school staff believed that parental support for the student was rather or very important to promote good academic results“ (Jónsdóttir and Björnsdóttir, 2012). Even so, findings reflected as well that there parents had different access to school. For example single mothers were more likely than other parents to feel that their voices were not heard at school when they needed support for their children (Jónsdóttir, Björnsdóttir and Bæck, 2017). During last two decades student populations in schools have become increasingly diverse in terms of languages and cultures. Therefore, many teachers are well aware of that they are facing new challenges such as cultivating relationships with all parents, and including diversity into their toolbox (Reykjavíkurborg, 2017). On the other hand, it seems that teachers are often hesitating in building relationships with families, especially with those of foreign origin. Teachers in secondary schools in Norway are reluctant to open the doors for parental involvement, but well educated, middle class parents of Norwegian origin are more likely to be accepted than migrant parents are (Melnikova, 2023).