Cross-Cultural Schooling Experiences of Arab Newcomer Students

A Journey in Transition Between the East and the West

Nesreen Elkord

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030144197
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030144203
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

This book presents Arab immigrant youths' voices through storytelling that reveals the challenges and achievements they experience at school and at home in a Canadian educational context. While Arab immigration to Canada dates back to the late eighteenth century, Canada has witnessed a significant rise in Arab immigration rates over the last twenty-five years, marking the fastest growth among all immigrant groups.These stories highlight the complexity of Arab-Canadian youths' cross-cultural schooling experiences and provide valuable opportunities for reciprocal learning among all stakeholders in Canadian schools. With an educator's vision, Elkord foregrounds the tensions between Arab youths' home and school experiences to help build bridges and make high school less opaque to Arab immigrant students and their parents, while offering insights into multicultural education and resources for teacher education.

© The Author(s) 2019

Nesreen ElkordCross-Cultural Schooling Experiences of Arab Newcomer StudentsIntercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14420-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Arab Migration—From East to West

Nesreen Elkord¹

(1)

Faculty of Education, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada

Nesreen Elkord

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Peoples of the Arab World

Upon moving to Windsor, Ontario, in 2012, I was surprised to discover how Arabs constitute a largely visible population. After being in Canada for 18 years, I heard a local news broadcast in the Arabic language on radio station CINA-FM on a September morning while driving my vehicle. CINA-FM airs programming in a variety of languages, with 80% of its daily programs in Arabic (CINA-FM 2018). At that moment, I felt pleased and excited, and I speculated that Arabic must be a highly spoken language in the Detroit/Windsor region. My speculation proved to be true, as a 2011 census reported that Arabic was the most common non-official-language mother tongue in Windsor, Ontario (Statistics Canada 2015).

For centuries, peoples from the Arab world have referred to themselves as “Arabs.” Since the eighteenth century, Arab peoples have been brought together by a nationalist ideology, asserting that they are one nation bound by common ethnicity, culture, language, identity, history, politics, and geography. Arab nationalism has promoted the unity of Arab peoples by celebrating the achievements of Arab civilization, language, and literature and by calling for political union across the Arab diaspora (“Arab Nationalism” 2018; “Arab World” 2018).

In general, the word “Arab” is used throughout popular and so-called official media—such as Wikipedia’s entry for “Arab World” (2018) and Statistics Canada’s (2007) The Arab Community in Canada—to refer to persons from the 22 North African and Middle Eastern member states of the Arab League,¹ a group of nation-states with common traditions, customs, and a single unifying language, with a total population exceeding 422 million people (“Arab World” 2018). While Arabs hold beliefs corresponding to three major faiths—Islam, Christianity, and Judaism—the majority are Muslims, and though more than 90% of Arabs are Muslims (Hayani 2014), they represent less than 20% of the Muslims of the world (Arabic Canadian Community 2008); an estimated 15 million Arabs are Christians, in addition to smaller but significant numbers of Druze, Yazidis, Shabaks, and Mandaeans (Pew Research Center 2014). In sum,

Arabs, like Hispanics, are a linguistic and cultural community, not a racial or religious group. Arabs are those who speak Arabic as their primary language and share in the culture and history of the Arab world, which stretches from Morocco to the Arabian Peninsula. (Wingfield 2006, p. 254)

While such data can provide a unifying definition of Arabs for the purposes of this book, it is important to note the diversity within the Arab League member states, given that they cover over 3.2 million square kilometers in the Arabian Peninsula² and straddle two continents (Africa and Asia), stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the east, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the north to the Horn of Africa and Indian Ocean in the southeast (“Arabs” 2018). Again, while people of the Arab world are bound by ethnic, linguistic, cultural, historical, identical, nationalist, geographical, and political ties (El-Shamy 1995; “Who Are the Arabs?” 2015), they constitute vastly diverse communities (Nydell 2005).

Writers often use two identifying terms to identify people of the Arab world: (1) Arabians to identify people of the Arabian Peninsula and (2) Arabs to identify Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, Palestinians, Egyptians, and North Africans (Cohen 2003). A widely used alternative to refer to citizens of the Arab League member states is Arabic-speaking people. Although the Arab Leagueʼs official language is Arabic, a number of Arab League member states have other co-official or national languages, such as Somali, Berber, Kurdish, Assyrian, Chaldean, and Nubian.

In short, although it would be difficult (and somewhat inaccurate) to say that Arabs have a singular overarching tradition or share a commonly held belief, we can identify some of the more popular beliefs and values among Arabs of different faiths. As Al-Hazza and Bucher (2010) note, “despite the rich array of traditions and diversity of customs, all Arabs are held together by the common identity of being Arab” (p. 6).

Arab-Canadians

Canadian immigration rates have more than tripled over the last few decades, with Arabic-speaking residents representing the third-largest group of immigrants in 2001 and rising as the largest group in 2016 (Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2006, 2016). The increase in rates of Arab newcomers to Canada in recent years has resulted in a corresponding increase in the percentage of Arab students among student populations in urban schools in several Canadian cities, such as Windsor, Ontario.

However, Arab-Canadians are not a recent addition to the Canadian mosaic, as the first wave of Arab immigration can be traced back to the late nineteenth century (Arabic Canadian Community 2008). While Arab-Canadians migrated from their respective countries for many reasons, studies indicate that most newcomers to Canada were motivated by the desire to provide better living conditions for their children (Anisef et al. 2001; Xu 2017).

A Journey in Transition Between the East and the West

My doctoral dissertation, from which this book expands, was titled Arab Immigrant High School Students’ Perceptions of Their High School Experiences in Canada: A Narrative Inquiry . My research fieldwork took place in three urban high schools³ in Windsor, Ontario: St. Mary’s Catholic High School (St. Maryʼs), part of the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board (WECDSB), and Windsor Public High School (WPHS) and Queen Elizabeth Public High School (QEHS), both part of the Greater Essex County District School Board (GECDSB). WPHS was also one of the sites in Xu and Connelly’s (2017) Canada-China Reciprocal Learning in Teacher Education and School Education Partnership Grant Project. Students attending both school boards are linguistically and culturally...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Arab Migration—From East to West
• 2. Living the Inquiry
• 3. Between Canada and Somalia
• 4. In Search of Peace and Safety
• 5. A Life Journey
• 6. Life in Transition
• 7. Overlapping Trajectories in Newcomer Youths’ Narratives in Spheres in Transition
• 8. Making Educational Meaning of Arab Immigrant Students’ Cross-Cultural High Schooling Experiences
• Back Matter