Presentation by: Negar Khodarahmi
Session: Session C | Time: 11:30AM – 11:50AM | Location: Room 201
Historically, the government of Canada has been a world leader in refugee resettlement. In response to the Syrian refugee crisis, Canada resettled over 59,000 refugees between November 2015 and September 2018, with 350 communities welcoming refugee families during that time. Although the majority of these families resettled in Quebec and Ontario, the province of B.C. welcomed an unprecedented number of refugee families, with over half of those refugees aged 17 and under. Of course, these numbers are specific to the Syrian refugees and Canada continues to accept refugees from around the world, which makes the accurate numbers of incoming students hard to pin down. Unsurprisingly, refugee families arriving in Canada have often had to overcome huge hurdles in the process of resettling and as their children enrol into schools, they can face a variety of different levels of challenges.
In response to how these challenges will affect B.C. schools and teachers, different agencies in B.C. have tried to convey this information to teachers through a variety of handbooks and toolkits. With such importance being placed on the arrival of refugee students and its imminent impact on the B.C. school system and its teachers, it’s essential that we turn our focus to the deficit-discourses in teacher education surrounding refugee children.
Through the perspective of Critical Race Theory, this sharing circle intends to engage participants in a conversation to acknowledge and challenge the deficit-discourse in the surrounding refugee students and discuss the negative impacts it can cause on their academic careers. The aim of this roundtable discussion is to discuss applicable, evidence-based strategies to battle the negative impact of this discourse in our practice and classrooms. We will also be sharing the handbooks and toolkits available to BC teachers with participants so that they can identify the positive, strengths-based strides made and negative aspects that must be challenged.