Rahat Zaidi

University of Calgary · Werklund School of Education

The present study was grounded in a social constructionist epistemology with an integrative social justice lens. It highlights the perspectives of one group – that of newcomer youth – from a collective case study exploring the phenomenon of school integration across multiple collaborators in one designated high school. As school integration is a ce...

Immigrant and newcomer students often experience challenges as they seek to assimilate in the new country. As such, this theme remains significantly under-researched and continues to hinder our understanding of newcomer students’ most urgent needs. This article focuses on the perspectives given by newcomer high school students as they discuss, thro...

Immigrant and newcomer students often experience challenges as they seek to assimilate in the new country. As such, this theme remains significantly under-researched and continues to hinder our understanding of newcomer students’ most urgent needs. This article focuses on the perspectives given by newcomer high school students as they discuss, thro...

The aim of this scoping review is to explore how the pandemic affected the mental health and well-being of newcomer adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) framework, this review includes 15 academic studies conducted in Western countries from 2020 through 2021. The data revealed that, because of situational...

This article presents a scoping review of literacy research that employs multilingual and multimodal literacy narratives and discussions as tools for enabling immigrant youth to explore their intersectional identities and experiences of inequality. It encourages a re-examination of emerging educational/societal issues, incorporating these intervent...

The increasing number of Syrian families seeking safety and security in Middle Eastern, European, and North American countries has given rise to conversations around resettlement and a timely and pertinent research theme. Through an arts-based lens reflecting on social integration post-arrival, trauma awareness, and resilience, this study follows o...

This paper focuses on the perspectives given by newcomer high school students as they discuss, through open dialogue and social media, their main challenges living in a new country. The scholars employed a collaborative action research approach and were guided by two questions: 1) How can newcomer students’ lived experiences inform best practices i...

This invited paper highlights the reflections of expert panelists who were spontaneously called upon, graciously accepted, and quickly organized to respond thoughtfully and compellingly to Dr. Arlette Willis' powerful and timely Oscar Causey address at the 2022 Literacy Research Association (LRA) annual conference. In her address, Dr. Willis issued...

For decades, international researchers and educators have sought to understand how to address cultural and linguistic diversity in education. This book offers the keys to doing so: it brings together short biographies of thirty-six scholars, representing a wide range of universities and countries, to allow them to reflect on their own personal life...

In response to Canada’s growing ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity, educators in French immersion classrooms are increasingly responding with enhanced cross-linguistic initiatives, and dual language books are promising resources in the promotion of multilingualism (Zaidi, 2020; Zaidi & Dooley, 2021). This paper details a research project we...

This two-year study examined the barriers and challenges encountered by refugee parents as they negotiate their children’s successful transition into a new school system. The researchers sought to determine what can be learned from parent and educator experiences of these obstacles in order to optimize parent–teacher collaboration for refugee famil...

This 2-year study examined the challenges and barriers that refugee families and schools encounter in their new homeland. The researchers sought to determine what can be learned from parent and educator experiences of these obstacles in order to optimize parent-teacher collaboration for refugee families. Contextualized within a LEAD (Literacy, Engl...

This 2-year study examined the challenges and barriers that refugee families and schools encounter in their new homeland. The researchers sought to determine what can be learned from parent and educator experiences of these obstacles in order to optimize parent-teacher collaboration for refugee families. Contextualized within a LEAD (Literacy, Engl...

ABSTRACT This study sought to determine the role pedagogical love can play in the emotional experience of (Arabic-speaking) refugee families in Calgary, Canada, as they engaged with the public education system at the Grade 4–12 level. Through a cooperative inquiry approach, based on a shared agenda and interests, the researchers used cycles of acti...

The United States and Canada, two countries known to have large immigrant populations, have long since reflected a dichotomy where Canada is generally perceived to be a country with education policies that demonstrate its receptiveness to embrace multiculturalism in schools and classrooms while the United States seemingly functions as a country tha...

Global volatility shifts the everyday realities of school life. In the culturally and linguistically diverse schools of Canada, Australia, and Europe with which we work, educators and parents seek to renew established pedagogies in response to transnational integration and disintegration, immigration, and refugee resettlement, and the cultural flux...

The growing number of international students studying at Canadian universities has exacerbated the need to address identity, cultural aspects of teaching, and the commonalities of different cultures through a transcultural lens. To explore these concepts, researchers conducted a qualitative study using a workshop format at a large university in wes...

This collaborative action research project in Alberta, Canada, explored how dual-language books (DLBs) can foster literacy instruction and learner engagement through language awareness. Canada’s changing demographics have resulted in mother tongue diversity and many urban schools identifying at least 25% of students as being English language learne...

Islamophobia is a term used to describe society’s phobic reaction to a certain religious or ideological group. Historically, the coined word Islamophobia has been manipulated into various constructs, which pose a microcosm-macrocosm challenge for educators over whether or not the education system can act as a platform for better understanding what...

As part of its required program review and evaluation, the Faculty ofEducation at the University of Calgary sponsored an internationalconference on teacher education in November of 2006, inviting papersand presentations to address the theme "How Might Teacher EducationLive Well In A Changing World?" (Faculty of Education, 2006). Thefollowing sets o...

This dossier of lesson plans contains the scope and sequence of ten lesson plans designed to show the potential application of dual language books as implemented through dual language reading strategies and translanguaging in the mainstream English Language Arts classroom in the middle years. Translanguaging is the process by which teachers and eme...

Combining language research with digital, multimodal and critical literacy, this book uniquely positions issues of transcultural spaces and cosmopolitan identities across an array of contexts. Studies of everyday diasporic practices across places, spaces, and people’s stories provide authentic pictures of people living in and with diversity. Its di...

Since patterns of immigration began taking hold, one of the primary goals of any immigrant to, or citizen of, North America has been to be accepted and to adapt to a new culture and learn to live a productive and healthy life. There are many different means by which people endeavor to accomplish this. One of these is through education, a platform t...

Background Sociocultural theories state that learning results from people participating in contexts where social interaction is facilitated. There is a need to create such facilitated pedagogical spaces where participants can share their ways of knowing and doing. The aim of this exploratory study was to introduce pedagogical space for sociocultura...

This paper describes a qualitative study conducted over the course of one school year in an ethnically diverse school. Aimed at exploring the conditions under which parents of low socioeconomic status (SES) immigrant-background children will engage actively with the school, we involved parents and facilitators in story-telling sessions, sharing per...

Cross-cultural education is thought to develop critical consciousness of how unequal distributions of power and privilege affect people's health. Learners in different sociopolitical settings can join together in developing critical consciousness-awareness of power and privilege dynamics in society-by means of communication technology. The aim of t...

Never before has the concept of peace been so vital. People are living in times of global upheaval, violence and turmoil, making it imperative that we provide our future generations with pedagogical experiences that promote a sense of well‐being and peace. Teachers, schools, education systems, and curricula offer possibly the best opportunities in...

http://werklund.ucalgary.ca/ltct/

This paper outlines the provincial frameworks that define the Spanish bilingual program in Alberta, Canada, provides an historical overview of its pedagogic constraints and evolution, and proposes a framework for bilingual pedagogy. The framework is conceptualized from the research evidence of three local case studies, and is based on the centralit...

Research has determined that dual language books have a positive effect on literacy achievement, motivation, and family involvement in children’s schooling. In this study we used quantitative methods to complement the largely qualitative extant research. We analyzed the early literacy skills of 105 kindergarten children (45 comparison, 60 treatment...

In light of the importance of early literacy achievement to long term academic and economic success, educators urgently need to comprehend the sociocul-tural complexities manifested in learning contexts that involve multilingual students. Dual language books (DLBs; i.e., books written in English and another language) are one tool that can be used t...

The effectiveness of dual-language book reading in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms is largely uncontested. Yet there are repeated calls for more research to determine how this resource can be used more broadly and effectively by teachers, especially in emergent-literacy learning contexts. In the present study we analysed culturally...

The idea of fragmentation has transformed the living, convivial pursuit of knowledge into something akin to an industrial assembly line. Schooling in North America is inherently based on this idea, working against the spirit of pedagogy and the very nature of knowledge itself. Fragmentation has lead to practices that are easily recognizable in scho...

The idea of fragmentation has transformed the living, convivial pursuit of knowledge into something akin to an industrial assembly line. Schooling in North America is inherently based on this idea, working against the spirit of pedagogy and the very nature of knowledge itself. Fragmentation has lead to practices that are easily recognizable in scho...

This article addresses strategies for promoting culturally responsive pedagogy through the implementation of a language awareness curriculum that includes a structured reading intervention program using dual language books. The research builds on the premise that resources such as dual language books can give teachers the opportunity to effectively...

This paper examines the media coverage of the murder of a young Muslim girl in Mississauga, Ontario in December 2007. We examine how that coverage moved from concerns for a terrible family event to the use of the language of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations.” We explore the nature of this exaggeration that occurs in times of threat and t...

As part of its required program review and evaluation, the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary sponsored an international conference on teacher education in November of 2006, inviting papers and presentations to address the theme "How Might Teacher Education Live Well In A Changing World?" (Faculty of Education, 2006) . The papers cho...

This paper examines the response made by the University of Calgary to changes in Alberta’s language policy in its language teacher education programme. The paper outlines recent policy changes in Alberta aimed at developing language education in schools and then examines how such changes have had an impact on planning for the delivery of education...

The focus of this article is to examine the notions of language learning, heritage (referring to tradition) and ancestry (descendants & properties passed on), and cultural identification for Urdu-speaking immigrant children now living in Canada. This article provides a detailed ethnographic account of an innovative language program developed to tea...

We explore the nature of knowledge and education and how Islamic traditions have shaped understanding of these matters. We contrast this with contemporary images of "Taliban-like" schools full of rote repetition and harsh, authoritarian literalism. Some of the history of Islamic scholarship venerates a much more generous relationship to knowing. We...

In this paper, we contend that the term traditional education has come to be identified, for the most part, with the worst that traditions have to offer (rote memorization, authoritarianism, etc.) and that this (mis-) identification has ignored another, more thoughtful, meditative and intellectually vigorous thread that forms part of most tradition...

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