“We’re here because we’re Black”: the schooling experiences of French-speaking African-Canadian students with refugee backgrounds

Abstract

This article discusses the educational experiences of a group of French-speaking Black African-born students who entered Canada as refugees. They were attending a French school and were placed in a separate programme that was designed to meet their particular needs given their limited language skills and level of education. Drawing on critical race theory (CRT), the article analyzes how these students’ identities operated in linking their academic abilities and particular life experiences in terms of race, gender, class, language, and immigrant status. The youth identified their separate programme as a problem in that their placement in it has to do with the fact that they are Black. The study provides important insights into the ways students with refugee backgrounds are being integrated into Canadian schools; and that, in some cases, the approach to their education operates to stream them along the lines of ethnicity, race, and life experience – the consequence of which is likely limited educational, occupational and social outcomes.

Keywords:

• education
• refugee youth
• African-Canadian
• critical race theory
• French schooling

Notes

1. Following Vera Williams Tetteh (2010), we prefer to think about students as having had a refugee experience rather than labeling them as refugees. This is done to avoid the essentializing and identity fixing that often accompanies the use of such labels. Although the Black African-born students in this study did not identify as refugees, they had either arrived as refugee or obtained refugee status following their arrival in Canada.

2. We call this a ‘separate programme’ because it was not designed as either a ‘special’ or an ‘applied’ programme. However, because it was created for students who were not succeeding in the regular programme and aimed to meet the needs of a particular group of students, it did run parallel to the regular programme.

3. Other discourses of multiculturalism also circulate widely. Notably, critiques from the left and right that have respectively reproached multicultural policy for either its failure to address structural inequalities based on race or to establish social cohesion by establishing a core set of common values (Wright 2012).

4. This discourse can be seen as authorized because it is formally and informally sanctioned by the state, and hence by the school board and school administrators.

5. The names of the school, programme, and participants have been changed to protect confidentiality.

6. The Official Languages Act of 1969, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism of 1971, Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the British Columbia Language Education Policy of 1996.

7. Practice-based research views art as a valuable means of knowledge production and form of inquiry (Barrett and Bolt 2007; Finley 2005). Practice-based research, also referred to as arts-based research, is situated within the field of participatory action research and focuses on action-oriented processes of inquiry, which can be of use to the communities in which the research is conducted (Finley 2005).

8. All the African-born students in this study also identified as Black. For ease, we refer to these students simply as ‘African-born;’ however, their race is significant to our discussion.