Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear a live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland.
Speaker: On the podcast today, Lorraine Chisholm talks with Rahat Zaydi about a project that led local schools to respect holidays like Eid, Diwali, and Lunar New Year.
Speaker: Every December, students across Canada enjoy a two-week break to celebrate Christmas. In spring, Good Friday and Easter Monday bring further celebrations and a long weekend.
Speaker: But for Canadian students who want to mark celebrations in their own traditions, it often means being marked absent from school. A research professor who worked with high school students in Alberta says Canada should recognize celebrations like Eid, Diwali, and Lunar New Year as public holidays.
Speaker: Dr. Rahat Zaydi is a research professor in the Workland School of Education at the University of Calgary, and she joins me now. Hello, Rahat. Hello. Let's begin by talking about your research project in Brooks. What took you there and who were the students you talked to?
Speaker: So I was contacted by the assistant principal at that time at Brooks Composite High School towards the end of the pandemic, who had learned about some work that I'd been doing in Calgary with Syrian parents.
Speaker: mostly refugee parents living in different parts of Calgary, Alberta. And so she reached out to me and she said to me that our students are together, but they're not really together.
Speaker: And we have a dilemma. We have people coming from different parts of the world who have different faith groups, different you know cultural traditions, different religious practices.
Speaker: Their kids are coming to school in Brooks, Alberta. And The diversity factor is completely crazy because they're from all different parts of the world.
Speaker: And there are a lot of sectarian, ethnic, religious questions that come up and that are basically creating a lot of division within this particular school and the community at large.
Speaker: And so the premise of the work began with this whole idea that we want people to be together. We want to build bridges rather than work off our differences.
Speaker: And so how do we bring community members together and in particular youth that represent the future of our country and kind of our hope in terms of where we want to take multiculturalism as a concept within our great country.
Speaker: So how do we work together in a way that brings everyone on the same platform? So we began the work with this premise and i was invited ah to converse with youth from diverse cultural, linguistic and religious backgrounds.
Speaker: to better understand the nature of the challenges that they were facing in integrating within Canadian mainstream society, as well as, in this specific case, the high school and their community life from a public perspective, as well as whatever it is that was going on within their private lives.
Speaker: And so the conversations began with this idea, specifically targeting kids that were coming from racially, culturally, ethnically diverse backgrounds, whose families were new to Canada,
Speaker: as well as ah students who were what we refer refer to as the 1.5 generation Canadians whose parents were immigrants and these students were raised in immigrant families in the Canadian context.
Speaker: I think some people might be scratching their head a little bit when they think of a small town in Alberta, because you don't typically think of that as a very racially diverse place. But I understand that there was a meat packing plant that kind of changed the demographics there.
Speaker: Yes. So just to give you an idea about the population statistics, the racialized population based on Statistics Canada was around 3% in 1996. And this has risen to over in and the school that i was invited to work with In this particular school, more than 75% of students at the school are newcomers or children of immigrants, and approximately one-third are Muslim.
Speaker: Now, you engaged with these youth ah using a specific structure. What's involved in a critically engaged language and literacy workshop? So basically what we're proposing is that we're saying we've co-designed these interventions that I've been working on this idea for over two decades at the University of Calgary in Alberta.
Speaker: And the idea stemmed from community needs that were voiced that I heard throughout my research career in Canada. Where I sense that, you know, there are these obvious things that you notice in schools, in literacy programs, and you don't necessarily know how to adapt or adjust to the requirements of students who are new to the classroom, new to the country, coming from different parts of the world and are faced with this challenge of learning a new language, in this case, English and French, depending on what part of Canada you're
Speaker: located in, as well as keeping alive their home language, their home culture, and in many cases, not just one language within the home, but perhaps two languages or dialects or, you know, so a very multilingual and rich fabric that they bring with them within the schools. So I began working with teachers to understand what it is that we could do to be culturally responsive to the communities in a way that we weren't necessarily coming with solutions to them and saying, this is what is going to help you. But we were trying to build something based on community requirements and better understanding
Speaker: where these community members and parents and families and students were coming from and meet them somewhere in the middle. So we began by offering um reading programs in Alberta that were based on this idea of dual language book reading. So a book essentially that's published in two languages. So you have the first language that could be any language ranging from Hindi, Punjabi, Arabic, Chinese,
Speaker: on one side of the page and English on the other side of the page. And these are primarily published from the UK through a publisher called Mantralingua. And they basically, each title is published in up to almost 30 different languages.
Speaker: And so you can use a book in, for example, a language like Tagalog and English. You can also find the same title published in Spanish and English and so forth.
Speaker: And so these programs began by inviting grandparents, community members, support staff that were multilingual to read to students within mainstream classrooms.
Speaker: And the idea was really stemming from this whole ah notion that it isn't necessarily about ah students who are multilingual or who are coming from different backgrounds, but really everybody within a mainstream classroom can benefit from being exposed to a variety of different languages, irrespective of whether they speak them or not.
Speaker: So my interest in this whole notion stemmed from the idea of advocacy. So advocating for language education as a form of social justice. So it stemmed from the belief that if you introduce people to different you know, sounds, phonics, linguistic systems, and you you have discussions that are based on general knowledge as well as particular linguistic aspects, it will get people around you curious and involved.
Speaker: And it's a learning opportunity, ah not just for the students who don't speak the language, but also for the teachers who are involved in these kind of opportunities. So this was step one, which was quite a big success out of which grew different interventions across the province and in Canada and in and beyond Canada.
Speaker: to various parts of the world where we worked with linguistically diverse, ethnically, racially diverse populations to bring community members into the classrooms. And we found that these were identity affirming for the students that were speakers of these languages as well.
Speaker: I'm ah smiling very broadly listening to you talk about that. It just sounds wonderful. Now, what were some of the impacts that you found out about in terms of what students face when their holidays weren't recognized?
Speaker: So what we found through the workshop designs and through our conversations that involved focus groups, that involved walking methodologies, that involved arts-based interventions where students were invited to engage in different activities where they were asked questions or they were provided with prompts that dealt with their life in the community, their life in the school,
Speaker: ah where they felt there was a disconnect or the nature of the challenge in terms of the new language that in particular these students were dealing with in terms of being new to the Canadian context.
Speaker: So what we found in having these conversations with these students was that there was a disconnect in their lives. So their private life had nothing to do with their public life, which essentially was represented through their engagement in a space and place like school. and so There was a disconnect in the sense that the language used was different.
Speaker: the cultural expectations were different, and that the way they were expected to behave, for example, was different. And so the learning curve was very big.
Speaker: And ah the assumption was that they're coming in with things that really are not necessarily of value within the mainstream educational system.
Speaker: So through our conversations, there were identity-affirming activities where we discovered the variety of sophisticated skill sets that these students brought to the table, but for example, in the form of calligraphy or in the form of knowledge about pictographic languages or in the form of...
Speaker: other skills that teachers may not have been aware of, or engagement with community life that, again, leadership in the school may not have been aware of, as well as very real-life challenges that they were facing in terms of adjustment in their life around the community.
Speaker: So in conversations and in walking around and documenting where these things were taking place and where the comfort zones were being established. For example, within the school as a space, we realized that there was something to be said about, for example, ah group activities inside the gym or, for example, group activities inside the common kitchen for the students where they would cook and basically talk about different traditions or different traditional cuisine that they had within their homes.
Speaker: And as part of this work, the students developed an advocacy media campaign, a social media campaign, where they basically created, they went on TikTok, they went on Instagram, they went on YouTube, they created real life scenarios depicting some of the challenges that they were facing, as well as educating others who would be interested, for example, in learning about some of their family recipes in terms of the kind of food that they consumed within their family life.
Speaker: So it all began with that. And I should also preface all of this by saying that this came at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was at its peak.
Speaker: And so the students from the school were also champions of EDI advocacy you know initiatives where they wanted people to better understand the nature of the challenges that they were facing individually and collectively as as members of racially and ethnically diverse communities.
Speaker: In May 2022, the students at Brooks made national headlines when the Southeast Alberta School District agreed to acknowledge the religious celebration of Eid al-Fitr on the school calendar.
Speaker: Tell us about that. That was so exciting for us because really, it's almost like, you know, as as a professor, as an academic, you dream about these moments where you want to get a sense of impact in real life and change in people's lives. So,
Speaker: I'm so proud of the leadership in the school and so proud of the community that's out there in Brooks, Alberta, doing all this amazing work and the superintendents and the board of trustees and all the folks that were behind this.
Speaker: So essentially, i should preface this also by saying that towards the end of our program and work, which was funded at that point in time by Alberta Education,
Speaker: through funding that we had received to work with Brooks Composite High School. We were at the end of our program and the students decided, based on the conversations and the dialogue that we had had within our workshops that we had organized around some of these issues and challenges, both linguistically, culturally and socially speaking, these students decided to go and have a chat with the superintendent.
Speaker: And they explained to the superintendent this whole idea of, you know, what does it mean to be marked absent? So it's not like, you know, calling in sick was an issue. They could have gone on with that, but it was a matter of principle. That is, they felt they represented quite a large number of students in the school body, and they felt that it would be really nice and affirmative for them if they could have a holiday within the school calendar that represented al-Fitr, which was, you know, marking the end of Ramadan.
Speaker: So it was everybody voted in favor of this. And basically, it was agreed that Eid would be recognized as a holiday in their school calendar.
Speaker: And so then these students made the national headlines where they talked about this whole idea of identity affirmation, developing the sense of belonging and being able to see themselves not just practicing Eid, for example, at home or at the mosque,
Speaker: or in private, but really being able to connect to the school life and ah really reach out, for example, to the staff members, other friends that they had from different cultural groups. So they could be invited to some of the collective community events that people wanted to come and, you know, ah meet ah these families on the day of Eid. It was completely possible to do so.
Speaker: And so I think it represented ah this really big step for these students. And I'd like to add that another pivotal moment that happened right after this was that these students and this work was selected by the Youth Teams in Education Research Act.
Speaker: at the American Education Research Association as part of their youth initiative. And they received one of the only awards from Western Canada to travel to the US, s to Chicago.
Speaker: And in 2023, these students were in Chicago. They presented ah some of the findings of this project to thousands of people out there, researchers, mostly, and professors and grad students.
Speaker: and other members of different organizations and basically spoke about their findings and what it meant to them and where they wanted to take this work.
Speaker: Oh, wow. They must have felt so empowered. Yes, I mean, they were accompanied by their cultural representative. They were accompanied by the the assistant principal at that time who had headed this work at Brooks-Compensate High School, Michelle Varroba, she and Joseph Octavius, who was a settlement worker.
Speaker: the cultural liaison expert, as well as the students themselves and myself from the University of Calgary. And so for me, it was one of those moments, like I said, you dream about these things as an academic. So I was just proud to be a fly on the wall, watching this unfold in front of me in terms of, you know, ah empowerment, as well as hearing these students so eloquently and masterfully talk about their experiences and where they would like to see this work go in the future.
Speaker: What questions should we be asking on a wider basis about what it would mean to make space in our school calendars to include different religious and cultural celebrations?
Speaker: So I think that this is contextual. I don't think this is about eliminating. It should be an additive model that needs to be responsive to the demographics in ah neighborhoods that are evolving.
Speaker: And so ah I truly believe that whether it's Diwali or Chinese New Year or Eid or any other holiday, it really depends on where the schools are located and what is the story that the demographics are telling you.
Speaker: So who is your student population and how can you be responsive to the student population? And so i think that the work would start by ah knowing and understanding community needs.
Speaker: and speaking to the student body as well as the parent body and finding different ways of being inclusive. It seems, Rahat, that the type of scholarship that you engaged in with the community in a very collaborative way points to ah an excellent model for future attempts to have a more inclusive future.
Speaker: Absolutely. i mean, ah the work continues. the The critically engaged language and literacy workshop design has grown exponentially. ah We have piloted these workshops in a different parts of the world, including more recently in Brazil.
Speaker: ah with students who are new to the country learning Portuguese, for example, as a second language from different parts of the world. And so the story that I'm kind of compiling now is around ideas of empowerment, listening to the community, and letting the students guide you through this process. So not being afraid of being a learner alongside these students and the teachers as well, understanding that Community has so much knowledge and to bring that to ah mainstream education is actually beneficial, not just for the individuals who are coming from these culturally and ethnically diverse backgrounds, but really for everybody to develop meaningful relationships so that we can move beyond tokenism in terms of multiculturalism and really look at this notion of growing and learning and living well together.
Speaker: Well, I am very moved and very inspired by the story you've told us today. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you very much for joining me.
Speaker: I've been speaking with Dr. Rahat Zaidy. Rahat is a research professor in the Workland School of Education at the University of Calgary. A documentary of the project called Bridging the Gap includes a discussion guide.
Speaker: It's available from movingimages.ca, which is based in Vancouver. You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver.
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Speaker: Thanks for listening.
