Immigrants

We often talk about ways to share cultures and have students learn about other cultures and their own too. We frequently mentioned travelling, exchanging with people from other countries, doing activities on the subject in class but rarely mentioned that there were may be people from other culture in your own class.

This semester I was taking the course “Aspect sociaux de l’enseignement” with few students from our program. There was a chapter on the fact that immigrants were more and more numerous in our school systems during the 80’s and they had difficulties to adapt to our culture and teaching methods. Their parents were often against the teaching methods which helped the students to develop their critic senses. They thought school should be a basic place to learn about basic things(maths, sciences), not about life, that was their job. Obviously, those parents had different views than Quebec schools on how to teach about life to children regarding their own culture. Integrating the students from other culture to our society is part of the job of a teacher. However, this does not mean that the immigrants have to ignore their own culture. This is still an actual subject as we saw in the news this year about the religion, the Muslims and all these debates.

Teacher may take advantages of these situations by having those students share their personal culture to the rest of the class. If they were born in Quebec, their parents might be able to tell them or came in class and make a small presentation of their culture with typical meats and clothing. Of course you always have to be careful in this type of situation, especially in our position, as teacher. Even in this text, the words were difficult to choose since it is a very controversial subject.