Insight: How Canada is helping young refugees adapt to their new home

In December 2015, Canada welcomed the first arrivals of 25,000 Syrian refugees it will be opening its doors to. As the new citizens adjust to life in their new home, the next step is helping the young refugees to adapt to their new environment.

Anna Kirova, a professor of elementary education at the University of Alberta, spoke to dna and shared her view on the challenges and resources needed in the country to integrate the youngest new citizens. With the new inflow of child refugees, there are many hurdles that need to be crossed for successful integration. Kirova says support in the early years actually makes a difference in childrens' lives as "they develop much healthier identities as good citizens". 

For any child, Kirova says the transition from home to school life can be challenging, but it can create additional stress for child refugees who come from traumatic experiences if they do not have enough support. "Children who come from war zones, who come from refugee camps, even though they are in really harsh dangerous circumstances, they are usually with their parents," she said, "So the separation from their parents to an environment in which they don’t speak the language and everything is foreign to them can create additional stress for them."

Child refugees need to learn to be with other children and adults out of their home and need a place where there is order and resources available to them. "It is important she says for young children to see their parents welcome in the school system. To see that their parents are part of the school, that their parents have not 'abandoned' them  in that new environment," she said.

Another issue is the lack of preparation in a country where more that 80% of the teachers are white middle-class women, who may not know how to deal with children who come from ethnic racial groups. "A recent survey in one of the city's shows that 1 in 3 teachers feel that they are not prepared to work with refugee children," Kirova revealed. "For children who have never encountered people from ethinic, racial, linguistic and culture and religious groups this can create additional stress," she said.

Kirova believes it is important for the school system to have intercultural knowledge and skills to successfully integrate children of all ages. When teachers who don't have the right skills, Kirova says, it is easy for them to look at the "deficits" of the child and the language of deficit creates the wrong attitude in school and in the general population.

 "The fact that they come from different circumstances doesn’t mean that their lacking skills," she said."In fact, they have skills that many of the children in the mainstream society don’t have because they haven’t had these experiences that they have to build to take care of themselves."

Cultural brokers

As it is impossible for teachers to have knowledge of individual cultures they need to actively seek communities. Kirova says there are several successful programmes that include "cultural brokers" who are available to facilitate the transition of new children to school.

These "cultural brokers", Kirova says, have the special cultural knowledge and linguistic knowledge that individual teachers cannot have because there are so many different cultures represented in each and every classroom in Canada. "The school system has to utilise the resources that already exist in the community  be it the older people that have been in Canada for a longer period of time that have adjusted to the Canadian culture.  They can serve as cultural brokers to the new families, " she said.

These pre-migration experiences are vital for every school system to understand to help children heal from traumatic experiences. In this way, children, are exposed simultaneously to their own culture and to the majority culture. "They are ultimately the support that the children need and the families need in order to learn the education system in Canada and also the system to learn from the families how to best integrate with these children."

It is also important for child refugees to maintain  their first language in order to maintain a connection that is important to their families and communities. "This language is so important because it fosters the identity, it develops healthy relationships with both cultures, the home culture and mainstreams cultures," she believes.

Learning what they know

Through the programmes, Kirova says, they have found it is very healthy to allow children to show their knowledge of the world with objects and materials their familiar with. "With these materials they show us what they know and what they can do and these are the ways in which we can identify the strengths that children have and that has been extremely successful."

While such initiatives have shown success in integrating children, the problem, of course, is that they are expensive to maintain. "The most important question is what citizens we will have in a country?" Kirova asks. Adding, "We need to have people who are healthy, who have healthy relationships in their communities and be productive and feel like they belong to both communities."

This requires resources and effort on a large scale. "Children live in communities families and in schools and so we have to really combine our efforts to have healthy children, its not just education only  that’s important that responsible it’s a joint effort."