Hongxia Shan

Shaping the re‐training and re‐education experiences of immigrant women: The credential and certificate regime in Canada

Research has extensively documented the employment barriers facing immigrants in Canada. Less attention is paid to the employment strategies that immigrants deploy in the host labour market. To address this gap in the literature, two projects 1 are conducted to examine how immigrant women learn to optimize their labour market outcomes. Both projects employ a combination of life history style interviews and institutional ethnographic analysis. Life history interviews offer women ample space to (re)construct their experiences in relation to the social economic and political contexts. Institutional ethnographic analysis starts with people’s experiences, but aims to explicate the social processes and practices constituting people’s experiences. The studies find that the women often resort to re‐training and re‐education as a means to improve their employment prospects. The women’s educational experiences help articulate them to what I call a credential and certificate regime (CCR), or the social processes and practices that attribute differential values to credentials and certificates produced at different places. I argue that in the era of globalization, CCR helps manage the Canadian labour force with an increasing number of immigrant workers, thereby preserving patriarchal and white supremacist power. The CCR that I explicate is predominantly Canadian centred. It is developed out of gatekeepers’ anxiety towards entrance controlling in various sectors that demand and indeed produce local certificates. The CCR also speaks of a transnational trend of credentialization, which is spearheaded by influential international organizations and companies located in the economic west. Both trends have helped create an expansive training market that is instrumental in feminizing immigrant women’s labour. In this paper, I also show different ways in which the CCR in Canada both services and disservices immigrant women, which makes it imperative to rethink the values and practices of training for immigrant women.

Lifelong learning as ideological practice: an analysis from the perspective of immigrant women in Canada

Critiques of lifelong learning have focused on the neo‐liberal underpinning of state policy, where individuals are expected to take responsibility for meeting the needs of changing labour market conditions in the post‐Fordist economy. We treat lifelong learning as an ‘ideological frame’ that (re)shapes how people see and understand social reality, and organise their job seeking activities accordingly. Our argument is supported with data from two studies that examine how professional immigrant women from China navigate the Canadian labour market from their perspectives. Specifically, we identify how lifelong learning as a discursive frame intersects with credentialism, the gendered and racialised construction of Chinese women, age and gendered familial relations to channel professional immigrant women into a labour market segmented along gender, ethnic and racial lines. We end with the policy implications of our discussion.

The politics of recognition: critical discourse analysis of recent PLAR policies for immigrant professionals in Canada

The unprecedented transnational mobility that skilled immigrants have experienced in the global war for international talents has made foreign credential recognition a policy challenge for many countries. Under the pressure of critics, Canadian governments recently launched new initiatives to facilitate foreign qualification recognition through policy interventions. Using critical discourse analysis, this article analyses the policy orientation of two benchmark government documents concerning prior learning assessment and recognition (PLAR) for immigrant professionals in Canada. The analysis shows that while these initiatives claim to promote fair, timely and transparent recognition practices, they are found playing an instrumental role in reinforcing the ideals of market individualism and procedural fairness. In particular, they have established Managerialism as the mechanism to reducing recognition barriers, which has in effect served to strengthen the monopolistic power positions of the Canadian regulatory bodies to delimit valid knowledge and skills and Canadian standards. Not only are immigrants left out of the process to decide on the value of their qualifications, they have also been further objectified vis-à-vis universal Canadian occupational standards. To build a more inclusive and equitable PLAR system, this article suggests a paradigmatic shift towards recognitive justice, which will take us beyond the discourse of righteousness in debating issues of PLAR concerning foreign credentials recognition for immigrant professionals.

Building social capital as a pathway to success: community development practices of an early childhood intervention program in Canada

In the last three decades, various concepts and strategies have been developed to address social determinants of health. This paper brings together the different focuses of health promotion, and demonstrates that effective health intervention programs need to be conducted at multiple levels and fronts. Specifically, based on the evaluation of KidsFirst, an early childhood intervention program in Saskatchewan, Canada, this paper presents the program practices effective in enhancing the social capital and social cohesion at the community and institutional levels. The findings fall into three interconnected areas: strengthening community fabric; building institutional social capital and bonding, linking and bridging. KidsFirst has brought the community together through conducting broad and targeted community consultations, and developing partnerships and collaborative relationships in an open and transparent manner. It has also developed institutional social capital through hiring locally and encouraging staff to deepen connections with the communities. Additionally, it has endeavoured to create conditions that enable vulnerable families to enhance connectedness among themselves, link them to services and integrate them to the larger community. The programs success, however, depends not only on the programs local practices, but also on the governments central policy framework and commitment. In particular, the programs focus on childrens healthy development easily resonated with local communities. Its endorsement of local and intersectoral leadership has facilitated mobilizing community resources and knowledge. Further, its commitment to local ownership of the program and structural flexibility has also determined the extent to which the program could fit into the histories of local communities.

Growing Everyday Multiculturalism Practice-Based Learning of Chinese Immigrants Through Community Gardens in Canada

While official rhetoric of multiculturalism claims to value cultural diversity, everyday multiculturalism focuses on how people of diverse cultural backgrounds live together in their everyday lives. Research on everyday multiculturalism has documented ways through which people negotiate senses, sensibilities, emotionality, and relationality across intercultural contact zones. While recognizing the importance of human intentionality and community in conditioning coexistence, this article also points to the constitutive power of practice-based learning that emerges through the coming together of human and nonhuman beings. Drawing on a qualitative study of the learning experiences of six Chinese immigrants in community gardens on a university campus in Canada, this article shows three ways of learning that foster knowing, connecting, and hybrid knowledge production across cultures: (a) learning through communities of conviviality; (b) learning mediated through nonhuman things such as land, waste, and free-floating seeds; and (c) learning through assemblages that fold in culture, place, and space.

An Ethnodrama on Work-Related Learning in Precarious Jobs Racialization and Resistance

This article is based on a research project on the lived experiences of precarious workers in Toronto, Canada. Using interviews with women in part-time, contract, and temporary jobs in three sectors (telemarketing, retail, and garment), the project explores the ways in which racial hierarchies structure jobs as well as forms of resistance that women exercise at work. The authors find that racialized processes stereotype workers and their skill sets, organize their work, determine their access to and exclusion from certain types of jobs, and impose cultural rules that classify and essentialize them in terms of race, language, and ethnicity. In this article, the authors use ethnodrama to represent their findings from this research project. Ethnodrama is a form that is well suited for this work because it allows us to bring the data to life through an embodied performance.

Transnational mobility through education: a Bourdieusian insight on life as middle transnationals in Australia and Canada

ABSTRACT This article argues for a more nuanced view of mobility through education within an era of increased globalisation. We explore questions of transnational mobility through the lens of underexplored Bourdieusian concepts, specifically transnational habitus and habitus clivé. Our analysis shows how ones perception of a ‘better life’ and ones ideology of ‘entrepreneur self’ are produced despite ones encounter with disparity between their fields of their host countries and countries of origin. We therefore assert the need for a more complex conceptual work to unpack the lived experience of mobility especially for those who are unable to operationalise their capital in the transnational field.

Complicating the Entrepreneurial Self: Professional Chinese Immigrant Women Negotiating Occupations in Canada.

A core mode of governance in the era of neoliberalism is through the production of ‘entrepreneurial self’. This paper explores how the ‘entrepreneurial self’ is produced for 21 Chinese immigrant women in Canada. The women displayed extraordinary entrepreneurialism by investing in Canadian education. Becoming entrepreneurial, however, is more than an individualised ‘choice’. It is imbricated with the ideology of meritocracy cultivated in China, the ‘credential and certificate regime’ in Canada, and the gendered expectations in the host labour market and at home. Given the ideological confluence, and the material conditions the women lived, a feminized and racialized labour is reproduced.

Reconfiguring the Learning Space: Skilled Immigrants in Canada

Existing learning spaces for immigrants in Canada, be they mediated through training programmes or constituted through workplaces, are often constructed based on a deficit assumption about the immigrant Other. To redress this problem, I have previously proposed distributed pedagogy of difference (DiPeD) (Shan, Canadian Journal for Studies in Adult Education 27(3):1–16, 2015a) as a way to (re)distribute the responsibility of learning and teaching among people—including immigrants, trainers, organisational leaders and other workplace professionals—and things, particularly cultural artefacts such as texts and technologies. At the centre of DiPeD is an engagement in sociocultural and sociomaterial differences to simultaneously further social justice and advance workplace and professional practices. In this chapter, I expand on DiPeD, drawing on pedagogies of differences and some major proposals derived from the practice-based ontology of learning.

Towards a postcolonial politics of appearance: unsettling lifelong learning as a racial contract

ABSTRACT In the context of flexible capitalism, lifelong learning has been posed as a pathway for individuals to accumulate skills and actualise potentials. What is overlooked, however, is that the process of accumulation and actualisation is embedded within the culture of recognition. People who are historically constructed as the anthropos, a legacy of the colonial history struggle to appear as equals vis-à-vis the gaze of the humantias. With this critique in view, I reviewed the field of immigrant and lifelong learning in relation to a postcolonial politics of appearance. I sought to understand how lifelong learning settles itself in immigrant consciousness, and how it shapes immigrant experiences in the West. My review points to three metaphors that speak of the challenges and possibilities for immigrants to appear: fixation of the Eurocentric gaze, re-credentialing as precarious investment, and lifelong learning as trans/formation. Together, these metaphors suggest that lifelong learning has conjured a racial contract, which ironically binds immigrants to the labour of learning and yet continuously suppresses their appearance. To unsettle this racial contract, borders need to be reimagined and crossed/vexed by recentring immigrants as knowing subjects.