1996/97 PCERII Funded Research Abstract

Research Title: Citizenship Instruction for Adult Immigrants

Research Team: Dr. Tracey Derwing (University of Alberta) - Principal Investigator

Research Domain(s): Education; Citizenship and Culture

Although the federal government and several provinces have funded citizenship programs for adult newcomers for a very long time, there has been a paucity of research on the efficacy of these programs. There has been a tacit recognition of the need for citizenship education, which was evident in the now-defunct federal government CILT grants: for many years the Department of the Secretary of State provided funding to English as a Second Language (ESL) programs on the understanding that both language and citizenship concepts would be developed. In fact, Derwing and Munro (1987) found, in a census of English language ESL and citizenship programs in Canada, that a very small minority of ESL programs placed any significant emphasis on Canadian content, much less on citizenship issues. Even programs designed specifically to impart citizenship concepts were, for the most part, interested primarily in helping their students through the court hearing; 86% of coordinators surveyed stated that preparing newcomers for the hearing was the main objective of their programs, 26% of respondents mentioned improving the students’ knowledge of Canada, and only 12% reported encouraging students to participate in Canadian society. Most of these programs evaluated their effectiveness by the high number of students who successfully passed the court hearing. In fact, a high pass rate among students is an extremely deceptive indicator of success. The overall pass rate has always been extremely high; whether or not the applicant has taken a citizenship course; the failure rate is approximately 2%.

The Derwing and Munro (1987) census was part of an initiative of the Citizenship Instruction Review Project (CIRP), under the auspices of the Corporate Policy Branch of the Secretary of State. As part of the project, Secretary of State also funded three citizenship instructor conferences and provided support for the instigation for some provincial citizenship newsletters, notably Citizenship Alberta and Citizenship BC. The Ontario Ministry of Citizenship was also very active in the late 1980's. One of their accomplishments was to produce a special issue of TESL Talk on citizenship education. At the same time that this flurry of activity was occurring in citizenship education, ESL was going through a phase of participatory learning, and a number of programs arose in which students' engagement in Canadian society was a principal goal of the programming (e.g., Mohamid, 1989). Citizenship education for adult immigrants seemed to be coming into its own.

Now, ten years later, we would like to trace the changes in the citizenship process, most particularly in citizenship education programs, but also changes to the Court procedures and the effect they have had, if any, on the nature of the programs. (Recently the Court interviews with appointed judges gave way to multiple choice tests.) We plan to identify the providers of citizenship education by contacting ESL programs, immigrant-serving agencies and citizenship Courts from across the country. Once located, we will send a questionnaire to the providers, with an accompanying letter to advise them that we will be following up with a telephone interview to elicit information on course content, student profiles, resources and equipment used, staff qualifications, training sessions available to staff, and program evaluation. The goal of this aspect of the research is to determine whether or not the innovations encouraged by the federal government in the late 1980’s had any lasting effect. Courchene (1996) has argued that the essential elements of Canadian citizenship are still missing from courses designed for newcomers, but he presents no data to this effect. In addition, we will be examining the federal government's policies towards multiculturalism and the citizenship education of newcomers to determine to what degree they have helped or hindered the integration of newcomers. Resources in the National Archives of Canada (Ottawa) pertaining to citizenship education will be collected, and interviews will be conducted with representatives from the Department of Canadian Heritage and the citizenship Courts. A description of the relationship between what actually happens in citizenship education programs and what policy suggests should happened will be made. Finally, recommendations will be made for citizenship education programs for ESL adults, based on the comparison of the two surveys and the policies which inform the current practice.