Category: research

During my candidacy exam, I was asked about my conceptualization of my bilingual identity. I wrote a very brief blog post about it then, but I would like to revisit the topic in light of a book I recently finished, Becoming multicultural: Immigration and the politics of membership in Canada and Germany by Triadafilos Triadofilopoulos. This well-written, well-researched book looks at the evolution of immigration policy in the two countries in which I am a citizen: Canada and Germany. The main argument for looking at these two case studies is that both country’s policymakers have changed the respective country’s immigration policies dramatically over the course of the last 100 years due to pressures to align their policies with their collective image of the countries as liberal democracies. Reading this book has provided a strong background for the work I am currently doing in understanding how universities prepare teachers for refugee education, starting with research I did as a visiting scholar at the University of Hamburg in June 2016.

The book also confirmed many observations I had growing up. As a child of immigrants, I always had a sense of Canada’s immigration history. My dad was sponsored by distant relatives who had come decades before, so I was familiar with Canada’s recruitment of strong labourers and land sales in an effort to cultivate the land prior to WWI. My dad came in 1950 and my mother came in 1961. Both represented a different wave of immigrants who were leaving war torn Europe, but who encountered strong negative feelings against Germans post-WWII. Later in my work I met newer immigrants from a variety of different countries, so over the decades I got a sense of how Canadian immigration law had changed.

My encounters with German immigration laws were more sporadic and timed with my personal trips to Germany. As a child, I met a young “Turkish” girl, who was actually born of Turkish parents in Germany at a time when her citizenship was not recognized by either country, rendering her stateless. This was my introduction to the German policy of jus sanguinis – citizenship based on descent. What I didn’t realize at the time was the my father’s German citizenship, despite having been born in Poland, was also a result of this policy. He had always explained that Catherine the Great had wanted workers for Poland and promised the Germans she recruited that they could keep their language and their religion, but I didn’t realize that they also kept their citizenship as Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans). Years later, I discovered a document among his old papers that indicated his family still had to be naturalized upon resettlement in Germany after World War II, but I have not investigated how rigorous that process was.

Unbeknownst to us, but consistent with jus sanguinis, I inherited German citizenship at birth. My parents became Canadian citizens in 1967, Canada’s 100th birthday, like many others. For them, that meant they automatically gave up their German citizenship, but as a baby, already born with Canadian citizenship, my German citizenship remained. Had I known, I could have avoided getting a visitor’s visa when I lived in Germany after high school. However, it wasn’t until one of my children was going on study abroad that someone asked me the right questions to discover my claim on German citizenship.

Interestingly, I inherited only from my father. Sometime in between my residence abroad in the 80’s and my children’s in the 2010’s, the law that allowed German citizenship to be passed on only through the paternal line was changed. Not only did my children inherit citizenship, European at that, I was offered the opportunity to purchase birth certificates for them. Imagine, they weren’t even born there, but they hold a birth certificate AND a passport from a country they have only visited.

This experience of dual citizenship, unearned and very beneficial, has provided me with empathy toward those without a home, citizenship, and a place to feel secure. I see my own research as a small part of learning what it takes to create a new home, new citizenship, and a new place to feel secure for those who seek refuge among us.

A January cold streak sounds like an excellent time to blog about a research trip to sunny, warm Brazil. A colleague of mine is heading up a comparative study of educational responses to diversity in Brazil and Canada. We are working with colleagues in Brasilia and Goiania. For the first phase of the research, we traveled to Brazil in November 2016. There we were a part of a symposium on the topic. Colleagues from Brazil and we, as guests from Canada, presented on perspectives on educational responses to diversity in our respective countries.

As a Canadian with no previous ties to Brazil, I learned a great deal. I discovered an interesting, rich and troubled history of slavery, migration and immigration that has been dealt with over the years with numerous policies that have not consistently been applied in practice. Yet, there were very interesting examples of application that Canada can learn from. For example, we met with someone from the Ministry of Education who works in Indigenous education. She told us about university programs that train Indigenous students to become teachers in Indigenous schools. I listened with great interest since I am involved with a program that targets Indigenous students to become teachers, but we are facing the challenge of finding Indigenous students who have the qualifications to enter the program and reaching adequate numbers of potential students. I am eager to read the transcripts and translation of the recording, since my Portuguese is minimal and our informal interpreter was doing his best to keep up.  This example alone intrigues me to learn more about their pre-service teacher education.

While we were in Goiania, we were able to hold focus groups with professors, graduate students and undergraduate students. At present, the transcripts are being translated. We presented the participants with a number of examples from the Canadian context and asked their opinions as to whether there are similar situations in Brazil, how such a situation might be handled in Brazil and what we could learn from Brazilian responses.

Looking forward, we will begin writing about our initial research with our colleagues, which in and of itself should prove an interesting challenge in light of the differences in language and academic culture, but we also anticipate bringing a few of those colleagues to Canada for a similar symposium to that which we held in Goiania.

So, beyond providing a great break from the November doldrums, this trip resulted into an interesting and potentially very productive research project. Stay tuned.