A Case Study of Mrs Smith’s Words and Her Quiet Girls

Abstract

For one year, I sat in on morning classes at a unique Canadian elementary school: an all Punjabi-Sikh private school. Here, all the students shared their Punjabi-Sikh heritage. Only a handful of such specifically heritage schools exist in Canada; all are sponsored and run by the immigrant communities, and all are protected by Canadian education law and policy concerning cultural accommodation in a deeply pluralist and diverse country. Whilst advocates for such heritage instruction have been long-standing and numerous (see Toohey, 1996a, b and Cummins, 2000), Canada has had very little reported research experience with culturally specific schools other than French or English (in Quebec). The main objective of schools like this Punjabi-Sikh one is to preserve the cultural heritage of the immigrant parents. As such, all students in Mrs Smith’s grade two classroom were Punjabi-speaking and all were of the Sikh faith. All were Canadian by birth, spoke Punjabi fluently as their first language and were emergent English speakers through their experiences with the larger English speaking world around them and through the language of the school — English as the language of instruction. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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