Diversity as a resource: Multiculturalism in practice in a Mississauga school

Inroads, Summer 2006 by Chodos, Bob

THE MULTICULTURALISM DEBATE RAGES ON. IN THE NEW REPUBLIC in February, Indian-born Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen warned of "the disastrous consequences of defining people by their religious ethnicity and giving priority to the communitybased perspective over all other identities."1 Here in Canada, the March issue of The Walrus carried the provocative cover line "Face It!: Forget Quebec, Our Crisis is Multicultural." Inside the magazine, prominent pollster Allan Gregggave readers a tour of intercultural conflict zones, from the London underground to the banlieues of Paris to the beaches of Australia.2 The London bombings indicated that Britain's policy of encouraging immigrants to retain their traditions had not succeeded, but the riots in Frances banlieues showed that that country's strongly assimilationist policy had not worked any better.

As for Canada, Gregg detected a growing accumulation of disturbing signs:

Twenty years ago, roughly half of the immigrant population gravitated to Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver. Today, nearly 80 percent does - and this is 80 percent of a much larger total. Within these growing urban centres, immigrant groups are clustering in tightly knit, ethnically homogeneous neighbourhoods partly because, according to the government's own studies, many ethnic groups feel out of place in Canada. Their first loyalty is to their group, and, against a history of the children of immigrants "moving out," today there is an increasing concentration of visible-minority groups "staying home," staying alien to host cultures and having little sense of civic nationalism.3

Is Gregg's picture an accurate one: is Canadian multiculturalism doomed to live out the consequences predicted in Sens dire warning? Or does the fact that we have so far avoided overt conflict indicate that Canada is doing something right? In this article I look at the experience of an elementary school in Mississauga, Ontario, where this seems to be the case: where multiculturalism shows signs of working.

The mouse that barked

It is a late afternoon in May in the library of Thomwood Public School, a K-5 school on a winding street in central Mississauga in Peel Region west of Toronto. A Spanish-speaking parent is reading The Barking Mouse,4 a bilingual Spanish-English story based on a Cuban folktale, to a mixed audience of children, their parents, high school students, teachers and York University researchers. Her young son Gabriel translates the Spanish into English for the audience, which includes speakers of Hindi, Urdu, Arabic and other languages as well as English. Gabriel is increasingly animated as he gets into the drama of a story, which concerns a family of ratónes, mice, who have foolishly provoked a gato, a cat. As the group discusses options for the mice, Gabriel suggests that apologizing to the cat might be the best strategy. In the story, however, Mama Raton ultimately rescues her family by barking at the cat, which turns tail and runs away. The punch line is: "You see, kids, it pays to speak another language!"

The reading of the story is part of a program called Parent Involvement AS Education (PIE), run as a collaboration between York University and the Peel District School Board at Thornwood and two other Mississauga schools (Floradale, a K-6 elementary school, and Glenhaven, a senior middle school). Earlier in the same session, project director Dr. John Ippolito of York poses the question: What languages is it important to learn? Is it important to know English? Is it important to know other languages? Why? Is English more important than other languages? "Yes," comments one father. "I am able to communicate because I know English." No, say others - English is equal to other languages. A question about whether students should learn English and other languages elicits a consensus in the affirmative. It is not only the immigrant parents who are engaged by this topic. Principal Diane Knowlton evokes her childhood as a francophone in Quebec, where she learned English to communicate with her anglophone neighbours. York education professor Sandra Schecter comments on her sons having had to learn Hebrew for their bar mitzvahs. A teacher laments how her connection to her heritage has been severed with the loss of the Japanese language.

Thornwood frankly defines itself as a multilingual school. A 2003 survey revealed that more than 40 languages were represented in the school, with English as mother tongue of roughly a third of the school population; Arabie, Hindi, Tamil and Urdu another third; and a panoply of languages from Albanian to Vietnamese representing the last third. A number of Thornwoods teachers, including those most centrally involved in the PIE project, are themselves members of minority groups and share a culture with many of their students. Many of the materials on display on the school walls are in multiple languages. Dual-language books are prominent on the library shelves. Morning announcements are in English and one other language, with the second language rotating through the year.