COMMENTARY: NEGOTIATING IDENTITIES IN "HONG KONG, CANADA"
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P87-C5
2025-09-29
318
COMMENTARY: NEGOTIATING IDENTITIES IN "HONG KONG, CANADA"
It's not just another wave of immigrants. Over 20 years, 142,000 from Hong Kong have moved here. With ambition, money and a strong identity, they're changing the city's face.
[Headline of a report on Hong Kong immigration to Toronto by Vanessa Lu, staff reporter, The Toronto Star, November 10, 1996, Bl]
The following commentary discusses Evelyn Yeung's artwork, Journey to Acceptance, as a symbol of Evelyn and Leslie Edgars' efforts to negotiate new identities in a school and a city that had recently seen increased immigration from Hong Kong. The importance of teachers undertaking such work and providing opportunities for students to engage in such work has been discussed by educational theorist Jim Cummins, who believes that the negotiation of identities at school is central to student learning.1 Cummins writes that identities are formed and negotiated through everyday interactions between teachers, students, and the communities to which the students belong. Importantly, these interactions are never neutral. In varying degrees, they either reinforce "coercive relations of power," the exercise of power over people, or promote "collaborative relations of power," the creation of power with people. By reinforcing coercive relations of power, teachers (and, I would add, students) contribute to the subordination of (other) students and communities targeted by discrimination. By promoting collaborative relations of power, teachers (and, I would add, students) are able to participate in "a process of empowerment" that encourages (other) students and communities to challenge the operation of coercive power structures and processes.2 Analyzing Evelyn's artwork as a project that challenges coercive relations of racial and linguistic discrimination at school, I try to illustrate how Leslie Edgars was able to provide an opportunity for her students to resist what writer Charles Taylor has called society's "confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves."3
In my examination of the journey Ms. Edgars and Evelyn undertook together, I draw upon Rosina Lippi-Green's ideas on the language subordination process. It is this process that underlies linguistic discrimination or linguicism, discrimination based on language use. But first, to introduce readers to the discourses that Evelyn and Ms. Edgars needed to negotiate, I begin with an analysis of what it means to teach and learn in a city and school that has recently seen increased immigration from Hong Kong.
1 See Cummins (1996).
2 See Cummins (1996, p. 19).
3 From Taylor (1994, p. 25).
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