NorQuest College LINC in Edmonton

LINC or Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada is a federally-funded program introduced by the Canada Employment and Immigration Commission (CIC) in 1992 (Cervatiuc & Ricento, 2012). According to its mission statement, it aims to facilitate the integration of migrants into Canadian culture by providing language and settlement training and by offering students possibilities to develop their academic, social and employment competences. In the province of Alberta, and its capital Edmonton, prerequisites for student eligibility include having attained permanent residence status and completed a preliminary Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) assessment conducted by the Language

Assessment Referral and Counselling Centre (LARCC), within the previous 6 months. CLB levels are assigned by looking at how learners accrue skills and develop competences in completing assigned learning tasks, although they focus primarily on linguistic competence (Derwing & Waugh, 2012, Citizenship and Immigration Canada 2015).

NorQuest College’s LINC program during the time of my field work was located at two rather different campuses. The Westmount campus, housed in an old elementary school, and LINC’s original home, was small, cramped and slightly dilapidated, yet homey. It still accommodated a large number of staff and students, many of whom were fiercely loyal to Westmount and slightly dismissive of LINC’s more glamorous downtown cousin, the main NorQuest College campus. The latter housed not only selected LINC courses but also other vocational educations such as Nursing and Business Administration in a modern College environment.

Staff regarded the “Westmount enclave” as too paternalistic and stifling.

Instead, they lauded the student diversity and the integration of LINC within a post-secondary educational environment as facilitating student societal inclusion.¹⁵ In the past, the largest group of LINC students were university educated, though their numbers have now been clearly declining while the numbers of students with 0 to 9 years of education are increasing.

The main countries of student origin were China, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Republics from the former Soviet Union, and these also represented the bulk of participants in my group interviews. Many were unemployed but seeking work and there was a clear upward trend in terms of students’

part-time employment. The majority of those working, commonly within the cleaning and retail sectors, had career aspirations in Health Care and other related fields, something which NorQuest readily encouraged in an effort to funnel students into its other vocational streams after they graduated from LINC or ESL.

The program was structured around three educational streams:

foundational/literacy, building academic skills, and basic studies in order to allow students of the same educational background to be grouped together.

Thus, literacy or foundational classes included students having 0-9 years of

15 At the time of publication, all NorQuest LINC programs have been moved to the downtown campus and Westmount has been closed.

education while regular integration stream classes comprised those with more than 10 years of formal schooling. LINC studies sought to help students improve their English proficiency, as well as develop intercultural, teamwork and IT skills. Unlike the Finnish SFI courses, however, obligatory work placement periods for all participating students were not an integral part of LINC. Work practice components were restricted to specialized courses like the Work Volunteer Program¹⁶, available to limited amounts of students who had to undergo a vetting process prior to being accepted. In recognition of the varied life situations of students, however, NorQuest College offered a wide range of LINC incarnations including full and part time studies, day and evening courses, as well as specialized classes organised in flexible time schedules to accommodate employed students, daytime care givers etc. In fact, all courses contained various synchronous, asynchronous and online learning strategies. An added benefit was the existence of a comprehensive net of student support services in recognition of the special needs and challenges faced by adult migrant students, many with family, work, daycare and transnational commitments. These included career counselors, settlement or social workers, and student advisors.

A task and outcomes-based educational approach emphasizing applied knowledge and skills rather than content serves as the focal point of NorQuest LINC’s pedagogical strategy (Lefebvre 2014). One outcome of this emphasis on applied, “real-life” skills has been the adoption of Portfolio-Based Learning Assessments (PBLA) as the foundation for curricular development. As an ideal, PBLAs have been conceived of as tools to empower students to take greater ownership of their learning and ways for teachers to re-conceptualize “learning” relationships in line with more horizontal power dynamics. They emphasize a collaborative approach where educators and students jointly set language-learning goals, collect evidence of competences in individual portfolios, and reflect on students’

learning progress over time. Curricular theme choices such as Canadian Politics & Law, Health Care and Employment, among others, are to be negotiated and decided upon in student groups. The agreed upon themes are then constructed around the four skill areas of Listening, Speaking,

16 Eligibility was restricted to c. 20 students who need to demonstrate a language competence CLB 4 level, pass an introductory interview and undergo a police check.

Reading, and Writing and reframed as “real-life skills” to facilitate students’

adoption into their communities and spheres of employment (Pettis 2014).

It must be added, however, that although LINC federal curricular documents only present “suggested” topics as well as teaching aides. How prescriptive these “suggestions” actually are is critically debated (Gibb 2008, Morgan 2009). Topic selection, structure and implementation, however, do leave a great deal of room for interpretation and experimentation. Moreover, given the various provincial manifestations of LINC; integration educations and curricula can vary widely from province to province or even from school to school.

In presenting myself and my research in introductory staff sessions at NorQuest, I solicited participants among teachers, administrators and support personnel who had been working a number of years within LINC in order to benefit from their wealth of experience and expertise.

Ultimately, this cooperation yielded 22 in-depth interviews with predominantly white female staff members. However, two of the participants were male and a further two were visible minority staff members, though in general staff from non-white backgrounds were clearly under-represented. Four participants had administrative positions within the program, two represented support personnel and the rest taught in LINC at various CLB levels. As far as my student participants were concerned, I observed three student groups comprised of 25 students each, as well as the Work Volunteer program which included the only work life practice component. It had 12 remaining participants, with the rest having dropped out for various reasons. The students generally operated at a CLB level of 3-5, indicating that most spoke English reasonably fluently, could cope with a modicum of language complexity and had basic competences in writing and reading. I alternated my presence in these groups over a six-week period in July and August of 2015 which culminated in 9 group interviews with 46 students near the end of the participant observation period. They represented a wide international cross-section dominated by students from Eastern and Northern Africa as well as Asia. Though female students were slightly overrepresented, the interview groups consisted of a relatively even mix of genders. The vast bulk of my daily time was spent at the Westmount campus. Student group interviews and observations transpired there as well as many staff interviews owning to the fact that the

majority of participating teachers and support personnel were employed at Westmount. However, I shuttled back and forth between the downtown campus and Westmount quite frequently for meetings and interviews with some administrators and teachers, coming to appreciate the unique differences and similarities of each working environment. These repositionings also aided my reflections in analyzing my data (see Methodology chapter).