Holding spaces : geographies of Filipino-Canadian students' educational experiences

This thesis is concerned with the educational aspirations and outcomes of Filipino-Canadian youth. Rendered by scholars as an anomaly to established patterns of academic achievement, integration, and social mobility among immigrants in Canada, children of first generation Filipino immigrants are neither meeting nor exceeding the levels of education attained by their parents. While a framing concerned with outcomes is useful for signaling issues around the integration of immigrants in Canada, there remains a need to interrogate how and where Filipino students are produced as different. This thesis seeks to explore ways of approaching the question of how to make sense of the less-than-expected educational achievements and outcomes of Filipino-Canadian youth. Based on interviews and focus groups with 46 Filipino high school students from two different Vancouver public high schools, I attend to the ways in which Filipino youth negotiate both time and space in their transnational and educational experiences. The thesis deals with the particular geographies in Filipino-Canadian students' experiences migrating to, and/or growing up in Canada, and their lives as high school students. In particular, I focus on spaces in the students' transnational and high school lives that can highlight conditions that help to shape their educational aspirations and trajectories.Arts, Faculty ofGeography, Department ofGraduat