The Secondary Schooling Transnational Nexus: Student and Educator Reflections Beyond and Within the Nation

This dissertation qualitatively examines how Greater Toronto Area (GTA) secondary schools are responding to the ongoing ties (transnational connections) some students and their families maintain to their place(s) of origin. Interview participants comprised transnational recent graduates of GTA secondary schools and educators, encompassing both teachers and administrators. “Transnationalism” was defined in terms of both behavioural and attitudinal characteristics. Interviewees were located in the public and private school systems, and included migrants with and without papers. Social class was conceived of and explored as a critical and decisive mediating factor (as well as a lens for analysis) in experiences of transnationalism in the GTA. The data were organized to elucidate themes at the levels of individuals and families, schools and institutions, and in terms of policy implications. Key findings include: that when students travel to their sending societies for ongoing periods there are disconnections at school that some teachers consider a threat while others see as an opportunity; that as families are increasingly transnationally reconfigured and some students’ parents or family members travel continually to their home country there can be difficulties in supervision at home which have reverberations at school; and finally, that when there are ongoing direct contacts with the home country, including both travel and new modes of communication, this may create knowledge and vivid experiences for transnational youth, leading to more difficult adjustment problems in secondary schools than has been typical for immigrant youth in the past. As well, the data suggest that within the GTA, there is a tension between the extent to which schools can and should accommodate transnational students and their families, and the extent to which transnational students and families ought to assimilate to the pre-existing (but changeable) assumptions and requirements embedded within the secondary schooling system as it stands.Ph.D