Resources for Teachers Working with Students from Immigrant Families

Many children from recent immigrant families face special challenges in school – cultural, language and social. Those challenges become their teachers’ challenges. The Canadian Multicultural Education Foundation and the Alberta Teachers’ Association are developing a series of resources that will be useful to teachers as they work with students and their parents from immigrant families.

The first two publications in the series address the challenges of working with Somali-Canadian and South Sudanese-Canadian students. Each resource is developed by teachers and community resource people with the assistance of a professional development consultant. The teachers and community resource people worked in two teams, each team deciding what kind of resource it would develop that could meet the needs of Somali students, their parents, and the schools they attend. The teams worked Saturdays and evenings over a period of two months.