Project Overview
This project examines how newcomer youth in a rural Canadian high school navigate the intersections of language, race, culture, religion, and identity while learning English and adapting to their educational and social environments. It explores how multilingual and multimodal literacy practices can create spaces for students to articulate their identities, experiences of inequality, and sense of belonging.
Learning English for newcomer youth is not simply a process of acquiring another language. It is closely entangled with questions of race, culture, religion, migration, identity, and belonging.
Situated in a rural high school in Western Canada with a growing newcomer population, this project investigates how students construct, renegotiate, and resist their multiple and intersecting identities while learning English and navigating Canadian schooling. It examines how students’ home languages, racial and ethnic identities, cultures, and religions shape their language-learning experiences and interactions within school and community spaces.
The project also shifts attention from the challenges newcomer students encounter to the linguistic, cultural, and experiential resources they bring with them. In doing so, it seeks to understand how schools, teachers, peers, families, and community members can contribute to more equitable educational experiences and stronger social and emotional support for newcomer youth.
Project at a Glance
Funding: ELEVATE Pilot Research Grant, Werklund Office of Research, University of Calgary
Principal Investigator: Dr. Rahat Zaidi, University of Calgary
Co-Investigator: Dr. Pramod K. Sah, University of Calgary
Collaborator: Michelle Veroba, Brooks Composite High School
Location: Alberta, Canada
Research Context: Newcomer students in a rural Canadian high school
Research Focus
Intersectional Racism · Linguistic & Racial Justice · Arts-Based Pedagogy · Newcomer ESL Students· Canada
Research Questions
01
What role do multilingual and multimodal resources play in developing an understanding of intersectionality and learning English as an additional language?
02
To what extent do newcomer youth articulate a sense of identity through community and school interactions in relation to the process of learning English?
Research in Action
The project adopts “workshop as a research methodology,” using participatory and generative activities to explore students’ lived experiences and create opportunities for reflection and dialogue.
The workshops engage newcomer students from several linguistic communities, including Arabic, Somali, Oromo, Mandarin, and Tagalog backgrounds, through three interconnected activities:
Identity Texts
Students create multilingual and multimodal texts that allow them to represent their identities, experiences, languages, and relationships with their new social environments.
Dual-Language Book Reading
Dual-language books, read with an ESL teacher and community members, provide opportunities to stimulate memories and conversations about language, culture, identity, migration, and belonging.
Walking Narratives
Students walk through spaces within and beyond the school while narrating experiences associated with particular places, allowing them to reflect on identity, resilience, belonging, and their encounters with their new environments.
Publications & Outputs
Zaidi, R., & Sah, P. K. (2025). “Just make them feel welcomed”: Examining newcomer ESL students’ intersectional nature of racism in Canadian schools. International Multilingual Research Journal, 19(2), 173-190. https://doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2025.2476838
Zaidi, R., & Sah, P. K. (2024). Multilingual and multimodal literacy interventions to explore youth’s intersectional identities and racialized experiences: A scoping review. SAGE Open, 14(1), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440241228122
Zaidi, R., & Sah, P. K. (2024). Workshop as a collaborative research method for critically engaged literacy practices of immigrant youth. Presented at AILA (International Association of Applied Linguistics), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, August 11-16.
Zaidi, R., & Sah, P. K. (2024). Race, language, religion, and gender: Newcomer students’ stories of intersectional racism in Canadian schools. AERA Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 11-14.
Zaidi, R., & Sah, P. K. (2023). Multilingual and multimodal narratives to explore intersectional identities and experiences of racialized youth in Canada. Literacy Research Association’s 73rd Annual Conference, Atlanta, GA, November 29 – December 2.
Zaidi, R., & Sah, P. K. (2023). Critically engaged literacy workshop: Examining newcomer students’ intersectionality in Canadian schools. ACLA-CALL Conference, Toronto, May 27-29.