The Relevance of Connectivity and Spatiality

 

                      to Identity Formation and Citizenship Relationships

 

                                           at School and Elsewhere :

 

                          Canadian Youth's Constructions of Self and Others

 

 

 

                                                  Yvonne Hébert and Christine Racicot

                                                              University of Calgary

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                       WORKING DRAFT

 

 

 

 

 

                                                             Presentation within the

 

                                      Symposium on Citizenship Education and Identity

 

                                                                          at the

 

                                       Fourth International Metropolis Conference

                                             December 7-12, 1999 in Washington, D.C.

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

            In modernity, the construction of identities became an individual task and responsibility, as in a lifelong project, 'un projet de vie'^[1], which required a reliability of contexts in which the whole was greater than the self.  Today, however, youth live in an uncertain postmodern world characterized by several social trends, such as major environmental pressures, globalization, multiples centres of power, changing North American relations, population ageing, social differentiation, technological change and value change.^[2] Taken all together, these major pressures and changes reveal an absence of visible structure and logic especially in terms of the unrelenting pressure of global harmonization, by universal deregulation dominated by  irrational and immoral market competition, by the weakening of safety nets once afforded by families, neighbourhoods and communities, and by an essential interdeterminacy of the world.^[3]  In meeting what are considerable challenges, immigrant youth are required to live with others as strangers on a daily basis and to reconstruct themselves in an on-going process in new contexts. Yet questions arise about how young people actualize themselves, especially when the distinctions between self and others need to be constantly constructed and reconstructed in this uncertain context. 

 

In Canada, a country constructed over time by waves of immigrants wherein each one was constructed as strangers by the previously established inhabitants,^[4] the required reliability of stable and certain contexts may never have existed even during modernity. Nonetheless, over time, difference and pluralism have come to be  considered as an inherently valuable social good,  worthy of protection in state policy and law.^[5]  Allowing for the transversal nature of current social changes, a plurality of ways of belonging, and a multiplicity of groupings, this context, created by a modern state but actualized within an increasingly postmodern one, may not be sufficiently stable and embedding for the uncertainty is permanent and irreducible.^[6]  In this complex context, we wonder how youth are creating themselves, as persons and as citizens, amidst a plurality of identities and cultural groupings in the Canadian multicultural society.^[7] More specifically, we wonder how immigrant youth are constructing themselves and how they are learning to engage in civil and social participation in Canadian society. And finally, we wonder how the construction of youthful selves  and of others, in uncertain postmodern contexts, could inform educational policy and practices.

 

What is Identity?

 

The concept of identity refers to an individual's sense of uniqueness, of knowing who one is and who one is not, developed in dynamic interaction between self and others. The development of a stable sense of identity is one of the central processes of adolescence, moving from childhood into adulthood. Immigration calls upon individuals to re-construct themselves in a new society and identity formation is key to integration. As newcomers, facing unfamiliar languages, spaces, and interaction patterns, children and adolescents must go to unfamiliar schools and try to make a place for themselves.

Well-accepted definitions of identity includes several components of interest to us: the view of identity as a dynamic continuous process that is aimed at individual uniqueness, the location of this development within a group having a shared sense of community or peoplehood; and the realization that this involves multiple identifications as well as multiple social, psychological and cultural dimensions.^[8]  This definition also allows for the development of a national identity, representing relationships among citizens as well as between citizens and the state, an important dimension of identity which includes elements of civic and societal culture, heritage, allegiance and patriotism.^[9]

 

The understanding of cultural contexts of identity formation has also been modified over time, moving away from being perceived as a complex whole, manifested in fixed social structures, in stereotypical patterns of thought, action and beliefs, in the way of life of a people, in the processes of adaptation to the environment, in the inculcation of the youth, with no need for an active subject at all.^[10] Instead, culture has come to be viewed as being the ability to take meaningful intersubjective action, involving an active, context-orientated appropriation of knowledge and significations within a framework of guided participation.^[11]  Set in today's world which may be viewed as a single horizontal and vertical field of socio-economic interaction, with uneven distribution of power,^[12] conceptions of culture make room for change as implicit and fluid, to yield a concept of flowing cultural complexity, much like a river, forever changing within perimeters of space and time.^[13]  Within this modified new understanding of culture, identity is constructed and reconstructed through social and political practices, and the integration process involves weaving elements from social fields of origin and of the host country, to create a new self constantly and unendingly undergoing further modification.

 

In light of social and cultural transformations, the hope of postmodernity lies in the possibilities for moving beyond disputes of all kinds, having deconstructed these for greater understanding. Thus could be revealed conditions of individual freedom which transcend the deeply rooted centrism and other limitations of nation-states, of ethnicities, of tribes; as well as the sole essence of human universality with its foci on individual choice, and on ultimate personal responsibility for that choice, and on states' recognition of the right to choose.^[14]

 

Research Project and Methodology

 

Our on-going research project intends (a) to examine adolescents' process of identity  formation, with particular attention to strategic, spatial, associative, discursive and developmental practices, in a variety of school and life situations, (b) to analyze their strategic competence within this process, and (c) to understand the links between strategic competence as an integral part of identity formation and theories of culture and alterity.^[15] Set in a western Canadian city, Calgary which receives more school-age immigrant youth per capita than any other Canadian city,^[16] our project focused in year one on the spatial and associative practices revealed in adolescents' maps or representations of spaces occupied at school and elsewhere, in sociograms (networks of friends and associates), in geneograms (family trees), as well as in open-ended and exploratory interviews in walkabouts. For the purposes of this paper, we focus upon the data in the form of drawings of

spaces which research participants occupy at school and elsewhere, referring to other forms of data as needed to provide additional insight into emerging patterns.

 

Situated within qualitative and interpretative paradigms, the data was collected by two research assistants, in five sessions, four of which were in focus groups, with a total of sixty-seven student participants during Winter-Spring 1999.^[17]  The first session brought participants together to develop a profile for each one and to invite discussion of their journey to Canada, their views on Canadian citizenship and life, as well as issues related to group and family membership. A second session focused on the construction of the geneograms (family trees) followed by a discussion of family histories and relations. A third session followed a similar pattern, focusing on the preparation of sociograms (maps of their friendships) and a discussion of friendship. Inviting participants to draw a map of the spaces which they occupy at school and elsewhere,^[18] through the use of pastels on large sheets of paper, the fourth session concluded with a verbal description of these spaces and commentary on their importance and significance. A fifth and final session featured a video-recorded walkabout these spaces, led by and sometimes recorded by the student participants themselves, singly or in pairs.

 

As part of the research process, analysis and interpretations of these rich, nuanced, graphic and discursive data began during the data collecting period and continued during Fall 1999, with a statistical analysis by means of SPSS as well as visual and content analyses. This paper offers our preliminary, exploratory understandings, as informed researchers, of the spatial elements, informed by the participants' recorded descriptions and discussion of their maps.

 

Profile of the Participants     

 

Sixty-two student participants from eight Calgary junior and senior high schools completed maps of their spaces. Of these, the gender distribution is nearly identical, with thirty males and thirty-two females. Approximately eighty-five percent of these participants were in the ninth grade at the time of the study; the other fifteen percent were tenth graders. Eighty-seven percent of the students are either fourteen or fifteen years old whereas the remaining thirteen percent are either sixteen or seventeen years old. 

 

The diversity of Calgary's immigrant population in Calgary is reflected in the demographic indicators, in terms of countries of origin, language fluency, categorical status in Canada, and religious affiliation. Participants originate from twenty-eight countries, with almost half coming from East Asia (e.g. People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Korea). South Asian and Middle Eastern countries contribute about fifteen percent each to our student participants. Every one indicates that he or she speaks at least two languages, with nearly sixty percent identifying facility with three or more languages. Nearly eighty percent say their strongest language is something other than English or French, the two official languages of Canada. More than half of them (fifty-five percent) have been in Canada for four years or less. Roughly thirteen percent of the participants have spent more than half their lives (i.e. seven or more years) in Canada. Three of the sixty-two students possess either refugee or visitor status. By far (i.e. sixty percent), most students' legal status is 'landed immigrant,' with the remaining (i.e. thirty-four percent) holding Canadian citizenship. Ninety-two percent of students are religiously affiliated to various groups, with Catholics, Christians, and Muslims each comprising twenty percent or more of the sample (24%, 20%, and 28%, respectively) whereas nearly ten percent claim no religious affiliation.

 

Three Essential Concepts for Analysis

 

To analyze these data and to arrive at the very core of the construction of self in relationship with others, we reach beyond the usual categories such as ethnicity, language and religion, in recognition of the socially constructed nature of these categories within modernity and of their limited explanatory value for and insightfulness into underlying processes of lived experience. Instead, we call upon more fluid organizing concepts such as connectivity, boundedness and spatiality, all having extent and duration, as plausibly central to dynamic processes of identity formation which include the development of a sense of belonging, in this case, of becoming Canadian.

 

The first concept, connectivity, refers to the quality of being connected to oneself and to others, in a general and specific sense. Of particular interest to the analytic concept of connectivity are the sub-concepts of immediacy and ubiquity, where the former occurs in time and refers to the conscious quality and content of being immediate, of being free from intervention, and of direct presence. The latter notion, ubiquity, occurs in space and refers to the quality of being present in more than one place at the same time.

 

The second analytic concept, boundedness, refers to the physical and symbolic quality of being bounded, of being confined or restricted, of having limits, and of enclosure. Boundaries as forms of inclusivity serve as protection from the outside, define who is included and who is not, and may offer a symbiotic sense of organic, psychologically inner and even monastic cell, which is an integral part of the individual while being dissimilar. The boundaries themselves may be airtight and watertight, that is, characterized by their permeability.

 

Defined as the quality of pertaining to space,  spatiality as a third analytic concept refers to the private-public nature and use of spaces, to the staking out of places and territories as one's own, and to the visibility and ambiguity of self and others in those spaces. By their iconic nature, these three concepts are analytically promising for they pertain to qualities which are intrinsic to the processes of identity formation, as to construct and reconstruct themselves, youth require to negotiate connections to a variety of others, be they friends, acquaintances or family members; need to have boundaries set for them and to set limits for themselves and others; and enact their construction in living spaces.

 

 

Making Connections: The Salience of Immediacy

 

The most striking feature of the group of drawings of participants' spaces is the way the recently emigrated represent their experiences in Canada, compared with participants who have resided in the country for nearly half their lives or longer. According to analyses set in modernity, it is well-established that, for many, the immigration process is wrought with major cultural adjustments and upheavals. Social ties from the originating country may be often severed or truncated while new languages and patterns of social interaction must be learned to assimilate successfully with mainstream groups. Regression analyses of this data indicate that the single best predictor for determining whether students represent friends in their drawings is length of time in Canada. Contrary to expectation, there is an inverse relation between the length of time lived in Canada and the representation of friends in drawings, as representative of connectivity in the form of social ties. For participants who have lived in Canada for six or more years, just over thirty percent definitively represent their friends. By comparison, however, seventy-five percent of those who have lived in Canada less than six years draw friends in their drawings. To establish the representation of friends in drawings, as opposed to random, generic people or family members, we turned to sociograms and interview discussions so as to definitively identify the representation of friends in the various elements of their maps or drawings. This pattern suggests that having friends is a matter of considerable immediacy to the newly arrived.

 

Source of Friends. This raises a question however about whether the friends represented in the drawings of  participants who have lived in Canada for a short period are overwhelmingly friends from their original countries. Given the challenges of adapting to a new culture, this indeed would be expected since it would suggest that recent emigrants find solace in maintaining social networks from their countries of origin.  However, our drawings suggest different patterns. Not only are the recently arrived more likely to represent friends in their drawings, they are also more likely than other participants who have lived longer in Canada (i.e. greater than five years) to represent specifically friends in explicitly Canadian contexts. Forty-one percent of the participants who have lived in the country less than five years represent Canadian friends in their pictures compared with less than twenty-nine percent of those who have lived more than five years in Canada. Nonetheless, approximately one quarter of those who have resided in this country for less than five years choose to represent friends from their countries of origin, and none from Canada.  Less than fifteen percent of this group do not represent friends at all while less than ten percent of the participants situate friends in both Canada and their origin countries. With the remaining group of drawings, it was not possible to distinguish friends from non-friends. The patterns are strongly distinguished from the drawing patterns associated with participants who have resided in Canada between five and twelve years. Sixty-two percent of this group do not represent any friends in their pictures, and none represent friends in both Canadian and non-Canadian contexts.  

 

Friendship as Critical Strategy for Survival. These findings suggest several possibilities about the role social connections play in helping participants become integrated as actual or future Canadian citizens. We suggest that recently arrived participants must adopt critical strategies for social survival in their new countries which psychologically orient them towards feeling connected to their new environments.  Recently emigrated participants might be more likely than others explicitly to situate friends in Canadian contexts because the role of friends and social networks in their lives are manifestly more important. These immediate connections can be less taken for granted as newly arrived youth attempt to forge social ties among often already well-established social networks.

 

One strategy that facilitates attunement to a new social environment is a demonstration of one's solidarity with peers. This is important for showing others that one is amiable and open to new friendships while also reassuring oneself, perhaps at a non-deliberate level, that one can succeed and 'feel at home' in the new environment. Students who have spent most of their lives here, even though they may have stronger and wider networks of friends, are more confident in their sense of social incorporation and feel less of a collective need to demonstrate proof of the immediacy of their connectivity. Moreover, having friends in more than one place, which refers to the ubiquitous nature of friendship, among the recently arrived and those who have been here more than five years is considerably less significant.

 

Multiple Ways of Belonging. Feeling connected to one's social setting does not necessarily entail greater commitment to making friends beyond one's group of origin and making links with Canadian youth. Of the participants who have lived in Canada for less then three years, seventy-five percent list as their closest friends members of the same ethnic group. While it is possible that this means that these youth are forming 'minority enclave' mentalities that are de facto segregated from members of different ethnic or cultural backgrounds, it is more likely that these youth are simply protecting and securing themselves from overwhelming assimilation into the Canadian mainstream by selecting friends who resemble them in some way, one of the common and usual criteria for the choice of friends.^[19] This interpretation is also consistent with allowing for differentiated identities which evoke a plurality of ways of being Canadian, recognized in policy and in law, as well as in multiple discourses.^[20]

 

Although one might be tempted to claim that recently immigrated youth who represent friends in Canadian contexts are more socially incorporated than those who draw friends in non-Canadian contexts or who do not represent friends at all, our data does not support an analysis of degree of integration. What the data does show is that, as an organizing constructive concept, connectivity intersects with inclusive boundedness, so as to have friends in the new setting but to preferentially select them from within one's own group, thus making oneself available for acceptance while preserving a sense of belonging to one's origins.

 

Connectivity and Weaving of Cultural Elements. What does strongly appear to be the case is that after five years upon arrival to Canada, the salience of social connections which participants maintain to their origin countries wane, regardless of gender, religion or indicators of introversion in the drawings. Their ethnic pride may still be substantial, but the emotional connections to specific people in those countries lessens. None of the participants who emigrated to Canada more than five years before situate friends in other countries. That this group of participants is also less likely to represent friends of any sort in their pictures than the more recently arrived participants, can be interpreted against the context of the other findings in several ways. The most implausible, it seems to us, is that the cohort of participants who emigrated to Canada between five and twelve years ago are by nature less sociable than the more recently arrived youth. A second, more compelling interpretation underscores the symbolic nature in which recently arrived participants use the representation of their friends in drawings as co-optative strategies for negotiating acceptance, or possibly a willingness for acceptance, among peers. A third possible interpretation is that the absence of representation of any friends in drawings may reflect a sense of alienation, evolving over several years of trying to reconcile becoming incorporated into the social fabric while attempting to perform justice to one's sense of ethnic heritage. Supported by informal conversations with ESL and heritage language teachers, a fourth and more plausible interpretation is that these youngsters feel reasonably secure in their acceptance and can afford to take their friends for granted as their attention is taken by other more salient factors, suggestive of joint overlapping phenomena, of the recurring construction of friendship and of a variable weaving of cultural elements into their self-identification process.

 

Self and Family. The striking feature about the representation of self in the drawings is that as students grow older, they are less apt to put themselves in their own drawings. Eighty-four percent of the fourteen-year olds represent themselves in their own drawing, compared with 73 % of the fifteen-year olds and approximately 63% of the sixteen and seventeen year olds. This is however understandable in terms of developmental stages, for it is in the early adolescent years that egocentrism is at its height, as youngsters cope with the passage from childhood to adulthood, when individuals are expected to be able to delay gratification and to care others and important tasks rather than continuing to focus upon themselves. This supports the fourth interpretation offered above, for student participants who have been in Canada for 5-12 years which suggests that with time, participants tend to feel secure in themselves, to take friends for granted and to turn to the acquisition and mastery of other cultural elements as part of a life-long process of (re)construction of self.

 

Spatiality: The Salience of Public Spaces

 

Mapping the spaces which the student participants occupy requires an analysis of the nature and enactment of these places, for identity formation as persons and also as citizens. Of particular interest is the applicability of analytic concepts such as territoriality of public and private spaces, of real and imagined places, as well as the permeability of boundaries and the fluidity of movement .

 

Consumerism, Convenience and Churches. The most common feature across the drawings is the representation of what may be termed public spaces: movie cinemas, TV/music, stores or malls, restaurants, convenience stores, places of worship and homes, as well as computers as windows into virtual space and time, and video games/arcades, cutting across variables of school, age, grade, religion, ethnicity, time in country, legal status, gender, and most fluent language. The best predictive factor of the presence of movie cinemas in the drawings is legal status. Nearly 30% of the Canadian citizens represent cinemas, compared to only 8% of the landed immigrants, and 0% of the refugees or visitors. Of the students who claim either Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, or Urdu as their strongest language, one-third of them represent churches, compared with 15% of those who claim English as their most fluent language. And most strikingly, every student but one put a convenience store in her or her drawing.

 

Representing this generally as an immediate and salient response to the pervasiveness of consumerism in North American societies, the presence of the convenience story is telling. Such an establishment represents an ease of access and availability, to a public space which student citizens may occupy with little question, resistance or contestation; however, it may also provide a real and imaginary link to the marketplace, one in which family fortunes would determine direct participation, for a student may loiter briefly in a convenience store without actually making any purchases, even minor ones. Thus, the store, an aptly named convenience, may well represent a wished-for link to the riches and fortunes of mythical proportion in the new land.

 

The distribution of cinemas according to categorical status in Canada lends support to such a symbolic analysis of the convenience store, as families in the refugee class may well be expected to have less disposable income which would permit their youth paying admission to see movies, however ubiquitous and attractive these may be. In contrast, the families of Canadian citizens, having been in the country at least three years and more, are more likely to have such disposable income and favourable dispositions. Similarly, the representation of computers by six students, five of whom are Asians, whereas over 90% of the Canadian citizens do not have computers represented is indicative of the symbolic status of the computer among Asians.

 

The significance of the link between the practice of religious beliefs and an Asian or South Asian mother tongue, is two-fold. On the one hand, it is representative of the visibility of recent immigrants to Canada and of a strong religious tradition as part of cultural elements of origin. Secondly, it is indicative of the strength of bond between languages of prayer and a central cultural value placed on religion, as speakers of these languages would tend to be Buddhist, Sikh, or Muslims, all religions characterized by strong adherents or faith believers.

 

Significance of Schools. The most predictive factors for determining whether a school will be represented in a participant's drawing is, in order of significance, that person's religion, ethnicity, and the school attended. Over 83% of the Christian students represent schools in their drawings, compared to only 36% of all the Catholic students. Sixty percent of the Muslim students represent schools in their drawings. All of the Buddhist, Hindu, and Punjabi participants draw schools in their pictures, but their numbers are too small for plausible generalizations.  Only one-third of the participants from the Americas (North, South, Central) and Europe represented a school in their drawings while over 60% of the Asians put schools in their drawings (68% for the East Asians, 60% for the South Asians). All of the students in School L in the public school district represented schools in their drawings and the majority of students in two of the Catholic junior high schools (M, N) included their schools. By comparison, none of the students at School P in the Catholic school district represented their schools, nor did four out of five students at a high school (R) in the southeast quadrant of the city, a highly concentrated immigrant receiving area. Participants at other schools did not have sufficient numbers for plausible generalization.

 

Whether or not the school is a public space or a semi-public one,^[21] reveals its liminal and yet bridging status, linking home and society, and serving as training ground for student-citizens.

In three of the schools, most of the participants, if not all, represented their school in the maps of their spaces, although the instructions provided to all the groups clearly indicated that they should include the places where they spend their time. It is probably reasonable to conclude that these three schools are particularly welcoming and comfortable places for a diversity of students.  As far as we can tell, from our data, this appears be the case because of the presence of particularly warm, strong, fair and caring individuals, either a principal or a teacher. As for the apparent link between religion and the representation of schools, it is tempting to suggest that some religions more than others place a central value on education; however, additional data on these cultures would be necessary to draw such a conclusion.

 

The use of common places such as  libraries as gathering places for many of the research participants or of a particular classroom is distinguished by factors of ethnicity and gender, as well as by participants' grade and school. Every single person who included a library in his or her school is East Asian. Additionally, all library drawings in Schools L and M were done by students in the ninth grade, this in a Canadian province which administers system-wide final examinations of considerable importance, as these exams determine whether or not the student continues on to high school. Moreover, almost 40% of the East Asian females drew libraries, compared to 13% of East Asian males. Thus, among these East Asian students, libraries are valued as they are understood to be places where one can enhance one's own educational attainments and future prospects, especially in schools with strong, caring figures among the teaching staff and administrators.

 

Private Uses of Public Spaces. Just as the school libraries are used for personal gain and advantage, the importance of the small cafés and restaurants for a number of students, especially females (ADDITIONAL INFO PLEASE), reflects the private use of public spaces, for it is around small tables that the females narrate themselves, share their sorrows and tribulations, seek solace and comfort amongst each other. The males tend to talk about sports while valuing the bonding that occurs in the use of these public places.  (QUOTES??) 

 

Athletic spaces are also featured in the drawings, influenced by gender, ethnicity and religion, in order of importance. Eighty percent of the boys compared with 41 % of the girls represent athletic spaces. Of these, Asians (41% of South Asians and 61 % of East Asians) are less likely to represent athletic spaces than members of other ethnic groups, for 80% of the non-Asians include such spaces in their drawings. Moreover, 71% of Catholics and 75 % of Christians are more likely to put athletic spaces in their drawings than students adhering to other religious groups. A refinement on these distributions of cultural elements comes with those who represent themselves as actively engaged in playing sports, where a student's ethnicity is the most significant variable. Over 44% of the Middle Easterners show themselves playing a sport, compared with 33 % of students from Europe, the United States, or Central and South America. Eleven percent of the East Asians and 20% of the South Asians represent themselves as playing sports. Neither of the two Africans drew themselves as playing a sport. While the overlap  between ethnicity, religion and sports is notable, what is salient here is the reinforcement of previously existing bonds and the establishment of social engagement and participation, created with team sports played out in public places. This, in terms of the current discourses on citizenship engagement,^[22] is of considerable importance, as it also creates inclusions and exclusions among student-citizens, who does not bode well for future civil\civic, political and social participation in adult life.

 

Travel and Fluidity. Student participants from nearly every religion and most fluent language category represent travel and other places in their pictures, whereas legal status and length of residence in Canada are not significant factors. Thus, one cannot claim that travel is most salient to recent arrivals. The ubiquitous nature of travel and other places, as part of the lived experiences of these youth, does however support an analysis of the permeability of boundaries with lived movement across real or imagined lines, and of the fluidity of the construction and reconstruction of self, taking into the weaving cultural elements from a range of sources and streams of consciousness.  (PUT IN DRAWING OF KID WITH RIVERS, AMONG OTHERS, SOME WITH TROPICAL SETTINGS).

 

Bedrooms as Territorial Cells. Surprisingly, 43% of the Catholic students draw their own bedrooms, compared to less than 17% of the Christian and 25% of the Muslim student participants. Almost all of the Middle Eastern students (eight out of nine) chose not to represent their own bedrooms. The relationship between religion and the representation of one's own bedroom is elusive; however, based upon some of the discursive data, it is plausible to suggest that this is linked to an issue of control of territoriality, and perhaps sexuality.  (QUOTES ABOUT WHO TO LET IN....). 

 

Moreover, the control of sexuality is a salient feature of two of the religions noted above, the Catholic and the Muslim religions; however, the difference between them in regards to the home may be relevant, for it is at home that the Muslim females may relax and remove the hijab, a religious practice which may be linked to the lesser importance of the bedroom as cell for the Muslim participants. Among the Catholics however, the control of sexuality even and perhaps especially in private spaces remains important, which may also influence the representation of 'own bedrooms' among almost half of these participants.

Physical Environment. Given Calgary's location, nestled in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies and famous for its skyline which reported resembles New York's, at least enough to attract the film industry, nature scenes feature frequently in the drawings. Four students included cityscapes, three of whom are female, all either fourteen or fifteen at the time of data collection. Of those who included nature in their picture, often in an idealized form, those who have been in Canada for the shortest period of time were most likely to do so. Seventy-three % of those who hold either landed immigrant, refugee or visitor status draw nature scenes in their pictures, compared with 43 % of those who are Canadian citizens. Nature representations are also significantly determined by the school attended. Seven out of eight students at School M drew nature scenes, in comparison with two of eight at either School L or P. Half or almost half of those at Schools R and Q included nature scenes in their drawings, as did 62% of students at School N.

 

Given the configuration of influencing factors, it is possible that the physical environment is most salient for the recently arrived for two reasons, both related to the geographical location of the city or country of origin and that of the host city. Moving from a tropical location to one in an northern clime, even a city whose winter snows are frequently melted by warm dry Chinook winds emanating from the Japanese current coming over the Rockies, is likely to be a drastic change, sensitizing young people to the influence, particularities and variability of climate.

 

Thus, spatiality is realized in a wide range of elements in the drawings, giving credence to the distinction between private and public spaces in which adolescent immigrants create themselves, valuing market places, schools and particularly their libraries, playing fields, travel, one's own bedroom, cityscapes and other natural phenomena.

 

Conclusion

 

The analysis and interpretation of the spatial and associative data of these immigrant youth underlines the salience of two of three concepts, that of connectivity and of spatiality.  Making friends as an immediate way of establishing self as open and willing to make connections in the new context appears to be a winning strategy, one to be facilitated in policies and practices designed to facilitate the integration of recently arrived student immigrants as future citizens of Canada.

 

The enactment of friendships in a private way in public spaces leads one to question however, just how youngsters already in their mid-teens are to learn to participate in public life, as participating in civic, political and social activities are not reported in the data. It is suggested that school content that focuses upon history without including attention to the geographical basis of citizenship and the collective nature of participation would be insufficient to assure the future life of citizens. 

 

Thus, spatiality in its most visible, active and territorial forms serves to strengthen the saliency of connectivity and its immediacy in supportive friendships and team sports, as these are enacted within public spaces. Given the limitations on participation, what is to be facilitated here is general participation as a means of establishing the basis of civic, political and social participation in future years.

 

 

Endnotes