Valuing English: An Ethnography of a Federal Language Training Program for Adult Immigrants

by Laura Cleghorn

| Table of Contents/Chapter 1 |  Chapter 2  |  Chapter 3  |  Chapter 4  |  Conclusion  |

The everyday occurrences of the LINC program take place beneath the overarching organizational structure of the Centre, where the program itself is instituted and imposes conditions of constraint and possibility on the activities of the teachers, staff, and students. At the level of interaction, what happens on a daily basis at the Centre is the teaching and learning of English. The everyday practices of the teachers and students show how teaching and learning take place to produce knowledge about language and education. At the same time, the linguistic interactions of the teachers, the staff, and the students enact social relations that are informed and shaped by the particular institutional constraints, as outlined in the previous chapter, and by the larger historical and social discourses that were examined in Chapter Two. As a result, the linguistic interactions that occur in this site produce complex sets of social identities and social relations. The everyday practices of the teachers and students reveal how the order of the institution manifests itself in daily interactions, and how the larger discourses surrounding second language learning for adult immigrants inform social relations in this setting. The point of this chapter is to make the claim that this is so--to locate the discourses of the institution and the discourses surrounding LINC in interaction, and to consider, as a result, what is produced as knowledge.

At the end of the last chapter I provided an example of the disruption of order at the Centre, where a conflict emerged between a student and a teacher over access to resources in a classroom activity. The resolution of the conflict resulted in a new set of rules for the students to follow. The new rules were a disciplinary measure and an assertion of institutional authority that altered what was expected of the students. The moment of conflict holds a few layers of meaning because, as I later found out, the difficulties that arose between the student and the teacher were about language use as well. This chapter will begin by looking again at "the incident" to explore how it was also about linguistic difference, and how this difference is made sense of by the students, staff, and teachers.

The moment of "the incident" produced a problem of communication, and this moment was framed in the service of a pressing problem, that of attendance, to refigure the authoritative and disciplinary order of the institution. After my examination of the production of a communication problem, I will take into account the students’ responses to "the rules," as they tell their versions of the problem. What emerges in this dialogue is the construction of a "culture gap," where the difficulty of attendance is attributed to "cultural differences." The nature of these differences and how they are problematized is explored. With reference to a morning of classroom interactions, I consider how gender ideologies inform the notion of cultural difference as well. What follows then, is a discussion of the construction of linguistic, cultural, and gender differences, how these differences are problematized, and the implications of them for the students, staff, and teachers of the LINC program.

As discussed in Chapter One, the LINC program is a form of education where a certain "relation to language and culture" is explicitly taught (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 114). The policies and practices of the LINC are shaped by the program’s mandate that Canadian values and beliefs are taught through the English language. In the examples of ESL teaching and learning described below, the relation to language and culture taught in and through LINC is explored as a relation of power that is based on notions of cultural difference. The students engage with the relation to language and culture in ways that both accommodate and resist it, to reveal, again, expressions of ambivalence. Their ambivalence suggests that the relation to language and culture that is taught through the LINC program is also about relations of cultural and linguistic dominance.

My narrative of "the incident" in the last chapter glossed over one important moment. The main point of contention was, in fact, about a linguistic difference. The student, wanting to take more supplies than she was permitted, was not saying the word "please." This was deemed inappropriate by the teacher, and this, specifically, was the focus of the teacher’s anger. In my previous analysis of the incident, I wanted to show how the conflict was resolved to serve the interests of the institution--the pressing problem of attendance. Here, my interest is to note that the conflict erupted because a social convention was not being observed by the student at the level of linguistic interaction. The student’s failure to observe that convention was unacceptable to the teacher.

The teachers are continually urging the students to "Speak English!" and are thus constantly grappling with a constraint that is produced by the conditions that place LINC’s mandate in conflict within a community-based centre that highly values the Somali language and speaking Somali. The conflict is very much about an institutional arrangement that produces these contradictions that then have to be managed. The teachers have to work hard to create a monolingual zone where English can be learned and practiced. The students codeswitch frequently, rely on the interpreters for help, and often speak Somali with one another.

The "incident" is a manifestation of this contradiction, and the way that it is managed, the outcome and interpretation of it, is determined by the power relations of the institution. The student’s failure to utter the linguistically appropriate request means that she is denied access to the resources she wanted; she is reprimanded instead, and the repercussions of the event refigure the management of the program. In this way, the event was interpreted and made meaningful by the institution. The layers of meaning contained in this moment of linguistic interaction are multiple, though, and for the Somali students and staff, the conflict has other meanings. I asked Dunia (one of the cultural interpreters) about the incident. She explained to me that there is no word in Somali for "please." Here is what she said about this linguistic difference:

No we don’t say "please, can I do this." It’s like you are begging the person, that’s how we see it. "Give me this," it’s not - or, "can I take it?" But please, thank you, please, we don’t use those words. And people get angry when you say, "give me glass of water," and they look at you ’cause you have to say "please can I have a glass of water?" For us we don’t use that. People think that we are very rude. It’s not in our language. Young people have learned that, older people they can’t --. We say "thank you," we have that. But not "please can I do this? Please can I have?" No, we don’t have that.

Firstly, Dunia’s explanation of the complex meanings that are contained in a dominant social and linguistic convention echoes some assertions made by Blommaert and Verschueren (1998) in their discussion of language education for adult migrants. They argue that the intentions of language policies for the purposes of integration/assimilation are often foiled because the adoption of the dominant language does not necessarily mean the concomitant adoption of the dominant "lifestyle, world view, values or culture" (p. 130). Instead, Blommaert and Verschueren suggest that when migrants learn the dominant language, "standard English may become loaded with new values, perceptions, associations and symbolic meanings in ways that delude simple beliefs in "‘assimilation /integration through language learning’" (p. 130). In Dunia’s opinion, the Anglo-Canadian convention of saying lots of "pleases" is distasteful, and is often simply not done. The refusal to conform to the convention, however, means that this linguistic difference is understood by Anglo-Canadians as a socio-cultural difference at the level of a personal critique: the person is judged to be "rude."

The tendency to explain linguistic difference in terms of negative valuations of the second language learner’s personality (or more likely as an element of their class, race, ethnicity, or culture) means that the "problem" of communication breakdown is often wholly attributed to the second language learner rather than to the speaker of the first language. Linguistic difference is rarely understood as an element that is produced out of and within the linguistic and social relations between the two speakers. Consequently, the second language learner is at an immediate disadvantage and is subordinated to the field of talk that is controlled by the speaker of the dominant language. The interpretation of linguistic difference as such occurs in institutional and bureaucratic settings so often that it is, in effect, a sociolinguistic fact that is well documented in the fields of ESL, education, and sociolinguistics (see, for example, Phillipson, 1992, chap. 5; Rampton, 1997).

The institution’s response to "the incident" shows how a conflict about linguistic practices goes unrecognized as such; it is read instead as insubordination. To elaborate on this point, I turn to some current theorizing about communication strategies found in Rampton’s (1997) article. Rampton points to some of the limitations of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory and the controversy over the identification and understanding of second language learner (L2) communication strategies (CS). He asserts that SLA and CS often neglect the socio-cultural dimensions of second language use. When communication problems are identified in a bilingual or multilingual educational environment,

defining someone’s behaviour as a "problem" often raises political issues, but there has been very little concern with this in work on L2 CS. In addition, where problematic moments can be reliably identified, it is almost invariably the L2 learner who is held responsible. (p. 283)

With examples from his own work on the linguistic strategies of a multi-racial youth community in the South Midlands, Rampton argues for a recognition of communication strategies that aren’t just about difficulty with the structure of the language on the part of the speaker. There are two commonly understood communication archistrategies, "avoidance" and "achievement," and Rampton argues that a third archistrategy should be acknowledged, that of "resistance" (p. 288). Understanding resistance as a communication strategy simply means that there might be good reason for any communicative breakdown. Dunia’s explanation above of the conflict over language suggests that the refusal to adopt an Anglo-Canadian linguistic convention is a form of resistance against a normative Canadian social practice. It might be a choice about what one does not want to learn. I cannot say with certainty that in "the incident" the action of the student was a strategy of "avoidance" or "resistance." What I can assert, however, is that uttering the word "please" has varied meanings for the two speakers and the two linguistic groups at the Centre. The conflict that emerged in this example of a single communicative moment reveals how the staff and students respond to and make sense of linguistic difference.

Dunia’s comments on linguistic difference point to a second area of import. She notes that while saying "please" is one convention that is apparently not adopted by Somali speakers of English, younger people "learn" to negotiate with some linguistic differences, such as the convention of saying "thank you." The "older people," however, "can’t." As noted in the previous chapter, according to everyone at the Centre, age acts as an organizing principle that describes similarities and differences among the students in many ways, especially in terms of what can be expected of them as learners. Dunia points out that learning English is taken up differently by the different generations of students. The heterogeneity of the students in this respect presents some difficulties for the staff. Dunia’s comments reveal how "the incident" contains the seeds of this dispute as well, which broadens the base of what the conflict is about.

The moment of the incident was actually a moment of communicative conflict about a word that is valued differently by each of the speakers. The "incident" is recognized as a moment where cultural and linguistic differences interfere with communication. It was interpreted by the institution as emblematic of the problems with student participation in the program in general, and signaled the need for disciplinary measures that would force greater participation in the program. The student’s inability to say "please" represents the student’s failure to learn to speak English properly, which in turn represents the instructor’s failure to teach the student. The significance of the latter is secondary to that of the former, however, and the students are the targets of the blame. Lifting the blame for a moment, we can see that the conflict is a product of a contradiction produced by the institutional arrangement. The conflict is really about the ideologies of two languages (and cultures) negotiating for discursive space, power, and meaning, and the staff and students of the program are caught in the struggle. There is a significant link between the linguistic conflict and the new rules on attendance. In both cases, the LINC staff demands complicity with their authority. Saying "please" respects a rule about linguistic practices, and attending classes regularly and on time follows the rules of the institution. To the LINC staff, both practices are extremely meaningful as proof of the students’ willingness to learn.

As I have indicated, the "incident" contains many layers of meaning. For the LINC staff, it is about insubordination; it is read as proof of the student’s resistance to learn English, which makes the teachers angry. For the students, not saying "please" is proof that English becomes loaded with new meanings that some students will negotiate and others will reject. This is something the LINC staff does not recognize. In this mix is also the age factor, as Dunia points out, which has a lot to do with how the students take up learning English. In what follows, I will explore first how this difference in the students’ age is understood by Rebecca, the Coordinator, and Lucy, who teaches the class of older students. Then, I shall consider the students’ responses to the "incident," since I took the opportunity that it presented to ask them about their interpretation of what, exactly, the rules about attendance mean to them, and what the tensions might be that produced the "problem" of attendance. Many of the students spoke favourably of the administration’s efforts to enforce the rules, even some of the students who participated in the boycott. Nevertheless, what was consistent in my discussions with the students was that a broad set of issues emerged -- different ideas about what the conflict was about -- in response to the actions of the administration to get tough on attendance. Most importantly, my questions about what was occurring at the Centre produced many rationales and reasons for the difficulties that were taking place between the students and the staff of the program. The linguistic difference that produced the conflict of "the incident" and the subsequent reordering of "the rules" unearths, upon my questioning, many other sources of "difference."

Since the literacy class began in November, 1997, more older students are attending the LINC program. The development of the literacy class was a response not just to the needs of the older students; both younger and older students were in need of a class that addressed fundamental reading and writing skills. As Rebecca explains,

We were getting a lot of people coming in who could barely do anything, or couldn’t read and write at all, couldn’t speak English at all, and we didn’t know what to do with them. Sometimes we’d send them to other programs, but there are very few literacy programs. Or we would send them into the Level One class, but it was really hard on the Level One teacher. Um, so, now, we’ve set up a literacy class, now what we’re finding now is we get a lot of older women, not younger women.

L: What was the make-up of the classes in the first place?

Occasionally we’d get older and it was sort of split, but right now what we are finding is we get a lot of older women coming in, and a few older men, but the problem is, that the older students, if the weather is the least bit inclement, they don’t come in. Or they, you know, they rea-, no, they’re a pretty good group, the ones that come in, I gotta admire them, really. But ah, it’s difficult to keep them coming on a regular basis.

The institution’s response to the low literacy levels of the group has made the literacy class very popular with older students. But constant attendance is a challenge for this group of students. The offering of the literacy class has increased the number of older students but this was not, most likely, the preferred outcome that the administration had intended in instituting the new class. The older students generally take much longer than the younger students to complete the literacy class. If a younger student requires the literacy class, she tends to move through it quite quickly. Lucy teaches the literacy class and comments on the many challenges of teaching this group:

There are problems with attendance; they aren’t in perfect health. Their memory isn’t good, you have to repeat and go over things. They can’t keep a lot of things in their heads because they have seen so much. It is hard to keep focussed.

Lucy also says, however, that they come to the classes to learn "to do things on their own" and also for "companionship." According to the students and the cultural interpreters, and as Lucy notes as well, the issue of the older students’ attendance is explained with reference to health concerns, to the effects of trauma from the war in Somalia, and to the enormous upheaval that the women have experienced since settling in Canada, such as changes in status and family organization as discussed in the previous chapter.

Zariba is in her late 50s. She has been in Canada for four years and is raising her teenaged niece. With Dunia translating, I ask Zariba what she thought of the conflicts taking place at the school. She comments on the challenges of adjusting to life in Canada after what she and her fellow students have been through in Somalia.

Her idea is, back home, people lost everything. People confused now. Back home, we would respect teacher and time, teacher was like father. Here we have problem. We cannot adopt this culture easily. Back home, women work slow, walk slow, school was close to home. Canada, work fast, school fast. . . . Here we have to respect teacher, it is hard.

Zariba mentions a few factors that make it difficult for her to "adopt this culture easily," such as the intensified tempo of life in the Western world. Kajia, one of the interpreters, also commented on the crazy tempo of North American life when she spoke about the adjustments she had to make when she came to Canada eight years ago, and compares it to the time she spent in Italy as a student:

It’s different because here the people are more stressed in work and ah, you don’t know when you finish your day you are rushing you are doing something you know. And, in Europe, you take your time. And, the context of money, money, everywhere, that you see, you have to work, you have to survive here, its not like that. I see big difference between.

Kajia asserts, along with Zariba, that the pace of North American society is a big change from not only life in Somalia but in Europe as well. My discussions with the staff and the students invariably produced comparisons with "back home," or comparisons to other places where the women have lived. This relational and recursive activity of comparing nations and cultures is the way that "difference" is understood. This discursive meaning-making activity was the way everyone at the Centre made sense of themselves and the "others" with whom they spent each day. It is, effectively, the active construction of difference, where the features of what constitutes one nation, one culture, or what is understood to be education, or "womanhood," are positioned in opposition to the culturally and racially different "other." The comments provided here by Kajia and the students show how difference is discursively produced.

When difference is talked about, the "subject" of the difference might be language, nationhood, religion, patterns of social or familial organization, or ethnicity, but all of these are subsumed by and within the overarching category of "culture." When the interpreters and students talked to me about difference, they often followed their comments with "this is our culture." When the students were talked about by the administration, they were described as a "cultural group" with "cultural differences."
Blommaert and Verschueren assert that "‘culture’ is how difference is talked about . . . culture is an interactional phenomenon" (1998, p. 16). "Culture" is also understood as the essence of a person’s identity. As Rampton (1997) explains in his study of language sharing and exchange among multi-racial adolescents in the South Midlands in England, the current manifestation of the notion of "culture" reveals that it is understood as an "ethnic essence" (p. 8). Culture gives more weight to ethnicity than other factors such as gender or class as a determinant of a person’s identity. In this way, culture is set in a fixed collocation that equates nation with culture, and culture with ethnicity (p. 8). Ethnicity, then, refers to elements of a person’s identity such as language and religion that make up the "imagined community" (Anderson, 1983) to which the person belongs.

Nationhood is linked more strongly now to the notions of "culture" and "way of life" than to biological notions of race (Rampton, p. 8). But all of these elements can be racialized in certain ways to attribute cultural and ethnic characteristics to a biological notion of "stock" or hereditary traits that link back to a myth of national origins (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1993). The apparent "culture gap" between, for example, a minority group and the majority, is believed to occur because the minority group is culturally incompatible with the dominant group. The discourse of culture is structured by relations of power; the construction of Somali and Canadian cultures is done in binary terms, and it is Canadian culture that is the signified concept against which Somali culture, the signifier, is formed. The fact that both the staff and students engage in the discourse of culture is interesting, and my interpretation of this discourse and the way it is structured rests on the understanding of the discourse as a dominant one.

As a dominant discourse, "culture talk" relegates race to the status of a "cultural inadequacy," which "deflects attention away from the structural relations of domination and subordination." (Razack, 1995, p. 67). Culture subsumes talk about race and ethnicity; it covers it up and makes it possible for difference to be talked about in more benign terms, in terms of a "relativist rhetoric of cultural difference" (Blommaert & Verschueren, p. 4). The rhetoric of "difference" that surfaces in the comments of the students and the teachers in the LINC program is construed as cultural and/or national in character. The notion of "culture" ("theirs" and "ours") that is operationalized here equates nation with culture and culture with ethnicity, where the ethnic affiliation of the individual rests on shared attributes such as nationhood, language, and religion which form the basis of the group’s collectivity. Both groups use the discourse of cultural difference to account for the ways that they understand the "other." It is, importantly, a discourse that dominant and dominated groups employ in managing their "power-maintaining and power-acquiring purposes" (Sarangi, 1994, p. 416). The discourse of cultural difference is a form of rhetoric that provides a means of talking about relations of power in apparently benign terms. The LINC staff relegates the student’s difficulties with the program to "cultural differences," as do the students. The power struggle is about whether the program can accommodate or recognize these differences or not.

To return to Zariba’s comments, and another articulation of "difference," she mentions in the quotation above that "respect" for the teacher is hard to observe. The conditions that make it possible to respect a teacher’s authority "back home" are a completely different set of conditions here. "Respect" figures prominently as an often-mentioned feature that is lacking in the relations between the students and the teachers. After "the incident" Rebecca asked the students to show more "respect" for the teachers by attending regularly and doing homework. In this sense, a lack of "respect" occurs when the students do not conform to the social and linguistic practices of the institution (see Heller, 1999, chap. 2). On the other hand, however, "respect" is also an element of "the incident" for the students. The student to whom Sarah raised her voice, Kunab, belongs to the grouping of older women students. It is possible that Sarah’s actions betrayed a social convention that is of value to the Somali students, that is, to display respect to elders. For both the students and the staff "respect" acts a measure of the tenor of social relations at the Centre, and it is based in and valued as forms of social interaction.

In speaking with many of the students, "respect" also came up as an issue that is under negotiation among the Somali women themselves. In interviews with the younger generation, respect for the older Somali women was often discussed as a difficult issue because the values of "Canadian" society in some cases severely contradict those of Somali cultural and religious practices. Thus I saw the students arguing in class about the rights and wrongs of divorce, or wearing the hijab. I asked Dunia about the conflicts that she has to negotiate in her job as cultural interpreter. Dunia answered by reflecting on her choice to not wear the hijab, and the fact that the older women students often commented on this choice of hers.

They keep asking me, to you know, cover and - we always tell them "Okay, I will, I will." Because they are old, and we don’t want to confront them or argue, that’s our culture. They tell you to do something, you just say, "Okay, I will." "Inshallah, you know. You don’t say no, you can’t tell me what to do because that’s not the way. They tell you every morning, you just say inshallah.

L: What does that mean?

It means "if God says." You can’t argue with them, you can’t be angry with them. That’s the way we are.

Elder Somali women are to be respected, as Zariba mentioned above, and as Dunia explains. Kajia concurs with both Zariba and Dunia, and tells me that teachers as well as "old women" are the most "respected people on earth . . . that is the culture." The value of respecting elders, and teachers, can be difficult, however, when the conditions that make respect possible are under contestation. The conditions, I think, depend on a recognition of authority. One day, I witnessed an exchange that pointed to this tension. Talaado, a middle-aged student in Sarah’s class, was mopping some tracked-in slushy snow off the floor of the lobby. Kajia and I stood in the doorway while Talaado mopped. Then Sarah busily walked across the floor from her classroom to Rebecca’s office. Talaado smiled and joked in Somali to Kajia, and Kajia laughed and said to me, "She can’t tell Sarah not to walk; she’s the teacher. It’s power don’t you know." The managing of social relations in the institutional setting, as Sarangi and Roberts note, "depends on notions of exchange and reciprocity" (1999). The tensions at the Centre about the need for more "respect" between the teachers and students reveal that the conditions that establish the professional authority of the staff and the authority of the institution are under some contestation by the students.

The issue of attendance is read by the institution as disrespectful of the authority of the institution. The institution’s measures to deal with the issue are read by some of the students as equally disrespectful, especially of the older students. Similarly, the institution’s response to the problem places conditions of constraint on the possibility of "exchange and reciprocity" in the social relations of the institution. One day, for example, I noticed a new poster in Lucy’s Literacy class. On the poster was a lesson that focussed on the uses of words such as "where, when, why, what, and how." Written on the paper were five questions that used these words, such as "What is your name?" and "Where do you live?" The third question was "Why are you late?" Here, the dominant "problem" of the institution gets inserted into the curriculum, which has the unfortunate effect, I argue, of highlighting and reproducing elements of the problem (i.e., a lack of "respect").¹

To return to the students’ interpretations of the problem, I asked Lambar, a student in Sarah’s class, about "the rules." To her, the new rules engage with the difficulties of attending LINC when many of the women in the program are single mothers. Lambar is in her late 30s and has been in Canada for four years. She finished high school in Somalia and worked as a pharmacist before the war broke out. At first, she is very supportive of the enforcement of the rules, but then acknowledges her own ambivalence about attending LINC. I asked Lambar, "What do you think about the new rules on attendance?"

Why not? All the mothers have children. My child, broke finger. My children no protect. Problem for mother. Teacher is right, students wrong. Sometimes sick children. Problems of the mother. I know all teachers right. Mothers, difficult to come every morning. -- Sometimes I can’t. I feel it. I can’t sometimes.

While the teachers are "right" in their expectations of the students, Lambar admits that the "problems of the mother" come into conflict with the responsibilities of the mother as student.

Kajia’s opinion on the struggles at the school encompasses many of the explanations given above by the students, and raise a new element as well. I asked her about what she made of what was happening at the school.

I think so it’s ah, the attendance really is too bad in the winter time. And this is connect to how they see the rules. Because they think that - I remember that the people when they were in back home, when the rainy day they never come out from the houses, they stay home. They say "Today it’s raining" . . . And they go back to that I think so for the winter time and winter for them is hard. And also this LINC program is in the community centre, they think like their homes, here, you know, that if you don’t go, it’s no problem, you are in the community. You know, something in their minds is connected about that.

Kajia’s comments raise the important issue, again, of one of the tensions that are produced when a federally funded ESL program for adult immigrants is housed in a community-based organization. Her reasoning of why tensions are produced around attendance are based on similar grounds as Mohammed’s comments in Chapter Three: there is an uneasy, compromising relationship between the Centre and the LINC program. As Kajia explains, there is an expectation on the part of the students that, as a "community centre" some accommodations will be made to recognize the profound "differences" that they are experiencing in adapting to Canadian norms and values through attending the LINC program. The teachers and Coordinator believe, I think, that the LINC program is the vehicle through which the English language and Canadian norms and values are learned, and the policies and regulations of the program advocate and enforce that position.

The students’ comments above illustrate that the issue of "attendance" uncovers a number of reasons and rationales for why it might be a source of conflict. The tensions around attendance are, for the students, about the difficulties they are having in adjusting to linguistic and social differences in Canada, factors as great as how linguistic conventions of politeness differ, how time is understood, how weather is regarded, and how one’s responsibility as a mother intersects with one’s responsibilities as a student. With the above comments from the students in mind, I would like to suggest one way of identifying the position of the students in relation to the LINC program, although I am aware of the homogenizing impulses that accompany the making of such an assertion. There is, it seems, a great deal of ambivalence in the students’ position in the school. Ambivalence might be a response to finding oneself and one’s "culture" the subject of "difference." Ambivalence might be a means of accounting for how a student might vacillate between Rampton’s communication strategies of "avoidance," "achievement," and "resistance" in an educational and institutional setting. I suggest, and will explore further below, that ambivalence is a legitimate response to the contradictions inherent to the learning of a second language in the institutional context of the LINC program at the Centre.

The ambivalence that I speak of above is not a factor in every student’s relationship to LINC, however, as Asha’s comments below reveal. Asha, who is in her 30s and has been in Canada for six years, supports the staff’s measures to enforce the rules, and feels that the students are not doing enough to respect the teachers and to recognize the chances that are offered to them through the LINC program.

Teacher respect students, but students don’t respect teachers. They don’t call [when they are absent]. They know how to use a phone. This is for you, you can do better, your life, when people have a chance. They know it, but I don’t know why -- .

I then asked Asha why she thinks it is difficult for some students to attend.

I think it’s the weather, most important things. It’s difficult to come to school for people. But still, if you’re are at home, why not come and learn? You get depressed, stressed. I have two children, I know it’s hard. You need to get out. I think the person is the most important thing to do. I ask my neighbour every day, why don’t you go to school? I will show my book, I say, I can write now.

Asha is certain that some students are not doing enough to respect and take advantage of what the LINC program has to offer. She acknowledges the conditions that can make attending LINC difficult, such as the weather and the responsibilities of motherhood, but these, she feels, are negotiable in light of the benefits that come with learning English. Thus, like Asha, not all students have ambivalent relationships to the program. Ambivalence does nevertheless account for the contradictions and vacillations in the students’ comments about their commitments to the LINC program.

It is necessary to acknowledge that the elements that are identified as constituting Somali "culture" as "different"--such as ideas about deference and respect for older people, norms and values about politeness, and social organization around time and weather--actively essentialize Somali "culture" as different from "my" culture in all of these ways, and construct Canadian culture as oppositional to Somali culture (and equally essentialized). In the process of describing how difference is produced and how othering occurs, I reinscribe and reproduce these discourses at the same time. My own investigation is affected and shaped by the dominant discourse so that the results are two sides of the same coin, the dominant discourse and responses to the dominant discourse. The students are understood and constructed as "a problem," hence they tell me why this construction appears to be so, and their own reasons for it. This is a limitation of my study that has to do with what it is possible for me to know given the constraints of the institution and of my subject position within the institution as a young, White, Anglo-Canadian woman whose ethnic affiliations place me within the dominant group.

The purpose of providing the students’ and interpreters’ responses to "the incident" and "the rules" was to destabilize the grounds of the institution’s certain interpretation of "the problem" and its solution, to reveal that ground as more varied and complex than it first appears. And in doing so, what emerges is proof of how dominant discourses work to structure counter-discourses, so that the fundamental assumptions that form the hegemonic version of what is going on remain unchallenged. This is the main contention of Blommaert and Verschueren’s study of the migrant debate in Belgium. The problem, as they see it, is that discourses about migrants construe diversity as a problem, which "[g]ives rise to some of the most efficient practices of discrimination, subtly veiled from sight by a rhetoric of tolerance which radiates the best of intentions" (1998, p. 4). That immigrants and refugees present a "problem" to the nation where they settle immediately structures the relationship between immigrants and the nation in polarized terms that position the migrant as a pathologized, abnormalized "other."

Immigration policies and official and public discourses on migration are about the "management of diversity" accompanied by a "rhetoric of tolerance," so that human diversity "is at once celebrated and qualified as dangerous, threatening, and problematic" (p. 4). In Blommaert and Verschueren’s study, the public debate about migration is framed from and by the perspective of the majority: the "other" is viewed as a problem to be contained, managed, and solved. The dominant Canadian social and political discourses around immigration contribute to a similar positioning of the immigrant subject as problematic and deficient in cultural capital in numerous ways, hence the development of programs like LINC that work to increase the linguistic and cultural capital of immigrants and refugees who settle in Canada. At the Somali Centre, the students are conceived of in a similar way; that is, they present a host of problems that the program’s staff have to work to manage and solve so that the goals of the LINC program can be achieved. The construction of immigrants and refugees as a problem-to-be-solved demands the attention of the rest of this chapter in an attempt to link the ways that the management of the problem of immigration described here is discursively produced through the institution of LINC at the Centre.

The conceptualization of diversity as a "problem" brings to mind the main tenet of Foucault’s notion of governmentality; it is "a way of problematizing life and seeking to act upon it" (Rose, 1993, p. 288). The "problems" of the Somali community, and how these need to be acted upon came up in my interview with Mohammed, the Executive Director of the Centre. Mohammed described the immense adjustment to life in Canada for the Somali community as a "paradigm shift." I asked him to explain this shift, and here is his response:

See the key thing is, that you don’t want to lose your values . . . the things that are bad we have to change it. We have to learn from the new culture. Things that we think is of value, important, is much better than Canadian culture, we keep it. So that is the challenge . . . If one portion of society gets very sick, the disease will spread. And that’s to maintain that everybody is healthy, you have to make sure the programs, put programs to assist the community. And you try to listen, seek help for the people’s expertise and talent of the new culture. And we’ll keep trying. That’s the only way that we feel that we can save the community.

Mohammed then mentions that the younger generation is "confused, ’cause we’re telling them something and its other, the T.V. is telling them something else." He says that many Somali teenagers cannot speak Somali, and "now they will never get that part of, that way of thinking, because the language is the way of thinking." The need to "save the community" is to be able to balance the gains and losses of social, linguistic, and cultural integration/assimilation.

Mohammed’s depiction of the state of his community is described by a metaphor of illness and disease. The solution to the problem, and the means of containing it, are "programs to assist the community," and listening to the "expertise" of the "new culture" to "seek help." The way that Mohammed understands the problems of his community is a product of the mentality that governs us, structured by the project of problematizing life and seeking to act upon it. Similarly, the teachers’ propensity to see themselves as "social workers," my interest in uncovering the "problems" of the LINC program at the Centre, and the LINC program itself, are also instances of the same mentality. All of these efforts are framed within the discourse and counter-discourse that construes diversity, and the migrants themselves, as a problem and a risk to the security of the nation, the solution to which is the continual development of programmatic initiatives.

A frequent critique leveled at the governmentality literature, and relevant here, is that since Foucault’s elaboration of the concept in 1978, subsequent studies focus primarily on the "mentality of rule" rather than engaging with "a conceptualization of politics as relations of contest or struggle which are constitutive of government rather than simply a source of programmatic failure and (later) redesign" (O’Malley, Weir, & Shearing, 1997, p. 505). The theoretical focus of governmentality literature on describing the mentalities of rulers is "a much more restricted inquiry than [that of] the institutions, procedures and practices of government found in Foucault’s earlier work" (p. 510). O’Malley et al. argue that the political and critical implications of governmentality work are weak unless they engage with the "messy implementation" of government programs and the "messy actualities" of social relations that characterize their existence (p. 512). What is important, then, is not only to identify and explore the "mentality of rule" that governs such programs and its subjects, but also to look for the (productive) effects of rule from the view of the subjects of the program. One might consider the limits of Blommaert and Verschueren’s expert analysis of the dominant discourses of the migrant debate in a similar way. Their analysis is framed by and within the voices of the majority, which they acknowledge. The effects of the discourse, and how it might be contested, is beyond the scope of their study. In what follows, then, I will pursue further how the "problem" of "difference" is construed and produced in the teaching and learning that takes place within the institutional discourses and practices of the LINC program at the Centre. I will also consider, however, the effects of this dominant discourse on the students, to show just how it reveals itself as a counter-discourse, so that contestation and even resistance might surface in response.

Once again, Kajia’s comments are extremely useful in understanding pedagogy and curriculum at the Centre, and once again, she describes the students’ learning needs vary according to age differences. Kajia explains that the basic curriculum content of LINC is very useful to the students. They need to learn how to communicate so that they can do their shopping, go to the doctor, or deal with immigration officials. Young people, she says, can learn English "from the beginning," that is, they can learn the intricacies of reading, writing, and speaking. For the older people, however, Kajia thinks that conversation skills should be the main focus of the program:

The people who are young they start from the beginning but the people who come here and are old or are in middle age they cannot learn grammar, they need a concept of conversation and they can learn the words, because they are adults, and they can learn the conversation. That becomes useful. But coming in the schools for writing and grammar, for me is, is, not - we cannot help like that . . . for me, it’s better, more conversation. To teach people more conversation than structural grammar.

L: Does that happen in the classes?

Yes, they work on conversation, but the curriculum that the teachers they have to follow, is not the conversation. Because the teachers, when they see the need, they change a little bit. But it is something that comes from them, it’s not something in the curriculum of the LINC program. And when they see that these people don’t need grammar, they do the conversation. The teachers, they deviate the route, and say, how can we help these people?

As outlined in the previous chapter, the LINC teachers at the Centre do have the autonomy to "deviate the route" from the standard LINC Curriculum and Guidelines. The teachers are driven to develop curriculum which helps the students with what they "need to know." This means that English language writing, reading, and speaking skills are taught to increase the students’ abilities to access mainstream institutions and services. During my visits to LINC classrooms, I saw that the students were taught, for example, how to pay bills at a bank and write a cheque, how to go grocery shopping, and how to go to a doctor’s appointment. These lessons included all three area of communicative competence with exercises in reading, writing, and speaking and listening.

One month into my visits to the Centre, however, I saw how the teachers "deviate the route" from teaching the usual lessons about accessing mainstream services to provide a forum for group conversations about a film that the classes watched together. Via an article in The Toronto Star, Gail discovered an educational series developed by a Canadian communications officer working for UNICEF. The "Sara Series," created by a team of researchers, writers, and artists from Canada and Africa, is a collection of stories about a young African girl’s various encounters with gender discrimination. The "Meena Series" was created by a team in Bangladesh, led by the Canadian UNICEF worker. The challenge for each team was to create in Sara and Meena, respectively, an African and a South Asian composite "girl-child" who would speak to women and girls across the countries and cultures of Africa and Asia. Each series consists of animated films, comic books and radio soap operas have been translated into English, French, Portuguese, Swahili, and Hausa and are being used in schools in Africa, South Asia, and Canada. As The Star reporter describes it, Meena and Sara’s adventures have

given girls a feeling of confidence and self-reliance in facing the whole range of discrimination and abuse surrounding them . . . instead of the adolescent girl being a pitiful victim of cultural and economic barriers, Sara is spirited and smart, turning the tables on child molesters and coming up with bright ideas to help her family. (Sanger, 1999, January 31, p. F3)

Gail was able to obtain from UNICEF a copy of a video and accompanying comic books from the "Sara series" entitled "The Special Gift." All three LINC classes gathered together two or three times a week over a three week period to watch and discuss the film. The film tells the story of Sara, who is commanded by her uncle to drop out of school because her labour is needed by the family. There is a shortage of firewood in the region, which means that women and girls have to walk further to find wood to burn. Furthermore, the family is short of money and cannot afford to send both Sara and her brother to school. Sara’s father works in the city, but has stopped sending money to the family. Being forced to leave school devastates Sara. To get herself out of this dilemma, Sara, with the help of her teacher, builds a smokeless clay oven that burns less firewood. Her family is so impressed by her initiative that they decide that she should stay in school. At school, Sara will continue with her efforts to help the community. In the end the uncle gets his comeuppance, too, as Sara’s father returns home to reveal that the uncle has been pocketing the family’s money.

The teachers were excited by the prospect of supplying the students with curriculum materials that were about girls’ and women’s issues in Africa. They told me that it was very difficult to find any materials that address the experiences of the women in their classes. Auerbach (1995) notes that much of ESL teaching is based on the model of "survival curriculum" that emphasizes "the way we do things here" to establish the learners’ language needs only in relation to societal institutions (p. 18). An alternative to this, she suggests, is to use materials that reflect the experiences and voices of the students. The classes that took place around the "Sara series" operated quite differently from the other classes. Clearly, the teachers and the students enjoyed the change in routine and curriculum content, and there was a great deal of pleasure in the exercise. The control of turn-taking by the teachers was loosened up in these classes, which allowed for more discussion between the students themselves and between the students and teachers in a frenzy of Somali and English. The topic of discussion that dominated the classes was education for women and girls in Africa, in particular in Somalia, and the students had a chance to engage the class with personal narratives about their experiences of education.

During one of these classes, Sarah asked the students about what education was like in Somalia after colonialism. A vigourous debate ensued, where the students disagreed with one another’s answers, and Dunia, always caught in the middle, tried to translate the various answers to the teachers. This pattern of discussion and disagreement occurred frequently when the teacher’s questions encouraged different rememberings and representations of Somalia. When one of the teachers asked a question that required a homogeneous representation of what "education was like," for example, it remained unanswered because no one answer would do. In this respect, the students’ responses troubled the teachers’ attempts to establish a definitive representation of "education in Somalia." In a similar instance later that week, the class talked about the figure of the evil uncle in "The Special Gift." The students told the teachers that when a father has been killed or is away, oftentimes an uncle will take his symbolic place in the family. Sarah asked, "what are uncles like?" and Madina responded, "It depends, some are good and some are bad. They are not all the same." She resisted the categorization of all Somali/African uncles with the patriarchal ogre uncle in the film, and pressed for a recognition of "African uncles" as a heterogeneous category.

In some instances, however, the students differentiated responses to a question are nevertheless interpreted to serve the interests of the dominant discourse. Sarah asked the students, "Why did some girls not go to school?" As the students offered their answers (got married, had to look after family, no government support, no money), Lucy recorded the answers on the blackboard. In the midst of gathering the answers, Lucy wrote the word "PROBLEMS" at the top of the board. "Who did not go to school?" Sarah asked next. The student who sat beside me, Damac, then commented to me that the teacher should not ask such a question, because the women feel "shamed" about it, and because they would "have to have a reason" for not going to school. She asserts that the question doesn’t take into account that some women were "cut off" from school for reasons beyond their control.

One student, however, answered Sarah in English, saying that she felt "sad" because she could not go to school, and there was a murmur of consent throughout the class. The teachers reassured the students that it was "Okay" not to go to school, and encouraged them not be shy or ashamed. One student responded to this by saying that it was her choice not to go to school. She was a "tomboy" and preferred to play outside, at which point the class laughed. This student managed to make room for a different kind of answer that placed the responsibility for not going to school onto herself. She was the agent that made the decision; it was not made for her. Damac then offered her own story, and said that she was pulled out of school at the age of seven to look after her aging relatives and her younger brothers and sisters: "I lived right across from the school . . . I was so sad, I cried and cried."

Damac’s critique of the teacher’s line of questioning and subsequent complicity with it shows how her ambivalent feelings about what is going on are negotiated. Answering the question in the right way positions her for a moment as a "good student." Damac was, not coincidentally, the student who was later asked to leave the program because of her bad attendance record. She was known as the "bad student." She frequently vacillated between resistance and compliance in positioning herself in relation to the authority of the school, as the example above shows, and in her inconsistent attendance of the program.

Damac’s ambivalence is well-grounded: the source of it came up in a group interview I conducted with Gail’s class. I asked the students about the frequent moments in classroom interaction when the students break into discussions in Somali that seem to be arguments about the "right" answer to give to the teacher’s line of questioning. The students laughed when I asked them, "What are you talking about?" and there was some hesitation on their part to tell me. At this point, Gail took it as a cue that their discomfort to reveal the subject of their discussions might be constrained by her presence, and she said that she would leave the room. The students all told her not to leave, and Damac turned to me then and said, "See, that is the problem." Gail’s unwillingness to listen to the students signaled that she was not interested in what they had to say. For Damac, this is a severe issue.

The students then explained that their discussions are about differences between people’s experiences. In discussions about education, it makes a difference, they said, if you are from the country or the city, and if you are young or old. Damac said their are differences about "religion and culture . . . religion and culture are fighting." Damac gave an example to say that one of the things the students discuss is the division of labour in the home, and some younger women want men to do more on their part. Madina disagreed, and said, "It is not about religion - it is about culture - is it? - it’s not about religion - it’s about women having to respect men." At this point, the discussion broke into Somali.

According to Damac, the "problem" as she sees it is really about the staff’s inability to recognize and value the knowledge and experience of the students. Damac’s comments to me point to her understanding of "the problem" beyond the "relativist rhetoric of cultural difference" (Blommaert and Verschueren, p. 4). It is about the relations of power that structure Somali linguistic and cultural practices as inferior and undervalued within the institution. Damac was one of two students asked to leave the LINC program. The form and frequency of her resistance to the program could not be contained or condoned by the institution, thus she was excluded from it. It was, however, an indeterminate solution to the problem because after a few weeks absence Damac returned to negotiate her position in the program with Rebecca.

In the example above of the group interview, Gail’s move to leave the classroom is an unwillingness to know about the students’ disagreements. It is also about the way that conflict and argument, as a form of linguistic interaction, is understood and valued. In the classroom, for the most part, the teachers control the order of the interactions in patterns of sequential turn-taking. Oftentimes, though, the students will turn to discussions in Somali where everybody talks at once. In most cases, the teachers work to quell these discussions immediately to regain the order of interaction, which they must do to get the job of teaching done. The form and content of the students’ interactions are, however, devalued in the process.

To return to the morning of classroom interaction, the trepidation that Damac expressed to me about the teacher’s question, "who did not go to school?" proved to be well-grounded, as evidenced by the fact that the answers elicited from the students were framed as "problems," and further evidenced by the ensuing events. Sarah presented the class with some facts from UNICEF about the developments that have been made in education for girls in Africa and South Asia over the last few decades. Sarah then asked the students, "what is good about coming to English class?" The value of education was quickly linked to the value of learning English in the LINC program, and Sarah supplemented this point with narratives about two successful LINC students. She then introduced the word "independent" to the class. An older woman student repeated one of the successful student narratives, to say that now she could go to the doctor by herself and be "independent." Sarah said, "Learning English gives women power!" Dunia, the interpreter, and some of the students in the class repeated this refrain.

The relation to language that is proposed in the LINC program functions to produce ambivalence in the student’s responses because it is construed as a relation to Anglo-Canadian language and culture that devalues that of the students. The inability of educational institutions to better contend with racial and cultural difference found here is similar to Heller’s study of ethnic minority students in a Franco-Ontarian high school (1999, chap. 5). The Somali students at the high school, for example, are marginalized by the narrow focus of the curriculum and a general devaluing of their knowledge, which produces ambivalence in their social relations to the school. Some of the students strategically manage, however, to contest and challenge the stratified social order of the school by protesting against their exclusion via a strike, and by eventually incorporating their perspective into the mainstream by joining with other "multicultural" students to win a student council election. Heller argues that anti-racist and multicultural education policies provided the "discursive spaces" necessary to foster these efforts to improve the distribution of power in the school (p. 235). In the LINC program, however, no such spaces appear to exist.

The examples provided here of one morning of classroom interaction about the "Sara Series" reveals that the topic of women’s education produces gendered representations of African/Somali identity and a corresponding construction of Anglo-Canadian female identity. The effects of the lesson on the students, as I could see it, produced pleasurable rememberings and tellings of their experiences, as well as some contestation and ambivalence around how this knowledge was framed. The utilization of teaching materials that, from the outset, are attempting to represent a homogenous view of African "women’s issues" through the vehicle of a generic African girl-child already reproduce the homogenizing impulses that inform the practice of othering, which the teachers reproduce further by only asking how the students’ experiences are similar to, and not possibly different from, what is represented in the film. What has value in these exchanges, as Damac’s negotiation shows, is only those answers that reinforce the teachers’ understanding of the women as unfortunately uneducated.

There are ways that articulations of "experience" in the ESL classroom can paradoxically serve to exoticize the minority culture rather than provide a means of analyzing it, or recognize the relations of power that produce it (see for example Peirce, 1993, chap. 8; Schenke, 1991). What is being produced as knowledge here is the continuation of the production of "difference" that increases and reinforces the divide between what is understood to be "Canadian" and what is understood to be "Somali/African." The focus is on the "difference" itself, rather than on how difference is constructed and how privilege and relations of power function to produce it.

The students’ narratives of experience are taken up so that the women’s "choices" to be educated are personalized and individualized; "they have to have a reason," as Damac says, or else the women will be (and perhaps already are) negatively judged. The women’s answers have to line up with the dominant representation of Third World Women as terribly oppressed by the patriarchal and religious systems in their countries. In this way, Western "First World" gender ideologies and political systems are seen as liberatory, progressive, and superior. Mohanty (1991) makes the case that much Western feminist academic writing rests on the othering of a "composite" Third World Woman, rendering her a powerless victim of patriarchy, so that gender difference is the source and root of all Third World difference. Hoodfar (1993) also discusses the prevalence of this view of Muslim Middle Eastern and North African women in public and academic discourses, where Muslim religious practices, such as wearing the veil, are regarded as static and unchanging, rooted in the patriarchal oppression of women, and come to symbolize the women’s ignorance and inferiority. "This is symptomatic," Hoodfar writes, "of ethnocentrism (if we don’t call it racism) and the lingering implicit or explicit assumption that the only way to ‘liberation’ is to follow western women’s models and strategies for change" (p. 13).

This dominant representation of Third World Muslim women figures prominently in everyday feminism as well, as what surfaces in the classroom examples above is a version of what Schenke (1991) calls "feminist orientalism," a discourse that she asserts is familiar to the ESL classroom (p. 47). What gets produced in the classroom discussion of women’s education in Somalia are collocations of linking terms that I heard echoed in the classrooms throughout my visits to the Centre. Through LINC, the students will be educated to "Speak English," which is linked to "independence" which is linked to "power" for women. The opposite terms define a fixed and essentialized concept of Somali womanhood. The patriarchal and religious traditions of Somali society are seen to be the root cause of the women’s marginalized positions both now and in the past. Those values need to be rejected so that the progressive values of Canada’s culture and educational system, and ESL in particular, can "empower" the women to positions of agency.

The possibility that educational opportunities are shaped by political forces, such as colonialism and nationalism, as well as gender ideologies, was not acknowledged in the class discussions or in the film series. In speaking about women’s education with one of the students, these factors emerged as equally salient to that of gender ideology in the historical forces that have shaped education for girls in Somalia. Asha gives a brief rendition of this history:

Back home, women didn’t get enough education - they never went to school. After colonial finished, we had chance to go to school. But parents still had control. They give her to a husband. She can’t say anything because her life would be destroyed. After 20 years, the military comes, says women and men equal, jobs, equality. We work up. A lot of women went to work for the government. Before, you would work behind your husband, father, brother, even if he is younger.

Asha’s comments emphasize that the changes in educational and occupational opportunities for girls and women in Somalia are due to changes in both political systems and gender ideologies over the past 30 years. Indeed, in the years after independence in 1960, Somalia made great efforts to develop its education system and invented a script for the Somali language in 1972. The advancements in education for girls and rural populations and the invention of a Somali orthography were strong elements in the development of a post-colonial Somali nation-state and the driving force behind a new nationalism until the civil war broke out in 1988 (see Abdi, 1998).

The education of girls and women was a primary focus of the country’s educational initiatives in the 1970s and the1980s. At the Centre, I met Ferhat, a member and volunteer at the Somali Centre who, during the decades of educational reform, was a high ranking government official. She spoke to me about the many programs she was involved in that worked to increase the access of girls and women to educational opportunities.² Somali’s history of educational developments and the development of a Somali script for the purposes of linguistic homogeneity are closely linked to nationalist objectives and initiatives. Here, this history can reflect back to that of Canada, where LINC, the current manifestation of ESL for adult immigrants, exists as a government initiative to create the grounds for linguistic homogeneity in the service of nationalism. There is more continuity here than difference between these gendered educational initiatives developed in the service of nation-building. The political efficacy of feminism has created an intriguing link between education and nation-building, so that in the LINC program and in the field of ESL generally the language work of the nation and nation-building is being performed by and undertaken by female teachers and learners.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I began with a re-examination of the disruption of order that was produced out of the constraints of the institution, as established in Chapter Three. The disruption of order was also a problem about linguistic difference, which provided me with an opportunity to show that teaching English is not a facile transmission of knowledge; it is, instead, the teaching of a relation to language and culture that is shaped by dominant Anglo-Canadian ideologies. The students take up or refuse the relation to language and culture in different ways, through resistance and accommodation. In the process, the relation to language is refigured, so that the English language is not simply "adopted" but becomes infused with different meanings, such as in the example of the conflict over the word "please." The institution’s response to the linguistic difference, however, was to deem it as unacceptable, as a challenge to its authority and to the objectives of the LINC program. The students’ responses to the way the matter was handled by the institution revealed various rationales that broadened the base of what "the problem" of attendance is about, so that it comes to be about "cultural differences."

The ideology of "respect" figures as an element that marks how differences about culture are negotiated between the students and the staff. One student, Aisha, believes that the students’ lack of respect for the teachers inhibits the opportunities presented to them by LINC to increase their English linguistic capital. She believes that the students should respect the authority of the school by obeying the rules. Other students have a more ambivalent relationship to the program, and have trouble "respecting" the teachers and "the rules." The conditions of exchange and reciprocity that make respect possible are hampered by the shape of the relations of power embodied in the LINC program that position the women students as linguistically and culturally inferior. The positioning of the women as such is discursively produced inside and outside the institution, with links to the construction of immigrants as problems-to-be-solved. The LINC program is designed as a solution to the problem, but on the route to increasing the linguistic and cultural capital of the students, the English language and Anglo-Canadian culture are idealized and figured as panaceas. Unfortunately, and paradoxically, the teachers efforts to "empower" the women students through English language teaching and learning actually serves to marginalize them further as immigrant women by reproducing discourses of "othering."

The three parts of this chapter that look at linguistic, cultural, and gender difference reveal a pattern that encourages the female Somali students to abandon their form of "difference" in favour of Canadian standards, norms, and values. The fact that the LINC program is administered out of a community-based agency shows up again as a factor that contributes to how some of the students expect these differences to be accommodated by the institution. The mandate of the LINC program, as they are delivered to Rebecca by the CIC, does not allow for this kind of accommodation.

I have characterized the various manifestations of "the problem" as a dominant discourse that also surfaces in the talk of the students and staff of the Somali Centre as a counter-discourse. There are important moments where this discourse is contested and resisted, where the homogenizing impulses that produce knowledge about "Somali culture" are made more complex by the students. The dominant discourses of the institution reveal, however, a bounded notion of culture and language where that of the majority is supposed to replace that of the minority. The LINC program teaches the values of the new culture through language, and these are expected to replace the language and culture of the minority. This is a rationality that rests on an equation of the addition and subtraction of culture and language, rather than the possibility of a concept of language and culture as integrative, where integration is defined by the minority language speaker. In effect, the students are negotiating the terms of linguistic and cultural integration as they move through the LINC program. The struggle, however, is in the process. This chapter is an attempt to show how the construction of the students, in a number of different instances, as the source of "the problem" produces ambivalence, resistance, and contestation which are legitimate responses to being construed this way.