Longing to become, coming to belong: ESL students' engagement of integrative antiracism social justice education

Based on the premise that powerful discourses of national identity, of racialized, culturalist, gendered and language difference unevenly overlap and diverge as they map onto the bodies of ESL learners in processes of becoming Canadian, this dissertation proposes the need for a model of cultural activist anticolonialist English language pedagogy in Canadian public schools.; Pursuing this proposal, this dissertation brings critical race, feminist post-structuralist, postcolonial and cultural studies theory to a qualitative study of the identity translation processes of a group of high school ESL students who have participated in an anti-discrimination leadership programme. Incorporating the concepts of cultural translation and identity ‘transcreation’ from postcolonial translation theory, this research holds two agendas in tension: the first examines the transformative pedagogical aspirations, strategies and assumptions of the anti-discrimination ESL leadership programme in relation to the processes by which they are engaged by participating students; the second agenda asks what insights participant experiences and learning gives us into the specificities of language minority students' negotiations of high-stakes relations of difference, recognition, authority, belonging and meaning within the complex discursive landscape of Canadian schools. The significance of this study lies in its articulation of the fields of second language, integrative antiracism/social justice and critical pedagogy. The interdisciplinary theoretical framework developed here opens onto three urgent questions: (1) How might ESL students be understood as subjects of language difference? (2) How might we conceive of language difference as a form of social difference which articulates with but is distinct from other forms of social difference and systems of discrimination? (3) What processes are recognized and invited into the classroom when we reconceive the learning experiences and socio-discursive negotiations of ESL students as cultural translation and identity transcreation?; These questions are pursued in the study through the development and application of a model for the design and evaluation of integrative antiracism social justice educational programmes for ESL students. I conclude with recommendations for the specific equity leadership programme and for transformative ESL pedagogy for new Canadians in a general.