Tier 1 school mental health programs for middle school youth often focus on healthy relationships promotion. However, the vast majority of these programs take a gender- and race-neutral approach (i.e., content that does not focus on the way that gender, race, and ethnicity intersect to shape relationships and mental health). Embedding these…

This article explores the unexpected discovery of a significant divergence between the strong feelings of safety and belonging reported in a school and neighborhood safety survey, and the discursive, contradictory, and complex narratives about safety revealed by students' storytelling through theater and narratives shared with researchers in a…

Through exploration of Black Caribbean youths' feelings of unbelonging and exclusion in Ontario schools, this paper argues that how Whiteness is systemically engrained in the education system negatively affects the learning experiences of Black youth due to predetermined measures of belonging. The present article draws on data from 32 qualitative…

The objective of this constructivist grounded theory study was to understand the experiences of students who have been disciplinarily excluded from school. Fifteen students (male, n = 11; Black, n = 10; having special education needs, n = 9) and 16 multidisciplinary staff in Ontario participated. Students experienced high rates of expanded…

The number of African refugees has been increasing in many countries, including Canada. As the number of refugee students are increasing, school support and programming must be adapted and enhanced to assist in the integration and settlement of refugee students, whose needs are different from those of immigrant students. This essay is part of a…

Many schools, school districts, and provincial education authorities in Canada are collaborating with Indigenous communities to indigenize content and provide progamming to improve Indigenous student success. With a focus on high school achievement in the area of Indigenous education at the cultural interface of Indigenous communities and…

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a drastic transformation to schooling for students throughout the world. During this period, a number of issues arose in our local, national and global communities, including the death of George Floyd and subsequent protests and rallies organised by #BlackLivesMatter. Living through and witnessing many social…

The purpose of this note is to summarize and share with the wider academic and non-academic communities our experience over five years, 2014-2018, running the Simon Fraser University Academic Summer Camp for Aboriginal High School Students. In what follows we describe our reasons for developing this outreach activity and provide the goals and…

"Voluntourism," or "volunteer abroad," is a form of travel involving unpaid work intended to benefit a local community. Critiques of voluntourism as reproducing and, indeed, perpetuating global inequities are yielding a re-framing of voluntourism around principles of "partnership" and "equality." Drawing…

This article addresses the issues faced by the young Aboriginal students in urban and rural settings, which hinder their achievement in mathematics and science. An effort is made to reveal the techniques and programs that address the under-representation of young Aboriginal students in these subjects at secondary and post-secondary levels.…

This article reports on findings from a qualitative research study investigating ways to support learners from populations who have been historically underserved by the Nova Scotia education system, particularly African Nova Scotian and Mi'kmaq learners, and learners who experience poverty. Working with middle school teachers located in rural…

Background: Students are key stakeholders in schools, and their participation in the work of health-promoting schools (HPS) is crucial. This study focused on African immigrant students to Canada, who face the unique challenge of navigating unfamiliar school systems. The purpose of the study was to understand how immigrant students imagined, felt…

Latent class analysis was performed to identify clusters of items on the Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health -- School Connectedness Scale among students. Cluster membership was explored by student-reported ethnicity. The sample included students attending Canadian secondary schools in two waves of the COMPASS study: Years 4 (Y4:2015/16)…

Critical literacy is widely accepted as an important element of culturally relevant pedagogy. In this article, we detail results of a study into how six teachers in rural Eastern Canada purposefully incorporated critical literacy into teaching and learning activities in their classrooms from a culturally relevant pedagogical stance. Findings…

This article examined the psychometric properties and validity of a new self-report instrument for assessing the social norms that coordinate social relations and define self-worth within three normative systems. A survey that assesses endorsement of honor, face, and dignity norms was evaluated in ethnically diverse adolescent samples in the U.S.…