The Location of Refugee Female Teachers in the Canadian Context: “Not Just a Refugee Woman!”

Authors

  • Snežana Ratković Brock University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.37522

Keywords:

Canada, Yugoslavian refugees, refugee women, teachers, resettlement, identity, intersectionality, systematic barriers, social agency, oppression

Abstract

This paper explores intersectionality of oppression and social agency in refugee narratives of four female teachers from Yugoslavia who immigrated to Ontario and Quebec between 1994 and 1998. These narratives reveal a number of systemic barriers participants encountered in their new country, such as lack of coordination between immigration and settlement services, lack of information about the teacher recertification process, systemic ignorance towards international teaching credentials and experiences, and a number of settlement practices that pushed the participating women teachers to the margins of the Canadian educational system. In addition to reporting a number of systemic barriers to teaching, these women also revealed self-imposed psychological and culturally constructed barriers to settlement such as personal perceptions of having limited language competencies, of being “too old” to continue education, and of remaining permanent outsiders to Canadian ways of being. Women also discussed their choices and priorities in terms of their personal and professional lives and the ways in which these preferences facilitated and/or hindered their integration in the Canadian education system and society. The paper challenges the master narrative of refugeehood in Canada by exposing the ways in which race, class, gender, age, ethnicity, and professional identity, in addition to refugeehood, shape the oppression and the privilege of refugee women in the Canadian context.

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Author Biography

Snežana Ratković, Brock University

Snežana Ratković is a science teacher from the former Yugoslavia who immigrated to Canada in 1998, after the civil war in the country. She works as research officer in the Faculty of Education at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses on forced migration and settlement, teacher identity, teacher education, research ethics, and social justice studies. She has published in The Reading Professor, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, South African Journal of Higher Education, Power and Education, Educational Action Research Journal, Studies in Higher Education, and Brock Education.

Published

2013-10-18

How to Cite

Ratković S. (2013). The Location of Refugee Female Teachers in the Canadian Context: “Not Just a Refugee Woman!”. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 29(1), 103–114. https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.37522

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