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This paper explores the relationship between the social context of schools, measured in terms of perceptions of teacher support and students' openness to diversity, and the academic persistence of immigrant and refugee newcomer students. It investigates whether newcomer adolescents' academic persistence varies by the perceived supportiveness of school environments. Based on data collected from newcomer students in a medium-sized city in Canada, results show that immigrant and refugee youth display higher academic persistence when they perceive that their teachers support them and when their fellow students are receptive to diversity. Specifically, newcomer youth's educational success depends on a school environment that encourages diversity and inter-group relations and teachers who are supportive of students, encourage them, and believe in them. This study also shows that newcomer youth are more likely to academically persist in school when they perceive that their fellow schoolmates exhibit cultural humility or openness to diversity and thus are interested in knowing more about immigrants' country of origin, respect them, and interact with them. [This paper was presented at the Canadian Sociological Association Conference, May 2021.]

This paper focuses on the experiences of ten women in Canada with refugee backgrounds from the Horn of Africa as they helped their adolescent children (ages 12-18) navigate the challenges of at-home online learning during the global COVID-19 pandemic. We situate our analysis within specific aspects of Yosso's (2005) Community Cultural Wealth framework to demonstrate that, while the women's efforts were hampered by online learning technologies, they were able to harness aspirational and familial capital to keep their children engaged in schoolwork. The women felt deeply involved in their children's education, particularly in terms of following up on children's homework, monitoring their activities, and providing guidance.

Although present in large numbers, Black refugee students do not necessarily feel welcome in Canadian public schools. In fact, research has long demonstrated that they face all sorts of oppressions from peers and educators, despite the abundance of seemingly welcoming discourses in educational policies and guidelines. Through a critical analysis of six curriculum documents published by the Government of Manitoba, and in light of the tenets of the ethic of hospitality and critical race theory, in this paper I discuss the role played by educational policies and guidelines in (un)welcoming Black refugee students. In the pursuit of 'hospitable education', I explore the strengths and weaknesses found in those documents while observing areas for improvement -- with major roadblocks being linked to the pervasiveness of (White) assumptions and expectations as well as a lack of critical self-reflexivity.

Language proficiency testing has long played a role as both facilitator and barrier in global migration. This paper outlines how Canada and other traditional migrant destination countries use English-language proficiency testing for immigration, asylum and resettlement, and citizenship. It identifies commonalities between these three related areas of migration and the covert values that are often embedded in the required test scores. It identifies different approaches for conducting research under the umbrella of Shohamy's (2001) "Critical Language Testing" and concludes with language testing research and advocacy suggestions specific to the Canadian context.

From November 2015 to October 2020, Canada had welcomed 44,620 Syrian refugees to more than 350 communities across the country. In 2019, it further surpassed the United States and Australia in the number of refugees settled. Lacking the necessary language skills for living and working in a new country is one of the most critical barriers refugees face. This paper aims to inform language-teaching professionals about pertinent linguistic and nonlinguistic issues as well as pedagogical implications associated with supporting adult Syrian refugee learners, drawing both on the literature more broadly and on the author's research in the Canadian context.

How should educators teach about one of the most complex and pressing issues of our times? This paper presents an empirically-grounded framework to help educators understand the opportunities and challenges of engaging youth around the topic of migration, including migration involving refugees. It stresses the importance of inviting youth to dialogue in ways that involve "slowing down, sharing stories, and making connections." The framework emerged from a design-based research study involving an experimental online learning community and curriculum on the topic of human migration. Posts and comments involving 140 teens from seven countries were closely analyzed using a modified grounded theory approach that incorporated constructivist principles. 14 interviews with participating educators also informed the analysis. The framework proposes that youth be supported to develop (1) curiosity and engagement about individual migration stories and migration in general, (2) nuanced understanding of the complex and diverse factors that help shape historical and contemporary migration experiences, and (3) critical awareness of their own and others' perspectives on migration and migrants. A visual representation is provided. Specific examples of student dialogue are unpacked to illustrate the framework, with discussion of the following cognitive and affective challenges: "the Three O's" of overgeneralization, overconfidence, and othering. The paper argues that youth of all backgrounds need opportunities to learn about migration in ways that allow them to leverage their various experiences and perspectives and engage with one another in meaningful, authentic ways.

The 2020 outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic imposed emergency remote teaching on adult English as a second language (ESL) programs globally, creating unprecedented challenges not only for language learners but also for instructors. Immense difficulties were produced in the collision between a biological hazard (the novel coronavirus) and the power-inflected social structures that organize language teaching in different locales. In this paper I explore some impacts of the pandemic on three instructors in the single largest adult ESL program in Canada, Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC). Grounded in an account of the historical origins and development of the LINC program, a reflexive thematic analysis of instructor responses to vignettes of resonant challenges identified three major issues that were intensified by the pandemic: navigating digital inequities, balancing the teaching of digital literacies and language teaching in an accountability framework, and managing boundaries and expectations. These results are contextualized in the larger conversations around LINC and adult ESL programming globally, and some implications and new directions for the post-pandemic landscape now visible on the horizon are also considered.

Much research focuses on schooling for refugee children in resettlement contexts; however, limited research addresses young adult refugees (YAR) between 16-24 years in the adult education (AE) system. This paper strives to fill this gap by providing the perspectives of 12 AE practitioners who welcomed and worked with Syrian YAR in Quebec, Canada. Practitioners' experiences and challenges faced with this refugee population reveal strategies needed to enable YAR to flourish and attain their objectives, including a call for systemic change in AE. Critical race theory and the capabilities approach set the conceptual framework guided by a narrative inquiry methodology. Semi-structured interviews provided the data that were thematically analyzed through collaborative work. From our understanding of the effectiveness of AE approaches for YAR, it is clear, based on the insights provided by the practitioners, that the face of AE has changed, and its current approach does not work for the YAR population.

This paper reports on the postmigration experiences of a group of Somali refugee students attending public schools in a southwestern city in Ontario, Canada. The findings were drawn from a qualitative study conducted to investigate the participants' postmigration experiences. Data were collected through semi-structured, one-on-one interviews with six participants. Study participants faced many postmigration learning difficulties and socio-cultural challenges. The findings show the strengths of the participants related to resiliency and perseverance. Educators, administrators, peer students, and members of the school community could play a central role in supporting Somali refugee students after resettlement. This paper proposes strategies and approaches to support educators and the school community in their work with refugee students of Somali background and other cultural backgrounds.

The suspension of onsite classes from March to June 2020 as a result of COVID-19 posed many challenges for educators supporting LAL (Literacy, Academics and Language) refugee youth. This paper reflects on the practices of a collaborative EAL (English as an Additional Language) and LAL high school team. It also addresses the challenges of remote learning for LAL students including a lack of intensive programming and direct teacher instruction, limited technological skills, and communication barriers. In the end, the success of delivering the program in a COVID-19 environment was nested in the collaborative approach.

This paper examines issues that Yazidi refugee students face upon arrival to Canada, and interventions that schools can implement to support these students. Due to traumatic experiences, Yazidi students suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Therefore, school staff need training to recognize the symptoms of PTSD, and schools must provide targeted counselling services and connections to community-based services. Yazidi students are often illiterate or have gaps in education, so schools need to incorporate inclusive practices to increase engagement, and provide instruction that focuses on emergent literacy and functional language. Teachers require specific training that addresses the academic needs of Yazidi students.

This paper critically examines two policy responses related to Canadian study permit processes that were adopted during two crises: the COVID-19 pandemic and the displacement of Ukrainian nationals due to war. We look at the expansion of the Student Direct Stream (SDS) to the Americas in 2021 and the creation of the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) in 2022 to discuss the effects of these crisis responses on the access to higher education (HE) in Canada for international students and forcibly displaced people. In this study, we conduct a policy analysis that draws on Bacchi's post-structural approach named 'What's the problem represented to be?' (WPR). We use the WPR approach to answer the question: how are students constituted as policy subjects in policy responses to crisis? Findings indicate that the two responses are accompanied by power imbalances that deepen barriers to equity in the access to HE in Canada.

Drawing on semi-structured interview data, this paper examines one man's multimodal engagement with the emotionally difficult aspects of his Chilean heritage. It builds on recent work (e.g., Marshall & Toohey, 2010) that has begun to unearth the intersection between funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005), difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998, 2000), multiliteracies (New London Group, 2000), and multimodality (Kress, 1997) in an attempt to call attention to the shifting nature of what is considered "difficult" about difficult knowledge, and to the role of multimodality in both accessing and making sense of the difficult in one's funds of knowledge. The analysis reveals that young people might be purposefully kept away from punctuations on their community's semiotic chain that are deemed difficult (e.g., images, documentaries) not only by schools, but also by family members for whom such punctuations invoke painful memories. The paper concludes with a call to teachers to be ever mindful of reproducing knowledge hierarchies in their classrooms, which may be partly mitigated by discussing the affordances and challenges of drawing on students' funds of (difficult) knowledge with families and communities.

This article offers an alternative point of view on the perspectives that large-scale literacy surveys provide on refugee women by presenting the case of Darya, a young Afghan woman who moved to Canada as a refugee in 2009. It also presents how a community-based organisation for young people addressed Darya's literacy and identity curation practices, and life situation in their everyday activities. The original study this paper is based on adopted an ethnographic and participatory approach. For the purpose of this paper, only the data relating to Darya was retained and analysed using a thematic analysis approach. The findings illustrate how exploring the intersections between gender, race, and religion is a fruitful lens to adopt in order to understand young refugee and migrant women's literacy learning and practices. The data suggest that the community-based organisation provided a positive space not just for literacy learning but also for important identity work. It did so by 1) grounding its activities in young people's lives and practices, 2) aiming to foster confidence building and autonomy, 3) being open to multilingualism and multimodality, and 4) focusing on young people's futures. The findings also illuminate the need to train youth workers about cultural responsiveness.

This paper presents data from a study examining the use of Theatre of the Oppressed as a critical pedagogy and research method for exploring notions of identity, belonging, and culture with francophone secondary students (Schroeter, 2009). It describes the process whereby Black African-Canadian students with refugee backgrounds identified their program, as well as their language, citizenship status, and race as factors limiting their imagined social futures (New London Group, 2000). The paper finds that students used their identities, symbolism, and ambiguity to challenge authorized discourses and show how their identities intersected in their educational experiences.

This paper examines experiences of labour market exploitation and precarity amongst migrating young adults in Canada. It analyses a specific case of hyper-exploitation and wage theft as experienced by a group of refugee young adults. Utilizing feminist materialist conceptions of knowledge and learning, this analysis seeks to move beyond an individualized conception of learning and experience by illuminating the inter-constitutive relations of social experiences. This paper seeks to demonstrate how attending to the social organization of migratory experiences allows for ruptures of individualized conceptions of self and society. Further, the case serves to demonstrate the complexity of experiences that influences the 'learning' associated with migration for refugee young adults.

The purpose of this paper is to share and discuss our research findings on the experiences of Syrian refugee students in elementary public schools in a southwestern region of Ontario, Canada. We used Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a frame to guide this study. Data collection involved an anonymous questionnaire completed by the students. The data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistical techniques. The majority of the students missed several years of school or experienced interruptions to their education prior to resettlement in Canada. The students reported positive resettlement and socio-cultural experiences in Canada so far; however, some of them faced difficulties with their learning. Based on the findings, we propose some strategies and make recommendations for educators and the school to support Syrian newcomer students with their learning and integration into the school community.

With over 1 in 5 Canadians identifying as an immigrant, Canada has been proud to call itself a nation of immigrants with a commitment to supporting refugees, from accepting thousands of Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s to Syrians fleeing civil war in 2015. In 2017, 44,000 refugees came as government-sponsored or privately sponsored refugees, having been offered permanent residency in Canada prior to arrival. Fewer arrive as asylum seekers -- 24,000 in 2016, 40% of whom arrived via the Canada-US border. Given Canada's geographic location, individuals may arrive by air, sea, or land across the longest shared land border in the world with the United States. In 2011, Canadian officials reported 4,205 claims made at this border. This number nearly quintupled in 2018, with 19,085 claims, totaling nearly 40,000 asylum claims since 2016 and coinciding with the changes in US governmental administration and their immigration and temporary resident policies. Families reported that for them, the US was no longer safe and they sought asylum in Canada. Due to the Safe Third Country Agreement, which does not permit asylum claims from the United States at official border crossings, many asylum seekers have crossed through unofficial border crossings, most of them in the provinces of Quebec and Manitoba. This article touches upon a number of issues that have come to light with the rising numbers of children who are asylum seekers trickling across the US-Canada border.

Purpose: Ontario is the most ethnically diverse province in Canada. School educators cannot disregard the reality of diversity in all its senses. The question that directs the focus of this paper is: to what extent are leaders in Ontario formally prepared to lead schools that support the students of today? The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach: This paper results from a document analysis of publicly available documents to investigate the current context in Ontario, Canada regarding the educational and social situation of new immigrants, immigration, refugees, and ethno-culturally diverse students. It includes an exploration of the training and information available for principals and vice principals in Ontario to support them in leading schools which serve increasingly diverse student bodies. This paper is also informed by interviews with 59 educational leaders from Ontario and the USA. Interviews centred around their experiences engaging in practices to support their diverse student populations. Findings: Results of the data analysis regarding the supports and training available to assist educational leaders in supporting the learning needs of diverse student populations demonstrate a serious lack of support. Very few actual resources exist for leaders, and most of those that do exist are connected to agencies outside of the education system, such as Settlement services. Research limitations/implications: Recent research investigating the relationship between identities and educational experience and teaching points to the importance of in-depth and targeted approaches to teacher preparation, and leadership preparation to help provide teachers and leaders with the knowledge, dispositions, and skills required to support all students in their academic and social development (Cochran Smith et al., 2009). This study confirms such findings. Given the current situation in Ontario and much of North America, there is a great need for leadership preparation programming, and school-level resources that provide educational leaders with the knowledge and skills to support all students in their academic and social development, but also in helping educational leaders to understand and address the systemic nature and forms of discrimination which their students face daily. Practical implications: With very few school boards requiring leaders to have a Masters' degree in Education, and none having stipulations regarding course content. This leaves educational leaders unprepared to deal with the reality of their situations, leading to the perpetuation of inequities in Ontario schools. Originality/value: Although sparse, previous research into the state of support and preparation for administrators and educators with regard to diverse student populations in Ontario revealed that little to no preparation or support exists (see e.g. Price, 2002). This study helps to fill that gap in existing research.

This paper offers a review of the research literature on the experiences of young children and their families who left Syria as refugees and resettled in Canada. We identify five key factors that influence Syrian refugees' experience of social inclusion within the context of the public-school systems as well as unveil the silences in and across the current studies. The five factors are pre-arrival experiences, mental health, social supports, acquisition of English language skills, and lack of preparedness of teachers and schools. Based on limited availability of research, we outline needed research to better understand social inclusion of Syrian refugee families with young children in Canada. There is a call to pay particular attention to their educational and social encounters.

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 larger qualitative study which explored the common challenges and barriers faced by young adult African refugee students in Ontario schools. Using narrative inquiry research design, interviews were conducted with three individuals with refugee status, who entered Canada from an African country. Participants described their experiences, highlights, and challenges, and posed ideas for improvements at the secondary school level. The purpose of this paper is to present one of the larger study's most significant findings -- the need for increased mentorship, within the school and community, in providing more effective support for this group of students.

There are thousands of refugee students in Canadian schools and many struggle with distress and trauma symptoms. Even those not demonstrating overt distress may face adjustment challenges. This paper describes the pilot of the Supporting Transition Resilience of Newcomer Groups (STRONG) program in ten schools. STRONG is a 10-session, manualized program focused on building skills and helping students process their migration journey. This pilot used a pragmatic mixed-methods approach to evaluate the feasibility of STRONG, with a focus on acceptability, implementation, and perceived utility of the intervention. Clinicians (n = 16) provided data at the training, throughout the intervention and at the end through clinician surveys and focus groups. Clinicians reported high levels of acceptability for the training and program. Implementation challenges included time constraints, external influences, and some challenges with language. Overall STRONG was seen to provide significant positive benefits for students in increasing connectedness, stress management, and coping strategies. Clinicians felt that students developed more positive self-image and had improved optimism. This feasibility trial of the STRONG program indicated the potential utility for promoting resilience and reducing distress among refugee students through a structured, school-based group intervention.

This paper describes how various community partners collaborated to design and implement a student-centred, trauma-informed educational program that addresses the personal and systemic barriers identified by refugees who are survivors of trauma as obstacles to accessing higher education, and consequently social inclusion, in Canada. This 14-week program created a safe space where participants could rebuild identities, agency, and confidence and develop healthy relationships of trust and mutual respect. Measures of well-being and qualitative interviews conducted at entry, mid, and exit points showed statistically significant improvements on measures of self-esteem, resilience, and life satisfaction and overall satisfaction with the program.

Postsecondary institutions in the global north have rapidly internationalized, driven mainly by the proliferation of international students and responses to these changing demographics. This internationalization has captured attention across various platforms, including increased media focus directed toward these students and the primary and ancillary influences of their participation in PSIs and surrounding communities. The project explored in this paper examines this phenomenon by connecting internationalization of higher education research with insights from critical media studies and framing theory to investigate news media representations of international and refugee students' participation in Canadian universities and colleges. A critical thematic analysis was performed on 391 news media texts published between 2000 and 2017. Findings reveal the Canadian news media's tendency to construct issues related to international students and internationalization into one or a combination of four broad macrothemes: (1) Canada as benevolent and ideal; (2) international students and internationalization as commodified assets; (3) international students and internationalization as threats; and (4) the strategic neutrality of data.

Employment training services are provided for immigrants to integrate them into the Canadian labour market. Evaluated on short-term labour market outcomes, these programs typically focus on enhancing individuals' employability, while risking naturalizing and reproducing the dominant social and cultural order. "Entry to Hospitality Careers for Women" is a government-funded program based on a partnership between a community organization and a community college specialised in vocational training. Uniquely, this program aims to expand immigrant and refugee women's employment skills as well as their social and cultural spaces. A community-based partnership research project was conducted to explore how the program worked towards these goals. It finds that the program contributed to the personal development of the women, expanded their social space and enhanced their social and economic opportunities to varying degrees. It also points to a set of women-centered pedagogical and programming practices that were conductive to women's learning through the program. Firstly, as a partnership, the program leveraged the resources and expertise accrued in both the community organization and the community college. Secondly, while navigating institutional mandate, the program was oriented towards the needs of the women. Finally, the women-centered and care-based pedagogy was found to be of immediate influence on the program participants. Theoretically, this paper adds to feminist pedagogy by grounding it in the actual work of immigrant service workers, which defies any abstract attempt to fix it within the binary frame of social reproduction and transformation.

Cummins suggested that within a social context of unequal power relations, classroom interactions are never neutral, but located on a continuum ranging between the reinforcement of coercive relations of power and the promotion of collaborative relations of power. Drawing on this understanding, the purpose of this paper is to examine instructional practices and interactional dynamics in elementary English as a Second Language (ESL) classes to explore the impact of the English-dominant instructional context on emergent bilingual students' access to and investment in literacy learning. The paper is based upon a selection of data from a collaborative research project conducted in a multilingual, multicultural elementary school in a large Canadian city. The paper describes students' creation of multimodal, multilingual stories about their migration experiences and explores how making these stories opened opportunities for negotiating understandings of students' identifications. The paper concludes that, though relations of power tend to endure in English language teaching, pedagogical pivot points exist, offering the possibility to transform these understandings through an affective practice and relation.

Because they propose a form of modeling, videos have been recognised to be useful to transfer knowledge about practices requiring teachers to adopt a different role. This paper describes the results of a satisfaction survey with 98 teachers, school administrators and professionals regarding their appreciation of training videos showing teacher-led psychosocial interventions. The association between teachers' appreciation of the video and their desire to implement the intervention are explored in terms of authenticity, vicarious learning and self-efficacy, in an attempt to further comprehend how the use of video supports different aspects of modeling (skills--know-how, attitudes--know-how to be). The authors suggest that training videos featuring teachers leading psychosocial interventions support knowledge transfer because learners can relate to successful peers and can think of themselves as competent to replicate the intervention and comfortable to adopt a different role in the classroom.

There are varied approaches that have been used in sport for development (SFD) projects. This article is focused on the move by sport and exercise psychology researchers toward community-based SFD projects where marginalized groups are centralized. The authors have chosen two of their projects to exemplify different approaches to SFD. An initial project with an Aboriginal community is critically examined to reveal cultural missteps that perpetuated cultural colonization--something antithetical to community capacity building. The second project is then considered because of its closer alignment with cultural praxis and community capacity building. This second project focuses on the initial developments of a YMCA physical activity project designed to meet the needs of forced immigrants (a self-titled name developed by the refugee community members) and the staff who work with them. We culminate with five postulates proposed for SFD project teams derived from our vantage in sport and exercise psychology, where community engagement and eventual self-governance are imperatives.

Public schools have historically been key sites where children learn of and adopt a common national identity. In states where multiculturalism plays a central role in the articulation of a national identity, schools actively recognize and support the diverse cultures of their students in fulfilling this function. Canada is a state where, via federal policy, multiculturalism has been identified as a fundamental element of the national ethos. Formal education has been a key area in which the government has implemented this policy. However, public education in Canada is also committed to secularism, and this has been a cause for resistance by diverse immigrant groups. This paper examines resistance among traditional Muslim groups to Toronto school policies and practices that reflect an avowedly secular orientation. It focuses on the experiences of one Muslim group in particular, Somali immigrants, and their encounters with school policies and practices that both supported and challenged their identities. In doing so, the paper exposes the schools as sites of countervailing policies and practices within which students must nonetheless forge new and meaningful identities. (Contains 11 notes.)

Teacher educators and field placement supervisors in early childhood teacher education (ECTE) programs aid their students in learning a specific repertoire of tools and skills, including pedagogical tools they can mobilize in their future practice. However, these tools reify abstract notions about how to teach young children that are consistent with the values and beliefs of the specific community of practice or culture, and culturally diverse students may ascribe different meanings and uses to the tools. This one-year ethnographic study explored how 20 immigrant and refugee students constructed understandings of the authoritative discourse during their coursework and field placements in an urban ECTE college program in western Canada. Qualitative data were collected through field notes, spatial mapping, interviews, focus groups, and artifacts/documents. Framed by sociocultural-historical theory, this paper focuses on the scaffolding methods used by teacher educators and expert peers to assist students in appropriating children's picture books and songs as tools to use during their field placement experiences. The most effective of these scaffolding strategies used mediational devices to evoke recollections of each student's experiences "back home," thus advancing possibilities for more culturally resonant teacher education classes.

Migration is a gendered phenomenon, embedded within patriarchal structures and social relations that extend beyond State borders. We draw on a transnational feminist framework to explore the gendered dimensions of young refugee and immigrant women's migration and learning experiences. Ten women were involved in a participatory photography research project over a period of two years in which they took and shared photographs, and engaged in storytelling and self-reflection through writing and dialogue. Through the photo-stories, the women demonstrate the plurality of refugees' and immigrants' stories and how these contribute to the larger social analysis of what it is to be an immigrant or refugee woman in Atlantic Canada. We focus this paper on three key themes: (1) "formal and informal learning experiences"; (2) the essential role "relationships" play in the women's migration experiences; and (3) the importance of reflecting on and embracing life's "journeys".

Service providers' crucial roles in securing housing for refugees in Canada is a topic scantly addressed in the broader literature. A focus on frontline workers in the housing and settlement sectors offers a productive analytic lens to map the critical link between service provision and housing access for refugees. Based on thirteen semi-structured interviews with service providers across nine organizations in Toronto, Canada, this study illuminates housing access barriers, such as lack of affordable housing and perceived housing discrimination. Furthermore, this paper unearths the intersectional praxis of frontline workers. Broadening the analytical frame to include an intersectional lens centring race, class, immigration status, and gender, this paper enriches current scholarship on 1) housing inequality, 2) refugee settlement, and 3) intersectionality. This paper also makes an epistemic intervention in the evolving field of housing studies at critical junctures. While this research was conducted prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, this study reflects on the added complexity of the pandemic to refugees' housing access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity construction can be very complex for refugee children, especially for Palestinian refugee children. For refugee children, organised violence and immigration are important parts of their life experience that can lead to trauma, which in turn influences how they construct their collective identity. Schools have to consider this specific experience as the development of a meaningful identity is an important factor in refugee students' well-being and school adjustment. School-based activities centred on creative expression can help refugee students in expressing trauma and in making sense of their identity and migration experience. This paper presents the case study of a 9-year-old Palestinian refugee boy in Canada and explores how he expressed and made sense of his multiple identities in his drawings. Many features of the boy's drawings evoked a wounded identity, especially spatial disorganisation and enmeshment. Data analysis revealed that the boy might have been experiencing collective identity trauma and that he used drawing and a peer as props to heal his wounded identity. Both drawing and the space offered by his teacher to safely explore and experiment with different identities contributed to the integration of his multiple identities into a meaningful whole, which contributed to his school adjustment.