ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the school as a critical juncture for newcomers to Canada, whose aspirations for their children's success begin with positive school achievement. A school community is a complex microcosm that includes children, families and local service professionals. Parents wanted their children to be successful in Canada, and they put great emphasis on report card grades to indicate progress. The most challenging difficulty for the school was getting appropriate services for children with special needs, given the community's sense of inviolable privacy. The cultural sharing project was a wonderful learning experience for everyone: teachers, students and parents. Children had researched how their parents had learned to deal with conservation issues when they were children, which helped them to connect family traditions to ecological realities. The learning community at Joyce Public School was keen to utilize the wealth of linguistic knowledge that parents and families held.
