“C’est la clé du succès”: Thinking Through the Parental Experience of a New Support Program for Newcomer Students in Minority French-Speaking Schools in Canada

In 2010, the Ministry of Education of one of the most diverse provinces in Canada initiated the implementation of a support program for newcomer students to facilitate their academic, linguistic, social, and cultural adaptation in French speaking schools. This longitudinal multiple case study will document how immigrant parents support their children’s learning, and create a home environment conducive to learning and cultural development. It will be shown that although parents in this study made it very clear that their primary priority was their children’s success, some of them simply did not have the social, cultural or linguistic tools to help foster this desire into reality. Moreover, parents’ active involvement with the implementation of the new curriculum was affected by their own understandings of the notion of culture; the status of the French language in the province where the research took place; and the preservation of their families’ heritage cultures and languages.