Two professors and a Master’s alumna from UNU-MERIT have won the RWB Jackson Award 2021, for the most outstanding English-language article published in the Canadian Journal of Education. The award went to an article entitled, The Use of a Multidimensional Support Model to Examine Policies and Practices for Immigrant Students across Canada, co-authored by Louis Volante, Camila Lara, Melissa Siegel et al. The article sets out the urgent case for ministries and departments to develop a stand-alone ...
There is no doubt that COVID-19 has significantly impacted our lives, including schools and education. Temporary closures of school buildings have highlighted how factors outside school systems affect schools’ capacity to meet students’ needs and support academic achievement. For example, elementary schools can only successfully deliver online education if children have an adult or responsible caregiver with them or they have a reliable internet connection. There is a large body of research that...
This is an extraordinary moment in world history. While it is too early to assess the global impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, emerging evidence indicates that it has made significant progress. The first significant impact of the protests has been the toppling of Confederate and slavery-related statues around the world. In England, protesters toppled the statue of Edward Colston, a prominent slave trader. In Belgium, protesters set fire to a statue of King Leopold II. In the USA, statue...
Since the end of World War II, the United States of America has been the leading voice in the promotion of human rights, equality and non-discrimination. In fact, from 1933 to 1945, it was the US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who spearheaded the drafting and negotiations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which eventually came into force in 1948. Human rights explicitly became a major part of US foreign policy in the 1970s, and since 1976 the Department of State's Bureau of Democracy, ...
Empowering people to manage their own money with a one-off cash payment could have an enduring impact on homelessness, if the “beautifully surprising” results of a Canadian initiative are anything to go by. The New Leaf Project, a scheme led by Vancouver-based Foundations for Social Change (FSC) saw a one-off payment of CAD7,500 (around $5,600) given to 50 homeless adults, compared to a control group of 65 homeless people who did not receive any money. The initiative, which began in 2018 and was...
An enduring goal of Migration Studies is to explain why people migrate: why some move and others do not. While the reasons to explain the migration of an individual are going to be different from those to explain an aggregate flow of many hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals, no individual is totally isolated from the broader context of the group within which he or she lives and moves....
Not the ‘classic’ Italian-Argentinian migration history, ours is more about those left behind and a return to the home country. Gaetano Bloise was born in 1895 in Cassano, a village in Calabria, the southmost region on the Italian peninsula. During World War I, he was injured at the infamous Battle of Caporetto, the worst defeat in Italian military history. Soon after he returned to Cassano, opened a grocery shop, and married Maria Ciappetta (1894-1975), with whom he raised four children in pove...
In May 2019, the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released a summary report for policymakers, “suggesting that around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken to reduce the intensity of drivers of biodiversity loss”. Highlighting the importance of biodiversity not only for our quality of life but for human existence per se, the report calls for transformative changes, i.e. “a fundamental, system...
Policies that cut school expenditures under the premise of “doing more with less” can also contribute to a decrease in high school graduation rates that could easily cancel out those savings. Shutterstock A joint post by Profs. Louis Volante, Jo Ritzen et al. Recently, the Ontario government proposed educational reforms that collectively amount to savings of almost $1 billion, according to an analysis by the charity People for Education. As a result of reforms, students will receive less attenti...
My migration story began in Honduras, a beautiful country, at the heart of the Americas. This is the land where the sacred pyramids of our Mayan ancestors stand tall among the jungle canopy, and where the coffee beans grow strong at the skirt of our mountains. We are mestizos, which is Spanish for ‘people of mixed race’. Since colonisation the blood of our indigenous ancestors has been mixed with the blood of African slaves and that of the European colonisers who settled there. It is these three...