Pending Summative report for School A in collective case study: The impact and implications of immigration, demographic changes and increasing diversity on teachers and administrators in a New Brunswick high school context

Description

This pending summative report is based on approximately seventeen (17) months of qualitative case study research in Eastern Coastal High School (pseudonym). The study was originally conceptualized as a collective case study consisting of four additional high schools within an Anglophone school district in New Brunswick. Recent and on-going global events since we began on April 22, 2015, have affected several planned stages of our data collection and analytical stages in this first inquiry. As a consequence, in February, 2016 when the school welcomed an influx of Syrian students and their families into the school community, our team decided to pull back and pause in the project. This decision was intentional and made in collaboration with our colleagues in the school who were part of and supporting this work. Many of our participants agreed with us that it was important to allow their colleagues abundant time to adjust to the flurry of recent demographic changes in the school. As a result we were unable to collect data from newcomer students. This student data set is an important part of this study, and it is our hope that the school and its administration will extend us one more data cycle in 2017 to acquire the perspectives of newcomer/new Canadian students. Case study research is bounded in time and place (Creswell, 1998; Stake, 1995); as researchers and educators, we are cognizant of the demands placed on educators and respect the reality that they and their students need to proceed with the daily rigor of teaching and learning. We have decided to report on selected data that we have collected in our inquiry in this pending summative report. We will not be able to report on all the data as a portion of it needs to be compared and substantiated with the student data. Further, if we attempt to write a full scale summative report, a monograph of many hundred pages may be produced and we believe it will not serve and support the efforts of the participants and their colleagues in the school. We do believe that our findings to date have the potential to make a valuable contribution to ongoing school and district planning so we report the main thematic findings in this report based on several categories we identified early in the study and developed into the thematic statements as the inquiry progressed.