Intersections Between the Life Stories of Internationally-Trained Immigrant Women and Institutional Narratives of Immigrant Success in Ontario

The following dissertation compares the life stories (Linde, 1993) of six internationally trained immigrant women, successful in finding employment in their fields of post-secondary teaching, with video success stories available on a government webpage for bridge training in Ontario and with national and provincial immigration and integration policy. Using Lindes (2009) institutional narrative to conceptualize how these video stories of successful bridge training graduates can serve as templates and tools of socialization for skilled immigrants who are seeking to re-enter their fields in Ontario, the analysis focusses on the representations of the integration process, the role of language learning and teaching in these narratives, and the ways that the six participants life stories (Linde, 1993) may take up the same discourses circulated in the institutional narrative. In order to understand the impact these institutional narratives of integration have on the life stories of individual immigrant women, the analysis makes use of Foucaults (1991; 1994) theoretical frameworks of technology of the self and governmentality. Seen through this lens, narrative becomes a tool for the construction of a self that is both in line with dominant discourses of self-responsibility and a self that is morally acceptable to the individual. The analysis finds that both the video success stories and the life stories of the six participants incorporate neoliberal discourses of self-sufficiency and lifelong learning that emphasize economic over social integration and allow for acceptance of the need for further training, in this case bridge training. Both the participants and the video success story protagonists accept the need to learn higher level professional communication skills and behaviour that places the burden for successful communication solely on the immigrant. In addition, both institutional and personal narratives make use of discourses of diversity and multiculturalism, accomplishing an alignment with established Canadian values on one hand, but also a separation of immigrant groups from the dominant white settler class (Bannerji, 2000; Thobani, 2007), relegating them to a peripheral position long after they have attained citizenship. Recommendations are made to include critical multicultural education (Kubota 2004a, 2004b) into the bridge training classroom.