Reconfiguring the learning space: Skilled immigrants in Canada

Abstract

Existing learning spaces for immigrants in Canada, be they mediated through training programmes or constituted through workplaces, are often constructed based on a deficit assumption about the immigrant Other. To redress this problem, I have previously proposed distributed pedagogy of difference (DiPeD) (Shan, Canadian Journal for Studies in Adult Education 27(3):1-16, 2015a) as a way to (re)distribute the responsibility of learning and teaching among people-including immigrants, trainers, organisational leaders and other workplace professionals-and things, particularly cultural artefacts such as texts and technologies. At the centre of DiPeD is an engagement in sociocultural and sociomaterial differences to simultaneously further social justice and advance workplace and professional practices. In this chapter, I expand on DiPeD, drawing on pedagogies of differences and some major proposals derived from the practice-based ontology of learning.