Labelled Before They Learn

A Multicultural Liaison Officer (MLO) in Ontario, recounted a conversation with an educator who said a refugee girl in his class was to be married off, so it didn’t matter whether or not she was engaged in the classroom. In the eyes of that educator, her future was already decided.

This is not an isolated story. In 2023, Canada admitted 74,979 refugees; many of them were children. And when those children walked into a Canadian school for the first time, the adults in that building quickly formed opinions about them, and often without realizing it.

I sat down with a handful of educators, MLOs, and social workers in Ontario. One pattern kept emerging: refugee children get one of two labels. They are either resilient or violent. Both of these labels harm the child.

Two Labels, One Outcome

Resilience sounds like a compliment. But when a child is called resilient, what often happens next is nothing. Instead of looking at a broken placement process, a lack of language support or the fact that this child may be sitting in a classroom not understanding a single word being said, the child is expected to push through. And when the child does, that is called strength.

The violence label works differently but has the same effect. Children who act out – often frustrated or traumatized, or acting in ways that do not match what a Canadian classroom expects – are classified as being aggressive and difficult. And once that label sticks, it shapes their Canadian school experience, from how they receive support or how they are read in the classroom.

What both labels have in common is that they put the problem on the child, not on the system.

Who Gets Called Resilient

In the majority of conversations I had with educators and MLOs, resiliencewas a word reserved for refugee children of colour. They were the ones seen as having survived something — and that perception carried consequences (Heringer, 2024).

Research tells us that resilience as a concept is not applied evenly. In Western schools specifically, it gets attached to racialized students not as genuine recognition of their strength, but as a way of explaining away their difficulties without addressing them. Kirmayer et al. (2008) found that resilience is shaped by cultural context, and that Western educational models define it in individual terms, failing to account for the collective and community-based ways many racialized children actually cope. When a Somali student endures a classroom where nobody speaks his language, that gets called resilience. When a Ukrainian student faces the same difficulty, it becomes a problem the school is expected to solve.

The distinction is not about the child’s experience — it is about whose suffering prompts action.

When a student’s persistence through difficulty is labelled as strength, the school stops asking why things are difficult in the first place.

Who is Seen as Violent

When I asked participants to describe refugee students’ behaviour, the words they reached for were “disruptive,” “violent,” and “difficult to manage.” An educator said, “They’re categorized as aggressive.”

The disconnect points to something deeper than individual bias. Behaviours rooted in trauma, frustration or cultural differences are routinely misread as intentional defiance. “When behaviours show up, they often manifest aggression, and then it gets coded and interpreted in that way,” said one MLO.

One participant described a student who had watched members of his immediate family be killed before arriving in Canada. At school, he was targeted relentlessly and bullied with slurs about his mother. He asked the other student to stop, but it did not work. Eventually, he fought back.

The school’s response was to call the police on him. A national study in the United States found that Black and Latino students were disciplined at significantly higher rates than white students for the same behaviours — not because they misbehaved more, but because their behaviour was read differently (Darling-Hammond & Ho, 2024). The same dynamic plays out in Ontario classrooms. The behaviour is identical. The response is not.

“He’s tried to resolve it without violence, and you at no point thought to call the police on this other kid,” the participant said. “But as soon as this child who’s had enough reacts, all of a sudden now you want to criminalize him?”

It was not an isolated incident. Police were called on refugee students — specifically racialized refugee students — when disruptions occurred, participants noted. Meanwhile, as one educator observed: “When the [white] kids exhibit the same behaviour, there’s almost always an excuse.”

The behaviour was the same. The response was not.

A System Sorted by Race

The labels do not stay in the classroom. They are written into the structures that decide where students are placed, which programs they enter, and what futures they are pointed toward.

Walk into any English Literacy Development class in Ontario, one participant said, and the pattern is immediately visible. “Look at the student population demographic — Arab and Somali,” she said. “What about the Ukrainians that don’t speak a word of English? They are put into normal streams.”

Another participant made the same observation from a different angle. Ukrainian refugee students, she noted, had integrated into the school system quickly. “It might be due to the fact they look like a lot of the other people in the school as well and their accents aren’t as heavy,” she said. “Whereas Syrian refugee students have struggled a lot more. They feel a lot more different.”

Same country. Same schools. Different treatment.

The process that determines these placements is broken at its foundation. Students are assessed through a test that lasts roughly an hour and a half, administered by assessors who, in some cases, themselves have difficulty with English. “And like the whole system is broken,” said one participant. “They place them at the level they think is correct”

Once a student is placed, no one checks back. A child placed in the wrong stream in Grade 1 can still be there in Grade 8 not because they belong there, but because the system forgot about them.

“They will get lost in the system,” one participant said. “If they are in the ELD program in elementary, nobody will check their record, and then the cycle will continue in high school. These students will then have their future determined for them.”

Not by their ability. By a ninety-minute test and a system that never looked twice.

How to Move Away from Labels.

1. Train educators in trauma

Many teachers have never been taught what trauma looks like in a classroom. Almost every educator I spoke to discussed how they have never had any trauma informed workshops.  A student who shuts down during loud group work may not be disengaged — they may be overwhelmed. A student who refuses to write about their family may have very good reasons for that silence.

What schools can do:

• Implement mandatory trauma-informed professional development not a one-hour workshop, but ongoing training embedded into how staff are prepared to teach
• Create low-pressure alternatives for triggering assignments offer different prompts, different formats, different topics
• Before escalating a behaviour, require educators to document what they know about the context behind it

Refugee students remain at high risk for traumatization in schools and that most existing staff training programs lack sustained implementation needed to make a real difference (Lembke, Linderkamp & Casale, 2024).

2. Break down the silos

Right now, a student can be placed in the wrong ELD level in Grade 1 and still be there in Grade 8 because nobody checked. A teacher can flag a concern without knowing an MLO has been working with that family for months. Everyone operates alone and students fall through the gaps.

What schools can do:

• Establish regular case meetings between teachers, MLOs, and social workers for refugee students, not just when something goes wrong
• Create a shared file for each refugee student that all relevant staff can access and update
• Require placement programs and schools to communicate beyond the initial placement, with at least one follow-up assessment in the first year

When Sweden made it mandatory for there to be case meeting to between educators and social workers, students stopped falling through the gaps (Nilsson & Bunar, 2016).

3. Diversify school staff

When a refugee student walks into a school and every teacher, vice principal, and guidance counsellor looks nothing like them and knows nothing about where they come from, that sends a message before a single word is spoken. Representation is not symbolic, it is structural (Villegas & Irvine, 2022).

What schools can do:

• Actively recruit racialized educators into leadership pipelines, not just classroom roles
• Hire MLOs and support staff who speak the languages and share the cultural backgrounds of the student population
• Ensure hiring panels include diverse voices when making decisions about who works with refugee students

Black students who have the same-race teacher in early elementary school are measurably mor likely to graduate high school and enroll in post-secondary (Gershenson et al. 2022).

4. Start from what students bring, not what they lack

Many refugee students are multilingual, adaptable, and resourceful in ways the curriculum never makes room for. Luna, a teacher who was herself a refugee student, described what she does in her classroom: “In a classroom, where I provide a prompt, I translate it into the languages I know are present in my classroom. It shows me that they understand the question, and I’ll also write in English to show them the translation.”

What teachers can do:

• Let students answer in their home language first, then in English
• Ask students to share how something works in their country before explaining how it works in Canada
• Design assignments that draw on students lived experiences as a source of knowledge, not just personal background
• Celebrate multilingualism openly in the classroom make it visible that knowing more than one language is an asset (Reyes et al., 2023)

Reflection Questions

1. Think of a refugee or newcomer student you’ve worked with, how would you describe them to those around you? Did that label lead you to ask why they were struggling, or did it let you stop asking?
2. Of the four shifts described above — trauma training, breaking down silos, diversifying staff, and starting from what students bring — which one is most within your own control to act on this year, and what is one concrete first step you could take?

References

Antony-Newman, M., & Niyozov, S. (2023). Barriers and facilitators for academic success and social integration of refugee students in Canadian and US K–12 schools: A meta-synthesis. Canadian Journal of Education, 46(4), 980–1012. https://doi.org/10.53967/cje-rce.5859

Darling-Hammond, S., & Ho, E. (2024). No matter how you slice it, Black students are punished more: The persistence and pervasiveness of discipline disparities. AERA Open, 10. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584241293411

Gershenson, S., Hart, C. M. D., Hyman, J., Lindsay, C. A., & Papageorge, N. W. (2022). The long-run impacts of same-race teachers. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 14(4), 300–342. https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.20190573

Heringer, R. (2024). Beyond the door frame: The role of educational policies and guidelines in (un)welcoming Black refugee students. British Educational Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3986

Kirmayer, L. J., Lemelson, R., & Barad, M. (2008). Understanding trauma: Psychological, biological, and cultural perspectives. University Press.

Lembke, E. J., Linderkamp, F., & Casale, G. (2024). Trauma-sensitive school concepts for students with a refugee background: A review of international studies. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1321373. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1321373

Nilsson, J., & Bunar, N. (2016). Educational responses to newly arrived migrants in Sweden: Understanding the structure and influence of post-migration ecology. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 60(4), 399–414. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2015.1024163

Reyes, C. C., Haines, S. J., & Ghemari, L. M. (2023). Examining community cultural wealth of multicultural liaisons and their leadership. Voices in Urban Education, 51(1). https://vue.metrocenter.steinhardt.nyu.edu/article/id/23/

Villegas, A. M., & Irvine, J. J. (2010). Diversifying the teaching force: An examination of major arguments. The Urban Review, 42(3), 175–192. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-010-0150-1

Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.

Meet the Expert(s)

Hibagh Ahmed

Doctoral Student, York University

Ms. Hibagh Ahmed is a PhD student in Sociology at York University and holds a Master of Arts in Migration Studies from Carleton University. Her research focus examines the educational experiences of refugee youth, with particular attention to migration memory, belonging, and the ways schools shape inclusion. She is passionate about advancing research that contributes to more equitable educational policies and practices, ensuring refugee children have equal opportunities to learn, participate, and succeed.

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