Ryerson ‘concerned’ about allegations of anti-Semitism at student union meeting

2016/12/03 Leave a comment

Worth noting:

Ryerson University has expressed concern about complaints of anti-Semitism that erupted at a student union meeting this week after students made a motion to mark Holocaust education week on campus every year.

“The university is very concerned about allegations at a recent RSU (Ryerson Students’ Union) meeting,” Johanna VanderMaas, manager of public affairs, said in an email Thursday.

“We are committed to providing a civil and safe environment which is free of discrimination, harassment and hate, and is respectful of the rights, responsibilities, well-being and dignity of all of its members.”

VanderMaas confirmed that Ryerson president Mohammed Lachemi had met with Obaid Ullah, head of the student union, to discuss the matter.

Ullah said the student union is also investigating the allegations, which he called disturbing.

Lachemi’s office has also spoken with one of the students who made the claims “to provide support, guidance and to ensure their concerns are heard” and contacted the Jewish student organization Hillel Ryerson, she said.

The alleged incident took place Tuesday evening at an RSU general meeting, during which a student introduced a motion to commemorate Holocaust education week with events to teach and remember the tragedy.

Third-year student Aedan O’Connor, there to support the motion, said she and other students were subject to jeers and snickers when they spoke, which escalated to anti-Semitic comments.

She also accused two groups of orchestrating a spontaneous walkout so quorum would be lost at the meeting, and with it an opportunity to vote on the motion for Holocaust remembrance — which both groups denied.

“Several students left crying and having panic attacks,” said O’Connor, 20, a member of Hillel Ryerson. Some posted their experiences on the RSU and other Facebook pages.

Neither Ullah or Tamara Jones, RSU vice-president of equity, said they heard any derogatory remarks from their positions on stage at the front of the room.

But they said the union is disturbed by the claims. The motion for a week to mark the Holocaust has the support of the board and will likely be approved at the next meeting, said Ullah.

“At the end of the day we have zero tolerance for this,” he said. “We do not tolerate any form of oppression. It’s not fair for these students to feel upset, or negative or hear such negativity on their own campus.”

He said he has met with two Jewish groups, Hillel Ryerson and Students Supporting Israel, and “they’ve been assured they have our support and the university’s support.”

Ullah said the controversy broke out more than three hours into the meeting, after many attending to support earlier motions had left, and attendance was hovering around the required quorum level of 100 people.

When someone proposed the motion regarding Holocaust education week be broadened to a week commemorating all genocides, “it definitely caused a lot of heat in the room,” he said, adding that proposal “was not appropriate.”

News of the allegations quickly spread on social media and sparked condemnation from such groups as B’nai Brith Canada and Hillel Ontario.

Jones said since the meeting, she has heard from half a dozen upset students and expects to hear from more.

“I’m shocked and disheartened that any of this had to happen,” said Jones.

Both groups accused of orchestrating the walkout strongly denied it on Facebook and did not respond to media requests.

“Allegations that we organized or directed the loss of quorum are completely false and hurtful,” said a post from the Ryerson Muslim Students’ Association.

“We strongly believe in free speech, the right for all paying members of the RSU to put forth motions, and the importance of motions being debated and put to a democratic vote.”

A statement from the executive of Students for Justice in Palestine said it supports the call for a week to commemorate the Holocaust at Ryerson and “did not engage in any manner in the ‘planned’ walkout.”

Source: Ryerson ‘concerned’ about allegations of anti-Semitism at student union meeting | Toronto Star

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Austria election: Holocaust survivor’s appeal goes viral – BBC News

2016/12/02 Leave a comment

We neglect these warnings at our peril:

An emotional appeal from a Holocaust survivor has gone viral ahead of Austria’s presidential election.

Gertrude, 89, said Norbert Hofer’s right-wing Freedom Party “brings out the basest in people”, as she urged people to vote for his competitor.

“I have seen this once before… and it hurts and scares me”, she said, referencing anti-Semitism in the 1930s.

She was deported to the Auschwitz death camp with her family aged 16. She was the only one to survive.

Gertrude, known only by her first name, shared the video through Mr Hofer’s rival, Alexander Van der Bellen. It has been viewed almost three million times.

Austria’s presidential vote re-run is on 4 December and the polls indicate the result is too close to call. If Mr Hofer wins, he will become the EU’s first far-right head of state.

His party was founded in 1955 by a former general in the Nazi SS and it is also distinctly anti-immigration.

“That’s what bothers me the most … no respect for others, they bring out the basest of people – not the decent, but the indecent,” Gertrude said in her video.

“And it’s not the first time something like this has happened.”

She compared the rhetoric surrounding immigration to her memories of Jewish people being mocked and laughed at as they cleaned the streets of Vienna in her youth.

“That hurts. I am afraid of that,” she said.

Gertrude also said she was particularly worried by comments from the Freedom Party’s leader.

Heinz-Christian Strache in October spoke of an “uncontrolled influx of migrants alien to our culture who seep into our social welfare system”, adding that “civil war in the medium-term [is] not unlikely”.

Gertrude said she remembered a civil war from when she was seven years old and saw a dead body for the first time – something she said she could never forget.

It is not clear which war she was referring to, but Austria’s February uprising of 1934 was a four-day armed conflict which left several hundred dead.

“A shiver ran down my spine and I thought to myself: this should not even be mentioned, or even thought of,” she said.

“This is probably going to be my last election. I don’t have much time left. But the young ones still have their whole life ahead of them.

“And they have to look after themselves and for a bright future.”

Source: Austria election: Holocaust survivor’s appeal goes viral – BBC News

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Immigrant acculturation and wellbeing in Canada: John Berry and Feng Hou

2016/12/02 Leave a comment

Another informative study by John Berry and Feng You showing that an acculturation and integration strategy that involves a strong sense of belonging both to Canada and the country of origin tends to result in higher levels of well-being:

Consistent with much of the research on acculturation strategies, we found that the integration strategy (in the present case, a strong sense of belonging to the two countries) was by far the most preferred strategy. This general preference for integration has been found in many previous studies (reviewed by Berry, 1997). This preference for integration is observed even when the assessment of these strategies is operationalised in very different ways (Berry & Sabatier, 2011; Snauwaert, Soenens, Vanbeselaere, & Boen, 2003). However, both these authors also found that that these differing operationalisations provided varying estimates for the extent of preference for each strategy. In the present study, even when using only the two dimensions of sense of belonging, and having only one question for each dimension, this approach seems to have provided results that are consistent with much of the research literature: integration is by far the most preferred strategy.
The relationship between the two belonging dimensions was examined by a simple correlation. We found this to be .13, which, while significant, does not indicate that they assess the same phenomenon. Berry et al. (2006), using two cultural identities (ethnic and national) in their study of immigrant youth, found a similar positive correlation between these two identities. In the 13 countries in the sample combined, the overall correlation was .17, ranging across societies of settlement from highs of .32 to a low of .28. The overall pattern was for positive correlations to be in “settlement societies” (such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States) and negative in all other societies. This is a well-established finding in the acculturation literature, particularly in traditional immigrant-receiving countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States (e.g., Benet-Martinez, 2011; Berry, 1997; Berry et al., 2006; Costigan, Su, & Hua, 2009; Snauwaert et al., 2003).
Having created these four acculturation strategies, we attempted to assess what factors might be related to each of them. With integration taken as the control, we found patterns of demographic and social factors that are associated with each of the other three strategies.
  • Those in the assimilation group: had resided longer in Canada, had immigrated earlier in their lives, were more likely to be in the labour force, had lower bonding with their own cultural community, and were more likely to be divorced or separated. These latter two associations seem to represent a way of living in Canada that is one of living alone, and not being linked to their cultural community.
  • Those in the separation group resided in Canada for a shorter period of time; this could well represent a lag in coming to learn about and feel part of their new society. Previous research has shown this phenomenon both longitudinally (Ho, 1995) and cross-sectionally (Berry et al., 2006). Those pursuing separation were also more likely to have experienced discrimination; this finding may be an example of the phenomenon of “reactive identification” (which was referred to earlier), where individuals who feel rejected reciprocate this feeling and reject those who are the source of discrimination. This seems to represent a way of living in Canada of turning inward toward one’s own group, at least in the short term.
  • Those in the marginalisation group were more likely to be underemployed and have a lower income, were very likely to have come to Canada in the family or dependent class, and more likely to be widowed or never married. This seems to represent a way of living in Canada that, while being initially tied to a family, they now are more alone in both their economic and family situation. These patterns of association between acculturation strategies and demographic and social factors are the most common ones to be found in the literature (see Sam & Berry, 2016 for an overview).

The main focus in this study is on the wellbeing of immigrants, and whether their wellbeing can be associated with their acculturation strategy, as well as with these demographic and social factors.

First, we found that in keeping with much of the previous literature, including numerous individual studies (e.g., Berry et al., 2006) and a metaanalysis (Nguyen & Benet-Martinez, 2013), the integration acculturation strategy was associated with higher levels of wellbeing (both life satisfaction and mental health) compared to the other three strategies. This remained the case when the scores were adjusted for the demographic and social control variables that also have impact on wellbeing.

Also in keeping with much of the research literature, marginalisation was associated with the poorest levels of wellbeing.

This pattern adds to the growing evidence that when immigrants remain attached to their heritage culture, and also become involved in their new society, they achieve a greater level of wellbeing. In sharp contrast, when they are disengaged from both cultures, lacking bonding and bridging capital, they have poorer outcomes.

The present study confirmed that integration is associated with higher wellbeing. This pattern shows that being involved in both the heritage culture and in the larger society (by way of integration) promotes life satisfaction.

The research carried out on the relationship between social interactions and wellbeing in a variety of samples (Jetten, Haslam, Haslam, & Branscombe, 2009; Jetten et al., 2015) provides a broader context within which to interpret this relationship: Being engaged in and identifying with many social groups provides a basis for wellbeing. This consistent finding with immigrant samples seems to be a specific example of this general pattern.

Of particular important is the finding that the effects of acculturation strategy was larger than the social and demographic factors that are often held to account for wellbeing (Helliwell, Layard, & Sachs, 2016).

Immigrant acculturation and wellbeing in Canada

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Dutch lower house approves limited ban on burqas, niqabs

2016/12/02 Leave a comment

Somewhat more restrictive than Quebec’s Bill 62 given that it also covers public transport:

Lawmakers in the lower house of the Dutch parliament on Tuesday approved a limited ban on “face-covering clothing” including Islamic veils and robes such as the burqa and niqab.

The legislation, approved by a large majority in the 150-seat lower house, must now be approved by the upper house of parliament before it can be signed into law.

In a text message to The Associated Press, anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders called the limited ban, “a step in the right direction” and said he will push for a full burqa ban if his Freedom Party wins elections in March.

Studies suggest that only a few hundred women in the Netherlands wear niqabs or full-face burqas, but successive governments have attempted to ban the garments, following the example of European countries such as France and Belgium.

The Dutch proposal, described by the government as “religion-neutral,” does not go as far as the complete bans in those countries. It applies on public transport and in education institutions, health institutions such as hospitals, and government buildings.

In a debate last week that paved the way for Tuesday’s swift vote, Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk acknowledged that debate about the burqa had played a major role in the ban. But Plasterk, who is from the centre-left Labor Party, said that in a free country like the Netherlands people should be allowed to appear in public with their faces covered, if they want to, but that in government buildings, schools and hospitals people need to be able to look each other in the face.

The maximum fine for breaching the ban, which also covers ski masks and full-face helmets, is just over 400 euros ($425).

Source: Dutch lower house approves limited ban on burqas, niqabs – The Globe and Mail

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The Difference Between Racial Bias and White Supremacy | TIME

2016/12/01 Leave a comment

Always find John McWhorter’s pieces interesting and relevant, and his valid point that the left has to guard itself against the very same criticisms it makes of the right:

Among too many these days, the term “white supremacy” has become, of all things, a kind of hate speech.

Of course, the meaning of words and terms always changes and always has. “Audition” once referred to hearing and only gradually came to refer to hearing someone try out for a singing part on stage, upon which the term was extended to any kind of tryout at all. Like “white supremacy” has, terms have a way of coming to refer to less extreme manifestations of what they first referred to—”terrible” once meant truly horrific and now can be used about getting stuck in traffic.

But words can be more than words. The N-word, the F-word referring to gay men and the C-word referring to an anatomical part are slurs, tools for injury, not just dictionary terms. We also all understand that a word or term or reference can be a dogwhistle. “Law and order” can have a racialized meaning, for example.

The term “dogwhistle” is even an example, in that we typically use it in reference to the right wing. However, white supremacy is now a dogwhistle itself. A leftist contingent is now charging any white person who seriously questions a position associated with people of color as a white supremacist. The idea is that if you go against a certain orthodoxy, then it isn’t only that you disagree, but that you also wish white people were still in charge, that you want people of color to sit down and shut up.

This is hasty and unfair. David Duke is, indeed, a white supremacist. The alt-right is, indeed, white supremacist. For one, they openly say so. Are there some whites who are more codedly white supremacist, even if they don’t quite know it? One assumes so—but the rhetorical brush is being applied much too broadly. After all, if whites accept anything a person of color states, is this not a new form of condescension? These days, the term “white supremacy” is being used not as an argument but as a weapon.

“White supremacist” is a new way of saying “racist” while stepping around the steadily increasing awareness that that word, too, is being wielded in sloppy ways. Writing “white supremacist” is a way of making the reader jump, in the way that “prejudiced” and “racist” once were. What handier way of driving your critique home than implying that your target would have broken bread with the Confederacy, stood at the school doors at the behest of Orville Faubus, or today would be happy to sip coffee at conferences with well-spoken alt-righters?

Of course, no one means precisely that—but educated people cannot lecture the world on how words must be used carefully, that we must understand words’ larger resonances, while casually throwing around a term that calls to mind black men hanging from trees. Never mind that it’s mean.

More to the point, the left sinks to the level of the right with its own dogwhistles, intolerance and exaggerations. This is not a call for the left to suppress their anger or lie down with the right as the lamb to their lion. Criticism is vital, and not always in emotionless tones. However, we must avoid the mores of the sandbox. Nietzsche’s point, that too often punishment is rooted in a desire for revenge rather than correction, is relevant.

If you make a claim that someone desires that white people be in charge and muzzle the opinions and opportunities of people of color, you should be able to prove it. No, the fact that psychological tests reveal subtle racial biases in whites does not justify calling any white person’s questioning of the views of a person of color a white supremacist. That’s an athletic jump from the subtle to the stark, from the subliminal to the egregious.

It is tragic how ordinary that jump is becoming—it isn’t only the famous being paintballed this way. My Columbia colleague Mark Lilla has presented an argument that the extremes of identity politics should be pruned in favor of a class-based politics in order to further the goals of liberals and the left. Katherine Franke of the Columbia University law school has tarred him for this as, well, you can guess. This is the quintessence of linguistic violence.

To use “white supremacy” as a battering ram is, in the end, as uncivilized as anything offensive to liberals scrawled on a wall or spewed into a comments section. Criticism? Of course. Recreational abuse? One is to rise above it.

Source: The Difference Between Racial Bias and White Supremacy | TIME

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Stop Playing Defense on Hate Crimes | TIME

2016/12/01 Leave a comment

Some good insights by researchers Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Michael Chwe but hard to square the core recommendation that those ‘elite influencers’ within ethnic or other groups admonish hate or disrespectful speech when so much of the tone comes from the President-elect:

How do we stop this violence? Looking in from the outside and reporting events after they occur is not enough. We must understand the perpetrators’ motivations.

We often think that perpetrators simply mimic the hateful speech and actions of others. In doing so, we discount the effects that community or peer pressure can bring to bear. In fact, research shows that potential perpetrators of hate crimes and bullying are actually quite conscious of the degree to which their community supports or condemns their actions. 

For example, research has found that when a person hears others tell racist or sexist jokes, his or her tolerance for gender or racial discrimination increases. At an extreme level, it can encourage genocide: David Yanagizawa-Drott has shown that inflammatory messages played on a hate radio station, aimed at motivating Hutus to murder their Tutsi neighbors in Rwanda, had a greater effect when people in surrounding neighborhoods were also exposed to the same radio messages. In other words, hate radio alone did not increase individual hatred or violence; rather hate radio coupled with widespread exposure resulted in greater community support for violence.

Potential perpetrators do not simply “imitate” Trump but rather are encouraged to act by the fact that he garnered so many votes and supporters. They infer that they have a better chance of escaping social and legal sanction than before.

To stop hateful actions, potential perpetrators must be convinced that those in their community are opposed to this behavior. Who can best communicate this opposition? 

Kevin Munger recently found that white males who racially harass others on Twitter reduced their use of slurs when another white male with a large number of followers admonished them with a tweet (black males, and white males with few followers, were not as successful). In schools, Elizabeth Levy Paluck, Hana Shepherd and Peter Aronow showed that students who receive the lion’s share of attention in student social networks have an outsized influence over school social norms: when they stand up against bullying and student-on-student harassment, student conflict drops by up to 30%. 

These studies suggest that some people are better than others at delegitimizing hatred and violence. These “elite influencers” are more likely to come from a community considered important by a potential perpetrator—whether their racial community or their friendship group. Also, these influencers are more likely to be higher status—connected to many people within those networks.

But whether or not you are an elite influencer in your own community, evidence shows that the old-fashioned strength-in-numbers approach also works. Large numbers of people who assert values of inclusiveness and tolerance in a big, public way can change minds and behavior. Large media events or assemblies that create “common knowledge” of these values, that show each member of the community that every other member shares these values, are the most successful.

For example, a public service announcement during the Super Bowl that encourages people to report domestic violence is more successful in deterring domestic violence than an ad in a magazine; a potential perpetrator infers that the millions watching the Super Bowl find domestic violence unacceptable and are more likely to stand against and report offenders. 

A recent study also showed that people who watched a political speech in the company of a crowd (in this case, a speech by U.S. House Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-CT, on the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act), are more persuaded by the speech. Listening together, as opposed to watching alone or watching a video viewed by others at different times, is more effective because when communities synchronize their attention, people process the message in a deeper and more serious manner. 

The alternative, in which communities do not collectively bear witness to and support anti-hate speech, is a scenario in which potential perpetrators will feel more and more emboldened.

Schools, universities and localities cannot just play defense and wait for their members to be victimized. Potential perpetrators must clearly understand that everyone around them, regardless of their political views, believes that hate is unacceptable. Elite influencers in every community can help to broadcast this message. Standing with them, there is strength in numbers, and as individuals and communities, we need to come together to speak as loudly and publicly as possible.

 Source: Stop Playing Defense on Hate Crimes | TIME

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New policy template aims to encourage gender diversity on boards

2016/12/01 Leave a comment

Good initiative and one benefit of having a policy is the discussion it engenders:

Canada’s leading association for corporate directors is hoping to nudge more companies to add women to their boards by offering a free template of a board-dversity policy.

The Institute of Corporate Directors has teamed up with law firm Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLC to develop a general model of a board-diversity policy, aiming it at smaller companies that have not complied with new diversity-reporting guidelines. The template includes alternative wording options so companies can customize the content and it is free to download from both organizations’ websites.

ICD chief executive officer Rahul Bhardwaj said his organization launched the project after seeing the results of a review of diversity-reporting rules by securities regulators in September. The review showed that just 21 per cent of 677 companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange clearly disclosed that they have adopted a gender-diversity policy for their boards and their executive ranks. While that is an improvement from the 15 per cent of last year, it still signals slow progress since regulators introduced new “comply or explain” rules in 2015 requiring companies to report on their approach to gender diversity.

Mr. Bhardwaj said he was concerned about the lukewarm response by companies to the new reporting rules and concluded that many smaller companies weren’t acting because they didn’t know where to start or didn’t have the resources to hire consultants and lawyers to help them develop policies.

“The first step is to actually turn their mind to it,” he said. “For organizations saying, ‘How do we actually start to craft a policy?’, we’re saying, ‘Here’s an easy way to do it.’ It will get you into the game and thinking about it.”

He said his hope is that boards will not simply “tick the box” by quickly downloading the sample policy and adding it to their disclosure documents, but will instead have a discussion about their approach to diversity.

Osler lawyer Andrew MacDougall, who wrote the policy, said many small companies could find it helpful to have access to a model that is similar to policies adopted by larger companies with help from professional advisers.

“Often the hardest part about making any change is taking that first step,” Mr. MacDougall said. “We thought that the easiest way to jump-start a dialogue at the board level would be to help them with the first step, which is the adoption of a policy.”

The template allows boards to choose whether to make a general statement about diversity, including having an “appropriate number of women directors,” or whether to commit to a specific target level of diversity on the board. They can also choose to add a time frame for reaching the target.

The policy also includes a provision that any search firm hired to help identify board candidates will include multiple women on the possible hiring list, as well as a clause that says female candidates will be included on any “evergreen” list of potential nominees.

Mr. MacDougall said he hopes many who use the template will opt to implement a concrete target for women on the board, but that might be a step too far for some.

“We wanted to make sure that they at least had a policy that forced them to have a dialogue about whether or not to adopt a target,” he said.

Source: New policy template aims to encourage gender diversity on boards – The Globe and Mail

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That ‘ethnic driver accidents’ stereotype? It’s wrong 

2016/11/30 Leave a comment

Good piece citing relevant studies:

“Everyone knows who the culprits are that are driving up our rates but no one has the guts to come and say it. Don’t give me the argument that there are no stats on this.”

Well, we all know the colour of this particular elephant in the room. It’s not white. And anyone who overhears casual conversation knows the stereotype to which the coded language refers — all those inherently terrible Asian drivers.

I hate to be the bearer of news but first, there’s no coverup and, second, that elephant is a chimera, that is, something that may be devoutly wished for by someone but which turns out to be an illusion.

There are some statistics, just not from Metro. The Insurance Corporation of B.C. does not track accident statistics according to ethnicity. But then, why should it?

However, there is third-party research into what’s essentially an ethnic stereotype: that adult immigrants are unsafe drivers and responsible for more road crashes than long-time residents.

The study was centred on Metro Toronto, one of the most ethnically diverse populations in Canada. It looked at the driving records of more than four million drivers and set out to discover whether recent immigrants represented any increased risk of involvement as drivers in serious motor vehicle accidents.

It was published in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention.

Contrary to popular opinion, it turns out, recent immigrants are actually better drivers than the native-born scofflaws who like to speed, race the amber lights at intersections, change lanes abruptly without signalling, smoke, eat and drink hot coffee while at the wheel and other common transgressions.

Traffic slowly moves over the Lions Gate Bridge between Stanley Park and the North Shore. Contrary to popular opinion, says columnist Stephen Hume, recent immigrants are actually better drivers than the native-born drivers who like to speed, race the amber lights at intersections, change lanes abruptly without signalling and other common offences.
Traffic slowly moves over the Lions Gate Bridge between Stanley Park and the North Shore. Contrary to popular opinion, says columnist Stephen Hume, recent immigrants are actually better drivers than the native-born drivers who like to speed, race the amber lights at intersections, change lanes abruptly without signalling and other common offences. DARRYL DYCK /  THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES

Hot coffee? Oh, yes, counterintuitive as it may be, a study done by the U.S. government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concludes that hitting the drive-through for a jolt of morning java increases your odds of an accident by 80 per cent. Furthermore, the researchers found, 65 per cent of near-miss accidents result from drivers fiddling with food and drink.

In fact, the agency found, drinking hot coffee puts drivers at the greatest risk for distraction while driving. It turns out drinking hot coffee at the wheel is worse than using your cellphone or, speaking of distractions, reaching for the radio to dial up Bruce Allen’s latest rant about cyclists.

Yet it’s not coffee-drinking commuters who draw ire.

“A frequently blamed group of drivers are adult immigrants as typified by negative stereotypes,” the researchers found. “Such beliefs” — stop me if you’ve heard this — “are based on the person’s presumed lack of familiarity with geographic locations, roadway layout, prevailing laws, common customs, local signage, social etiquette, basic skills or language idioms.”

One trope is the recurring anecdote about foreign-looking drivers looking lost, being inconsiderate of traffic etiquette and delaying or putting other commuters at risk with their driving and parking ineptitude.

Why is this? The researchers sought explanations in psychology. They discovered that when traffic is congested and drivers feel late rather than relaxed they display heightened selfishness, diminished graciousness toward others and increased reliance on stereotypes to explain their situation.

“Second, the anonymity of driving provides little deterrence against outbursts of bigotry.”

And finally, people justify their own driving errors as a result of their situation while judging other drivers’ mistakes as latent traits.

Among the million Metro residents of Asian descent there are doubtless a few bad drivers. The published research indicates, however, that the proportion of bad drivers is greater in the long-term population than among recent immigrants.

In the Toronto study, researchers examined accidents and hospital admissions with traffic injuries and compared the rates among a million recent immigrants with those for long-term residents.

“Recent immigrants were less likely to be drivers involved in a serious motor vehicle crash compared to long-term residents,” the study says. “Findings suggest that recent immigrants contribute to fewer serious road crashes than the population norm.”

Source: That ‘ethnic driver accidents’ stereotype? It’s wrong | Vancouver Sun

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6 Potential Brain Benefits Of Bilingual Education : NPR

2016/11/30 1 Comment

What the latest science and studies show:

So what does recent research say about the potential benefits of bilingual education? NPR Ed called up seven researchers in three countries — Sorace, Bialystok, Luk, Kroll, Jennifer Steele, and the team of Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier — to find out.

Attention

It turns out that, in many ways, the real trick to speaking two languages consists in managing not to speak one of those languages at a given moment — which is fundamentally a feat of paying attention.

Saying “Goodbye” to mom and then “Guten tag” to your teacher, or managing to ask for a crayola roja instead of a red crayon, requires skills called “inhibition” and “task switching.” These skills are subsets of an ability called executive function.

People who speak two languages often outperform monolinguals on general measures of executive function. “[Bilinguals] can pay focused attention without being distracted and also improve in the ability to switch from one task to another,” says Sorace.

Do these same advantages accrue to a child who begins learning a second language in kindergarten instead of as a baby? We don’t yet know. Patterns of language learning and language use are complex. But Gigi Luk at Harvard cites at least one brain-imaging study on adolescents that shows similar changes in brain structure when compared with those who are bilingual from birth, even when they didn’t begin practicing a second language in earnest before late childhood.

Empathy

Young children being raised bilingual have to follow social cues to figure out which language to use with which person and in what setting. As a result, says Sorace, bilingual children as young as age 3 have demonstrated a head start on tests of perspective-taking and theory of mind — both of which are fundamental social and emotional skills.

Reading (English)

About 10 percent of students in the Portland, Ore., public schools are assigned by lottery to dual-language classrooms that offer instruction in Spanish, Japanese or Mandarin, alongside English.

Jennifer Steele at American University conducted a four-year, randomized trialand found that these dual-language students outperformed their peers in English-reading skills by a full school year’s worth of learning by the end of middle school.

Such a large effect in a study this size is unusual, and Steele is currently conducting a flurry of follow-up studies to tease out the causality: Is this about a special program that attracted families who were more engaged? Or about the dual-language instruction itself?

“If it’s just about moving the kids around,” Steele says, “that’s not as exciting as if it’s a way of teaching that makes you smarter.”

Steele suspects the latter. Because the effects are found in reading, not in math or science where there were few differences, she suggests that learning two languages makes students more aware of how language works in general, aka “metalinguistic awareness.”

The research of Gigi Luk at Harvard offers a slightly different explanation. She has recently done a small study looking at a group of 100 fourth-graders in Massachusetts who had similar reading scores on a standard test, but very different language experiences.

Some were foreign-language dominant and others were English natives. Here’s what’s interesting. The students who were dominant in a foreign language weren’t yet comfortably bilingual; they were just starting to learn English. Therefore, by definition, they had much weaker English vocabularies than the native speakers.

Yet they were just as good at decoding a text.

“This is very surprising,” Luk says. “You would expect the reading comprehension performance to mirror vocabulary — it’s a cornerstone of comprehension.”

How did the foreign-language dominant speakers manage this feat? Well, Luk found, they also scored higher on tests of executive functioning. So, even though they didn’t have huge mental dictionaries to draw on, they may have been great puzzle-solvers, taking into account higher-level concepts such as whether a single sentence made sense within an overall story line.

They got to the same results as the monolinguals, by a different path.

Source: 6 Potential Brain Benefits Of Bilingual Education : NPR Ed : NPR

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After Election, Diversity Trainers Face A New Version Of ‘Us Versus Them’ : NPR

2016/11/30 1 Comment

Interesting story on how some US diversity consultants are assessing the impact of the election:

[Dorcas] Lind is a diversity consultant in the health care industry. It’s her job to go into companies and help them create inclusive environments for their employees.

For consultants like Lind, the election’s polarizing nature, which especially divided the nation on issues of race, is two-fold. While it means some of their business will almost certainly boom, a new set of challenges emerges for the professional peacemakers. Now, they say, they have to work harder to tamp down heightened feelings of us versus them; they have to hear the concerns of people usually thought of as privileged; and they have to navigate a language minefield where the wrong word can ignite conflict.

Studying the maps of how people voted, Lind was disturbed by the stretch of red in her district, a New Jersey suburb, which she said had once been celebrated for its diversity. Like many others in the business, Lind equated a vote for Trump with a vote for intolerance.

“I thought that my whole career had blown up in front of me,” said Lind, who has worked in the field for more than two decades and is founder and president of Diversity Health Communications. “I felt so absolutely overwhelmed with the depth of how much work had to be done. And on the other hand, I felt like I didn’t even want to do the work. … Given the results and how the map looked, I felt my work would be futile.”

“There’s a whole toolkit of language we need to create [in order] to talk about this polarization,” Lind said. “It’s those who voted for Trump or support Trump — and everyone else. And that’s a really difficult dichotomy to address.”

Luby Ismail is the head of Connecting Cultures, a diversity consulting business in the Washington, D.C., area. She said one of her biggest tasks is to break down any feelings that people are on warring sides. Ismail, who’s an Egyptian-American Muslim, has worked with companies including The Walt Disney Co., Nike Inc. and Sodexo to lead sessions that help employees better understand Arab-Americans and American Muslims.

“The workplace is very tricky,” Ismail said, “because what do we say if you want to remain friends with people? ‘Then don’t talk about politics and religion.’ And yet, people are needing to talk about it. So if only we had some way to bring civility with caution, and for people to feel that instead of doing an us versus them, a right versus wrong, it’s, you know, ‘Help me understand why you believe something.’ “

The Department of Justice uses one of Ismail’s training videos on identifying anti-Muslim bias as part of its cultural competence curriculum. She’s updating the DOJ training now, but she said she’s not sure what will come of it after Inauguration Day.

That “us-versus-them” sentiment Ismail mentioned is particularly tough to manage now. Doug Harris heads The Kaleidoscope Group, a diversity company in Chicago. He said that he has to help people of color deal with “historical garbage” — he means racism — while also helping white people who, he learned during this campaign, feel strongly that they’re “out of the power base.”

“I think right now there’s a temperament within society of exclusion on both sides of the table,” Harris said. “And those who may have been seen to have been historically included are feeling just as excluded as everyone else. It’s always a fight today in some ways [over] who’s most excluded. Historically, it might have been about women, people of color, gay and lesbian. There’s another group that’s more powerful called — uh, I don’t know the right name of it, but white males — who feel they haven’t been given their fair shake. And so how do we make sure their viewpoint is heard?”

Usually, Harris uses an exercise he calls “insiders and outsiders” to get people to self-reflect. In this exercise, employees list who might feel like outsiders in the company. Maybe it’s new workers or people at lower levels or people who have English as a second language or introverts, Harris said. Inevitably, the list turns to women and people of color.

“So we look at the list. If you’re not part of the list, that means you’re probably one of the ones causing the exclusion,” Harris said.

White people as a group, and particularly men, don’t typically make that list. But the presidential campaign, Harris said, unearthed the strong sentiment among white people that “they don’t feel like the lead group that’s been privileged, and if you look at their lives, they’re not.”

Those who do diversity, he said, have a responsibility to address everyone’s concerns. “It’s not about a special effort toward white men,” he said. “That’s not the effort I’m talking about. It’s more-so that … if you honor everybody’s challenges, they’re more likely to own their privileges.”

Lind adds an amendment to that thought, one that underscores the tension diversity consultants, like the rest of the country, are tasked with resolving. Longstanding racial discord, fueled by the “historical garbage” Harris mentioned, collides with the idea of honoring everybody’s challenges when some of those challenges spring from racial ignorance and racism. Thinking of all challenges as equal, she said, is a problem.

“I think the backlash we’re seeing is people who work in the diversity space — and also civil rights folks in general — are saying, ‘We are not going to be inclusive of ideas and values that are explicitly detrimental and harmful,’ ” Lind said. “Because the rhetoric is, ‘One side has lost, one side has won, and everybody needs to get together and move forward for all Americans in the country.’ ”

Walking that line of competing interests is made even tougher by the language of diversity, including the word diversity itself. Leah P. Hollis, president of Patricia Berkly LLC in Philadelphia, said she actively avoids language that might be polarizing so she can keep everyone in the conversation. After all, in a swing state like Pennsylvania, where nearly 6 million people voted and Trump won by fewer than 70,000 votes, she has to assume that half of the employees she’ll be working with voted for Trump, half for Clinton. So figuring out what tone to strike is important.

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