Books and Book Chapters

Beyond Translation: Exploring Child Language Brokering in Alberta’s Culturally Diverse Landscape is a groundbreaking study on how children in immigrant families serve as informal interpreters and cultural bridges for their parents. Rooted in Alberta and addressing a gap in Canadian literature, the book uses mixed methods—quantitative data and multilingual qualitative narratives in English, French, and Arabic—to explore the emotional, social, and cultural dimensions of child language brokering (CLB). It includes perspectives from both children and parents, highlighting real-world challenges and strengths in the CLB experience. The book moves beyond theory by offering best practices and program-based recommendations for service providers. It challenges U.S.-centric, homogenous research by foregrounding Alberta’s ethnocultural diversity, making it a vital resource for educators, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working with immigrant communities.

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The ReNEW program was a yearlong settlement counselling service at TIES that offered one to one help with practical needs and tracked the most common client concerns (user-provided text). ReNEW research at the University of Calgary examines newcomer emotional wellness in settlement services and concludes these supports are still early, experimental, and precarious despite recent IRCC investment, based on a two year study in four western cities using client surveys, interviews, and staff focus groups, with gaps in staff capacity, model fit, and funding complexity compared with mature language services

ReNEW research by TIES and the University of Calgary examined emotional wellness supports in four western Canadian cities and gathered agency feedback through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and a workshop, surfacing five issues: client acculturation stress, barriers to community and municipal supports, structural limits inside agencies, front line staff working beyond scope, and uneven LINC approaches; it recommends capacity building that embeds informed practices into lesson planning, classroom management, and client engagement, noting wellness is often not prioritized by funders and is not in the LINC curriculum, so an embedded model is a practical fit.