Facilitating Seamless Inclusion of Migrant Students into Working Life. A comparative study of the ”best practices” from integration educations in Canada and Finland

Firstly, we aim to analyse integration education programs’ “best practices” aimed at worklife inclusion of adult migrants into the Finnish and Canadian labor markets. Secondly, we will develop a worklife integration model based on these best practices which will be pilot tested within the partner education programs. For students integrating in a country’s minority language, this integration into institutions of the national minority is of additional importance as the dominant environment is generally constructed around the majority language.

While integration education programs generally include components of language teaching, developing societal competences and work life education including short practice placement periods these are often not well connected and do not sufficiently correspond to students’ previous professional expertise and competences. Our project will create a more cohesive interface between these components by surveying educators, employers and migrants' experiences of worklife integration and include their development proposals to identify best curricular and extra-curricular practices. Based on these best practices we will create a worklife integration model to be pilot tested in existing courses within the participating schools. This research is a comparative study between the Swedish Adult Education Institute's (Arbis) tailor-made integration model in Helsinki, Community College Kvarnen’s Social Integration Program in Kronoby and NorQuest College’s Portfolio-Based Language Assessment Model in Edmonton, Canada.