Connecting identities through drawing: Relationships between identities in images drawn by immigrant students

Immigration is extremely stressful and has an impact on children’s identity construction. When immigrating, children must make sense of the changes they experience in order to develop a flexible and plural identity. Schools can foster this meaning-making process by promoting the creation of bridges between home and school social markers. These bridges allow movement between different aspects of students’ identity and account for multiple identity configurations. One way to promote connections between identities is to offer creative expression activities within classrooms. When drawing, children project their inner feelings onto images through symbols and identify to elements of their drawings, which contribute to their identity construction. In this paper, the authors rely on data obtained from immigrant children’s drawings and interviews to present three identity expression strategies put in place in their drawings: protective withdrawal on the identity of origin to allow movement between identities, mastery of globalized youth cultural identity and neutralization of identities. These strategies reveal the relationship between identities, particularly between the cultural identity of origin and that of the host culture. One strategy, the protective withdrawal on the identity of origin to allow movement between identities will be illustrated by the case of a young Chinese boy

Assessing Wild Bee Biodiversity in Cranberry Agroenvironments: Influence of Natural Habitats

The conservation of bee populations for pollination in agricultural landscapes has attracted a lot of recent research interest, especially for crop industries undergoing expansion to meet increased production demands. In Canada, much growth has been occurring with commercial cranberry production, a field crop which is largely dependent on bee pollination. Wild bee pollinators could be negatively impacted by losses of natural habitat surrounding cranberry fields to accommodate increased production, but growers have little insight on how to manage their lands to maximize the presence of wild bees. Here, we described a 2-yr study where bee diversity and species composition were investigated to better understand the dynamic between natural habitat and cranberry fields. Bees were sampled using pan-traps and hand netting both within cranberry fields and in one of the three adjacent natural habitat types once a week during the crop flowering period. We found that bee community composition among cranberry fields did not differ based on the respective adjacent habitat type, but fields bordered by meadows were marginally less diverse than fields bordered by forest. As one would expect, field and natural habitat communities differed in terms of species composition and species richness. There was no evidence that one type of natural habitat was more favorable for the bees than another. Future agrobiodiversity studies should simultaneously examine bee diversity comprised in both crop fields and adjacent natural environments to better understand the species dynamics essential to the preservation of pollination services