In the fall of 2023, I was fortunate to experience a Community College for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) webinar featuring Heather Bruce Satrom from Montgomery College in Maryland and her video interview project: History in the Making; Documenting the Stories of Immigrant and Refugee Students at Montgomery College.  As an English language teacher, Professor Bruce Satrom was able to interview students from all over the world about their experiences in coming to the United States and her college. The result is a wonderful collection of video interviews with students from a range of different countries, including Iran, Haiti, China, El Salvador, Israel and Cameroon, etc. This amazing project received a 2024 Award for Faculty Innovation from the American Association of Community Colleges. Inspired by Professor Bruce Satrom’s work, I wanted to celebrate the diversity of my own college and city with a similar project, one that would feature not only NorQuest students but also staff and faculty.

Diversity is one of the main reasons I love NorQuest College. I feel very privileged to work at an institution whose dedication to inclusion is reflected in its strategic plan We Are Who We Include.  We have such a rich student body with over 3,000 international learners with 84 countries of birth and 77 languages spoken on campus (NorQuest College).  As reflected in our interview videos, our faculty and staff are equally diverse. In fact, some started their Canadian journey as NorQuest students and later became NorQuest employees.

In the videos that follow, you will see interviews with three students and six faculty and staff. In these videos, we tried to mirror the diversity of our college, interviewing candidates from a range of geographic locations who differed in terms of age, gender and length of time spent in Canada. We chose a set of questions that would allow people to demonstrate their unique personalities, as well as the challenges and opportunities they encountered during their settlement journey. Unsurprisingly, a common challenge was the cold but there were other unique difficulties in adjusting to life in Edmonton and Canada.  Our interviewees share some incredible stories, some humorous experiences and some terrible tragedies. I hope the resilience of our interviewees will inspire people; specifically, I hope they sustain the hope of others who are at the beginning of their settlement journey to Canada. Secondly, I hope they inspire Edmontonians and Canadians across the country to see the incredible diversity that is our strength and to see the amazing contributions of first-generation immigrants to Canada.

I want to thank all of our interview participants for taking the time to share their amazing stories. I would also like to thank Aubrey Kelly for the incredible videography and video editing. I want to thank Kohinoor DevRoy for her amazing leadership in guiding the project from the initial planning stages to the interviews. Thank you to Oscar Vergara for his interview work and feedback on the project outline and questions. Regarding the latter point, Selina Kunadu-Yiadom and Anna Borynec provided extremely valuable feedback on our Research and Ethics Board application. This project was reviewed and approved by the Research and Ethics Board Health Panel at the University of Alberta on January 27, 2025. Leah Ettarh was instrumental in securing project funding and in keeping the project on track through the final stages of development. This project was created by NorQuest College with the generous support of the City of Edmonton in 2025.  Thanks to Wendy Chambers and Dawn Witherspoon for supporting the genesis of this project. Finally, thank you as well to Gurkirpanpreet Singh, a NorQuest student in the Therapy Assistant program, who created the incredible cover art. We have such amazingly talented students at this college!

I enjoyed having the opportunity to collaborate with all of the amazing people involved in this project. I hope you find the interviews as engaging and informative as I do!

Robert Lawson

Note about the Cover Art: Gurkirpanpreet Singh has designed cover art for another book we will be publishing on mental health and cognition. He has a very interesting process when it comes to creating his art. According to him:

“The whole art is sketched and rendered on paper. I sketch the outlines with a pencil and then shade with a pen. I like working with ink pens, but for this piece, I used a ballpoint pen because I was going for a more realistic style.

When building a composition, I try to think of two or three key objects that I want to include in the piece, and then add or build around them. In this case, Atlas holding the miniature Earth was the first image that came to mind. Once I have a rough composition in mind, I look for references online.

Each object’s placement presents another challenge as it’s very arbitrary. For this, I use what is called the golden ratio and my own free will to see how the elements interact in a meaningful way. As I continue drawing the key objects, the composition evolves in my head and I expand on it as I see fit.”