Defying the Odds: Promoting Success for Refugee Background and Non-English Speaking Background (NESB) First-year Students Through Peer Support: Final Report

The Equity Buddies program, designed, developed, implemented and revised as part of this project, was originally conceived as a means to provide peer support to refugee background students and facilitate their acculturation to university life. The extensive literature on retention of first year students and of refugee background students in particular makes it clear that for them, many dimensions of university life are unclear, foreign, or inaccessible. Many students lack the social, academic, and cultural capital required to succeed at university. Equity Buddies is based on a cross-level, for-credit elective peer mentoring unit. Essentially it involves pairing first-year students with second or third-year students as Equity Buddies. Both members of these mentor-mentee pairs are enrolled in the for-credit unit and are supported through participation in tutorials and de-briefing groups. The latter are conducted by students who have previously completed the unit and have been outstanding as mentors. The unit is deliberately inclusive. Considerable effort is made to ensure that students are paired with students from different cultures or backgrounds. Students, whether mentors or mentees, are expected to participate in 40 hours of mentor-mentee activities over the course of the semester, keep a log-book, and attend debriefing and tutorial meetings each week.