In Quebec, since the 1960s, many measures, policies and action plans have been established to promote the reception and support of immigrant students in their integration into French schools (Mc Andrew, 2010). Although many educational policies have been established to urge teachers to support this integration process, they haven’t necessarily been able to equip them to handle the complexity of diversity and to promote equity, inclusion, and social justice in their schools. Thus, teachers need to have more power over the school system (Kincheloe, McLaren & Steinberg, 2011) in order to lead a process of change (Freire, 1971; 1974) to overcome social inequalities and racism. Based on a research project about reconstruction and theorization of primary teachers’ stories of practice (Desgagné, 2005) in a multiethnic context (Audet et al., CRSH, 2017-2020; Audet et al., FRQSC 2018-2021), this presentation discusses teachers’ actions to support immigrant and refugee students in their social and scholarly integration. Data was collected from teachers in highly multiethnic primary schools in Québec through explicitation interviews (Vermersch, 2017), lasting approximately 60 minutes. Teachers were asked to narrate a story related to a problem or an event that occured with one of their minority students in the class. These stories were reconstructed by the researcher and validated by the teachers before being analyzed. Inspired by the use of the critical method in research (Freire, 1971; Kincheloe, McLaren and Steinberg, 2011) that asserts the role of teachers as partners in the research, data were analysed according to categories used in the teachers’ stories. For the purpose of this presentation, four stories will be chosen for analysis because of their potential to illustrate, through the teachers’ explanations, their actions when facing a situation with minority students. Thus, this presentation aims to explore how teachers are taking on the responsibility to participate in the school justice system in order to support their students. Considering some structural constraints, such as racism, marginalization and discrimination, the stories were analyzed using the critical multiculturalism approach (May and Sleeter, 2010; May, 2002). This framework allows us to go beyond the superficial celebration of diversity to analyze teachers’ critical actions among their students. Results show that some teachers, through their reflection on the situation, opt for a change in their practices in order to become more efficient for students in terms of integration and social justice.

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