Has the family joined friends or relatives in the new country? What is the family's immigration status? Is there someone in the home who can speak English? Is anyone in the house employed? Does the family have knowledge of its ethnic associations in our city? Has the child witnessed or been the victim of any trauma before or during the move to our country? Is the family here for business, for example, a three year term? Has a parent or family member had previous experience with North American culture?" (Meyers, 1993: 4-5).

The production of knowledge about a child's family situation is important for considering the child's personal history, but lends itself to a form of disciplinary practice which resembles the traditional work of white Canadian women in the area of social and moral reform. In the early 20th century reform was organized around a series of issues which included attention to prostitution, prohibition, divorce, illegitimacy, poverty and the "Indians and the Chinese" (Valverde, 1991). English-Canadian women worked to "raise the moral tone" of society, to purify the nation state of Canada (Valverde, 1991:17). Constructions of Lady Bountiful intersect with ideas about white women and social and moral reform. Lady Bountiful "collects" culture in the form of facts about immigrants. Social and moral reformers also collect "facts" about immigrants to Canadianize the foreign other.

Such facts are provided in the 1992 text Multicultural Education of Children and Adolescents by Leroy G. Baruth and M. Lee Manning. The Table of Content reads: Chapter 1) Our Increasingly Multicultural Society; Chapter 2) Understanding Native- American Children; Chapter 3) Understanding African-American Children; Chapter 4) Understanding Asian-American Children; Chapter 5) Understanding Hispanic-American Children. The notion that one can understand and know the "other" is all within the capabilities of Lady Bountiful, particularly if the "other" is neatly totalized in chapters in a book. Identities of minority groups becomes stable, fixed and knowable while whiteness is rendered invisible.

The Baruth and Manning text has its Canadian counterpart in the recently published Children of the Canadian Mosaic (Ashworth, 1993). The text, which is already on the curriculum for teacher training courses in Ontario, provides chapters describing the history of Native, Métis, Black, Chinese, Jewish, Ukrainian, Doukhobor, and Japanese children as well as street or poor children in Canada. The histories of white, middle-class Anglo-Saxon children in Canada are not named and become the invisible norm, separated from the "mosaic." This kind of depiction insures that the historical relationship between and among dominant and non-dominant children can be easily ignored.

It is important that teachers acquaint themselves with their students and their families. What we are suggesting is that the imperative to "know" minority students and the language and image in which it 284 is couched operates to keep invisible white privilege and the hegemony of dominant culture. This serves only to reinforce the marginality of non- dominant groups. Lady Bountiful, in her more current day representation, may not overtly contain any colonizing aim or intent but the effect is nonetheless similar.cont'd...