<p>Despite being a rapidly growing demographic in Canadian public education, immigrant parents’ engagement is rarely theorized as a learning process shaped by structural and historical forces. Drawing on 6 months of critical ethnography and targeted qualitative interviews with South Korean newcomer parents in Greater Vancouver, this paper proposes a three-sphere analytical framework (official, communal, and shadow) grounded in sociocultural theories of learning: legitimate peripheral participation, communities of practice, and history in person. The findings reveal a <i>loop of anxiety</i> in which institutional opacity within the official sphere structurally compels parents toward shadow education and ethnic networks. Paradoxically, this reproduces the very education fever parents migrated to escape, not as cultural preference, but as an institutionalized response to systemic silence. By tracing the interconnected dynamics across three spheres and through individual participant trajectories, this paper reframes immigrant parent engagement as active, socio-historically situated learning, offering a more comprehensive and equitable analytical framework for understanding how newcomer families navigate Canadian education.</p>