Pre and post settlement education experiences and post-school outcomes for young people of refugee background in Australia.

Author(s):

Susan Creagh(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

07. Social Justice and Intercultural Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

07 SES 03 A JS, Counteracting Discrimination in Schools and Minority Students’ Educational Experiences

Joint Paper Session NW 07 and NW 26

Time:

2017-08-22

17:15-18:45

Room:

W3.09

Chair:

Dana Moree

Contribution

This presentation explores the educational background and experiences of Australian refugee background young people with limited prior schooling, from their arrival in Australia, through to post-school. It explores how educational disadvantage is experienced by this group. It identifies how pedagogy and policy must be responsive to the unique needs of this group, despite the increasing strictures of ‘educational accountabilities’ associated with national standardised testing, engagement with international testing programs, curriculum reform, school ranking and the marketization of the government school system (Lingard, Martino, Rezai-Rashti, and Sellar 2016). The presentation resonates in the European context: those seeking refuge in Europe come from the same source countries as refugee groups entering Australia. This research also complements recent European work (e.g. Nilsson and Bunar 2016; Pinson and Arnot 2010) focused on educational systemic responses to newly arrived refugee young people.

As a signatory to the UNHCR refugee resettlement program, Australia annually settles approximately 6,000 refugees, and has a long history of doing so (Karlsen 2016). This has significant consequence for Australian education services and of particular concern in this service provision, are those students entering schools with minimal prior education, from a range of African countries, and from Middle Eastern and Asian locations, who face enormous challenges, particularly if they have reached secondary school age and must engage with an English only curriculum, designed for students with at least 6 years of schooling. These students are manifoldly disadvantaged as they have not had the opportunity to learn to read or write in their first (spoken) language; they need to develop literacy in English for school but do not have oracy in English; they must do this at a much older and later stage of schooling than their age group peers.

Problematically, refugee background students with limited prior schooling are also hidden in poor statistical category definitions in national standardised testing practices because reporting of their performance is impacted by high performing English as an Additional Language (EAL) students also in the category, with results which skew the data upwards. Existing statistical processes fail to identify and measure these students who are essentially ‘invisibilised’ (Creagh 2015). The follow on effect washes down from policy to pedagogy undermining the provision of appropriate second language (L2) pedagogy for this group (Creagh 2014).

Drawing on two different studies and sources of data, I wish to focus on the education challenges being faced by educators and these young people of refugee background who resettle in Australia. The two sources of data include: survey data from Building a New Life in Australia (BNLA), an Australian longitudinal study of humanitarian migration; and qualitative reports from EAL teachers working with newly-arrived refugee background learners. Each of these sources offers complementary understandings of the educational experiences of newly arrived refugees. The former, a recent initiative of the Australian government, taps into the voices of the refugees themselves, and illuminates their lives before settling in Australia, including education attainment, their experiences of settlement, English language proficiency, and post arrival education pathways. The latter gives voice to experienced professionals who design and implement appropriate pedagogical responses to the specific learning needs of this newly arrived cohort of learners who are just beginning to develop literacy for the first time. Unpacking the complexity of the refugee educational experience, both pre and post arrival to Australia offers useful insight into ways in which policy and practice can alleviate the levels of disadvantage experienced by this group of young people. Such insight has global significance, and resonates in all nations who are grappling with settlement of displaced populations, as has occurred across Europe in recent years.

Method

There have been two waves of longitudinal survey data captured in BNLA and these have been analysed quantitatively in order to provide descriptive evidence of the extent of learner educational need and to explore relationships between pre-settlement experiences and post-settlement education and post-school outcomes. Regression models were devised to explore which predictor variables were associated with successful post-school outcomes such as attaining employment or further study, and experiencing a positive sense of well-being. The interview data with EAL specialist teachers are sourced from an action research project aimed to improve teaching practice specifically in relation to the teaching of reading to refugee background students who commence secondary school in Australia with beginning reading skills. The setting was an intensive on-arrival English language secondary school and the students were in the very beginning stages of secondary schooling and were engaging for the first time with literacy. Much of the existing literature (for example Hammond and Miller 2015; Gibbons 2002) understandably focuses on the ‘at-risk EAL learner’ in the mainstream classroom setting (at which time oracy may be very developed), but there is little literature which assists teachers in understanding the enormous progress made by learners, whilst in the intensive on-arrival English setting, given the challenges that students face in developing both oracy and literacy. An analysis of the qualitative data identified the concepts, ideas and key themes which were central to the challenges of providing high level support for young people learning English and learning literacy for the first time. Teaching and learning theories from the field of second language acquisition and transfer of knowledge from first to second language informed the analysis, as well as theories of pedagogy which relate to scaffolded learning. I argue that both sources of data offer key insights, making visible the various learning experiences of refugee young people and how these experiences are understood and translated, to ensure that nuanced teaching and learning pedagogy is best able to support learning progress. Good educational outcomes lead to good long term settlement: these insights have relevance globally, and significantly, in European countries responding to the asylum and refugee flows from Afghanistan and Syria, in which considerable numbers are young people aged from 14 to 17 years (Koser, 2016).

Expected Outcomes

The findings from these complementary analyses target some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged learners in Australian schools, and will have resonance in Europe and the UK. Refugees (or humanitarian migrants or those seeking asylum) are persistently perceived and portrayed as a threat to the fabric of the nation state (Pinson, Arnot and Candappa 2010); however, engaging with the voice of these groups, and with those working most closely with them, in the early stages of settlement when vulnerability may be greatest, offers enormous insight into the possibilities of an inclusive pedagogy which supports learning, wellbeing and ultimately, settlement in the new country. Where Pinson et al. (2010) were concerned with the intersection of the rights of the child within the British education system and immigration control, this presentation also considers these in the Australian context, intersecting with current political rationalities which generate forces of competition, expressed through testing, ranking and public displays of school data, and does so on the assumption of continuous and uninterrupted schooling in English as first language. However, it will be argued that these rationalities do not equate with improvement in education provision for all, and that pedagogy and policy which is responsive to the learner, in this case the young refugee who has had limited schooling, and which acknowledges the complexity of the learner, offers capacity to improve the educational outcomes of all young people, including those most disadvantaged.

References

Creagh, S. (2014). A critical analysis of problems with the LBOTE category on the NAPLaN test. Australian Educational Researcher, 41(1), 1-23. Creagh, S. (2015). Australia’s most disadvantaged children invisible in official NAPLAN results [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=879 Gibbons, P. (2002). Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning: Second Language Learners in the Mainstream Classroom. Portsmouth: Heinnemann. Hammond, J., & Miller, J. (Eds.). (2015). Classrooms of possibility: Supporting at-risk EAL students. Newtown: PETAA. Karlsen, E. (2016). Refugee resettlement to Australia: what are the facts? Parliamentary Library Research Paper, Department of Parliamentary Services, Parliament of Australia. Retrieved from http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1617/RefugeeResettlement 12 January 2017. Koser, K. (2016, June 27). Europe’s real refugee crisis: unaccompanied minors [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://blog.oup.com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/2016/06/europe-refugee-crisis-minors/ Lingard, B., Martino, W., Rezai-Rashti, G., and Sellar, S. (2016). Introduction. In Lingard, B., Martino, W., Rezai-Rashti, G., and Sellar, S. Globalizing Educational Accountabilities (pp.1-18). New York: Routledge. Nilsson, J. and Bunar, N. 2016. Educational Responses to Newly Arrived Students in Sweden: Understanding the Structure and Influence of Post-Migration Ecology. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research. 60 (4), 399-416. Pinson, H. and Arnot, M. (2010). Local Conceptualisations of the education of asylum-seeking and refugee students: from hostile to holistic models. International Journal of Inclusive Education. 14(3), 247-267. Pinson, H., Arnot, M., and Candappa, M. (2010). Education, Asylum and the ‘Non-Citizen’ Child: The Politics of Compassion and Belonging. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Author Information

Susan Creagh (presenting / submitting)

University of Queensland

School of Education

St Lucia

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