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Weekly UpdatesIn Australia, approximately a quarter of the current population is composed of first-generation immigrants (ABS 1994). These inflows of people have added greatly to the diversity of the country, especially its urban centres. However, the needs of particular immigrant groups have not always been adequately recognized. With such an influx comes the possibility of exclusion, racism and negative responses by members of more settled communities who may feel socially and economically threatened by these newcomers. A new series of concerns has been provoked by Australia's offshore humanitarian program. This program has brought some 17,419 primarily African entrants to Australia since 2004, many of whom had spent 10 or more years in refugee camps (CRC Report 2006: 31). This is particularly salient in terms of the children and young adults who may have spent a majority, if not their entire lives in camps. While their numbers are relatively small, their situation is so different from that of the average population that special education measures are essential.
Many of the young refugees arriving in Australia have suffered the effects of trauma, conflict and loss; many of them speak little or no English; they may be illiterate and have never attended any school. This means they may be completely unaware of the basic expectations of classroom and school behaviour: how to hold a pencil, wait to be called on; sit at your desk; do your assignments, and so on (ANSN 2008). This may be a relatively extreme example, yet it does apply to many refugees. Most refugees have an initial experience of being internally displaced people; eventually some (but not all) will become trans-national refugees. These multiple transitions and disruptions mean that many young refugees have a severely limited experience of schooling. This places them at a distinct educational disadvantage relative to the 'normal' local children against whom they are compared when they enter a mainstream classroom and ultimately the labour market.
Mainstream schooling in Australia is not only poorly adapted to meeting the needs of refugee children but also fails to respond adequately to children from a range of urban communities including the poor, Aboriginal Australians, and recent immigrants. Whereas in the past policy makers may have been concerned about these groups from an equity perspective, the introduction of new technologies has led to a demand for higher levels of literacy from all students including those least likely to succeed academically. The problem of providing the level of support that these students need is one of the huge challenges education systems in most Western countries will face in the coming decades. Hitherto educational provision in innovative cities has tended to focus on producing highly skilled professionals. However, today's technologically sophisticated manufacturing processes have boosted educational requirements even among low skilled workers (Murnane & Levy 1996). Even with an exceptional injection of training and resources, schools, as they are currently organized, will find it very difficult to meet these challenges. The solution to these problems may be to institutionalise local community partnerships that work with schools to create innovative solutions to these educational problems.
Collaborations may be established across institutions such as foundations, non-government or government organizations, and community agencies within the city. In this context, each organization brings different skills and abilities to a collaborative effort that could relieve schools of carrying the total burden of meeting the needs of refugee and other disadvantaged students. Examples of this approach are being developed in the Greater Western Sydney (GWS) urban area. The vast majority of Sydney's excluded populations, including Indigenous people, live in this extended sector of the metropolis. The Refugee Action Support (RAS) program is one of the best examples of such a collaborative effort. The RAS program is based on a three-way partnership between the University of Western Sydney, the NSW Department of Education and Training, eight high schools (the number is growing) and a community organization known as the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation (ALNF).
At UWS, students preparing to be Secondary school teachers are required to do a third practicum (PE3) as part of their Master of Teaching degree. Under the RAS option of PE3, teachers-in-training are trained by ALNF and become mentors and tutors to refugees, supporting their acculturation, and providing study assistance related to the curriculum, in non-classroom settings or homework centres. On the one hand, this practicum encourages the teachers-to-be (as RAS tutors) to develop insight into and understanding of the lives and experiences of the diverse range of students they will most likely have in their classrooms in the near future (Vickers 2007). On the other, it delivers much-needed small group support to refugee students themselves.
An initial survey of the Coordinating Teachers, who supervise the homework centres, found that among refugee students who regularly attended a Centre, 85 percent showed substantial improvement in verbal, written and comprehension skills. Even the students who attended the Centres somewhat intermittently showed some improvement (Ferfolja 2007). From the research with the Coordinating Teachers and the RAS tutors come various policy suggestions that could be adopted to improve the educational achievement of refugee and disadvantaged students. The most important idea is the creation of active partnerships among schools, community groups, foundations and non-governmental organizations to assist schools in meeting the challenges of educating children from excluded communities.
Other suggestions for these groups include providing mentoring and tutoring. Having guided assistance in mastering the mysteries of computers, assignments, word problems, sentence structure, and school cultures increases the self-confidence of excluded students and lessens their frustration with schooling. Tutors or mentors could be teachers-to-be, trained community members or, depending on the learning needs of mentees, final year students from regular undergraduate programs. Investing in one-on-one or small group tutoring pays off to all concerned as it improves the learning and adjustment of students, and creates an inclusive means of incorporating excluded students into the mainstream. In addition it is important to change the mind-set of trainee teachers. Working individually with small numbers of refugee and disadvantaged students can lead to a transformation of the views that trainee teachers hold about teaching. Moving beyond a narrow concern with classroom management and teaching the curriculum, UWS students told researchers that, because of their PE3 experiences, they had become more sensitive to the quiet kid in the back and to the diversity of students in their classrooms (Vickers 2007). Much could be done in teacher preparation courses to provide mentoring experiences for new teachers by connecting them with students from immigrant or refugee backgrounds. These skills and insights would be of benefit to teachers in all schools as the students they face are often very different in background, expectations and values and therefore unlikely to achieve their full potential.
Schools need to take an active part in developing innovative ways of supporting refugee students and others as they seek to become competent and comfortable in the school milieu. The willingness of some schools to create an opportunity for refugee students to gain additional academic assistance, by linking a community agency or foundation with a teacher, indicates that schools can facilitate the learning of refugee and other disadvantaged students without disrupting the timetable, inconveniencing the teaching staff or ignoring the learning needs of mainstream students. If schools fail to do this, many students will remain excluded from the educational mainstream.
All schools in innovative cities should explore ways of creating innovative partnerships with relevant community agencies, foundations, and institutions in providing help that the schools themselves cannot deliver. These partnerships can function as proto-types for broader changes in the education system, promoting more flexible and localised approaches. But the burden of making classrooms more inclusive should not rest on the teachers alone. Effective education for the full range of young people requires widely diverse teaching materials, and the development of these materials needs to be supported by organizations, foundations and community groups outside the schools.
CONCLUDING COMMENT
The current structure, culture, and curriculum of many schools is not well adapted to meet the challenges of educating young people for a future in which major changes will occur. Yet the burden of re-shaping schools to make them more responsive to these challenges should not rest on the teachers alone. Indeed, a substantial aspect of the problem is that teachers' working conditions and the schools in which they work are constrained by monolithic and inflexible bureaucracies that frequently fail to respond to the particular needs of the diverse groups that make up modern cities. The standard biography is now dead. Flexible schools, new relationships with work places, and innovative curricula, including service-learning, will be needed to respond to this changing environment.
Whether we are looking at how we can support young refugees and their families or young people and their families from other excluded sectors of the population; or how we can help digital natives to make face-to-face connections with people across the generations and across the diverse social groups that make up our cities; or whether we are looking at how we can help young people to juggle school and work, the solutions we come up with must involve creative collaborations. It will be necessary to bring together a range of different institutions: schools, employers, unions, foundations, and local community organizations. Working together, these institutions will need to create social compacts where all partners play key roles in developing and delivering programs that address the issues that have been discussed in this article.
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