Thank you very much for that introduction and I'd like to thank everyone for coming
and also thank the organisers for inviting me to speak here today.
So my, as Adrorit has already said, this is the title of my talk today and you've already
heard about the kind of work that I do, a lot of which is in educational settings even
though my field is population health.
I'd like to just begin by saying that I'm sure most of you have heard about Australia's
offshore immigration detention system and our harsh policies that aim to deter asylum
seekers.
I'm not going to dwell on the politics of all of that today but I will just say that
I, like many people I know, am personally ashamed of those policies and I find it particularly
disturbing that some people in other countries, most of which are certainly having to deal
with many more refugee arrivals than Australia, see Australia as leading by example with those
policies.
So I'll move on to what I want to speak about today.
I just want to say that I want to acknowledge the work of an organisation in Australia called
Foundation House or the Victorian Foundation for the Survivors of Torture.
Much of the work that I have done in this area has been in partnership with them and
I'm drawing very heavily on some of their programs in this presentation today.
So my talk will be in three parts.
I want to begin by talking about the importance of understanding the refugee experience.
Then move on to discuss some theoretical and conceptual frameworks and models that I think
are useful when we're thinking about how do we work with refugee background, young people
and families in education.
And then I'll present some case studies that show how some of those theories have been
integrated into practice.
Okay, moving to the first part.
This is probably not news to anyone here but I just wanted to start with some definitions.
So a refugee is a person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race,
religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside
the country of his or her nationality and is unable to or owing to such fear is unwilling
to avail himself or herself of the protection of that country.
So that's the definition according to the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to
the status of refugees and I would imagine that for most of us our countries have signed
up to give people protection if they meet that definition.
An asylum seeker is a person who has applied for refugee protection and is awaiting a decision.
So many asylum seekers are also refugees but they haven't yet been assessed to legally
meet the definition.
So that's all very legal and I'd just like to also propose an alternative definition
that being a refugee does not equal some distinct identity, it rather defines a temporary and
more often than not a prolonged state in which ordinary people find themselves when going
through extraordinary ordeals as a result of social and political upheaval in their
homeland.
So refugees may be rich, they may be poor, they may be educated or uneducated, many
are young, many of them are just like us, they're ordinary people who had jobs, lives,
families and then their lives have been thrown into turmoil.
There are currently, these figures are just over a year old, these are from 2017 and at
the end of that year there were an estimated 68.5 million people who had been forcibly
displaced from their homes, that figure is now over 70 million and that's the highest
number there has been since statistics began being collected.
Looking at the 2017 figures, 40 million of those people are still inside their own countries
so they're internally displaced, 25.4 million are outside so they meet the definition of
being refugees and 3.1 million are asylum seekers outside their country of origin and
waiting for their status to be determined.
57% of the world's refugees in 2017 came from just three countries, Syria, Afghanistan and
South Sudan, all of which have been experiencing war and conflict for many years and in the
case of South Sudan and Afghanistan for generations.
It's really important I think to remember that 85% of the world's refugees are being
hosted in the developing world, they're not in Europe and they're not in Australia.
We need to think critically about the way we use the term refugee crisis therefore in
the European context.
The countries currently hosting the most refugees are Turkey with 3.5 million, Uganda and Pakistan
who each host 1.4 million, Lebanon hosts the equivalent of a third of its own population,
1 million refugees and there are also almost a million refugees in Iran, a country that
also produces many refugees of its own.
The other thing to note here is that only a tiny proportion of the world's refugees
are resettled through the UNHCR programs in wealthier countries so there were just over
100,000 people resettled in that way in 2017.
If we zero in on Europe, this diagram shows asylum applications to the EU between 2008
and 2018.
As I mentioned, I think we need to think critically about the term refugee crisis with respect
to Europe and about the political work that is being done when that term is used.
This figure shows that applications for asylum in Europe peaked in 2015, 2016 at around
1.3 million and have declined considerably since then.
This number clearly represents a lot of people but it is still many fewer than the number
received by some much poorer individual countries that are close to refugee producing conflicts.
Because I'm going to be drawing a little later on some Australian case studies, I'd
also like to just touch briefly on the situation in Australia which has some similarities as
well as differences to Europe.
So I just want to play a quick game here of true or false.
So the first statement, Australia subjects asylum seekers to extremely harsh mandatory
detention policies.
Who here thinks that one's true?
It's true, it's certainly true.
Second statement, opinion polls show majority of Australians support these policies of deterrence.
Who thinks that's true?
It's true.
Thirdly, Australia has a well-regarded refugee resettlement program.
Do we think that one's true?
Maybe a few of people.
That is actually also true.
And D, the majority of Australians endorse the policy of multiculturalism and support
for new arrivals to facilitate their integration.
Can that be true?
Yes, all of these statements are true.
So there are some definitely apparent inconsistencies in both our attitudes and our policies.
But I guess that's probably the same here as well.
Okay, so I just want to move on now to talking about the refugee experience.
Of course, we know that many people become refugees because of war, and this has particular
consequences.
This photo is taken from a strike from the Children's Hospital in Aleppo in Syria some
time ago.
It might help us to imagine some of the experiences of wars many refugee families and children
have been exposed to.
Chronic fear, chaos, separation, experiencing and witnessing violence, death and destruction,
rapes and murders, loss of people and property, poor health access, poor food and water access,
homelessness, impossible choices, decisions and consequences.
Also sexual assault and exploitation and conscription of child soldiers are common experiences.
Let's try to imagine what that experience might be like for a particular child in his
or her family.
This is a picture of a boy in the courtyard of his house next to a room that was damaged
in a mortar attack in a northern Syrian city.
His father was seriously wounded and the boy received slight wounds when the shell struck
the house as the family was eating.
The family, until this point, has made a choice to stay.
How hard was this decision?
What happens if the mother wanted to go and the father said to stay?
And something happens, someone dies.
How do they live with this?
What are the potential long-term consequences for this choice?
What developmental stage is this child in?
What is being lost, disrupted for him?
His parents probably told him to stay inside, that it would be safer for him when the mortar
came through the roof and shattered that.
What does he now think about his parents' ability to protect him, to keep him safe?
In the future, when all is hopefully calm, how will his assumptions of safety possibly
be affected?
How does his mother feel about her ability to protect her children?
How does his father feel?
This is a photo of Aleppo in Syria and it shows Aleppo as it was before the war and
as Aleppo is pretty much now, or certainly towards the end of the war.
And I'd just like to show you a short video clip of our family who came from Aleppo.
This is a video of our family who came from Aleppo, and this is a video of our family who
came from Aleppo, and this is a video of our family who came from Aleppo, and this is a
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The next slide shows an extended version of that framework.
The framework provides a way to conceptualise the causes and personal impact of traumatic
events as well as ways to support the recovery of survivors.
The first column identifies the many types of persecution and state-sanctioned violence
used by oppressive regimes to destroy both the bodies and minds of the individual.
Their connections to their families and often the spirit and fabric of their communities.
The second column shows the impacts of persecutory violence.
Each person is different.
How they come to understand their experiences will impact on their trauma reaction over
time.
Violence is not limited to direct experiences, it includes witnessing violence against others.
Violence breaks physical and emotional connections and the resulting isolation may do as much
harm or more harm than physical injury.
Violence and persecution can also bring about fundamental changes in a person's belief
systems about the self, others and the world.
This is sometimes described as internalising violence.
In a persecutory regime, acts of violence can be performed by anyone, people known to
the survivors.
Sources of violence are unpredictable, nowhere is safe.
The third column describes the symptoms that can be brought about by those experiences.
The processes and challenges of resettlement in a new country can also exacerbate many
of these symptoms.
And then in our fourth column we have the recovery goals that I mentioned before.
This is another framework some of you may be familiar with.
It comes from some research done in the UK looking at domains that support integration
for people from refugee backgrounds.
And it's work that I've drawn on a lot in my work in education settings.
The framework suggests that there's a series of interconnected domains at the foundation,
rights and citizenship.
These are connected to the need to support gaining of language and cultural knowledge
in a new country, also a sense of safety and stability.
The framework also suggests that social connections are absolutely vitally important and the people
need different types of social connections.
They need social bonds, social links and social bridges.
Social bonds are the connections we have to people in our families and close friends that
provide us with emotional and practical support.
Social bridges are connections that we have to people across some kind of device.
There may be people from other cultures, people from different socioeconomic status, people
from different countries, different genders and these are the connections we need to get
access to new resources that we don't already have in our own circle.
And research also tells us that social links are extremely important for people resettling
in a new country.
Social links about connections to institutions such as schools and there's a lot of research
showing their importance.
At the top of this diagram are what are described as the markers and means of integration, employment
housing, education and health.
And all of these domains are linked and need to be there to support integration.
When we're working with families and young people from refugee backgrounds I think it's
also helpful to think about the impact of cultural differences.
This picture describes culture as being like an iceberg where most is below the surface.
The cultural features that we can see are things like food, dress, music, literature
and language and these things are the relatively superficial components of culture.
Below the surface are many unspoken rules such as around courtesy, concepts of time,
concepts of personal space, body language, eye contact, courtship rituals, ideas about
modesty and even deeper are the unconscious rules we all follow such as those concerning
the nature of friendships, attitudes towards elders, the meaning of childhood or adolescence,
definitions of insanity, what are people's roles in relation to age, sex, class, occupation
and kinship, etc.
All of these have a profound effect on how we act, acting and experience the world.
I would suggest that the concept of cultural humility is useful to help us respond constructively
to cultural differences.
Cultural humility is I think qualitatively different from the idea of cultural competence
which suggests that we can get to a point where we know how to understand different
cultures.
I would also make the point that neither our own nor others cultures are static or singular.
We all have constantly evolving and multiple cultural identities.
So cultural humility involves having a life on curiosity to learn from others.
It involves being critically self evaluative of cultural awareness, of having an other
oriented stance open to new cultural information and it involves developing partnerships to
address power imbalances that occur across cultures.
I would like now to also consider intersectionality as a relevant theoretical framework for working
across difference.
Intersectionality is a sociological theory that considers how various categories of oppression
interact on multiple and simultaneous levels contributing to systematic social inequality.
The term was formulated in 1989 by American black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw
who argued that black women were excluded from feminist discourse which was based on
the world view and experience of white women and from anti-racist discourse which was
equated with black men.
The theory maintains that the experience of a particular individual or group results from
the interaction of multiple modes of oppression or privilege such as those based on race,
ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, class or disability.
If you want to understand outcomes for refugee adolescent girls for example or many other
groups that are disadvantaged or marginalised for that matter, we need to examine the ways
in which things like culture, gender, language, religion, immigration status and socio-economic
status interact with corresponding processes of oppression and discrimination such as racism,
sexism, Islamophobia and classism.
Finally, just one more conceptual model that can aid our thinking.
You might recognise this as a socio-ecological model for thinking about how we can promote
health and wellbeing at different levels.
It's used frequently in public health which is my field.
This is a framework that I've put together for thinking about how we can intervene to
promote wellbeing and inclusion for refugee families.
So on your left are what I've described as the drivers of wellbeing and inclusion being
social networks, social capital and cross-sexual partnerships.
In the centre, the model suggests that at an individual level we need to support people's
belonging and sense of wellbeing and at an interpersonal level we need to support their
opportunities for connectedness, at a community level we need to support social inclusion
and opportunities for participation and at a societal level we need to advocate for policies
that reduce social inequalities and increase social cohesion.
On the right are strategies that are associated with positive outcomes for refugee families.
These include celebrating diversity, providing welcoming and culturally sensitive environments,
ensuring flexible and local delivery of programs, employing people from refugee communities
as liaisons and workers, engaging with parents, working with interpreters and recognising
people's strengths and aspirations as well as the challenges that they face.
So I'm going to move on to discussing a couple of case studies from my work and this is work
– there's two particular programs I want to focus on, both of these are programs that
Foundation has runs and that I've done research looking at.
Just one more set of concepts before we move on though.
When trying to support disadvantaged groups, some population health scholars have argued
that we need proportionate universalism when providing services and I would suggest that
this concept is also relevant in education.
So universal services, which in this case would be schools, must be non-exclusionary
and aim to reduce discrimination and ensure equal treatment for all.
But we also need targeted services such as specialist programs that attend to the particular
needs of marginalised groups and promote inclusion.
So proportionate universalism then is a combination of targeted and universal policies and services
that considers people at the bottom of the gradient and the gradient as a whole, ensuring
that the impact of services is proportionately greater at the bottom to promote equality.
So moving on to the context from my Australian case studies, young people of refugee backgrounds
face multiple challenges in engaging in education following settlement.
Pre-arrival experiences are characterised by exposure to violence, loss, persecution,
perpetration of human rights violations and forced displacement that includes prolonged
insecurity and often protracted periods in transit countries with associated significant
disruptions to formal education.
Post-settlement challenges include learning a new language, adapting to unfamiliar systems
and discrimination, often accompanied by economic and social marginalisation.
Despite these challenges, most refugee young people and their families are also highly
motivated to succeed in education and they have high aspirations for their future.
I would argue that it's vital that we do our best to support those aspirations and their potential.
So Australia's resettlement program generally focuses on areas of protracted refugee displacement.
What this means in practice is that people who arrive have often experienced multi-generational
trauma which has profound impacts for their families.
This table also reminds us that there are refugees coming from many parts of the world.
Whilst we might be currently focused on the situations in Syria and Iraq, for example,
there are still many people fleeing persecution in a number of different African countries
as well as in my region where, for example, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people have
been forced to flee from Myanmar in recent years.
So the first program that I wanted to talk about is called the School Support Program,
and one part of which is an intensive program called the Refugee Education Support Program.
It's a program that's conducted as a partnership between Foundation House and the Department
of Education in Victoria and also an organisation called the Centre for Multicultural Youth.
And the aim here is to make universal services, schools, more inclusive and better able to
cater to the needs of students with refugee backgrounds.
Schools are clearly a critical site for promoting successful settlement outcomes and social
inclusion.
I've already discussed the challenges for recently arrived students.
Exposure to violence we must remember also comprises a risk factor for poor mental health
outcomes for young people, while social support in the country of settlement has been shown
to be protective.
In the absence of appropriate support and responsiveness by schools, the impact on education
and learning can be profound.
Effective students may demonstrate lack of engagement, feelings of disempowerment, absenteeism,
failure to establish and sustain healthy relationships, early except from school, and therefore significantly
poorer achievement and associated poor long-term prospects.
So the Refugee Education Support Program is a program where Foundation House staff work
for two years at a time with clusters of six to eight primary and secondary schools
in an area, and they work with five of these clusters at any one time.
So at any one time, there's about 30 to 40 schools involved.
Professional learning workshops are conducted for staff, the schools are assisted to do
an audit of their processes and activities, thinking through how well they meet the needs
of refugee background students.
The schools then develop an action plan to address any gaps that they've found in their
audits.
And they're strongly encouraged to be involved in community engagement and participation
strategies to support families, as well as to partner with local community business and
government organisations, so that you have a whole network of support for those families.
There's a whole lot of associated resources that accompany the School Support Program,
and these are all available on the Foundation House website, which you could just Google
or the URL is there.
So these include models and strategies for schools to implement buddy programs to help
connect students to each other, strategies to address racism, strategies to address behavioural
issues, ways to improve enrolment procedures so that they're more inclusive for refugee
students, strategies for trauma recovery, and also resources to help schools understand
the impacts on learning and wellbeing of the refugee experience.
So I've been involved in two different studies that looked at the School Support Program.
The first of these was an evaluation of the Refugee Education Support Program, which is
then called School Support Program, in which we interviewed staff and also collated audit
data from the schools that were participating.
And this found that the program supported a holistic and whole school approach that
enabled schools to create a more inclusive and supportive environment for students from
refugee backgrounds.
In more recent research, I worked with Foundation House staff to conduct a study with students
of refugee backgrounds in some of the schools that were participating.
And that produced the report that you can see there, and that's also available online.
So I would just like to share some quotes from the studies, from these studies.
So the first is from a student.
I think for people like us, when they first come to a new school, a new country, the worst
thing is that they feel lonely.
We've lost all our friends.
So when you first come here, you don't know anyone, and any activity that gets you to
know more people will really help.
The second is from a school leader.
If we hadn't had that great awareness developed through the program, we would have just gone,
well, okay, here's some students.
Yes, we need to look after them.
They can just go to English as additional language classes, but we wouldn't have been
aware that there's a whole range of things that we need to provide.
Also from these studies, another quote from a staff member, our enrolment, that would
probably have been the major thing that changed.
We designed new forms, and parents had an interview, and I could fill out the forms
with the parents, making sure that they've got background information on where they come
from, how long they've been here, who lives in the home, the languages they speak.
And this school found that through this process, they really also started to develop good
relationships with the parents, which was so vital to supporting the students.
The last quote from a student, for the teacher, they need to understand that if they give
advice, they can change a student's future.
It's the little things that make up the big things.
You start small, but it's the teacher that drives you towards the pathway.
The teacher needs to be really careful, though, what they say, like discrimination.
You don't want to say, we can't do this.
And students certainly reported a lot of instances where schools had very low expectations of
them.
They equated their lack of English language proficiency, for example, with a lack of ability
to learn.
And that was something that students found really obvious, but also really frustrating.
Okay, so the second program that I wanted to highlight is called the UCAN2 program.
This program is developed also in partnership between Foundation House and the Centre for
Multicultural Youth, and with a number of different English language education providers.
Most people arriving in Australia as part of the humanitarian settlement program undertake
six to 12 months of intensive English language tuition when they first arrive.
For young people, this is provided either in specialist English language schools or
English language centres, or sometimes it's provided within mainstream schools.
So the UCAN2 program aims to facilitate and support the social inclusion of young people
of refugee background aged 16 to 26 years.
So this is a slightly older group, by strengthening mental health and wellbeing, social connections
and networks, their access and engagement in education, training and employment pathways.
And it also supports cooperation between providers of education, social support, training
and employment.
And I probably should mention, I would say that the school support program has been an
example of working to support universal services, whereas the UCAN2 program is a targeted service
for refugee students.
So the program operates one day per week, generally within on arrival English language
classes for 16 weeks.
It provides contextualised and experiential learning focusing on work skills, with opportunities
for part time work experience or volunteering for students.
It provides psychosocial support to assist with recovery from trauma and emotional wellbeing,
and that's conducted in a group setting and is very powerful.
It also works to develop social connections and networks through bringing volunteers into
the classroom, bringing in support agencies, and as I said, group work that creates strong
connections amongst the UCAN2 student group.
The facilitators also provide one-on-one support and referrals to appropriate agencies for
young people who require that additional support.
So key findings from the research that we did looking at the UCAN2 program was that
it did promote English language learning for students.
It supported their engagement in education and employment pathways, increased the size
and diversity of their social networks, fostered their confidence and resilience, and built
the capacity of teachers to respond to the needs of young people of refugee backgrounds.
And I'll just also share some quotes from that research.
So the first is from a student.
UCAN2 helped me improve my English because we are communicating with new people, getting
to know new people, and a teacher, which I guess shows how language and connections
are so intertwined, which gets back to some of those frameworks we looked at, which suggests
that we need to be looking at the holistic needs of people if we want them to learn as
well.
Then a teacher said, the program gave them so much opportunity to voice opinions, engage
in discussion, do a bit of reading and writing as well, that I thought it benefited their
speaking and listening so much, and we were able to move most of the class up into level
three after six months, which doesn't always happen.
In this research, we also looked at the changes to participants' social networks from the
beginning to the end of the program.
So analysis of the longitudinal data that we got for 100 participants who were present
at both the beginning and the end showed a statistically significant increase in the
median number of reported connections.
The reported Australian-born friends increased from a median of zero at the beginning to
one by the end, and overseas-born friends increased from a median of two to five.
Participants also reported more connections to what they described as other important
people who represented linking connections, and these included people like teachers, counsellors,
people from a number of other agencies that they'd been linked to.
Importantly, we also saw fewer people reporting that they had no friends.
This reduced from 65% at the beginning, reporting that they had no Australian-born friends, to
46% at the end.
At the beginning, 16% reported that they had no overseas-born friends, and this reduced
to 6% by the end.
We also used a resilience measure, and we found that there was a measurable increase
in young people's resilience associated with their increases in social networks.
So on that topic, the participants had much to say, and it was a really strong theme across
all of the people that we spoke to.
So these are some quotes from students.
Yes, I think the U Can Too program, it makes us friendlier than the school classes.
We feel like when we go to the U Can Too class, we are friendlier than the English class.
Another said, getting to know about people in Australia, I get to know other people like
you and the volunteers.
When we did the work experience, we know other people from Australia, like the manager, my
supervisor and other employees.
So they really felt that I had connected them to people they would not otherwise have been
able to meet.
As I mentioned, the volunteers also come into the classroom from the wider community,
and this third student said, the volunteers know a lot of Australia.
That's the thing.
You can find a job off them, and you can learn more English because they speak English.
You can speak English with them.
Another really strong theme was around confidence, and again, almost all of the participants we
spoke to talked about how their confidence had been improved through the program.
So this is just two quotes from students.
I wasn't confident.
Personally, I'm a shy person, so after this, I became confident, so I can have a voice.
I can see and I can share my feelings.
Another said, it was fantastic and so helpful for me, and also help to get friends, which
is great.
And also, the most important for me is to have more confidence.
Okay, so that's the end of my case studies and the end of my talk.
I think I've left plenty of time for discussion.
Thank you.