Narrating our World (NOW)
Visual narratives can tell stories
by Julie Matthews, Victoria Palmer and Marcela Ramirez *
Brisbane: located in Queensland, a State known for its laidback "she'll be right" approach and a "no worries mate" attitude to life, endless stretches of beaches and situated in Australia, a nation that continues to struggle to find appropriate responses to refugee and asylum seeker issues, particularly in educational contexts. Australia faces an interesting time, with the increased media attention in the Asia Pacific region after the recent acceptance of 42 independence movement asylum seekers from the Indonesian military-ruled West Papua.
Australia's "she'll be right" approach may not support the government or other organisational bodies through the complexity of refugee issues and, in particular, the increasing numbers of educational issues that continue to emerge for young refugee people. In 2005, four Australian universities were funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) to explore 'Schooling, Globalisation and Refugee' policy issues. Six researchers interviewed policy players, teachers, youth workers and other significant people in Brisbane to hear their stories. Importantly, the researchers wanted to hear young peoples' stories about how they experienced and found school life in Australia. The team was acutely aware that young people had either overcome or were continuing to overcome language barriers, and were still becoming accustomed to Australian life.
Interviewing refugee young people directly, however, was problematic. The students didn't know the interviewers and may not have been comfortable divulging details of their schooling experiences to strangers. The team did not want to focus solely on young people's traumatic experiences either, causing more pain and unnecessary suffering. Students' English language skills were uneven and might also be an impediment in the researchers' understanding of information or ability to tell the students' stories.
The researchers decided to trial a data gathering method known as photo-elicitation as a means of better appreciating young refugees' experiences of school life. Researchers also wanted to provide a resource to under-funded, under-supported schools that could build understanding between researchers and students. A program called Narrating our World (NOW): using visual tools for understanding school was devised to assist researchers in collecting data, providing a resource to schools and documenting student stories.
NOW is designed to elicit visual narratives. In other words it seeks to generate stories about student life worlds without relying on the verbal and language components on which interview techniques rely. NOW enables researchers to focus on non-verbal elements to ensure students with different languages and English levels are not excluded from the process. During June 2006, the team began the first pilot of the NOW program with a group of 12 refugee students from the Queensland Survivors of Torture and Trauma (QPASTT) homework program. The NOW program was developed to further understand, to generate stories from young refugee people and to assist in building peaceful relations between teachers, youth workers, bicultural workers, school counsellors, and others working with young refugee students.
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The NOW program pivots on the use of three forms of communication - photography, drawing and painting, and sand tray - and the program is run over five weeks. Prior to student participation, parents are asked for informed consent. Participation in NOW is voluntary. Each student is briefed on the program and given a scrapbook to keep during and after the project. The scrapbook develops and keeps stories throughout the NOW program.
Each group rotates weekly between the mediums, for example, digital cameras are used by young people to snap representations of their thoughts and opinions of what school is like for them. Without any expectations of perfection young people are also encouraged to experiment with colour and drawing to produce images of their school experience and, in a team of four participants, sit around each edge of the sand tray and create a school scenario as they have experienced it via sand play. Throughout the process and at the end of sessions, the groups are encouraged to negotiate and discuss what their creation will look like and what they mean.
The idea is that visual narratives assist to foster oral communication, which helps to develop expressive language skills and vocabularies while promoting understanding between refugee young people. There are many stories, then, that can be told from using these visual narratives. Themes are provided by facilitators to start the sessions, some examples are: happy places, my friends, people I learn from, unfriendly places, places I belong, difficult people, my hopes for the future and, a perfect school. After rotating between mediums, the whole group gathers to discuss the visual productions of each team. In this way, the young person tells and shares a story though these visual mediums.
While NOW is used to elicit visual data for a research project, researchers believe that the discussion of the school experience will also give deeper, personal reflection. NOW enables the research team to share in young refugee peoples' stories and to understand the complex experiences of the school environment in a non-threatening manner. As well as the development of new and enjoyable communication skills that young people from refugee backgrounds can take with them, this program might offer something to Australian school ESL programs to generate understanding between educators and new refugee student arrivals. At the conclusion of NOW, young peoples' visual stories are placed on the project's website and researchers will be able to respond to the feedback.
Stories have a way of lodging in national consciences and with the West Papuan arrivals the deplorable story of the Norwegian boat Tampa in 2001, which carried over 400 Afghan refugees to whom Australia refused asylum, has resurfaced. East Timor's story lives on in the national memory also and their search for independence from Indonesian rule is, again, likened to the West Papuan situation. These moral moments and moral decisions continue to plague the Australian government and educationalists who work with refugee young people everyday. To build peace and reconciliation we must first understand. To understand we must first listen closely and see what is said.
* Dr Julie Matthews, Victoria Palmer and Marcela Ramirez worked collaboratively to develop the NOW program and will facilitate its first pilot in June 2006. This short piece appeared for the Storyteller & Listener website in the May 8 2006 edition of http://storyteller-and-listener.blog-city.com. The project extends thanks to QPASTT for its ongoing support and provision of students for participation, and in particular, for the organisation's work on the Help Increase Peace (HIP) program from which NOW derived its initial ideas. Thanks also to Holly Stevens, manager of the Storyteller and Listener site, for her permission to reprint this publication in this version here.
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