The Narrating Our World Project: Investigating the schooling experience of refugee young people in Queensland
by Julie Matthews and Marcela Ramirez
What is life in Australian schools like for refugee young people?
This is the question we set out to answer through the Narrating Our World (NOW) program. We knew that students from culturally diverse, non-English speaking backgrounds did not necessarily have the same experience of schooling as other students and we expected that the experiences of refugee young people would be different again. We knew that many refugee students had little or no prior experience of schooling and had likely experienced trauma, racism and racial harassment (YANQ, 2005). We were also aware that many refugee high school students were in the early stages of English language learning and were likely to be struggling in mainstream classrooms.
The NOW program explored a way of generating accounts of refugee students’ experience of schooling that did not rely on the competence in oral or written English required by conventional research methods such as interviews, focus group discussions and written survey materials. We developed a data generation tool that tried to facilitate communication regardless of competence and confidence in spoken or written English, and which would help young people to creatively, insightfully and comfortably share their thoughts in a small group environment.
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The program
The NOW program ran over five weeks during May 2006 and involved a group of fourteen volunteer young people who were enrolled at various state high schools. We worked with these young people after school for 2 hours once a week at the QPASTT (Queensland Program of Assistance to Survivors of Torture and Trauma) workspace, where most students had previously attended the afterschool homework support program. Surprisingly, most of our participants were from a Liberian background. Only three were Sudanese, and there were individual participants from Ethiopia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Given the population of people from African backgrounds living in Brisbane, we would have expected the ratio of the Sudanese participants to push the proportion to 80-90%. Many students who have come from Sudan via refugee camps in Egypt and Kenya have been through particularly difficult circumstances and arrive in Australia with a significant amount of catching up to do in terms of English literacy. The quality of the discussions which occurred during the program were influenced by the comfort of the Liberian participants with English language conversation.
Students used three different forms of visual communication: digital photographs, drawing and painting, and sand tray. Sand tray is an expressive play tool which involves using miniatures in a tray of sand to create images, stories and/or patterns. The potential of this medium to allow participants with limited oral communication skills to create a group narrative warranted its inclusion in the NOW Program. In the program students received or borrowed the resources necessary to communicate through these mediums, such as scrapbooks, coloured pencils, and digital cameras. The general procedure of the meetings was:
- welcome and group discussion of images taken or created during the week
- division into three groups, one group allotted to each medium (drawing/painting, photography, or sand tray)
- group discussion of sand tray
Students were divided into three groups of four to circulate through the different mediums each week. Those working on sand tray for example, would spend the session producing a joint sand tray narrative, while those on digital camera and painting would discuss what they might represent in various themes. The young people were encouraged to choose one theme to focus on for the week from a list on offer, which included: safe/peaceful spots, my friends, people I learn from, fun places, things I like to do, unfriendly places, places I belong, powerful people, difficult people, my hopes for the future, and a perfect school. Those on sand tray selected one theme as a group and depicted it in the sand together. Participants were encouraged to think about a different topic each week. This meant that they had the chance to use three different mediums and to address three different themes.
We were aware that that the photography group would generate far more pictures than we could discuss in one session so we tried to restrict discussion to one picture per person. To meet the confidentiality requirements of university and education department ethics protocols we had to secure the anonymity of participants and their subjects and asked everyone to think about creative ways of doing this. In fact they ended up generating between 4-30 photographs each, many of which could not be circulated or shown on the website.
We subsequently asked participants to identify a selection of photographs we might present. Knowing that there were things that could be done to photographs which would make them more interesting and evocative of their lives and experience we added a final session to the NOW program which taught the rudiments of Photoshop software so that they could modify their pictures. During the school holiday we arranged a session for two groups at the University of the Sunshine Coast with Debbie Livingstone, a lecturer in Computer-Assisted Art and Design who kindly volunteered her time to teach the young people how to work with their photographs. Eight students in total were able to attend the trip which proved to be very successful, as was the trip to the beach which followed. We were amazed at how quickly the young people grasped the basics of Photoshop. For more information, visit the NOW excursion images.
The NOW program was devised with the aim of eliciting visual responses from refugee students in order to construct visual narratives. We wanted to generate rich insights into the everyday world of refugee young people without directing them to recall or resurrect disturbing or traumatic stories of their past. It was our intention to engage in a research process which was able to establish relationships of trust and confidence and generate purposeful conversations (Burgess, 1988). We felt that the process of research engagement would generate insights that were as important as the material images delivered to us by students.
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Findings
We anticipated that the visual images would deliver narratives about school life and these would be discussed on our group sessions. We expected that the project would foster listening and speaking skills, develop expressive language skills and vocabularies, promote understanding between refugee young people, and assist students to see their world differently. To a large extent these things occurred but not in the predicted manner. Because the program was run in a youth space rather than a school most, but not all, participants came to all the sessions. Some attended intermittently while others turned up later keen to join in, having heard that it was an interesting thing to do after school. We had to spend time bringing absentees and newcomers up to speed. Sessions were more spontaneous than anticipated and it was not always easy to maintain the sort of order necessary to follow the various steps of the program. Participants made us aware that they were there to have fun. Nevertheless group discussions were more successful than we imagined. The young people enjoyed being able to see what other had done and effective rules for respectful communication were eventually appreciated and adhered to.
On a practical note, we found that time and technology constraints made it very difficult to keep track of the 300 plus images generated during the course of the project. Some students focused all their pictures on one theme, others used several themes and others forgot about themes entirely. One student for instance came back with a picture of his Mum, his sister, a teacher, a friend at school, his girlfriend, and a basketball game. He only had time to give us feedback on one image and we had no means of tracking what he intended the other images to represent. Eventually we abandoned the idea of identifying each or even a few of the pictures in terms of themes.
We also realised that participants were not particularly interested in depicting unfriendly places or difficult people. The most popular topics were ‘fun places’ and ‘my friends’. Several of the students made a particular effort, on our request, to provide photographs of specific themes, but we came to see that school life was not important enough to exclude bringing in representations of other elements of their lives.
A more detailed account of the NOW project is currently being drafted for publication and we hope that our findings will assist teachers, youth workers, bicultural workers, school counsellors, and others working with young refugee students to realise the merits of a project which engages directly with the lives of young people whose life experiences are so different from those of their teachers, their peers and even one another.
Acknowledgments
The NOW project was an aspect of the Australian Research Council Project: Schooling, Globalisation and Refugees in Queensland. We would also like to acknowledge the support of the Queensland Program of Assistance to Survivors of Torture and Trauma (QPASTT) for their assistance and provision of the youth space, Ravinder Sidhu and Vikki Palmer for feedback on the development of the project, Parlo Singh, Annette Woods and Vikki Palmer for attending various sessions, Debbie Livingstone for running two Photoshop workshops and providing artistic and technical advice, and to the University of the Sunshine Coast for providing access to computer labs.
References
YANQ, 2005, New Kids on the Block: Making Space for Sudanese Young People in Queensland, Youth Affairs Network of Queensland Inc.
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