Refugee action support : deliberate pedagogy in the school community

Many refugee background students have high aspirations for educational realisation, and a strong need to succeed academically and establish required attributes such as high levels of resilience and problem-solving capacities. Forced migration, interrupted schooling and variances in teaching styles are barriers to their language learning journey in Australia. The pedagogic experience is different for various refugee groups based on the complexity of their journey to Australia and their response to the changes in demography. Refugees are not homogenous and their life histories therefore cannot be reduced to deficit thinking about their ability to learn the mainstream language. This paper argues that deep language learning is best when it is linked to students’ fund of knowledge, specifically to their past and present context. Further, the conflation of refugee background students with other categories such as Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) communities or English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) categories is significant as refugee background students, particularly those arriving from Africa, are a specific group with greater educational, welfare and support needs. Thus, community engagement models such as Refugee Action Support (RAS) that feature high-quality teaching strategies to make connections between the context and language learning stimulate deep knowledge about literacy and language development practices that are central for connections to global perspectives.