Educational resilience and experiences of African students with a refugee background in Australian tertiary education

Abstract

In Australia, only a handful of refugee background students are able to navigate mainstream secondary education and senior high school (Years 11 and 12). Most refugee background students arrive in Australia as adults and enrol in Vocational Education and Training (VET) colleges as a pathway to university. The institutions and educators that receive these students can struggle with supporting their integration into the Australian education system, and students struggle with learning new content, in a new language, within a new culture. To complete tertiary education in their new home, these students must possess educational resilience, amid language barriers and culture shock. Using three cases (the researcher and two participants) this article presents the narratives of displaced African students, highlighting their educational trajectories and the factors influencing their educational resilience. This article seeks to open space for situated and embodied understandings of the broader resettlement experience for refugee background students. It tries to intervene in and interrupt the 'deficit logics' that have shaped scholarship in this area. Data were obtained by means of life history narratives and self-reflective methodologies. Educational resilience is evident in the students' lived experiences and influences from: family; community; teachers; peers; faith and religion; and self-determination and behavioural factors. The study's findings reveal that the effects of displacement continue beyond people's initial school experiences and into their vocational and/or university education. In other words, the trauma of social breakdown, war and geographic displacement experienced by these students unfolds into major educational and vocational challenges. My personal life story of growing up a refugee, and the struggles I have gone through to acquire tertiary education, resonates with those of my research participants across multiple institutions and locations within and outside Australia. The stories in this study reveal the impact of forced displacement on refugee background students' education pathways.