Navigating the Australian Education System Refugees and New Arrivals

Abstract

The chapter highlights students' initial contacts with the Australian formal education system, the deficit logic that underpins underachievement, and provides a discourse around what can be done to make the Australian education landscape more inclusive and accommodating to refugees and new arrivals. The author employs a storytelling/narrative approach that focuses on three research participants to explore factors that enable students to successfully navigate the Australian education system. The discussion explores themes drawn from the narratives of participants and are supported by scholarly research. In addition to the participants' narratives, the author provides an insider's narrative with a strong emphasis on the view that ‘no one can tell the lived experience of refugees and new arrivals in Australia more accurately than themselves'. Narratives about lived experiences of refugees have frequently been told in the third person because many of the studies that were carried out used methodologies that kept participants passive rather than active.