Educating Students with Refugee and Asylum Seeker Experiences - Maura Sellars

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(Steger & Roy, 2010). Historically, there have been many theoretical perspectives on the purposes of education which reflect the changing nature of society and perceived needs. Dewey (1938) for example, observed that the primary purpose of education was not to prepare students for the future, but to help them live practically and sensibly in their own environments at that time, meaning that education was life at that time and to provide students, in an orderly manner, with the skills they needed to join society. These skills included a critical and enquiring mind and was articulated as ‘social efficiency’. He was a very strong advocate of learning as experience and believed that the quality of the experiencer was paramount to learning. Quality learning experiences were those that combined theory and practice. Much later, Adler (1982) brought together major themes which had [7] influenced education for some time. He presented three main objectives of education; to develop students as citizens, to promote individual holistic development and to prepare young people for work. Over a decade later, again in recognition of the changing nature of society, deMarrais and LeCompte (1995) indicated four main purposes of education; intellectual development of students, especially in literacy and numeracy, economic purposes, that is for reasons of employment, the development of social and moral responsibilities and, interestingly, a fourth purpose which had not previously garnered much public attention; education for political purposes, including the assimilation of migrant students. The degree to which this is possible is debatable, given the hegemonic principles upon which current neoliberal education systems are administered, monitored and evaluated.

      There is hope, however. ‘There are many things that can be done to mitigate the deleterious effects that neoliberalism has on education in North America and beyond’ (Ross, 2017:4). While it is not possible for those directly involved in educational contexts to entirely transform the hegemonic foundations of these education systems, it is possible to develop attitudes and strategies that serve to empower all students for whom schooling is a disempowering experience, the most vulnerable of which are students with refugee experiences. One of the most basic and most human of the ‘things’ that can be done to ‘mitigate’ the impact of neoliberal policies on education is to recognize what it is to be human and to understand educating students as the ‘whole child’.

      The purpose of the first mass education system established in Prussia in the 18th century was holistic education which focused on the process of supporting increasingly mature levels of both cultural and personal growth (Gidley, 2016). Influenced by German and Swiss educational systems, it was an integrative initiative in that it focussed on the development of whole person. Sadly, this notion of education was eroded by the industrialized, more factory style model whose sole purpose was to provide workers for the immense factories that resulted from the British Industrial Revolution. Several independent, alternative models of education developed early in the twentieth century and reflected the educational ideals of people such as Montessori, Steiner and Dewey. Gidley (2016:135) speculated that all these educators were ‘tapping into an important zeitgeist’ or spirit of the times that was reacting against the utilitarian focus of contemporary mass education. While these theories had many individual characteristics, they also had many common features, including an emphasis on imagination and creativity, practical engagement, spirituality and many attributes of Postformal reasoning (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1993), which will later be discussed in detail, but which essentially involve four pedagogical principles or values. These are love, life, wisdom and voice, much of which was absent from utilitarian agendas in education.

      [8] The next significant challenges to conventional, mass educational thinking came in the late 1960s and 1970s and reflected a new consciousness of the need to question the policies and practices of mainstream schooling amidst the background of youth protests and dissent around the issue of the involvement of capitalist countries in the Vietnam war. It was a period of alternative education, characterized by several new perspectives on how learning may be best achieved. Neill’s Summerhill School (Neill, 1960),which advocated free schooling where adults supported learning but did not plan anything for the students to learn, the students determined this themselves, was one comment on the rigidity of the regular classrooms. Holt's (1964, 1970) critique of the school system and support of home schooling was another. Illich (1975) advocated strongly that schooling in economy based countries simply served to corrupt and institutionalize society and that, in order to deinstitutionalise society, education needed radical reform.

      Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. (Illich, 1975:9)

      In place of tightly kept regimes and frameworks, he suggested networks of learners who could connect and provide genuine opportunities for each individual to engage with others for the purposes of learning, sharing and caring. It was also the period in which critical pedagogy was brought to public prominence as Freire (1970) highlighted the political nature of teaching and learning, perceiving that no educational process was neutral and advocating teacher awareness of their professional life as a series of political actions. Freire (1970) also focused on education for the poor, deploring the ‘banking’ model of education which not only led to the reproduction of unjust society, but which did not allow the underprivileged opportunities to engage in educational discourses that provided them with opportunities to improve their situation. Whilst all these ‘alternative’ educational ideas were highly critical of the traditional industrial model of schooling, it is in the work of Illich and Freire that notions of ‘care’ in educational interactions articulated for over half a century. Nearly half a century later, reforms in educational politics, policies and practices have been scant, despite decades of academic writing. These discourses included considerable attention being paid to the role of the teacher (see, for example, Poulou, 2005; Warner, 2006), the importance of school climate (see, for example, Cohen, 2006; Coladarci, 1992; Cotton, 1996; Loukas & Robinson, 2004), child care (see, for example, Fanning & Veale, 2004; Gerhardt, 2015), teaching as an act [9] of caring (see, for example, Darder, 2009) and a philosophy of care (Noddings, 2012; 2005) being articulated as means by which students can be positively socialised into the constructs of tolerance, kindness and reciprocal, caring relationships.

      Love and Care in Education

      Darder (2009, 2017) in her discussion of the work and friendship that she shared with Freire, provided a definition of that surpasses the commonly held assumptions of the concept of love. She states,

      …is a political and radicalized form of love that is never about absolute consensus, or unconditional acceptance, or unceasing words of sweetness or endless streams of hugs and kisses. Instead it is a love that I experienced as unconstructed, rooted in a committed willingness to struggle persistently with purpose in our life and to intimately connect that purpose with what he called our ‘true vocation’ – to be human. (Darder, 2009:567)

      Freirean philosophy demonstrated the ways in which the political, economic and social backgrounds of people served to explain the current social and economic inequity in the world. It illustrated how discrimination, injustice and capitalist agendas, such as those expressed in neo liberal influences in education, dehumanize people so that they have reduced capacity to act humanely in regards to themselves, others and the environment. His notion of teaching for love included tolerance and acceptance of diversity, of opposing perspectives and contrary views. Teaching as an act of love for Freire was not about being well meaning and inducting students into an acceptance of the social and moral inequities of traditional schooling. It was about teachers having a deep understanding of the negative impact of these educational systems on the students’ capacities to develop the skills, confidence and competencies that were required for them to transform their worlds. To teach with love demanded that educators at all levels of school engage with issues of social justice and give marginalised students a voice in the educational context of privilege and hegemony.

      Many of these themes are echoed in moral teaching from an ethic of care (Noddings, 2005, 2012)

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