With partners:
Teacher Snapshot 1
TEACHER: One of the boys I’ve been working with in Year 9 is having an awful, awful time. He’s Arabic and he’s becoming quite troubled because he sees the way that kids -“Aussies” and “skips”- behave here and it’s very materialistic and he sees his family and a lot of his friends from his culture being able to make a bridge between the two and cross happily between the two but he can’t. He’s just feeling like he wants to go back because he doesn’t fit in here, he doesn’t fit in with his family any more and he can’t understand why his family is changing… He figures “I don’t fit in anywhere. I don’t fit in with my family, I don’t fit in with my friends, I don’t like what I see here.”INTERVIEWER: What will happen to him?
TEACHER: I’ve been talking to him and we’ve isolated that that’s what’s really doing his head in but I don’t know what you do to help him. I trained as a teacher, an English and History teacher 25 years ago. Obviously I’ve spoken to people at Foundation House because there’s got to be people around to help kids like that because he just hasn’t made the transition, and increasingly not making it because he’s getting resentful and he’s angry with his family because they’re becoming like “Aussies”…It’s really hard for kids when they come over at that 14, 15 year age because they’re so concerned, I’m sure in any culture at that age, with: “Who am I? Where do I fit in? Where’s my identity?” And what they took as certainties is all falling apart and they don’t like what they see coming in front of it. They hanker for what was, but they can’t have it.
INTERVIEWER: So they’re feeling dislocated, yet their younger siblings are adjusting and getting on with life here?
TEACHER: And that’s the very thing that’s getting to him. “Why can they do it and I can’t? Why can my friends do it and I can’t? Why do they want to be like that? It’s not the way we are. Why are they behaving like that? Why are they doing those things? It’s not important. It’s not important to have a house and a car.” This is what he’s getting from his family. He says but it’s not like that in the village. Some kids do it rough. He’s getting angry, he’s getting very angry and eventually that anger is just going to do something. He’s in Year 9, so he’s 15. And they’re the ones who talk to you. What’s happening with the ones who don’t? At least he’s coming and talking, he ends up in my office because he’s done something to someone.
TEACHER: We’ve got one Koori boy who tells everyone he’s Lebanese… But his mother says: “Your brother dances with an Aboriginal dance group, what are you on about?” But he tells everyone he’s Lebanese and wears the Lebanese cap. So it [identity] can be confusing for the kids.
Teacher Snapshot 2
TEACHER: A lot of our Iraqi kids culturally have been in refugee or transit camps and that’s not their parents’ tradition and culture. It’s an artificial culture.
TEACHER: …how much do you use kids’ experiences as the basis for the curriculum, or is it more effective to provide something where there is a bit of distance and allow them to talk about their experiences in relation to that?... Or do we look for texts about the Iraqi refugee who migrates to a north western metropolitan school in Victoria? You can make stuff too relevant that they’re threatened, they’re too close.