Creating learning spaces for refugees: The role of multicultural organisations in Australia

Upon arrival in Australia, refugees are directed to various organisations, including multicultural community organisations. Multicultural community organisations are well recognised for helping refugees become self-reliant; what is not fully recognised, however, is the contribution these organisations make to the development of refugees’ learning. This study sought to examine the extent to which literacy and numeracy provision occurs in multicultural community organisations serving three particular refugee groups: those from Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sudan.

Given their diverse experiences, backgrounds and reasons for fleeing their homelands, refugees in Australia clearly have a range of different needs. The authors highlight that multicultural community organisations work to meet these needs by creating networks and relationships with refugees. The nature of these organisations, and the informal learning environment they provide, can help refugees to learn skills needed for life in Australia as well as build networks with other non-government and government organisations.

Key messages

• Trust is the foremost factor to be established between multicultural community organisations and the refugees they seek to serve. Bilingual workers are integral to building trust and establishing networks with other groups beyond these community organisations.
• Successful learning programs grow out of refugees’ needs and incorporate the outcomes necessary for successful settlement—improved English language proficiency, cultural competence and enhanced employability skills.
• By providing informal learning spaces where cultures and languages are respected, multicultural community organisations play a central role during the resettlement process in the creation of social cohesion between refugees and their families and the wider community.

This report will be of interest to those providing services to refugees and migrants, such as multicultural community organisations, and to policy makers dealing with refugees. It will also be relevant to providers of Adult Migrant English Programs and others involved in teaching English, literacy and numeracy or offering vocational education and training to refugees and migrants.

Readers interested in teaching and learning for refugee or migrant learners may also want to review:

• Classroom management strategies to address the needs of Sudanese refugee learners , by U Burgoyne and O Hull (NCVER, Adelaide, 2007).

Tom Karmel
Managing Director, NCVER

The research set out to identify the role of multicultural community organisations as surrogate English language and work skills learning organisations. Through the experiences of refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iraq and Sudan, the study explored the role played by multicultural community organisations in creating informal networks and learning spaces which connected people from refugee backgrounds to the wider Australian community. Three refugee groups were selected to reflect their differing characteristics, including age profile and levels of education and workforce participation in their countries of birth, as well as in Australia. Consequently, the research methodology incorporated ways to identify the diversity within and between the three refugee groups.

The research explicitly moved away from the tendency to position all people from a language other than English background, regardless of cultural, religious, educational and migration history, as a homogenous group with common experiences and needs and to subsequently fashion generic solutions. The research methodology consequently built ways to identify the diversity within and between the three refugee groups.

The research examined the factors and mechanisms which can promote or inhibit opportunities for developing English language, literacy and employability skills for each of these groups. It identified the specific practices adopted by multicultural community organisations to support informal skills transfer and examined how these might be applicable to the wider vocational and adult education sectors.

In all, 175 people participated in the research across regional and metropolitan Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. Staff and members of management committees of multicultural community organisations participated in in-depth interviews. These were followed by ‘inlanguage’ focus group discussions with refugees from Bosnia, Iraq and Sudan. Each discussion led to the creation of a ‘network’ diagram that summarised the perceived links between the organisations and the particular refugee community.

It was found that refugees prefer to work through community-based multicultural organisations for the following reasons:

• Partly independent of government, these organisations are more likely to be trusted.

• Typically located in a public or community space, they are able to create a professional but culturally inclusive, small-scale environment transcending the family and personal.

• They provide the specific service, information and advice at the time it is required rather than via the disconnected, generic, fine print of an on-arrival information booklet.

• They usually provide critically important public and community access to informal learning as well as practical experience of most forms of information and computer technologies taken for granted by many other Australians, including telephone, the internet, email, word processing, and data bases.

• They tend to be staffed by multi-skilled, culturally aware and empathetic people who are either bilingual or have access to others who are bilingual.

• They provide opportunities for refugees who have used a service to reciprocate – particularly to mentor, advise and give back to other refugees as well as to the wider Australian community.

• They provide initial sites for essential, informal learning and particularly for referral to other formal learning sites, tutors, institutions and interpreters to develop necessary Australian vocational experience and English language expertise.

Our deliberate use and exploration of network relationships, in both our interviews and focus groups, was based on an assumption that different forms of civic or community engagement (ethnic, religious, cultural, sporting) would contribute to the refugees’ informal learning. It was assumed that such engagement in both first and English languages could lead refugees to become more trusting of and networked into both their ethnic or cultural community and the wider Australian community. It was believed that this would have flow-on benefits for language acquisition as well as for employment.

The in-depth interviews and focus group data supported these hypotheses and assumptions. The network diagrams demonstrate the centrality of linkages to community-based multicultural organisations for facilitating trust and the early creation of informal learning opportunities for refugees. These early links assist the subsequent links to employment and to formal learning organisations: schools, adult and community education (ACE), technical and further education (TAFE) and higher education.

Our finding that multicultural community organisations are diverse and multifunctional is not surprising. On arrival, the majority of refugees speak a language other English at home and they have little idea of whom to contact for advice, services or assistance; they also have particular problems addressing and communicating their needs in English. Direct approaches to governments, service providers and the private sector are rendered more difficult because of language. Migrants generally, and refugees in particular, depend heavily on a small number of trusted and informed intermediary people or organisations acting as ‘clearing houses’ for information and as a conduit to other service providers. First and foremost, refugees need to access services; it is also important for them to make contact and communicate with and learn from other similarly displaced refugees.

Although beyond the scope of our original research questions, the research provides evidence of how these multicultural community organisations enhance the effectiveness and reach of the services provided by the government. The linkages we describe lead not only to education but also to housing, health, welfare and work. Our research demonstrates the value of multicultural community organisations working collaboratively and reciprocally with government agencies. Our data confirm the importance of bicultural and bilingual facilitators in developing trusting and collaborative reciprocal relationships within, between and beyond these organisations.

In the context of social capital acting as an overarching community framework (OECD 2001; Cavaye 2005; Bjornskov & Svendsen 2005), the network data and analysis demonstrate the importance of trust, networks, shared norms and reciprocity at both individual and family levels. This social capital unites and creates bonds between refugee households and communities, and builds bridges to the wider Australian community. We also provide evidence that, at the community and institutional level, the functioning of government agencies and institutions is enhanced by active and voluntary community involvement in community-based organisations. In relation to this project, we demonstrate both the bonding and bridging roles of these organisations in building trust and providing opportunities for refugees to learn.

In the context of the contemporary debates about refugee engagement in the wider Australian community, this study shows that neither bonding (within like cultures, religions or communities) nor bridging (across cultures, religions or communities) alone is beneficial to individuals, households and communities. Both are important to the Australian community, as well as to refugees, and are improved by refugee involvement in community-based refugee/ethnic organisations. The bonding function is particularly important to ensure that refugees, typically with a long history of broken trust and bonds, connect quickly and positively to one another and to essential services in Australia. Paraphrasing Field’s (2005) arguments about social capital and its enhancement of lifelong learning, it is imperative not only to prevent refugee disengagement from or indifference to the wider Australian community and cultures, but also to avoid active resistance to it.

Our interview data confirm that the development of trusting and reciprocal network relationships between individuals and families and community-based multicultural organisations is generally and positively associated with engagement in learning in all its forms. We recognise that, for refugees, this learning and the contexts in which it occurs may be informal as well as formal. Learning sometimes occurs in their own language(s) as well as in English; it involves oral as well as formal literacies (including the use of communication technology); and may result in pathways to unpaid voluntary work, as well as to paid work.

One of our conclusions is that, in attempting to prescribe the most effective path (that is, formal or informal learning; English or not English; formal or informal literacy; formal paid or informal unpaid work), it is unhelpful to choose between these dipoles. All can be important at different points of the refugee resettlement cycle. As for any learner, refugees gain from learning that takes place in authentic and familiar cultural, community and linguistic contexts (Lave & Wenger 1991). Accredited formal and vocational learning in English can be ‘too soon and too fast’, unless it is also situated and practised in real work contexts.

Our findings for refugees are consistent with research in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, summarised in Faris (2005, p.30):

Non-formal learning is fostered in a wide array of voluntary organisations that exist in our communities. Learning acquired through volunteer work is a major motivation for many volunteers who wish to gain new skills … [I]t is in the communities—the families, workplaces, voluntary associations and educational institutions therein—that most of the learning associated with building trust, networks and shared values occurs.

Organisations in the adult education sector have not widely embraced multicultural community organisations. Those that have are mainly registered training organisations delivering accredited vocational education and training (VET). Our research provides evidence of the crucial role of multicultural community organisations, regardless of their formal VET status, in creating learning opportunities for refugees at significant settlement transition points. These organisations provide the supportive environment and time required to regenerate and re-establish trust, redefine goals and begin the long process of becoming a productive citizen in a new land. These organisations are working daily with people whose trust, reciprocity, shared norms, networks and collaboration had been run down or exhausted in their own countries. Many have been ‘warehoused’¹  and/or detained offshore in Australia, some for up to a decade in second or third countries.

The multicultural community organisations identified in this report rebuild social capital effectively and encourage widespread informal learning. In the process, they enhance English language acquisition and employability. They provide a trusting context in which refugees are able to communicate with staff in both English and their native language, enabling refugee communities to build social capital, which in turn can offer considerable benefits to other fellow Australians.

Further information relating to the research is provided in the accompanying support document available from this web page.

¹‘Refugee warehousing’ describes the ‘practice of isolating large populations of displaced refugees in camps or segregated settlements’. Undertaken in part as a deterrent to seeking asylum, it has the effect of keeping refugees ‘in protracted situations of poverty, immobility and economic dependence, with neither freedom of movement nor access to basic state services’ (Uniting Church in Australia 2006).