Of course migrant students, like migrant teachers, are just students, and just
teachers. The characteristics of good teaching do not change. Any research which
aids better teaching of all children will assist migrant children.
Nonetheless there are some aspects of good teaching which can be reinforced for
the benefit of migrant students.
Foucault makes the point that the laws of the land are established by the
dominant group in a country (Foucault 1980 ). Sometimes these people are them-
selves migrant—as with William the Conqueror’s invading forces—and are able to
bring with them their language, cultural assumptions, mores—and perhaps their
children require little extra assistance as ‘migrants’. But successive waves of
non-conquering migrant students do not enjoy the privileges of sharing hegemonic
language, culture,“habitus” (Bourdieu 1977 ). For them, there is a transition
period—quite possibly lasting their entire life times—when they have to negotiate
the language and culture that are already established in the new land, while
retaining to a greater or lesser degree, the cultural attributes of the homeland.
In some cases, the transition is abrupt: particularly in the case of refugees, there
may be no going back, no cultural groups of compatriots, perhaps even no family.
Such isolation is fortunately relatively rare, although not unknown, and is a little
beyond the scope of this paper. Chain migration and resettlement patterns can result
in lively immigrant communities.
But, typically, student teachers come from the dominant group. They tend (we
apologise for the generalisation, but it is a useful one), to assume that the way they
and their peers see the world is—not so much the right, but theonlyway, to see it.
They often fear and/or distrust the immigrant groups (along with other minorities).
Hence it would be helpful for teacher educators to be familiar with some of the
migrant groups in the community—both those their students come from and those
they will teach.
31.4 Teacher Educators’Research into Perceptions,
and Changing Behaviour of Student
and Young TeachersIn our experience with student teachers, often they simply do not‘see’the immi-
grant children before them. They will make huge assumptions, considering Pacific
children to be Maori for instance. Sometimes they take pride in this failure to‘see’,
considering it to be proof of their non-discriminatory values. They often believe that
to acknowledge or discuss difference from the norm is somehow insulting—so
closely is their own consciousness of status bound up in their belonging to a visibly
privileged group. Wanting to believe that they are not prejudiced in any way leads
them to a belief in‘sameness’, a misrecognition of sameness as equality. This
misrecognition is often founded on an ostensibly egalitarian view that every child is
thesameas—‘as good as’—themselves, which is both wrong and defies the possi-
bility that the migrant child takes pride in belonging to their own community of origin.
31 Teacher Education, Research and Migrant Children 473