But it is also the case that their sense of personal security is bound up with
belonging to that elite group, and that to abandon that privilege can be a frightening
move for them.
Thus the teacher educator has to do two things at the same time: to encourage the
respectful acknowledgement of difference; and to reassure the student stepping
hesitantly into a world they do not know, that it is going to be all right: they will
survive engagement with the Other without loss of mana or prestige.
Of course it is possible to lecture on such topics—endlessly—and of course
students in seminars will—sometimes—discuss their fears and hesitations—and
sometimes deny them—but what transpires in the classroom shows all too clearly
the state of the student teacher’s head. Sometimes, perhaps often, the clues lie in
what is said, but more often it is in classroom actions and interactions. Who is asked
the questions—and what kind of questions—whose waving hand is acknowledged
and whose is not—who sits at the back of the classroom, and does the teacher ever
venture down there? Who is regarded—to use the words of a teacher one of us
worked with—as a‘waste of space’?
Teacher educators therefore can usefully be engaged in two kinds of research: one,
into the characteristics of the migrant communities their students must engage with, to
smooth the path to a recognition of difference, and two, into the issues presented by the
student teachers themselves, on their nomadological journey from assumed privilege
to conscious and deconstructed privilege as a means to developing the wherewithal to
engage with the‘other’. Research of this kind could be most productive, particularly if
it assists the teacher educator to hep their student teachers‘see’the migrant child as
legitimately belonging to their own groupas well asto the classroom group and to see
and question the positions the student teachers start from.
If the focus is on research into student teacher engagement with migrants then it
should take the form of investigating the attitudes they hold at the outset and
(hopefully) the changes over time and exposure to migrant students. Many of the
questions we might ask are both social and psychological: what supports/factors/
circumstances might lessen their fear/make them feel more secure in a strange
environment and reassure them that association with migrants is not going to cause
them loss of face or status. Exasperating as it may be to devote more research time
to an already privileged section of our society this may well be the most efficient
way to ensure more equitable treatment of our children.
31.5 Student Teacher Research into the Ways of Being
of Migrant Groups in the Form of Sociological
or Nomadological InquiryHow can student teachers, so anxious about‘control’and‘covering the syllabus’
and generally about performing the role of teacher, learn to put aside their
pre-conceived ideas of what they‘ought’to do; and instead take the more humble
474 N. Devine et al.