migrant participant will appear to be lessened when the research conversation is
held in English. This apparent lessening in difference however is deceiving, as
English simply will not have adequate translations for some concepts and the
migrant children will have learnt (already) what they can say in English and what
they cannot say—some ideas will remain obscure, incomprehensible,‘irrational’in
terms of English language and research discourse. Some recognition of this
recalcitrant problem of translation and articulation will assist the student researcher
to lessen the impact, but collaboration with speakers of the migrants’language
would probably assist more.
31.7 Pedagogic Tactics: How Do We Get Our Student
Teachers to Engage with the Other?
This cannot be left to chance: the defence systems against vacating the assumptions
of privilege are already highly developed and moreover, constantly reinforced by
educational discourse—‘ability’; excellence’;‘achievement’—all these terms con-
tribute to the over-valuing of the already privileged and undervaluing of the migrant
child’s knowledge.
An interesting, exemplary process which might show what can be done, was
developed as an inquiry assignment by Timote Harris and Timoti Vaioleti at the
University of Waikato.
Secondary education students had to undertake, in pairs, to coach an adolescent
student from a recent migrant or refugee family for 10 hours, in the family home. It
sounds simple, but required a great deal of lecturer effort tofind and match pupils
with the ITE student in respect of disciplinary specialty. Then there was the matter
of access and communication. Schools often do not know where these children are:
they move frequently and often do not inform the school. For some of our ITE
students, locating the child and getting access comprised much of the task.
Supervisors had to acknowledge the difficulties and honour the efforts involved.
Some students would be scared off by dogs, peeling paint, tattoos or social
taboos about gender interaction (hence we tried to send out mixed pairs). Often it
was the students who had had the most difficulty overcoming their fears who
reported the most dramatic changes in their own perceptions, once they had made
the contact and established relationships with the family. While the target of
assistance was ostensibly the teenager in the family, it was frequently the case that
all the children of the family would gather around the table—with the mother. Often
our students would devote a lot of their time to assisting the mother with English,
with navigating social welfare or explaining cultural practices.
The endpoint of this research project—research in Dewey’s( 1915 ) sense, of an
inquiry that changes things for the researcher as much as for the researched—was a
one page summary of what the student teacher had learnt. In this case the‘research’
was less in the report—although the reports were often deeply moving—than in the
doing.
31 Teacher Education, Research and Migrant Children 477