Chapter 1: Positioning Refugee Students as Intellectual Class Members

With diversification of student populations around the world, new criteria of teacher competence emerge. One of these is skill in positioning all students for participation in the intellectual work of the classroom. This form of competence is particularly important when cleavages of educational opportunity are sharp. This chapter describes two techniques employed by teachers of students with little, no, or severely interrupted schooling: (1) smart links, and (2) smart paths. “Smart links” are connections between students’ ways of knowing and other ways of knowing, while “smart paths” are clear routes between different ways of knowing. Data are drawn from interviews with English as a second language (ESL) teachers and African paraprofessionals that were conducted as part of a study of engagement of middle school-aged Sudanese, Eritrean, Burundian, and Rwandan refugees in Australian schools. They provide evidence of alternatives to deficit discourses about students for whom pre-existing programs have proven inadequate.

[T]he profession of teacher … should no longer be defined simply according to traditional criteria of competence but rather by ability to transmit to all, with the use of new pedagogical techniques, what some students … have acquired from their family milieu. —Bourdieu, 2008, p. 44, emphasis in the original