I have chosen to write about refugee students as a neighbour
of mine is a refugee student undertaking his HSC this year, having spoken to
him about his experiences in school I am interested in how the media is
covering policies on refugee student education. I’d like to write about a news item broadcast on SBS World
News on October the 7th. The
video and transcript is available here:
This article has an overall hopeful and positive tone.
Refugee students are seen as being engaged in learning and having new
experiences. Notably it is highly unlikely that this story about this volunteer
program would be aired if the students were Australian citizens – the program
is a simplistic extra-curricula activity in which students are taught how to
time and record swimming races. The article is significant because it involves
a marginalised group of people who are otherwise mostly portrayed as defective
and unwanted (think of Rudd’s anti-boat smuggling advertisement campaign in the
lead-up to the recent election).
Hattam and Every (2010) outline the historic origins of
Australian government strategies and policies surrounding the “refugee problem”
dating back to the 1970s when asylum seekers were reaching Australia fleeing
the Vietnam War. Hattam and Every quote Oakes (2000) on a definition of “wedge
politics” as the strategy of finding a “hot issue” with which to create “resentment
among a large group against a smaller one” (pg. 412). Hattam and Every explain
that the dehumanising effects of the political rhetoric surrounding refugee
immigration have become part of Australian
public culture, and as such infiltrate classrooms, resultingly “the experience that refugee students
have in schools is very much determined by the way that refugees are thought
about, and represented in the public culture and how these representations are
taken up or contested in schools.” (pg. 409)
This SBS news item combats the fear which Hattam and Every
describe is the cause of the pervasive nature of the “refugee problem”: a fear
of difference and a strong sense of boundaries to keep certain people in and
certain people out. The recent amendments on reporting practices regarding
asylum seeking boats in Australian waters is exemplar of the practice of “keeping
these people nameless and faceless” (pg. 415). The snippets of interview with
the two students in this news segment give names and faces to young refugees in
Australia, yet at the same time reflect Bauman’s notion that “the growth of individual
freedom may coincide with the growth of collective impotence” (cited in Hattam
and Every, pg. 416) i.e. this example of free and happy refugees is potent
because it is co-extant with extreme
anti-refugee public culture.
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