Engaging Refugee Background Parents in Their Children’s Learning

Each year, Australia settles tens of thousands of refugees, initiating a process of transition and a unique combination of challenges. Schools play an important part in that transition.

Parental engagement is a vital component in narrowing the achievement gap for refugee students and parents from refugee backgrounds have to make many changes to adjust to a school system that is embedded in an unfamiliar language and culture.

Dr Sharon Wagner and her colleague, Professor Loshini Naidoo of Western Sydney University have researched the role school plays in integrating refugees.
Their concern is that by focusing on the barriers faced by parents who are in transition as refugees, policy directions may further ingrain the sense that engaging parents with backgrounds is a matter of remedial measures and lowered expectations.

The starting point needs to be the educators and parents learning from each other. When parents and teachers come from different cultural backgrounds, they need to be willing to negotiate across cultural divides to build mutual understanding. To quote one teacher, "... It's understanding the aspirations of our community and restructuring our commitments as a school to meet the changing context of our community. So, we need to be adaptable. We need to be as a school an ongoing learning institution. That doesn't mean just teaching. We have to be learners as well."

In Australian schools, parent-teacher meetings are the main touchstone for parents and educators to discuss how students are going. "Teachers we spoke to told us of their deep concern that many refugee background parents don't attend these meetings," Dr Wagner says.

Schools often group refugee parents together with other culturally and linguistically diverse parents. Many refugee background parents attend one group parent-teacher meeting, where an ESL teacher explains school information and an interpreter provides an overview of the child's report.

"Now, obviously, in this scenario, the parents are not meeting with individual subject teachers. As one parent said to us, 'our children don't have only one teacher, so it would be good if we could have meetings with every one of these teachers’", says Prof Naidoo.

"This raises the question of whether the interest and the relevance are there for the parents - whether non-attendance is a sign that the forms of engagement that schools might offer are not seen as helpful."

Some parents expressed a preference for something other than parent-teacher meetings altogether. They put forward the idea of workshops that could focus on building knowledge around homework, English, and computer skills to help them support their children's learning.

"That could be a way of addressing a few issues at once. You can establish contact and engagement between the parents and different subject teachers, meet the parents' interests and needs, and also directly assist with struggles with language proficiency and limited education," suggests Dr Wagner.

Other issues leading to non-attendance or poor attendance at engagement events, like parent-teacher interviews, might arise from how the school handles communication with parents.

School information can be overwhelmingly long and heavy and full of jargon and an increasing reliance on digital communication platforms to share school information disadvantage those parents without the linguistic, technological, and economic capacity to access online information.

"When schools do not communicate in ways refugee background parents can understand, that often leads to a reliance on the children themselves to translate or interpret," says Dr Wagner. "Many of the refugee background parents depended on their children to translate school documents. But, as parents and educators pointed out to us, this means the children are effectively deciding what the parents need to know."

"The parents get the messages through the children's filter, so, for instance if the child is in trouble at school, they might avoid passing certain things on."

The researchers found that many parents who don't speak English, or who are not confident in it, often address these challenges by using interpreters. "If they can afford to, they may even hire interpreters themselves, in order to communicate with school staff," says Dr Wagner.

Even though refugee background parents tend to have high aspirations for their children's educational success, they may not be aware that the Australian school system has an expectation of active parental involvement.

Dr Wagner says, "Some felt disempowered by a different educational system and its expectations, while others stress the importance of active parenting, and highlighted the benefits of parents initiating contact with the school."

Previous educational experiences also influence how parents and teachers perceive their roles in the school context. "Some parents viewed teachers as experts and were hesitant to ask questions, fearing it might appear they were doubting the teacher's expertise," Dr Wagner says.

"On the other hand, some teachers acknowledged their role as experts who need to provide information and support because of refugee background parents' lower educational qualifications, unfamiliarity with the Australian school system, and language barriers."

"I think there is a need for training in how and when to communicate with parents from different socio-cultural and educational backgrounds," says Professor Naidoo. "Despite the rhetoric of schools partnering with parents from different backgrounds, it is all too often the case that the views of parents are rarely sought, and teachers tend to have difficulties relating to parents who come from outside their cultural frame of reference."

"There needs to be a shift away from viewing refugee background parents from a deficit perspective, recognizing the strengths they bring to the school community. Valuing parents from different backgrounds requires looking beyond assumptions that parents need to be like us," Dr Wagner suggests. "Listen and learn from the refugee background parents in their school communities to better understand what parents are doing, their needs, and how to work together to support the child."

At the school level, ongoing evaluation is imperative to ensure that parental engagement strategies and practices reflect the school community's needs. Teachers need to be adequately prepared in their training and professional development to communicate culturally with parents from refugee backgrounds, fostering effective relationships based on mutual understanding.

See Wagner, S., & Naidoo, L. (2023). Engaging parents of refugee backgrounds in their children's education : insights from Australia. In S. Subasi Singh, O. Jovanoic, & M. Proyer (Eds.), Perspectives on Transitions in Refugee Education: Ruptures, Passages, and Re-Orientations (pp. 175-189). https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv32bm1gz.15

Photo by Ahmed Akacha