Abstract
History has provided us with moments where we lessons have been made, two years of a pandemic is definitely one of these moments. Yet we can’t forget what the World Economic Forum recently reminded us of ‘More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015 – the largest movement of people the continent has seen since the end of the Second World War.’ This paper presents our work with a group who we know here as the Ezidi community. For hundreds of years the Ezidi (the Armidale community prefers Ezidi to the more commonly used Yazidi) have been a stateless persecuted minority. The Australian Parliament called Islamic State’s assault on the Ezidi a genocide. The Ezidi say the 2014 genocide was the 74th in their history. Our project funded from Federal Government Equity funding for Higher Education, and has been funded over a 3 year period. We have built the language support based on notions of Vygotskian pedagogy and dialogic teaching to enabling advantage for all, we adopt a broad sense of what it means to be literate, not only reading and writing, but also confidence with spoken language and with digital literacies. This paper will detail the 9 teaching strands which have evolved to match the English language learning needs of the community. We will also share highlights and successes for the community - after 3 years of English literacy programs we have 19 students studying at tertiary level from a community of some 500 community members.
Presenters
Robyn CoxAssociate Professor and Head of Department, School of Education, University of New England, New South Wales, Australia Helen Harper
Senior Lecturer, School of Education, University of New England, New South Wales, Australia Harrison Munday
University of New England
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Adult, Community, and Professional Learning
KEYWORDS
Refugee settlement, English language, Dialogic Teaching, Literacy, Higher Education
