Journey to Australia

This video is from a public dropbox which provides a range of informative resources from UNHCR Australia exploring various refugee issues across the world including child refugees, women refugees and environmental refugees.  This particular video ‘To be a Refugee’ is a video where child refugees from many countries tell their stories and the voice over commentary by a child explains the key issues and terms related to the refugee experience.

This video could be used as a unit introductory resource to present new information and familiarise students with basic terminology and definitions; an important part of the presentation stage of digital curation (Schellens & Valcke, 2005).   Groups could undertake a research task to define key terms or describe concepts and present as constructed into posters. This work may then be presented to the whole class creating a glossary of terms as a visual reminder for the rest of the unit such as UNHCR, UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, ‘refugee’, ‘human rights’, ‘asylum seeker’, ‘detention’, ‘persecution’ . 

This powerful artwork gives an indigenous perspective on the concept of being forced into a new way of living that is entirely alien, suffering violence, loss, and   disruption of culture, home and family. It could be used as a resource to compare the experience of Indigenous people and Refugees as perspectives of people who feel they have lost their homeland through invasion and those that have been forced to leave. It may enable students to see similarities such as confronting alienation, communication problems, feelings of grief and loss, fear, fragmentation of families and communities and cultural clashes and misunderstandings.  

This exploration could be enriched with creative arts with students asked to create an artwork communicating their interpretations of the feelings or experiences of indigenous people or refugees and a message to their fellow Australians about refugees. This would be in line with Bennett’s fourth stage of cultures education to assist actual ‘commitment to combatting prejudice and discrimination’.  Students might enter works in a competition such as that being run by UNHCR Canberra for school children’s artworks   to raise awareness of the struggles of asylum seekers.  Details at: http://unhcr.org.au/unhcr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=286:world-refugee-day-2013-art-competition&catid=35:news-a-media&Itemid=63

This website by Amnesty Australia provides a good overall resource for the refugee issue in the Australian context.  It has strong and simple visual and graphic displays which explore the key issues and provide good statistics in easily accessible form to students.  It could be used for all stages of presenting facts, delving deeper (explication) and evaluation (critical analysis). It is particularly useful for the latter in setting out the key facts, misconceptions and issues surrounding refugee issue in Australia. A further useful resource is a collection of media reports to explain and clarify common uses of discriminatory and inflammatory language in relation to refugees.   This would stimulate students to critically analyse media presentation of issues and work to combat or challenge common prejudices. The anti-discrimination element of this resource links to the four necessary ‘interactive dimensions’ of ‘cultures education’ that Bennett proposes. These are: movement towards equity, curriculum reform, the development of intercultural competencies and the commitment to combatting prejudice and discrimination (Bennett 1999 in Reynolds 2012 p.215).