Creating Spaces of Wellbeing and Belonging for Refugee and Asylum-Seeker Students

Skills and Strategies for School Leaders

Scott Imig, Maura Sellars, John Fischetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000414233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This practical resource for principals and school leaders provides guidance on how to develop schools into places of belonging for all children, especially children of refugee and asylum-seeker backgrounds. It demonstrates the need for school leaders to be informed, reflective individuals and highlights the role that leaders can play in a school culture that provides a safe place and effective educational opportunities for these students. Written in an accessible manner, each chapter includes a summary of theory and vignettes from school leaders that outline approaches, challenges, critical reflections and suggestions for how their experiences can be adapted to other contexts. Principals' voices and experiences from across the globe are included, representing a range of school levels including primary and secondary, large and small enrolments, religious and public, and urban and rural settings.

This book is intended for use in schools by school principals and aspiring school leaders, and by educational professionals engaged in supporting schools with students with refugee backgrounds.

1 The reflective leader

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090731-1

Introduction

School leadership is a demanding, unpredictable and, at times, highly stressful career. Due to the pressures of the role, time-poor principals tend to operate on the fly, in a reactive posture as they interact with students, parents, staff and community members. This approach is not ideal when making practical and policy decisions with real-life implications for individual children and families. For principals who find themselves serving children and families with refugee and asylum-seeker backgrounds, who bring experiences of trauma and vast cultural differences, the challenge of thoughtful decision-making is further amplified. This chapter positions the imperative of reflection as a tool for effective decision-making; it presents conceptions of reflection and reflective processes in the research literature and offers unique perspectives on reflection from school leaders around the world.

Why reflection?

Reflection has been the focus of much academic writing. It is difficult to determine the single most appropriate definition, but the authors agree that it is the deliberate, purposeful, metacognitive activity in which professionals engage to improve their professional practice. Reflexivity is the term used to reflect deliberately on an individual’s own responses or actions in any educational context. Among all the models of reflection that have been developed to support informed educational practices, there are four common elements. Firstly, principals need to identify and consider the situations, circumstances or incidents that have prompted reflection. Secondly, in undertaking the reflective process itself, what needs to be determined is the type of reflection required, the diverse opinions around the reflection and the opinions about the reflective process selected. Thirdly, the actual content of the reflection needs to be extrapolated, determining what it is that needs to be analysed, to be discussed or challenged and what are the epistemologies and ideologies that underpin these circumstances, situations or actions. Finally, what may be the result of the reflection? What improved understanding of this aspect of professional practice has occurred as the result of the reflection? (Sellars, 2017, pp. 2–3).

Dewey considered reflection an essential cognitive process in which all teachers and their leaders needed to engage. He writes of reflection as: ‘The active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends’ (Dewey, 1933, p. 9).

He considered reflection to be based on thinking in a particular manner; logical, rational analysis of the problem and the attention paid to the way in which these thoughts are ordered and connected meaningfully. He then envisaged that this chain of thought be analysed for assumptions, value judgements and underlying beliefs that had influenced the thinking and which in turn required investigating for evidence to support them. This was presented as a scientific method of evaluating good practice, professional decision-making and undertaking the reflective process. This was Dewey’s approach as he sought to distinguish reflective thinking from everyday arbitrary thinking and, most especially, from impulsive thinking and actions. Calderhead (1989, p. 44) noted this Deweyan approach of rationally and scientifically examining issues and all their components before determining the most appropriate action to take as resulting in what Dewey himself called ‘intelligent action’. In the process, the professional must undergo some uncertainty and doubt before finally determining a rational action or approach to take to the issue in question. The discomfort caused by this uncertainty became the catalyst for Boyd and Fales’ (1983) six-step process of reflective practice designed to focus on learning from experience.

Proposing that learning from experience or experimental learning is not predominantly outcome based but rather that the learning is in the process, Boyd and Fales (1983) contend that it is in the participation in reflective practice that perceptions and frames of references are challenged and changed, not in the resultant action taken, thus confirming that the difference between an individual who repeats the same mistakes and one who is changed, affectively and cognitively, is their engagement in the reflective process. Quoting one of their research participants who was asked to reflect on the process of reflection itself and trying to explain what she understood to be its non-linear nature, they note that she expressed this well:

Reflecting back inside what that has meant to you, externalising it, and internalising it, I think that’s part of what reflection would be. The very word reflect has to have something there from which you’re coming to something and maybe back again – a kind of spiral – or back and forth, back and forth.

(Boyd & Fales, 1983, pp. 105–106; italics in the original)

The six-step model that these authors developed was based on the responses from their participants. They understand the reflective process as:

1. A feeling of discomfort;
2. Identification or clarification of the concern;
3. Openness to new information from internal or external sources, with the ability to observe and take in from a variety of perspectives;
4. Resolution, expressed as ‘integration’, ‘coming together’, ‘acceptance of self-reality’ and ‘creative synthesis’;
5. Establishing continuity of self with past present and future;
6. Deciding on whether to act on the outcome of the reflective process.

(Boyd & Fales, 1983, p. 106)

This basic model, although conceived some decades ago, provides a step-by-step process with which principals are invited to consider the challenges in the following chapters. It provides an opportunity to reflect on the comments of peers who have participated in the research, in conjunction with the theoretical underpinning, to present and guide other perspectives and to inform on each of the key topics that emerged from this initial research. It also provides a chance to engage with the critical reflection of others who seek to understand and to share knowledge and strategies, incidents and experiences that provide the data for this writing and, hopefully, encourage each of you to reflect as leaders of educational communities who support students with refugee and asylum experiences.

Research findings

Nearly every principal we interviewed in our research talked about the need for continuous reflection when faced with the challenge of serving children and families with refugee and asylum-seeker backgrounds. Two individuals who offered keen insights were a high school principal in Australia and a high school leader in New Zealand.

Context: My school’s student population is 1,400, with students in Grades 9–13. I’ve been in my role now for about 16 years. I’ve seen students come through, and now they have siblings who are coming through the school and there are former refugee students, families and siblings, too.

We’ve got this Congolese support worker. We were paying her to work but she wasn’t coming to school on any regular basis. She had been employed 15 hours a week, she was there the whole year and I had no idea where she was spending her hours. I was saying to one of my other colleagues, “I’m going to get her to fill in a timesheet, so I can catch up on everything she’s doing”, I was looking at it very much from an Anglo-Saxon, white perspective. And then, slowly as time went on, I’ve got to know the worker and sat in the conversations listening to her. I realised she’s so valuable. She doesn’t work in the way that we do, in terms of coming to work and being somewhere. Her work, it is all relational, and within the community. As a leader, for me, it involves learning how to work with people in the community, in terms of employing staff.

Context: My school is a high school (Grades 7–12), with around 430 students. We have an Intensive English Centre for newly arrived students. I have been principal here for over 20 years. My career trajectory has been sort of mainstream, but with multicultural and English as a Second Language perspectives, and human rights specific perspectives becoming more important in that.

I went into a hostile environment at the school. It was hostile and it had entrenched racism. It was hostile to a lot of the kids. There was a casual dismissal of children, which was entrenched in the school’s culture. I had a huge cultural battle to fight in the school. But you don’t do it by walking in and saying, “all right, everything’s changed overnight.” During the time of change, I sat through some gruesomely painful executive meetings. First, I listened to people. This means listening to the ladies in the office and they told me a great deal about the school, things that other people might have not wanted me to know. I listened to the young teachers who told me “we don’t have anyone to talk to in school, they’re all old” – which informed the way that I asked for replacement staff. If you ever wanted a definition of a stuck school, this school was that. I introduced the idea of a consensus, that decision-making didn’t have to be top down, that people could contribute to it. If you contributed, then you have a say in it. If you stood aside from contributing, you really didn’t have any right to have a say. I flattened all the hierarchies; and of course, this all got me undying hatred from a couple of the chaps.

Unique contexts, global principles

Though separated by the Tasman Sea and a wealth of cultural differences, these two principals share an understanding of the importance of reflection and seeking new understandings when faced with uncomfortable situations. The high school leader from New Zealand has a long history of working to understand and support her diverse families, yet when exposed to the non-western work practices of her Congolese staff member, she felt compelled to reflect on her discomfort and seek more information. The Australian principal found herself thrust into a far more difficult environment that operated in a hierarchical and callous manner that challenged her integrity. Though naturally assertive, as a new leader, she tempered herself and gathered information from office staff and young teachers, individuals who are often not consulted in school decision-making. This information source both provided her with a unique vantage point and helped develop a collaborative structure in her school. Both leaders recognised a discomfort in themselves and spent time working to understand what was causing their discomfort. The way these two leaders operate, the way they purposefully seek new knowledge and understandings before responding to unique challenges, helps them to create positive school environments for their staff, students and families.

School leaders are faced with hundreds of decisions daily. While experience can offer much guidance for seemingly routine decision-making, principals must remain attuned to the sense of personal discomfort certain challenges elicit. Discomfort stems from uncertainty and it is a trigger for reflective practice. Developing a process for reflection is necessary for school leaders and the six-steps outlined by Boyd and Fales (1983) can be very supportive. Their reflection process enables school leaders to address their discomfort by purposefully focusing on it to ascertain why it is concerning and determine what information they need. This reflection process allows them to determine what action, if any, is necessary. To amplify the power of this approach, leaders can train their entire staff to engage in the six-step process. Creating a culture that employs such a process is vital for dealing with difference and integration and continuously reflecting on what is best for all students, including those with refugee and asylum-seeker experiences.

Critical reflection

Despite the importance of Dewey’s thinking around reflection, critics have responded that it may be just that, thinking about the incidences, situations or occurrences without any emphasis on action. For some, this left a component missing from the reflective cycle, which was, for them, the purpose and the product of the process of reflection itself (Gore & Zeichner, 1991; Noffke & Brennan, 1988). Calderhead (1989) has been dismissive of any reflection that does not complete the cycle and include action. While there are many situations in which principals can take action as a result of their reflective practice, it is not always simple or even possible to achieve. This is most apparent when working with critical reflection that engages with social reconstructionist themes or issues which involve social or political aspects of schooling. When engaging with the reflective process as an everyday practice for principals, it becomes apparent that there are different levels of reflective thinking, some simple, some more complex, and the actions that can be affected as the products of these diverse incidents or situations are correspondingly simple or complex (Gore, 1987, p. 121). Gore and Zeichner (1991) developed a taxonomic model of the levels of thinking in which practitioners may engage. It comprises four levels, each more complex in purpose, process and potential product:

1. An academic version, which focuses on teachers’ skills in disseminating discipline content and presenting it in such a way as to maximise its accessibility for students;
2. A social efficacy model version, which is based on research findings and focuses on evidence-based practice;
3. A developmental version, which primarily considers age and develop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The reflective leader
• 2. Racism
• 3. Understanding cultural diversity
• 4. Trauma and loss
• 5. Wellbeing and belonging
• 6. Social safety, identity and integration
• 7. Leadership and school culture
• 8. Supportive pedagogical approaches
• 9. Sharing the leadership challenge
• Index