The Migrant Presence by Jean I. Martin

Author:Jean I. Martin [Martin, Jean I.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781000248081
Google: g-TzDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-07-30T03:51:32+00:00

The unwillingness of the States to establish a career structure for staff engaged in migrant education has always been a symptom of grudging commitment to solving what they saw as a temporary problem, which was not their responsibility anyway. Career opportunities are still extremely limited. Of far-reaching importance in schools, however, is the differentiation in the composition of school staff that has resulted from the introduction of non-teacher personnel—still defined as ‘ancillaries’—into the school situation.

Teachers, counselling staff and others with direct contact with migrant children have for years been emphasising the need for bilingual ancillary workers to support school staff. Education systems began to respond to these demands about 1975, partly as the result of funds for this purpose being provided through Schools Commission programmes, partly as a by-product of a general relaxation of traditional constraints on school staffing. In Victoria, for example, legislation introduced in 1974 to permit school councils to employ teacher aides led to the appointment of bilingual aides in some schools of high migrant density, their salaries paid under the Disadvantaged Schools Programme of the Schools Commission. The fact that these ‘ethnic aides’ are not recruited, trained or employed by the Department of Education, together with the inevitable initial lack of definition in the roles they were expected to fulfil, created some difficulties in their incorporation into the school system. Somewhat similar structural problems seem to have been responsible for the meagre impact of a scheme to train bilingual welfare officers to work in schools, initiated by the Commonwealth Department of Immigration in 1972, and taken over by the Department of Social Security in 1974. The fact that the training and employment of these welfare officers are the responsibility of a body other than the State authority that controls the schools in which they work has clearly counteracted their usefulness and the schools’ capacity to absorb them. By contrast, an interpreter service introduced by the Department itself in 1976 has been well received and is being effectively incorporated into the system.5

Teacher-education bodies have in general put up a strong resistance against changing their programmes in response to the ethnic diversity of schools or concepts of multicultural education, and their resistance has been the easier to sustain because they are to a considerable degree isolated from productive contact with schools, curriculum developers or community groups. The Curriculum Development Centre, for example, is beginning to support the development of multicultural materials in a variety of enterprising ways, but the impact of its work on school practice is likely to be attenuated because it has no formal access to teacher-training bodies and therefore no means of ensuring that teachers have the knowledge and skills to make effective use of what it produces.

In the early seventies, it is true, a number of universities, teachers’ colleges and other tertiary institutions did introduce courses on the teaching of English as a second language, and some teacher-training courses added units on migrants and cultural pluralism. But the mode of response of training bodies

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