How do 'We' Know What 'They' Need?

Abstract

With the growing intensity of the humanitarian crisis around the world, Australia continues to see a steady increase in the arrival of asylum seeker, refugee and migrant (ASRM) families. As fathers seek work and children begin school, mothers have taken a backstage role supporting the day-to- day needs of their families with very limited knowledge of discourses and cultural practices in English. In this chapter, we draw on an English language teaching project we, as teachers and researchers, undertook from February to May 2016 investigating the language and literacy needs of four ASRM women living in Melbourne, Australia. Rather than starting from university language experts' understanding of what they need or by simply asking the women what they think they need, we used a dialogic and narrative method framed within a duoethnographic approach as a way of exploring their needs. In this chapter, we describe the process of how we came to learn about the women's language needs together through classroom activities, the researchers' reflective dialogues steeped in stories of our own language learning and teaching experiences, and finally through the process of writing up the study. In describing the process of how we made sense of the needs of ASRM women, that is, of what gets left out and interpreted from our limited positions, we aim to show how a) making decisions about others' language and literacy needs are vested in practices of power, and b) 'coming clean' in our writing can help to manage the power and positioning of both researchers and participants.