Pre-Enchanting Young People in Learning and Employment: Building Safe Relations for Diverse Students

Abstract

In Australia, approximately a third of young people under the age of 24 speak home languages other than the language of schooling (English), yet national and state-level education system designs remain stubbornly monolingual. This chapter explores how refugee and migrant students might be pre-enchanted with secondary schooling through integrated arts-based and digital-technologies curriculum designs. Ten upper-primary students participated in book and activity-making as part of a term-long (ten-week) extension unit, scaffolded on a prior whole-of-class curriculum unit, in which students produced bilingual digital stories designed to instruct or inform younger peers about school routines. Drawing upon Indigenist theories of ways of knowing and being, this research frames digital and material making as integrated and empathetic learning processes that can afford students culturally safe and socially just schooling experiences. The chapter critically and creatively examines students’ performances in ‘makerspaces’, generating more complex views of their diverse cultural backgrounds, lived experiences, and language literacies, and their multilingual and multi-disciplinary technical, practical and emancipatory knowledge interests. It argues that pre-enchanting students with secondary schooling and potential employment opportunities, and thus more equitable cultural and socio-economic futures, require as a necessary precursor, a more complex and holistic understanding of multilingual students’ lifeworlds.