Narratives of displacement, resilience and education : experiences of African students with a refugee background in Australian tertiary education

This study investigates educational resilience through the narratives of displaced African students from the Great Lakes region of Africa and surrounding countries, in Australian tertiary education. The study provides an insider’s understanding of events in order to capture the educational experiences of refugee students in general, and African refugee students in particular. The study uses life history narratives of participants to explore the factors that enable students with a refugee background to be educationally resilient in spite of challenging life circumstances. The Banyarwanda of Rwanda say ‘Ijoro ribara uwariraye’, meaning that ‘the events of the night can only be narrated by the one who stayed awake’. In other words, no one can tell the lived experience of refugees more accurately than refugees themselves. Unfortunately for a long time, narratives about lived experiences of refugees have been told in the third person because the majority of the studies that were carried out used methodologies that kept participants passive rather than active. Participants [students of refugee background] in this study are special humanitarian refugees who have been granted refugee status in Australia. The research process in this study, recorded the participants’ life experiences in great detail and covered three main life phases: 1) prior to displacement; 2) in transit countries; and 3) after resettlement in Australia. As a result of the data collected, the researcher employed several strategies to create meaning out of the narratives. The first strategy was reporting the contextual life story of the participant in their own words. The second strategy was ‘collaboration’ with the participants whereby each participant agreed with the researcher on the content in his/her narrative. Critical events were further developed by the researcher using information from the transcribed data. The third strategy was tracing the educational life journeys of participants from the transcribed data with a particular emphasis on motivational factors that enabled them to continue with their education through primary, secondary and tertiary stages