Migration and education

This online article (Sydney Morning Herald 2013) sparked my interest in how migration affects education seeing as over 35million migrants are young migrants between the ages of 15-24. This suggests the need for the students to undertake an educational course, secondary or tertiary in their new country. So how does an influx of international students affect education? There are several factors that may contribute to an international student’s success or failure within the educational system of NSW.

Firstly, the major determining factor would be the language barrier, are the students coming from background whereby English is taught avidly, especially in NSW whereby the language main curriculums were taught in is English, LBOTE or ESL students may experience difficulties keeping up with lexically dense texts. However, this obstacle is normally targeted by schools in areas of a high immigrant demographic by offering subjects like ESL for students that have trouble in the English literacy.

Secondly, students from another country would most probably have had went through a different educational curriculum, the older the student, the more immersed and accustomed they would be to their home country’s curriculum, this may be a problem for NSW education because now within the classroom, there would be a greater diversity of students and their content knowledge. Therefore, a major implication of migration on education would be the push for the NSW curriculum to accommodate a wider range of students with differences in language and also background knowledge for subjects such as maths or science. I feel that this has not been achieved being a migrant student and going to high school in Sydney, as educators do not completely provide their utmost help and when a student experiences difficulties in a certain area of a subject that is relatively “easy” to grasp for other students, the teacher would not want to hold back the class for the sake of one student, also the possible frustration the teacher may experience trying to explain a simple concept to a student may lead to a projection of annoyance toward the student, and students may feel the same being explained the same thing in the same or different manner and still not getting it. Most of the time, students tend to tell teachers that they understand even though they do not.

Therefore, as we can extrapolate from the above, students from other countries may experience difficulties in accommodating to the NSW curriculum; this may be a language barrier, or a disinterest or frustration in the subject. barrier, or a disinterest or frustration in the subject. As Vygotszki’s model of zone of proximal development illustrates in Mercer et al. (2011), optimal educational outcomes can be achieved from tasks that challenge the students and they can understand with some scaffolding from the teacher.

References

1.      Sydney Morning Herald 2013, Nearly 35 million migrants are under 20, 13 August 2013, Sydney Morning Herald, Australia, viewed 25 October 2013, <http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/nearly-35-million-migrants-are-under-20-20130813-2rt9k.html>.

2.      Wass, R, Harland, T & Mercer, A 2011 'Scaffolding critical thinking in the zone of proximal development', Higher Education Research & Development, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 317- 328.