Encountering education in the rural: migrant women’s perspectives

ABSTRACT

This paper explores migrant women’s encounters with formal and informal education in what can be termed new immigration rural destinations. We ask to what extent educational opportunities are realized in these new destinations. We show that education aspirations may be jeopardized because of the desire to achieve economic goals and thus require remedial action. Specifically, we refer to qualitative data collected in rural (and remote) Boddington in Western Australia, and rural Armagh in Northern Ireland. The paper engages with two interrelated dimensions of this migrant/migration experience. English is not a first language for our participants and we first examine the provision and consumption of informal English Language classes. In doing so, we demonstrate the complex social and cultural dimensions of community-based English language instruction. Second, we attend to migrant mothers’ perceptions of and responses to children’s formal education. We highlight transnational senses of, and tensions around, ‘local/rural’ pedagogies and resultant migrant strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• English as second language
• informal education
• migrant women
• new immigration destinations
• rural education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We note that Pennycook and Coutand-Marin (2003) make this comment in the context of their examination of the teaching of English as a missionary project; however the broader reach of this statement is clear in the paper’s acknowledgement that all pedagogy implies a politics.

2. In the case of Boddington, part of this research was commissioned by the Peel Community Development Group to better understand the provision of community services in the Peel Region; in the case of Armagh the empirical data were part of a project conducted for the Nuffield Foundation’ Small Grant Scheme REF SGS/34428 and for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (Ref: 1103001PFA01 and 1103001A) on migrants’ everyday experiences.

3. This has been written about in some detail in Mayes and Koshy ( in press).

4. Several women then recounted their own experiences of racism though each instance was presented as having been resolved through confronting the perpetrators.

5. This is not to say that fathers are not involved in their children’s education.

6. At June 2010, the percentage of the Boddington population aged between 15 and 25 (9.8%) was the lowest in the Peel and substantially lower than in Rockingham, Perth, and WA (all around 14% to15%). At the other end of the scale, the percentage of the population aged 65 and above (13.8%) was also relatively low for the region and marginally higher than in Rockingham (12.6%) and the State (12.1%). (Mayes, 2012, p. 103)

7. Interestingly, at the time of our fieldwork the student/teacher ratio at Boddington, often seen to be an indicator of ‘quality’ education was 13.3 students to each teacher whereas the state average is 14.6 students per teacher (Mayes, 2012). However the high school took students to grade 10 as opposed to grade 12 as needed for university admittance; students then either took up vocational training, attended a high school in another town, or entered the workforce (Mayes, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

Ruth McAreavey’s research was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation [REF: 1103001A; Ref: 1103001PFA01].