Shoptalk:Kuala Lumpur Focus Group with Teachers of Refugee Children

I explained the purpose of the focus group. We videotaped it and focused the videocameras on everyone's number, on their arms to protect their identities when they spoke.

HELP University Lecturer Anasuya led the focus group. She specializes in qualitative research while I specialize in quantitative research, so I was thrilled to have her run a focus group that I'm clueless how to lead. It was a learning experience for me.


Dr. Anasuya listening carefully. She was talented at pulling out themes across multiple people's comments, and using that theme to stimulate further discussion.
Tutors from HELP University who are in my Refugee Children research lab did the video and audiotaping. They are also facilitating the transcription and writing of a publication on the focus group.
I took notes the entire time since I needed the results of this focus group immediately to create a refugee teacher training manual in time for a training intervention a few weeks away. It takes a long time to transcribe the focus group and get the detailed results.
Here, Dr. Anasuya has turned her back and is looking back to a dominating participant who turned out to be a supervisor of the teachers, unfortunately shutting down some of the teachers' more honest comments.


April 15, 2011

This focus group asked for teachers' perspectives on how to manage urban refugee students' behavior, attention, and emotions in class. Let me first put this focus group in perspective.

In Malaysia, refugees are illegal and under the threat of detention because Malaysia did not sign the UN convention for protection of refugees. Over 13,000 school-aged refugee students are not allowed to go to government schools, as a result. In fact, they have to hide away from the Malaysian government for safety reasons. But, being barred from a formal education doesn't stop these hidden refugee communities from starting informal "learning centres" for their refugee children's education. Hidden away in kitchens, living rooms, and high up in crime-ridden apartment buildings, the refugee communities have small learning centres staffed by untrained refugee teachers. Despite such a resilient effort, the refugee communities are only able to provide a sparse education for 30% of the 13,000 school aged children, typically only taught til age 12. Then, these students are not allowed to work here, leading to a question of why bother getting educated and how can you keep hope for the future?

One of these refugee schools has grown to the size of 700 students! And, they have to turn away a long waitlist of refugee students every new semester. The school is called Harvest Centre, and they have become my partner in crime, er, I mean research, of these "criminal," illegal refugee students and their teachers. Our goal is to improve the services for these underserved refugee students by training their teachers. The government provides its government teachers so much training that the teachers are downright annoyed by having to go to yet another training. These refugee teachers are DYING for more training. The refugee teachers are also put on waiting lists and turned away by Harvest for their multiple trainings on content, like Math and English. These trainings are funded by UNHCR.

But, Harvest has not done any trainings of the refugee teachers on how to manage the refugee students' behavior, attention, and emotions. Refugee student behavior is a real issue. Many are like "wild mustangs" in the classroom, as one refugee school leader quipped, because they come straight from the hills of Burma, often never having set foot in the classroom. Most of the refugees in Malaysia are Burmese, almost 80% of them. Other refugee students are from Afghanistan, Somalia, or Sri Lanka and have had an equally spotty history of education due to their escape from their countries of origin, and often due to their maltreatment by those in power in their countries of origin. So, when they arrive in Kuala Lumpur, school is a completely new experience for them, and it often leads to problematic behavior and focus in the refugee classes.

The teachers are also not trained in how to best manage their behavior, and they often come from very traditional education backgrounds where the sole method of behavior management back in Burma was using the cane as corporal punishment, or, even, just to get their attention in class. The cane was even used to whip kids for minor issues like not doing their homework. Truth, is that happens in Malaysian government schools too. The larger issue is that the refugee classes are overcrowded, overheated, undertrained and resourced, only have half-day classes in order to accomodate all the students, and face real issues in their refugee students, including anxiety, attention problems, distraction due to trauma from their country of origin, detention, family problems, or multiple moves across Southeast Asia.

In this focus group we asked 10 Harvest Centre teachers whose classes are largely filled with refugee students (Most of these 10 Harvest teachers were local citizens, from Sarawak, or refugees themselves; The teachers we will be targeting in the community refugee schools are all refugees):
1. What are the challenges of working with refugee students in your classrooms?
2. How do you manage their behavior, attention, and emotions in class?

1. Regarding the challenges of teaching these refugee students, the following themes emerged from the teachers' discussion:

• "I feel like I spend more time managing their behavior than teaching."
  
• The teachers might teach a class for 6 year old children, but they also have 12 year old children in it, because those children are 6 years behind in their education.
  
• It can be tough for the teachers to stay hopeful for the students' future and to keep the students motivated for their education.
• At the same time, school is a safe haven for most of the refugee children. School is often a happier place for the children, when home and their neighborhood can be an unhappy place. School can give some much-needed freedoms that the Malaysian government restrictions don't allow for students. Harvest keeps their students safe by dressing them in government uniforms, even though the refugee students do not go to a government school. These government uniforms will camouflage and protect them from the concerning phenomenon of local citizens harassing the students to and from school because they are refugees, or the immigration police finding the students.
  
• Some parents do not value their children's education, leading some children to have poor school attendance and homework completion, taking their children out of school to work as young as age 10, and marrying off some of their daughters as young as age 13.
• There is high student turnover in their classes, due to refugee resettlement elsewhere, constant flow of new refugees into KL, high need of uneducated students to start school, and the unpredictable mobility of student families.
  
• Some refugee students won't sit still and seem to think school is for playtime with their friends rather than work time.
• Other students are insolent or disobey the teacher, having cultivated a strong distrust of authority.
• Some students seem shut down and too quiet, almost withdrawn, as if they are preoccupied by worrying thoughts.
• The students can get stir crazy because they are unable to exercise due to safety concerns, that they might anger local citizens who are neighbors by their noisy exercise.

2. The teachers handle the refugee students' behavior, attention, and emotions by:

• For the most serious misbehavior, the teachers have a well-known secret method of threatening to send the child to the headmaster for corporal punishment. They may call the parents to tell them about the child's serious misbehavior.
  
• For the semi-serious misbehavior, the teachers may simply show the cane to the children. Or "scold" the children.
• For the more common misbehavior, the teachers use their "authority." -- Body language like standing tall, strong, and serious eye contact to the child. Their voice is equally strong and serious. One teacher spoke of using empathy, asking the student what is wrong, what is making them so disruptive that day. Another spoke of using the "if, then" technique of "If you finish two workbook pages, then you can play with your friends." This particular school also has a Montessori method in its younger classrooms where they ask the children, "Are you ready to learn today?" helping to put them in a focused frame of mind. With older students, a couple teachers give the students a menu of topics they can choose from to study that day, just so they finish covering all the topics by the end of the month, for example.

3. The teachers get very stressed by working with these equally stressed refugee students, and the teachers have trouble finding time to take care of themselves. But, these are some self-care strategies the teachers reported using:

• With Students -- The teachers struggle with and try to practice anger, stress, patience management.
  
• In Class -- The teachers try to take little breaks like reading books to the students. They stay hopeful at school by sometimes spending time with the younger students, the "babies," who seem innocent and motivated. They mentioned feeling hopeful by "a smile on a student's face," "playing with the students," and "getting a student to laugh."
• Out of School -- At home, some try to stay clear that "Now is MY time," not schoolwork time at home. Many do religious activities that recharge them spiritually.
  

In the end, we will use the refugee teachers' input to adapt a teacher classroom behavior management manual we used at NYU with teachers at underserved Brooklyn public schools, which have a different set of challenges than refugee schools in Malaysia.

We also realized by the end that this focus group doubled as much-needed therapy for the refugee teachers, given how alone they often feel with all their teaching stress. At the end, we discuss the possibility of their having a monthly teacher support group.