Tutor Reflections 4

Intergenerationally speaking: a reflexive account of working across generations and cultures

Michele Grossman, Victoria University
ICIP Conference, Melbourne
27 June 2006

I joined SAIL as a volunteer tutor a little more than a year ago. I’d gone to a talk given by Matthew, whom you’ve just heard from, about his work with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, just across the border from southern Sudan. Matthew’s presentation about the global refugee situation in general, and the Sudanese refugee situation in particular, was detailed and galvanising, and it concluded with a description of the Sudanese Australian Integrated Learning Program and the continuing need for new tutors to work informally with an ever-increasing number of Sudanese refugee families.

A big drawcard for me was SAIL’s proximity – one of their campuses, a church and community centre, was located in Footscray, where I live and work. I knew nothing at all about Sudan as a nation – its politics, its history, its languages, its culture or religions or economy or lifeways. I had only the vaguest idea about the political situation in southern Sudan, or about the complex forces and circumstances over the last 50 years that have progressively resulted in a growing population of Sudanese refugees seeking humanitarian asylum in the United States, Canada and Australia. I was aware, however, that my adopted home turf of the Western suburbs had over the last few years become a new home – and a new kind of ‘home’ -- for growing numbers of refugees who had begun their journey of migration and resettlement from various countries across the African continent.

Another drawcard was the opportunity to use meaningfully in a broad community context the kinds of skills and knowledge I’d developed throughout a career of teaching and researching as a literary and cultural studies academic. My early training as a university lecturer had begun in New York City 20 years ago, working with the full range of cultural diversity my hometown has to offer under the City University of New York’s open admissions policy through their academic writing and literacy programs. Although I went on to specialise as a researcher in the cultural politics of Indigenous Australian writing and representation, my first love had been the kind of hands-on work with language skills and literacy acquisition that defined and broadened new educational horizons for a host of differentially positioned young New Yorkers from every conceivable racial, ethnic and national background.

So, one Saturday morning shortly after Matthew’s talk, I showed up at SAIL in Footscray. To the untrained newbie tutor’s eye, the scene presented as a kind of organised chaos that was both enlivening and intimidating. There were children of all ages tumbling everywhere; tutor-student pairs perching on church pews, at tables, on the grass outside and tucked away in corners of the vestry; high-decibel dialogue emanating from every corner of the church hall; an avalanche of papers, pens, books, games and magazines in use and at rest, and some rather harried-looking staff-type people valiantly striding from group to group armed with clipboards, bi-lingual name tags in English and Arabic, and the biggest, loveliest smiles I’d seen for quite some time.

In the centre of this maelstrom were about half-a-dozen adult Sudanese women sitting stolidly around a long table with a few tutors. They worked quietly in groups of twos and threes, reading and writing, occasionally pausing to stop a rushing boy in his tracks or reverse the direction of a wayward infant making an escape from the littlies’ room adjoining the church foyer. Everyone at this table was incredibly friendly and welcoming, yet I was terrified when I was invited to sit down and join them for all the familiar reasons: I’d say something wrong, they wouldn’t like me, we wouldn’t connect, I had nothing to offer. Part of this fear was due to feeling mildly unsettled because I hadn’t expected there to be anyone other than Sudanese school-age children present. Yet I knew almost instantly that I wanted to work with adults rather than kids.

My motivation for this was no mystery to me. I grew up in a European Jewish multilingual household in New York City where everyone spoke English but where the difference in reading and writing skills across generations and also across different sides of the family was pronounced. My father had begun school, and learned English, when he was seven years old, and left formal education when he was only twelve years old to work full-time beginning in 1920. His first job after five years of primary schooling was for a launderer, carrying heavy bags of wet steaming laundry up many flights of stairs in many tenements for 50 cents a week. My grandmother read and wrote English very well, as did my mother; but my Persian-Israeli step-mother, who had migrated via France in the 1960s, never learned how to read or write in English and always relied on my brother and me to translate and negotiate written texts for her, with sometimes comical and occasionally disastrous results, especially when she was trying to stave off the oil company because the heating bill was overdue.

As I grew up and then grew older, becoming the first person in my immediate family to gain first a high school, then a university, and finally a doctoral degree, I became aware of the widening gap in how we understood ourselves, each other and the world that characterised the generations in my household. My education gave me access to things that my parents and grandparents not only never had, but at times could not fully understand or comprehend. This disjunct of understanding could sometimes be amusing, but more often it was painful, because I could not communicate with the full intimacy of shared knowledge and understanding that one sometimes yearns to have with a parent or a close family member. One of my most poignant recollections is the moment when I told my father, by then in his early nineties, that I had finished my PhD at last. After the expected congratulations and praise, he asked something that really surprised me: he wanted to know what it was like. I realised he was asking me what the process of doing this work was like, how it had been for me; he was struggling to understand what it meant as an experience and as a form of craft. I struggled in turn to think of a way of expressing this that would be meaningful for him. Finally, I said, ‘Well, Dad, it was the longest piece of homework I’ve ever had to do.’ A lot of people laugh when I tell this story, and I laugh too when I remember it. But behind this lies a shard of sadness that we did not, and could not, have a fully shared understanding of what it all meant as mutual intimates on the inside of such an experience. The generational gap, defined by my own educational opportunity gain and my father’s educational opportunity cost, loomed very large for me at that moment.

My own experience in this regard is echoed by that of many migrant families in a variety of host countries and historical periods. Of the few generalisations that can be made about ‘migrant experience’, one of them is that the children of resettlement migrant families adapt much more quickly and flexibly to the demands and challenges of a new homeland environment than adults in their families, developing language skills and acculturation repertoires that help them straddle, if not always comfortably or without conflict, the worlds their parents left behind and that which they now occupy. In the western world, literacy skills are key to this adaptive process, and much has been written about the importance of focusing not just on the literacy of individuals but of whole families, since the foundations of literacy in many ways begin at home and are nurtured, sustained and reinforced beyond classroom environments of formal learning.

Yet much intergenerational literacy thinking has until recently largely focused on the importance of adult literacy as a support for the development of children’s literacy, conceptualising intergenerational literacy as a one-way process in which family literacy skills are required to supplement and drive the advancement of literacy for young people. This model does not really attend to the cultural and social as well as pragmatic meanings of literacy for adults themselves. More significantly, it does not explore the impact of differential literacy skills and knowledge on the relationship – affective as well as cultural and social – between family members across generations.

One of the common threads binding diverse groups of migrant and resettlement communities is their aspirations for their children, particularly regarding education, and many families make heavy sacrifices in order to ensure that their children have the opportunities they did not have themselves to succeed in a complex and changing world. Yet to focus exclusively on the acquisition of literacy in all its senses for children at the expense of adult learning is a recipe for widening and deepening rather than bridging the gap between family generations, and the consequences of this can be counterproductive and sometimes painful.

Another consequence of focusing exclusively or primarily on children’s literacy in family contexts where adult literacy is limited or absent is the creation of a deficit model in relation to the education, knowledge and skills that adult family and community members do possess in abundance. In the Sudanese context, roughly 90% of South Sudanese women are not literate in any language (SORA website); literacy levels for Sudan as a whole, which includes the Muslim-dominated and largely Arabic-speaking north, are estimated at between 30-46%, with lower levels of literacy for women (around 35%) than for men (around 58%) (Adult Migrant Education Program Research Centre, ‘AMEP Fact Sheet – Sudan’, May 2003, p. 2). Yet in terms of oral language bases Sudanese people are most often bi- or multilingual, and of course are bearers of essential and rich historical and cultural knowledge and resources that are critical for the health and wellbeing of their children, their families and their communities (Packard). However, educationally speaking, when literacy skills are singled out as the primary or exclusive unit of value by which adults are measured, the limited or absent nature of these skills creates a climate in which children feel keenly the struggle to maintain respect for what their parents and other community elders do know (which Gatwech will be talking about a little later) because of cultural pressures in the host country that focus on what adults around them don’t know, what Matthew earlier referred to as a form of ‘generation inversion’.

All these issues bear down on the challenges that face both the Sudanese community in Australia and those of us who work with them to meet and negotiate these challenges. I became part of SAIL well before I encountered the literature on intergenerational literacy, but it is clear that SAIL’s approach to the learning and support needs of new or recently arrived Sudanese migrants is a classic example of intergenerational literacy development in action – with one important difference I’ll come to in a moment. For now, back to a typical Saturday morning at SAIL.

Tutor-student work takes place for an hour and half every Saturday morning from 10:30 am to 12 noon. At the ‘SAIL seniors’ table where I sit, there are usually 5 or 6 of us together, all women. (I’ve pseudonyms throughout this section.) The students include Samia and Amaya, both of whom come from the Nuba mountain region in south-central Sudan; Elizabeth, a Dinka speaker, and Malia, another Dinka speaker. The regular tutors are Dora, an Anglo-Australian woman in her eighties, Ruth, a middle-aged Anglo-Australian woman from Surrey Hills, and me, another middle-aged woman born in New York City who migrated to Melbourne just under 20 years ago. We work most often in pairs; adult Sudanese learners have a strong preference for working on a one-to-one basis rather than in groups, and are strongly teacher-focused in their learning styles (Muir, 2003). The student I work most closely with on a one-to-one basis is Amaya, a 30-year old woman who came to Melbourne two-and-a-half years ago from a rural village in the Nuba region via several years in Egypt. Amaya has a husband, Malik, and two sons, Abul and Adok, all of whom work with their own tutors nearby. There is a saying in Sudan that the Nuba region has 99 mountain peaks, and 99 languages to go with them. Amaya speaks two of these languages; one from her own village and tribal group, the other language of her husband’s people. In addition, Amaya speaks Sudanese Arabic, the lingua franca in which Sudanese people from many different regions and language groups communicate with each other. Amaya did not read or write in any language until she came to Australia. As she never tires of telling me, ‘A’ is for Amaya, and we spend heaps of time working on and through word lists, picture-and-word-matching, reading comprehension and other literacy-based activities. But we talk together about a lot more than vocabulary and phonics. We share our views about food, clothes, children, husbands, cooking, television, mobile phones, dancing, ailments, wishes and disappointments. I teach Amaya English, and Amaya teaches me Sudanese Arabic: I have learned how to count from 1-10 (but usually can only get up to about 3 – waheed, idnen, talata…), and I can say two other words in the same language: ‘jama’, for the university where I work, and ‘ja’, as in ‘Michele ja’, or ‘Michele is here’. There are different ways of saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ depending on context and occasion in Sudanese Arabic, none of which I’ve yet mastered. At 48, I’m old enough to be Amaya’s mother; yet I am a font of ignorance when it comes to a range of knowledge that Amaya possesses about many different things. I’ve visited Amaya at home and I take her older son to the footy; we sometimes play soccer together on the grass outside SAIL and we bring each other food from time to time to make good on our oft-expressed favourites: Amaya’s is fish, mine is chicken.

All of this to say is that Amaya and I are very good friends who share a special and developing relationship with each other, one that is defined by our respective life experiences and circumstances rather than our ages, and which both transcends and is constrained by our ability to communicate deeply and sometimes even shallowly with one another. There is a lot of interest and emphasis at SAIL on practical real-life skills for adult learners. One day I was trying to explain the concept of a refund to Amaya, but we were getting nowhere; the receipt I’d brought along and the enactment of shopping and returning an item to get your money back that I had put together just didn’t fly. Just after this particular session, we went together to a community talk sponsored by SAIL on Australian laws surrounding domestic violence and intervention orders. The talk centred for a little while on divorce, and the presenter mentioned that in Australia, unlike Sudan, when you divorce your wife, you don’t get your dowry payment back after the marriage dissolves. I forgot myself entirely at this point and bellowed out, ‘NO REFUND!’ Amaya looked at me with sudden comprehension in her eyes, and we broke up laughing, to the complete chagrin of the presenter. More recently, we got on to the subject of working. I wanted to know what kind of work Amaya had done back in Sudan. She said to me a word that sounded like ‘floor’, and the gestures she made to show how the work was done led me to think she had worked as a cleaner, either in houses or in some institution. I was a little puzzled to hear that her husband Malik had also done the same work. Weeks later, I mentioned this to a mutual Sudanese friend, who looked at me pityingly. The word Amaya had used was ‘flour’, not floor’, and the hand gestures she used to embody this related to the grinding of grain into flour from the crops that Amaya and her husband grew back home.

This misapprehension on my part, and the feelings of stupidity I experienced thereafter, are one of the most common experiences for adult literacy learners who are simultaneously trying to negotiate a new culture, a new language and a new set of communication skills and modalities. Particularly in relation to their own children and young people more generally, the threatening nature of having to turn the clock back educationally and experience the feelings of childishness and helplessness that accompany trying to make yourself heard and understood to people who are not always willing to listen or be patient means that many refugee adult learners feel profoundly disheartened at what seems like a lifetime of learning that looms ahead. The average length of time for a non-literate adult learner to gain a moderate level of proficiency in English reading and writing is about 10 years (Miller). The primary challenge for adult learners, and those who work with them in achieving this, is to focus on building confidence, maintaining self-esteem and a sense of empowerment and control over their own lives, learning new techniques for dealing with the inevitable frustration that accompanies the slowness of the learning process, and to have as much fun as possible along the way.

Which brings me, finally, back to the topic of intergenerational literacy at SAIL. SAIL is intergenerational literacy in action partly because, while the program is divided into 3 major groups – SAIL juniors, SAIL primary and secondary and SAIL seniors – adults and children share the same physical learning space together throughout the morning. This means that Amaya and Malik’s sons see their parents embedded in a learning relationship at the same time they are embedded in their own tutor/student relationships. Amaya and her children will occasionally, though not often, read from the same text together; her children are better at reading in English than she is, but their pleasure in this shared experience is abundant, especially for Amaya’s younger son. In this way, her children, without necessarily realising it, are supporting Amaya’s aspirations and goals as much as she is supporting theirs. They are, as I suggested above, mutual intimates on the inside of a shared experience in a way that my father and I could never be. SAIL makes this kind of sharing and mutual intimacy around the process and politics of learning possible. It enacts, without fanfare, a model of family- and community-centred education that recognises and supports but does not over-privilege the educational and literacy-based aspirations and interests of a Sudanese migrant community that is fully involved in a program devised and provided with rather than for them.

Above all, my own experience of SAIL makes clear that the environment it provides and nourishes does not just work as a two-way learning process in intergenerational terms. It is also a living laboratory of cross-cultural learning, one in which I am able to set aside my status as a senior professional knowledge worker and embrace the process of learning, once again, how to count to ten, how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in the right way at the right time, how to be just another tutor working alongside other tutors who may be less than half my age or nearly twice as old. In this sense, the ‘integrated’ in SAIL’s full name – the Sudanese Australian Integrated Learning Program – makes of integrated learning a model than spans inter-generational, cross-cultural, multilingual and cross-gender territories, bridging rather than dividing, knitting together people and the knowledge and perspectives they bring to their relationships with each other at many different levels and in many varied contexts.

The robust friendship I now have with Amaya and her family was made possible by SAIL; I might have passed the same family in the street in Footscray and never thought twice about them other than along the following lines: ‘There goes another recently arrived African refugee family. I wonder who they are and where they come from?’ The Sudanese-Australian Integrated Learning Program has opened up a space where one can not only ask these questions, but answer them. In the world of SAIL, we are all learners now.
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