Building a sense of community belonging: Making mobile families welcome in a rural Australian school

Abstract

Seasonal farm workers play an important economic role through their contributions to annual harvests and the fact that they spend income in the community where they sojourn. However, research shows that farm workers and other temporary residents are often socially marginalised in rural communities and feel as though they are outsiders who do not belong. This paper reports research that focused on a primary school in a rural community in Australia, where seasonal mobile farm workers arrived for the annual harvest. Using a single case study design, the research demonstrated that the school made a deliberate attempt to welcome newly-arrived students and their families into the school community. Using a whole school strategy, the school staff aimed to meet families’ and students’ social needs, thereby building a sound foundation for the academic work of schooling. However, the data and data analysis also suggested that the school’s strategy was helping to work against the deficit discourses that operated in the broader community, thus demonstrating the school’s role as a hub for the community’s socio-educational development.

Relationships between student mobility and academic and behavioural outcomes in Western Australian public primary schools

“…A similar program, The School-Based Attendance Officer Program, has operated in the Kimberley region of Western Australian (Prout & Yap, 2012). Further, a small case study in a rural northern Queensland community with a 'reputation for being skilled in catering for mobile students' (p. 20) were intentional in working to include families in their school (Henderson, 2017). Staff were deliberate in their interactions to ensure parents were made to feel welcome, supporting the notion that initiatives responding to mobile students need to go beyond the students themselves.…”