Migrant Girls in Australian Schools: Voicing Their Mathematics Learning Experiences

Abstract

since the 1970s, policies regarding gender equality and multiculturalism had important but limited impact on education. This paper focuses on the schooling experience of girls from Non-English-Speaking Backgrounds (NESB) in different school years, particularly when learning Mathematics. The study identified how the girls relied on peers or previous experiences to navigate the learning space with little school support, despite national and state policies. This research also indicated the importance of considering the girls standpoint and the intersection of gender and multiculturalism when designing and implementing policies, (Reitman 2005, Fraser 2010) explained however that women in minority cultural groups require the accomplishment of fundamental points in both the feminist and multicultural agendas and the consideration for the specific intersection of these agendas in order to achieve social justice.This qualitative study employed Carol Gilligan's Listening Guide (LG), the application of her feminist theory of women's voices in research (Doucet and Mauthner 2008, Brown andGilligan 1993). In the LG, semi-structured interviews are recorded, transcribed and simultaneously listened to and read in four steps that give the basis to the data analysis (Doucet and Mauthner 2008).Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participant girls (Patti, Idina, Bernadette, Sutton and Marin) and 10 with informants (the girls' parents, siblings and a childcare worker). Informants were interviewed to enrich the participants' stories.The interviews were between one and two hours long in the participants' homes. The interviews sought to listen to their voices to elicit an understanding of the girls' experiences of negotiating gender and multiculturalism at school, what their schools had made available and the difficulties in navigating their intersecting realities. The girls' schools' websites were