Refugee Education Australia Research Seminar: Preparing Language Educators for a World Shaped by Displacement: Beyond Individual Responsibility

Refugee Education Australia Research Seminar Series

Preparing Language Educators for a World Shaped by Displacement: Beyond Individual Responsibility

Join us to hear from Associate Professor Rachel Burke (University of Newcastle/ Refugee Education Australia Advisory Group member)

What does it mean to teach language in a world increasingly shaped by displacement? How can language educators work ethically and responsively alongside learners whose lives have been impacted by displacement, trauma, and uncertainty when they do not share those experiences? And how do we prepare and sustain language educators for this complex and essential work?

Drawing on the lived experiences of teachers and learners, this presentation examines language education in contexts of displacement and (re)settlement. It argues that language learning is never a neutral or purely cognitive process, but a socially embedded practice shaped by identity, place, power, and lived experience. For learners affected by displacement, the language of (re)settlement can embody a fundamental tension: it offers access to participation, opportunity, and belonging while simultaneously evoking loss, dislocation, and identity disruption.

Without informed, responsive, and contextually sensitive educational approaches, the language classroom itself can become a site of symbolic and structural violence. Yet many educators are expected to navigate these complexities with limited preparation and without direct experience of displacement.

Using visual systems mapping, this presentation challenges the assumption that preparedness for teaching in displacement contexts rests primarily with individual educators. Instead, it reframes preparedness as a question of collective justice, institutional responsibility, and systemic support. In doing so, it explores how education systems can move beyond reliance on individual resilience to create the conditions that enable language educators and learners affected by displacement not merely to cope, but to belong, participate, and thrive.

About the researcher

Associate Professor Rachel Burke is an applied linguist and language rights scholar at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research explores how language shapes experiences of equity, belonging, and participation, particularly in contexts of displacement and (re)settlement. Working at the intersection of language, education, and social justice, Rachel collaborates with communities to advance linguistically just approaches that uphold language rights, strengthen plurilingual ecologies, and position lived experience as a catalyst for knowledge creation and institutional transformation.

Rachel serves on the Advisory Group for Refugee Education Australia (REA), is Co-Founder and Co-Convenor of the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education Special Interest Group within the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE), and is an Affiliate Researcher with the UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Language and Arts (RIELA).