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Community Engagement Activities

Faculty of Arts and Sciences

ACU Refugee Program on the Thai-Burma Border

The ACU Refugee Program on the Thai-Burma border which offers tertiary education to Burmese refugee students from the camps is becoming better known and not just in Australia. Coordinator, Duncan MacLaren (MacKillop Campus), recently attended the International Summer School in Forced Migration at Oxford University where he presented on the situation on the Thai-Burma border twice. He then presented to the Board of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in North Sydney followed by a presentation to the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities East Asia and Oceania (AJCU-EAO) meeting at Canisius College, Pymble. He also advised an assessment team from Jesuit universities in the US going to a refugee camp in Malawi to ascertain the feasibility of setting up a similar program to ACUs to assist refugees from neighbouring countries to access tertiary education online.

Duncan reports, The ACU program is successful because of the commitment of the lecturers and Faculty to one of the most marginalised groups on the planet camp-based refugees. Add to that the reasons why Burmese flee across the border the violence, oppression and poverty caused by the rapacity of the Burmese generals and you see why ACU cares so much. The program has been enhanced recently by the arrival of an Australian onsite tutor through the good offices of the volunteer-sending agency, PALMS. The tutor acts as a liaison between the online lecturers and the students and helps them with academic English and study skills. All students have finished the first two units of the Diploma in Liberal Studies Business Information Technology and Business Communication Skills and a number received High Distinction. They are now finishing off Leadership Theory from Gonzaga University (Washington State) and Anthropology from Saint Louis University and will embark on a unit on human rights when ACUs Director of the of the Institute of Legal Studies, Professor Spencer Zifcak, and his team visit the students in October to teach the unit.

In addition, a Faculty research grant is enabling us to carry out research to ascertain how past graduates have used their qualifications to benefit the common good either the refugee community if they have stayed in the camps or the community in diaspora if they have been resettled to a third country. We believe that the benefits derived from higher education among camp-based refugees can be regarded in international development circles as a tool for empowering refugee communities and, if we can prove that, we might be able to change government and NGO policy which tends not to favour investment in tertiary education in such circumstances. We will be presenting the findings at the Learning, Teaching and Social Justice in Higher Education Symposium at ACU in Melbourne on 18th November. In the meantime, the Burmese students are working hard under unbelievable circumstances to graduate.

Duncan MacLaren is available to give a presentation on the program to student and staff groups on all campuses. His email is Duncan.maclaren@acu,edu.au and his extension x 2010.

Duncan MacLaren at the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University