Beyond Exposure to Diversity: A Historical Secondary Analysis of Pre-Service Teacher Accounts in Community-Engaged Refugee Education

Preparing teachers for culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms requires attention to learners’ knowledge, educational contexts and assumptions about difference. This article presents a historical secondary qualitative analysis of coded interview extracts from a 2008 evaluation of the Refugee Action Support (RAS) programme in Greater Western Sydney, Australia. The original evaluation involved 63 pre-service teachers in entry interviews and 24 in exit interviews, without a matched pre–post sample. Informed by reflexive thematic analysis, four themes were developed: varied motivations and prior understandings; assumptions about refugee-background learners; relational and responsive tutoring practices; and professional learning through relationships, reflection, and collaboration. Participants described scaffolding, pedagogical responsiveness and learning through relationships, alongside persistent deficit assumptions and cultural generalisations. These accounts suggest that community engagement offers opportunities for situated professional learning but cannot establish individual transformation or reciprocal relationships from learners’ perspectives. Drawing on contemporary scholarship, the article proposes critically mediated relational learning as a provisional interpretive lens emphasising professional dialogue, critical reflection and recognition of community knowledge. The findings highlight the potential of community-engaged teacher education while demonstrating the importance of critical mediation and research incorporating students’, families’, and communities’ perspectives.