Building Community Integration Through Arts Report
The Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages Aotearoa New Zealand newsletter – TESOLANZ News, 39:3 (2021) – contains Dr Pooneh Torabian’s summary of, and images from, 4 recent workshops with women from Farsi/Dari-speaking migrant communities who now live in Dunedin. Each workshop was run by artists from the community.
Pooneh says in the article: ‘As a woman who has migrated twice in her life, I am aware of the difficulties of starting a new life in a new country, where you might need to overcome several obstacles to integration and settlement. I can relate to the complications migrants face within their new communities, which range from separation from loved ones to learning a new language, finding new friends, finding employment and housing dealing with financial insecurities – to name just a few’.
The workshops were funded by the Centre for Global Migrations and the research team plan to publish results this year and develop the project further through external funding. We look forward with interest to their findings and ongoing work.
The report can be downloaded here: Pooneh project TESOLANZ 2021.
