Connecting digital participation and informal language education: Home tutors and migrants in an Australian regional community

This chapter describes a social living lab with volunteer language tutors and adult migrants in a regional town in Queensland, Australia. The aim of the lab was to build the language teaching capacity and digital skills of the tutors as a foundation for teaching English to the migrants who had settled with their families in the area. The social living lab enabled ‘a space of encounter’ that prioritised participant co-construction and afforded attention to both research and the community needs (Franz, 2015). In Australia, migration and settlement are increasingly impacting regional and rural communities as skilled migrants provide much-needed labour in abattoirs and other workplaces. In this particular town, many of the migrants were Brazilian on a temporary skilled visa, known as the 457 visa. The Brazilian women were supported in their English learning by the government-funded Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) based at the local Technical and Further Education (TAFE) college. Because of the women’s work and family commitments, the language teaching was largely delivered through a home tutoring program conducted by the volunteers, many of whom were retired, community-orientated women from the local town. The chapter highlights the processes of building a learning community and fostering digital participation, and provides an example of informal language education in a rural setting undergoing cultural and linguistic change. It also proposes extensions to thinking on social living lab methodology that respond to calls for greater theorisation of practice.