With partners:
Teacher Snapshot 1
Everyone has a story; everyone has made a journey. As these teacher reflections illustrate it is important that every student in the class feels included and that his or her contribution to the journey narrative is valued.
TEACHER: It moves away from the tokenism of “hey you’re an Arab” to rationalise and recognise that the Anglo kids also have their story of a journey, of some kind of travel. For while we continue to say “you’re an Arab”, “you’re an Aussie”, “you’re a ‘skip’” or “you’re a ‘wog’” or whatever, they need to find some threads that they share in common rather constantly delineating between them.
Teacher Snapshot 2
TEACHER: The common thread is that everyone has a story. Every class had a world map, every kid had a piece of string and on the world map they just mapped where they were from, tracing their journeys through the various countries, all suburbs.
INTERVIEWER: Even the kids born here?
TEACHER: They’ve still been on a journey: why you went to that kindergarten or school, why you’re friends with these people and not those, why you play football and not soccer. That was all part of the telling, the choices that people make along the way.
Teacher Snapshot 3
TEACHER: I’ve got a Year 12 group and we had a big talk about what they were allowed to do at home and when they were to get married and all that. But they didn’t know that about their peers. So we had kids who didn’t know that their peers weren’t allowed to do certain things, not allowed to leave the house until they were married. They don’t talk about that sort of stuff…
Teacher Snapshot 4
TEACHER: …if kids are going to understand each other they need to know where each is coming from and part of this is what you believe and what your belief system is. The line we take with staff is that no-one is right and no-one is wrong, just different.
Teacher Snapshot 5
TEACHER: We need to give students the confidence to offer their perspectives without fear of being isolated or rejected
Teacher Snapshot 6
TEACHER: It’s interesting when you get a minority group being Anglo kids. They are a minority and they need to be incorporated. It’s gone the other way… I’ve started to feel, what about these kids, they definitely need to be included… For some it’s an area that generations have lived in and they identify very strongly with the area. That needs to be highlighted as well, maybe the history of the area, teach the other students that this area does have a history…