With partners:
Teacher Snapshot 1
Minority cultural groups in society are not the only ones subjected to stereotyping. In the Moreland City College Culture Club video a student with an Australian background identifies characteristics commonly attributed to ‘all’ Australians: “There is a cultural stereotype of Australians. They’re meant to be really obnoxious, drink VB, fart and burp all the time in public. That’s not like all Australians, that’s only some.”Some teachers indicated that students’ perceptions of “Aussies” relates to their socio-economic status and their neighbourhoods, in that they tend not to mix with a cross-section of Australians.
TEACHER: They don’t get out of their little box.
TEACHER: It’s socio-economics, where they live means they only see a special stratum of Australians.
TEACHER: So who are they mixing with, who are they meeting and is that affecting their perception of who is in that group and maybe them being ignorant or not aware or experienced of Australian culture in the wider setting.
TEACHER: Except my friend here. She doesn’t fit into that group. And kids are like that. It’s the “Aussies” living next door to us that we don’t know very well, the “Aussie” that sits alongside them in class all year, that’s an exception. People have that kind of contradiction in their behaviour, I think.
TEACHER: Sometimes I feel people exclude Anglo culture from those terms [multiculturalism and cultural diversity] and I have an issue with that because it is a culture whether it’s the dominant culture or one of the cultures. Maybe you can counteract that “them” and “us” mentality. If it’s legitimate to find out about the cultures of your students in your classroom, I also think that discussion about different types of Anglo culture is legitimate. There are stereotypes just as there are stereotypes around Arab-Australians or Muslim Australians. I think that needs to be addressed as well.
Teacher Snapshot 2
Some teachers find that “them” and “us” labels vanish when students start to personalise “the other” through direct contact with someone from that cultural background.
TEACHER: I was looking at the Year 12s at the awards and there are some kids there who have experienced all the Ramadan thing, they’ve experienced all the grown-up boys being able to put their arm around each other and be affectionate, they’ve experienced those subtle things that come from being beside another culture. They’re not afraid of Muslims, they’re not afraid of someone in a headscarf, they can look at each person individually and not say “there’s a person in a headscarf, that must be the same as the next person in a headscarf”. And they know that within those, within that cultural group there are great and lovely, warm and caring and beautiful people, and that there are bad eggs. And they know enough not to lump them all in one basket and go, “oh there goes all those bad Lebanese kids”.