With partners:
Teacher Snapshot 1
TEACHER: The reality is that a lot of the Asian kids coming out now are fee-payers. They see it as a punishment. They’re not necessarily academic. The notion of the high achieving, academic Asian is becoming unstuck in the teachers’ mind. Some teachers still have those expectations. Some of the Iraqi kids do have severely interrupted backgrounds so they don’t do well at school. Others don’t. So it can be a generalisation.
Teacher Snapshot 2
TEACHER: In the beginners classes we often get them to do little stories about where they are from, because you’ll get kids identifying all Asian kids as Chinese. One of our teachers is from Laos but the kids call him Chinese. Then they can’t understand if the Thai boy can’t talk to the Chinese boy, because to them they’re both Chinese.