With partners:
Teacher Snapshot 1
TEACHER: With cultural diversity I think it’s embracing difference. It has the potential to embrace difference… I don’t like the word [multiculturalism], I hate the word. I despise the word. It’s a tokenistic way of putting people into baskets and then saying, let’s do multiculturalism and we’ll cook or we’ll do this and we’ll put a little Bandaid on all the underground social problems that can come when people move and they’re in transition or whatever. Multiculturalism is a nice little middle-class word that you can throw as a label to say that we’re doing something about the problem without really defining what the problem is.
Teacher Snapshot 2
TEACHER: I remember 10, 15 years ago teaching stuff on multiculturalism, cultural conflict is what it used to be called, and it was all about let’s come dressed up in our national dress, let’s cook, festivals. It was at a superficial level, isn’t it cute we’re all from different cultures but really we’re all here. Whereas cultural diversity seems to me to go out more, to say something much more about the cultures, and that there are cultures…
Teacher Snapshot 3
TEACHER: It’s more embracing because if you used the term multiculturalism, a lot of people are like, “oh you’ve come from somewhere else”. If you use the term 'cultural diversity' it’s inclusive of everyone, and the groups within the groups.Teacher Snapshot 4
TEACHER: I don’t like the word “multiculturalism” as it implies festivals, food and a tokenistic impression of cultural diversity.Teacher Snapshot 5
Cultural diversity in the classroom creates challenges for teachers, too:TEACHER: …I had 140 students this year in my group. And I had to somehow develop and maintain a relationship with each one of those kids. That’s an almost impossible task. Even in a class of 25 when you’re looking at kids that come from different cultural settings and different backgrounds, and also different arrival dates, because that also has an impact… You know, the recognition in this school that Assyrians are Christians, they’re not Muslims. Assyrians are Christians, the Iraqis are Muslims: do you put Assyrians and Iraqis together? Yes you do but recognise that in their own country they wouldn’t be together. Different kinds of groupings from Turkey … there are seven different regions in Turkey. Certain regions in Turkey don’t mix with other regions.
TEACHER: We always talk about treating kids fairly and consistently which is different to treating them the same…
TEACHER: If I’m going to discipline a class I’ve got to know what’s going to work with that culture. The way I might discipline an Asian kid is going to be different to how I might discipline an Iraqi kid. I know Asian kids are horrified when teachers yell…
TEACHER: The Iraq community are what we’d call active participants, so “I’m going to give an answer whether I know or not because I want to show I’m interested”; whereas the Asian kids aren’t going to nominate themselves so I have to say, “Philip would you like to give an answer?” and then he’d be happy to. So you do have to treat them differently because they act differently. It cuts both ways.
TEACHER: Teachers can go right off because they’re telling off the kid and the kid is smiling [referring to Vietnamese students], which is a very Asian thing to do, that loss of face. “I’ll smile now” and it doesn’t mean you’re laughing at the teacher but then the teacher is getting more angry because she thinks the kid is laughing and not taking her seriously and the kid is smiling more because he’s completely nervous now. That sort of stuff. Eye contact, “oh the kid’s not looking at me, he’s lying ‘cause he’s not looking me in the face.” No, he’s being polite.
TEACHER: I’ve taught Aboriginal students who won’t establish eye contact with you until they absolutely, down the track, trust you. And that’s a process you have to go through.
TEACHER: It might be a Samoan kid who’s in trouble so they’ll just come in and sit down straight away, because to them that’s being polite because they need to be lower than the person in authority. But unless you know that you’ll think “cheeky”…. Just getting staff aware. If they think the kid is being rude is there something else behind it?
TEACHER: Like with the Turkish girls this morning, the ones that have been wagging school and doing all kinds of things. I got really cross with them and said right, … you’re letting your family down, you’re letting the whole Turkish community down. You no longer have that choice. You will go to school because if you don’t, I’ll get on to your parents and they will beat the crap out of you. And they went, [scared]. And they didn’t do it again. But a lot of teachers will say, no you have to do this, you have to do that…
TEACHER: Boys are really tough. The issues are different according to age but there are issues with Arabic boys at every age. Some of the Arabic boys can be fairly intolerant of women. We’ve got a couple of Arabic boys who we’re getting better at understanding, we’re beginning to pick up on things now which in their culture is very rude but we didn’t see it as that because our culture is different. So I think we’ve got a bit more work to do with staff about understanding what different things mean in their culture. For example there’s one particular boy in Year 9 who with one particular teacher will always sit with his feet on the table with the soles of his feet facing the teacher, that sort of stuff. Whereas we’d just say, “come on take your feet off the table, that’s not what furniture is for.” But he means something else, a much stronger statement. It’s things like that that can make it tricky, because even if you get him to take his feet off the table he’s still won a victory. And that’s the way a lot of the boys see it as you’re either one of us or not. And it’s more cultural than religious…The Lebanese boys can be a lot tougher than the other boys. The Somali boys can be hard to manage because there are so few male role models within the community and they’re used to being the male in the house. So it’s different according to where they are from, but boys in particular can be trickier for female teachers to manage than the girls can be.