With partners:
Theme 7: Curriculum, School & Culture
This theme looks at differing expectations of classroom culture including the types of issues that should be taught and different understandings of acceptable behaviour within classroom settings.
Arabic-speaking background students interviewed for this TSM identified a number of particular challenges including:
- Language proficiency and the ability to articulate what they know.
- For girls the requirements of school sport activities in relation to perceptions of the body and for some Muslims, the wearing of the hijab. Conversely, sport for boys is a great cultural leveller and a chance to demonstrate their ability.
- Music is prohibited amongst some members of certain Muslim communities.
- Access to extracurricular activities and support groups, such as homework groups, can be constrained by cultural concerns and large family demands.
- Parents sometimes devalue certain areas of the curriculum because they experienced a far more traditional schooling and/or lack a comprehensive experience of schooling themselves.
Some students expressed an appreciation of curricular materials that referred to their heritage cultures. As one student remarked:
“We had one class about Lebanon, and one about Egypt, and about heritage cultures and all that. It was good."
Another student expressed her appreciation for the cultural understanding and support of certain teachers in the school environment:
"In Ramadan, some teachers were helpful, and understood we couldn’t exercise as much, others didn’t help us out. …The PE teachers let us rest more often, because we were fasting. And in cooking class… instead of eating food we could take it home in a container. Normally we would eat it for lunch, but she understood we couldn’t… Another teacher kept telling me to do work when I told him I was tired, and I couldn’t think, and he wouldn’t understand and told me I had to work.… The lesson of Ramadan is to go about your everyday activities as normal, but fasting, and I just did it that way."