With partners:
Teacher Snapshot 1
TEACHER: …already it’s coming out to me how much of a disjunct we’ve got between what we teach and what the students’ experiences are. Thinking about the Year 10 English curriculum it’s all about sex basically. It’s all about having freedom, it’s a kind of Western story that we’re telling and I’m quite aware that a lot of my Muslim girls are quite confronted by the images that we show in things like Muriel’s Wedding and Looking for Alibrandi, for example.
Teacher Snapshot 2
Teachers should consider cultural issues when introducing a subject like Sex Education. Students need to be free to choose whether they participate or not, and parents need to feel comfortable with what their children are being taught in these areas.
TEACHER: Most of them [Arabic-speaking background students] seemed quite comfortable with doing this subject. A few of them said, my parents wouldn’t be very happy… I think one of them said that we would never be doing anything like that, so it’s like in our culture we’d be staying true to ourselves and wait until we’re married to be doing that sort of thing. It doesn’t really apply to us. I got that impression from a lot.
Teacher Snapshot 3
While health and personal development topics such as Sex Education, Alcohol and Drugs may appear culturally irrelevant to some students, teachers believe students need this knowledge for interaction with the wider community.
TEACHER: They were quite happy to talk about it but you wonder what relevance it has, but the thing is if they’re going out into a mixed society it could become relevant. They could be at a party and someone could give them a drink.
TEACHER: Being so narrow minded; their views about the world are so narrow. Some things… you have to know just in case you go into a workplace and someone uses a particular term it’s important for you to be aware of that vocabulary even if you don’t use it in your culture. It’s important. If you’re living in Australia you’re going to come across all these sorts of things whether it’s STDs or whatever the topic is.
Teacher Snapshot 4
Some parents believe the Australian curriculum should mirror the one from their home countries. They feel that here the curriculum is too broad and would prefer schools to focus more on traditional subjects.
TEACHER: One of the Somali community leaders was saying they wanted kids to do maths, physics, chemistry, biology, literature and something else, that old academic curriculum. They say, “I don’t want to do PE and Health, just real subjects”. And someone in the Somali community said, “no in Australia education is about the whole child, it’s not just education in that narrow sense”.