With partners:
Teacher Snapshot 1
Teachers cannot assume that all students are familiar with classroom and culture in Australia. This often needs to be taught explicitly.
TEACHER: How you behave in a classroom in Australia may not be the same as in other places. Things like you stay in your seats, you might put your hand up to answer a question, you don’t have to stand up when talking to the teacher, ways of addressing teachers. Some of our kids with interrupted schooling haven’t got any classroom culture because they’ve been in refugee camps or other artificial situations. Learning a language is about learning the culture. Even things like teaching them how to organise their folders. Folders are a new system for a lot of them where you have to separate your subjects with coloured tags. They’re used to exercise books handed up to the teacher. So they’re getting used to folders which some of them find difficult initially, loose pages everywhere and where they’re supposed to go and why they have to be organised in a certain way.
TEACHER: We often find that the students are indifferent to their education. Work is often not completed, they do not study. There is a disregard for school rules- such as starting and finishing times. We do not always receive support, if we approach families. They do not always think it is important that girls finish work, come to school on time, or at all. Often they are picked up early – whatever suits the parent. They do not necessarily support us if we wish to have an after school detention.
Teacher Snapshot 2
By knowing more about the cultural backgrounds of students in their classrooms, teachers are able to adjust their curricula and cater for issues relating to food, dress, religious observation and participation in school activities.
TEACHER: In my own [art] classes I include a choice of topics to allow for students who don’t wish to represent living creatures to engage in activities…
TEACHER: We have swimming sports but we have a high absent rate, probably 150 kids away that day… We had a No Male policy in the past. … This was the first time we had males around the pool … We just decided it was time and we didn’t think it was fair to the male staff that they got excluded. They belong to the school and they’re their teachers and they deserve to be involved…
TEACHER: [regarding extracurricular activities] The thing is, the girls have got to be in the care of somebody else in the early evening and, oh my god, what are they doing? Are there boys there? Like, if we have the Islamic girls group playing sport or going out for dinner or whatever, we have to assure the parents that there will be no boys around. So we have to be very aware of what the parents needs are to even allow the girls to be part of something.