The Culturally Responsive Pedagogies (CRP) Project is a partnership between CESA and UniSA. It aims to have educators adopt pedagogies that enables students to authentically draw on their own real-world experiences while also animating the curriculum.
Two of the participating teachers, Angie Selga and Kathy Hennig from Kildare College describe their school community as culturally being super-diverse. For the CRP Project participants were asked to design or redevelop a unit of work. As their small beginnings, Angie and Kathy chose to redevelop a Year 8 HASS unit on urbanisation. In the past, the unit had been very teacher driven and involved covering content about the push and pull factors influencing the movement of people into the major cities in Australia. It spoke of the various ethnicities making up Australian society without delving into specific cultural backgrounds that their students might identify with. Teachers designed the activities and the unit concluded with a shared lunch as the only recognition of various cultures.
Through the CRP professional learning, Angie and Kathy, in conjunction with the supporting CEO consultant, redesigned the unit to place the learner as the researcher of their family’s journey. To commence the unit the teachers adopted a very different pedagogical approach, by modelling to the students aspects of their own real-world experiences through an activity entitled ‘Did you know?’ This created a climate of trust in the classroom and empowered the students to feel safe to disclose aspects of their own lives. As researchers, the students designed surveys, and then interviewed family members and college staff to build up a picture of ‘Adelaide, Then and Now.’ The pedagogical shift was from student voice to student agency with the teachers operating as facilitators to guide and prompt the learning and encouraging, through the students’ individual stories, a greater deep of understanding of influencing factors of urbanisation. This approach enabled the students to illustrate the issues that culturally diverse groups experience and at the same time class members gained a greater understanding of the lived experiences of cultural groups that currently make up Australian society. To conclude the unit, students were asked to put forward recommendations that the school leadership could adopt to promote a feeling of greater cultural inclusivity within the school.
Angie and Kathy both reflected that the reworked urbanisation unit has enabled them to both step back, reflect and see where and how they can enable students of diverse cultural backgrounds to not only engage with the curriculum but also drive it by becoming agents of change in their school community. Since the completion of the urbanisation unit, the student proposals have been passed on to the Justice and Democracy Group. The CRP Project has also sparked an idea of sharing and publishing refugee and migration stories from those within the school and the wider community.
As a result of being in the CRP Project, Angie and Kathy also highlighted the ripple effect it has had. The next Year 8 unit on Civics and Citizenship was revamped to recognise cultural diversity as a positive asset by having the students design brochures that explained the Australian government system in different languages. Another unexpected outcome was a refugee student sharing her story about life in Afghanistan and Australia in a moving poem entitled 'Afghani Girl'. She will read this poem as the opening to a dance piece about refugees being performed by a group of Year 10 students participating in the PEACE RULES - Performing Arts Award Showcase.
My heart is torn in the city of Kabul
I’m standing on a bridge, shattered by sadness
My body is from Ghazni, but I’m somewhere else
My flowers in Ghazni are fading,
My tongue is not confident to say,
My heart is getting torn to pieces,
Afghans are on the path to evolution.
But books of reasoning now lie in pieces.
the girl becomes a student at school
then, like tiny flowers she has seen blown up
her hopes are shattered.
the young girl, walking down a path of a new country
she jumps in happiness.
she’s starting a new life,
starts building new hopes,
communicating with new people,
thinking of a better life.
she starts to learn the language of her hopes,
she gets the things that she thought she dreamt of, shattered in the past
she understands she is a lucky person.
she starts to get a good education for her hopes
she understands that bad things happen to good people
she wants to be safe and hold on to her hopes
she knows that life is hard in a different country
she is brave.
she will do everything to achieve her hopes and dreams.
by Adela
Reception students who join a 2024 mid-year intake at a Diocesan Catholic school will get free tuition in Terms 3 and 4.
