Education and racism
Due to multiculturalism people from different part of the world starting to migrate into Australia and we see different cultures starting to emerge into our society, for example we see different resturants from different countries, having different language radio stations and television such as SBS, where movies and news from different part of the world are being shown. In relation to education, we see students with different culture and background coming in, bring diversity into our classroom. Not only does this affect our education system, e.g in a way that people changing the difficulty of Mathematic in examinations due to the emergence of people with a higher academic level from other country, it also challenge us teachers by making us aware of the consequences as the result of cultural diversity.
As teachers we should be aware of the cultural diversities and when we teach we have to understand other cultures so that we can avoid conflict and being able to teach them in a appropriate manner and effective way. In the lecture cover by Karen, I remember her saying that many people are not trying to be racists, in fact its the ways they employed to outreach to people give them such identity because people stereotype people from other cultures and backgrounds. To that I completely agree, many racial offenses that most people committed are not intended but instead its because of ignorance. Therefore it is important that we as teachers have the knowledge of other culture instead of being ignorance and stereotyping students in the classroom because even though we might not be offending the student intentionally, cultural ignorance of the teacher will make students feel that they have been offended.
As such I completely agree with the June 17 Sydney Morning Herald where the importance of education on culture understanding is being addressed. In the article they are reinforcing, with reference to Sydney Swans player Adam Goodes's case, that sometimes things are said out of ignorance instead of being racist. Hence the University of Sydney is putting in money to help provide training and research to support cultural understanding in order to solve the problem of cultural ignorance so that incidents like Adam Goodes's case would not happen in the first place. For more depth of the article go to http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/wakeup-call-on-racism-needed-20130616-2oc2w.html.
Many people in the society today creates racial remarks out of cultural ignorance and instead of staying on the same point looking at things like this happening over and over again, it is important that we move forward and do something about it so it can be solved overtime. To that I completely agree with what University of Sydney is doing because unless we start from the root of this problem it can never be solved. Therefore I think its important that the government invest more money and focus more on education to help improve people's cultural understanding and knowledge. Communication is what keeps human connected to each other and understanding each other is the key to having good communication. In society, such as Australia where multiculturalism plays a big part, it is important to develop harmony between cultures by creating good understanding and communications and to do this is to solve the problem of cultural ignorance by reinforcing cultural understanding.
I couldn't agree more with supporting the idea of improving people's cultural understanding and knowledge, but for me and for all those who are to be future teachers if cultural ignorance or racism was to occur in the classroom. My concern would be to figure out if the student responded in such a way just because of ignorance and ill manners or because he/she is truly attacking that person of a certain culture. I think for a change to occur especially within schools and education, the role models and adults that students look up to need to understand the importance of cultural diversity and that it is a growing notion. Also that to be acceptable of different cultures is also gaining a greater perspective of the world.
ReplyDeleteI also couldn’t agree more! I think it is extremely important to build upon student’s cultural awareness and therefore eliminate the issue of cultural ignorance. Although personally I believe it goes far past the efforts of implementations of money to achieve such a goal, I believe acceptance of such a multicultural world should begin through implementing the teaching of this multicultural doctrine as more than mere subject matter. It is when students are taught in a certain way consistently that they begin to understand and become aware of such cultural awareness and even racism as a whole. Therefore implementing racial awareness when a school or even university sees it best fit can create a struggle to work. Positive approaches to multiculturalism and therefore racial awareness in an educational context can be achieved when it is embedded in the everyday pedagogy of teachers, unit coordinators and other school leaders. Moreover, it needs to be taught as a way of thinking and accepting diverse beliefs and backgrounds, rather than being implemented as another stream of subjects. Thus once again, it needs to be taught constantly rather than just when it arises as a problem.
ReplyDeletePosted by: Jessica Garcia
I agree with your point of view, I believe that it is quite important to pay attention to the culture background. Like what you mention in the paper, we shouldn’t stand still on the racial-cultural issue, we should work hard on improving this problem. Furthermore, I also agree that Australia is a multicultural country, and this condition is reflected in school as well. Multicultural classroom can bring significant difficulty to teacher. Sometimes teachers are not intending to discriminate those students who have different culture background, but because the teachers are not familiar with those students culture background and thus they can’t get along with those students nicely. In order to solve this problem, the prospective teachers should have better comprehension of different countries culture, and pay more attention and patience on those students. Also, teacher can have more conversations so as to understand their thinking. All these method can really improve the quality of teaching and can also enhance the reputation of Australia education. Although it seems easy to solve the problem, as matter of fact this will take a long time to carry out and solve radically. Therefore, the Australia education department should have patience and determination to improve this issue.
ReplyDeleteLadson.G (1995)， Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, American, American Educational Research Association, http://aer.sagepub.com/content/32/3/465 28/10/2013