Culture in Australian Schools
Culture Explored
Influence of Aboriginal Culture: The history of Australia is taught in all school as part of the curriculum. There is special importance placed on indigenous culture and history, and the role aboriginals had in shaping the development of Australia from discovery to democracy.
Classroom Management: Classroom management has changed with integration of school wide behavior focused systems and policies. Systems such as the Tribes Community Learning System, Kids Matter provide schools with a framework for building a positive collaborative learning environment.
http://tribes.com/about/
Cultural Diversity: Diversity in schools is more than just the colour of your skin. Students are coming from diverse backgrounds with differing religions, traditions and languages. This plays a huge part on classroom dynamics with many schools needing to include EAL programs for students immigrating to Australia. Teachers should take advantage of this learning opportunity as having cultural diversity in a classroom can positively enhance learning outcomes and social awareness.
http://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/diversity/eal/Pages/default.aspx?Redirect=1
Bullying and Cyber-bullying: Bullying has changed with the integration of ICT and social media. It used to be that bullying would stay at school but now bullies can continue over social media and this is having devastating consequences on youth. It is becoming increasingly difficult to monitor and deal with bullying as a teacher with much of it happening over ICT outside of the classroom. The Australian Government have setup a task force called 'Thinkuknow' aimed at educating parents, carers and teachers on the issue. http://www.thinkuknow.org.au/site/
Link to movie Cyberbully (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otBRjJzWviY
Differentiated Curriculum: This incorporates the use of lesson plans, including lesson objectives, learning intentions and goal setting. This is a structured way for teachers to plan their lessons so that it has an intention that is linked with the curriculum and flows in a logical way that provides students with the opportunity to understand the content delivered. Goals should be individualised and should focus on improvement and progress rather than receiving the highest grade. Differentiated learning needs to take into account the varying skill levels within the class. Teachers needs to consider activities that are achievable while challenging, but still within the individual students skills level.
Higher Order Thinking: Involves transformation of information and ideas and is based on the reformed Blooms Taxonomy. This occurs when students combine facts and ideas and synthesize, generalise, explain, hypothesise or arrive at some conclusion or interpretation. This is one of the factors of productive pedagogies.
Integrating all areas of the Curriculum: Dewey (2012) highlighted that learning was maximised by integrated learning areas. The Australian Curriculum provides a link that connects areas of the curriculum thus allowing teachers to have access to educational resources that will enhance a students knowledge and development of deeper learning.
Influence of ICT: Information Communication Technology has had a major influence in Australian classrooms. In the 1980's the ratio of computers was one per 3 classrooms on average. Today students have access to a multitude of devices from laptops, computer desktops, iPad and android tablets, projectors and interactive whiteboards. The has changed the culture of teaching, as teachers can use ICT as a way of teaching. The downfall of ICT has been students reliance on technology for typing and auto spelling correction. This has impacted students language and writing.
Socioeconomics: The association
between individual socioeconomic disadvantage and educational outcomes is well
documented. Current research shows that disadvantaged students have lower rates
of Year 12 completion. The Australian Bureau
of Statistics (2001) found that young people who were living in the most
disadvantaged areas were over twice as likely as young people overall to have
finished school prior to Year 12 and not be engaged in further education.
Special Needs: Special Needs are dealt with both in mainstream schools and also in school dedicated to different levels of ability. Within this avenue are Special School for children with Intelligence Quotients between 50 and 70, and Special Development Schools for children with Intelligence Quotients below 50. If a child has an IQ above 70 but has a diagnosed learning disability they are generally funded according to severity. This can include Spectrum Disorders which encompass a broad group of problems, such as autism and aspergers . Some children if they qualify get access to an integration aid (a paid helper for the student) for certain hours per week. Teachers work with parents, integration aids and case workers to develop plans to maximise learning opportunities for a student with a learning disability.
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