AUSTRALIAN PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS
Standard 1: Know students and how they learn
1.3 Students with diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socio-economic backgrounds
This chapter will develop teachers’ knowledge of theory relevant to understanding the cultural complexity of the student populations of the schools in which they teach and of the broader community beyond. It will encourage them to rethink established practices around multicultural education and to avoid forms of cultural essentialising that can have repercussions for student learning.
I don't have a culture, miss. I'm not different.
(Alice, aged 9 years)Introduction
In writing this chapter I am reminded of the 2014 downing of flight MH17 in the Ukraine. This was a tragic event, but one that resonates with many of the themes to be examined here around culture, hybridity and globalisation, their impact on schooling and the preparedness of teachers and students to meet the challenges they pose, some of which I see encapsulated in the young student's comment that opens this chapter. MH17 was a Malaysian Airlines flight en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam. It was carrying 298 passengers and crew of varying nationalities, though predominantly Dutch, Malaysian and Australian. Some on board had dual citizenship. Many others were resident in various countries on a permanent or temporary basis. Passengers were travelling for various reasons: holiday, work, study, family reunion. The plane was also carrying the passengers’ luggage and various possessions, manufactured and purchased in numerous sites across the globe. Together with this, the plane ‘carried’ less tangible items: the expertise, for example, of those travelling to Melbourne for an international AIDS conference; the transnational contacts those and other passengers had forged in the pursuit of their work and travel. This global connectedness is, of course, repeated thousands of times over on a daily basis in journeys across the globe. Malaysian Airlines itself, while a national carrier, operates as a transnational business, having links with numerous airlines worldwide. This illustrates not only how globalisation operates through transnational flows of people, goods, services, capital and labour, but of culture itself: the complex entanglements of ideas, understandings and practices resulting in a hybrid mix that is characteristic of the everyday reality for many.
