AUSTRALIAN PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS
Standard 1: Know students and how they learn
This chapter illustrates the importance of being responsive to the learning strengths and needs of students from diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socio-economic backgrounds.
Standard 4: Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments
The chapter also highlights strategies to support inclusive student participation and engagement in classroom activities.
The tensions and complexities that play out in teaching and learning for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) student communities around the world are highlighted in this chapter. The standards above are considered in the offering of explicit research-informed ways to acknowledge and build on the broad language resources students already possess. Practical applications for knowing CALD students and how they learn and evidence of how classrooms can maintain a creative and supportive environment that facilitates student participation and engagement are detailed. Being open to the idea that students do bring myriad knowledges, skills and understandings to school, and that these associated knowledges are easily revealed and can be explicitly connected to school curriculum, is a crucial starting point for teaching and learning. This thinking and related practice is fundamental to becoming a reflective practitioner, one who prepares young people to lead successful and productive lives by acknowledging and building on their linguistic potential.
Well, my teacher got a different insight into us, and where we are at, and it's fun to know what other people are learning and how their life is and what they speak.
(Year 6 student)Introduction
Diversity is an increasingly prominent feature of schools and society. Western education systems in particular are made up of communities of young people who come from diverse cultural, religious, linguistic and educational backgrounds. Scholarship (Blommaert, 2010) purports that these young people's linguistic capabilities and cultural experiences are increasingly diverse and dynamic. Yet, as the student comment above helps illustrate, societal and institutional mandates have been slow to recognise the complexity of language/s and literacies across all domains of students’ lives. Instead, common educational policies and practices continue to focus on promoting the universal individual development of English literacy, compared and measured by high-stakes, traditional tests. Rarely are the resources and repertoires of students called on in supporting this endeavour.