AUSTRALIAN PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS
Standard 1: Know students and how they learn
This chapter helps the reader to understand how students with diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socio-economic backgrounds experience the issues of disaffection and its impact on their education. It also highlights the importance of having broad knowledge and understanding of how culture, cultural identity and linguistic background affect the education of students from diverse backgrounds.
I used to think I was poor, then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me deprived was a bad image, I was underprivileged. Then they told me underprivileged was over-used, I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime, but I have a great vocabulary.
(Feiffer, cited in Pilger, 1989, p. 237)Introduction
Dominant ways of understanding disproportionately low academic outcomes for students from Indigenous and other minority groups fail to locate the debate about learner engagement and academic achievement in the wider context of social inequality. Instead, they continue to attribute students’ disconnection from schooling to their cognitive, emotional and behavioural deficits or in terms of a moral underclass culture in their communities. However, considerable international evidence suggests that socio-economic status (SES), or class, and ethnicity can have significant effects on social and educational outcomes (Blanden, Hansen & Machin, 2008; Blanden & Macmillan, 2016).
According to Blanden et al. (2008, p. 7), there is a ‘very clear pathway from childhood poverty to reduced employment opportunities, with earnings estimated to be reduced by between 15 and 28% and the probability of being in employment at age 34 reduced by between 4 and 7%’. Their British study found clear links between children and young people receiving free school meals (FSM) and low academic achievement, with students from Black and minority groups more likely to receive FSM. Such inequities are not limited to the United Kingdom. Ford (2013) uses the concept of ‘locked-in inequality’ to draw parallels between the enduring educational disadvantage of Black students in Britain and the persistent and systemic achievement gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in Australia.