Every child has the right to a sense of belonging at school
This is the first of a two part blog series by Dr. Talia Avrahamzon on children’s sense of belonging at school.
Every child has the right to a sense of belonging at school. Yet our annual ceremonies celebrated like Harmony Day silence experiences of racism and highlight the assumptions adults can make about how children maintain the status quo or contribute to transformational social change.
ME Have you heard of reconciliation week?
All Yes
L I think we learnt about it I think it was last year.
ME Have you heard of NAIDOC week?
B Yes. It is about if you come from another country and what kind of person are you.
ME What’s Harmony Day?
B It’s for cancer. Harmony Day is for cancer and it’s also for all the people who died in the war.
E Aren’t you talking about Pink Ribbon Day? (Extract from focus group, children aged 8-10 years, ACT school, 2016).
From the moment children walk through their school gates, they are exposed to explicit and implicit messages about harmony, reconciliation, diversity, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and cultures, multiculturalism and multi-cultures, and about Australian history. These messages are entwined in messages about race, racism and the normalising and privileging of a national white culture. Messages are delivered in different ways, through teachers’ beliefs and values, pedagogical practices, the hidden and unhidden curricula, resources, rituals and ceremonies. Ceremonies like Harmony Day and Reconciliation Day celebrations.
Last week, primary school children walked through their school gates wearing their national dress, potentially appropriating someone else’s national dress, the colour orange, or if they don’t have any such items, they might have adorned their favourite sporting team’s colours – an emerging Harmony Day option. They may have done a colouring-in of cultural symbols or the Harmony Day slogan ‘Everybody Belongs’, brought a plate to share, observed a ‘cultural’ dance group or music ensemble.
Assumptions are likely to be made that such activities contribute to the National Curriculum’s General Capability of Intercultural Understanding or particular Teaching Standards. And a line of sight might be made to the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration’s emphasis that education should contribute to ‘a socially cohesive society that values, respects and appreciates different points of view and cultural, social, linguistic and religious diversity’. However, given such celebrations have the potential to silence lived experiences of racial discrimination – are they really creating a sense that ‘Everybody Belongs’?
Ten years ago, I undertook a multi-sited school ethnography in two culturally diverse primary schools on Ngunnawal Country, in the education jurisdiction of the Australian Capital Territory. The aim of the study was to explore how ‘Everyday Reconciliation’ occurs at the policy, school and classroom levels as well as through the perspectives of 8-10 year old children. The research revealed that in the main, schools reproduce forms of what Euahleyai / Gamillaroi scholar Professor Larissa Behrendt describes as ‘colonial storytelling’ about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and cultures. Thus, despite educators’ strong commitment to engage in some form of reconciliation, policies and practices serve to maintain the structures of what Gunditjmara scholar Professor Mark Rose coined, the ‘silent apartheid’. In some cases, this led to the creation of schools, classrooms, practices and policies as sites of what I refer to as ‘Settled Reconciliation’, in which good intent and celebrations of perceived Indigenous culture(s) silence diverse Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ experiences and agency, and ignore ongoing settler colonialism. This includes assimilation, racism and a privileging of a dominant white culture, all of which the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, educators and parents, as well as non-anglo Australian children in the study experience themselves.
Ten years ago is a long time – the 52 children in the study have now finished school and are likely to have voted in the last election. Yet given we are still celebrating Harmony Day and silencing the International Day of the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, has much actually changed?
Everyday Reconciliation revealed there are likely to be many assumptions contributing to this. Firstly the assumption that processes of intercultural understanding occurs through mere exposure and the learning about the ‘Other’. Secondly, an assumption that schools are inclusive and racism free cultural spaces. And finally, the assumption by teachers and policy makers that primary school children are colourblind and are not embodying and (re)constructing race, racism and whiteness at schools and outside the school gate on a daily basis. Underpinning this is different assumptions of what is and isn’t racism.
It is in the revealing of such assumptions and giving opportunities for teachers and children to engage in the evidence, as well as to create safe spaces to engage with the complexities, contradictions and ambiguities of intercultural relations that could lead to the disruption of silencing racism, and create more of a sense of belonging.
Author: Dr Talia Avrahamzon, Honorary A/P, ANU. Talia undertook her PhD at ANU as a Sir Roland Wilson Foundation Scholar. She acknowledges the participants in the original study, supervisors, and the guidance of First Nations Advisory Group.