CIS Regional Conference

Day one Asia Literacy and Talking about Race

Fazal Rizvi

Relationships and identities are paramount and dynamic. The Asia literacy approach has been rooted in colonial fear & security discourses and post colonial geopolitical and economic discourses. Current c21 work in Australia e.g. the Melbourne Declaration 2008, The Australian curriculum 2012 and the White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century ignore the historical facts of ongoing change in Australia and Asia based on human connections and understandings. Vijay Mishra has exposed the complexity of this in his work "What was multiculturalism?" which shows the depth of human change in languages, cultures and demographies. Australia exists in a global polity and culture in which 8% of Australians now work elsewhere. This means there is educational need to prepare all students for globalised interpersonal, intrapersonal, intercultural and dynamic interactions. The situation is not polarised East and West but an organic exchange of East MEETS West through human relations. These relationships are fundamental to human understanding so learners for and international context need skills to understand how identities relate, how connectivity means that innovation is transnational and that demographic diasporas are radically reshaping our realities. In this context, it is important to find ways to bring students across the globe together and facilitate opportunities for them to teach each others' languages and cultures. The challenge is to redefine internationalism ion inclusive, equitable ways.

 Eeqbal Hassim

Need a new narrative for Asia literacy that goes beyond Asia and into the realm of perspectives, modalities, relationships within and across cultures. So its a matter of perspective:

Developing Asia literacy is going to need to start with telling stories  so that people can share what it is to be other and in this to develop skills to be comfortable with the uncomfortable and retain a sense of self. It is not untrammelled cultural relativism. It will involve a an examination of power and status and this includes considerations of race as in the poem from a UNODA poetry competition in 2006.

Race, by an African Kid

When I born, I black

When I grow up, I black

When I go in Sun, I black

When I scared, I black

When I sick, I black

And when I die, I still black

And you white fellow

When you born, you pink

When you grow up, you white

When you go in sun, you red

When you cold, you blue

When you scared, you yellow

When you sick, you green

And when you die, you gray

And you calling me colored ??

In order to build dialogue, learners will need to consciously develop intercultural communication skills, fundamentally through learning languages but also by exploring other cultures through text, artifacts, interactions and immersion so as to avoid the 'fishbowl effect'. This will give learners a capacity to operate in the third space between two cultures and develop competence for diversity. This is a transformative experience the product of which will be understandings, attitudes, skills and behaviours that engender empathy, perspective, reflection, creativity and critical thinking. This is an experiential AND reflective process which is underscored by a moral purpose to learn from each other and with each other in the service of human betterment. Asia literacy is really a form of global literacy. So, I just thought really its about creating identities and then I found this great talk performance by Hetain Patel and Yuyu Rau which makes you think about how we are constantly striving to be authentic in the world:

Malcom Fialho

This section and the workshop I went to on Courageous Conversations about Race dealt with the elephant in the room. Its there, a dominant theme but we avoid it like the plague when in fact we really have to talk about it. The whole idea of white privilege and the attendant issues of power in society resonated with me because of my personal experiences a s kid growing up in post colonial Zambia, learning a range of languages and coming to Australia and my spouse is Indian, an immigrant like me and I have taught Chinese for over thirty years. So identity, race , culture and what's fair have been ever-present. Last night,one of my adult children popped in then caught a cab to the city: she sent me a text about the racist taxi driver who belaboured her with his views about Indians...........pretty unpleasant and he continued when she said she is Indian.

How do we talk about it? there needs to be an acknowledgment that it is there first. Ican see it in my school but many would say it doesn't exist. I can see it all around in truth. Ideas about race revolve around markers like accent, skin colour, cultural distance, networks of influence, degree of racial consciousness and these markers can be found in any organisation. Once behaviours and attitudes are exposed then its a matter to move the people in the organisation through a series of  stages  beginning fundamentally with the idea Malcolm expressed that "in order to treat me equally, you must recognise my difference." This also means identifying and opposing destructive internalised racism whereby people deny their own identity and seek to demean themselves or escape into the dominant reality by denying themselves (bananas and coconuts, Uncle Toms etc).

It snot a matter of taking away white privilege but rather including all groups in whatever the privilege is- this means the dominant group has to be self-aware and take steps to critically examine its inclusiveness or otherwise. part of this should include culturally safe spaces for other groups to express their sentiments and ideas to inform the critical awareness of race in a school. The process of developing an inclusive environment proceeds on 4 conditions:

• Engage- spotlight on race
• sustain- tell your stories
• deepen- make complexity the friend of inquiry
• action through transformation- understand white privilege and make adjustments

The aim is to support all members of the community and to build diversity which can be shown thus:





CIS Regional Conference

Day Two, CIS and International Education

CIS Developments

CIS has tightened up procedures for membership and is providing more focused support in the accreditation process. The eighth edition of the Accreditation Manual has less sstandards but has a much greater emphaisis on the teaching and Learning component and on governance. It is moving away from an audit approach where reams were written about facilities and fire drills to look at the essesnce of an international education across three domains:

1. Learning programs to enable student growth
2. School Commitment to local and global ciommunity
3. Support systems.

The purpose of international schools is to assist learners to become successful global citizens who are comfortable with cultural differences, interact across cultures and move through cultural milieu with a suite of identities. Intercultural understanding underpins the notion of international education

The process for accreditation requires the school to have a clear idea of what international education means in its contexts for its students. A significant development is that Chair and Co-Chairs will receive a Self-Study that has been pre-read at CIS and potential issues for exploration highlighted. This in turn gives greater support to a candidate school for accreditation because it can be alerted to areas that might require deeper clarification or greater evidence.

Tine Kohler. Cultural Skill Building

This workshop outlined a range of techniques and concepts that can be explicitly taught to engender intercultural and intracultural understanding. The idea is to give students an toolkit to expose our conceprions, challeng them, support students to question constructively and to learn from experience so that they are able to reposition themselves with insight. One activity was to write up 5 things about two  distinct societies (e.g. China and Australia) , the peoples and the values and then to compare and contrast in a group discussion. Another was to use a leadership roleplay to construct culturally diverse scenarios which were performed and then debriefed. Anothher kind of roleplay was to see how conversations have cultural rules embedded in them. Having a quick look later, there are many resources available and I liked these

http://www.englishadvantage.info/lesson/culture-role-play/

Tim Minchin "Prejudice"

SALTO-YOUTH

Wayne Craig, Schooling for a brave new world"

The knowledge economy reuqires that education is transformative for the learners and this in turn requires braodening and deepening of teacher quality. Education will need to shift from training and instruction for certainty in life pathways to innovative strategies and structures that help students thrive and inmprove in uncertain and ambiguous global contexts. The world  can no longer be delivered in a classroom by teachers deleivering what they learnt. We don't know what will be next  but we can speculate.

There is more to education than international and national standards like PISA but there is no doubt that excellence for every learner is fundamental. The capabilities needed by the young are:

• metacognitive thinking
• intrapersonal knowledge and reflection
• interpersonal competence

These need to be nurtured in education systems that allow school autonomy, provide fair funding, have clear standards for teachers and students. In a nutshell schools can only be as good as the people within them so its about developing people with high quality instruction and an ethic of high performance, meaning that every child succeeeds to reach their potential. Schools need to be truly autonomous to do this.

The other thing that that schools are going to need is a a strong sense of moral purpose underlying a strong team and collective capacity to innovate. Professor David Hopkins has much to say about autonomy, improvement, accountability and collective responsibility as elements of moral purpose in education

David Hopkins' powerpoint

Follwing on from this then, the whole business of school change is about leadership at every level and for every person. So the leadership capacity of a school has to be identified and attached to shared group values that promote interdependencies not hierarchies. David Logan explores this in his work on tribal leadership:

http://www.triballeadership.net/media/TL-L.Excellence.pdf

Education has to empower young people and allow them to define themselves not be defined:

Council of International Schools Leaders Workshop

Well, went to the 8th edition accreditation manual workshop to update my understanding.
CIS Accreditation

 CIS Powerpoint presentation

Adelaide HS will be undergoing a Preparatory visit sometime mid-next year and then we will complete our Self-Study ready for the Accreditation Team Visit in 2015.  For me the key points have been that:

• the school must have a coherent definition of internationalism across the school and it must be integrated into how the school operationalises the accreditation standards. The intersection of the school organisation and operations with its definition of internationalism is what produces the ethos of the school: it is this ethos, permeating all areas of the school and its culture that creates an international school for its students and community.
• the accreditation standards are not a checklist and the explanatory material produced by school committees should pick up intangibles such as culture, interculturality, interpersonalisation and intrapersonalisation. These must be evident to the Visiting Team.
• Global citizenship is a cornerstone of the educational Vision and Mission and Objectives (VMO) and should be clearly evident and inherent in the curriculum. In the VMO it is not a "given" but must present as a challenge to drive the innovation and improvement processes in the school. This then gives something for the school to aspire to and gives its members something to aspire to. The VMO must be very clear and the globalist outlook consistently embedded.
• Teaching and learning are the core business of the school across three linked areas of values(embedded in VMO), student learning and well being and a collective view of internationalism. The evidence of effectiveness will be developed through the data associated with longitudinal assessment and tracking, along with a process of using data to target improvement for each student AND in the evidence that can be extracted from evaluation of the attainment of graduate qualities.

So, we will need to review our definition and use of internationalism, evaluate the way we collect and use data and examine the intangibles across the school. Staff teams will need to commence this process in learning areas and leadership groups over the next term and into 2014.

Education is about developing the humanity of our learners