Inclusive School Communities Youth Summit
Our students were outstanding examples of success, as they were selected to present in the NSW Parliament House where they spoke in front of politicians, religious and community leaders and the media. The project provided many great opportunities to learn, to discuss and to reflect on how we are inclusive and the areas that we could improve upon. The project provided many partnerships where students worked with each other, various staff members, family members, community leaders and personnel from Educational services. These partnerships were also extended in meeting the Minister for Education Hon Rob Stokes and the Shadow Minister for Education Gihad Dib. We were also lucky enough to spend time with Mayha Abdo.
Inclusive Communities Youth Summit Project
As leaders of the school it is important to foster a sense of belonging, connectedness and intercultural understanding in our world today. We challenged ourselves to think about the ways in which we do this at our school. The ideas came easily and from the school's core values of partnerships, success and opportunities. We found many examples of the ways that we are inclusive of the social, religious and ethnic backgrounds of all including students with disabilities. We found many examples of how we promote ‘A Part' and ‘Apart' of society where we celebrate diversity and difference.
Through the project we challenged cultural assumptions such as what ‘Halal' means and that the meat is not from another animal, we questioned the need to be inclusive of our school uniform with the proposal to include the hijab and the turban in school colours, we questioned why we cannot do the traditional Acknowledgement to Country in other ways, we had in depth conversations around how we each identify and asked the question of "Am I Muslim or Australian first?" and we evaluated ways of being more inclusive of our students with disabilities. If we are the leaders of the future we need a true understanding of the cultures represented in our school.
We proposed that our politicians, religious and community leaders need to:
- Use time in forums to share and challenge cultural assumptions by building a culture where it is safe to ask questions in secure environment so we learn from each other. Leaders need to lead the way.
- Foster and support communication for people with disabilities, Aboriginal people and people from diverse cultural backgrounds. Develop communities that understand and support and celebrate diversity
- No one person has all of the answers. It takes the collective input to make the diverse fruit salad seen at our school and we aim to go beyond tolerance to enrich the inclusive community partnerships seen at our school.