Personal Reflection

Personal Reflection

In my own experience of culture and identity in relation to education, I went to De La Salle Revesby Heights, NSW. This school at the time was undergoing a transformation of being a school from 7-10 to 7-12. As a baptised Greek Orthodox it was a little bit harder for me to get into the catholic education system than most of the students that I found there. I met little criteria, not coming from a feeder school, not coming from a Catholic background and being ‘Out of area’ I was lucky at the time to get in.

It made no difference for me coming from a non-Catholic school coming into catholic school system in other educational parameters other than masses held by the school in the local church and in my senior years; Studies of Religion. In Studies of religion I become the cultural other to give information about the culture and ceremonies of the Greek Orthodox Church. A couple of times I was asked to explain to the whole class some of the celebrations of the church and the rituals behind them with the comparison to Catholicism. This therefore made me the ‘Other’ in the class. I found this personal reflection of my own educational experience to be reminiscent of the argument being made within the article The possibility of cosmopolitan learning: reflecting on future directions for diversity teacher education. This reading particularly focuses on teaching diversity in all its forms, in particular not separating one facet of culture as ‘The other”. I personally believe this is very important not only from the experiences that I have from school but also as a multicultural country. What is socially normal for one set of people maybe be different for another group, therefore teaching one type of cultural variance or societal variance would be beneficial to kids learning experiences.

I think that if in some aspects of my learning I wasn’t treated as an ‘other’ and told to speak about my differences I wouldn’t have felt ‘different’ within the classroom. I feel as if that without a multicultural school I would not have been singled out as one of the only Greek and only Greek orthodox students in the classroom and in that sense the teacher would not have had to rely on me, rather teach the class accordingly. However in saying this I never really felt like this greatly impacted on my education until doing further studies on it such as this course. Reading academics write about cosmopolitanism and multicultural learning has shifted my view on what was, at the time to me, normal practice within a school.

References:
Rizvi, F. (2008). Education and its cosmopolitan possibilities. In B. Lingard, J. Nixon & S. Ranson (Eds.), Transforming learning in schools and communities: The remaking of education for a cosmopolitan society (pp. 101-116). London: Continuum.
Ho, C. (2011). Respecting the presence of others: School micropublics and everyday multiculturalism. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 32(6), 603-619.