Global Guardians

Jehan Bamboat, Blake West, Sophia Gob, Mia Doyle, Ezekiel Gamble, Natalie Hiu, Kenji Ishijima

Global Ambassadors at St Michael’s Primary School

Contact: Amanda Tinson (amanda.tinson@syd.catholic.edu.au)

As Global Ambassadors from St Michael’s Primary School in Daceyville, Sydney, we are excited to share our journey with you. We are a Catholic school in the south east of Sydney with 374 students aged between 4 and 12 years. We are very lucky to have the opportunity to be involved in lots of different real-world projects.

The Global Ambassadors team took part in Meg’s Global Citizenship Student Ambassador Program in 2023. We are a group of eight students from Grades 5 and 6. We didn’t all know each other very well when we started this project, but have become a great team and learnt a lot about each other by working on the project together.

We created an action project for our school and the community to learn more about each other's cultures. We surveyed our school community and discovered that not everyone knew a lot about the different cultures in our school, and sometimes that made people feel left out or misunderstood. 

Our project linked to a number of the Sustainable Development Goals including: 

·       Goal 4: Quality Education: By promoting inclusivity and diversity in our school environment and community.

·       Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities: By addressing stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination through cultural understanding and respect.

·       Goal 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions: By fostering a culture of inclusion and respect, and addressing discrimination and stereotypes.

·       Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals: By collaborating with various stakeholders and our local community to implement the project effectively.

Identifying our issue

First, we needed to understand the problem better. We surveyed the students of the school with some questions about cultural backgrounds in our school and found out that many didn't know much about other cultures or even their own. We also found out that people were confused about the words ‘stereotype’, ‘prejudice’ and ‘discrimination’. The biggest issue that we discovered was that 80% of people who responded to the survey had either experienced or witnessed someone being made fun of because of their cultural background. That's when we knew we had to help everyone learn more and appreciate each other's backgrounds.

‘I was surprised to hear that people at our school had experienced teasing because of their cultural background. I knew that this was a worthwhile issue to address!’  - Jehan

Educating others

We decided to teach everyone what words like 'stereotypes', 'prejudice' and ‘discrimination’ mean. We made posters with our mascot Dotti the Donut to explain these big words in a fun way. We came up with clever slogans like: ‘Do’nut box us in… celebrate our differences’. It was important for us to teach these words so we could understand how to be more inclusive. We also recorded our own podcast and created a short movie to help teach these tricky concepts.

Posters created by Global Ambassadors featuring Dotti the Donut

 Celebrating cultural diversity

To meet our aims, we planned to have a huge party called the Global Fiesta where everyone could share their culture and learn more about others. Students worked together in teams to plan everything, and we learned how to make sure everyone's ideas were heard. All of Year 6 were involved by creating their own action project for the big celebration. There were so many ideas… we weren’t sure if we would ever be able to pull it all together and bring our plans to life.

Then came the exciting part: the big day we were all waiting for – the Global Fiesta! The festival was bigger than we ever imagined. We had activities running during the day and then again after school, so that the community could come along. There were games from around the world, delicious foods, story-telling, virtual reality tours, cultural art, a cookbook, world music and beautiful dances that everyone loved. It made us so proud to see our friends and families coming together, having fun, and learning from each other.

‘Global Fiesta helped us understand more about each other and brought us closer together’  - Mia

Creating digital content

We decided to create a website called ‘Global Guardians’ to showcase our work and keep it all together in one place. Putting together the website was a fun challenge. We started by figuring out what we wanted the website to look like and what kind of information we wanted to share. We worked together in groups to decide the best layout and how everyone could get into the website to add their own parts. We called on student experts to help us edit music, record podcasts, and take photos to make our site look amazing. We learned how to use Google Sites, choose pictures and videos that looked good, and make sure everything was easy for people to find and use. 

Our learning

Through this project, we learnt a lot about leadership, teamwork, and respect for all cultures. We helped our school become a place where everyone feels welcome and valued. While we were planning the festival, we all took leadership roles and made sure every student could share their ideas. This is how we used Student Voice: by making sure everyone had a chance to speak up. Seeing our ideas turn into a real celebration was incredible. This taught us about Student Agency, which means we got to make decisions and take action in our school. It was amazing to see how our ideas turned into a real-life celebration. We knew that when we all work together and understand each other better, our school is a happier place.

‘It was great to see so many people get involved… it was like we were a community full of Global Guardians, not just a team.’ - Ezekiel

We hope our story inspires other schools to learn more about each other and celebrate what makes us all unique!