Yeronga Reconnect
Shirley Mokoe
Yeronga State High School
Contact: Holly Haswell-Smith (hhasw1@eq.edu.au)
In 2024 the Yeronga Student Congress, of which I was a member, decided to focus on the important topic of Global Competence and Cultural Inclusion. As a multicultural school, Yeronga State High School in Queensland values and acknowledges the differences and understands the barriers existing within the complex area of cultural understanding. With a population of 950 students from 50 different cultures, Yeronga State High School strives towards inclusivity, sustainability, equality and success.
Meg Languages Program Announcement
The Student Congress, a group of students from across the high school, was specifically set up to address Global Competence at the school, through their own, and peer’s perspectives. Across the year, the Student Congress members took part in various initiatives and participated in the external programs, such as Together for Humanity and the Meg Global Citizenship Ambassador Program, which all made a significant impact on developing an understanding of what discrimination is and how to reduce its risks.
At the start of the year, we established a smaller student leadership group of five students from Grades 8 to 12. These Global Citizenship Ambassadors represented the wider Student Congress through their participation in Meg’s one-year Global Citizenship Ambassador Program. The program participation was aimed at supporting the student congress’s wider aims for 2024.
What is Global Competence?
Queensland Department of Education Global Competence Framework
To start this important work, we knew we had to first understand what Global Competence is.
Global Competence might not be a term familiar to readers. It is the combination of attitudes, knowledge, skills and understanding, applied to relevant global issues represented in our society. It's where collective communities unite together to take action, often using the SDGs (the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals). An important part of Global Competence is taking action on issues to improve our world. As I like to put it, Global Competence allows mere mortals to change the world for the better.
Queensland schools recently adopted a Department of Education-developed Global Competence Framework which can help us understand what Global Competence is.
Across the year, the Meg Global Ambassadors were involved in a student action project, with the major objectives being able to identify, communicate and reflect on issues that occur within the Yeronga community, ideate potential solutions, and select the best ones to then implement.
This helped us as young leaders, not only understand issues, but have the attitudes, knowledge, skills and understanding to act upon issues that negatively affect our society, developing our Global Competency skills.
Within the Queensland Global Competence Framework, student agency is central. For our student action project, we were supported to use Student Voice through discussions, engaging and informing students about the topic. We used Student Agency through taking action and making decisions on things such as social media, making posters for our events and educating others, including presenting at school assemblies.
Student Congress
The Global Citizenship Ambassadors collaborated with the Student Congress to identify some issues within our school community that we could tackle within the school year. Discrimination was a major topic of universal concern. As a multicultural school that strives to achieve equality, the differences displayed within opinionated individuals in the community affects this goal. Religion, race and gender equality were the main aspects we identified when looking at the challenges faced within discrimination. We decided to focus our work on cultural inclusion and addressing discrimination linked to this.
Before we started addressing our chosen issue, we created questions to help develop a clearer idea on different aspects of discrimination.
Who is a part of our community?
What are the different groups or sub-groups that make up our community? E.g. SRCs, Student Congress, cultural, religious, etc.
Through our questions and student led meetings, we developed a clearer understanding of our topic and why it was important.
Project journey and solutions
The Yeronga Student Congress provides a representative structure through which students can debate issues of concern and undertake action on them. This was the platform used to support the student action project that we focussed on for Cultural Diversity and Inclusion.
The first Student Congress highlighted why discrimination occurs within the Yeronga community. We discussed how this issue affects individuals and the community. The Student Congress members and Global Citizenship Ambassadors started by identifying where the problem lay and who it affected, so we had a better understanding of how we can stop this happening in the future.
The first step was to highlight why discrimination occurs within our school community. To do this, we created a survey that we sent to the students and staff. The survey was a valuable aspect of the project, as it allowed us to establish who had been impacted by discrimination, and in which ways. This helped us develop our project’s aims.
The second Student Congress identified the root causes of our issue, where and why it was happening, and what we can do as a community to reduce it. This laid the groundwork for us to develop solutions.
The third Student Congress focussed on planning our solutions and events. These projects also helped to create a wider sense of belonging within our school. As part of our solutions, we introduced our topic at our whole school assembly, designed and displayed posters to educate our community about the issues faced by many members of our school community, produced more Yeronga podcast episodes and encouraged more staff and students to share their perspectives.
Other initiatives and solutions included:
Regular meetings
Student Ambassadors gathered once a fortnight to create event ideas that could help inform the students about discrimination and the importance of this issue. These regular meetings helped us stay on track.
Cultural Diversity and Inclusion Workshop
Our Global Student Ambassadors took part in a Meg Cultural Diversity and Inclusion Workshop, alongside some Grade 6 students from our local primary school in a design sprint style event to learn more about local, regional and national cultural diversity and ideate possibilities for a more culturally inclusive school and community.
Podcast Logo
Yeronga’s Quick Chat
You can find the school podcast here: https://youtu.be/LDJzwbR_Tek?feature=shared
Students collaborated to identify relevant discussions topics, as well as to film and edit the podcast episodes.
Yeronga Celebrates! Poster
Yeronga Celebrates! Multicultural Celebration Day with Cultural Bunting
Students worked together to set up the whole school multicultural celebration day, to support and encourage others to perform and participate in the event activities. We displayed cultural bunting that students developed instead of national flags. The student event organisers felt that students with diverse identities were oversimplified by national flags, with many students not fitting into one country’s demographic. Cultural bunting allowed students to express their own cultural identity and heritage.
Worldwide News/Catch up with Culture
Worldwide News was a project to help inform students about current global events. It was also used as a resource for students to refer to if they need to talk about them. Through this initiative, we learnt a great deal about the complex area of cultural diversity and inclusion, including the ideas of bias and stereotypes. We realised we needed to do more work to understand Stereotypes.
Yeronga Celebrates! Promotional Banner
Addressing Stereotypes
Cultural inclusiveness supports a multicultural society that addresses the needs and values of their unique contribution. As part of our Cultural Inclusion and Discrimination Project, the importance of addressing stereotypes arose. Within a school community that has different opinions on genders, cultures and religions, many issues can arise which may affect the peace of that community. Stereotypes are, unfortunately, very common across all societies.
The Student Council helped identify stereotypical comments and then educate our community about the importance of accepting, respecting and protecting different genders and cultures in our communities. Stereotypical comments are offensive to everyone and can lead to consciously or subconsciously avoiding or limiting contact with entire groups of people. Inclusivity is important in our generation; as a society we need to appreciate everyone’s identity. By being truly inclusive we can overcome negative comments and perspectives and unify our communities.
Challenges faced
Although this work was rewarding and important, at times we faced challenges in designing and implementing our ideas. It was challenging undertaking this work on top of our other school commitments but we worked through them as a team, developing a range of leadership skills as we did so.
Challenges included:
· National changing time zones: as we took part in the Global Citizenship Ambassador Program with students across the country, we had to navigate changing time zones to meet online.
· Student absences: When students were absent or got busy, we had to work as a team to ensure the project continued.
· Project management: Time management was hard in order to implement all our ideas and we ran out of time to do them all. This meant that ideas left unfinished were available to the next year’s Student Congress to implement.
Our Learnings
Collaboration was a major skill we all developed throughout the project. The Student Congress made sure that everyone's ideas and voices were heard. Having multiple voices and opinions helped give the project a sense of originality and enabled us to understand different ways that discrimination impacted different aged people.
Throughout the year we focussed on celebrating, acknowledging, accepting and appreciating different religions and cultures represented in our school community. After implementing our solutions, important learnings were:
· Discrimination affects everyone; it doesn’t matter what your age is. We need to be mindful and respectful of others and not make unwanted judgments.
· When addressing sensitive topics in schools, we need to make sure we respect others’ rights to be anonymous.
· Not everyone is as fine as they say they are; we need to check in with others to make sure they’re okay.
· We need to stick up for students who are facing or witnessing discrimination; we may need to be their voice when they need help.
· Having a culturally diverse school means that we, as members of our school community, accept and respect everyone’s cultural identities.
Future ideas
With many challenging and important issues facing society today, global competence is important for everyone. It helps us tackle important issues and create solutions to make our communities a better place. It provides people with skills and knowledge to not only inspire but to lead others to improve our society. It’s accessible to everyone and it’s amazing to work together to share and explore ideas about global issues that you are passionate about.
Participating in this program helped me to understand the effects of identified issues on different people. It provided me with the skills and knowledge to design activities that connect individuals. Global Competence helped me allow myself to ‘be in the other person’s shoes’, which allowed me to view issues from others’ perspectives. Doing that helped me identify ways to help them.
I strongly advise anyone who’s passionate about issues in our world to develop their Global Competence. It helps you make a difference and it’s a great way to help your community out.It starts with the simple passion of making our schools and communities better places for us all. If we can do it, so can you.
“If you want to change attitudes, start with a change in behaviour.” William Glasser
Student Artwork