Cultural background

Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up! is the theme for NAIDOC Week 2022. Here, we take you through some of the NAIDOC Week resources for educators to use in the classroom. We also talk to Nerae Preece from Badger Creek Primary School, and Connor Russell from Newtown State School, about what their schools are doing for NAIDOC Week.

Equal education involves many things – equal representation, participation, access to resources, and more. There’s a lot to explore around equal education in the Teacher archives, and in this edition of Teacher Staffroom, we bring you some recent examples.

For many of Australia’s regional and rural schools, accessing culturally relevant reading material can be a challenge. Here, we speak to Principal Jeff Parker and Early Childhood Leader Monique Marzocchi from Clyde Fenton Primary School in Katherine, Northern Territory, about how the school is working to improve student literacy.

‘I put my students’ cultural and social identities at the forefront of my teaching. It’s important to recognise the inequities they face.’ In today’s Q&A, Global Teacher Prize 2021 winner Keishia Thorpe joins us to share more about the work she’s doing to improve student outcomes in her school setting and wider community.

The biennial Narragunnawali Awards recognise Australian schools and early learning services that are implementing outstanding reconciliation initiatives. The 2021 winner in the schools category was St Virgil’s College in Tasmania. In today’s article Bridget Jenkins, the college's Aboriginal Student Support Teacher, shares some of the significant moments in the school’s reconciliation journey.

Little J, Big Cuz and their teacher Miss Chen are heading back to class for a third season of their Logie-award winning animated children’s series, which supports the transition from home to school for Indigenous children and their families.

In her final Teacher column of the year, Dr Sue Thomson explores data from a new large-scale survey of young people’s social and emotional skills that reveals significant differences between students from advantaged and disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.

A secondary school English teacher in Maryland, United States, who is passionate about supporting low-income students to access tertiary education has just been named the 2021 winner of the US $1 million Global Teacher Prize. In this article, we share the impact she’s having in her community.

Australian students report greater levels of respect for people from other cultures and more positive attitudes towards immigrants than the OECD average, according to a new report from the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). Find out more in today’s article.

What is excellence in Indigenous education? And, how is it conceptualised in practice? In this article, researchers from the University of Queensland, Dr Marnee Shay, Dr Jodie Miller and Dr Suraiya Abdul Hameed, share details of their pilot study in Queensland schools that explored these questions.