Dear Parents, Teachers and Students,
Many of you would be unaware that I am the ACT Director of the National Catholic Secondary Principal’s Association. As such, there are meetings each term in different parts of the country. Earlier this week, I was in Darwin for the August meeting and had the opportunity to engage with many people involved in Indigenous education. On the Tuesday, Directors were flown to Bathurst Island to spend the day with the Principal and his community of St Francis Xavier High School. The whole day was inspirational. The imposition of the Australian curriculum on Indigenous communities poses challenges of relevance, cultural sensitivity (and insensitivity), resourcing, assessment, and staffing. None of this is surprising. All of this could be better done with greater voice and agency by Aboriginal Communities – particularly remote communities such as the Tiwi’s.
The Australian curriculum offers some flexibility, which is good. Teaching geography in the Margaret River of WA should be done a bit differently to its teaching in the La Trobe Valley or far North Queensland. But the efforts to do more with this flexibility is encouraging. All of the students that I met are multi-lingual. All of them possess a profound understanding of Indigenous cultural practice. Their capacity for dance and music is highly evolved and their ability to live “on country” for extended periods of time would fail most of us. I was inspired by a strong sense of community, powerful welcome and real spirit. It is not to say that issues of domestic violence, economic exploitation, and the delivery of services around public health, gambling and alcohol excess are not unknown to these kids and their families. Many of these social challenges are aggravated by distance. Having spent an hour teaching measurement to two year 9 boys, required extraordinary patience, pedagogical dexterity, and serious concentration on my part – the closing of The Gap didn’t move much for these boys in that lesson. The work of the teachers and leadership of that school points to the very best that Catholic Education can provide its community.
Thank you to college counselor, Catherine McMahon for her work on World Anti-Bullying Day conducted today (Friday the 18th). Many of us have been on the receiving end of bullying and emerged from it with varying degrees of success. It has to be admitted that some of us have bullied other people either intentionally or overtly – I’m sure I have. We can never measure the full impact of bullying on individuals and groups. Catherine’s work today helped to highlight the scourge of bullying on our society and offered pathways to recognise it, acknowledge it, and deal with it. Stopping bullying is a work-in-progress everywhere.
Yours Sincerely in St Mary’s College,
Michael Lee OAM.
Principal (Acting)
