This term students will be exploring the concept of culture. What is culture and what does it mean to be part of a culture? As a way into the inquiry, students were asked to consider the communities they are part of outside of school. These varied from sporting, to dancing, to horse riding clubs. They were asked to think about what knowledge they needed to be an active member of their community. Students shared with a partner all aspects of being an active member of their communities. They were asked to assume that the person they are sharing with wants to be a member of that community and that their job is to tell them all the things they need to know. Students then shared what they spoke about with the whole group. For example: Adam spoke about Karate. He said that one of the rules you need to learn is that you cannot make physical contact with your opponent. Archie P, who also does a martial art, spoke about the practice and tradition of bowing before entering the Dojo. Archie also spoke about the terms you need to learn like Sensei and the terms for some of the moves. Yvette spoke about netball and about learning the different positions in netball like Wing Attack, while Marta spoke about the moves for dressage in horse riding and the language needed for naming and identifying the moves. Thomas V spoke about the tradition of singing their club song for soccer when they won. Others spoke about the way some of their communities preserve their history through photographs and trophies of achievements. From these responses, generalisations were formed about rules, expectations and traditions. Other students were asked to share other examples of these to the rest of the group. We continued to explore different facets of being part of a community and recorded these on the whiteboard. The children were then asked to see if they could come up with a ‘We Statement’ to answer the question we set.
In order to be part of a community we need to know:
The rules and expectations;
The traditions and celebrations;
The language;
The skills and practices;
The history and sometimes;
The costumes you are required to wear.
The children then took time to test the statement out by comparing their communities with what they had learned about Aboriginal culture from their trip to the museum. The question was asked: Do Aboriginal children have rules, traditions, celebrations, language, history that they have to learn? This becomes the stepping stone or conceptual hook for taking the children deeper into understanding the concept of culture and what it means to be part of a culture.