Cultural diversity
Managing cultural diversity in schools and colleges M
odern Britain is a culturally diverse place, and for most children, the first time they come into contact with children from other races and creeds is in the classroom. It is important that children are taught to recognise and value the beliefs of others, and in our feature this month, we look at two schools actively working in this area. Helping its pupils to respect and value religious and cultural diversity has been a key objective for The Discovery Primary School in Peterborough, as its student population has increased over the past few years, reflecting the new migrant communities who have been drawn to the city in recent years.
Becoming three-form entry in September 2011, Discovery is a larger than average primary school with 500, rising to 620, pupils with an above-
average number from ethnic minority groups, including those from Muslim and Jewish backgrounds. Twenty-two languages are represented in the school.
So when head teacher Anne Hampson heard about the Interfaith Explorers bank of resources to promote interfaith understanding she saw an immediate application for it.
“We are a changed school,” she said. “While we’ve always had an international focus and felt that we wanted to teach our children about all different faiths, the new make-up of the school made that even more important. With Interfaith Explorers, I really like their angle that, ok, we may all have a different religion, but we also have a tremendous number of things in common,” she said.
This premise, that there is more that unites us than divides us, is at the heart of the Interfaith Explorers programme. It is a UNESCO-endorsed free online primary educational learning resource designed to add value to RE and PSHE lessons and to develop core personal and social competencies.
It is based on an idea by Professor Nasser David Khalili, founder and chair of The Maimonides Foundation, a charity committed to encouraging dialogue, co-operation and understanding between the three Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - through cultural and academic programmes. School improvement specialists EdisonLearning developed the resource and organise and support it on an on-going basis.
Designed to give teachers a trustworthy bank of resources to use when helping pupils explore different faiths, the Interfaith Explorers programme is highly interactive and promotes enquiry-based learning. One of the school’s favourite activities is ‘The Lemon Activity’ which teaches children about challenging stereotypes. Each child chooses a lemon and at first everyone views the lemons as all appearing to be the same, with shared characteristics including being yellow and having a similar shape. But, on closer inspection of their own individual lemon, the children discover that all the lemons are
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www.education-today.co.uk April 2014
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