CREATIVE EDUCATION
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SAILing Into Uni (2012)
SAILing into Uni was a video-based project in the southeast suburbs of Melbourne, Australia that addressed pathways into university for refugee-background young people from Afghanistan and South Sudan. The project worked in two ways: first, in collaboration with 7 young people, short ‘public service’ clips were made to highlight and celebrate the educational achievements of these young people, and a series of ‘film fragments’ made to ‘talk back’ to universities about how they can better support students from refugee backgrounds. Secondly, over 100 young people from those communities were shown the public service clips and were interviewed about whether it made a difference to see young people from their own cultural identities celebrated for their educational achievements.
The project was a collaboration between Monash University Faculty of Education, Faculty of Nursing and the community organisation Sudanese Australian Integrated Learning (SAIL) program (2011). This project is ongoing as a partnership between Monash University and SAIL in order to address pathways for Sudanese students in Australia. For more information on SAIL, go to: http://www.sailprogram.org.au
Culture Shack (2012)
Culture Shack was a gathering of young people (ages 16-25) from the western suburbs for arts workshops conducted by local, national and international artists from Melbourne, Alice Springs, New York City and Montreal, with an eye to creating pathways into further education. Culture Shack offered workshops in playbuilding, physical theatre, digital animation and sound composition, video, slam poetry and hip hop.
Culture Shack grew as an initiative of Dr Dan Harris, Lecturer, Victoria University. All Culture Shack workshops were free and all workshops were designed to link to a TAFE Certificate III in Creative Industries.
As part of the program a symposium was held on called Artful Practices: A Community Conversation.
Teaching Diversities (2011)
Throughout 2011, the TD research team conducted a community consultation on how to better support lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer and questioning (LGBTIQ) young people from / in multicultural communities.
This project was conducted in 2 parts: part one was a community consultation across Victoria, Australia, which resulted in the Teaching Diversities report included here, in which the young people talked about the dual marginalisation they experience due to both racism and homophobia, and the artforms they would choose to address these issues in any public pedagogy project. During Part 2 of the project, the young people worked with a professional animator to produce the stop-motion animation, CALDPlay. Created for web release, CALDplay addresses some of the major concerns these young people are navigating in their everyday lives.
More support and information on being multicultural and queer can be found at http://www.agmc.org.au