Now more than ever we live in one world ...

"It opens their eyes … I think that's a terribly important aspect of education."

This quote from one of the following stories provides a view that was universal among the interviewees. 'It opens [students'] eyes' - meaning that a focus on Asia broadens perspectives, introducing new ideas, ways of thinking and points of view.

You will notice as you read that this perspective is coloured by three sorts of elaboration.

a multicultural context

The first is that some teachers are already working in multicultural circumstances and quite rightly feel they need to reflect this fact in their school's programs and offerings.

Vietnamese and other Asian students have for some time been the dominant group in the schools in this area as both first and second generation migrants. It was crucial to know something about their countries and cultural backgrounds. So our school's interest has been driven by responsiveness to our parents and the kids. That is not always easy. But once you get started you understand the richness that global approaches can engender.

The primary intention was to get students understanding other cultures which exist within our own community, our neighbours, and the huge range of diversity within cultures. We want to challenge and shift stereotypical perspectives. And that happens. We are achieving what we set out to do.

This is a useful reminder not just that around 800,000 Australians speak an Asian language at home, but also of the fact that significant numbers of foreign born, fee-paying students are entering Australian schools.

a monocultural context

The second is a mirror image of the first. These teachers are working in situations that they perceive as largely monocultural, and they are concerned that their students' school experience should reflect a wider world.

The major benefit? It is terribly important to connect rural students with some of the basic facts of the 21st century and our neighbours in Asia. Some of them will barely leave the small towns or settlements in which they live now. They have a much richer, a much better, life as a result of the exposure they get at school to these issues. It's the wider view. That's what we can and do offer.

The students here are basically Anglo-Saxon. They live in very small self-contained communities where it is all too easy for them to be left behind. I think it is absolutely essential to try to incorporate other cultural experiences in their schooling to give them some wider perspective.

And it's not just rural students. This is from a teacher working in a suburban setting in a capital city with an enrolment that has a similar cultural uniformity as those in the two rural schools.

Open-mindedness. No question. The change can be striking. More tolerance, more interest in and acceptance of other points of view, less inclination and haste to judge. When the kids talk, you can just hear it in what they say. The change in parents and their attitudes over the time I've been at the school is just as dramatic. I can remember early on when kids were kept home because Tibetan monks were visiting the school. That wouldn't happen anymore. They are much more accepting of, and grateful for, what we are trying to do.

Both contemporary and traditional forms of fiction
take students to unfamiliar places, or, in this example,
to stories which explore links between Australia and Asia.

student futures

The third reason is closer to the surface in secondary schools, where students' adult futures are of more immediate concern. This is a view that those futures are bound up with internationalism in terms of employment and other forms of productive and, increasingly, necessary contact.

Stronger intercultural consciousness and capabilities to cater for the immense diversity of futures that our students may encounter. [These sorts of programs] are productive of new ways of thinking about the world, with new lenses for looking at ideas and events; and all that comes from opportunities to interact with people from differing cultural backgrounds and environments.

A summary set of reasons which would be shared across the board by those interviewed was expressed this way.

Our students become more empathic with a broadened mindset that is culturally inclusive. I think it is obvious that they are more considerate and better informed. With younger students it is more about awareness raising and building an understanding of others, but I can see our older students developing, what we call these days, cultural intelligence.