Children's Day and World Indigenous Persons Day

My centre is very passionate about Aboriginal Culture. We started our learnings with exploring Dreamtime Stories and Mia-Mia's. Mia-mia's are the shelters Aboriginal people built but the name might be different from region to region so make sure to check on what the name for your area is. We have done Aboriginal flag collages with the children learning the meaning behind the different colours. Maybe you can connect with Elders from your region and see about someone coming in to read Dreamtime stories with the children or do a cultural performance. But also be weary about the day becoming tokenistic. It's my belief, and a strong value of my centre's, that the culture should be explored properly and be a part of an ongoing learning journey, not just celebrated one day a year and then forgotten the rest of the year otherwise we're just teaching tolerance and not understanding, knowledge and respect.

Another issue to to with culture and inclusion is that I'm having trouble after several attempts to explain to others staff members,(it seems as if they just do't care!) about non-tokenistic art or activities for inclusion, such as having all 3 Australian flags displayed, or having dress ups, dolls with different ethnically backgrounds, or areas set up with cultural significance all the time (can be rotated e.g. foods in home corner or traditional dress for role play. Any ideas as I'm now just an assistant as I needed a break from being a group/room leader but I still think and believe this learning is VERY important.

This may help:

Tokenism In Early Childhood

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Lorina

S-Agnew wrote: #43471 Another issue to to with culture and inclusion is that I'm having trouble after several attempts to explain to others staff members,(it seems as if they just do't care!) about non-tokenistic art or activities for inclusion, such as having all 3 Australian flags displayed, or having dress ups, dolls with different ethnically backgrounds, or areas set up with cultural significance all the time (can be rotated e.g. foods in home corner or traditional dress for role play. Any ideas as I'm now just an assistant as I needed a break from being a group/room leader but I still think and believe this learning is VERY important.

I'm not sure what funding is like for your centre but I would explore options for professional training and development from Indigenous people. I'm in Perth and we had a PD session presented by this girl https://www.ccyp.wa.gov.au/our-work/projects/young-aboriginal-leaders/meet-some-of-was-aboriginal-leaders/mikayla-king/
It completely changed the way we saw the Aboriginal culture and resulted in us becoming very passionate about it and wanting to learn alongside our children. I'm sure there would be similar options for where you are, or maybe even get in touch with the above and see what contacts she has. Try and get in touch with elders in your area and see how they might be able to help; we now have connections with elders that do educator PD's about the local history and culture and come into our centre to do stories with the children. It's mroe expensive but if it's important to your centre, they'll invest in it.