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I think the crucial thing for schools to really
engage with the Asian Century is to build
sufficient ability inside the school to understand Asia,
Asian languages and Asian cultures in - in their
many shades and colours and complexions.
And so we need excellent teachers who deeply
understand Asia and Asian ways of thinking and we
need then to inspire students to want to take this
on as a challenge. I think those are significant
questions for us to really embrace the Asian Century.
As far as meeting the Asian White Paper
objectives I think there needs to be a cultural
shift in schools. Schools need to think very
seriously about the closeness of Asia and then how
that will impact upon us as a society and then
think about how that impact should then come down
at the school level. Our young people need to
learn about Asia. I think there's some challenges
ahead of us about incorporating Asia into our
curriculum but I think the Australian curriculum
is certainly saying to move towards that way, so
there are opportunities there for us.
The Asian White Paper objectives challenge
schools to look at their nearest neighbours.
It used to be really strong. There used to be really
strong links with Asian languages in schools.
Then it kind of disappeared and now the challenge is to
bring it back but I think we've lost some of the
skills and the teachers who did that work who
were really skilled in that. So I think getting -
the challenges are going to be getting your staff
and also looking at how it fits into your
curriculum that you engage in within your school.
I think the challenge is just for the leadership
to be committed to it. I think we - I think a lot
of principals would think when they - we talk
about implementing that White Paper they
immediately think "language". Language is not the
issue here. It's certainly a difficult one to
grapple with given that we don't have enough
teachers of Asian languages but there are lots of
innovative and creative ways of teaching language
full stop and we probably need to take some of
those on board. But for any leader in a school
it's easy I think to implement Asia literacy as such,
in a wide variety of ways. So it's about the
commitment of the leader to implement the strategies.
The White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century
really does throw down a heap of challenges for schools,
particularly primary schools. The biggest
challenge there I think is actually being able to
provide good Asian language education and to get
the people in to actually teach the language.
But there is also some really fantastic opportunities
in terms of study tours, getting to know culture,
cultural experiences where even, even here within Australia
with the communities that we have access to and the
organisations that can actually bring us to those other
places as well. So you know there's lots of challenges in it
I think, but the opportunity there and the -
again the opportunity to broaden what we do in our
curriculum is really, really important in that.
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