Two Way Learning & Professional Development for Teachers

The education team at Culture is Life along with Rachel Perkins, the director and presenter of ‘The Australian Wars’ series hosted the ’Teaching the Australian Wars and First Nations Perspectives’ webinar on the 9th of November.

The webinar was designed to support teachers, who are keen to watch and teach the series in their school and classroom. There was a huge sign up, indicating a real need for this webinar, for those who couldn’t make it on the day and signed up, the recording will be available to you soon. For those of you who missed out on this opportunity, we will be offering a series of webinars to further support you, early next year and into the year.

The CisL education team talked through the new resource ‘Teaching First Nations Knowledges and Perspectives’ available on the Culture is Life education webpage, further explaining how this resource can help create a culturally safe classroom.

There was a lot of interest in the ‘Two Way Learning’ graphic developed with Teach For Australia, which explains how teachers of different cultural backgrounds and First Nations students enter a classroom and school and how working and learning from each other benefits all. As a result of the webinar this has now been added to the ‘Teaching First Nations Knowledge and Perspectives’ guide for you to utilise in your spaces.

Survey responses during the webinar indicated that only 90% of teachers who attended learnt The Frontier Wars history when they were at school. An alarming statistic that highlights the need for our true shared histories to be taught in schools. Something so many teachers like those who attended are demonstrating their commitment to changing!

The pre and post poll responses also indicated a significant increase, around 80%,  in attendees feeling more confident and safer to go ahead in a culturally safe manner to teach to the Australian Wars series.

The Australian Wars Education Resources are freely available on the CisL website for Years 10, 11 and 12. Understanding The Frontier Wars resources with accompanying short clips for Levels 9-12 are also available on SBS Learn.

It was fantastic to have time at the end, to get to participants’ questions to help them feel ready and safe to get into ‘The Australian Wars’ series utilising the ‘Teaching First Nations Knowledge and Perspectives’ guide along the way.

If you missed this webinar and would love to be a part of the next webinar in 2023, subscribe to our website to receive news about future events.