#008 - Why Cultural Diversity is ESSENTIAL In Education 🌍📚

Here in Australia, we have people from all over the world, and we have this incredible opportunity to connect with them, to learn from them, and to bring their natural resources into our classrooms. Welcome to Neuro Education, where we're exploring the neuroscience of how to switch on the brain to supercharge learning. I'll be sharing with you innovative teaching techniques, effective parenting strategies, and educational advocacy. I'm your host, Angie D. Together, let's revolutionize children's learning. Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us again on Neuro Education podcast with Angie D. Today, we're gonna be talking about what are some great resources that are easy to source and cheap, if not free, that you can do at home with your children or at your family daycare, childcare center, school, wherever it may be to explore the world and even our letters and our numbers. So, I wanted to start by a absolutely fantastic method of exploring the world from our own little backyard. There's a beautiful song by Ella Jenkins, and in the song she says, we can travel on a boat, we can travel on a plane, we can travel in a song, and we can travel in a game. And she goes on to say all the different ways that we can travel, but really, we can travel through music, through dance. There's so many things that we can do to explore the world right from our backyard. When I was doing some volunteering to teach English to refugees at a fantastic school here in Brisbane, Australia called Mill Para High, I learned so much about the world, so much about languages, cultures, dance, food, from all the amazing cultural experiences I had right there at that school. And how do we do this? Because the students were sharing, parents were sharing, and I felt even after I went to another country, which I went to Tahiti in 2004. I loved Tahiti, loved the people, loved the food, loved the dance, but I didn't feel like I had a huge, let's say, culturally personal experience because while I went to a cultural show and I watched the dance, I ate the food, sated a beautiful resort, I didn't feel like I got to really meet the people. But here in Australia, and I would say in many Western countries, we have people from all over the world and we have this incredible opportunity to connect with them, to learn from them, and to bring their natural resources into our classrooms. And a lot of these parents and grandparents, they want to share. If you come from another country and you've come all the way to a country that speaks a dramatically different language, lives dramatically different kind of style of life, it's not only an honor and a privilege, but it's just so nice to be able to acknowledge a totally different way of life that they have come from and their children and their grandchildren. So it's beautiful to honor that in our schools, in our centers, family daycare centers, and in our homes. And there's lots of ways we can do that by inviting friends to share different cultural things. But as a teacher, something that I really enjoyed doing was bringing people in, family members, mothers, fathers, grandparents, to speak about their experience in different countries and come to share different things, whether it's a song, whether it was some delicious food, or they even got to cook some special food from different countries. There are schools where I have seen doing a cultural expose where they're doing a beautiful expo, children picking different countries and getting to share all different things. But in terms of some DIY resources, one of my absolute favorite activities, geography activities to do with children, is to create a collage of the world. And it is free and easy. It literally didn't cost me a cent for this geography project that I did with children that lasted months. And they got to come back to it and they kept adding and adding and adding to it. So what I did was I wanted to create a massive map of the world, but I wanted it to be a visual map of the world. So I went to a shop that sold blinds and I asked if they had any cutoffs. Sure enough, they had plenty. And one of the cutoffs was maybe four meters by two meters. So it was a huge piece of canvas. And I painted the background blue and we outlined all of the different continents. And I went to my local travel store and I asked them, do you have any magazines that you don't use? Because travel stores always have magazines that are outdated. Whatever the tours were to roam the year before, it's updated, it's got a new price, or whatever it may be. And so they have all of these magazines. So I brought these magazines from all over the world in a big box. I had glue and I had scissors. The only two things that probably cost me money, but I already had a lot of those resources. And we had this massive map of the world. And different children got to choose different continents. Asia, Africa, North or South America, Europe, Australia, Antarctica. And they got to cut out the pictures that they thought visually showed the continent, the beauty and the wonders, the people, the food. And lo and behold, after several months, 'cause they worked on it maybe for half an hour here or half an hour there, we had this incredibly beautiful canvas that was this visual map of the world of some of the most beautiful places you can imagine. But what was amazing about this process was like the saying goes, the journey. It's not about the destination because the children would ask so many questions. Why is the rocks that color in this country and where is this and why is the water formation like that and why are they dressing like that and where is this from? And we did so much deep and meaningful learning which was from the children's interest, which we know their brains activated when they're interested and they're engaged in their asking questions. We did so much beautiful, deep and meaningful learning around all of these countries, these landmarks about the lateral landscapes, the people, the food, the culture, the customs, the religious traditions. So many of these things through these beautiful images that sparked the interest of the children. It was such a fabulous project and I've done it replicated in different ways in different schools around Australia that I've worked in. But it's one of my favorite go-to experiences that you can bring in a world of learning by obviously asking parents, asking grandparents, but also creating this beautiful visual display and exploring the questions that the children have of different things from different countries and continents along the way. So Montessori, I have to do a shout-out to one of the most amazing materials because Maria Montessori was brilliant in the way that she created materials that were very hands-on and interactive and child-led. And the Montessori globe that children even as toddlers start with is a world globe that just has blue, silky paint for the water and rough sandpaper for land. And that's what they start with. Here is the water and here is the land. That's what our world's made up of. The next globe goes to the continents. So rather than having all of the countries broken up to the hundreds of countries and children having to figure out all these countries, it's just Asia, Africa, North and South America, Europe, Australia, Antarctica. And the children get to explore these by having different color codes for each of the continents and each of these continents then have their own little folder and you can have special pictures of food and people and religious traditions and landscapes from all these different countries that are color-coded back to the continent and then an object box with fun little things, whether it's magnets or little artifacts from those countries. And it's a fun way of having something in the classroom that children can explore different parts of the world. And they can build up on it with magazines just like you could make a poster, you can make little things to add to the folder as well. And it gives them that little sense of, I feel like a little bit of independence that they're contributing to it. In the same way, we'll get to ABC Letter Mastery Resources in another episode, but you can do the same thing, exploring countries of different letters, animals, foods from around the world and you can break these into all of the letters from A to Z and it's a fun way to explore the letters and practice the letters by exploring the world around you as well. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you for tuning in. Please, if you can do our podcast, a massive favor, give us a review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify and subscribe on our YouTube channel. We have more information down below and all the links below. I'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in.