Education Review Issue 7 October-November 2021 | Page 18

in the classroom

Early intervention

Presenter Marc Fennell with students from The School That Tried to End Racism . Photo : Supplied
A bold experiment to tackle racism at school comes to the ABC .
Marc Fennell and Kevin Dunn interviewed by Conor Burke

The School That Tried To End Racism is a three-part TV series that documents one school ’ s attempt at identifying and challenging racial bias .

Hosted by award-winning journalist and author Mark Fennell , the show follows the school over three weeks as it implements a ground-breaking pilot program designed to provide school children with the tools to identify racial bias and make positive change .
Filmed in a NSW primary school , a team of inspirational educators , and leading expert Professor Fiona White , attempt to reverse the racial bias in an ordinary multicultural class of 9 to 11-year-old students .
Marc Fennell and consulting academic Professor Kevin Dunn ( one of the lead researchers of the Challenging Racism Project at Western Sydney University ) joined Education Review to discuss the show .
ER : What did you know about racism and the curriculum prior to the show ? MF : It ’ s interesting , because my real experience of it at school is you don ’ t talk about it . The way we talk about the history of race in Australia , at least when I was coming up through school in the 90s , was you had one page of Indigenous history and then Captain Cook arrives , and then the history of Australia begins .
It ’ s nice to know that that is not the case these days . I ’ ve got small kids aged five and seven , and they ’ re getting a much more rounded history of Australia that encompasses both our colonial history and our first nations history .
Specifically in terms of racism , I think it was really interesting in how little that had moved on . We were talking to 11 and 12-year-old kids who already have had direct experience of either blatant or subtle racism .
I know by the time I was 11 or 12 , I had experienced it too . The research tells us that those attitudes around race really get in around adolescence . So it ’ s important to give kids a toolkit with which to talk about it . And that ’ s really all the show is . It ’ s about giving kids a toolkit with which to navigate talking about race and things that make us the same and the things that make us different . And once they have that toolkit , you can actually do incredible things to have better conversations around race .
One of the reasons I think this series is really important is simply because the word ‘ racism ’ is like a grenade . Nobody wants to touch conversations around race . Either you ’ ve experienced it yourself and you ’ re concerned that you ’ re going to get told you ’ re playing the victim card or somebody tries to minimise it , or you ’ ve never had any experience of it , and therefore it ’ s not that big a deal , right ? Or you think if you say something about it , you might say the wrong thing and you ’ ll be cancelled forever . So it ’ s very hard for adults to talk about .
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