Connecting, catering for, and celebrating diverse student learners

Connecting, catering for, and celebrating diverse student learners

Schools are populated by learners with a multi-hued array of complex personalities, capabilities and needs. Learners from mixed cultural backgrounds; students needing support or challenge; and, those needing social and emotional support are in every classroom. Data at the heart of this research into inclusive schoolwide practices were collected from three Primary schools in a regional city in the state of Queensland, Australia. Each school comes under the jurisdiction of the Queensland State Education system and appropriate permissions were gained to conduct this research. Each school is of a similar size: the first caters for large numbers of students with special needs and has a low socio-economic rating; the second caters for both students with special learning needs and growing numbers of students from refugee families with a relatively high socio-economic rating; and, with an average socio-economic rating, over half of the students in the third school come from 32 diverse cultures and many students have special learning needs. A Refractive Phenomenological Methodology was used to analyse the data collected from focus groups and individual interviews with the lenses of the Research Based Framework for School Alignment and Schein’s understanding of organisational culture used as a means of filtering the data into specific themes. Students, teachers, leaders and parents’ voices can all be heard in the findings from this research project. Their blended experiences form a picture of inclusive classroom practices, celebrations of achievement and schoolwide principles for inclusion that have implications for other contexts.