By Kedina Hoeft, Y12
Our school can proudly say that its students are worldly minded people. Although our environment is extremely culturally diverse, not everyone is included equally. Our school wants to teach its students to be open minded people that can withstand the pressure of society to conform to stereotypes. Dr David Hawley introduced a concept called Inclusion through Diversity, Equity and Anti-Racism, I-DEA for short, which is meant to not only improve our school environment but teach students for life and prepare them to be more open minded citizens. This project is meant to promote a more socially and culturally diverse atmosphere at school. It aims to re-evaluate the engagement of the needs of students at school in concern to political, ethical, environmental and economic changes.
I-DEA is run by our Director General David Hawley, Yasmine Sadri who is the I-DEA Advisor and René Bujard the Leader of the I-DEA Board Task Force and is the Chair of the Policy, Risk and Procedures Committee.
The ultimate goal of I-DEA is to not only put policies and processes into place at school to make it more inclusive, but also wants its student and staff body to re-examine their own behaviours. They will be raising awareness on all aspects of school life in order to promote a more inclusive atmosphere like for instance; personal, interpersonal, institutional and cultural aspects. However, for the project to take any shape in the school environment it will require the participation of our whole school community. The point of this project is to discuss problems of discrimination within our school community and not highlight specific incidents that happened.
If you are interested in joining this project, I-DEA is interested in creating an Ecolint student led Steering Wheel. This Steering Wheel will include one representative from each campus for the following groups; Board, management, teaching staff, administrative staff, parents and year 11 to 13 students. The intention is to keep the group relatively small, but still allow two-way communication between the members of the Steering Wheel and other student representatives on campus who will report back issues and concerns.
The commitments for this project is that the members of the “I-DEA Steering Wheel” are required to come together for a minimum of one full day per term to discuss relevant issues. There will be smaller group meetings over the course of the terms where members will be in contact with people from the school community in order to report back their insights. The first meeting will most likely be online due to Covid, but will change to face-to-face meetings as soon as possible.
