From the Director of the Pymble Institute

Research typically takes a long time and the duration is often key to phases of reflection which add to the richness of the output. For the past year, I have been involved in an incredible project with a group of graduates from my school which has focused on the communication of research and practice. The (now) ex-students – graduates of Pymble’s class of 2022, Fiona, Faye and Isharah – began working with me and fellow teachers in 2021 on an anti-racism initiative which resulted in student-devised, prejudice reduction curriculum being developed and implemented.

Professor Fiona White from the School of Psychology, Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney, was our academic guide throughout the journey. Her expertise supported us to develop three lessons on unconscious bias, microaggressions and casual racism. Many of you will have seen Professor White in the ABC TV series, ‘The School That Tried to End Racism’ (Karabelas, Woodward, Foley & Ozies, 2021), where she was the academic advisor. Professor White’s expertise in the field – plus her experience in working with schools – helped us conduct research about the efficacy of the intervention. We used an instrument from Professor White’s research, the Cultural Issues Scale (CIS) (White & Abu-Rayya, 2012), which allowed us to craft a pre- and post-lesson survey to evaluate their impact. The Cultural Issues Scale measures blatant and subtle racism by asking respondents to rate the seriousness of scenarios including making a joke about someone’s background and not enrolling a student in a school because of their culture.

The College’s research involved around 200 Year 12 students and indicated that, prior to the lessons, ratings of both subtle and blatant racism were low in the cohort. The post-intervention survey revealed a reduction occurred in both subtle and blatant racism. There was also a rise in students’ metacognitive cultural intelligence which could likely be attributed to the impact of the three lessons. This finding was very reassuring to the project team, but we wanted to go further.

The students felt strongly that we had an important story to tell about how student voice contributes to curriculum development in the area of prejudice reduction education in secondary schools. Since December 2022, Faye, Isharah, Fiona and I have met regularly via MS Teams to construct an article which captures how the project came about and what it achieved. We have journeyed through the students’ new life phases of receiving their HSC results and university offers, attending ‘O’ week, starting university courses, tackling end-of-semester exams, moving dorms, and even moving countries to take up study at Oxford! Writing in a scholarly way with ex-students about a school-based project is not a common undertaking and we often felt we were in new territory. We look forward to the paper soon being published which will be a happy achievement.

Through co-writing, these young scholars have gained insights into how academic journal articles are written and they will soon have a publication under their belts. However, this will draw our post-school, online catch ups to a close. I will formally let my Principal know the partnership has ended, and I’ll cease taking notes to document the meetings. We will close off the always-open Google documents we have been working in for this past year. These three ex-school students, now university students studying law, economics, politics, gender studies and philosophy between them, have made an unusual and unique contribution to literature. I can’t wait to follow their research careers from here!

References

Karabelas, J., Woodward, J., Foley, E., & Ozies, C. (2021). The school that tried to end racism. [Documentary series]. Screentime Pty Ltd.

White, F.A., & Abu-Rayya, H.M. (2012). A dual identity-electronic contact (DIEC) experiment promoting short- and long-term intergroup harmony. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48, pp. 597–608.