Diversity drives learning at Te Aro School
Christmas and Easter celebrations are out, while Chinese New Year and Diwali are in for a Wellington school meeting the challenges of cultural diversity.
Geography is a strong point for pupils and teachers at Te Aro School, where 39 countries are represented.
Principal Sue Clement said 21st-century learning was about knowing where each student came from and keeping their native languages alive.
Events such as Chinese New Year had superseded more traditional New Zealand celebrations because they were more relevant to the school's roll, she said.
"You wouldn't walk into a classroom at the end of the year and see a whole heap of Christmas activities going on."
A large number of refugee families and children of international students studying at nearby Victoria University contribute to the 220-pupil roll.
About 8 per cent of the children were Chinese speakers, 12 per cent were from other Asian-speaking countries - including Cambodia and Vietnam - and one-third of all students spoke English as a second or third language.
Ms Clement said refugee children who had crossed borders and picked up new languages, and families with a national language and a regional dialect were common.
For the past few years, the whole school had learnt Mandarin, rather than a European second language, like French.
A weekly initiative, First Languages, was designed to help students retain their native tongues. For an hour each week, children got together in pods to talk in their national languages and work on cultural projects.
Kintaka Lim, 12, moved to Wellington from Jakarta when she was 4, and her mother continued to speak to her in Indonesian at home.
"I reply to her in English because that's what I speak most of the time with my friends at school."
Learning about other cultures, trying new foods and discovering countries she didn't know existed were highlights, she said.
With several pupils only in the country while their parents studied for a semester, saying goodbye to friends was regular.
Raymond Su, 11, said he kept in touch by email with friends who had left.
"It's fun that every day there could be a new student coming who could be a new friend."
Year 4 and 5 teacher Claire Tocher said the children were very good at listening to each other's stories and experiences.
"They expect each other to be different, and are mature about it."
On shared lunch days, the children were mesmerised by what was brought in, and asked a lot of questions about taste and texture.
Teachers were on first-name terms at Te Aro and, for some Chinese parents, who were more used to formal and structured classes, it took a lot of explaining, Ms Clement said.
"The children don't sit in rows of desks and you have to explain it to some families, because their expectations of a good-quality education can be different."
The Dominion Post