Bishop Druitt College’s Rainbow Project

Posted: 18 November 2019

IDEALS

• Democracy
• Leadership

Discoveries

• Appreciation for diversity
• Problem solving
• Sense of responsibility
• Courage
• Self-awareness
• Compassion

Age range

Secondary

Overview

In 2018 a LGBTI Group was formed in an effort to support the students at Bishop Druitt College and their diverse needs and to promote inclusion and acceptance across the school. The group organise weekly meetings for students to come together with the aim of building a sense of belonging and community within the school and to develop their advocacy skills.

Recently LGBTI Group worked to develop an impressive art installation dubbed the ‘Rainbow Project’, a campaign to raise awareness of the issues faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) students at their school.

Planning

As a school Bishop Druitt aims to nurture character, embrace diversity, prioritise well-being and serve the community and encourages its students to realise their own leadership potential to be positive role models throughout the college. Collectively, students wanted to build on the progress made by previous students in Human Rights Group over the years which aims to support student diversity within the school and form their own specialised LGBTI Group.

The group is intended on being a safe space for young LGBTI people and their friends to raise awareness, tackle homophobia, develop a straight/gay alliance and is above all a place to learn more about LGBTI and gender issues.

The group is open to any high school student who identifies as LGBTI or their friends and currently has 15 members taking part.

Activity

The students form regular weekly meetings every Wednesday lunchtime with the support of the school counsellors and raised awareness of diversity through various community activities and created an innovative and collaborative art installation. During the creative process, students moved their weekly meeting to the art room and the whole artwork took two terms to complete. Once completed, the artwork was then hung up at the school in a prominent position.

The group then entered the 2018 Youth for Peace Project Award which encourages and recognises innovative projects by groups of young people aged 12-18 living in Australia, which address current social issues around peace and conflict using psychological knowledge or strategies. The Bishop Druitt College LGBTI group were selected as the 2018 winners and received $1000 in prize money which they are using for future projects.

Impact

This group and more specifically the work done in relation to the Rainbow Project has created a sense of safety among the students, provided a student voice, created friendships, enabled stories to be shared and created a sense of community in a fun and creative way. The existence of this group has helped to reduce the stigma around sexual identity and students are very open to understanding difference in this area.

Long term

We want all our students to embrace a spirit of mutual respect, service, inclusivity, integrity, courage, justice and generosity of spirit and on-going projects like this one go a long way in helping with that. By being public advocates for all these things, the students in the LGBTI Group are helping to shape a positive ethos within the school community.

We encourage our students to think about each other, to have ‘respect for all’ and to be generous to those in our community in need. Our Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning program helps our students to develop skills in making friends, being aware of developing resilience to bullying, developing goals, including others and being proud of our skills and attributes. Our school community is generally a happy place to be and our teachers take their duty of care responsibilities seriously.

Advice

• the best thing you can do to support any of your friends or family going through gender issues is to give them all the love you can, reassure them that they are perfect the way they are and try and use the correct pronounce should they prefer ‘she/her’, ‘he/him’ or ‘they/them’.
• Open the group to allies once formed and comfortable or established to ensure safety, privacy and confidentiality.

 

Author: Holly Heather, Marketing & Events Coordinator, Bishop Druitt College’s