My latest communication from Indigenous Community Volunteers in Australia, whose website can be found here, prompted me to reflect again, very positively, on the power of connecting and sharing experience, and the immensely encouraging effect on individuals and on communities when people reach out and collaborate with one another. The vision of ICV is of …
Category: Uncategorized
Apr 07
Celebrating our uniqueness
I marvel frequently at how amazing human beings can be. It is a helpful – and true – contrast to the multiple messages we receive every day from different directions about how human beings can have a dark side of cruelty and violence; it is also an incredibly useful discipline to inspire to action – …
Mar 08
International Women’s Day – a day for equality, not just for women
The first International Women’s Day was celebrated in 1911, and then – as now – it was (and is) an opportunity to highlight and celebrate the achievements of women, and to focus attention on the work that still needed (and needs) to be done to ensure that women have equal rights, in whatever context they …
Feb 25
Why people are important in education – but so is technology
I had a very good experience recently when I phoned a Government department to sort out a claim: the (pleasantly reassuring) computer voice asked me to say in a few words what it was I was calling about, repeated back to me a very accurate summary of my issue, and then took me through a …
Feb 20
Developing a fuller awareness: International Mother Tongue Day
Friday of this week marks International Mother Tongue Day, which has been celebrated since February 2000, with a clear mandate from the UN to promote tolerance through recognising the diversity of linguistic communication in the world. This statement on the UN’s page devoted to the Day is striking: “Languages are the most powerful instruments of …
Feb 17
The courage to make a difference: Nasrin Sotoudeh and her fight for justice
It is easy to forget sometimes that we are immensely privileged to live in a society where we can take justice and freedom – of action and speech – for granted. No society is perfect, of course, and nor is any system of law or government, but on the whole, living in Australia, or the …
Feb 10
We have work to do …
I read a potentially rather depressing report recently about a survey of British teenagers post-GCSE (aged around 16), who were looking ahead to their futures and commenting on what was important to them, what they envisaged doing with their lives and what skills they thought they would need. The main takeouts of the survey, as …
Nov 22
Why life really is like a box of chocolates
In the 1994 award-winning film, Forrest Gump, the eponymous hero (played, as anyone who has seen it will remember, by Tom Hanks) utters the words “My momma always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get’”. It is a film worthy of its many Oscars, Golden Globes and …
Nov 08
The male-female divide in sport
An article in this Tuesday’s Sydney Morning Herald caught my eye very early that same morning – it was a story about Melissa Barbieri, former captain of the Australian national women’s football team, who finds herself without funding after taking a year out to have a child. In order to keep playing in the W-League, …
Nov 01
Schools leading the messages we need to hear in our world
I have been thinking a lot about the role of schools recently, and I have come to a very firm conclusion. All schools need to educate and to communicate, but this role should not be restricted to communicating and educating within the environs of a particular school; as schools, we need to speak out, more …