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Hands 2: Community, Facilitator Guide 15
Activity 1: Sharing and talking about culture
Maintaining one’s culture, values and traditions is beyond price. Human
beings cannot live without that. We are glad to share our culture with
Europeans and other migrants but we will never give them up.
Getano Lui, jnr Thursday Island, 1994
(Australian Museums online Indigenous site)
• The purpose of this activity is to develop writing and oral
communication skills by celebrating an individual’s connection
to an aspect of their culture that the individual is comfortable
sharing with others.
• Ask learners to think about something that they can identify
within their culture that is important to them. Some of these
things may be tangible objects – e.g. places, objects, artwork,
songs, language – which can be described and named; some may
be intangibles – e.g. relationships, family, spiritual knowledge,
memories.
• Ask them to work in groups of 2–3 and discuss these things. One
person per group could be the writer and each group could list
these things and share their list with those of others. The purpose
of this is to include a broad range of possibilities.
• The teacher can write up a list of these things as the groups
contribute their ideas.
• Discuss with learners: ‘What it is that makes a culture special,
unique?’ ‘What do they think is most important?’ ‘In what way are
these things linked to each other?’
• Ask learners to bring to class something that is important to them
and that links them to their culture. Assure learners that this what
they choose needs to be something that they are happy and feel
comfortable sharing and explaining to others
• Discuss possibilities: these could be real items, such as food,
artwork (or photos of it), or less tangible items such as family
relationships. If less tangible, how could it be shown? E.g. a family
relationships might be shown in a family photo, a special place
by a photo, map, rock, earth. Songs could be used, words of a
language explained, a story told.
• Support learners in organising their presentation. Handout 1 gives
some ideas for guiding the structure to the presentation, but this
will vary according to what is chosen.
• Learners will need some time to prepare for this. Set a date for this
as a cultural sharing/celebrating day.