A new Jesuit school will open its doors in the Sydney suburb of Redfern later this year. It is the first Jesuit school to be established in Australia in 60 years, and one that goes to the very heart of Jesuit teaching: equality and opportunity for all.
Catering to Aboriginal students, the primary school – tentatively named Jarjum College – will identify children who have fallen through the cracks and who are not attending school regularly due to disadvantages. It has been sponsored by St Aloysius’ College, Milsons Point, but will be an independent Jesuit school.
Founding principal Beatrice Sheen says she’s honoured and excited to be involved in this potentially life-changing project. But she’s ever mindful that the school’s success will depend to a large extent on the support of the people it serves.
Jarjum will offer short-term assistance to at-risk children, returning them to the mainstream schooling system wherever possible. But Beatrice concedes that once the community’s precise needs are revealed, the model may change.
‘[These students] have got different needs. Their learning styles are different. So the kids fall through the gaps, and that’s why we’re trying to close the gaps. But if we can teach them resilience and they make it to high school, then they’ve achieved. And if they go further, well…..’
And there is no better model of resilience for the future students of Jarjum than Beatrice, a woman who left school at the age of 14 and married when she was just 17.Beatrice is also part-Aboriginal, a fact hidden from her by the adults in her life and which she only discovered at her paternal grandmother’s funeral.
‘I went to the funeral with my grandmother, my mum’s mum. And I’m going, “Who are they? What are they?” because there were all these black people there and I’d never seen a black person. And my grandmother said, “They’re your cousins”. Well, I hid under her frock. I was so scared.’
Today, the fear has morphed into intense pride. ‘I’m a Gamilaroi woman from Gunnedah’, says Beatrice without hesitation.
‘Until the day my father died he didn’t recognise the Aboriginal in him. Because in those days if you were white you could get away with it, and it was shameful to say you were Aboriginal. But I’m very proud of it.’
At the age of 38, and eight-and-a-half-months pregnant with her third child, she enrolled in an education degree at the Australian Catholic University, at the urging of her parish priest.
‘I had one week off when I had the baby, and that was two weeks after I started, but I thought, “They’re not graduating without me!”.You can do it if you want to. When I sat in the lecture hall and they were talking about bibliographies, I had no idea what they were talking about! But I got through it.’
No doubt this feisty, determined approach will rub off on the children who come into Beatrice’s care. And she will ensure that they are taught in a way that appeals to their own special strengths.
‘Everything will be practical, because they won’t hang around if it’s airy fairy. We’ll use a different pedagogy for the kids because we want them to come to school, we want to make them welcome, so it’s going to be a nice learning environment.’
Asked what her own dreams are for the students of this fledgling school, Beatrice speaks as one who knows that the possibilities are endless.
‘I hope the students realise they can do anything they want to in life. The world is their oyster, really, but we’ve got to get that into their heads.’
29 March 2011