17 September 2025

Natalie Gentle, Education Programs Manager at Reconciliation SA and a member of the Department for Education’s Reconciliation Action Plan working group, and Leonie Shelley, Principal at Blair Athol North School (B-6), join us to discuss anti-racism in education. Natalie shares how Reconciliation SA’s Education, action and change: anti-racism resource for schools and preschools is a blueprint for teachers and educators to understand racism and foster anti-racist behaviour. The episode highlights the impacts of racism on learner and staff wellbeing and how to develop skills, strategies and capacity to engage consistently in anti-racism in schools.

Show Notes

• Reconciliation SA: Anti-racism resource for schools and preschools
• Department for Education: Reconciliation Action Plan.

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today we're talking about anti-racism in education. And we're joined by Natalie Gentle, who's the education programs manager at Reconciliation South Australia and Leonie Shelley, who's the principal at Blair Athol North School.

Thank you both for joining us. Now we're here to talk about Reconciliation SA’s ‘Education Action and Change’ anti-racism resource for schools and preschools. When we talk about anti-racism. Natalie, I might start with you. What do we actually mean by that?

Natalie Gentle: Anti-racism really is about action, like, taking an active role in dismantling the systems and your own, I guess, personal ideas and values that might impact your relationships with people. So we often talk about that as individuals, we don't want to be racist, and our kind of role is to reframe that we want to be anti-racist.

So it requires action, thought, ongoing effort to dismantle racism. It's not enough to just say, I don't want to be racist anymore.

Dale Atkinson: So it's more of an active stance than a passive belief set.

Natalie Gentle: So that's a really nice little segue because we often talk about anti-racism is not like a set of values. Like that is important because obviously none of us want to be racist. But if we just rest on that idea that we don't want to do that, nothing changes, we need to build our skills and capacity to be anti-racist. So anti-racism for me is about building skills, building our own capacity,

Dale Atkinson: And if there's one place that we like to build skills and capacities, it's in schools  and preschools. So can you tell me a bit about what the new resource for schools and preschools is and what does it intend to do?

Natalie Gentle: Yeah, so we developed the ‘Education Action and Change’ resource in, well, it was developed for a very long time, but launched officially in April last year. And it basically exists to support anyone working in education. So, from preschool all the way to secondary school, to engage in anti-racism practice.

So, it's not just about anti-racism, the ‘education’ component of it is to learn about what racism is, the history of racism in Australia, and how it impacts our students. ‘Action’ is really about anti-racism; so how can we be anti-racist educators and teachers? And then the ‘change’ section is our curriculum. So we've actually developed an anti-racism curriculum where anyone can pick up the resource and basically teach about racism with students from 4 years old to, you know, years 10, 11, 12, if they like.

Dale Atkinson: Might be a good point to bring Leonie in on that. So obviously your school is engaged with this resource. What have you found helpful about it and how have you used it?

Leonie Shelley: I think it's been – it's been helpful for our teachers to have something that really sets it out. So what's different from a junior primary to a middle primary to an upper primary, and how to approach that. We've sort of had a bit of a dovetail approach where we’ve done some action around challenging racism, but then bringing in that education side because that's where that will move us closer to reconciliation.

So what's been really useful is having that education side where it opens up the dialogue in classrooms around who we are, what we, you know, what might be the same, what might be different, but also what hurts people as well when we are having those conversations with each other.

Dale Atkinson: How are you interacting with families, students, your teachers? What's the journey that you need to go on in terms of engaging with this resource?

Leonie Shelley: So we've been on quite a journey, we started by really understanding our own positionality, so what are our biases, and allowing people to sit in that uncomfortableness of understanding that, and then how that might kind of colour the way that we see things and what we value as well. Right from, you know, what are we teaching that kind of brings through our values, to what are we standing up for, and what are we kind of interrupting when we hear and see racism as well.

So, Natalie and Kirsty came in with Reconciliation SA and we did some education with our whole staff. And then as a leadership team, we gave people some really easy actions and phrases that they could use, just to get them started because it is a challenge for people and I think people do feel a little bit scared about taking that on.

We had lots of conversations with our families. Our school is quite multicultural and so, it was really important for us to have those conversations with families. And then with our students, we had some really strong conversations, so we had to be quite fiercely anti-racist as a staff and then have a no tolerance kind of stance.

But as I said, dovetailing into that education around who we are and how we value each other, and, you know, ensuring that we have that sense of belonging. Yeah, so, it's quite multifaceted, I suppose, about the approach that we've had to take.

Dale Atkinson: Natalie, you've been involved in this journey. What have you observed the across the course of the last little while?

Natalie Gentle: So we were just speaking about this before we started, because we obviously, we come in and we do a two-hour workshop, and so you can change people a tiny bit with that, but you leave and you hope that someone like Leonie takes that work and runs with it. What we've really noticed, I think from our perspective has been like really strong leadership and courage to take a real no nonsense approach to this.

We're gonna do it and this is gonna be our kind of rules and our boundaries around it. We've seen like a lot of repetition, so again, Leonie's been able to really focus on what the needs of the site were and be like, this is what we want to eradicate first. So they focused on really clear priorities to work on to begin with.

And I think something that I've really loved is watching how the school has taken on those ideas of education, action, and change, and almost created a framework for what those mean within the site. So, things that they're working on that are immediate, urgent issues and then things that are more about cultural shift for the school.

We are really lucky as well – we've had an ongoing relationship with both shell and also the Aboriginal education team, so we kind of do pop in and out, see how things are going. We know a lot about what's going on with the Reconciliation Action Plan at the school. It's very much, I think, a multifaceted approach that anti-racism is part of this really big picture or tapestry of things that they're working on, and they're all deeply connected.

Dale Atkinson: Now we talk about, obviously Reconciliation SA has led out on producing this resource. And this might be an interplay between the two concepts, but what's the relationship between reconciliation and anti-racism and how do the two concepts kind of work together?

Natalie Gentle: So, anti-racism, honestly, is a foundation for all the reconciliation work that we do. Something that we've really talked about a lot is that we often start talking about reconciliation when anti-racism work should come first, because you can't really separate our history in Australia from racism.

We were, you know, colonised and, and founded on a lot of racist ideas. And so we need to understand that historical legacy and how that impacts how we engage and interact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, and families, and communities today. Reconciliation is about truth telling. It's about historical acceptance; it's about interrogating and investigating our systems and our institutions. It's about equity, and then it's about unity. And so really to achieve any of those, they're called the ‘five dimensions of reconciliation’, what I just listed.

But to achieve any one of those dimensions, I think it needs a foundation of anti-racism because you need to be able to look at our own positionality within how we interact with people. We need to be truthful and courageous. We need to look at our history. We also need to really review and interrogate our systems and how things like policy, process, culture, social contracts - all those things impact the lives of children and their families that we are working with as educators and teachers.

Dale Atkinson: So, these are quite big concepts in some respects and, and quite simple in others. How do we translate those things to young people and educate the young people? Leonie, what's been the experience there with work in a site that's birth to year 6? How do they engage with it as very young people?

Leonie Shelley: Well, we provided for, as a staff after Reconciliation SA came in, we looked at just some really short phrases that we could use with different age levels, so it was really age appropriate. So, I think that was really helpful as a starting point, and it just kept it simple. So with quite young kids interrupting, you know, racist comments and explaining to them those words hurt people – had a really big impact. And then as they get older, talking with middle primary kids, we've had the phrase changes more to, there's a lot of emotion behind that word – are you meaning to hurt someone like that? And maybe depending on the child, give them a bit of context around where that word has come from and what it actually means.

And then with our older kids, we were actually able to introduce them a bit more to that truth telling and some historical understanding about where that's actually come from. So that was a really useful step to kind of take these big concepts, but simplify it I suppose, in a way that made sense for everyone.

And it also gave our educators away to start addressing it. Whereas I think before there was a bit of, I don't really know what to do about this. And also, I think when we hear racist comments, and this happens as adults too, sometimes you're just a bit shocked that you've heard it and so you, you actually don't respond or you don't know – you say nothing. And that's possibly one of the worst things that we can do, is say nothing.

Dale Atkinson: And I think it sort of speaks to how you create a culture within an environment to create permission to challenge and empowerment. Have you seen that operate in other schools as well, Natalie? Have you seen how this has kind of taken hold?

Natalie Gentle: It's so different from school to school. So, one of the things that we really wanted to do in creating the workshop content and also the resource was create something that was not prescriptive and could be contextualised based on how sites are feeling and their own knowledge base. The biggest piece of feedback we've had about this has come from Aboriginal education teams and is just the permission – which was not our intention when we created this resource – but to bring racism to the table and start talking about racism really openly with students, with families, with their colleagues and staff and leaders.

So, people are bringing that book and saying, it says racism on it, so we can talk about this now which I think that empowering is a really good word. Because it is giving people the tools that they maybe were missing before to come and say this, we need to start kind of working on this as a team and focusing on this.

So, we've had a wide range of responses, I would say, to the workshop, but we definitely are seeing lots of unique things come as a result of that. So, student action groups, we've seen, a school bring together like a multicultural action group. So they're looking at, well, how can we take our learning and they are a high school? So they've got a different level of capacity.

Some really unique opportunities I think come from engaging in the workshop and, and even just looking at the book can help you uptake opportunities and do something brave and exciting and different with your site.

Dale Atkinson: So it sounds like it's a resource that can be, you know, really moulded to suit the strategy and the, priorities within the site. Has that been a deliberate kind of act on your part?

Natalie Gentle: Yeah, look, we, we definitely didn't want to tell teachers how to do anti-racism work in a prescriptive way. There's definitely things that I think Leonie's really spoken about, like naming racism, when it's racism that don't have a lot of negotiating. But the curriculum guide and the resource, it exists for people to like put their own stamp on it, bring their own personality, their own context into it.

Teachers know how to plan, they know how to do their curriculum and how to implement that. So, we just wanna give them a nudge and for them to then, you know, utilise that within their setting in ways that suit them and suit their students. Because Blair Athol was a very different site. We've worked all across suburbs, eastern suburbs, we've gone regional. We did our workshops in Port Augusta. So, each site is gonna have a unique take on how they do this.

Dale Atkinson: I bet they will. Now, Leonie, for your unique take. What's the key learning that your educators have taken away from this work and what would be your recommendation to other leaders?

I think the key learning has been that when it does come out in the open and we name it – it's a lot easier to then do something about it.

And that's been the big difference, I think, is that being able to name it. So, we have a cohort of kids now who can name it, and they're actually kind of calling it out themselves. As a leadership team, you need to be really fiercely anti-racist and you need to have a stance about it because when we are neutral, we can't actually do anything about what we want to do.

So, I think that's been a, a really big piece of learning for us and, and brings people along as well when they've got a stance and they know, have that clarity of, okay, this is what we are all kind of moving towards. I think their permission was really a key thing for us and the idea that we are all just, we are all striving to be anti-racist.

We are never going to be 100% anti-racist maybe, but we're all striving and we are learning together. Yeah, so I think been a key learning and for us it was just holding the line initially because we were seeing around 3 to 4 incidences that involved racism a week, and we've maybe had 2 this year.

So last year we had, you know, we were dealing with this continuously, but we all banded together, and we held the line and brought our families along with that. So, they understood that we had this strong stance and now we are in place where we can focus more on the education and the reconciliation side of it.

But kids know and families know what will be tolerated and what won't be.

Dale Atkinson: It's an incredible journey. Natalie, you mentioned earlier that the foundation for the reconciliation stuff sits around approaching anti-racism as the first step, and it's interesting Leonie that you talk about that is something that you can now move on to focus on.

What does it look like in terms of good approach to focusing on reconciliation as a practice, once you've got some of those foundations in place around anti-racism?

Natalie Gentle: When you focus on anti-racism as like your first step, it will just influence the way that you think about everything else. Because our work, it asks people to think about their positionality, who they are, what they bring into the classroom, what their values are, how they maybe have developed biases, how they've developed ideas about students, what they value, what they don't value. That's all related to the bodies that we're in. And so then every decision you make from that point on will be impacted by anti-racist practice. When you start to think about how our world is shaped by racism a lot of the time, it then builds your capacity to be able to make decisions in your school around what you're prioritising in your curriculum, how you’re engaging with students, with their families, what sorts of decisions you make, what policies you work on.

It filters into everything when it comes to reconciliation.

Dale Atkinson: I think that's a good point on which to leave it. Natalie Gentle, Education Program Manager at Reconciliation South Australia and Leonie Shelley, Blair Athol North School Principal. Thank you very much for your time.

Leonie Shelley: Thank you.

Natalie Gentle: No problem. Thanks for having us.