For the second session of our unit Inclusive Practices, there was an interesting discussion around religion and cultures. Basically, the point made was that UAL, a broad international institution who claims to be highly inclusive, the main calendar year and corresponding breaks and holidays are ruled by a Western and Christian calendar. Therefore, Islam, Buddhist, Hindu, and many other religions and their corresponding festivities don’t formally appear, putting students in sometimes uncomfortable positions. For example, someone mentioned the fact that students who are fasting for Ramadan don’t get any formal support or flexibility by UAL, and they have to continue their studies as usual.
Because of this, I plan to include with my students the development of a joint yearly calendar, where collaboratively we share our own cultural calendars. The idea is that everyone is invited to share which dates are important in their own cultures – for example, Easter and Christmas for Christians, or Eid and Ramadan for Muslims. The calendar doesn’t have to be religion-centred. Indeed, we could add Western New Years Eve, Chinese New Year, maybe even holiday times for each country. The idea is that each one shares what are the main festivities celebrated in their home countries.
Through this exercise, I think we could foster not only the inclusion of different cultures, but also of the different times and rhythms that each one has, and that sometimes are tightly attached to our original cultural systems. The result should be not only an instance to empathise and share with other cultures, but it would help lecturers to better prepare for and understand their students’ different timings.
The activity should last around 40-60 minutes. We would start by framing this collaborative calendar, and then we would craft an actual physical calendar. It could be a large cardboard where we put the whole year and each student can draw, write, put stickers, to mark important dates of the year. After this, students would be invited to share about how do they celebrate, what is it expected, and how are they planning to celebrate this year (if they celebrate it at all).
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