Be heard and understood - our Student Leadership Day!

Student Leaders had a chance to speak up on behalf of their class and campus. Students from Year 5 to Year 13 from all of our 3 campuses gathered at our Libus site to explore and improve their leadership skills, learn from one another, and identify how they can have the most impact on the school community. This year’s theme was “Representing Diversity”, and looked at how we can make sure that our student leaders hear and represent the voices of all students in the community, and not only the loudest voices. Activities in the afternoon were prepared and run by the Head Students from Year 13. The Student Leaders did a fantastic job throughout the day and raised some very good points for further exploration by the campus teams in the future.

Our guest speaker Jessica Stephenson, the Learning and Evaluation Program Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, works with diverse global communities to fund and support them in contributing to the "sum of all knowledge" and talked about the importance of diversity within media sector.

Did you know that 80% of content submitted to Wikipedia comes from white males aged over 30?

"Wikimedia is a global movement of activists, many people like the student leaders at PBIS who want to contribute to a better world. The idea is that Wikimedia can really represent the true diversity of knowledge in the world, and to ensure that we represent this correctly with information that is reliably sourced and without a bias.”

Sadly, the reality specifically on social media or some news media outlets on social media is very different. We can see polarisation and misinformation. Lack of source proofing and transparency together with the high reach of social media posts/news can lead to false assumptions or beliefs, which are not based on facts. Jessica also mentioned this issue during her speech:

"We see polarisation and misinformation and we cannot be sure what sources are real or unreal. Wikimedia wants to build a world where everybody can contribute knowledge with verifiable information and where we can do this collectively, and when there are disagreements about different visions or historical facts they can be discussed and mediated. We're not building this system of polarisation or arguing with each other. This is very important as we explained through the exercises we did during the Student Leadership Day workshop, that 80% of Wikipedia is written by a very small group of people in the world. 

Usually represented by white males living in Europe or the US, and this is how historically, a lot of knowledge and history has been written about. Today, we live in a much more diverse world where knowledge can come from oral history, women that have not been represented by history, have not been written about, only 20% of content on Wikimedia is written by women about women. Only 18% of people who contributed on Wikipedia are under the age of 25, so we need youth to have their voice on these platforms.

During this activity, students could see a group of diversified students of different ages, backgrounds, nationalities, languages spoken, which helped them to understand the importance of hearing all voices to avoid bias. Mastering these skills will help them as student leaders to represent their year group adequately. Jessica also mentioned how this activity can help students in the future:

"Wikimedia can be used to really develop those skills that are needed today in our lives and also in the future in professional life, which we know as media and literacy skills, to understand how to verify information to look for sources and to identify bias."  

Finally, students were encouraged to think about Wiki challenges and think how they could run a contest at school to get students involved to write, to photograph, or make videos to contribute to Wikipedia projects and represent their knowledge which may not have been represented. In mixed groups, they worked together to shape a plan on how to represent diversity. All the groups presented incredible ideas about how to promote diversity of food and cultures at each campus, how to tell stories of local heroes (students, teachers, community members), how to promote equity in sports, how to develop welfare through meditation, how to document endangered species and the lives of communities where these endangered species are. 

Thank you to our Student Leaders and Head Student for their great contributions and enthusiasm throughout the day!