ABSTRACT
Classroom One: a Year 7 geography and commerce class at State High, a Sydney school in an old, traditionally working-class neighbourhood (Kalantzis, Cope and Noble, 1991). Since the late nineteenth century, this has been a fIrSt-stop suburb for wave after wave of immigrants - fIrSt the Irish, Scottish and English, then, after the Second World War, the Greeks, followed by the Lebanese and South and Central Americans, and now, since the end of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodians, Laotians. The school is officially designated 'Disadvantaged'. Ninety-three per cent of its students come from families where English is not the main language of the household. This is why the Year 7 geography/commerce teacher has taken a three-week in-service training course called 'Multiculturalism in the Classroom', run by the New South Wales Department of Education.
