Explain a situation where you have had an ethical decision to make.

Something that jumps to mind was a situation that involved critically examining the balance between myself, my career and my family.  I have worked in low-socioeconomic status schools for my entire career (8 years) - starting in regional Victoria and then for 5 years at a school in Melbourne's inner north, called the Pavilion School.  The Pavilion School's guiding philosophy is every child has the right to an education (drawn straight from the UN Declaration of Human Rights).

I fully believe in this philosophy and gave my all to the school. I am someone who can have trouble drawing boundaries between work and home – I sort of like the energy and pace and stakes of working towards something but this can have trade offs. 

Anyway, in 2021 I started to experience what I think was burn out – my roll entailed considerable behavioural work so I was right at the pointy end of, and experienced, really challenging behaviours including property damage, assault and threats. Over time this caused me to sort of dread going to work etc. And, in turn, made me unable to give my all to the job and begin to feel compassion fatigue and less unconditional positive regard for our students than I once would have.  

More importantly, it took away from my ability to be a good father and husband when at home. It wore me out, made me irritable and distracted.  

This was pretty challenging given we had a 2 year old and just welcomed our daughter into the world in June 2021.  

It was probably around then that I had to take a hard look at what the ethical thing to do with myself was.   Do I continue to try and just give my all to the mission and values of the place I worked and the cause I felt so passionate about but at the expense of my family? Or, do I step out of the career I had begun to solidify and so I could be more present for my family, a better dad, a better husband.  

Ultimately, the choice wasn’t that hard – having kids really changes your outlook on life and what matters. Without kids I (we?) defined myself through different prisms: do I have a good job, am I "starting something new", am I successful etc. But kids kinda create your purpose and meaning and your reference points for success move away from being what other people think about you, or whatever, and become more about how you see yourself doing as a parent and a partner.  

So I decided to step out the school, to let someone else come in with fresh energy, fresh passion for the good of the students and the school too.  

Along the way, I was kind of lucky to discover a real interest, or enjoyment is perhaps a better word, for web development – I found the process of writing and creating and problem solving and thinking and learning to be quite therapeutic during some really challenging times at work. To be able to just focus on a black screen with colourful syntax and listen to music and work into the late night was very soothing and the opposite to my graft for the preceding 8 years.  

Ultimately, I hope to bring together my nascent technical skills as a web app developer and my deeper knowledge of education along with my intimate experience working with marginalised youth who have missed out for a long time to do something amazing for them and their teachers. To continue, in my own – perhaps small - way, my commitment to the cause educational equity and justice and, in turn, help every child achieve their right to an education. 

Describe how your culture has influenced your values and identity. 

I dunno. What is my culture and what “values” follow from this cultural association? I don’t really know it’s quite a problematic question to engage with.

If you grow up as a white man in Australia and you are vaguely self-aware and willing to interrogate yourself and your place in the fraught context of Australian history and not cover your ears and shut your eyes to uncomfortable facts – it's pretty hard not to realise the truth behind the words: "Always Was Always Will Be Aboriginal Land”.

Unlike here in NZ, Australia has no treaty between the British Crown and the original custodians of the land, establishing some sort of legal structure, however problematic, around the claims on sovereignty. This has lead to all manner of atrocity and displacement against the First Australians since Invasion. And its all sorta just locked in now despite the fact the Australian High Court, the Crown’s highest court in Australia, determined in ruling on Mabo v Queensland that the principal of Terra Nullus - via which British dominion was declared over the continent despite Aboriginal peoples' existence prior to invasion - was null. Logically, it follows that the sovereign claim of the British Crown over Australia has no legal basis and, in turn, its laws and government, you'd think, don't extend from any, even quasi-legitimate, claim of sovereignty and won't do so until some form of legal instrument, like a treaty, is agreed to. Making them, theoretically at least, pretty shakey. (To put it lightly).

So, yeah, it's a cooked situation to say the least. 

Anyway, I was at a talk a few years ago featuring an interesting panel, one of whom is a Kurnai, Gunditjimara, Yorta Yorta, Wiradjuri person. They were asked about how white people living in Australia can be good allies, work in solidarity etc etc etc her response "well you could all leave" - which yeah is funny and elicited a nervous chuckle from the room of self-aware, mainly white, young people like myself - but despite its humour there is an uncomfortable truth in it. Like, it's actually a fairly reasonable request. The act of continuing to be on land unlawfully as, essentially, an occupier kinda just perpetuates colonisation and continues the structural violence that correlates with colonisation.

So yeah, my culture… I mean becoming aware of my kinda passive role as a coloniser was a real eye opener. Don't get me wrong, I wasn’t like out in the streets throwing molotovs and shit – I just sat with a quiet discomfort at the dissonance and contradictions and impossibility of reconciling the situation. It's a hard sensation to describe but it kinda makes you feel like your existence is floating rather than rooted down or grounded. 

So it wasn't so much my “culture”, but it was the culture of the owners of the country on which I was – culture that had been marginalised, squashed, brutalised – but never the less endured – that influenced my values and identity. I guess, I try to be self aware, check myself, interrogate my assumptions and history and learn to sit with discomfort.

In fact, this sensation, I think has been well described as the “democratisation of discomfort”. See Yale Psychologist Jennifer Richeson:

“There were whole swaths of people uncomfortable all of the time. Now we’re democratizing it. Now more people across different races and religions feel uncomfortable.”

So my cultural background has me, identity-wise, in a space of discomfort and self-interrogation, which seems pretty par for the general human experience. Values-wise: I suppose, as I mentioned above - be self aware, check myself, interrogate my assumptions, do the learning and adjust.