Teaching is the most hallowed of professions, 2025 Archibald Prize People’s Choice winner and White Hibiscus: A Portrait in Words author, Loribelle Spirovski told members at Federation’s New Activist Conference on 24 October.
Loribelle, who came to Australia as a nine-year-old from Manila, Philippines said: “Language is a gift.” And in appreciation of teachers, she said: “To be able to teach language is a rarer gift, and to do it well is to empower the learner with a means by which to enact agency in this world.”
New Activist Conference is held in term 4 each year for members in their first five years of teaching (or first 10 years if they hold a Federation position), who are interested in becoming more active within our union.
Loribelle recounted that when in year 6 at Croydon Park Public School, her teacher Ms Lowe asked the class if anyone could think of a way to remember how to spell ‘parallel’.
“When I looked back at the board and saw…two parallel lines built into the word itself, I spoke my discovery out loud…Ms Lowe and I locked eyes and she held me in a moment of silent recognition. All she gave me was a funny sort of smile — subtle, almost invisible, but enough to show me that what I noticed mattered. That moment of suspended acknowledgement planted a seed in me: the indelible comprehension that things can mean other things.”
She said she owes her fluency in the language of visual art, to her teachers.
“I had aptitude, and they — whose life’s mission it was to spot such things — grasped its significance immediately, conveying this with a simple gaze that said, ‘I understand that you understand,’ or a simple set of words like, “This is the supplies closet. You can use whatever you like (within reason).”
Loribelle noted that artists, like all teachers, possess a gift that comes from and deepens only through practice: discernment.
Teachers are students’ guides towards discernment, she said.
“My teachers all enacted quietly radical forms of activism and advocacy — not by prescribing ideas but by showing me how to think for myself. Not what to think, but how to look. That in fact I could think, could look, to return again and again to the thankless task of self-inquiry and the inherent understanding that real change can only begin from within.”
Loribelle thanked all of the teachers who changed her “through acts that were small, but indelible”.
Campaigns and workshops
Members also heard from Federation President Henry Rajendra about the union’s campaigns.
Topics for the workshop session included Association activism, Aboriginal education, workplace activism, feminism, advocacy and allyship to create LGBTIQA+ inclusive schools and supporting students with disability. Dinner and karaoke followed.