Cultural Awareness Week 2023

Queen Anne’s School celebrates diversity with an annual Cultural Awareness Week organised by the Queen Anne's Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Society and its sub-groups including:

• Asian Students’ Association (ASA)
• Gender and Sexuality Association (GSA)
• Afro-Caribbean Society (ACS)

In this year’s Cultural Awareness celebrations, the week began on Monday lunchtime with a K-pop dance workshop hosted by Reading University’s K-pop society. Students from all different year groups who were passionate about K-pop learned and performed an up-beat routine. This was followed by a film night hosted by the QAS ASA, where they watched Howl’s Moving Castle.

Tuesday saw another successful film night by the QAS GSA watching The Half of it, after a ‘share your identity’ activity in The Space where students were encouraged to decorate a person in a way that represented them. The ACS society followed on Wednesday with a jewellery making evening which was extremely popular with boarders.

A highlight of Cultural Awareness week were the events of Thursday, where students held an ‘Express Yourself!’ non-uniform day and were free to dress in clothes that represented their cultures, hobbies or personal style. The biggest celebration of the week came on Thursday evening with the Cultural Showcase evening, a huge event with a completely full audience of students and staff, as nine acts took the stage. The event was completely led by students who operated the lighting, music and even recorded their own soundtracks to dance to. With K-pop dancing, Afrobeats, British Sign language, Indian Kathak dancing and more, this truly was a highlight of the celebration. The showcase finale was a fashion show of different cultural dress with so many students getting involved.

The final event of the week happened on Friday with the EDI fair, allowing sub-groups to come together to present their work and talk to lower school students about what they do.

Although the Cultural Awareness week has ended, the progress of the EDI society has not, and they  will continue to promote diversity, inclusivity and equality at school to provide a safer and inclusive environment for everyone.

Thank you to all who were involved in a very busy and successful week of events to promote cultural awareness, particularly to Dr Kirsten Smith, Head of EDI at Queen Anne’s, for all of her hard work and dedication to the society.

Keep up-to-date with all things equality, diversity and inclusion at Queen Anne’s on our dedicated EDI socials:

Twitter @QAS_EDI

Instagram @qas_edisociety