JOURNEYING WITH YOUTH
By Daniel Mahon, Principal, John XXIII College, Perth
I read recently that Oxford University Press (OUP) has named “friend” as Oxford’s 2024 Australian Children’s Word of the Year (CWOTY), reflecting how Australia’s primary school children seem to value deeper connections with people, despite being more digitally and globally connected than any generation before.
Using data collected through the online program Writing Legends, (which aims to improve students’ writing skills), OUP analysed 25,600 primary school children’s stories. It found students are writing more about the value of their relationships with family and friends, the complexities around friendships, and the way they relate to others.
Words such as “friend”, “hope”, “love”, “play” and “game” all appeared in higher frequencies in 2024 compared to 2023, with associated words such as “companion”, “friendship”, and “bestie” experiencing significant increases in usage.
Lee Walker, Director of Publishing at OUP, highlighted the themes in this year’s research findings: “It was clear that connection was at the heart of students’ stories.”
Recently, our Year 5 students challenged themselves during their adventure camp and our Year 7 students enthusiastically participated in their three-day St Omer Experience, which is a significant component of the College’s Year 7 transition program.
But why St Omer? For background, St Omer, patron of the blind, was a seventh-century bishop born in northern France in 595 AD. The predominantly Catholic town now known as Saint-Omer, in the Pas-de-Calais, was named after him.
It was in the early 1600s that one of our Founders, Mary Ward, spent time in Saint-Omer. Over the course of four years, she travelled to and from Saint-Omer, which, at the time, was growing with Catholic refugees fleeing persecution as King Henry VIII forever changed England. For Mary Ward, this was a troubling time; a time of great introspection and searching. It was also a time of revelation, a time of great clarity about the need for a counter-cultural response to religious life and education. Underpinning this clarity was the revelation that service should be the hallmark of her newly established charism and to truly be “of service”, a connection with community was paramount.
It is with this in mind, then, that our Years 5 and 7 students fully embraced the opportunity to build relationships and deepen connections. Perhaps words such as “friend”, “hope”, “play”, “game”, “companion” and “friendship” appeared in high frequency throughout their time together too.
Read the OUP shortlist report for the Australian Children’s Word of the Year 2024
Banner image: Matt Nelson, Unsplash.