My name's Melissa Gould-Drakely.
And I'm the Dean of Studies and a teacher of Indonesian
at Macarthur Anglican School.
And currently I teach Year 7 and Year 9 Indonesian.
In light of what we're trying to achieve in this unit,
which is it's a very strong unit on intercultural and on friendship
and the idea of, you know, friends exchanging personal information
and asking about friends,
does this task itself actually fit within the unit?
Is it something that we say, "Yes, we like this task,"
"and we have to tweak it and maybe work out ways
"to explicitly unpack the intercultural..."
The assessment task that we had set up
was actually a task that had been set up for a previous unit
just on small talk.
And so we'd altered it slightly
to try and make the intercultural stronger.
And what we were looking at in the evaluation of the unit
was has the unit actually worked, has it been a strong intercultural unit?
Has that been successful and do we need to do something else?
And has the task itself worked and has it actually, you know,
shown us the outcomes that we were hoping to achieve
both linguistically but also interculturally?
And I think my intention was, you know, when I talked to Jo,
I really wanted that whole idea of friendship,
and what we'd been doing,
it seemed like a term to actually do that,
but it just didn't work.
But the feedback from the students is saying,
"We really like this task."
It's a really good task, I think.
-JO: The task is valuable. -MAN: It's fun, yeah.
-MELISSA: So you think it's valuable? -JO: Yes.
MELISSA: So I asked them a few questions,
like, I wanted them to think about, you know, where would you meet?
So they've internalised the fact of what Indonesians ask,
but at this point, they still were thinking that
they could quite easily ask "What's your name?" and "How are you?"
because it's what they ask,
until we started unpacking it and having conversations
about, "Well, actually, you're interacting with an Indonesian
"so if you want that conversation to be authentic
"and to be a true interaction,
"would you use something that you would use with an Australian,
"or would you use something that you would use with an Indonesian?"
Having student data is really worthwhile
because now I know that the students actually really enjoyed the task,
they really engaged in doing the task.
More than that, I know that
they actually have an intercultural knowledge
and some of them more than that - an intercultural understanding.
JO: How do you build a relationship?
So how do you make contact with someone
so that you can keep that friendship going?
That was a really good idea you had about the Flat Stanleys.
Can you tell me about that again?
In the context of the friendship unit, what I was thinking was that
our BRIDGE school could send us
photographs, face shots of all of their students,
and we turn it into a puppet
and so the students are actually writing about a real person as if...
..and they can build a friendship with this person
because they can have their details - because they are a real person -
and their hobbies and take photos of them doing things with them.
MELISSA: So, like, having breakfast?
MAN: Yeah, or going through what we've learned -
they're at the beach, they're at the cafe, they're at the cinema.
JO: "This is my friend, Siti, and Siti and I went to..."
So we're bringing in all of the places,
and they can even describe Siti.
"Siti, how would you describe yourself?"
And then they can be recycling all of that
by creating a PowerPoint presentation.
And then they can ask another...they can say, "Oh, this is my friend..."
Whether it's a task or not, I think they'd really enjoy
taking this little person around and taking photos of them
at the bioskop and the warung and the restoran.
I think that would be really cool.
And it's an ongoing assessment.
Yeah, so it becomes more of an assessment for learning
and we still give them the feedback.
-And it's more a motivational task. -Definitely.
I mean, if we gave them the info at the start of the unit,
then their role play could be about
meeting that person for the first time.
MELISSA: That's a great idea.
And then we follow it up with,
"Well, now your friend is hanging out with you."
MELISSA: And because it's then a real person,
then they really have the impetus
to really make sure they get the intercultural right.
I think it's a really valuable process to evaluate a unit of work,
especially straight after you've taught it, with colleagues
because you actually get other people's perceptions
on whether something worked or didn't work,
and then you can collaboratively work at
what your future direction will be.
Certainly from this one we were able to establish the fact that
we had made the intercultural very strong in the unit.
And that the task itself,
while it didn't necessarily match with what our intentions were,
it was a very valuable task, and what we need to do is to tweak it
and in particular we need to actually go back
and change the marking criteria
and also think about how we would set up the task prior to administering it
and also set up some more time
for reflective process with our students afterwards.