[Slow strumming acoustic guitar music]
Providing an insight into the future world of work is one way
that we prepare students for life beyond school.
Today we are visiting Urangan Point State School, where Year 6
students participate in the Butchulla Junior Ranger program, building cultural
understanding and connection to place and country.
This provides a window into the important work of the local land
and sea rangers in supporting marine diversity and biosecurity,
especially on nearby K'gari.
So our school's strategic approach to learning sits around the fact
that we really want to make sure
that our kids are familiar with their local area,
so we run a highly structured program at school with everything that we do.
But what we also want to make sure that our kids know their local area,
given the fact that a lot of our kids are born and raised in Hervey Bay,
that they attend Urangan State High, which is not far from where we are.
So we really want to make sure that our kids are familiar with
what's around them and that they can be, you know, contributing to our community.
The Junior Rangers program has been exceptional for that because what it does
is it's allowed the kids to go visit places like Dayman Park,
like the Botanical Gardens and actually see
that those areas have some historical significance.
There's some really specific, clear
curriculum links within the Junior Ranger program for the students
learning experiences and leading into career pathways.
We see aspects there to the Australian Curriculum
through the Science strand and the English, as well as the Arts
with the Science, because the topics that they cover
are to do with marine turtles, marine debris,
biosecurity on K'gari, on Fraser Island.
So to the Butchulla community, it's very important,
this program, because it is one of our Butchulla laws, is
if you have plenty you must share and that includes knowledge.
And through this program,
we share that knowledge and the children get to understand
more about our culture, and they develop a deeper
understanding of cultural environmental values in their local area.
It's been really a positive program within Urangan Point
being able to work with the school in planning prior to the program beginning
and embedding a lot of activities into the school curriculum.
And they're able to continue that journey when we're not here
and still learn about the values within the classroom.
Another important aspect of the Butchulla Junior Ranger
program is the involvement of elders within the program
and that promotion of intergenerational learning.
The program itself has been really, really beneficial because what it's done
is it's brought outside agencies
into our school as well
as it's also influenced the way that our teachers are delivering curriculum.
Last year we had the Rural Fire Brigade came out
and they talked to the kids about current fire practices.
The kids then spoke to the junior rangers who showed traditional fire practices
and then how both of those areas of the community
can work together to manage fire and take care of the land.
I think that's definitely been a massive impact on our teachers
to be able to start to incorporate more of the cross-curricular
priority with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders,
and then also to learn from local indigenous people in our community.
And then they can link that back to any specific
topic or lesson that they're doing throughout the week.
And it really is a good tool then, to activate the kids'
prior knowledge as to what the Rangers were talking about.
It seems to be that the
perception is that rangering work is a male dominated
field, and I think for the children to see some of us female rangers
coming in here and taking a leading role that it's a career path
that they can look at that they didn't think was possible.
During last year's program,
we had a group of Skilling Queenslanders for Work trainees that also came
along and helped us out in delivering the program,
and they were studying Conservation Land Management Certificate I.
A lot of the children that were here have seen them as older role models,
for them to be able to see them
and see that they were studying and working towards becoming a ranger.
They could go and do further studies in that conservation land management
to move towards that goal. So I think
it was really positive for them young trainees to be here
and give that positive outlook for the children.
As a leadership team, the program's been
really beneficial because it's shown us that
by engaging these kids in their local area and giving them some relevance
and showing them about their context, that we
have better outcomes from for those students.
What it also did was when we discovered the Junior Rangers program
and we brought the Butchulla Aboriginal Corporation into our school,
it really gave our kids an outlet and better understanding of their local area.
It gave them connectedness to the world around them,
and we saw a marked level of engagement with our kids.
And then what our teachers have done is then taken that learning from
the junior rangers program and been able to contextualise that into the classroom.
So by teachers using more applicable, real world experiences for our kids,
we're then seeing an improvement in engagement not only
through the Junior Ranger program, but also in the classroom itself.
By creating learning experiences that
build students' career knowledge and skills for the future,
we are preparing them for the challenges and opportunities of their future world.
When we make connections between classroom, context and culture,
it opens the door to authentic, developmentally appropriate career
learning and help students to consider future possibilities.