My name is Nicole Scriviner.
(INDIGENOUS SINGING AND MUSIC)
We have been learning an inquiry unit on farming around,
so getting to know what a farm is.
Been looking at Aboriginal Australian farming and different methods,
looking in particular at firestick farming.
We are at Sturt Street Community primary school
in Adelaide city.
We are quite small in the sense that we only have 150 students,
therefore, as teachers, there's only a few of us
and we do work quite closely together...
..in a way, I guess, teaching each other a lot of the time.
Yeah, so today I'm working with my colleague Jill,
and I'm going to help her learn more about
the Aboriginal Cultural Studies resource moodle.
At the moment I don't have any Aboriginal Cultural Studies
happening in my programs
so I'm keen to see how I can link into
the subjects and topics that we're presently studying.
Each one of these inquiry questions
goes into a full unit outline, I suppose,
so it gives you lots of ideas about resources, activities to do,
future directions that you might take.
JILL: Brilliant.
So, Jill, I'm wondering what your inquiry focus is this term.
What are you looking at with students and their outcomes
in your term overview?
In science we're looking at a mixture of physics and chemistry, so changes.
I have used this a lot in my planning and I found it quite useful.
We looked at firestick farming.
I was thinking, "How are we going to then further learning from here?"
NICOLE: I have contributed somewhat
to the development of this moodle design
and implemented my own unit of inquiry.
It also ties in well with science as well though,
looking at also states of change as well, which we've been doing as well,
so it all integrates in some way, shape or form.
I think that we can probably draw some comparisons and some links
that I haven't been aware of in the past,
or that perhaps have just been too difficult to find the resources
to go off onto that brainstorming pathway.
There's different aspects.
What I really like about it too is there's section on web resources
that these Aboriginal project officers have looked at
and critiqued and said, "Yep, they're really good ones to use."
So this one popped up...
..that I looked at the other day and I found really useful -
Indigenous AFL players, you know,
what parts of Australia, what parts of the country they come from.
So that's got potential with i-Lit information report on AFL players.
It does. Definitely, it does.
That'd be a great topic for the upper primaries.
You could have your macro group as the AFL players and then...
Our micro group as individuals.
That's a wonderful idea.
A few weeks ago, we went to the art gallery
and looked at the colonial art exhibition.
There were a lot of artworks
that were presenting Aboriginal people from those times
and I would have liked to have felt
that I had some sort of authorative backup
to be talking about those with the students.
So I can see that this is going to be a springboard
into me feeling more confident to present that sort of topic
and that debate in the classroom.
And just then it goes on how the students are going to get there.
So this is a lot to do with that backward design planning
that we've been using in maths and science ourselves as well.
I think that when I go about designing my lessons now,
I'll try to be including more of these open-ended questions
and research-type learning that the children can go off and follow.
What are you doing at the moment in regards to maths, say?
In maths at the moment, we're doing measurement.
JILL: We can all go off and learn more
and then come back and report as a class.
And it's talking about with the time, investigating the ways
time was and is measured in different Aboriginal countries
such as using tidal change, so using the environment to help.
Well, that will certainly be one of our topics,
so I'm sure that we can include that.
Oh, OK, wonderful.
I am passionate about it.
I do believe it's really important to integrate it on a daily basis.
And so to be able to share that with another colleague
and then see the response that
she's also then enthused and motivated to include it in future,
it's a really nice feeling.
You're going to have to choose your sequins.
Us as colleagues, working together, bouncing ideas off each other,
it advantages the children and us.
They look really good.